I am retiring from the blogosphere.

I know, I know… I’ve said this before. This time I’m the Wizards Michael Jordan, not the Bulls version. I’ve now reached a point in the past two months where I have entirely shifted my priorities, and I’m purging a number of poor habits. Writing in blog format doesn’t have the same joy I once found in it. Instead, no matter what I write, whether I am passionate about something or just trying to be humorous, there just seems to be a sinking feeling of words cascading into the ether.

I stopped reading blogs a long time ago, and I rarely even update my own. I find them to be whiny or preachy, just a bunch of self aggrandizing tripe, and I find my own writing to come off in the same manner. The only blogs I go to on occasion are picture blogs, and even then I don’t do it often. There aren’t many good blogs that are active anyhow, and I don’t personally know anyone who blogs, so there isn’t even a reciprocal desire to scribe online. I spent most of my time online on reddit, which replaced Fark some time ago. My browser’s bookmarks are a stripped bare compared to what they used to be.

I just don’t have the desire to write for the overpopulated world of the internet. I don’t even want to use the internet much anymore. I have much better things to do than to distract myself with the endless banter that oozes from every pore of this virtual hell. I started on Lifejournal some years ago, when I first started writing regularly, but since that was unintuitive and clunky, I switched to Myspace. Once on Myspace, I developed a rather cult following. But when I quit that, there was a large gap between then and when I started this site.

It’s not about statistics. I just feel I have graduated form this wasteland that is the internet. I deleted all of the websites that were questionably a potential waste of time, got rid of Myspace, and plan to streamline whatever else. I need to focus my energy on what the next eight years or so are going to bring, so I am bidding the internet adieu.

I’ll still use it for news, sports, research and porn, of course. But other than that, I’m done. I have much, much better things to focus my energy on. I will still write, but my own projects and school related work.

Thanks intrawebs, but I’m all growed up. It was fun while it lasted.

The media is a circus. This country gets so preoccupied with the most banal and inconsequential bullshit. The current story I am tired of being barraged with?

Carrie Prejean.

Miss California. First runner-up Miss America. She is also an activist for inequality, an outspoken member of an organization dedicated to restricting the civil rights of a particular group of people when it comes to marriage. Of course, the underlying cause is of major importance. However, the thoughts of a beauty queen in regards to such an important social issue really does not merit the hoopla it has garnered.

I honestly cannot take much more of this horseshit. First off, anyone against “gay marriage” is a mentally retarded waste of human flesh. Don’t get me wrong… every person is entitled to his or her opinion. But when it comes to civil rights, fuck your opinion. Civil rights have absolutely nothing to do with opinion; they have nothing to do with how you define a particular word; they have nothing to do with what you believe to be abnormal; and they certainly have absolutely nothing to do with what you interpret as how your invisible omnipotent deity would look upon such a right.

What I would like every homophobic and religious (or typically a combination of both) simpleton to understand is this: people born with homosexual impulses that act on these impulses and follow their sexual desires have every right to enjoy the symbolic joining that marriage provides. You can spout your views on what “God” thinks, but until I personally hear from him (and if I did, and he disagreed, I’d tell your God to go fuck himself), I will maintain my authority on this topic. And homophobic people don’t even deserve to breathe in my opinion. Homophobic people rank just barely above pedophiles on my list of despicable examples of humans.

Yet now Miss Prejean has become some sort of martyr for her stance, and suddenly she is the poster child of your pathetic movement. It really does not surprise me that people with a fear of homosexual people and who spend their Sundays talking to a pretend authoritarian would choose such an intellectually vapid spokesperson. By all means, I welcome the opposition having a person with an IQ that could be tabulated on a preschooler’s abacus.

Regardless, this whole sordid affair is exhausting. Hasn’t this country learned anything in its existence? Does every minority group have to claw and thrash for equality? It is 2009. I think it is about time for our society to grow the fuck up and start understanding what the word equality means.

This religitard takes the cake. And I hope she chokes on said cake and dies in asphyxia agony. You know, I am all for forgiveness. But not when I am supposed to forgive an idiot of this nature:

She (Ria Ramkissoon) was involved with a Christian group called One Mind Ministries. Her son refused to say “amen,” during the meal prayers, so their leader, ”Queen Antoinette,” insisted the boy was possessed by a demon. The boy continued to refuse to say the magic word, so she said that God wanted to raise him from the dead. Which, of course, meant he had to die first.

