Pagoo

Let's take a trip back in time, back to when I was a wee little... being. First, imagine the chirping of crickets, and the occasional bird call. It was a hot summer day, much as it is now, and I had taken refuge from the heat in the cool interior of a library that is no longer standing.

Back then the shelves towered over my larval form, and I suspect my supervision units had left me to my own devices for a time.

My wanderings took me to a section I had never seen before. Curious, I knelt down and perused the titles on the bottom tiers. Most of them seemed to be serious, adult nonfiction, unappealing to my developing literary palate. 

Then I saw one with a strange title, one that seemed too silly to be among these serious, adult books. I pulled it out, and was greeted by a stark white book jacket, upon which the title was emblazoned in large black Times New Roman characters:

Yes, it was that timeless childhood tale that we all know and love. Although I'm not sure why the jacket cover didn't look like what it should have been. Nevertheless, I was undaunted by the cover and opened the book. As I beheld the fascinating illustrations within I was drawn into a strange, ethereal experience that defies description and memory.

Pagoo is a story encompassing the life and times of a hermit crab, from his infancy as a tiny speck swirling amidst schools of plankton to the acquisition of his first shell and beyond. Despite having not read it for many years, some of its scenes remain as vivid echoes in my mind. It was perhaps my first foray into the world of xenofiction; narratives written from a nonhuman point of view. 

Well, this was the most profound-sounding post I've ever made on this farce of a blog. Too bad I'm all out of profoundness for the day. Ta ta.

Arr Nein Kay

"Pinnochio is just a taste of his ability!" --pink haired lover boy

Have you ever had that feeling that there's something stuck in between your teeth yet no matter how hard you pick, you can't quite get it out?

firecracker hexagen

I've had this feeling for almost two days now, and at this point I'm thinking the inner edge of my tooth just got eroded for some reason. I can feel the irregularity with my tongue, but not with my teeth, and I can't see anything when I look in the mirror and shine a light down the old orifice. I must have gone through a few feet of dental floss and a millimeter of fingernail by now trying to get some relief, but the only real result I've had is making my gums bleed a little.

Ain't that a bitch?
That's heavy man.
 
Maybe it's always been like that, and I never really felt up the backside of my teeth that thoroughly with my tongue before.

Maybe it's just a plaque buildup from not brushing the backside.

Or Maybe it's Maybelline.

 

 

weylcome to weybtoon

A couple days ago (because I always take a few days to get around to writing this up) I had a dream in which I had traveled to this Egypt-like place with my dad and some other guys. This was probably not influenced by anything, especially not a particular work of fiction. It's useless to try and guess. Useless, useless, useless.

It was night time in a vast desert with various shiny buildings sparsely scattered around. We chose to go to this big, plain stone pyramid. There was a big square opening in the center, and we all walked in. It was unlit, there was something large writhing in the darkness, and I got an immense feeling of foreboding. I recalled my horror movie dream policy of "start running before bad things even happen" and immediately high tailed it out of there before people even started dying. I ran out into the desert and as usual my running was horrifically slow, as if I was exhausted. I'm surmising this is because I'm actually trying to run in my sleep and the bed is impeding my limbs.

Suddenly it was daytime, and all the townsfolk started panicking because a sandstorm was approaching on the horizon. I saw that huge cloud of dust with a scary face like on the cover of The Mummy movie, no not that one, I mean the 1999 version with Brendan Fraser (praised be his name).

I huddled in this small alcove in an alleyway, but its protection proved to be insufficient. The first wave of the storm hit, because this storm comes in waves. The experience was akin to being hit with Boomer bile in Left 4 Dead, except it was sand and my outer layers were being ground off. The wave passed, giving me a brief respite, but I knew I wasn't likely to survive the second wave, completely exposed as I was. Lord knows what the fifth wave would have done. Probably turn me into some lovesick little girl.

I decided to take shelter in this building that was like a fusion of a pharmacy and a government DMV type facility. The situation escalated when some rough looking folks came in looking for me, and I had to slip out again.

