In rougly one year between 2004 and 2005, I created 10 YTMND sites

Here they are:

Mah niggas don't dance - Combining Fat Joe with The Simpsons. Based on its poor quality, I'm pretty sure I made the image myself and recorded the song with a PC microphone.

Shake Your Rump-Ah! - Some fat kid + Alizee + the Beastie Boys. It sounds like I used a PC mic again. I did not make the GIF.

Solid Snape kills Dumbelnooo - This is a combination of 3 trends on YTMND at the time (I believe I'm the only one that combined them in this way): Harry Potter spoilers, Darth Vader's "NOOOOOO" from Revenge of the Sith, and parodying Metal Gear Solid. I believe I made the sound and the image myself, which is way more effort than I'd currently put into something like this. This also seems like the first one where I actually had sound editing software.

Resident Evil 4 is GC exclusive!- I thought the lyrics in the song I used (by Taking Back Sunday) were hilariously bad and fitting for that image (which I did not create). I was also a bit of a Nintendo fanboy at the time so I sort of cared that Resident Evil 4 wasn't exclusive anymore even though I didn't buy it until last year. For Wii.

OW! My sperm! - Image/sound from Futurama.

Supersize it, Supervise it - Combining a picture of a fat kid at McDonald's with part of a song by Le Tigre (I believe it's called "Well Well Well"), who I was really into at the time. Le Tigre, not the fat kid.

Sexy, am I right? Guys? - A GIF of an anorexic transsexual walking towards the camera while the "Imagine there's no heaven" part of A Perfect Circle's cover of "Imagine" plays.

Sex in the future - I have no recollection of making this. I probably found the comic and the song around the same time and thought they'd fit or something.

Fear not, for I shall assist ye! - Another Futurama joke, but this time I put the extra effort into actually making the GIF myself.

SOUL RLY? - The "O RLY" meme was huge on YTMND. If it didn't start there, it definitely rose to prominence there. Soul Calibur III came out and had an owl character, so I made an O RLY YTMND using a picture of him. This is the second GIF I actually made myself.

The internet is stupid

I have a thing with message boards. The entire time I've had access to the internet I've been posting on them. Primarily video game message boards, especially during my adolescence. I still visit and post on message boards, but I try to stay away from video game specific boards now. The reason? People are idiots. Console fanboys are what did it mostly. I thought I had escaped... but sometimes the internet will follow you places.

Enter (the) Dragon Age 2. I loved Dragon Age: Origins and apparently so did a lot of people on the internet. I played it on PC. Apparently so did they, because they hate how DA2 is "consolefied" or whatever. They made this judgement before the game was released, mind you, and somehow managed to get their user reviews on Metacritic before the game was released. They must have industry connections! Truly they are superstar video game critics!

I played and finished DA2. It's superior to DAO in virtually every way. I have a fondness for the original, don't get me wrong, but DA2 is simply more fun and tells a more memorable story in my opinion. It's shorter, less expansive, flawed... but DAO was just as flawed in many similar ways. And it's still damn long. I'm a bit of a slowpoke/completionist and DA2 took me 50 hours as opposed to DAO's 80 hours. 30 hours is a pretty big difference, but I was far more familiar with the gameplay this time and 50 hours is nothing to sneeze at.

The big complaints seem to be that you can no longer select your race, you can no longer zoom the camera all the way out, and you have less diverse environments to explore. All valid complaints I suppose, but if these people actually played the damn game I'm sure they'd enjoy it and give it more than a 0 on Metacritic. Dragon Age 2 addiction is the reason nobody has updated this blog in 3 weeks. I personally think it could have benefited a lot form an extra 6 months or so of development, but I played the hell out of it regardless so I'm satisfied.

Chatroulette Love Song

This video is adorable. It sort of brightened up my day just now. It's been cloudy and rainy and miserable outside and I feel like I'm coming down with a cold. Having been aware of the stigma Chatroulette carries around with it, I was both surprised and delighted when this was sent to me today.

