One bourbon, one scotch, and one mav

I know you’ve had that kind of moment.

I know you’ve had that kind of moment when you’ve come to a realization that whatever you’re seeing, hearing, or otherwise encountering was so brain-shatteringly unlikely, so utterly improbable, so wholly preposterous and far-fetched that only millseconds ago you would have bet your (insert most valuable posession here) that there’s no way in hell it could happen. You were absolutely certain of its complete inability to exist, until it did.

And your brain comes to a SCREECHING FUCKING HALT, acrid smoke billowing out from behind your now-shredded Potenzas, brakes ablaze and metal crying out from the strain and you have to literally bite your tongue to keep yourself from screaming WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS HAPPY HORSESHIT.

In retrospect, you know what’s neat about that moment? In a world that’s easy to predict, it shows your true character. Even if only to yourself.

Also your tongue will probably hurt a bit.

I know it sounds like a lot, but lately I’ve been averaging some sort of crisis or major life-changing event about every two weeks, and just when I get one mostly sorted out another one pops up.

I got the house thing mostly sorted out (just waiting for legal shit to happen) and now my beautiful new car is broken. I don’t know what’s wrong yet, but it sounds expensive. Oh, did I mention I’m still flat broke from PAYING for the fucking car?

Am I just destined to be ass-deep in stupid bullshit for my entire life? Can’t I get a few weeks peace without something to stress me the fuck out? I’m really starting to understand why people move into a shack in the wilderness somewhere.

From the Share your Police Stories thread on SA, so good I had to post it:

My friend was speeding somewhere, I think in Las Vegas, when a cop pulled him over.

The cop gets out of the car and walks to my friends window. My friend rolls down is window and before the cop can say anything he waves his hand and says “These are not the droids you’re looking for.”

The cop looks at him and says “These are not the droids I’m looking for.”

He then proceeds to turn around, get back into his car, and drive off.

I watched the show for the last 6 months of its one-year run, and I miss it a little every day. I’m not sure why, perhaps for the same reason I pathologically scroll down to the bottom of my Google Reader list every day hoping that V posted something new; the things these people create make every day just a teensy bit better than it would have been otherwise. Perhaps that’s fulfillment.

Or perhaps that’s a load of shit, I’m reading into it again, and I need to just shut the fuck up and have fun already.

Whatever the result, this is without question my favorite of all the show episodes I watched, just because the time in which I saw it was a particularly stressful time in my life, what with the job being crazy and deadlines looming and holidays coming up and finances being tight and, most importantly, me not adapting to any of those things particularly well. I’ve been trying to put this into practice daily and I’ve found this simple piece of advice phenomenally helpful, probably because I am that person who tends to get into those emotional feedback loops. Watch it.

If you’re not into political news, you probably won’t like this much. Jon Stewart covers the Republican presidential candidate debate. It’ll tickle your funny bone a little, untll the very last line, which will make you fall off your chair.

Unless you don’t care about politics, like Beta, in which case you’d probably best avoid this post altogether.

The problem, of course, was that nobody got the warning. On the whole, people are pretty damned dense.

Jerry Falwell died today. Say what you want about him, but he was a great leader that inspired a great many people to go out and speak their mind, and in doing so, make the world better. The problem with that, of course, is that the leader was a bigot, and the people were a bunch of humorless bigots called the Moral Majority. (My mom was a member.) Along with Pat Robertson and James Dobson, Falwell helped bury us under the giant pile of shit we find ourselves in today.

Well, I said I wouldn’t dance on the man’s grave. But don’t take it from me. Throw off the shackles of religious oppression and fucking do a Google search, god dammit. Start with this Slate article that has lots of quotes with many sources. If I hadn’t grown up with this horseshit, I’d be surprised to read it all. But this is the Christian organization at its finest, folks. This is where we are today.

For all his bitching about the liberal media, the NY Times did a wonderful job writing an obit for him that’s very unbiased and uninflammatory.

So he’s passed on, on to whatever occupies us after death. Perhaps nothingness. Perhaps not. But it would be really, really funny if good ol’ boy “Dr.” Falwell showed up in Heaven only to find out God was a card-carrying member of the ACLU all along.

What do you do when you can’t crush the competition with skill or innovation? You litigate them to death. Microsoft appears to have chosen this centuries-old practice to rid the world of Linux, OpenOffice, and something that the following article quotes only as “the Linux graphical user interfaces” - presumably KDE and/or Gnome.

