Once upon a time, in some place or another, a tiny village sat.  Partly because of the steep and dangerous mountains that surrounded it, and partly because of the fierce dragon that guards it, this village escaped both the detrimental and beneficial effects of time that changed the world around it.

Inside this village, life is simple, vowels are frequent, fairies are benign, and the greatest mind the world has never known works diligently away in a dark and musty study.

Ancient tomes, bubbling concoctions, and whirling contraptions littered the already cramped study, reducing it from cramped to claustrophobic nightmare dimensions with just enough room for one man to navigate the gargantuan piles of books and oddities from cluttered desk to cluttered desk.

The wiry man behind the madness appears to work very hard translating an ancient document of some sort, surrounded by the appropriate paraphernalia related to such a pursuit, but instead he is about half way through a crossword puzzle that sits on his lap.  He taps a pencil idly on his chair, and in a moment, reaches behind him to place a phonograph needle back on track before leaning back and taking a sip from a glass sitting on the desk beside him.

This is the lair of one of the great heroes belonging to this village, the Mechanic.  The other two are the Captain and the Governor.  The Captain spends his days drilling and marching out of doors with his handful of deputies, and the Governor hosts parties every night.  Everyone else has a normal job, farming, shepherding, blacksmithing, keeping an eye on the dragon, or mining the mountains for sugar and precious metals.

Everyone in the village knows the Captain and the Governor very well, their hero status is unassailable, but the Mechanic is rarely seen.  A few people believe he is a normal villager, perhaps somewhat invalid, or a nut perpetuating a few myths, but he is, indeed, a hero.

All of the Captain's war machines (both of them) were designed by the Mechanic, the Governor's parties are powered by rumbling machines designed by the Mechanic, and oddly enough, the pretty pictures on the wall, and the dazzling coloured light displays are also designed by the Mechanic.  

Sir Lord John Fritzlebald's Adventure Journal

2/1/08 I joined the Intrepid Explorers League, and my first assignment was to explore Lost South American Dinosaur Mesas.  I packed up my belongings, and sold them at a slight loss, and then swapped assignments with the tall gentleman from Nice, and then stole the assignment back when he wasn't looking, because looking for Dinosaurs is much safer than exploring Detroit's sewers.

2/2/08 I headed out to Abercrombie & Fitch, American Outfitters, and Hot Topic to load up on supplies, and grabbed a pile of gummy bears and some pretzels for substinence.  My canteen was full of Ovaltine, and my heart was full of courage.

2/3/08 The aeroplane I chartered was a rickety old contraption built before the great war, and the pilot seemed about the same age.  I had my equipment and unconcious companions were stowed in the back, along with a years supply of booze and sunblock.  I entered a drunken stupor at 900 hours, and the flight left at 901 hours.

3/1/08 My drunken stupor has worn off, and I'm surprised to find South America is full of desert, and my mouth is full of blood.   I have no idea where the pilot went with the aeroplane, and I believe he absconded with all of my supplies and companions.   I have no hope of survival, no booze or women, I may as well sit here and die.

3/2/08 Praise the Heavens!  I have constructed a still and am distilling my own liquor from local cacti and crushed insects.  Now to do some exploring!

3/3/o8 Crickey, I'm plum done in, right knackered I am, best to sit here and drink a little moonshine.

3/10/08 I've run out of moonshine, and have decided to explore a bit further, perhaps I'll make it to that large house on the hilltop that has been haunting my dreams and hosting loud parties which give me wildly painful headaches.

3/11/08 Just my luck, the the gentleman that owns this house on the hill is an avid hunter, he desires to hunt the 'most dangerous game' in the world, and but I've seen that film before, so I've just bludgeoned him with a crudgel, and stuffed him in a wardrobe while I assault his wine cellar.

3/20/08 Wine cellar depleted, back to the adventure.  I crammed my pockets full of port and brandy, and my pack is full of various cheeses and a couple of tongues.  My canteen of Ovaltine is still untouched.  I swiped a map of the area from a filling station, but I can't read this silly colonial dialect. 