"I had a floppy disc that you turned into a harddrive." - Some things just make the rest of your day a little bit better. :)

Using My OCD for Good, Not Evil

So, as mentioned in my previous post I have the compulsion to collect things. It makes me both happy and sad because I find my bank account suffering more often than not due to my lack of control of my spending habits. Once I start buying things, I find I just won’t stop – I’m on a roll. It’s especially bad when my friends start going to comic shops or electronics stores on whims and take me a long. It’s not like they’re holding a gun to my head, but I’ll go if someone is driving… I don’t drive or have a car myself… T_T

Another downside to my “OCD” – I’m not a doctor so I’m not going to officially diagnose myself with OCD – is that I buy so many games that I don’t end up finishing them all. I’ve started most of them, but finished few – and it’s not for a lack of trying or wanting to, but somehow along with my “OCD” I also have some kind of “ADD”. I have a ton of games on the go, some I’ve almost finished, some I’ve just started, but very few have I actually finished – at least recently.

When I was younger and didn’t have the means to finance my addiction (I still don’t technically), I had to rely on birthdays and allowances for my video games, and when I got them I played them to death. I finished them and then played them again. To this day my two most memorable experiences with games – The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Devil May Cry – are games that I have played again since finishing them. I don’t know if it’s just the nostalgia factor, or if they truly were just great games (I have enough friends that will vouch for Ocarina of Time), but I would totally pick them up again and have.

I’m really baffled as to why I can’t finish games now, however. Sometimes I will literally stop just before the end (Folklore and Persona 4 are some more recent examples of this behaviour for me). Sometimes it’s the grinding, sometimes it’s the rest of my life getting in the way, but for whatever reason – I just can’t finish games anymore…

I’ve decided this habit is coming to an end. Being obsessed with collecting and organizing, I’m also a big fan of excel. When I get the opportunity to make a sweet excel doc at work – I am happy. It’s like a productive form of meditating while working for me. I feel like I’m doing something productive while also somehow zoning out at the same time. I don’t really know how it works but it just does. I am by no means an excel guru, but I’ve got enough knowledge to make some decent looking and relatively efficient excel reports.

One day soon I am going to do an inventory of all my games, played and unplayed, finished and unfinished. Somehow I will prioritize them (probably starting with the ones I’ve started but haven’t finished or am almost finished). This will also probably take me 900 years… but I’m willing to give it a try because I'm tired of missing out on great games that are literally at my fingertips and ready to be played. I’ll keep you(the internet) abreast of when my all powerful excel video game tracker is complete and any time I manage to make a dent in the rather large list of games that I own but haven’t finished….

I HOPE THIS WORKS! O_O

Collections

So for a while now – basically since I’ve been making my own income – I’ve been collecting things. It did originate when I was a kid, however. I collected Barbies (I am female so I get a pass on this…), and not “Teacher Barbie” or “Gymnast Barbie”. I collected the ones that cost between $50 and $100, the rare ones. I got them as gifts, I had to be patient and wait until Christmas or birthdays for them, but by the time I left home I had what could be called a collection. Even before this, when I was a really small child I collected stuffed animals… again, I am a girl – there are some things I just can’t fight.

Since this habit began I’ve been collecting books, movies, games, comics and statues/action figures (I still collect stuffed animals…). While I don’t think any particular collection could be considered among the more substantial collections out there, when I put them all together, my “Nerd Collection” takes up a whole wall – or if I chose to do so – the den in my apartment. The only things stopping me from going all out and nabbing every item I want is my lack of space and insufficient income.

Yet still, I will now go out and buy the books, games, comics and toys that I really want, the day they come out, and for full price if I want them that badly. It’s a combination of OCD and ADHD… if that’s even possible… I can’t focus my obsession on key area, but I feel the need to get these things as soon as possible and promptly put them on display in my living room. Some of my more prized items include my Big Daddy statue from the Bioshock collector’s edition, my Thor bobble head, my Domo Kun plushie, my Misdreavus pokemon plushie that I got from the Pokecentre in Japan, and just my comic collection in general.

When it comes to books, I read about sixteen at a time – mostly sci-fi or fantasy, with some classic literature, books on D-Day and history thrown in for good measure. It takes me much longer to finish them sometimes but I can’t restrict myself to one story at a time. There are probably more than sixteen books that I have on the go, but I stopped trying to keep track when I was fifteen. The list just got too unmanageable. When I find an author, who’s written one or two books that I liked I will get as many of their books as I can get my hands on. I don’t always read or even like all of them, but I must have them.

