SHAFTWAXER

The massive rush of getting shit done continues despite all obnoxious obstructions that are hurled my way. Sometimes it seems like certain people only exist to fuck up whatever you are doing.

So one of my absolute favourite games has been under fire as of late. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, 6th game in the series, was a massive hit when it came out for the PS2 in October. I bought it the day it came out because I had loved the previous games so much.

Turns out there was a part of the game that was originally going to be in, but they decided at the last minute it wasn’t appropriate for the game, so they altered the code to get rid of it. 10 months after the fact, somebody figured out a way to hack the game so you could get to this removed part of the game. Understand that it took a 3rd party hack and you physically altering the game to make it work, something not at all intended for you to do. The mod allows you to have sex with your girlfriends in this little minigame thing. It ends up looking like 2 people dry-humping with their clothes on. It’s really lame, and decidedly annoying. I’m glad they took it out of the game because it sucked.

But oh no! There is hacked content available that you have to download on the internet that will show absolutely horrible simulated dry-humping that I guess kinda looks like sex! Don’t get me wrong, I firmly believe that this game is not to be sold to kids, and the game retailers should be held accountable for observing the ratings on games that they sell to people. That being said, at what point did the game vendor and the game maker suddenly have to be the parents? If the parents were stupid enough to buy the game, a game that allows you to shoot random people, cops, kill hookers, blow up cars, run people over, rob homes, and steal from the government (yet a poorly simulated sex scene is apparently WAY over the top), then it’s their own damn fault. Adult entertainment is just that: for adults.

Don’t ruin my fun because your condom broke.

I have officially gotten to “that point”.

It usually happens right about now, so it’s not entirely surprising. This is the middle of my busiest season with work, I have deadlines all around me, often taunting me in vile and offensive ways. It takes a lot of self discipline to be in business for yourself. Especially when you are the only employee and work out of your home. In my case, the machine I play on is also the one I’m expected to get all my work done on as well. After a while, sitting in front of the computer makes you a little batshit insane, and your mind starts to mess with you. Fortunately, I’m almost there. The end is in sight, and I know I will make it. And really, when looking at last year as a comparison, I’m doing so much better in so many ways. I think the quality of my work is decidedly higher, and I think that while I’m still under a heavy workload, I’m not nearly as pressed up with my back against the wall like last year. Most importantly, I think that the people I have in my personal life being more grounded gives me a stronger support system, something that makes life so much better.

But that’s not the point today. I was listening to The Al Franken Show last week, and one of their regular features is to have on Al’s childhood friend Mark Luther on who also happens to listen to Rush Limbaugh religiously. Mark was in absolutely rare form. Eventually he went off on this giant tirade about how liberals seem to be so angry, upset, or down about things, later going on to insinuate that we are always mad and that it would be a horrible way to live life.

Quite the opposite.

To be honest, sometimes I wish I didn’t have a conscience. To not care about anything aside from my family and friends, not see the shades of gray in between the black and white… Ignorance would make life easier because then I wouldn’t care about people I didn’t know. Hell, it would be easy to not care about people I do know.

Yes, I get angry about corruption and hearing about how people who can’t stand up for themselves are disenfranchised. I get angry when our administration seems to care more about a family dispute in Florida than the 20,000 who die every day because of poverty and poor living conditions. I get angry when we live in the only civilized country that doesn’t seem to have a basic universal health care system in place. I get angry knowing that corporations actively look to cut corners by polluting the ever living shit out of our planet and water supply just so they can increase profits by 2%. Yes, I get angry when you see people who are working hard to do nothing more than divide people in order to reduce the power they would have if they could work together. If I didn’t care, if I were ignorant of the bigger picture and were content to just sit idly on my balcony, turning my head away from anything that might be uncomfortable or difficult to face, it would be so much easier...

Unfortunately, I care.

It makes me happy to know that there are people out there fighting the good fight, trying to bring equality and power back to people. It makes me happy knowing that people are taking notice of the poverty in the third world. It makes me happy knowing that groups are speaking with their dollars as well as with their voices to get corporate America to give a shit about the environment. And really, with all the great work that some of these other people do, I don’t know if I could even put myself in the same paragraph as them, all I do is sit on my ass and plug away at my work on my computer while they are really making an honest difference.

And for that, I’m happy.

I just saw the most incredible interview on television in YEARS. Dissenting points of view, both side made their point. It, of course, helps that I agreed with the person who totally and completely laid the smack down on the dumb shit. It was an interview of Bernard Goldberg (of CBS fame) pimping his new book “100 People Who are Screwing up America (and Al Franken is #37)” on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. A small excerpt:

Goldberg: You know, years ago, a drunk in a bar wouldn’t think to say the ‘F’ word. Recently, Chevy Chase was at a formal gala at the Kennedy Center, and he called our president a “dumb f-“.
Stewart: Well, Thomas Jefferson used to fuck slaves. I think things have improved.