My recollection of what transpired after that is fuzzy but at some point I was walking around a Korean harbor at sunset looking for fountains and other perverted stuff.

RIP Mall

I don't usually make spelling mistakes, at least not ones that I don't notice and correct immediately. Today I was typing quadruped into the search engine but spelled it "quadraped" instead and only noticed after hitting enter. Talk about Freudian slips. It just sounds so extreme though if you think about it: QUAD RAPED! Like four rapes in a row, or rape with an ATV.

Oh yeah, I forgot to warn you guys: this blog post mentions rape.

Earlier I was at the mall, seeing how much more fashionable everyone else was compared to me. Clad in a blue collared t-shirt and khaki shorts, I realized I was the spitting image of a Best Buy employee. If there was a Best Buy nearby I'd probably get kicked out because they'd think I was trying that Geek Squad impersonation prank a bunch of people tried a couple years back. 

Oh, it was actually more than a decade ago, so chances are you don't know what I'm referring to. This'll get you up to speed:

 https://improveverywhere.com/2006/04/23/best-buy/

I thought my worries were unfounded, as this mall didn't have enough space for a Best Buy store. But then I turned a corner and lo and behold, there was a Best Buy Mobile!

While I was there I also noticed that the Chick-fil-a had been replaced by a House of Kabob. Not sure when that happened, but its almost like a direct cultural swap occurred. Gonna have to get those waffle fries elsewhere now.

sunlight in motion

It's around 10 o'clock in the morning, and all's well. I've been watching the night slowly turn to day for the past four hours in the comfort of my bed. This is primarily due to a bout of insomnia preventing me from sleeping in on the weekend.I've already finished reading all of the books I got, and backed up my files on ye olde external drive, so I once again return to the sustaining solace of the internet.

Let's talk about cringy children's book authors. Is it just me, or does Rick Riordan look a lot like DJ MacHale? It could be the pose, their similar professions, or maybe I'm not as good at telling white folks apart as I thought I was.
Here's a side by side comparison, so you can decide for yourself:

Uncanny, isn't it? But then you have this magnificent bastard:

This man is my hero.

Holy crap I just slacked off for half an hour from finishing this post. Let me just leave you with something nice for the road, before the hour changes and I must depart to greener shores.

Bring out the gimp

Tragic irony has vindicated my previous post. Last night I somehow twisted my leg at a weird angle while sleeping, delivering an unending holocaust of pain. Well not really, I just needed to make a Lyttle Lytton reference. It did hurt like hell for the first minute or so, and then settled down to a dull ache, which persists to this moment.

Naturally the first thing I did was check for bleeding or bruising (a sign of internal bleeding for the anatomically impaired) but there doesn't appear to be any.

In other "news", there's going to be a sequel to that movie about a weird ass board gayme, except in lieu of the now departed Williams the star power is the Rock. This would be fine, if they didn't try to shoehorn in some stupid video game tropes. This is an international travesty.

 

Chicken noodle soup for the beard

In recent times it seems that it takes some sort of bodily ailment to get me to do one of these posts. Fortunately no such affliction plagues me at this time, if you discount some normal sleepiness and a recurring ache I get from flexing my right middle finger to scroll the mouse wheel. I hypothesize the latter may be due to a puncture wound from several weeks ago, but that was positively tiny and should have healed by now. I certainly don't feel the same pain in my index finger, which suffered the same injury. 

TRIGGER WARNING: POLITICS!

A couple days ago I dreamed that I had convinced Donald Trump to adopt me as his son, and was now set up to live the rest of my life in opulence and luxury. It was pretty cool, going into conference rooms and feeling all high class. But then the world turned into Minecraft and I  kept falling into these crummy dirt caves in the hills, which is pretty similar to what happens when I actually played Mein kraft.

My shorts are too short and my shirt is too long. Both are a pallid white, quite fitting for a "laundry day" outfit.