As for comics, I don’t bother looking to the old classics. I catch up on the events of the past to get a better understanding of what made my favourite heroes who they are today, but I’m far too poor to spend the money on collector’s items of the past. Plus there are plenty of contemporary comic story arcs, writers, artists and characters that are extremely good that I don’t really mind if I’m missing out on the vintage stuff. I actually have my mom to thank for my obsession with comics. If she hadn’t gotten myself and my brother and sister into watching the old 80’s X-men cartoon I don’t think I’d love comics as much as I do today. Fables, The Walking Dead, Batman, Justice League, X-Force, X-Men, X-Factor, Thor, Captain America, The Eternals, Deadpool, Cable, Dorohedoro and more are all part of my comic collection.

I’m also currently amassing a collection of Collector’s Editions of games. From Assassin’s Creed to Halo, Final Fantasy to Dead Space, if there are cool enough statues, artwork, toys, or in-game items I will try to get the Collector’s Editions of games. I have some of the boxes still because they looked cool (this may or may not be verging hoarder behaviour but for now I’ll give myself the benefit of the doubt, I can still move through my apartment without tripping of piles of shit).

I love my collection, as random and chaotic as it is. It’s not just a collection of things created out of a need to have everything related to one thing – they are things I really love which happen to all be related in the fact that they could all be considered nerdy. These things are stories, characters, and experiences I’ve had. They’ve connected me to new people, helped me discover new worlds and new experiences, and eaten a great big hole into my bank account… but that’s beside the point. This collection has grown so big, it’s a part of who I am, and I hope I never stop.

*As a side note… as I’m writing this I’m also watching an episode of Criminal Minds about a crazy woman who COLLECTS women and turns them into living dolls by paralyzing them, dressing them up like dolls until they die and she finds a replacement. Suuuuuper creepy…..

The Sub

I recently moved from my very own one bedroom apartment to sharing half of a small house with two other people. As such, I've had to throw away a lot of crap. As I was tossing out a backpack with a broken strap (the strap is only partially broken, and therefore in my mind the backpack was still usable... anyway...) I discovered 3 copies of a script I wrote in a high school writing class. I've been out of high school for about 5 years and continued using this backpack for about 2 years after high school and never removed these scripts for some reason. Maybe I hoped one day they'd be a conversation starter or something, I don't know. I even knew they were there before I decided to throw out the backpack. The script itself is heavily inspired by the BBC version of The Office and grizzled old lazy substitutes of my youth. It features semi-excessive cursing due to the fact that the teacher didn't care if we swore and I was a teenage boy. Here are all 8 pages of the script in their unedited written-by-a-17-year-old glory.

Amnesia is dark, decent, not a traditional game

There are some people that believe horror games should be played alone, in the dark with headphones on. Those people don't know what they're missing out on. Nel, a few of our other friends and I have been playing Amnesia: The Dark Descent by committee on a projector screen at work. It's almost scarier when other people are reacting to things (especially when they're as wimpy as my co-contributor) and there's something very compelling about working together to solve puzzles despite the fact that only one person is really in control. It probably helps we're all reasonable human beings for the most part.

Anyway, interest in Amnesia among our friends is largely fueled by this video:

We actually played through this part of the game yesterday.

Uncanny X-Force

My interest in comics is generally pretty variable. I always enjoy them, but whether or not I'm willing to keep up with them monthly is another story. If I am reading a monthly series or two, it's probably something involving the X-Men. I made the unfortunate decision in the early-mid 2000s of reading Chuck Austen's Uncanny X-Men instead of Grant Morrison's New X-Men. My decision was based entirely on which characters I liked more at the time and on the fact that I was 15. At the time I was into the stories too, but I reread some recently and had to stop when Juggernaut had sex with She-Hulk. At the end of Austen's run (which really isn't so bad, just a little over the top and soap opera-y), I kind of stopped reading comics monthly. I've revisited X-Men occasionally (especially through the magic of trade paperbacks), but never got all the way back into it. There are so many X-books that it's hard to get it right when you're looking at a rack that often requires you to literally judge a book by its cover.