The interesting part, though, is that while most of the time this sort of thing has involved suing the company that’s the source of whatever you’re trying to bury, Microsoft chose a different tactic:

Since the GPL covered only distributors of Linux, nothing stopped Smith from seeking royalties directly from end users - many of which are Fortune 500 companies. He would have to proceed carefully, however, because most of those users were also major Microsoft customers.
[...]
Some customers actually entered into direct patent licenses with Microsoft at that point, Smith says, including some “major brand-name companies” in financial services, health care, insurance and information technology. (He says they don’t want to be identified, presumably because they fear angering the FOSS community.)

This is a really neat example of the cowardice of the free market. It’s not in anyone’s best interest, financially, to take on Microsoft. The numbers never work out in your favor, so you never do it. It’s sad, really.

We’ve been listening to Stallman gripe about ‘freedom’ and ‘choice’ and moral imperatives since the 1980’s, but few took him seriously. Now, the largest software company in the world is trying to wipe out the largest free-software project in the world - the Linux kernel - and thanks to patent protection, it’s a very real possibility it could happen. If it became illegal to provide Linux to anyone, would Torvalds have to flee back to Finland? Would it be possible to engineer around Microsoft’s patents or are they so broad that it would be impossible to write a disk driver or a GUI with tabs without infringing on a MS patent?

I remember watching a late-night scifi movie where computer ownership was illegal, and thinking that could never happen. But it is happening. Mark my words: 20 years from now, computing will be very, very different. “Computers” will be overpriced little boxes, like gaming consoles, that are illegal to modify in the U.S. They will run only “signed” code from companies like MS or DRM’ed media from record companies. Indie movies and music will be forced underground, as will Linux and many other supporting free-software projects. Illegal reverse-engineering, running your own apps and playing your own media will be just as illegal as mod-chipping or phone unlocking is now.

This is the “freedom” that the market grants us. Pathetic.

I guess it’s time to start stockpiling books. You can’t pay-per-view a paperback (yet.) Let’s hope that even though Stallman was right, Bradbury wasn’t.

I was surprised by my mom walking into my house this morning to mention that she was going to church and would call me after.

So to say that she’s feeling better is a pretty big understatement. She’s still not 100% but she can at least get around on her own. That’s a huge improvement.

Beta helped me move a replacement washer into her house yesterday so she can actually do laundry. Big improvement. It was really fun wrestling a 1970-era washer back up the ba sement steps. I think it would have been lighter just to try and carry a big fuckin’ box of lead up the stairs.

Passed on the LoveCrymes/Crafty Bastards show because after the washer debacle there wasn’t a muscle in my body that didn’t hurt, and I felt like I was gonna throw up. Today I feel like I got hit by a an EXTREEEEME truck. I am old, fat, and getting older and fatter and it’s fucking up my universe. So after I cram my way through 70-298 I am going to start working out.

Also: curiously, during my crazy last week of working with people in health care I met a nurse that looks and sounds like Kaylee Frye from Firefly, and a therapy assistant that’s a freakin’ clone of Catalina from My Name Is Earl. That was a good day.

Serious. I don’t give a rat’s fucking ballsack whether the answer is privatization or nationalization, all I know is that my mom is home alone and she probably will be indefinitely. The thing that Really Blows(tm) about this is that while she is doing better, she’s still not able to do lots of things that you or I would take for granted, like do her own laundry. She may be able to do this in time, but not right now.

Either way, thanks to whatever happened to her, which we simply don’t know, it is highly unlikely that she will ever again be able to do many of the things she used to do. I’m wondering if she’ll ever drive a car again. Right now it could go either way.

In any case, the honest truth is she’s about to be way more dependent on me then she ever was before, and like I said last time, I’m not even very good at taking care of myself.

What I really want to know is, why is there no service or something that can help out in times like this. My mom’s only got medicare and the crappy military insurance my dad got. I suppose there’s some sort of crazy l33t insurance out there that covers bullshit like this, but there’s no way in hell a person living on a normal wage could afford it.

Fuck America. Motherfucking profit-margin dickweeds. I hope they all choke.

So this crazy dude called Vertexguy has done some metal versions of video game songs. This is not particularly unusual, but the sill and overall presentation he puts forth is nothing short of amazing. It’s a shame shit like this is illegal in the US, isn’t it.

Still, while they’re still available, you can ROCK THE FUCK OUT to his renditions of the Contra music, the Double Dragon mission 1 music, or my favorite:

THE DUKE NUKEM 3D THEME SONG! (”grabbag“)