John Zeitler

The weekend was a good way to relax, but unfortunately something struck me this afternoon, and I was out of it for most of the day. I offer my deepest apologies. Know this, though: Tomorrow there will be a post of substantial length and content; I have quite a bit to talk about.

Sorry, folks. I have an early morning tomorrow and had a very, VERY long day today. This week is pretty much shot, just for the record, so I’m going to just call this a mini-hiatus and get back to you all on Monday. Sound good?

I firmly believe that in each company, somewhere deep in the recesses of the workforce, there exists a guy whose job it is to sit at a desk for eight hours a day and Google the company’s name, over and over again to find out what people are saying. I imagine that this is a thankless job, and that his coworkers all deride him for the task. “Boy howdy,” they say, “I sure wish I could get paid to do nothing productive but surf the web and/or eat Cheetos!” I can envision this man’s sad, lonely existence in his dank cubicle, lit only by the glow of an aging, faded 13 inch CRT. Perhaps he is only viewing this in 800 by 600 resolution. Verily, his (or her) lot in life is to be pitied.

Let me say this, then, to the one who does that job for NIS America: I love you. I love you and your whole company. Your fate is not forgotten, dear friend. I don’t know you, and I don’t hope to ever know you. But I want you to know you’re loved and appreciated. Because you can do something no one else can. You can convey a message to your bosses, a missive that desperately needs transmission: “Thanks for being funny.”

And for you, friend? Well. I promise that if I ever meet you, I will buy you some Cheetos. You’ll have earned them.

I would love to tell of the festivities partaken of over this past weekend. I would tell of grand adventures, heartfelt conversations, and an epic quest not soon to be forgotten.

But a) I’m really, really tired still and b) getting to the merrymaking was a journey through several levels of Hell.

On the bright side, I did get a lot of reading done. So there’s that.

Upon further reflection, and another hour or so of gameplay, I have to say that maybe my very subtle recommendation of Shadow Complex was not sufficient. This game is good. I mean, really good. It’s a little visually busy, so it can be hard to tell where you can move and not move, so be warned… oh, and I never thought I would ever say this, but the lack of a low-health alarm makes the game feel slightly unfair once bad guys start mowing you down in seconds. Still, even with all that, the game is pretty much a must-play, even just for the demo.

Catch you cats tomorrow.

…I didn’t exactly get my brain back into full gear today. However, I do have enough presence of mind to dig up an AMV as bailout. This doesn’t excuse me, but… yeah.

On a completely unrelated note: if you have a 360 and liked Metroid, then you probably want to give Shadow Complex a try.

Sorry I don’t have anything better to offer tonight than an excuse. Tomorrow I should be more able to be coherent.

The Think B4 U Speak (and this really deserves the scare quotes) “campaign”, while basically doomed to failure from the very beginning, has its heart more or less in the right place. The primary problem is actually very simple, once you understand one very important thing.

Howard Phillip Lovecraft once described a sound so horrific, so mind-bendingly alien that it could not, by sane men, be considered speech. The sound of wet flesh smacking tonelessly and arrhythmical, moistened by spittle and foam from the gaping maws of things once human but no longer, is the psycholinguistic equivalent of a Dremel applied directly to the forebrain: it is intended to convey a message which is as nonverbal as it is unambiguous. But this foul resonance is no mean fiction.

Lovecraft wasn’t describing the fell chants of R’lyeh. He was describing the chatter in an online match of, well, anything.

When you consider that the homophobic, racist, and other various unpleasant verbiage slung like plasma bolts across the internet are in essence the equivalent of the unintelligible screaming and gibbering of, for lack of a better description, monkeys– when you realize it’s not a deliberate slinging of slime, but a reflexive scream of primal fury from people who should know better but don’t have the presence or force of mind to control themselves– well, I think that pretty much says everything there needs to be said about it.

Except that there’s a convenient setting to allow voice only from friends on Xbox Live, and for the love of all things holy and a few things that aren’t, PLEASE USE IT. That way the apes can scream into the void or with their ilk, and the actual human beings can go about having a fun game or two.

Since a picture is worth a thousand words, let me drop thirty-five hundred “I’m Done!”‘s on you right here:

I’ve got a ton on my plate today, folks, and I forgot to post before I left. Sorry. Hopefully I’ll be done with the Redesign tomorrow early enough to post and get out to see Ponyo. Bizarrely enough all signs point to yes on that aspect, particularly because I only have one piece left to assemble before I do the final moving and deployments. Still, I was as surpised as anyone that the audio stand both looks better than I anticipated and was so easy to assemble. Moreover, the cabling was badly in need of reorganization, and that was relatively easy as well.

Later, folks.