One bourbon, one scotch, and one mav

Well, not really live. I’m not nearly so arrogant as to believe that I’m important enough that anybody on Earth wants me to sit around and update the same motherfucking post over and over. That’s insanity. I’ll save it for when I get my Gawker Media contract. (In their tradition of being edgy my Gawker blog would probably be just called “Asshole,” although I don’t even know what they would have to pay to get asshole.com.

First half was busy eating spaghetti. Got here about 10 after 6 and started watching, so I mist the very beginning. The whole Youtube idea was fucking brilliant. The questions actually seemed relevant. Go figure. The last Dem debate was so inane I think they were reading the Youtube comments.

I mist Fred Thompson’s youtube video. Too bad, too, because I hear it was flametastic. He didn’t get the Youtube concept but he sure got the Youtube comments concept.

Hey everybody, I’m Ron Paul. I get shafted because I use logic and all these other douchemos are using scare tactics and stumbling over pointless rhetoric.

I love how nobody except Huckabee managed to answer the fuckin’ bible question. I don’t like the douchebag but boy can he answer a question.

Mitt Romney’s Youtube video was so fucking corporate recruiting video I want to submit a resume and buy a washer dryer from him or something.

Commercials!
Coal! YAY! Pollutin’ like a motherfucker!
Campbell Brown is hawwwwt.

Hm. Giuliani totally fucking nails the shit out of the Youtube video. He gets it. Weird. He doesn’t seem to get anything else.

Aaaaaand immediately proved by his shit-eating answer to the Islamic lady’s question. Durr.

McCain is the wettest fucking wet blanket ever. Hey guys more troops! Withdrawal from the holy war = surrender! Fuck me, I should have known that. I answered B.

Jesus Romney is such a corporate lackey. Torture is bad but fuck if I’ll tell you if I think waterboarding is torture. Also the Gitmo illegal prison is A-OK if it keeps the bad people in the little box that nobody gets to see. Because they’re bad. How do you know? We told you, duh. And people applaud. God damn are Americans fucking stupid.

Go fucking John. Hint: Telling these people that torture is bad and that we should be the better man is fucking laaaaame.

Long term military commitment? Well Fred Thompson’s in. “As long as it takes.” Well, it’s a holy war, so that’s forever, dipshit. We need to find all the people that don’t like us and beat the fuck out of them.

Ooh, Ron Paul. This should be good. And unpopular. Boy, people at the debate don’t wanna end the holy war.

McCain’s babble: Wait, we never lost a battle in Vietnam? WHAT THE DICK Who cares? Winning the battles wouldn’t have won us the war. Stupid move.

Hm. Big G actually answered the 9/11 question well.

Hey everybody Mike Huckabee’s a Christian! Go jesus!

Brigadier General Keith Kerr, you are welcome to a place to stay and as much beer as he can drink anytime you find yourself trudging through Southern Idaho. Huckabee was nervous. And Mitt proved himself to be a lameass yet again.

Wow, that audience is fucking pathetic. Booing a brigadier general because he’s gay really tells us something about the modern Bigot, er, I mean Republican party.

Goddamn can Huckabee answer a question. I’m starting to like the guy, and Jesus is my second favorite fictional character (next to Batman.)

Seriously, Mitt Romney is so cliche I think he’s actually a living Ken doll. He was probably the quarterback at his high school, his girlfriend being the head cheeerleader. I bet they went to the soda fountain for burgers and egg creams, and then took Dad’s car up to Makeout Point for a little Ken-on-Barbie action.

I’m completely fucking in on Huckabee’s “Send Hillary to Mars” campaign. Perhaps we could use the hot air in her head as an alternative source of fuel for propulsion.

Aaaaaaaaaaand Rudy totally trips over the black guy’s question. Rock on, 9/11. Huckabee nailed it, though. Goddamn is he ever a good preacher. Shit, he might even be able to get me to stop fucking swearing.

The dude with the Stars & Bars has a V mask. Gimme a hug, Stars & Bars guy. And Fred Thompson actually answered his question. He’s doing better than Romney, who said lots of words, but didn’t make any actual sentences from them.