3/21/08 Deadly ill, must have eaten something bad, perhaps accidentally drank water?

4/4/08 Pretty tired of all this damned adventuring, I never expected life to be this hard, a couple bottles of the port are corked, and I have to carry all this crap myself.  I've been dragging all of my supplies behind me, and I'm exhausted. 

4/5/08 Hallejulah, I've been picked up by a kindly gentleman on his way to make a profitable business deal somewhere to the south, I'm well on my way now!

I didn't really have anything to write today, so I'm posting a few bits of my dreams I had written down not too long ago.  This one I had a tough time remembering, but it started with a journey through a enigmatic and eccentric building filled with odd bits buried in the cornerse of my mind somewhere.

The comforting reward room is packed with jokes and neat gimmicks, but somehow, it collapses into a disaster area, a pop-culture poster comes alive and suggests you take a random length of duct to a fabrication machine for some reason, but you can't find it, you notice things along the way that weren't there before, or are now ominous, in the way, or malfunctioning.

Screwing lightbulbs into a skull, in order to make the whole room descend like an elevator, can only tell that might happen from outside the room. The increasingly evil looking skull begins to snap at your fingers, and a bulb breaks.

The sky, seen from the backdoor is at the end of a beautiful sunset. Stars are visible, but there is a storm on the way.

One of the rooms you come across is now inhabited by odd fantasy-type characters, like toys come to life, they ignore you, and just do their own thing.

This one started differently, but I barely remember it, so it basically starts here, inside my bedroom.

Outside the window, something mysterious inexplicably grabs your attention. Your find yourself outside, where the horizon fills your view with the dark shapes of trees and nearby buildings, dimly lit by the night, until you look up at the sky, where a silently growing symphony accompanies your every glance, where all that are nearby are drawn, where the moon sits serenely, the quiet source of the curious music.

Lunar eclipse sends the world into chaos, surrounding clouds explode into reddish colored plumes overhead, framing the eclipse in wild shapes, growing shapes inside of which entire worlds of contrasting hues and shades seem to exist, until you are watching universes burst into being and then crash wildly into each other, sending galaxies of color swirling away together. Galaxies are filled with people and planets interacting, fantastic beasts and familiar memories of your past whirl together in the clouds, seeming to originate from the glowing lunar eclipse.

Is reaching this lunar spectacle possible? You feel as if it is close, as if you could climb a small stair and step inside this chaotic realm, where matters of divine importance call for your attention.

Dr. Pierce McWiggle scratched a writhing tenticle across his brow and tasted some of the charred honeydew melon.

"Interesting." 

Honeydew melon does not grow on this planet, though several varieties of vegetable and one animal are somewhat similar.  None of them travel at very high velocities, and few get charred on their own.

"Fruit may be extraterrestrial in orgin."  He jotted down with a serpentine finger a few more notes, and then got to work.

Dr. McWiggle consumed the entire Corpus Delicti with gusto and vinegar, and carefully filed away the report.

  

 

Little spherical bits of frozen vomit drifted aimlessly through space, clinked off a passing asteroid, and smashed into the atmosphere of a large pink planet.  The portions of scotch burst into flame, but the honeydew melon survived the journey, making landfall in several charred chunks.

The medical examiner dusted off his tenticles, and scribbled on a chart.

"Cause of death appears to be high-velocity impact of charred fruit of some sort, smashing the skull into itty bitty pieces."

Not wanting to fill his airsick bag yet again, Race Lardjaugh unrolled the window to his Xtireme fighter ship and vomited explosively out into the vaccum of space, the moist chunks of freezedried honeydew melon embraced in little orbs of bile and scotch got caught in the ships gravity well and began a revolting orbit around it.

Race rolled his window back up, and wiped his mouth.  

"Burp"

  

I've decided to shoehorn another post into this annual journey around the sun we've titled a 'year'.

