COMMENTARY – A blog by any other name still doesn’t get any traffic

Well, I’ve had this blog up for a few weeks now and am here to report that, despite any efforts, I still get about NO traffic. That’s right. I’m still largely talking to myself. So what else is new. Seems appropriate that if I largely talk to myself and no one listens to me in the real world, the same should go for my website. At any rate, I’ve made a little analysis of this phenomenon and put together a few tips on what to do and what not to do to get traffic to your blog. How to waste your time and not get any traffic You will not find “doing nothing” in this category, believe it or not. Think about it. If, by doing nothing, you get even a single visitor, you’re actually getting a better return on your time than if you spent hours working to promote your site only to get the same result. So from that perspective, doing nothing is actually quite efficient. However, if you are actually interested in getting any traffic, doing nothing is among the poorest forms of site promotion. There are even less efficient ways to not get traffic though. The following are a few examples. Blog directories. How many people actually sit down in front of their computer and think, “Hey, I want to read about other people’s mundane lives today, let’s see if I can find a directory of people’s stupid personal sites”? The answer, apparently, is nobody. I am listed in four or five different directories of this nature, and have only gained about 3 hits off of them collectively in the past two weeks. Most people that bored who find themselves sitting in front of a computer with an internet connection are far more likely to be looking for free porn. Webrings. An even dumber idea than blog directories. At least a blog directory is relatively quick and easy. You submit your site with some info, wait a few minutes to a few days, and your site gets listed. With a webring, you have to similarly submit your site, but then you have to wait for a ring administrator to visit your site and accept it, and then you need to add some code to your site to become an official member of the ring. And you have to do that for each and every ring you want to join. That’s a lot of work to not get any traffic. Now consider, for someone to actually find your site using a webring, they first have to stumble across the ring, and then they likely have to make their way through a mass of other dull, boring, and stupid sites in the ring in order to reach yours, assuming they don’t lose interest along the way first and go look for some free porn instead. With the five webrings I signed up for, I have only been approved for three, and between those I have only gained one meager hit in two weeks. How’s that for inefficient? Spam I have not engaged in this form of shameless self-promotion, but thought it was worth a mention. Nobody, save for maybe AOL subscribers, pays any attention to spam. Spam people’s email, and you’ll likely get filtered out, blocked, and/or deleted without a second glance. Spam message boards or chat rooms and you’ll meet similar success, with your posts most likely being deleted and you getting kicked/banned from the site or server as well. You might be able to meet short term success with spamming, by advertising your blog as free porn, but you will quickly lose those visitors once they discover the false advertising. How to actually get some traffic Let’s face it. Nobody really searches for blogs. Nobody cares about what you think or what you have to say, so they’re not even going to look for a site where you tell them as much, and if they are to stumble upon it, it was probably by accident and they will leave as quickly as possible before they might waste precious minutes read something, taking away from their time searching for free porn. So since getting legitimate traffic that is actually interested in your site is all but impossible, here are a few tricks to get some unknowing visitors to your site. Update constantly. You don’t even have to add any content. Just keep updating your site. This is particularly effective if you host your site on Blogger, as you are improving your chances of getting on that “10 Most Recently Updated” list on Blogger.com’s front page to make some cheap hits from people who are actually at least somewhat interested in blogs. The other advantage is that most search engines rank new sites better than those that are updated less frequently. This leads into my next point… Search engines. Again, let me reiterate that no one is ever actually going to look for your site, nor stumble across your site while searching for anything related to blogs in general. They’re too busy looking for free porn. Tailoring your site to rank well in searches related to terms on blogs or blogging will not do much to your benefit. Thankfully however, sites that are largely text based, as a blog should be, will generally rank well in search engines, since you have more keywords for them to hone in on. So use this to your advantage, and cover as many random words and phrases as possible in your posts. Then people searching for something totally irrelevant to the contents of your site will stumble across you in their search results thanks to the large volume of unrelated words on your blog. Free porn. Now, taking into consideration everything you just learned, you should no longer be attempting to promote your blog as a blog, but rather filling your site with as many random keywords as possible for commonly run search engine queries in order to get traffic. Probably the best way to do this is to say words like “free porn” as often as possible. Take a look at this post alone. I’ve used the words “free porn” more than half a dozen times already. I can guarantee you that I’ll get a good two dozen hits for this post off of search engines as a result. Of course, your visitors won’t stay long when they realize you don’t actually have any free porn, but hey, it beats trying to get legitimate traffic.