Ron Paul’s video was pretty good. Remember folks, a vote for Ron Paul is a vote for anarchy. Be a part of it!

And Dr. Hank Campbell from somewhere, somewhere wins the 2nd Booze & Bed award. You, me, and General Kerr can hang out, drink PBR and watch Terminator 2 or something. Of course, nobody bothered to answer his fucking question except for Paul. BIG fucking shock. McCain toed the party line real good. Even waved a sharpie.

And the line item veto is unconstitutional. And Giuliani made McCain look like an idiot. Way to go.

Ooh, a question directly for Mr. Paul. He’s not going to run as an Independent. So a vote for Ron Paul is a vote for nobody, since he’s never gonna get the Repub nom.

Winner: Huckabee. The man’s got charisma pouring out wherever his species traditionally crams things. He makes me wanna believe in Batman, er, I mean Jesus. Believe in Jesus. And his utility belt.
Runner-up: Giuliani. He used words that make sense most of the time, and didn’t sound like he was toeing the party line all night. With the exception of the question that specifically mentioned it, he didn’t mention 9/11 once.
Loser: McCain tried like a sonovabitch to lose but he got torture right, so he sucks even at losing. Romney’s El Zilcho for this evening. He’s like a fucking toy, for Christ’s sake. There’s a button on the man’s body that spits out the party line. No gays in the military! Big fence on the border! Cut out the pork! The sheep says, baaaaah.

And since I know somebody who’ll care (Hi Dave! *waves*) I thought Ron Paul did quite well, with the obvious exception of them not asking him very many questions. His answers were quite obviously unpopular. Every time I see him I think he’s less insane than I had previously thought. Then I think about what it would be like if my employer ran the DMV and I reconsider my opinion. While outputting violently from both holes.

On the other hand, if private business was handed the reins to our country’s many law enforcement agencies, maybe there really would be an OCP. Which means there really would be a Robocop, and suddenly Ron Paul doesn’t seem so bad. Murphy and Ron Paul could team up and kill Red Foreman and ED-209.

But maybe somebody can explain me this: Ron Paul’s website indicates that not only is he pro-life, but he also has actively taken part in passing bills to define life as beginning at conception (HR 1094.) Then he talks about states’ rights, including in the debate tonight when he said that the abortion thing wasn’t even a debate, because control of abortion law should fall to the states. These ideas are in conflict. Explain plz. I’ll catch you at work.

I had occasion to get the M*A*S*H box set very cheaply recently, and I’ve been watching all the episodes and reliving my childhood, which didn’t disappoint me for once, and now I get all the jokes I didn’t get when I was 7. So, in closing, here is a rather apt, if depressing, quote from my favorite character, Father John Patrick Francis Mulcahy.

“You know, Sis, it doesn’t matter whether you feel useful or not when you’re moving from one disaster to another. The trick, I guess, is to just keep moving.”

The Transporter came out on DVD when I was in Moscow. We rented it and spent the whole movie laughing. It was without question the most over-the-top action movie I’ve ever seen to date, and the thing that killed it is that it too itself so painfully seriously.

When a movie does that, there’s only one choice: Laugh. That’s what “laughable” means, for fuck’s sake. The determining factor as to whether the movie is good or not, at that point, depends on how much the people involved with the movie were laughing along with you. Or, more to the point, as to whether or not you’re laughing at someone or with someone.

Well, I just got a chance to watch Shoot ‘Em Up, a movie that I’ve wanted to watch ever since I heard about it. Clive Owen as a mysterious asskicker? Paul Giamatti as a psychotic bad guy who spits out slick dialogue? Fucking SOLD.

It was everything I ever wanted. Plus boobs. Also, “Fuck you, you fuckin’ fuckers” is an actual line from the movie. It is made obvious from the first minute of the film that the writer/director was unquestionably laughing with you. And that makes it great.

It is Crank with a plot that’s the tiniest bit more sane and way, way, WAY more ridiculous over-the-top action. Picture the episode of The Simpsons when Homer joins the NRA and does everything with his gun, with a slick veneer, Hollywood budget and Metalocalypse sense of humor.