This post won't be as morbidly introspective and incoherent as those previous, but hopefully, it will be slightly more pointless and wandering than usual.  Assembled at my fingertips before me are the keys to the universe, lit up with a soothing blue glow from the LEDs in my logitech G15 keyboard.  What a nice looking five!  

Gotta assemble some magic for a party later.  I'm a nervous wreck when asked to perform magic.  The problem, is that I always know how the magic works, and am not impressed at all, why should anyone else?

"Awwwwww" hollered whatshisface, referring to something that had previously occurred, and of which you were not yet cognizant.  However, you soon discovered the reason for this outburst.

"I was used as a springboard into another one of these silly stories!"  He muttered, and wandered away into the distance, disappearing over the horizon, the curvature of the earth swallowing him up and erasing him from your view.  You then sat down, and began typing on your IBM electric typewriter:

"Awwwwww" hollered whatshisface...

This time paradox feels familiar, you think, but your paper flutters to the floor on top of the pile of crumbs that had slowly built up over the hours you spend consuming mass quantities of corn chips and Chip's Ahoy! chocolate chip cookies.  Bending down to pick up the sheet of paper, you find a window into the unending depths of the universe on the floor, the entire cosmos spinning away obliviously into eternity to the strains of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue.  

Mesmerized by the sight, you sit in your chair, lost in your thoughts, unable to remember the ones before, never knowing what the next may be, completely fascinated by the intricate ballet beneath your feet, until your sheet of unreadable text slips into the void, and sails away into the distance.  

Without hesitation, without a care, you follow it.

Completely motionless, the universe falls around you, all reason is lost behind, you are a mere spectator as the play unfolds, the ballet continues around you and you are numb to all but sight.

This is the place.  All things can now be easily understood, but nothing needs to be.  Nothing is important, you need not do anthing, and you are now capable of accomplishing any feat; but something needs you, something is calling desperately for you, but you aren't yet aware of it.

A passing planetary orb is torn asunder. Its flaming guts spill into the inky blackness and its several majestic moons wander off to find another home.  The planet rotates slowly, first nearly blinding you with the heat at its core, its flaming heart beating away under a cloud of magma, then rotating away, metamorphing into the face of a clock, ticking away the minutes.

"Time moves slowly like a hunter stalking its prey, but as soon as it realizes it has drawn attention to itself, sprints madly away at a pace unmatched."  

The clacking of typewriter keys snaps you out of your reverie, and you begin typing anew.

"Awwwwww" 

Aha!  Caught you on your way to forward chain emails again?  Stop. Please stop, it's pure torture.  I don't even read them, I just abandon the email accound and create another one that I wont share with you, until a moment of weakness down the road ruins everything and I have to create another one.

As usual, I refuse to stoop to conventional humor tactics and use dirty words or fart jokes to produce a nervous laugh or embarrassed chuckle.  Instead, damn butt boobies heiny poopoop fart.

Haha.  Slightly more creative maneuver there, with a setup and a punchline and all.  Fart.

That bit was the kicker.

  

The new Star Trek trailer has been out for a while, and I thought some opinions from a bona fide nerd would be in order.  I compiled my thoughts thusly:

Corvettes are cool.  There was a brief period during which they were hideous, but at that time, everything was.   Mechanically, older cars are more beautiful than the Enterprise, which is full of wingdings, widgets, and magics.  Nobody uses that crap anymore.  Magic went out with the wizards years ago, and while widgets are fine for things like books and blogs, it would be silly to run a spaceship with them.    

Why does everyone get so emotional and dramatic in Star Trek?  Real spaceships are filled with alcohol and boredom, puctuated with card games and depressing introspection.  The results are a lot of forced jokes, drunken stupors, fist fights, and lazy doodling.  (In that order.)  I usually spend the time reading or playing video games, not having heated discussions with the crew as to whether our course is right or our crystal magic is running dry.  That's what computers and other people are for.  

Now, for my money, the sexiest new tech in spaceships is Improbability.  It's often unstable, but boy howdy, is it fast.  