Aside from naming Jimmy Carter #6 on the list (WHAT THE FUCK?!?), he contends that the real problem isn’t with the people in power filling the government with corruption, it’s with actors and rappers who use nasty language. Even better, during the interview, he had no problem bringing himself to say “spic, kike, and faggot” on TV, but he couldn’t bring himself to say “nigger”. I guess that would have really crossed a line or something.

Amazing. I actually found myself getting closer and closer to the TV, getting up on my knees, totally riveted with it. If you can, catch it on the replay. Otherwise, watch the video here.

Why can’t there be more people willing to call bullshit like Jon Stewart?

• Body Worlds, currently on display at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, is pretty damn cool. Once you get over the initial reaction that what you are looking at were once living people, it’s impressive. Most impressive was the display on the circulatory system. Never before has a concept that was for the most part a bunch of red and blue lines on a chart of the human body more real.
• Old Main Street, also at the Museum of Science and Industry… not so much.
• Yay for the Chicago Skyway going to I-Pass.
• A significantly larger yay for the slow but sure process of me merging what I would consider the best of my life now with my “old life” from when I was living in Illinois. I don’t think I had made a conscientious decision to separate them before, but for some reason, I never actively tried to mix them. Strange, because the people I continue to associate from Illinois (as well as those in Illinois I only see every now and then) were pretty fucking cool, and to be able to start to share that (and me when I’m around them) with the people I care about now is satisfying.
• While I did have a bit of a “freak out” when I started to really analyze how much shit I had to get done before deadlines started to hit, I feel like I am really making some significant progress knocking that shit out. My progress over the last week has been really solid, and while it is difficult to keep up that kind of pace, I’m very confident that I’m making it happen. I just need to push hard and ride this wave as long and as hard as I can. Getting shit done feels good.
• I had a strange moment where I revisited (unintentionally) a part of my life via DVD I had put behind me. As I was watching the old band I used to work with, I started to remember a lot of the great things about it. Often, we focus on the bad, but as you get some time away from it, you get some decent perspective. If I think a little harder, I remember some of the difficulties, but really, in the end, I’m glad I was there, and I’m more glad to be associated with (and working for) the program.
• My hand writing has gotten significantly worse. Probably because I type everything and never really have to write anything anymore, just writing one page of stuff is strangely difficult. I recall being in school and taking copious notes with ease. I’m now officially a pansy.
• These things are like crack: crazy addictive. You’ve been warned.

What the fuck do you think you’re doing?

This is London. We’ve dealt with your sort before. You don’t try and pull this on us. Do you have any idea how many times our city has been attacked? Whatever you’re trying to do, it’s not going to work.

All you’ve done is end some of our lives, and ruin some more. How is that going to help you? You don’t get rewarded for this kind of crap.

And if, as your MO indicates, you’re an al-Qaeda group, then you’re out of your tiny minds. Because if this is a message to Tony Blair, we’ve got news for you. We don’t much like our government ourselves, or what they do in our name. But, listen very clearly. We’ll deal with that ourselves. We’re London, and we’ve got our own way of doing things, and it doesn’t involve tossing bombs around where innocent people are going about their lives.

And that’s because we’re better than you. Everyone is better than you. Our city works. We rather like it. And we’re going to go about our lives. We’re going to take care of the lives you ruined. And then we’re going to work. And we’re going down the pub.

So you can pack up your bombs, put them in your arseholes, and get the fuck out of our city.

–The London News Review

Seriously. What the fuck.

Why innocent people have to suffer because somebody thinks the only way to make a point is to kill randomly is completely beyond me, but then again, what the hell do I know. If it was supposedly a bombing about the war and policies in Iraq, why did many people just trying to go to work (and probably against the war and the British governments involvement in the war anyway) have to needlessly die? There are so many things that I could say, but I’m sure that nobody needs to hear poetic waxing of a nobody writing on an insignificant web page.

The group that is taking “credit” for this says that there is no connection to the G8 summit going on right now in Scotland. I’m sorry, I have a difficult time seeing that. At a time when the world’s wealthiest leaders SHOULD be focusing on global warming and ending the 20,000+ people who die every day from poverty around the world, once again fear can potentially change the focus of the meeting.

Fear is dangerous because it often leads to people being willing to give up their rights and their freedoms for supposed protection from the government. When people are not afraid, they are better able to focus on improving their lives instead of trying to save their life. When people are not afraid, they are able to work on bettering their lives as well as bettering the lives of people who are not able to. When we are not afraid, we can attend to the least among us. Don’t let fear stop you. Don’t let fear inspire you to hand over your rights under the false title of patriotism. Don’t let fear get in the way of sending a message to our leaders that we need to be committed to helping those in the world that can’t help themselves.

Earlier this morning, I was thinking I was going to post something about how stressed I was getting over the sheer quantity of work I was facing over the next month. That is absolutely nothing compared to what the people in London will have to face over the next month.