The only thing more awesome than people who post outraged comments on blogs is people who post really outraged comments on blogs about video games. I check this site Joystiq sometimes for information about video game releases because I am a dork. Apparently there are people out there who really, really identify with their video game system of choice. Like, there are people who don’t just like playing video games on their Playstations or Xboxes or whatever, they’re really into the fact that they own these systems and do not like people who own other systems. And then they go on blogs and write comments about how the other video game systems suck. To wit:

16. @Jack
“15. You naive bastards! I admit it will be fun to play. Why Nintendo? Why do you continue with the same piece of shit quality as last gen. Jackasses!”

Because they can Jack, because they can. It has become apparent to me that almost no-one remembers the Nintendo arrogance of the late 80’s to late 90’s.
They were so arrogant that they said you dont need disc media. They said you dont need DVD media. Look at what that got them….2 anemic 3rd place finishes in the Playstation era.

Now they build (er excuse me) they repackage a GameCube with a silly motion controller and they re-sell it to the naive public as something not only new…..but innovative.

And you know what? The mobb eats it up, the same way a mobb of “faithful” eat up the crap that the likes of Benny Hinn, Jerry Falwell, and Adolf Hitler spewed or are still spewing from thier mouths.

So, Nintendo now realizes that they can do whatever, whenver they want to and the mobb will take it. They even got most of the mobb media to believe the massive amount of crap that they have been feeding to the mob as INNOVATION.

You cannot blame Nintendo for doing this….because it obviously works very well on the banta poodo. (weak-minded fools)

The only good thing about the crap that Nintendo has been shoveling to the masses is that some of Nintendo’s recently converted flock is slowly waking up and realizing that they have just been fed a stinking gigantic pile of crap. Just look at all of the current Wee owners who are saying that it was tons of fun at first but now it is boring and the grafix suck.

Nintendo shovelware….coming to a re-hashed system near you.

I certainly will agree with him on one point … I do eat up the crap that Adolph Hitler spewed from his mouth. Pardon me … not the crap that he spewed, but the crap that he is still spewing!

Oh, and P.S. — this incensed reaction was provoked by a game called Mario Party 8.

There’s a huge movie shoot going on next to my office today. I don’t know what the movie is. Movie shoots all have the same signs that say the name of the movie upright no matter which direction you point them in. This is what they look like:

People in Hollywood lack the gene that allows them to recognize letters when they are upside down, so the invention of this sign saved a lot of people a lot of worry. You can tell a movie is fancy if the sign has an acronym on it. The DIRL sign above is for a movie called Dave in Real Life that was shooting in my friend Matt’s neighborhood. It stars Steve Carrell, who, in case you didn’t know, is fancy.

The movie that is shooting behind me has an acronym on its signs, too: PYTEK. I guess its possible that the name of the movie is actually PYTEK … I can’t say for certain. I’m assuming it’s an acronym.

You might think it would be cool to be surrounded by movie shoots, but you would be wrong. Movie shoots suck, because movie shooters are total dicks to people who are not working on the movie. They hire dudes who have no official capacity to stand on street corners and tell you, the normal person who is trying to go about your business, where you can and cannot walk.

One day I was walking to work and there was a cabal of these guys sitting on the corner that separates our residential part of Los Feliz from the business part of Los Feliz. This corner is located 3 blocks away from our apartment. I was the only one walking down this street at the time, because I am the only person who walks in Los Angeles. (I won an award from the mayor!) Perched at the corner were like 5 of these burly union he-men whose job it is to tell people where they can and cannot walk, staring at me and pointing as I walked down my own street. I looked behind me to see if there was possibly something else they could be staring and pointing at, but I came up blank. I kept waiting for them to shout something at me about how they now controlled the street and I was not allowed to walk on it anymore, and also that it would be best if I moved out of my apartment for a few weeks and let them sleep with my girlfriend, but they never shouted anything of the sort, and as I walked past them, I realized that they were not pointing at me, they were pointing at the non-thing behind me that I couldn’t see.

So now these same guys (or at least a reasonable facsimile of) are standing behind my office, smoking. I’m pretty certain I’m going to have to shoot my way out of here.

In the past week, I’ve gotten invited to join 3 different sites in which I need to create a user profile. I do not know how to respond to these requests. What is the etiquette for social networking sites? Is it rude to simply ignore someone who asks you to “join their network?”

I was super into Friendster when it first came out. I was working at an office where I needed to waste a lot of time, and Friendster was an excellent way to waste a lot of time. Then, I got laid off and I stopped having a lot of time to waste. And I’ve never looked back.