In all honesty, yes, I am the masked vigilante gluing your jenga blocks together

I'd like to take this opportunity to set the record straight concerning a few popular misconceptions running around and nipping the ankles of good sensible citizens of our Sub etha net.

First: yes, several advertising planets have exploded without warning into vast galactic confetti drifting aimlessly into space, and it was one of the greatest adverts a soft drink corporation could have asked for.

Second: no, I didn't post naked pictures of the star of the hit POI network dramedy "Zeali, the Vegelian Sea Creature Who is also a Police Detective!" packaged with a credit card stealing computer virus.  All of the naked pictures of Vegelian Sea Creatures posted here are virus free, completely unlike the actual star of the hit dramedy "Zeali, the Vegelian Sea Creature Who is also a Police Detective!" who has a great number of sea viruses living in a puddle of sea water pooled up in its ear scale.

Third: I have no idea who took a Flightbeam Instant Aero Transporter on a joy ride on Monday.  Whoever did was a fantastic pilot though, and should get a lucrative advertising deal with a soft drink corporation where he pilots one through several loop the loops and into space holding a bottle of soft drink in his hand.

Fifth:  For tax purposes, the fourth point is donated to charity.

Sixth: A gang of super hackers are actually running around the Sub etha net starting silly rumors about obscure mathematical functions and congressmen best ignored.  These rumors serve no purpose other than to rile up politicians, and--who are we kidding?  Fire away hackers!

Seventh: This is the actual end of this post, don't be fooled by the following advertisements.

"Please, please, please, purchase copious amounts of JaqueSuet Soda before we destroy more planets you ungrateful buggers!"

"Lonely? Looking for love? Try Sub Etha Net Harmony.Commercialsite.sub.lotsamoolah for carbon based lifeforms that are not likely to attempt to gnaw your arms off.  I did, and now I have a symbiotic parastite living in my skull!"

"Parajoy soda is planet destroyingly good!"

One dark day in the middle of a sentence,

two bad adverbs to fight got up,

back to back, each other they faced,

their swords they drew, and each other they modified.

Large & Small.

While the world is cold and the north wind blows,

I've lost my train of thought.

I looked everywhere, in the station and the depot,

It's not where I thought.

Cats perhaps, or leaves maybe rode there upon,

That's not what I thought.

It was fascinating, perplexing, and whatnot,

That's what I thought.

But I've misplaced it, it's gone and that's that.

So now I've got a new thought.

Or have I?

The Elusive 'Jump'

Notice: This is a rant, however, I have cleverly disguised it as an informative and slightly humorous blogopost.

How many times have you been reading an article, maybe a blogopost, or whathaveyou, and the article said:

More after the jump!

or

Find out, after the jump!

Well, I have news for you. Find out after the jump.







Did you see any jump? DID YOU?! HUH? No? Maybe? Don't know what a jump is?

I'll tell you.

Many, many years ago, there was only one screen resolution, 800x600, anything over that was only for stupid rich people, and anything less was probably what you had, because you suck, and are poor.

Webpages can scroll down many miles, some going into the center of the earth where they can get infected with demonic spyware and explicit hardcore donkey sex ads. After the Stockholm Conventions, where web developers decided to only scroll down to the earth's crust, someone got scared and, not underestimating the stupidity of the human race, worried that maybe humans are so incredibly stupid that they would not realize that the rest of the webpage scrolled down the screen. So they started leaving clues, like making sure a giant picture dribbled down the screen, forcing a scroll, or leaving the helpful:

More, after the jump.

HOWEVER, today is the future, and we have at least 100 resomolutions, and mine is pretty big, the screen is 22 inches for the love of all things sweet and sour. AND YET, never once, has that damn line break, that elusive jump, been at the bottom of the screen where it belongs, nor has it been even on the first screen. I always have to scroll down the page several paragraphs to find a completely useless and somewhat cryptic:

Find out more, after the break.

What the Care Bear screen size do they expect everyone to have? If I had the oh so common 800x600 or even a nice 1024x786, I would have to scroll a good 6 inches to find that stupid and useless misplaced insult to my intelligence.