Let's discuss juice drink pouches. No, not juice boxes, but the squishy kind. These silvery beverage containers were first used (or at least codified in the public mindset) by Capri-Sun, and now also by Kool-Aid in their "Jammers" line. Oh yeah. They even use the same pointy yellow straws. Which brings us to the main topic: you ever notice how it's easier to take the straw out by pushing it down through the bottom of its wrapper, despite the fact that the pointy end is on top? After sacrificing half a box's worth of straws in my quest for truth I've found that this holds true even when it's upside down, ruling gravity out as a factor. So what's the cause behind this phenomenon?
It's all in the leverage. You see, the bottom half of the straw's wrapper is attached to its pouch via a weak chemical adhesive(aka glue) while the top half can move freely. This holds it in place so that when you push the straw down it'll punch through the wrapper's bottom and exit in one smooth motion. Contrast that to the "normie" method where you pull down the top so the pointy end pierces through and you have to pull the whole thing out.

I'm going through a sort of creative drought these days, it took me a week to accumulate all of this.

Mundane made awesome

Ah, Youtube "Recommended" videos. You try so hard to discern my tastes with deep learning algorithms but in reality, like most people, I'll watch just about any drivel that's presented before me:

Did you too feel a mingled sense of simultaneous boredom and suspense? You might need to have viewed Christopher Dolan's feelm in order to fully appreciate such a juxtaposition.

In other news, I've recently experienced one of the best memetic joke setups in recent years. It's been supplying me with chuckles for days.

Friend: How many chaos you got?
Me: Preem chuckled. "You mean the Chaos Emeralds?"
Friend: u stole obummer's line

Explaining the joke kind of takes away the punch, but if you don't get it you probably aren't laughing anyway, so here's a little context: I've been on-and-off playing Path of Exile, one of those single player games where you have to be connected to the Internet and see other people's chat messages. One of the main currencies used in the player based economy is the chaos orb, but my friend neglected to clarify that, and I love to harp on little details like that (which is part of what makes me such a great conversational partner). 

The Obama quote is self explanatory, as a matter of course.

AssCreeThree

Imagine, if you will, a video game in which you play as an orphaned hero whose whole hometown was burned down by a dastardly villain. After years of combat training under a wise old hermit, he returns to society to join a secret resistance movement of freedom fighters to help them overthrow the evil empire that is trying to take over the world. 

Sounds exciting, doesn't it? Well you need not imagine, dear reader, for this amazing video game is real, and I have played it.

I am speaking, of course, of Assassin's Creed III.

"That is not what you expected the guy to sound like" -- videodonkey.com, Mess Effect

Here, I'll give you a nice unrelated picture to space things out in case you need time to recover from the epiphany I just gave you and gather up the bits of your blown mind:

Ay fam, you good? Aight, I'mma letchu finish.

In fact, one could easily point to the American Revolution as the main reason that these tropes have become such worn out cliches in the first place. So don't think of this as a stereotype, "playing it straight" or a cliche storm. Think of it as our entertainment culture coming full circle. Or something like that.

Anyway, you actually start off playing as Haytham Kenway instead. This is fine because Haytham is a pretty cool dude, aside from his uncanny resemblance to Judge Claude Frollo from Disney's Hunchback of Notre Dame. 

Or wait, that's not quite the beginning, I think there was something else... some generic guy running around a cave?  

i dunno lol

Meh, close enough.

As per usual there's the hours-long prologue; in this instance you're doing some suave secret agent stuff shooting fools and stabbing sods. I had already cottoned on to what the first major twist was going to be after noticing the conspicuous lack of hoodies and Charles Lee specifically yelling FOR THE ORDER!, like aren't you leaving something out there buddy, it couldn't possibly be important could it?

Stuff happens, and we transition to the main chap, Ratohnhaketon, and I think the romanization is somewhat imperfect because the Ks sound a lot like hard Gs. I'm klad though that the memory begins when he's a young child, and not as a newborn infant, because that would be really awkward and very painful to sit through, especially if you were running it on a below-spec computer which ran at four seconds per frame at the lowest settings even on the cutscenes. Haha, what a funny hypothetical situation. Childbirth. Haha why did I say that I can be so random sometimes ecks dee.

