Current mood:	rushed
Current music:	Nightwish - End Of All Hope

Word up.

Been a while.

For the record, and because people will ask, I’m doing fine financially. I work for the state, and they’re paying me decently.

As for where I’ve been, my life has been pretty heavily invested lately. See, normally, I’m torn between the games that are out now and the games I rediscovered while I was bored while waiting for the new games to come out, so there are either two or three things catching my interest at all times. Lately, though, there are a few more, and they’re rather...well, they’re the each-you-alive variety of time consumption. On the mental table right now, I have:

1) Silent Hill: Origins
2) Command and Conquer 3: Kane’s Wrath
3) The original Command and Conquer timeline games, and Red Alert 1
4) GIRLFRIEND
5) The brain-asploding fatigue factor of work
6) Studying for the MCSE, and in that, I mean reading a study guide in order to learn what would normally require twenty thousand dollars worth of school to learn...my roommate is, indeed, paying that much to learn all this, and it’s only because he did that I got my hands on worthy study material
7) Trying to get a fourth roommate
8) Solving the problems that a fourth roommate would create
9) Determining the possibility of moving to a different place because our management’s thumbs are perpetually brown
10) Running my RPG again
11) Trying to finish editing a 636-page novel
12) Writing a new novel of indeterminant length, that is currently on page 185 or so and isn’t even really at the meat of the story yet

So I’m busy. Bugger off, you vultures.

No, wait, don’t bugger off. Truth is, I need you. See, I’m heartless and mean until I want you for something. I’m like all men. And all women, come to think of it, you e-a-vil vixens, you. I need proofreaders, yo (see item 12 above). I need to know where I’m making typos, and whether I’m conveying the right impressions about circumstances and so forth. Don’t abandon me just because I abandoned all of you for like a year! It wouldn’t be f....okay, it would be completely fair, but it would be failing to be unfair in my advantage, which, to me, is unfair. World revolves around me, if y’recall. The sun and planets are in on the conspiracy to make it look like it’s not really that way, but don’t be fooled. Aristotle died just days away from being able to conclusively prove that we live in an Egocentric universe.

And yes, I know that somewhere out there is a Mitriphrenial weirdo thinking “Well, if he needs proofreaders, why don’t I have his stinkin’ book yet?” This is Jess’s fault. She’s hoarding it. Ordering another one would cost me thirty bucks, and I don’t want to pay that until I’m done with the editing. Then he can read at leisure without having to worry about providing feedback. If he still cares. I’m kind of an ass. I mean, I wouldn’t want to read my book.

Anyway, about the proofreading thing, the trick is that you would have to have read the first book to understand anything, so that limits the utter crap out of my options. My two most beloved readers of the first one have dropped off the face of the planet, so they’re no good, and the only other one I can rely on has bronchial pneumonia and has to stay in bed all week. And also has two kids to watch. So I would need someone to read my whole first book and then start in on the second. Unless Cassie wants to provide me with the unreal amount of feedback I require. Hey, people who like to be heard and have your opinions count? This is, like, the first time in the history of the internet that it can make a difference. Seriously, the first. No, forget all that nonsense that the TV is telling you about the online economy and the user-generated revolution. This is the first.

I got an Ask Dr Dave question that I wanted to get to while I’m here, though, so lemme tackle this one.


