Comic for Tuesday, Nov 30, 2004

Posted: 8:59 am, Tuesday, November 30, 2004

OK, sorry for the brief one yesterday. My one craptacular post I allow myself a week. Although, hell, it's the holidays, I'm probably going to need to run around on my lunch breaks more and more, it may happen with alarming frequency for a bit.

So, where to begin? I guess with yesterday. My office doesn't look a damn thing like that - it's all kind of beige, and I definitely don't have a flat-screen monitor. I do, however, have an Uno card taped to my cube wall. As Jeevs says, you never know when you need a Wild Draw Four. It's what I, as a sane person, carry instead of a gun to get me out of a tight jam.

Holly - who I feel like I know but only met once while wasted but who apparently liked me - got engaged over the Thanksgiving holiday. Man, sociologists of the year 2204 are going to have a hard time making any damn sense of why this whole Weblog thing.

Sociologists, and others, of the year 2004 just kind of sigh and shake their head at Alabama. I learned something from this article. A) School segregation is still legal in the state constitution of Alabama, but uninforceable because of federal law (which came as no surprise), and B) the Alabama state constitution is the world's longest constitution of any sort. That is shocking to me. I was going to make a joke about how I thought the longest thing ever written in Alabama was Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, but it turns out that was written in Mississippi. The Alabama book everyone read in high school was To Kill a Mockingbird. But everyone remembers To Kill a Mockingbird, so that's not nearly as funny. Damn facts, getting in the way of my jokes, again.

I still can't believe the Irish accepted a bowl bid. E can't understand why I'm actually angry about this. I guess it makes no sense - everyone knows ND would shoot the pope if there was money in it. But, I dunno. I really wish they had fired the whole coaching staff in the lockerroom right after the game.

Oh, RAW sent me a thing on Tuesday last week about Favicons, which I totally meant to work on over the break. Of course, I forgot to. D'oh! Anyway, hopefully, you'll soon have a little icon pop up in your favorites list, the three of you who bookmark this thing.

It's Christmas party season! 2.0's roommate from Pratt Venice has invited us to a thing on the 17th already, I evidently get some crazy lunch thing next Thursday as a benefit of my department changing hands at the office, and the officewide party, to which we are not allowed to bring dates, is on the 15th. All of which pales in comparison to the office party E got invited to. As I've mentioned a few times, E's temping at Halliburton right now, the poor creature. When she first mentioned the Halliburton Christmas party, I've got to say, I pretty much freaked out. I mean, can you imagine such a thing? Decadent asshole arms dealers at Christmas? I was begging her to write an article about it for an alt-weekly like the Voice or something, but she was hesitant. As it turns out, the party is a Saturday afternoon family-friendly thing with face-painting and no booze. Holy God, that sounds like hell.

This color map of election results is interesting, but doesn't change the fact that we are scuh-ruuuuuuuuuuuude.

Oh, about today's strip - Silent Hill is a series of horror games for the PS2, and I guess it's on the X-Box now, too. I maintain that Silent Hill 2 was the scariest of the bunch, 3 was the most fucked-up (the finale involves the heroine expunging a stillborn god-fetus and her antagonist then eating this fetus to keep the god-spirit or whatever alive), and 4 is a nice mix of the two (kind of stalled out about a month ago playing SH4, will pick it up again soon). Video games have gotten unnecessarily complex in recent years, but also completely terrifying. Silent Hill 2 was about the creepiest damn thing I've ever seen. I've often wished that the game developers found a way to make it so that the disc itself is cold, getting the feel of dread going from the second you open the box. Anyway, I played Silent Hill 2 with the lights off and the sound high, to give myself the full atmosphere. The whole town of Silent Hill is shrouded in this heavy, heavy fog, and when the zombies near, this radio you're carrying starts to emit white noise. At the beginning of the game, all you have is a 2x4 with a nail in it to fend the bastards off, and the nail makes this awful ripping sound as you're clobbering baddies. At one point, your character notices a hole in the wall and the game goes, 'Do you want to investigate?' I'm like, 'Hell, no,' but I figure I need to. So my character gets on his hands and knees and reaches in to this hole up to his elbow. Silence, he's reaching, he's reaching, all of a sudden the controller starts shaking and the dude jumps backward and I throw my controller across the room because I'm having a heart attack and shrieking like a pre-schooler with a skinned knee.

Nabbed this off CNNSI, but it's pretty cool - the NBA fight as if it were Picasso's Guernica. I thought I saw a group in the Halloween parade *as* Guernica this year, but it turns out I was wrong. That would be a pretty cool costume, though.

OK, well. That's enough for today. Tomorrow begins the insanity of Christmas!

bullfrog