It is ABSOLUTELY FUCKING AWESOME.

If you like guns and laughing, you should see it. You will absolutely not be disappointed.

Had you going there for a minute, didn’t I?

Oh well. A man can dream… a man can dream.

Recently I’ve been thinking about building another computer. For various reasons, not limited to but including

• boredom
• new/cool fetish
• junk addiction
• XBMC can’t play HD
• XBMC is not a DVR
• xboxes are way, way end of life
• xboxes are frightening expensive given the previous fact

See, I figured that my Athlon 64 4400+ would have enough oomph to at least play back 720p HD content. 1080p still seems a little out of reach but it would be a good start. I wanted to play around with LinuxMCE as it seemed to show some promise (even if it is ass-ugly) and give Media Portal another run.

I mean, I got my xbox almost two years ago, and I was pretty late to the party. Those apps I had tried before had 2 years to improve. It’s gotta be all sunshine and rainbows by now, right?

I spent part of yesterday (don’t ask) and (after getting a working power supply from RD) all of this evening working on it, and you know what I found out?

XBMC is so much better than both of the aforementioned products it’s not even fair to compare. LinuxMCE, Mediaportal, it’s like the Special Olympics of media center software.

You know what? Neither of those fucking pieces of worthless shit was capable of browsing a network. LinuxMCE found every single share on my Linux server, individually, and proceeded to bug me about each of them, individually. Then it put them somewhere on that godawful menu and didn’t tell me where. Media Portal isn’t even capable of browsing a network at all, from what I can tell.

Listen, dammit. All I want is a little menu that shows me the whole fucking workgroup, and lets me navigate through systems and shares some sort of traditional folder structure. I should be able to find a fucking file directly on the network. And get this: when I mash some stupid button, it should play! It should be so simple I can even do it when I’m drunk. This shouldn’t be so fucking hard.

Then again, if you’ve ever tried to access Windows shares under Linux maybe you wouldn’t be so surprised.

So I’m not sure why I am.

What I did find is that these software programs are absolutely jam-packed with stupid shit that at best only tangentially relates to actually playing media.

I couldn’t give a flying rat’s ass if it can control lights, alarms, talk to video capture devices by itself, play games, or show me the fucking weather report. (Hint: If you’re not dead, there’s still weather. The sun didn’t bluescreen between 2 and 3 AM.) Perhaps while we’re on track with all these features that are at best gratuitous and at worst silly and useless we could consider improving actual functionality. Or perhaps we can consider adding the ability to feed a dozen Taco Bell burritos into the fucking optical drive and have the goddamn thing fart the Star-Spangled Banner while drinking a beer, blowing some shit up and donating ten bucks to Ron Paul, because in his Rand-esque free-market utopia four dozen competitors would all have media centers that gloriously interoperate and they’ve packed in so many features that they can’t pack in any more actual useful stuff so the only thing that differentiates each one is the amount of stupid, gratuitous features each one can add in. In this world your media center will do everything including control your toaster and remote-flush your toilet so people basically choose the superior product by the color of the box, and don’t forget every sale includes a one dollar donation to the “Right to Life Fund,” because having abortions would be having too much freedom and we wouldn’t want that.

While I’m on the subject of “too much freedom” we should talk about corporate-funded censorship (the opposite of which is curiously called “Net Neutrality,” because apparently “GET YOUR FUCKING HANDS OFF MY GODDAMN PACKETS, YOU SOULLESS CORPORATE FUCKS, BEFORE I SLAUGHTER YOU EN MASSE AND MOUNT YOUR CORRUPT FUCKING HEADS ON PIKES IN THE TOWN SQUARE SO EVERYBODY CAN SEE WHAT WE DO TO EVIL, MONEYGRUBBING CENSORSHIP-SELLING MOTHERFUCKERS” was too on-point.

Wait, how did this turn into a disjointed political rant?

Regardless, XBMC does all the shit I want and it does it all with a controller on five-year-old hardware, and if I could make the fucker play HD video I’d never have to trade up.

Laaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaame.