A softer side of Ned.

If you are about to enter into a stressful situation (such as a job interview), have had a rough day, or just plain want to smile. You must...MUST....check out Cute Overload. I am not joking. It's a freakin cure-all miracle drug.

Pardon me?!

Good ol' American Justice! The home of (almost) every great vigilante bent on righting the wrongs society lets slip through the cracks, America has had a long history of unflappable lawyers defying mafia bosses! Whistleblowers bringing down big corporations! The common man sitting wherever on whatever bus she damn well pleases.

Check this out. Or, better yet, balance it out. The government abruptly ended its inquiry into a warrantless eavesdropping program because the National Security Agency refused to grant Justice Department lawyers the necessary security clearance.

That's pretty damn tragic. I'm adding it to my long long long list of outrages against this administration, political turncoatery, and the inadherence to the same group of principles we use as justification to declare war on other nations. Recently there have been many criticisms of Russia's step back from Democracy. If that's a step back, then this is a giant leap, a cataclysmic-pounce-in-reverse. Oversight committees are there for oversight. No man or woman or agency made up of them is beyond the law. That includes those that make the law.

If they are that worried about necessary security clearance, then how do they have humans working for them in the first place? I had to sign an NDA for my new job. I had to sign it as an intern. Just slap one of them puppies down on the Justice Dept. desk and have at it. Unless you have something to hide. Or you are made up entirely of robots. Maybe killer robots who drink gas and eat innocent children.

Gnarly Dudes

Just go out and buy it, however you can legally get it.

Gnarls Barkley - "St. Elsewhere".

I said get up and go and freakin buy it!

You've got to love it when two talented individuals come together and collaborate on something and that something turns out to be wonderful. Exceeding your expectations. For those unfamiliar: Danger Mouse (on the left) gained international notoriety for mixing Jay-Z's Black Album over the Beatles' White Album and shooting it out over the internet as the Grey Album. Cee-Lo (the short fella on the right) grew up in the Atlanta rap scene alongside Outcast and the Dungeon Family.

Plus, can you go wrong with a guy who looks like David Blaine and a dude who has one of the strangest southern accents you've ever heard both dressed up in an homage to A Clockwork Orange for a promo shoot?!

Like totally karmic

Few things have disappointed me on a cosmic scale as much as last week when I got some takeout Chinese food and was denied my AMERICAN RIGHT to read my fortune upon cracking the eery pseudough of my after-dinner treat. My cries of outrage must've reached the heavens...for just now I reached to my prepackaged dessert to find two cookies packaged where one had been each time before. I named my two new friends Chang and Eng, for they had lived so long, so close together in in a plastic prison that must've tested the dexterity of the machine that sealed it and the social graces of the two cookies inside.

And much to my happiness, there were fortunes in each of them. For each fortune I read, I don't add "in bed" to the end like most people do. Instead, I try to imagine who wrote each cookie and why.

Fortune 1 (I ate the surrounding pseudough)
Penned by a descendent of Dr. Frankenstein named Teddy Franks (geneology was tough to prove considering the Americanization of the name once his grandfather arrived at Ellis Island in 1911), this bit of invaluable and enigmatic advice acts as both a family motto and as a call to arms for his new branch of research involving the Asian concept of chi and the time-honored pursuit of immortality.
"Try to channel excess energies into rejuvenation."

Fortune 2 (One folded morsel of pseudough is enough)
Lovingly crafted in a dark apartment strewn with pizza boxes, the glare of a computer with a greasy mouse and a crumb-caked keyboard by Harry Holcomb. Bereft of real friends thanks to staggering social behaviours he cares not to change but exhibits freely on various less-than-wholesome websites on a pay-by-basis, he has compartmentalized his bits of conversation into several easy-to-understand English phrases that are designed not to wow, but convey his "interest" in people. No thanks Harry, I'm not buying what you're selling. It's going to take more than a vacuous compliment to rattle my cage!
"You are talented in many ways."

Tracing back the branches

Will Hindmarch, Vampire: The Requiem developer, renaissance man, and irrefutable fuddy-duddy, forwarded an article around to the office a week or two ago. I just got around to reading it this morning as I was waiting for my check engine light to be checked (everything's A-OK).

LARPing, a phenomenon in Scandinavia? Even I don't go THIS far!

