We’ll be raiding Southshore this Friday. We’ll meet up at Tarren Mill at 4:00 PM PST. All characters are welcome regardless of level and are encouraged to participate. Rumor has it that I’ll have a few pink shirts for DORK Club members who want them, but be warned, they’ll be available on a first come, first serve basis only.

I have this small, round, ridiculous English professor who could easily win a nation-wide Jerry Mathers lookalike contest. He is, by all accounts, a fantastic orator. The man is able to speak fluently and eloquently for one hour and twenty minutes without ever missing a beat, presenting the lecture material in this sort of over-rehearsed-so-as-not-to-seem-rehearsed fashion. Yet, for all his unquestioned skill as a lecturer, he manages to convey very little information in our biweekly meetings, successfully presenting only two or three concepts over the course of this marvelous oration. It’s all very unnecessary. It’s all very ridiculous.

This man is the sort of man to come to each lecture dressed entirely in black – black shirt, black pants, black socks, black shoes, black bag – so that at the same point in each class, exactly at the fifty minute mark, he can brush the chalk dust from his chest (he’s only used the chalk once in his lecture today) and comment, in a rehearsed unrehearsed way, that he’s managed to get chalk all over himself. This man is the sort of man to spend the entirety of the first lecture informing us that yes, the class we’re enrolled in is titled Principles in Criticism, but he’s gone ahead and retitled it Introduction to Literary Theory. This is the sort of man to dedicate his retitled class to the memory of Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) in a sentiment which, while incredibly pretentious, is also wholly ridiculous. An acquaintance of mine who spent his fair share of nights zoning, recovering, and facing the aisles of OfficeMax with me tells me that I’m a cynical bastard for pointing this out before completely agreeing with me.

As we leave Principles in Criticism/Introduction to Literary Theory and begin our walk across campus where we share yet another building, but not another class, I note that it’s ridiculously cold outside, though the ridiculousness of the temperature doesn’t quite match the ridiculousness of our professor. However, he’s quick to point out that, were we in Antarctica, we’d consider today a warm, ideal day for rolling naked along the ice. Our incredibly interesting observations on the weather continue until a girl we’ve been walking behind the entire time joins our conversation. She used to live in Alaska. It’s very cold there.

The conversation continues and things are said by all parties involved, but at this point, I can’t remember the specifics. To be perfectly honest, they don’t really matter. As we’re coming up on the building both my former OfficeMax buddy and I have our next class in, this girl manages to slip in that she’s an undergrad, hey just like us!, and she works for some poorly named marketing company and, guess what!, they’re hiring. There’s this moment of stunned silence before we both make up some excuse as to why we don’t give a damn, and then this girl turns a full one hundred and eighty degrees in the opposite direction and walks away. Having both realized that this girl just spent the last five or eight minutes earning the trust of two perfect strangers on the street via friendly, spontaneous conversation before pitching her sell, we both agree that this is a fantastic, if completely ridiculous, means of selling something.

I visit soosed.com�s LiveJournal image collector, which spits out the last 30 image files used in LifeJournal posts to a single page, far too often to be considered healthy. Though the feature is temporarily malfunctioning following LifeJournal�s power outage-related death a few days ago, when it was active I found it to be an extremely interesting cross section of the human condition. There were also lots of �If I Were A�� poll results.

Anyway, one day while I was scrolling through the images which LiveJournal users were unknowingly sharing with the world, I stumbled across this little beauty. For those of you stuck behind a 14.4 modem on AOL, it�s a movie poster for a film adaptation of V for Vendetta which fashions itself as an �uncompromising vision of the future from the creators of the �Matrix� trilogy.� IMDB tells me that James McTiegue, who served as assistant director on all three Matrix films and Star Wars Episodes 2 and 3 in addition to his work on the Street Fighter movie, is directing this thing. I think his resum� pretty much speaks for itself. As should be expected, Joel Silver and those lovely Wachowski brothers are producing.