So just stop, ok? Nobody uses that stupid crap resolution you think they do, nobody is so incredibly stupid that they can't scroll down the screen, and even if they were, you didn't put that 'helpful' hint in the right place, and you wrote it in web developer code, you stupid sqid ink.

Novel IIII

Swinging from the rafters was a DeVinci-esque gyroplane; fabricated out of wood and waxed paper, it appeared both heavy and fragile at the same time. Dr. Spaulding manipulated an array of pulleys and levers, and the gyroplane eased down to the floor.

Brick peered inside, and found a number of dials and levers, switches and buttons.

"What's this for?" He asked.

"I figured it would be safest to travel, um, not on the ground. That's why I built this, based on some ancient designs, it should keep us out of the reach of those beasts out there." Dr. Saulding jerked his thumb at the door.

"Ok, but I still prefer my bike."

I forgot

because Pandora is playing Bjork.

But other than that, everything is ok, nevermind the rabid wolves that are building an oil derrick in my neighbor's oatmeal.

Bjork. Honestly.

Anyhow, on to today's narrative explosion of epic tonality! Rawr! Bjork, Bjork!

Yosemite Thermite Johnson was a man, a big man, a man of unquestionable poise and unsatisfactory bearing. This posed no problem at all, except when he assailed an oil derrick held hostage by poor engineering and design.

Don Quixote once said something which is immaterial at this junction; however, Yosemite used semi-colons at every opportunity, even when unsure of success. For this purpose he carried an assortment of pens and Sharpies, and corrected grammatical errors to his own satisfaction, and not that of Gregg, nor even e.b. white.

Yosemite deftly shot apostrophe's and dashes at advertisments-things like posters or playbills-as well as a few decimal points for good measure.

The oil derrick in question appeared in a copy of 'Space and Ancient Greece', barely a month had passed before the derrick was assaulted by a hyphenating psycophath like some sort of raping serial editor, and woke up in a hospital a shadow of it's former self, an oi-derrick.

Yosemite scrawled a moustache and glasses on a Calvin Klein underwear model and yodeled away in his black Fiat Spider, scanning for unvandalized and uncivilized, unaesthetic and unironic text to 'correct'...

Until next-time; never "fear", for unecessary character may (or may~not) be "near".

Piracy their dreadful trade is

I want to start an internet website that is devoted to pirating Disney pirate movies. Why? You foolishly ask, knowing it will result in a long, and impossibly unfunny monologue?

Because it's possibly ironic, depending on how you understand the concept! I'd also like to see the lawsuit.

"Stop pirating our pirate movies, you dirty thief!"

"What? The movies that encouraged me to steal, rape, and plunder and rob, not to mention thieve and noddle and cob? Make up your mind! Is it good or bad to be a pirate!? Lolzz!1!"

I will call it "Captain Long John Jack Sparrow's Treasury of Pirate Fun and Disney Movies" and I will use their logos without permission. Also, I will include pirate recordings from Gilbert and Sullivan's productions, but not the filthy crudola that isn't Disney or D'Oyly Carte.

The lengthy legal proceedings will make for good watching, and that's how I'll make my fortune. If you pirate that, I will hunt you to the ends of the world, where we might fall off into upside-down neverland, if sources are to be trusted, AND WHY NOT, DISNEY IS HONEST AND TRUSTWORTHY, right? If they aren't, then their legal standing will be shaky, to say the least, and goofy, to make a painful and pointless, but perfectly played pun.

Yo ho ho and a bootleg DVD or two!

Novel III

"No need," Dr. Spaulding pointed out, "sensors indicate the intruders are retreating. Isn't that right girl?"

Dr. Spaulding's dog nodded in agreement, her ears twitching, searching for the sound of intruders.

"I've got a pile of new gadgets for you to test on your next run."

Brick eyed the pile with some interest, but nothing beat the security of his .45 revolver and his trusted damascus blade. Dr. Spaulding's inventions sometimes came in handy, but they weren't terribly reliable in 'real world' situations when hostiles were closing in hard and fast and you had no time to read the labeling.