Dear Doctor Dave
Why are some people so afraid of clowns?
Blismo

Dear Terrifying Undead Avatar of Hell,

It’s a much more simple explanation that it would appear, and at the same time, will take a while to really expand on, so I’m just going to try to get all the major points covered. To sum up, some people are afraid of clowns because they’re programmed to. Yes, fear of clowns is evolutionary.
See, there are two very different sources of fear that most people experience, and though the experience is somewhat the same, the sources are entirely different. Most horror/slasher fans shrugged off Cape Fear and Fatal Attraction and such, because they’re not scared of some guy or some chick with emotional issues. Likewise, fans of suspense genres roll their eyes when they see Jason Vorhees’s heart leap down some guy’s throat and suffocate him. In the course of human development, one type of fear was developed to encourage creatures to get away from things that will kill them, and another type was developed to keep them away from situational danger, such as avalanches, ambushes, and the release of a new Ben Affleck romantic comedy.
Subtle clues, like the non-chirpage of birds, will set a person off...changes of air pressure, strange tracks, etc. Like if you woke up, and there were no cars on the street, and everybody was gone with no explanation, that would be scary as hell. Same with dead bodies. Just having one around will freak people right the hell out, because it’s just about the most effective and present form of that situational fear; clearly, there’s something around that is capable of killing a person, so having fear of being around it is going to prevent people from getting killed by the same thing.
And clowns? Well, they’re damned near the closest thing to the living dead that’s available to be seen in person. Consider, if you will, that one of the most recognizable aspects of death is paleness. Clowns usually wear white makeup. The only color to be seen on a corpse is usually red, which is concentrated in the nose, cheekbones, and the lips, as is the case with clowns. Clowns also wear makeup to exaggerate their eyes, making the actual eyeballs appear to be sunken and recessed, as with a corpse. There’s also the oversized hair, which, since it’s almost never in standard human proportion, makes it appear to be the patchy, hair-fall-outy way that a corpse will undergo, and since a clown’s hair is large, it makes the head look shrunken, as happens to dead people as well.
And they usually don’t talk. This is a situational cue. People fuckin’ talk. Clowns don’t. And their motions are exaggerated as well, which sets off a discomfort-alarm in a lot of minds, where it’s close, but it’s not what’s used to being seen. And they engage in mockeries of human behavior, often involving life-or-death situations. This brings death back to the attentions, reminding people who are watching that they’re essentially watching animated corpses imitate them.
Add this to the number of movies with evil clowns in them (Killer Clowns from Outer Space, It, for Christ’s sakes...), and you’ve got a double-fear martini of terror. It’s not even a rational fear. People have fear of spiders and snakes, and those people, when presented with those things, tend to stare in fright until the thing goes away, but people can go utterly apeshit if a clown walks into the room at the wrong time, because it cuts a little deeper than the standard present terror. It’s something they often don’t understand and therefore have no experience controlling, so it’s not likely to ever get better.


So there you go.


So here's what I've done ...
I've seen Iron Man.

Now let me go ahead and say that I've never liked Iron Man. The villains always looked lame. The character was hokey and directionless, and just not the kind of thing you make a movie out of. With Spider-Man and Batman and Superman, there's a celebrated canon to molest and redesign to put new spins on it for the sake of modernization, and people are curious to see how the newest actor/director will present already-familiar information. With Iron Man, there's a built-in problem, and that is that nobody gives a shit. Case in point: Me.

Now, having sit through The Punisher and Daredevil, I was perfectly willing to let this one be the first recent Marvel movie to slip on by m...no, wait, Elektra counts. Okay, the second recent Marvel movie to slip past me and have me not care at all. And Robert Downy Jr? Snorefest. And then I caught the preview, and it actually made me laugh. Okay, so I figured I'd check it out, even with my distaste for anyone who's been on the news for massive, rampaging, drug-addled benders...repeatedly.

As it turns out, the movie is absolutely awesome. Yeah, I was shocked too. The characters were all very believable and (gasp!) not stale. They had depth, yo. The movie introduced something noticeably absent from the general entertainment media today, and that is subtlety. Motivations were solid! Lines were interesting! Action sequences were...well, fairly rare, but y'know what? I had fun that whole damned movie. And I'm going to go ahead and say it: Best. Superhero movie ending. Ever. I can't explain it, but those of you who have seen it know what I'm talking about.


Also saw a performance of Cats, through Perfectly Legitimate Digital Means. And I stopped giving a fuck what a Jellicle Cat is halfway through the first song. What a completely retarded-sounding word. That theme continued throughout the play, with names that picked up my poor little willingness to put up with retardation to a point, and kicked it in the nuts. If that weren't bad enough (and it's not, because I'm generous), I went in expecting a story, and found....none. No dialogue or anything. I'd become interested in the play because Epica did a cover of Memories, and I thought "Well, if there's a song this well-phrased and solid in it, there has to be a redeeming factor or two therein." Joke's on me. Turns out it's one a long propogandafest of Satanism. And while I normally approve of such things, this was an insult to He Who Gave Us Video Games, Rock 'n' Roll, and That Thing Your Girlfriend Does. You're going to have to have a hell of a time telling me that Andrew Lloyd Weber was not saying that Satan keeps Jesus around in order to promote a corrupt transcendence system. I'd try to think more about the representation of communism, but I don't like to review pictures of aborted fetuses, I don't like to pick up roadkill and match it to the "missing pets" posters, and I don't like to think too hard about Cats. So in closing, it's a bunch of overly-punchy, hit-you-over-the-head-with-it jazz hands in a series of scantly-correlated songs.

When I had a moment, I also saw No Country For Old Men. It was an okay way to start a movie. Now if they could just shorten it to five minutes (I am positive that they could), and put another movie at the end of it, they'd have something.

And that's that.

Big love to all of y'all, even if your opinions differ dramatically from mine. I'm still all about The Love. Yes, capitalized.