NEWS – Site Updated

Sorry to all four or five of you who visit my site regularly for not posting anything new yesterday, but as you can see, there have been some substantial updates to the site’s appearance. I’ve got an all new color scheme which you may or may not like, and I also added a poll so you can vote on that very topic. There are new additions to my list of sites that don’t suck, and I have also finally settled on my stat trackers. Here’s the quick rundown on my findings. Extreme had way too much code for a tracker and doesn’t work correctly with blogger. Bravenet wasn’t bad, but didn’t do enough as a stat tracker for me, although they do offer a lot of other free services for webmasters, so I might revisit them at a later date. Similarly, Sitemeter, iHit, and Gigastats each were not bad, but did not provide me with all the information I expected from a good stat tracker. So here are the winners, IPStats, and AddFreeStats. IPStats has the sleekest code of all the trackers, with only 2 lines to add to your HTML, and it displays all your information on one simple page with pretty charts and graphs to boot. It doesn’t track referrers however, although they are apparently working on adding this feature, but since that is one of the biggest things I want to see, IPStats obviously wasn’t the sole solution for me. Enter AddFreeStats. AddFreeStats easily tracks more information for free than all of these other trackers combined. You even get many of the features for free that other trackers charge for as a premium service. My only complaint is the lack of any charts or graphs to display your data. So by combining AddFreeStats with IP stats, I get about everything I need. That’s about it for now. Now that the site’s all new and pretty, I’ll add some fresh content tomorrow, I promise. Until then.

COMMENTARY – The Dangers of the Discovery Channel

Parents need to be very careful about what they allow their children to watch on television these days. Even the seemingly harmless Discovery Channel is no longer safe. Take the Crocodile Hunter, Steve Irwin, for example, running around grabbing crocodiles by the tail, and playing with venomous snakes, spiders, and a variety of other lethal animals and insects. Do not allow your children to watch this show under any circumstances. Next thing you know, they’ll all be running around talking with Australian accents, saying things like “Crikey!” all the time, and who as a parent wants their children to do that? But children and Australian accents aside, those seemingly most susceptible to Steve Irwin’s bad example of tackling large reptiles is your average ordinary Floridiot. I spent three years living in Florida, and know the breed well. Just take a look at this news article for a typical example of Floridiocy at work. While I am initially impressed by a 49-year old woman who can pick up a live 6-foot alligator and toss it in the back seat of her car, I am more immediately struck by the sheer stupidity of doing so. You’ll notice how they mention it’s a felony to possess an alligator in Florida, as she was obviously not the first person to try something so incredulously unintelligent as wrapping her arms around one of these land sharks. The tourists have more respect for these prehistoric lizards than the natives do. You’d think with such easy feeding, the alligator population would explode uncontrollably in Florida. It very well might if Floridiots were to learn how to drive their boats sober and stopped mowing down any gator or manatee in their path. I suggest that, in an effort to discourage future incidences of such television-inspired stupidity, all timeslots previously occupied by the Crocodile Hunter should instead be replaced with The Joy of Painting. I challenge even a Floridiot to kill themselves mimicking Bob Ross.

NEWS- Music makes my head go round

I didn’t know it was possible to blow out headphone speakers. Perhaps I play my music too loud? Could be that I’ve had these headphones for a while and use them eight hours a day every day, so I’d suppose they have certainly exceeded their average life expectancy. Whatever the case, I have noticed that over the past week, as my headphones have been slowly passing away, my quality and quantity of work have deteriorated. And here I am today with a brand new set of headphones at only 10:30, and I’ve already completed and posted my Animal Crossing article, AND have more work done already than I have managed to accomplish in a full eight hours any day last week, and now I’m posting again today. Yessir, music is my lifeline. Perhaps it’s a side effect of watching too many movies, that my life feels as out of place without music as a movie without a soundtrack. Whatever the case, well, I’m back! Back in the saddle again…

GUIDE – How to piss off your chick obsessed with Animal Crossing.