I signed up for MySpace about 2 years after everyone else was on MySpace. I thought it would be a good place to put my music. Unfortunately, I signed up for a personal profile instead of an artist profile, and to this day I have been unable to change it. If you have a personal profile, you are not allowed to post your own music. Not for lack of trying. Here’s the pattern: I would send a message to the support people asking for help. I would get a response back that did not address my concern. On the response, I would be forbidden from responding. So I would cut and paste my exchange into the support email, and never hear anything back. This happened three or four times. You would think this would be a simple problem to fix, but if it is, no one has told me.

And it’s so ugly! MySpace is unbearably ugly. Everyone’s profile has a horribly busy background or the margins are all blown out by enormous pictures or there’s some crap song that starts playing the minute you open the page. On top of that, it refuses to remember me, so every time I get a friend request I have to click on the request, which leads me to a page saying, “you have to be logged in to do this.” But after I log in, I am taken to my profile page, where I always have to hunt down the “add a friend” link because I do not use MySpace enough. It is an unnecessary multi-step process that always seems to take an unbearably long time, even though, in all actuality, it probably only takes a few seconds.

Sigh. I don’t get it. This revolution is passing me by. This is all just an elaborate way of me telling you that, while I may refuse to be your friend in the virtual world, I promise it means nothing in the real world. We can still hang out. You could even bring along a picture, if you like, and I will write my impressions of you below it in brief, two sentence bursts of in-jokes.

From Salon:

In his new book, Al Gore accuses the Bush administration of making “bold and confident assertions” that left a majority of Americans thinking that Saddam Hussein was linked to al-Qaida and had a hand in the attacks of 9/11.

Asked about the charge at the White House today, press secretary Tony Snow said that Gore must be “listening to people who have deliberately misled him” because the president never suggested any such thing.

OK, then, a reporter asked, what about the vice president? Didn’t Dick Cheney maintain that there was an operational link between al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein? Didn’t he raise the specter of a pre-9/11 meeting between Mohamed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence official?

“Right,” Snow said, “but that’s an entirely separate issue” from the charge that Gore is making.

Really? When Tim Russert asked Cheney in September 2003 about a poll showing that 69 percent of the American public thought Saddam was involved in 9/11, Cheney said he wasn’t surprised that so many people had reached that conclusion. Among his reasons: “With respect to 9/11, of course, we’ve had the story that’s been public out there. The Czechs alleged that Mohamed Atta, the lead attacker, met in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence official five months before the attack, but we’ve never been able to develop any more of that yet either in terms of confirming it or discrediting it. We just don’t know.”

My comment here is not about Gore’s assertion, which is true. It’s not about Tony Snow’s rebuttal, which is false. My beef is that I have been reading this same crap for the last 4 years. Someone accuses the White House of linking al-Qaida to Iraq. The press asks the press secretary about it. The press secretary pretends it never happened. The press reports his answer. Bloggers get incensed and point out the same Meet the Press interview or Bush’s speech or whatever and then we wait for the next time when we can engage in the same exact back-and-forth all over again.

I feel like George Jetson on the treadmill with Astro. I’m sick of this whole charade where the press feels like they have done their job by asking the same question and then writing down the press secretary’s response, which is, guess what? always exactly the same. I don’t think the administration should be let off the hook, but I am getting sick of every side in this “debate,” including my own.

From the Washington Post:

Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) stood before the refrigerated section of the Safeway on Capitol Hill yesterday and looked longingly at the eggs.

At $1.29 for a half-dozen, he couldn’t afford them.

Ryan and three other members of Congress have pledged to live for one week on $21 worth of food, the amount the average food stamp recipient receives in federal assistance. That’s $3 a day or $1 a meal. They started yesterday.

$21/week?!? That would cover my iTunes purchases. Seriously. I am spending the same amount every week on two records that someone out there is spending to feed their entire family. That is a problem.

Me: Where have you been, me?

Me: I have been working. Some of us have to work, you know. We can’t hang around the house and write about how the Bush administration is filled with incompetent idiots all the time, much as we would like to.

Me: But don’t you work from home?

Me: Not anymore, sucker! I rent an office. It’s like I actually have a job or something.

Me: What do you do in there all day?

Me: Write about how the Bush administration is filled with incompetent idiots. Only I do it over email, instead of on my blog. One has to communicate with others if one expects to be a successful whatever-it-is-I-do.

Me: Are you ever going to return to us so that we may all enjoy your fierce wit and refreshing honesty again?

Me: I will. I just need some downtime. If you would like to help me do my work, I will write something for you.

Me: No, thank you.

I am about to make you waste the rest of your day. The goal: control both dudes at once. Good luck.

I have no idea what this website is all about, but I feel pretty confident in saying that it is awesome.