I had a bit of a misstep by deciding it would be worth my time to read the first story arc new volume of X-Men (with no Uncanny or Astonishing or New attached to it). It was a fun enough read, but nothing too memorable aside from bringing Dracula back from the dead. I did a bit of research and discovered that Uncanny X-Force is the buzz book these days, so I picked up the first 4 issues. I think I finally hit it right. The characters play well off each other, the action is intense and the first story arc has already set an amazing tone for the series.

The basic concept is that Wolverine, Archangel (who can turn from Angel to Archangel at will but loses some of his humanity as the blue-skinned, metal-winged Archangel), Psylocke, Fantomex and Deadpool are the new X-Force. They handle the dirty jobs the X-Men stay out of, specifically missions that will likely require them to kill. The 5 characters all serve distinct roles on the team and compliment each other well. They have the perfect amount of history to incite the right amount of drama and tension without going overboard. The first story arc is about as comic booky as they come (Apocalypse is back from the dead in the body of a child and has recruited his 4 horsemen from throughout history), but it's handled with a sense of humour and driven by strong characters. Deadpool using his healing factor creatively to nurse Angel back to health was a particularly memorable moment. The final decision as to what to do with the child Apocalypse was one of the most unexpected sudden twists I've seen in a comic in a long time.

Issue 5 continued with the same delightful weirdness of the first 4 and I look forward to following Uncanny X-Force for months to come. Being reintroduced to the pain of waiting a month for another few minutes' entertainment kind of sucks though.

As a side note, I'm just now starting to read Astonishing X-Men and it's awwwweeesoooooooommmeee. I kind of ignored it because I'm meh on Joss Whedon, but I have the first 3 trades and they were all great.

Girl Nerds vs. Guy Nerds vs. Strip Clubs

Our gang of friends at work talk about a lot of amusing things at random. Things we often feel we should at least attempt to share with the world. So now I present to you our first attempt and sharing the love. Some of these things are revelations, philosophies, life lessons, and sometimes they’re just plain funny. This story in particular I think contains all of the above.

It all began when we were making fun of one friend in particular for ignoring a girl that we all thought was hitting on him – which in his case he should have been thankful for - and we had no problem sharing this opinion with him. He eventually rage-quit the chat (for a week) and the slurry of metaphors and analogies began.

As I said earlier, we could all agree that he was lucky a girl was even interested him and thus a fact about nerd girls and nerd guys was revealed. As a friend of ours then pointed out. Any guy in our "career" should consider himself lucky if a decent looking nerd girl takes interest in him, the simple reason being the ratio of nerd girls to guys. There are far more guys in our line of business than girls. A nerd girl has her choice of the “cream of the crop” of nerd guys. The rest who aren’t lucky enough to be snared by a nerd girl will die alone.

The fine Doctor then pointed out that everyone in the chat (around 10 people) were probably going to end up alone. And so the curse began… But there was a flaw in his logic. There were three girls and one guy here who were all in relationships. He then modified his curse to include all the people with relationships to have them end at the end of the week. Since he’s a doctor and not a magician this didn’t happen. However that didn’t make his first comment any less true.

People started trying to come up with excuses for not having a girlfriend, and in one case, substituting them with THE STRIP CLUB. The one guy who first suggested this was pretty instantly shot down. And we all began coming up with analogies for Strip Clubs and why there were terrible and would only ensure you die pathetic and alone. And then… I said probably the most brilliant thing I will ever say.

A Strip Club is like jumping into the ocean without knowing how to swim. And as you sink further and further down, you lose more and more oxygen. With less oxygen getting to your brain, the more ok with it you become. Then eventually a mermaid swims by you and takes off her seashell-bra and you think “this isn’t so bad”. Then you die alone at the bottom of the ocean.

Alone…

Alone and forgotten….

Sold Out

I listen to music. A lot of it is rock music typically on independent labels, and thus "indie rock". Within indie rock, there is an obsession with whether or not bands have "sold out". There are people that will literally stop listening to a band once they become popular or will vehemently insist that only the stuff they released BEFORE they were popular was good.

