John Zeitler

So apparently some idiot decided it would be a good idea to rob six Gamestops. Let’s set aside the obvious Clerks-esque “in a row?” comments and take a look at one of the key details of the case: when it happened. Captain Dumbass here decided to rob a Gamestop in March. Because March is, as you all know, when Gamestop does its most brisk business in advance of the holiday season. Granted, it’s the Easter holiday season, and that little stretch of time in, oh, I don’t know, late November and early December miiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight bring in a little more dough.

Crime, once exposed, has no refuge but in audacity. Crime isn’t the best way to get ahead in this world, but there’s just a little bit of awe involved in pulling off a caper with some style, or at the very least brains. Sadly, this story had neither.

Sometimes, folks, the internet feels like the biggest haystack of all time.

Considering the entire world will not shut up ever about Scott Pilgrim, which I am told is the name of some kind of movie coming out, I decided that I probably ought to at least read the books before deciding if it’s garbage dolled up in the trappings of nerdity that are suddenly considered “cool”. I’ll be reading the first book tonight and rendering judgment.

Wait, let me rephrase that. There’s nothing wrong, inherently, with something being popular. And despite how that last paragraph makes me sound, I really do want nerd stuff to be cool, or at the very least acceptable to the world at large. What bothers me is when people put it on and take it off as if it were nothing more than just sneakers. On some level I guess I feel a lot like Jello Biafra writing “Nazi Punks Fuck Off”.

Come to think of it, that last sentence right there sort of makes me just as guilty, doesn’t it?

(Oh, and as for the unprecedented and uncensored use of the F-Bomb up there, it’s warranted as it’s the title of the song and a sentiment I agree with. So if you came here, as a Nazi punk, expecting polemic in opposition to Mr. Biafra’s intent in, well, all of his songs, I urge you with all sincerity to please, at my earliest convenience (that is to say, right now), fuck off.)

EDIT, about twenty minutes later: DAMMIT I AM AN IDIOT FOR DOUBTING THE INTERNETS

I think there ought to be a prohibition against upgrading a browser early in the morning on a weekend. Or at the very least, some kind of alert box coming up, saying, “You’re about to install software that will break more things than it fixes in order to check to see if it fixes the one little thing you wanted it to fix months back. This will cause you to go on a wiki-walk-like hunt for another piece of software which does fix what you found annoying, maybe, but can’t import your settings from the old piece of crap software because they decided they just didn’t want to. More than that, every single new piece of software you find will have some minor little sticking point that causes you to run it once, dislike it, and then forget it’s there until weeks or months later, when you need to free up three gigs of hard drive space and can’t for the life of you remember if you installed all that garbage for a specific and critical reason. In short, you’re about to ruin the next seven to ten hours on a fruitless search which will leave you unfulfilled, unproductive, and ultimately waste the day so that you go into work tomorrow upset and irritable. Are you sure you want to do this?”

And then the options should be “No”, “Hell No”, and “Screw All This, I’m Going Outside”.

Earlier today, I had occasion to take a good, long look at the chocobo doll that sits on my shelves. It’s a pretty cute doll, and honestly it’s one of my favorite pieces in the collection, mostly because of what the doll signifies. A constant in the universe. No matter what happens, there’s always going to be huge yellow flightless birds that are invariably friendly and unimaginably adorable.

And then an hour ago I watched a cut-scene from FF13, wherein a photorealistic chocobo is torn to shreds by savannah cougars. What’s been happening since has been at once unsurprising, and dehydrating.

This week has been remarkably fulfilling, in many respects. Things that were set in motion months ago have crept ever closer to their destinations; some in small steps, and others in tremendous leaps forward. Some things, even, arrived at their next staging points days or even weeks ahead of the schedule I’d been banking on. Regardless, the next few weeks are going to be a bit of a lull as I continue some of the preparatory work towards the big rush of activity that will be September and October. I promise you all now, of course, that by the first of November, I’ll be able to reveal most, if not all, of the details of this current Secret Project.

In the meantime, I’ll just have to keep teasing you.

It’s been a little unusual to see so many free episodes of TV series I actually care about being offered on iTunes lately. The two big ones have been Top Gear and Mythbusters; a relatively recent episode of the former and a positively ancient one of the latter. While I can understand on some level wanting to promote shows that are coming up on their new seasons in the next couple months (unless the BBC runs on a different season schedule than North America, and they’ve already started), it just feels kind of weird to think that there’s some huge rush to get these old and dusty ones and zeroes off of virtual store shelves in order to make room for the proverbial new hotness.

Everyone knows that ones and zeroes attract dust no matter where they are. That’s why the insides of computer cases are always so horribly filthy.

Do you know any other words that start with F?

(….sorry, it’s been a long day, and there’s not much I can say about it all right now.)

Regarding RoboPope from last night, I did manage to beat him with a minimum amount of grinding and a fair to middling amount of digging through FAQs to figure out the indecipherable and obtuse equipment upgrade system. Of course, now that I understand the system, it makes perfect sense, but it would have helped out tremendously if the system was explained a little better in-game.

But it would have helped out even more if RoboPope hadn’t basically gotten back up after the climactic and awesome boss battle, spouted off some plot stuff, and basically told us “GTFO, you’re not ready to end the game yet, oh and you’re still totally gonna be my pawns for the next ten to twenty hours, too”.

Sunday evening I booted up Final Fantasy XIII and discovered that I hadn’t played the game, at all, for over four months. I wondered why, since it seemed like the story was getting to a really good point.

Tonight, I came to a conclusion that it might have had something to do with the huge RoboPope monster that supposedly ends Disc 2.