Considering that the previous film adaptations of Alan Moore�s work, From Hell and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, both turned out to be 98% and 99% terrible, respectively, there�s an extremely good chance this could be the film to finally hit that coveted 100% mark. Considering the people involved, I�d wager it�s all but guaranteed. Then again, if V for Vendetta turns out to be completely meritless, that doesn�t leave much room for the upcoming Watchmen film to grow. I�ll change my prediction to a more conservative 99.5% terrible index.

Obviously, I�m basing all of this on four names, a movie poster, and the directors� of Menace II Society�s ability to make a really, really bad movie, but if it weren�t for baseless accusations and random predictions concerning industries which we are no way associated with, this here Internet thing wouldn�t see much use.

I have a single 180 page spiral bound notebook which I used for all the classes I took over the summer as well as all the classes I took last quarter. I don�t take many notes. I don�t plan on buying a new notebook for this quarter either, even though the number of remaining pages is numbering fewer and fewer. Though I rarely record anything which is written on the board and usually trust my memory to serve me well enough come exam time, I do manage to fill these pages as my mind wanders from the lecture topic at hand. Random thoughts about the latest Final Fantasy game, strange phrases which I find incredibly clever at 8:00 AM on a cold Monday morning, and new ways to describe my multi-faceted penis litter this notebook. However, rather than actually taking these thoughts any further (as this site�s extreme inactivity over the last six months or so clearly shows), I normally return home and spend my time playing video games (99% of the time the video game in question has been World of Warcraft), avoiding school work, or rummaging through the few useful tatters of the Internet (which vector_black tells me that Wired told him we shouldn�t capitalize any more).

That�s really just a lot of useless words leading up to this: I plan on trying to maybe update with a slightly greater frequency. Possibly. I doubt I�ll be able to churn out daily updates as I so aptly did in the days of my youth. I�m not entirely sure how I managed to find something to write about each and every night, but I did it. Surely I can manage to scrape something together three or four days out of the week in my old age. Then again, we�ll see how appealing this prospect seems tomorrow morning when my orc warlock has a couple �bubbles� of rest experience just begging to be used up.

And yes, the forums are still down, comments for old updates are saturated with spam, and Movable Type is only 50% functional. Still.

To further summarize: meta-content, blah-blah-blah, false promises, butt shovel.

�Butt shovel� may just be the most hilarious phrase ever built by man.

One of the best things about the original Half-Life was its unparalleled mod community. A multitude of mods are well underway for Half-Life 2, but already at least one truly excellent mod has been released. The unfortunatly named Garry’s Mod acts as a sort of Source-powered Mario Paint in which players have access to nearly all of the game’s character models and a wide range of objects as well as a handful of useful tools to manipulate them. Then it’s up to you, your imagination, and your patience with the game’s physics system to generate whatever you desire. Using Garry’s Mod you could, for example, arrange a haphazard screen featuring all of Half-Life 2’s key players.

The pseudo-crucified Dog left me with an urge to crucify a scientist. So I did.

However, when I tried to puncture the scientist�s wrists and ankles to add a touch of realism to my blasphemy, the force of my crowbar broke my cross as well. If I were a religious man, I�d probably take this as some sort of sign. Then again, if I were a religious man, I probably wouldn�t be using Half-Life 2 to reenact the crucifiction.

Alyx eats the babies.

About this time a couple years ago, on some website long since purged from my memory and my bookmarks, an article analyzing this generation’s three new consoles ended by stating, rather proudly, that Nintendo is the past, Sony is the present, and Microsoft is the future.

Back when Ian Samuel still headed up the Gameforms letters section, and thus back when Gameforms was still worth reading, someone stated that the Playstation 2 is the console that wants to be a PC, the XBox is the PC that wants to be a console, and the GameCube is the only home console without an identity crisis.

Sometimes I think those two statements are linked.