Shaft!

You're daaaamn right.

This is a picture I took today at my place of business. It clearly shows the elevator shaft leading to the building's surface level entrance, which has been cleverly disguised as a Chuck E. Cheese's restaurant.

Note the lack of an elevator car in the shot. This is due to the fact that we don't believe in things like "waiting" for elevator doors to open. Time is money, and if a guy has to rappel down the exposed, grease-covered cables holding the car up and slip through the maintenance hatch to get into the elevator quickly, so be it.

The shaft passes upwards through the human biological weapons testing wing and the Infinite Monkeys/Typewriters labs. We only have about 120 monkeys and typewriters so far due to the economic downturn, but as the country's finances pick back up we're looking to upgrade to 250 monkeys/typewriters out of infinity monkeys/typewriters. Those Shakespeare works won't write themselves!

Downwards, the elevator suddenly snakes sideways through the sewer system (alliteration!) for about 100 feet before plunging at terminal velocity towards the bottom of a mile-deep natural chasm in the Earth's crust. That's where the break room is located.

Microwaves are for pussies.

My company actually used to rent the penultimate sub-floor of the facilities. We decided to abandon it in favor of much more reasonable rent prices, as well as the fact that mole people kept breaking in at night and eating our janitorial staff. Good sanitation isn't cheap, you know. The ultimate sub-floor, of course, is rented by the mole people.

Photo taken by Phil G. (before he was eaten by mole people) of our children's toy manufacturing area.

Note the preponderance of loose rock and exposed wiring. We have our priorities straight!

Anyway, my job isn't the most fascinating or impressive in the world. That title goes to Steve in accounting. Nevertheless, I hope this little glimpse into the workaday world of corporate America has given you some insight into your own career choices. It also might give you a newfound appreciation of the elevators in your own buildings. You know, the ones that don't fall nearly a mile in pitch darkness before jerking to a stop over a lava lake surrounded by charred human remains.

Don't Believe the Hype

Hello, loyal readers! I'm sure some of you are wondering what has happened to the promised HYPEs that I had mentioned so long ago. Well, like so many things, I just kinda stopped caring after a while. In this case "after a while" is interchangeable with "after I did the first one."

Is this the end of the HYPE? Probably not. But I kind of figured there wouldn't be a good way to keep this going on any kind of consistent basis.

If I end up planning something badass at a future date, I'll let you all know. Last time I kind of threw the event up in the air and hoped somebody would catch it (spoiler alert: nobody caught it and it twisted its neck 180 degrees on the harsh, unforgiving ground. It is now in a medically-induced coma at Grady hospital). When and if I do another one, I'll try to get some more notice in between the announcement and when the event actually is, instead of running into the blog like a surprise witness in those old courtroom dramas and yelling about when the event will be held.

Now I know you're all drowning your keyboards in delicious, salty tears of pure anguish at the thought of not being able to cavort with moi, the debonair, suave, and all-around great author of this magnificent blog. 

Artist / Unemployed police sketcher's rendition of you after hearing this news. 

Also what the blog author looks like at any time on any given day.

But! Don't go and fling yourself out the window of your house/apartment/prison cell just yet! If you don't live above ground, then don't dig down with your bare hands until the heat and pressure of the Earth's crust turns you into a foul, misshapen piece of carbonized doo-doo. There will definitely be some cool stuff coming up soon. It's going to be summer, and there will be plenty of places to go, movies to see (and possibly mock openly in the theater like the trolls we are), and mayhem to wreak upon the fair city of Atlanta.

You don't have to believe the HYPE, because the HYPE believes in you! Sweet vaudeville-loving Zoroaster, that sounded gay.

Please Drink Responsibly

A while back, one of my friends had a great idea for a beer. You know how every company that sells alcoholic drinks in the US has to put something in their ads about "drinking responsibly" or telling customers to "enjoy responsibly" and phrases like that? I guess there's some regulation that the government created regarding the ads that requires companies to put that phrasing in there so that they won't be held responsible (ha ha! GET IT?!!) when their customers go out and act like total lushes. Well, my friend decided that it would be a good plan to make a beer and name it "Responsibly", so that even our competitors would be telling you to drink it!

So, in the spirit of good-natured competition that doesn't require testicle-shrinking steroids to be successful at, I have decided to have a contest of sorts. The contest is to design a logo for Responsibly beer. It can be pretty much any style, and I will be providing my own entry by the end of the week. Somewhere on the logo it should have the phrase "Please drink Responsibly", because not only will it satisfy the legal requirements of US sales, it will be good self-promotion.

