Ok, now the layout is working properly. All I have to do is get the episodes online and get all of the old news properly archived and this thing will actually be up to date.

Here’s the setup:

Your opponent is in front of you; if you don’t defend yourself, you will die. Assume that all other options for avoiding a confrontation have been exhausted. You can’t run, and he won’t speak to you rationally — you must fight.

Sink into a fighting stance: right foot back, left foot forwards, hips and shoulders rotated to face to your right in order to present less target area, knees bent, most of your weight on your back leg. Remember to keep you hands up! Your left hand sits in front, forearm vertical, elbow bent 90 degrees. With your fist clenched, it will protect everthing from chin to floating ribs. Your right arm is horizontal near your side, elbow up slightly and shading your solar plexus. Like any fighting stance, there are holes in this one but they are small and difficult to exploit.

Feint with a lead-hand jab to his face. While his attention is briefly diverted up top, move in with your actual attack. With your back leg (your right leg), perform a low roundhouse kick to his knee. Remember to rotate your hips along with the kick as this will maximize the energy delivered on target. The impact to his knee will cause catastrophic lateral movement, breaking the collateral ligaments which are designed to limit just this sort of thing. Another result of this attack will likely be a violent inward rotation of the knee which will severely injure the anterior cruciate ligament and may even cause the patella to be driven out of place.

Follow-through is an important part of kicking technique. Your foot has reached its target, but you continue moving it on through — at the terminus of the kick, your back foot has now become your front foot and your stance has changed sides. Exploiting your momentum, your right elbow comes up at about the same time your right foot reaches its target. As the right foot and leg come down into place at the end of the kick, your right elbow strike is already on the way and hits him near his left eye. Though it is possible to fracture the zygomatic arch (cheekbone) of the skull with this attack, a more properly targeted elbow strike will impact the temple just slightly above the eye socket. The downward-angled force of the impact combined with your angular velocity from the kick will tear the left orbicularis oculi muscle and splinter the bone of the left orbit itself, causing bone fragments to destroy the eye.

Now you reverse your momentum. Your current stance after the kick leaves your right hand as the lead, and the left as your reverse hand. With your reverse hand, lash out in an open-palm strike to the floating ribs on his right side. Again, rotation of the hips is critical to maximizing the amount of energy delivered on target. The energy of the impact, manifesting itself as a shockwave propagating through the watery medium of the human body, will likely cause extensive rupturing of the delicate alveolar blood vessels in the right lung. With any luck, the ribs will also be broken and driven into the organ to add to the collateral damage.

Congratulations. Your enemy is now a crippled, hemorraging, half-blind wreck, and you are free to continue with your life. You sick fuck.

I also invite all of you to attend a parenting seminar I will be hosting this July.

The layout seems to be fucking up more so than usual. I’d like to say I’m working on it, but I’m really not. As for the Eternal Darkness impressions I’ve promised for the last two days, they sort of turned into a full-blown article. However, I just uploaded that Dr. Strangelove essay all of two days ago, and want to give it a little more time in the latest article spot on the bottom of the page, so maybe I’ll upload my Eternal Darkness review on Monday. Maybe I’ll upload all 48 episodes on Monday too. Maybe I’ll send out that “last episode ever” I’ve been talking about for uh… actually this is the first time I’ve mentioned it. Review for sure, the rest maybe. Now if you don’t mind, it’s time for Farscape.

I just thought of a name for my Eternal Darkness review…

Eternal Darkness: I’m Crazy For It. Jesus, I’m sorry.

We’ll just pretend like yesterday’s update never happened.