 As a small child Ratohnhaketon is still fairly helpless, possessing no weapons, armor, or clothing dye of any kind. Pressing the run button makes him skip instead. This childhood scene introduced me to the traditional Native American game of "hide and seek", an integral, unique part of their culture. Unfortunately being the clumsy paleface that I am, I had to use his superpowers to cheat my way through. 

The resulting segments of Conna's childhood will be recited in poetic meter. 
So mote it be:

Iiiin west New York he was born and raised

On the treetops was where he spent most of his days

Chillin' out hopping, droppin like a scamp

All collecting some feathers outside of the camp

When a couple o guys who were up to no good

Started making trouble in the neighborhood

He got one little threat and his mom was dead

And said, I'm moving in with some guy at the Davenport Homestead!

Not entirely accurate I suppose, but it's in the same way that this game was accurate to US history. Turnabout is Fresh play, as they say.

So I found myself running about this generous tract of land, performing mundane errands when suddenly:

I get the feeling he doesn't want me going this way.

WHOA-HO-HO there, Ahkilleez! That is one mighty long piece of wood you're working on there. Maybe we ought to let those lumberjack bros handle this instead? Oh wait, we can't because they're too busy fighting each other and when I try to stop I somehow end up just standing there uselessly for eternity.

For real though, that "break up the fight" homestead mission is a total crapshoot. The first couple times I tried to do it, the control bars didn't show up at all and I was given zero indication of what was supposed to happen. After exiting the mission and restarting multiple times I resorted to looking up guides on gaymefax and youtub, which described some bizarre dual-stick tug of war minigame. This still didn't solve the problem because the game was literally not responding to any of the proscribed button/key inputs. What eventually got it to work was the rather strange process of force-quitting the whole application in the middle of the mission and then relaunching it. This shouldn't be necessary. Ubishit needs to stop treating all their non-microtransaction projects like disposable cash cows, this gayme is turning 5 years old and there are still so many BUUUUUUUUGS.....

It's not all bugs and glitches though. There are indeed parts of the game that frustrate you entirely on purpose. Take the most recent Homestead mission I started: 
Norris the miner wants me to stand guard over him while he does some mining stuff. 
"It's not far, just outside the property," he says. Okay, so I start following him. Then the dreaded screen fade to white occurs and he has suddenly vanished into thin air.
The quest prompt tells me to "Meet Norris in the Frontier." 
The Frontier being outside the Homestead, which is already like a couple acres or more across. Kinda segregating gameplay and story a little here, but fortunately I can use fast travel to get to the entrance. He said "just outside" so it should be close by, right?

Nope! It's a kilometer and a half away in the middle of nowhere wilderness. No fast travel4u.

That's enough of the negativity, let's look on the bright side. For one, adult Connor is a serious hunk. This incarnation of the assassino outfit is rather lacking in swag, but his brawny beefcake build sort of makes up for it. Eazy-O always seemed scrawny compared to the mercenarii and armor bros, but as Connor it feels like more of an even match against the jaegers and big kilt boys. 
There are plenty of gimmicks to distract you from the plot and characterization like:

• Naval combat
• Lesser known European board games
• The bow counter
• And my favorite pastime, AIR ASSASSINATING ANIMALS

PREPARE YOURSELF, VERMIN!

That hare put up a good fight, but my blade was superior. Yama, motha nature.

I also gave the multiplayer mode a fair spin - it's not a gimmick. It's a legit PvP game that could have had eSports potential, if Ubisuck gave a damn about competitive balance(For Dinner). Only problem is that not too many people are on the servers these days.
It's like that song goes - we all need someone to lean on.

A view askew

Pioneer X Independent confirmed

 Well, there are multiple songs that say that, but you get the idea.

Snaaaaake

I was on my way home on the sidewalk yesterday, when suddenly I heard a strange rustling by my feet. No, it was not my jimmies like you might expect, nor was it a flying lawnmower or an amused gorilla. I looked down and there appeared to be nothing, but widening my search I saw a strangely curved brown branch just off the sidewalk.

I then realized the branch was actually a snake, lying very still besides its flickering tongue. I probably should have taken a picture or something, but it was Friday and I was very done with life so I just kept walking.