I don't really have a prize for winning. Maybe I can send the winner a birthday card I found on clearance at CVS that says "Happy 80th birthday! You're somehow not dead!" It was all I could afford at the time, so shut up with your talk of "it's not my birthday" and "I'm not 80" and "but I'm already dead". Sometimes it's the thought that counts.

Contest entries will be accepted through whenever the fuck I feel like it. I'm kinda laid back with things like that. Entries will not be judged unless there are more than 5, and then the winners will be chosen by a trained elephant seal down at the Georgia Aquarium, so you can be sure it will be impartial.

So remember everyone, please drink Responsibly! Drink as much of it as you possibly can!

Your Attention Please

I have just discovered that I don't like the dubstep genre of music. That is all.

My Boy is Made of Superior Meat

Welcome, children. Gather round ol' EmJay for a story. Hey! Get back here Billy, before I dunk your head in the toilet again for sassing me! OK, now that you're all here, I want to tell you a tale of the long, long-ago. The before time. Far back in the past (late last year), during the time when all white North Americans gave thanks to their eldritch, heathen gods for their bounty of green bean casseroles and backyard pools filled with gravy, there was a contest. It was an epic battle of zeroes and ones, fought in the mystical land of Steam, ruled by the great New-ell and the Valve horde. What was this unimaginably cool-sounding contest, you ask? You didn't ask? Well fuck your eyeballs with a horse dick and throw yourself off a cliff! You aren't welcome here.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes. The people who ran the Steam service were holding a contest for their users. You could win the top 5 games in your wishlist, regardless of price. I read about it the night of the contest and thought to myself, "self, free games are pretty cool, so quit masturbating to beluga whale dominatrix fetish porn and enter!" So I put the requisite 5+ games in my list, hoping to win but realizing I had a better chance of being struck in the ass by lightning and having the smoldering ass-vapors turn into a clown.

Later that night, after I had pounded down a few beers and was suitably inebriated, I decided to check my email. I saw a notice saying that I'd won the games I put into my wishlist and kind of gave a little laugh. You know the kind. Incredulity mixed with a headrush of endorphins akin to the experience of a schoolgirl who just saw the Beatles in concert for the first time. I'd actually won something on the internet! Holy flaming shitburgers, hooray for random numbers!

One of the games I won was Super Meat Boy. It is the hardest platformer I've ever played, bar none. It is in the running for hardest game I've ever played, period. Super Meat Boy takes whatever you thought you knew about platformers and puts it to the test, grinding it up into bloody chunks and spitting it back in your face with a defiant, offal-spewing laugh. Saying this game is hard is like saying the core of the sun is a wee bit toasty. Technically accurate, but woefully wanting in the flowery, descriptive adjective department.

Epic!

You play as Meat Boy. He's a boy like anyone else, except that he exists as a kind of square, semi-deformed midget. Also he has no skin. His main squeeze, Bandage Girl, has been kidnapped by the angry and diabolical Dr. Fetus. The doctor is basically a sentient fetus in a monocled jar which has been put into a mobile tuxedo suit. And he hates you!

You run and jump through each short level in an attempt to reach Bandage Girl and save her from Dr. Fetus. The stages are designed to last less than around a minute or so, and some last fewer seconds than you can count on one hand, but you will spend hours trying to beat the more difficult of them. They're filled with wonderful implements of death such as massive circular sawblades, giant piles of used hypodermic needles, heaping piles of salt (because who doesn't like rubbing salt all over a skinless wound?), guided missiles, unguided missiles, guided saw blades, maggots, fire, and all other manner of things that will instantly render you an exploded pile of gore. Life bars? Hah! We don't need no stinkin' life bars!

I love this game. I would have this game's babies. Why do I profess such a disturbing (and anatomically impossible) level of love for this game? Because despite being almost as hard as my gigantic, pendulous testicles, the game never feels cheap (unlike my gigantic, pendulous testicles). It is only hard because you aren't good enough to beat it yet. This game pushes your reflexes to the absolute limit. By the time you beat some of the stages, you are operating with 2 sore thumbs on muscle memory alone, using the visual cues of the game only as a subconcious trigger for the neurons in your brain to fire the nerves in your fingers. Every other platformer suddenly feels easier after you play this game. Long story short, it makes you a better gamer.