As you can see, the site’s new layout is live. As you may or may not be able so see, it isn’t exactly working properly. The tracker and accompanying border in the upper left hand corner only feels the need to function about 50% of the time. I’m looking into changing the whole thing from 10 small images into a single large image, but I’m certain that will end up being an even greater failure. At least all of the gray bars line up everywhere else, even on the Articles and Staff pages. Speaking (or typing) of the Staff section, I need to e-mail the staff concerning the graphics on that page, but seeing as how my e-mail service works differently every day, only luck determines whether or not I have the means to communicate via electronic mail. As for getting the episodes back online, I care about doing that about as much as you do, so we’ll see if that ever happens.

Tomorrow I’ll have Eternal Darkness impressions, I promise. Let’s just put it this way; it may not be the greatest game ever created, but it is not that far behind.

Yesterday evening I found myself embroiled in a conversation of politics with a patch of petunias in full bloom. Of course, I use the word “conversation” lightly; it was more of a one-sided ranting session than an actual exchange of opinions and ideas.

It all started innocently enough — I simply asked its opinion as to the shape of future Congressional fiscal policy. I should have known better, of course. I meant only to make conversation, but that was the only invitation it needed to spout every misguided opinion it had ever formed over the course of its long days in the sun.

The affair began with a fifteen minute post-modern neo-Luddite diatribe, cursing everything from middle school science education to genetically modified organisms. Scarcely even pausing for breath and preventing me from getting in a comment (edgewise), it when went further to touch on Marxism, anarchist rhetoric, McCarthy-era social paranoia, and a surprising anti-Semitic streak. Sick of this mix of ideological crap after a full hour, I turned my back and walked away. The petunia was still talking when I walked out of earshot — it just wouldn’t shut up.

This is why I don’t ask flowers for their opinions. Hell.

For the most part, the new site is online. I still need to upload the episodes and archived news, but other than that, it’s all here. Sometimes the layout works, sometimes it doesn’t. Probably my spotty HTML, but I don’t really now for sure. Anywho, tomorrow I’ll be posting some Eternal Darkness impressions and uploading a sizeable chunk of the episodes. It’s a good time to be alive. I’m sorry, that was one terrible paragraph.

Dirt owns me.

It’s a common complaint of mine; I complain about it just about everywhere I live. However, I feel it warrants another go: I am sorely disappointed with the soil quality around my house. The topsoil extends a meager six to eight inches below the surface of the ground. Some parts of it are exceedingly sandy, and the humus seems to be lacking oomph. The ground is also peppered with large skull-sized rocks — no doubt a gift from the last glacier that passed this way.

There’s not much to say about the underlying layer of sediment below the rather anemic topsoil. It’s fairly standard, as far as inorganic sediment layers go. I wouldn’t mind seeing a few more earthworms working their way through it, though.

The groundwater is what really gets me, though. I don’t understand how something can contain so much dissolved metal and salt (mostly carbonates and phosphates) and still be considered water. It may, in fact, have something to do with the craptacular soil layer. I’ll let y’all know more about what I find after I conclude my Earth Destroy-o-Ray experiments later this week.

On an unrelated note, this evening I shall try to eat my own body weight in linked sausages.

I saw Minority Report today expecting a Blade Runner/A.I. hybrid and am glad to say I was sorely disappointed in that regard. The future presented in MR is far more feasible than A.I.’s version of tomorrow and seems like a radically updated version of Blade Runner’s vision. However, the drastic advances in technology, while certainly possible someday, seem very unlikely for the year 2054. The film itself is surprisingly good, and the special effects are fantastic. In fact, they’re better than those found in Star Wars Episode II. My one complaint with the film is that the last twenty minutes seems to be one ending after another, but not to the extreme of A.I.’s dozen or so consecutive climaxes. Overall, Minority Report is certainly worth the admission fee.

My previous update should have been titled “Sans Bob Skir” as he has fucked up far more modernizations of classic franchises (3) than Tim Burtin (1).

Well, the whole get-DSL-and-route-it-to-the-other-computers-in-the-house plan failed royally. I’m sure looking forward to uploading all 40 mbs of the brand-spankin new DORK Club web site on Wednesday using a 56k modem on AOL.