Friday
So today I was cleaning the space around my computer, because I do that sorta thing every once in awhile (for instance, in this case once every two years), and I found this super old story I wrote when I was 9.
Hello, my name is Joe, Joe Kolophegis. That’s not my real name, but everyone calls me that. I have no idea why. Maybe it’s because that’s what I tell them to call me. Last Monday something magical happened…
…I got magical powers. I have no idea how, but I did. I pointed to this broccoli and in my mind I was wishing that it was a cake and it turned into a big three-layered carrot cake!
On Tuesday I made it so we had world peace that was really cool. The next day, Wednesday I made it so we had natural powered cars. Finally on Thursday I made it so that everyone in band played really well, which we already did. That’s stuff I wanted to happen.
But on Friday, something terrible happened. I zapped myself to the thing that gave me powers and he took them away. It was some creepy old guy.
I figured out having magical powers may not be all that good, because you could do bad stuff with them, so I don’t want magical powers anymore. It would have gone to my head anyway. Yesterday I’m sure I saw my sister’s celery disappear! Mary, I salute you.
Needless to say, this blatant display of lack of ability infuriated me. What are you doing trying to write stories, 9-year-old self? Don’t you know that that’s a big people’s craft? Bad past self, bad! And just in case you don’t believe me I’ll just do the honors of picking apart this sorry attempt at fiction and tear down any illusions of talent you may have had.
So first off, that name thing. “Some people call me Joe, and I don’t know why, maybe ’cause I tell them to.” Of course. Thank you for letting us know. That was vital to our understanding of this shitty story. If I hadn’t known why some people may or may not call you something, none of this would have made sense. And that’s sarcasm. It would have made so much sense it was coming out of your ears. Well, no, not that much, but you get the point.
And then that segue between the first and second paragraphs. You’re all, “Wait for it wait for it…” and then there’s absolutely no enthusiasm when you pay it off. “I got magical powers.” Period. Monotone. “It is your birthday.” And I know it’s not just because you were for some crazy reason against the use of exclamatory expression, or because you were very confused about what interjections were and the religious connotations in that School House Rock song, because you turn right around and exclamify as soon as you get your stupid freaking carrot cake.
On Tuesday you made it so we had world peace? That was really cool, huh? Just really cool. Very nice. And on the next day you magicked in some natural-powered cars. What are you trying to prove here, kid? Are you trying to win a Nobel prize with this crap? Are you gonna make some people and then take a day off to rest on the sabbath? I mean come on.
And then on Thursday you made it so everyone in your band could play really well, even though they already did. Nice job, Sherlock, way to waste a day on a frickin wish that had already been granted. Basically what you just did was you negated all the hard work and practice all your bandmates put into their instruments and instead stuck in your magic.
Annnd on Friday. You decided that you would zap yourself to the source of your power… and then what? Chat about magic? Ask to go to Hogwarts? And the creepy old guy who is the keeper of the magicianship just, what, took it all away? Did you, like, piss him off or something? Or is the creepy old guy just as annoyed at things you’ve written as I am?
Either way, nice job losing your power in less than a week. That’s probably some sorta record.
And finally, what are you trying to imply with that last paragraph? That your sister suddenly got magic too? But she clearly wasn’t silly enough to think that writing some stupid story about it was a good idea.
So Mary, I salute you. Good job.
That was dumb, sorry.
Filed under Miscellaneous, School | Comments (2)The Day Fox Broadcasting Company Died
It was announced today that Fox would not be bringing Dollhouse back after its second season. It’s better than what they did to Whedon’s Firefly a few years back. Firefly was canceled mid-season for low ratings that were Fox’s fault. Dollhouse is being allowed to finish its second season and Whedon was warned before hand so he can prepare an actual ending for the show. Dollhouse‘s finale will air January 22, 2010.
Fox will not actually die today. They have till the end of the season to prepare. Till then there will be uproar about it but on that day they will fall.
Dollhouse isn’t the first scifi show Fox has canceled this year. In Spring they canceled Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. That show they didn’t even give a chance to end itself, it just stopped in the middle of the storyline. Firefly released a movie after its cancellation to finish up the series and the unaired episodes were released on dvd.
Fox is trying to avoid another Firefly incident. Well, you cancel a good show and guess what happens, people get pissed. Whether or not it’s the second good show from the same writer you’ve canceled. Fox was never that great, it’s just big, and they are going down the drain, fast. After this they will probably lose almost all scifi fans, especially the cult ones as viewers. Alienating their viewers is them hurting themselves. Maybe, just maybe, the viewers and ex-viewers need to hurt them a bit too.
Filed under Countdown, Guest Contributors, Miscellaneous | Comment (0)Cow ****ing.
Is it just me, or does every year seem to get more and more important than the last? Maybe I’m just getting older, but it seems like more stuff is happening now than it was a few years ago.
I dunno.
Sometimes I just want to crawl into a corner and pretend like the rest of the world is nothing but a humongous elephant that’s rabid and is trying to eat me. Then I can justify apathy and laziness, and I can just safely go fetal and pretend like I really am apathetic and lazy.
Hot damn, check out the Kdufhas on that chick!
Hi, my name is Benjamin. What’s going on.
“Are math stars really that popular in Iran? Are Iranians going to start chanting ‘Math to America?’”