So they put the child away in a back room and prayed — and left him there without food or water for over a week.

The boy died.

No resurrection took place. Any sane person could have told them this, because resurrections only happens in myths and fairy tales. But they were deluded and thought it could happen in real life — an unfortunate consequence of believing in miracles.

The mother has been charged with first-degree murder, but she has insisted on a clause in her plea agreement that requires the charges will be dropped once her son is resurrected. The clause has been accepted.

Jesus Christ. And religious people still wonder why freethinking secularists look down upon them with such disdain?

What a story to read on Mother’s Day.

Today’s winner is this post I came across. It made me tingle with joy as the laughter burst forth from my diaphragm.

But there are certain phrases that irk me.

Today’s is “may or may not.” You may see this phrase just about anywhere (see what I did there?) in society, from college term papers to the ingredients list of some questionable food product. I might as well include “maybe or maybe not.”

Here’s the thing: it is an entirely redundant statement. It has no other purpose other than giving the originator a false sense of inflated expression, an attempt to come across in a more intellectual fashion than just simply using the lonely word “may.”

The word, by definition, conveys uncertainty. So why is it some desire to illicit uncertainty in uncertainty?

We may or may not ever know.

First of all, Maria Bello is no Rachel Weisz.

Second, Luke Ford sounded like a bootleg Matt Damon.

And finally, Yeti.

Sick Bitch That Should Be Tortured To Death

SimCity for the iPhone is not all that bad, but EA Games has some (read: a lot of) work to do. It is pretty impressive graphically, and controlling the city with the touch screen is actually easier than on a laptop’s track pad (which is why I lasted only twenty minutes playing SimCity 4).

The game has all the typical features, the zoning, the rewards, the annoying advisors. It’s fun to kill time with, especially when I don’t feel like getting my ass kicked by Deep Green, or watching the CPU steal my chips on trip nines after the flop by tossing one of its players trip kings on the last card.

Ah, but there are issues, issues aplenty.

First off is the lack of a subway system. If they can work in the water pipes, they could have added subways. The only other two mass transit options are buses and railroads. Railroads are space wasting garbage, whereas subway stations take up the same land area as bus stations. So in my city, I had to sprinkle bus stations everywhere (once they were available in the 1930′s). Here’s the thing: no matter how many I built, Sims were whining about not being able to get to work, and how many passengers per day were these stations servicing? Zero. How is that?

Highways are also absent, which is dumb, but not as bad as the lack of subterranean trains snaking beneath the masterly crafted city on the surface. At least I got to put up the Empire State Building.

Another missing feature is the ability to check your mayoral approval rating by clicking on City Hall. I also am lost without knowing how many pigeons are on my statue. This is a staple, and hopefully an easy fix.

I reached a rather annoying point with the petitioners. I had over 200k in my city’s coffers, and my income from business deals and income ordinances was enough to pay for all of my other services and costly ordinances. So in an effort to boost my population, I lowered all three tax brackets to zero. Tax-free. Yet every year I would still get petitioners telling me taxes were too high. I let it slide the first four or five times, but I figured if they were going to bitch either way, I might as well charge the bastards eight percent.

I also had a landfill that was no longer needed, so I cut it off from roads hoping it would decompose. In fifty years, not a bit. How long should it take?

The worst part is the program’s tendency to crash. At one point, I had to do a hard reset of my phone just to get the app to run again. At another, I lost over 30 years of work to a crash. Apparently the autosave feature only works when it damn well pleases. I’ll save more often in the future, but that takes a good minute to complete.

Paying $10 for a game should absolve the owner of the frustration of crashing software, but I guess not.

All in all, it’s an okay game, but I expect the developers at EA to right some of the wrongs (crashes first, please) with this game.

***UPDATE***

I know, I know… how can you “update” a new post? I wrote this about a week ago, so live with it. The game crashes every time in July of 2005, and I started my city back in 1900. 105 years and that is it. Lame.

Why so serious about the movie?