Throughout this article, I will be referring to these guides at GameFAQs.com. I hate Animal Crossing. I don’t have the patience for it. I don’t like a game that makes me wait. Gaming is about instant gratification. It’s about firing up your favorite game and letting the instant mayhem take you away from the dull tedium of your real life for a while. What’s the point of tossing a game in to live a virtual life of tedium to replace your real one? I don’t get it. For some reason though, chicks love this game. It’s like Tetris. I never understood chicks’ fascination with Tetris either, how they could just sit there and play it for hours and hours, yet it seems to be an undeniable universal female trait nonetheless. It appears that Animal Crossing has this same female appeal, however this time Nintendo has made it far more insidious. For as she plays the game, it will continuously drop hints to her about how much more fun the game would be if she were to get some friends to play it with her too. Which means you. Within three days she will have suckered you into playing it with her, and there is nothing you can do but suffer through it with her to make her happy. Or is there? I feel your pain, for I am in the same position as you. Have no fear though, I have a few tips to help you out so you don’t have to actually work or wait for anything. With these guidelines and a little help from GameFAQs.com, you will be able to show your significant other that Animal Crossing is NOT, in fact, more fun with more people, and she’ll be deleting your memory card in no time, and you’ll be off the hook. Step 1: In the Beginning… First off, start your own town, don’t just move into your chick’s existing town. This means you’ll need a second memory card, but chances are you already have one since she’s likely playing this on your Gamecube and is using the free memory card that came with the game, so you should still have that memory card of your own you can use. Alright, now I hate to tell you this, but you’re going to have to actually play the game for a bit at the start. When the game begins, you move into your new town and pick out and buy a house from Tom Nook, the shopkeeper. You have next to no money, so you become his indentured servant for a time and have to run a handful of errands for him, until he can’t think of anything else he needs you to do. He’ll then release you from working for him, but will tell you how you still need to pay off the rest of your house. This will have given you ample time to develop a solid aversion for the actual game, and once that part is done, you’re ready to move on to step 2. Step 2: Back to the Future. Time traveling is one of the greatest and cheesiest ways to make quick cash. Next time you start your game, set the date back to January 1st 2001 (since that’s as far back as it will go). Check your mailbox. You’ll have a “Happy New Years” letter from “Mom” with 10,000 bells attached. Pocket the cash, save your game, and change the date to January 1st, 2002. Lo and behold, mother left you another 10 grand. Pocket it, save, and warp forward another year. If you did this all the way to 2030, which is as far as the calendar will go, you’d have close to 300,000 bells already in a manner of an hour or so. Other good dates for easy cash are October 31st (Halloween, after 6pm), and November 5th (Mayor’s Day), 11th (Officer’s Day), and 29th (Sales Day). You’ll have to actually trek to the wishing well on each of these days and talk to the mayor, where he’ll give you some model or other, depending on the holiday, all of which sell for bank at Nook’s store. The next best way to get cash is to scout the area for fossils each day, mail them off to the museum for identification, then save, quit, and warp forward a day so they’ll already be back in your mailbox. Sell them to Nook, find the new fossils for the day, and repeat until you have enough cash. Also check some of the guides at GamesFAQ.com for some other tricks for quick cash if you have an additional empty memory card or a GBA with a link cable. Step 3: The Black Market. Now that you have all this easy money, paying off all the upgrades on your house should be a piece of cake. But now there’s the problem of putting stuff in that empty house. To actually find the items you want in the game is a pain in the neck. You have to shop around every day to see what new items are in the store, or run stupid errands for other townsfolk and hope they give you something good instead of some crappy stationary. This certainly takes an unacceptably sizable amount of time. That’s why you just steal the items you want. Check out the Universal Codes FAQ on the above link to GameFAQs.com. This is by no means a complete list of items in the game, and I’ve come across a few codes on this list that don’t seem to work, but you can still use it to attain the majority of items in the game for free, without the days, weeks, or months of hunting for them legitimately. All you have to do is go to Tom Nook’s store, give him the code for the item you want, and he just gives it to you. Simple as that. Oh, and don’t have enough cash yet? Check the turnip prices with Tom Nook everyday, and when they’re high use the code to get 100 turnips and sell them back to him. This can be the most efficient source of income by far. Tom will only let you use the codes to get items three times before he says he’s all out, but just go back to your house, save and quit, and then come back the same day, and he’ll let you use another three. The highest I’ve seen was 624 bells per turnip, and using this trick I had over a million bells in far less time than the time warp trick. I don’t think there’s any real way to gauge what the turnip prices are going to be, so just keep an eye on them as you play. Step 4: Cat Burglary. And all the other animals for that matter. Now that you’re loaded with cash, and your house is all upgraded, use the guides to make a perfect house/ perfect town. This might take a little while, but not to worry, we’re almost done. Oh, and don’t worry about the weeds. It would take you forever to pull them all if you’ve accumulated a lot of weeds in your town, which you will if you time warped at all. So set the clock to about 2am and wander around town looking for a ghost. He’ll ask you to catch 5 spirits lost somewhere in your town. Grab your bug net and with ten or fifteen minutes of searching you should have captured them all. Return them to the ghost, and to reward you he will offer to paint the roof of your house, give you a present, or pull your weeds for you. The choice should be obvious. After you’ve managed to attain a perfect town, spend a lot of time traveling back and forth between your town and your chick’s town. While you’re taking the train, the memory cards interact, and if your town is rated better than hers, a lot of the people from her town will move out and settle in your town instead. Also, now that you know what it takes to make a perfect town, you could do a little sabotage in her town as well. Trample flowers, cut down trees, and the like. She will be none too pleased to play the next day to find everyone in her town has instead moved to yours. COVER YOUR TRACKS! This is the most important part. If she catches you changing the clock, or using the codes to get items, or discovers any evidence of the steps in this guide, she will likely take to cheating as well just to stay ahead of you. While you will have managed to destroy the game for her, you now don’t have an easy way out. The idea is to leave her frustrated and baffled at how your town could be so much more successful than hers. So it is important you do not get caught. If you time warp, be sure to set the clock back to the correct date and time before she plays again. Hide the codes where she won’t find them if you’ve printed them out. And don’t totally ravage her village all at once. She’ll notice if all her trees are leveled overnight, but won’t miss a few a day, for example. If you follow these steps correctly, you should be rich, have a big house with all the cool items, and everyone will want to live in your town, while she will be left living in a shack in an empty village. She won’t be happy, and you know what that means. So say goodbye to your memory card, and you’re off the hook.