Like most children, all of my favourite bands growing up were bands on major labels that got played on the radio. I still like a few of these bands. I've never really seen the problem with music I like being commercially successful. I honestly get excited if a band or artist that I love starts getting mainstream press. Case in point:

I love the band Screaming Females. I discovered them just under a year ago and almost instantly bought all of their albums. They just released another album late last year called "Castle Talk". It's very good. Anyway, despite them being popular enough for me to hear about them on the internet they still play at bars, record stores and in people's basements. They're not even popular enough to be an indie buzzband that gets "Best New Music" on Pitchfork. Basically, if I wanted to have indie cred for liking a band they'd be a great candidate.

The thing is that their music is legitimately great, in my opinion. Not in the way that makes you want to cry or write poetry, but in the way that makes you nod your head and grin like an idiot when that awesome riff comes in right as the cymbal crashes and the singer is yelling something you can't understand while it's suddenly clear to you how amazing the bass line you've been hearing for the entire song is. That's how I feel about it anyway. I was excited to see that they were on Last Call with Carson Daly. Of course I don't watch that show. It's on at 1:30 AM and hosted by Carson Daly. But this is a band I want people to hear getting covered on a major US television network. It's shown coast to coast in at least two countries.

My point is, if you don't like a band you like getting mainstream attention you shouldn't even call yourself a music fan. If the band actually got worse after signing to a major label or having a hit single they were probably falling apart anyway. If they let money dictate stylistic changes they never had any artistic credibility. Most of the bands people make the "well their first album was good!" argument for were never good anyway (see: early-mid 2000s "emo" bands).

The only time I might consider a band "sell outs" is if they hate each other and then reunite to tour for a year and make a ton of money. I really can't blame them or hold it against them though. I like money too. Plus, if they're a band I like I'll be at the show.

Adventures in "Next Blog"

To be completely honest, I'm new to blogs in general. I visit mainstream blog-format websites but I don't really read grandma's knitting blog. Until now. The "Next Blog" feature has taught me that every housewife with a hobby has a blog. Or has a blog as a hobby. They sometimes even blog about blogging (I heard you like blogs, etc.). I'm fascinated (and a little terrified) that I was able to find 3 blogs about miniatures within the course of about 10 minutes. Is it because they're related? I really don't understand now the feature works.

I sometimes wonder what the genesis of these women is. The type of women that are positive about everything, church goers and have hobbies like miniature collecting. Were you like this when you were young? Did you meet your husband at a craft fair? It's really so completely alien to me. You people are my neighbours, my friends' moms, my mom, my mom's friends, my aunts, my grandmothers. My female friends in 10 years. You were the teachers that got mad at me for throwing things at my friends in class and docked marks for not underlining every title with a ruler and not colouring in the lines. You are the women that shaped my childhood and will always represent female authority figures that like things that bore me. I'm honestly concerned for my future if an otherwise not boring girl can grow up to like things like stitching "HOME SWEET HOME" onto pillows. Do you understand what you've done to your spouse? I can only hope he collects trains or builds birdhouses or something.

Also, what decade is this? Why are there housewives that have 4 children under the age of 10 but no job? I get how it must work financially, but I don't get why a guy with enough ambition to support a family by himself would marry someone whose hobbies include having children and telling people on the internet about said children.

Oh, look at you.

Oh, look at you. You have a blog. You should really take a moment and reflect on all the hard work that went into making this happen. The stories that go untold. The jokes that only a small group of people are privy to. All those times they said "Why don't you blog about it?" Look at you. Blogging about it.


Now that that's out of the way...


This will be the home for the opinions, stories and ramblings of a small group of friends working as testers at a video game company. There are only two of us now. There may only be two of us ever. That's beside the point. We work and socialize with the kind of people that spend way too much time being sarcastic and inflammatory. We're those kinds of people too. We have interests, sure. We like stuff like video games, comics, movies, music, books. Expect posts about those things. You can also expect works of fiction written with the intention of poking fun at things through extreme hyperbole. And works of non-fiction where we do the same thing with less hyperbole. We might even drop a recipe or two. Stay tuned.