It's an interesting trip through the prehistory of my job. For anyone who could in any way, shape, or form be considered to have a nerdish streak, this article will fascinate you. For those who yearn to understand their nerdish spouses, partners, or relatives, it might help you unlock their inner secrets.
Without further ado, here is the article.

Uncle Walt

Disney is great and all. Some people even have an unfortunate obsession with it. Yet I speak not of the man subject to much conspiratorial speculation. He's the salt of the earth. American Poet. Introducing Walt Whitman. I heard this poem on NPR. Me like the words. Me repost them here.

Reconciliation

Word over all, beautiful as the sky,

Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in time be utterly lost,

That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash again, and ever again, this solid world;

For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead,

I look where he lies white-faced and still in the coffin--I draw near,

Bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.

The Adventures of Salaried Man!

"To create a little flower is the labour of ages." - William Blake

Well, hell, ain't that the truth. I am proud to say that finally, after much time and effort, I have finally become a working stiff. My warm body will fuel the capitalistic machine and integrate itself into the great American Dream.

My wonderful internship (thanks Kelley!) at White Wolf Publishing has finally blossomed into a beautiful flower that is a paycheck. I'll be doing sales and marketing for DriveThruRPG, which sells .PDF (digital copies) of roleplaying game books. It's housed in the same offices as my internship, so I won't have to move my cubicle stuff far, if at all. Click the image above and BUY LOTS OF STUFF!!

Basically I'll be acquiring and maintaining publishers to host their products on our site. There are a couple things down the road that I'll be handling as well, but they might be top secret. So you'll just have to wait! I'll also be doing some traveling throughout the year on the company buck--to gaming conventions.

I know, I know. It's a rough life. But somebody's got to live it.

This post might be edited later with more info, but right now I'm off to finish up some ongoing projects for my internship.

Two-Times-Twitching Double Peace Signs

As my wife will attest, few things are driving me crazier these days than the way the news is delivered. Don't get me wrong, NPR actually does a good job, even if they interrupt every third sentence with a plea for money. Every once and a while I'll get a smattering of BBC or some regular print media that's worthwhile. The Daily Show and The Colbert Report have more substance than that of which I speak.

CNN and FoxNews. I don't watch a lot of Fox News for obvious reasons. But CNN's Headline News and CNN.com are a few of the primary ways I receive information about the world around me. And it is weighing on my soul. They are all guilty (video link!). Every last one of them!

I speak of course, of the "Flying Tomato" Syndrome. Or, as the title of this post explains, the exessive use of quotation marks around items they consider newsworthy. I've been noticing it for a long time, but it wasn't till they started covering the Winter Olympics in Torino (remember this Bode Miller!) that I realized the full extent of the destruction wrought. Poor Shaun White, skateboarder extraordinaire and now-holder of one of those wondrous gold medals. He doesn't even know who he is anymore, as news reporters stopped calling him Shaun White and affixed the name "Flying Tomato" to him as a story hook and something that's supposed to make middle-aged-women-of-the-heartland-smile. I doubt any of his fans are middle-aged women.

Granted, most of the local news is actually gloom and doom. But there's some substance, some explaining of the world around us and the interaction between people. As far as I'm concerned, celebrities don't deserve news unless they do something good. The cult of personality needs to end at MTV for those without any real political power, especially if its just an exploration of their relationships. For the past two weeks or so there's been a top running story about the Cruise baby. Will he eat it alive? Does he keep Katie Holmes locked in a cage? It's name confuses Jewish people (audio link)? NOT news. There's a video of "Baby, dad, grandpa share birthday" but not of " Nepal protests give way to joy" on CNN.com right now.

So while it seems to be a severe prioritizing problem, is it really? I know that bashing 24-hour news cycles is becoming quotidian. But it is necessary. It is a business. The News is just as much a part of our education as adults as evolution/creationism is for our kids. People pick sides, but it is important. But nobody seems up in arms about the disturbing divergence from real journalism it has taken. It has become damn emasculated and fluffified. There's little or no coverage of warfare like we had in Vietnam. No pictures allowed of even the caskets of soldiers killed in combat. I haven't seen one story about a war veteran who was injured in combat. These are some of the most important stories of our time, and instead we get space taken up with "Teen diver bangs head on diving board". Blech.

Apologies for not updating this more recently in the past couple months. I've been a busy busy bee at work.