I have seen the Dark Knight a plethora of times, almost enough to be qualified for my very own padded cell in Arkham Asylum. I saw it at IMAX the moment it was released on the eastern seaboard, I saw it in the theater, I’ve seen it on DVD, Bluray, and on my iPhone. And as much as I love the film in all it’s glory to the point of wanting the Joker tattooed on my left ass cheek with Bats on the right, there are a number of glaring issues. I figure I can come up with ten, so let’s have at it:

1. STFU, Bale – Is it me, or does Christian Bale throw his voice harder than a Nolan Ryan fastball in this movie? His throat must have been feeling like he’d been the star of a bukkake flick, or blew ten guys with sandpaper condoms on. He definitely didn’t try that hard in Batman Begins. And why throw your voice with Fox in the sonar scene when he knows you are Bruce Wayne?

2. WTF, really? – In the aforementioned sonar scene, Fox mentions spying on 30 million people. Yeah? I doubt Gotham is even close to 10 million just based on the size of Gotham General, which is smaller than the main hospital in my state of a paltry 1 million people. And to give you an idea of how big a city with 30 million people in it would need to be, just imagine the world’s largest city (Mumbai, India) being doubled and still not being as big as Gotham.

30 million? Really?

3. Car ≠ mattress – So the Joker let go of Rachel and the Batman dives after her from the penthouse of a rather tall building. As they tumble through the night sky, I await the deployment of a Bat-grappling-hook, or some other high tech Bat device. But no, Batman and Miss Dawes have their fall broken by an occupied car. Obviously no one was hurt, that would be crazy. By contrast, in the earlier scene with the Scarecrow, Batman leapt several stories and decimated the van Scarecrow was driving.

4. Blind as a bat – I owe this to the other half of my brain, the half that I am moderately convinced masturbates to old back issues of DC’s only great superhero. But the point is that all throughout the movie, Batman seems at least a step behind. That is completely contradictory to the character of Batman throughout his multiple incarnations. Either that, or the Joker was just that awesome. I’m kind of stuck between the two, maybe a coin would be handy to decide… could I borrow that, Harvey?

5. I’d bet there’d be a sound – So the scene with Gamble learning the first story of the Joker’s scars was great, up until the Joker “killed” him. I’m pretty sure a blade running across my face would result in a heinous scream, and death would not be so instantaneous. Even if you cut someone’s throat, there is some chortling and gurgling as they twist about in the throes of agony. I realize they had to tone it down to keep the rating from hitting R, but come on, at least give us a screeching wail.

Why so fake? The kiddies can handle it.

6. Busicide? – “Bus driver? What bus driver?” He’s not getting up from that? I’ve seen people get hit much harder and be just fine. Lame.

Looks like he'll need to use the wheelchair access.

7. I’m sorry, Commissioner Batman – With the aid of the sonar, Fox has located the Joker. Fox alerts Batman. Batman alerts “Commissioner” Gordon. And by alerts, I mean orders the highest-ranking police official to assemble his SWAT team on the building opposite. Kind of dumb.

8. Blind as a bat, Vol. 2 – The sonar eyeshades were snazzy when he was getting a floor by floor view of what was going on in the Pruitt Building, but when Batman resorted to using them in a linear one-on-one (okay, and some dogs) fight with the Joker, that was stupid. The guy is Batman. He does most of his work at night, so why does he need fancy blue virtual vision in a simple fistfight?

9. That’s some strong makeup – So Bats changes his suit to the one with the arm plates that fire what look like Chinese stars cut in half. He accidentally pierced the metal of a filing cabinet when he first discovered them. However, for practical use they just don’t do much but bounce off of makeup, as you can see in the close of their big fight scene.

But do you have some that will cut through, I dunno, makeup?

10. Just once more, please? – Okay, it’s hard to call this an issue, but I’m adding this anyway. Could they have blown up both Maggie Gyllenhal and Katie Holmes for those of us who had to suffer through both of their substandard performances? Are there any actresses in Hollywood with at least a little bit of range and talent? I’m torn as to whether I should commend them for blowing her to pieces or despise them for not doing it much, much sooner. Maybe in the next one they can both do a cameo and we can watch them get blown to itty-bitty pieces of mediocre flesh.

Okay, so a little nitpicky for the most part. But even such a great movie can be picked apart. I certainly hope Heath Ledger gets the Oscar for his performance, and if he does, I hope asshats don’t claim he only won it because he died. He redefined the Joker with his performance, and it was the best role of his career by far. I mean really, who else could pull this off…

And the Oscar goes to...