COMMENTARY – The Legend of Zelda: A cel-shady future

Nintendo got me. They got their hookshot in my wallet and I was forced to fork over my hard earned rupees to preorder a game that by all appearances will do nothing more than piss me off. That’s right, I already reserved a copy of Windwaker. Just a few weeks ago I swore I would never even play it, much less buy the game, and here I am reserving a copy before it’s even released. What could have caused such a drastic turnaround? Because Nintendo is crafty, and while it may not appear that they are on top in the console race right now, they know what they are doing. Look at the Pokemon craze. That was all Nintendo’s doing. The marketing genius behind Nintendo managed to captivate the minds of practically every child under the age of 14 worldwide with the stupid little critters for years. Their same tactics which can be seen so strongly in the Pokemon franchise are also making them a fortune in other channels. For example, and the point of this article, their popular Zelda game series. I remember the footage from Spaceworld 2000 of the new Zelda they were working on for the Gamecube at the time, prior to the decision to go cel shaded. (Sorry if this post is rather devoid of links, I don’t have time to hunt down the pics right now, so you’ll just have to take my word for it, go find them yourself, or wait until I have a little more time and update this post with them.) It was absolutely amazing. There was Link and Ganon, beautifully rendered and big as life, locked in yet another legendary epic battle. I almost cried. I eagerly awaited news of when this game would be released. I could hardly contain my anticipation. But alas, my dreams were shattered and all hopes of ever seeing this game in my hands vanished as they made the announcement: The project had been scrapped in favor of a cel shaded version. I don’t know what prompted them to try something as new and different and stupid with the series as turning it into a cel shaded cartoon. I don’t know anybody who actually likes cel shading. I can’t think of a single cel shaded game that sold well either. But that doesn’t matter to Nintendo. Nintendo knows of the fanatic following the series has. They know we will buy anything with the Zelda name on it, no matter how badly they crap it up. We may whine and complain about it, but the fact remains we still bought it and Nintendo is still making money off of it. My guess is they went with the cel shading to see if the new style would bring in some new players, since they already know they can rely on their old customers to buy it, no matter what they do to it. But that’s not the end of it. Nintendo knew there would be some of us old hardcore fans who would put our foot down at this abomination, and say cel shading is taking it too far. So they employed a tactic to not only ensnare these rebels and bring them back to the franchise, but to also ensure a successful product launch, by offering a bonus disc with preordered copies of the game. This bonus disc includes a complete copy of the N64’s Ocarina of Time, as well as the “Master Quest”, another full version of Ocarina of Time with new and more challenging dungeons. Wow. You get three games for the price of one, and if you don’t like Windwaker you have the N64 classic along with it’s remix to keep you entertained. If you think about it though, this bonus disc is costing Nintendo next to nothing. They merely had to alter the existing game for the new platform and they were done. They didn’t even make the Master Quest with the Gamecube release in mind. It was actually previously developed for release with the 64DD, a disc drive add-on for the N64 which they were working on late in the console’s life cycle in hopes of capturing a few more game developers with the prospect of making games on cheap discs as opposed to the expensive cartridges. Obviously the accessory never caught on, so the Master Quest has just been sitting in a closet until someone got the bright idea of dusting it off and bolstering Windwaker sales with it. So with little additional investment of time, money, or resources, Nintendo has already ensured this radically redesigned addition to the Zelda series will be an instant success. I can see you thinking already. Three games for the price of one, not a bad idea… maybe I should reserve a copy… And there you have it. You don’t play Nintendo. Nintendo plays you.