The hum of the dog food can opening laser perked the dog's ears up, and she trotted over, her nails clicking on the flagstone floor. She nuzzled Brick's hand briefly, and then sneezed slightly when the scent of gun oil reached her brain.

Dr. Spaulding shifted a number of levers, and an array of pulleys and ropes leapt to life above their heads.

Princess Dairies

There, I finally got around to putting this review together. Death Race 2000 stars some really funky cars, like Hanna Barbara's Wacky Races or some such. They have teeth and knives and guns, or caricatures thereof. These are used to run over people in the cross-country (LA to LA, judging from the scenery) race. On purpose, for points.


We get some commentary from goofy TV personalities, like Old Guy, Overly Friendly Female, and Scary Druggie. They provide a lot of exposition, like how many points babies are worth, how Frankenstein is a "close, personal friend of mine", and which racer just drove off a cliff through a giant ridiculous fake tunnel entrance. Scary Druggie is fun to watch, because he is like a 70's clown, and is always incredibly excited by the slightest thing, if he found a penny on the floor, he would explode like a bucket of sheep filled with TNT.



Our hero (I guess) is David Carradine, played by Frankenstein, a mish-mash of human parts cobbled together after a gazillion accidents he's accrued through the years of racing. His experience and fan base is enormous, and so was the simile I was cooking up. That's his car, it's kinda cool. Is he a bad guy? A good guy? I don't really care if you ever watch this movie, but I won't ruin his story line for you, just in case you smoke a lot of pot and want to watch this movie while dropping acid and shooting up reefer. (I guarantee everyone in the movie production was, except Stallone, he hadn't even started on steroids yet.)

See?

His character's name is too stupid for me to remember, but he's a thug, or perhaps a hood. I forget. He slaps his girl around a little, and shoots a tommy gun blindly into a cheering crowd. A little like Rambo, I guess. He may be second favorite to Frankenstein, but he's a bigger star. Also, he has guns. I'm not talking about his arm muscles there, because I'm not sure he had them there.

The President of the United States lives on a pyramid, I guess, and nobody knows where. This may indicate a post-apocalyptic setting, but I can't tell the difference between the setting here, and really early Rockford Files. He acts kind of religiously, like the Death Race is a rite or something. He provides some exposition again, and some a plot point, but don't expect this to be clever like Ultraviolet!


The gaps between legs of the races is filled with horrible, horribleness. Oompa Loompa cameramen run around with toaster ovens strapped to their backs, and David Carradine stomps around like a leathery Darth Vader, and the female racers take their tops off gratuitously.

They have the complexion of Miss Piggy.



Thank God Miss Thomasina Whatsit does not remove a single article of clothing! She leads the resistance, which is comical, and attempts to sabotage the race by killing racers and airing her Weirdness on TV in protest. She makes speeches and eventually becomes the fascist she pretended to fight against. Just like Republicans.


The crescendo, if you will, is when the resistance brings in awesome air support in the form of this here aeroplane. It's pretty badass, except the whole scene put me right to sleep. I'm pretty sure an ambulance was there to for some reason. The president blamed the aeroplane on the French to conceal the fact that the resistance somehow got an aeroplane past security and is trying to kill people by boring them to death.

There is a bunch of plot, like Thomasina's daughter is in there, David Carradine has a handgrenade, and the twist ending which hits you really fast and gives you no time to savor what the hell just happened.

It's a great idea, just hampered by such things as the 70's, no budget, and thinking gratuitous nudity and gore can make up for not knowing how to make talkies. And probably drugs.

I managed to install linux mint on my mom's oldish notebook computer, and so far, she is happy with it. It eliminates a lot of the slow down (spyware?) and now I know for sure what is running on it, and what is not.

Installation is a breeze, unless you have low memory, and then it's a bit awkward. But it includes support for nearly everything, so it's an easy switch from Windows.

I've got Death Race 2000 on it's way now, and hope to have
a review for you soon.