Also, there are innumerable things to do in the levels that add to the replay value, like beat the level under the par time, or find hidden warp zones to unlock secret characters, or get insanely hard to reach bandages that unlock even more characters. As of this writing I've played nearly 25 hours, and I've only gotten about 75% of the game completed. The parts I haven't finished yet are nightmarishly difficult, and I'll probably be trying to beat them for a long time to come.

There is one drawback, however. It's the pesky human tendency to become violently and animalistically enraged that inevitably creeps in after a long attempt to beat a particularly hard level. If you can play it long enough to get good without hurling your gamepad through your monitor and eating your pets, then you've managed the kind of self-control this game demands. I've called "bullshit!" so many times I long ago lost count. Nevermind the fact that I can't count past 8. But it wasn't that I was mad at the game. I was always mad at myself. Mad because I hesitated a tenth of a second too long to make a jump, or because I didn't wiggle my left thumb quickly enough to dodge a giant sawblade before it cleft my meaty bodice in twain. Mad because I fell down a hole for the 18th time instead of landing on a platform I knew was there. Unlike the rap scene, you can't hate the game, you can only hate the playa. However, if you can get past this bit of self-loathing, you'll eventually realize you are starting to get really, really good at the game.

If you are a fan of old-school platformers that demanded quick reflexes, like Sonic the Hedgehog and Super Mario Brothers, you will love this game to death. It's funny, wierd, and sometimes downright masochistic to play, but dammit, it's good. Too good to pass up. Do yourself a favor, buy a wired Xbox 360 gamepad, shove it in your computer's USB port, and buy this game. It's cheap, but the replay value is through the roof.

You will spend hours challenging your reflexes and pushing yourself to the brink of madness, but when you finally beat that one level that's been bugging you, you'll feel like royalty. Like you just climbed Mt. Everest alone, without an oxygen tank, in your underwear, and when you finally reached the summit you had hot monkey sex with every one of the 10 supermodels you carried on your shoulders because you felt like a challenge that day. Yeah, it feels pretty good. Buy it!

Thumb up!

Hello, Pangolin!

Here is a YouTube video of a Ground Pangolin. Watch it!

Cute little buggers, aren't they?

A Picture's Worth

If you're reading this, you've no doubt heard about the freaking enormous earthquake and tsunami that devastated the east coast of Japan recently. If you're not reading this... well technically that's impossible since you're reading this text right now. Anyway, I noticed something interesting in the media coverage of the Sendai, Japan earthquake to the one last year in Port Au Prince, Haiti. That something is the content of the pictures taken of the damage.

In the pictures returned via a Google image search for "Japan earthquake 2011," the vast majority of them show damaged structures and seismic data. The few that do show people do not show them wailing in the streets. Most of them show people assisting in reconstruction, or surveying the destruction of their towns.

Here's a snapshot of what I got during the most recent search I did:

Compare that to this snapshot, taken when I did a search result for "Haiti earthquake 2010":

The differences are interesting to note. In the Haiti photos, we see many pictures of people crushed under rubble, or being assisted by foreigners, or waiting around in shock. It is interesting to note that Haiti's population and Japan's population are similar in that they are very homogenous. Yet we do not see the same kind of treatment applied to these populations when it comes to disasters. Both disasters were huge in scale. However, it seems that the media coverage of disasters in 3rd world countries almost always swings toward pictures of women and children weeping in the streets, or people horribly injured in the disasters.

I don't know quite what to make of the disparity. Maybe it speaks to the rabid desire in major news media outlets to get ratings by exploiting heartstring-tugging pictures of rubble-covered orphans. Maybe it says something about the way we look down on infrastructure in developing nations, that when it is destroyed, we only focus on a few landmarks and don't give much of it a second thought. I don't even know if it's really right or wrong. Part of me doesn't even care. Maybe that says more about me than anything else. Maybe it says nothing.

I think Sean Penn is kind of a douche, but in a way he is right when he says that we need to focus on helping people long after the media decides it's no longer fashionable. If our media were operating back after World War II the way it operates now, we'd have headlines a few months after V-J day reading something like "Marilyn Monroe Wins Oscar!" (buried on page 17 next to ads for Bryll-cream: Marshall Plan helping to restructure Europe after near-total obliteration).

If you are inclined to help, you can donate directly to the
Japanese Red Cross via Google:
http://www.google.com/crisisresponse/japanquake2011.html

This is one of my more rambling posts, so I apologize to the readers I've somehow not managed to alienate yet. But sometimes the Earth burps or wiggles a bit and humanity is caught in the middle, and my tolerance for writing my typical bullshit wears thin.