Why does religion make everyone so crazy? And why does it spark so much hatred? Doesn’t that kind of completely defeat the purpose? I really don’t get it. I think there’s a very clear order to the universe that says, be nice and help others and everything will turn out okay for you.
I mean, like, I think that’s like the whole point of life. Well, the whole point of life is to make babies. But I think the point of human life is just to make a positive impact on somebody else. And the bigger the impact you are able to make, the happier you end up being. I think Gandhi was a pretty happy guy, right? And Jesus?
I bet Bob Saget is one happy dude. And you know why? Because he positively affected millions of people’s lives, with his wholesome values and his goat-loving and his working with Simon.
I bet George Lucas is pretty happy.
I mean, I don’t think that anyone is truly capable if figuring out what is right and wrong. Like, Hitler really thought that he was doing the world a favor by killing all the Jews.
But I think that there’s a universal Gaia hypothesis type thing. The Gaia hypothesis is that the Earth is a living organism that, just like all other living organisms, wants to maintain homeostasis, and will take action to make sure it achieves that. Something the dinosaurs did pissed off the Earth. Bam, it let itself get hit by a meteor.
Like that.
I think that the universe also wants nothing but homeostasis.
I think everything in the universe wants nothing but homeostasis. Genetically and metaphorically.
No one wants to have to worry about all the crap in the world.
I think that the Universe has a very firm stance against everything that’s wrong inside of it. And when the time comes to pass, everything that’s wrong in the universe will be gone, and everything that’s right will continue.
And religion comes in as a way to explain this, right?
I love Craig Ferguson’s book Between the Bridge and the River. The book is pretty much all about religion, but it’s about the ideas of religion being the important part. No one really cares that so and so gave birth to so and so and lived 900 years. What matters is the universal message that you need to love others and help them to be happy and a successful person.
That’s all that matters in life, I think. I think the happiest person on the Earth is the one who is truly selfless and who doesn’t ever want to just crawl away into a whole from this rabid elephant of a messed up world.
The happiest person is not apathetic.
The happiest person probably doesn’t exist.
Filed under Miscellaneous | Comment (0)KUFO: Portland’s Rock Refueled
Listen to the final countdown:
“Would they still be big if they were called ‘System of an Up?’”
That made me laugh.
Other than that, what a pointless waste of time. They didn’t even switch formats.
It’s the same exact station.
Except they fired a bunch of people.
Whatever, guys. It was a cool stunt. It could have been cooler.
-Ben
P.S. The forum is kinda insane right now! Fizzzard and I are kinda having a word filter war! Crazy.
Filed under Uncategorized | Comment (0)RIP Geocities
Oh Geocities, it has been so, so wonderfully long, and yet you still have a special place reserved in my heart. But alas, Yahoo is steadfast in their decision to remove you as one of their services, and all we common folk with Geocitacular memories are left with nothing but that left to keep you alive by. Woe! Oh dear.
You were the host of my very first, crappy little website which, I think, was, like, Neopets related, or something. Because Neopets used to be cool. It was like myspace for little kids. This was before the advent of force-fed Jonas Brothers and Miley Cyruses and crap. Back in the days when we got force-fed Bop-it and… the backstreet boys? I don’t know. I just remember watching Zorro on the late-night disney channel vault thing. Back when the Disney channel was cool. Which I’m pretty sure may have just possibly been never, but whatever.
Years in the past, I found an old HTML book my dad had in our office thing and I learned to make hyperlinks and to change the background and text colors and fun stuff like that. And how to post animated gifs, which was undoubtedly the most important thing that book taught me, apart from how to open notepad. I learned how to make a website. I was inescapably proud of myself.
When it came time for me to make my newfangled webly learnings available for all the world to see, so they would know what a brilliant child prodigy I was, I of course went searching for a free web host, and I of course found that holiest of holies: Geo-freaking-cities.
And so it was that I uploaded my very first hand-coded website onto the numerous internets, with a topic based somewhere between, like, Astronomy, Neopets, and Harry Potter. Or something. I dunno, I was kind of a weird kid.
I don’t remember a lot of my early struggles with HTML, but I find it kind of fitting that some of my earliest memories of the internet were learning to create my own slice of it. And Geocities played a huge role in that.
I remember bragging during elementary school of my, like, 50 websites, all hosted on Geocities. Because I was a frickin’ bamf and I knew how to do that sort of thing. My first jab at self-promotion.
I dunno, this was originally going to be a joking jab at that little piece of mediocrity that Geocities kind of represented, but now I actually am getting a bit nostalgic and it’s making me a bit sad.
It definitely came as a shock when I first heard the news they were closing you down. It was all like, “wow, that’s a place with some memories attached to it and now it’s going to be gone.”
I dunno. I guess all I’m going to say is, goodbye Geocities and thanks for giving me a place to host my first meanderings into the internet. Without you, this site probably wouldn’t exist. And that is the truth.
RIP, Geocities.
And when this time comes for all the current popular sites like Facebook and Twitter, self, and you’re writing a blog post about that from your huge mansion on a hill overlooking a forest made of elephants, keep in mind before you get all teary-eyed and nostalgia’d, that it’s just a frickin website, and, really, I mean, Geocities? Really?!
-Benjamin
Filed under Miscellaneous | Comment (1)