NEWS - Too busy for a clever title today

An unusually busy day at work today. Especially for a Friday. Oh well. Guess you half dozen people who visit my blog will have to wait until Monday for any substantial new content. You might notice some stat tracker rotation over the next couple of weeks. I decided against adding all 7 of them at once, since it looked sloppy and annoying, so I’m only going to test one or two at a time, and rotate out the ones I don’t like, and fill you in when I’m done tinkering with them and come to a conclusive decision on which one is best. EDIT: You'll notice my hit counter may be really low, but that's only counting the time since that particular stat tracker was on the site, not the total hits to date for the site proper. I know I don't get a lot of traffic, but I'm not that pathetic...

NEWS - Site Re-update

Okay, I got a new stat tracker now via GigaStats, we'll see how/if this one actually works. I appreciate the unobtrusive button with the new service as opposed to the annoying banner, at least. I also got to looking at the color scheme for the site, seeing as I haven't bothered to change it from the blogger template default, and decided that it's really kinda boring. So look for some new colors in the coming weeks, or whenever I get around to it. I typically only really have time to either post or tinker with the code, and not often can I manage both in the same day. Unless someone wants to give me a computer so I can work on it over the weekends... EDIT: In my searching, I also found a handful of other free stat trackers that looked promising. So I decided what the hell, tomorrow I'm going to just add all of them. Then I'll monitor each of them over the next few weeks, decide which one I like best, throw out the rest, and then write up a little review on it. Why not. There's a chance that someone might possibly find it useful. Might be interesting to see how their results compare too.

NEWS - Site Downdate

I have just removed Freestats from my blog. I was having too many problems with that stupid stat tracker for it to stick around. I'll start looking for a new stat tracker that actually works tomorrow. You know, maybe one that doesn't take my whole site down with it when it doesn't load properly...

COMMENTARY – How to make a complete blithering idiot of yourself in only three square feet of space

I had briefly mentioned earlier the spastic spectacle I saw convulsing on the Dance Dance Revolution machine when I went to the theater over the weekend. I have given a fair deal of thought as to what exactly made him look so ridiculous, and it real boils down to this: Take that geek off that nine square pad, and he wouldn’t have a clue how to dance. Yet you pop in a few quarters and throw him up there, and he thinks he’s John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. How many guys that actually know how to dance have you seen pounding away on a DDR machine for hours on end? Most likely none at all, because they’re all out at the hot clubs showing off their real dance moves and actually picking up chicks. Yet geeks remain in their delusion that somehow the DDR machine makes them cool and will help them get a date. Just watch when a girl steps up to the pad next to him to play a round or two. His heart starts pumping madly, his eyes go wide with hope and anticipation, and he jumps and gyrates with twice the enthusiasm as before. Yet it always ends the same. She steps off after a round or two, and the geek can do nothing but look on dejectedly, and wait for the next female contender to set foot in his domain. DDR is a hopeless trap for geeks. It’s like clubbing for nerds. They are enthralled by the idea of simply stepping onto a pad and following the uncomplicated instructions on the monitor, and then by adding some music and flashing lights they think they’re dancing. I can understand the geek appeal. It puts you in front of a big screen, turns dancing into a game with computer instructions, and social interaction is not required. But DDR represents the opposite of everything required to get a date. You will not pick up hot chicks. You will not be a better dancer. And people will certainly not think you’re cooler, in fact they will most likely think the opposite, watching you flailing around like an idiot in your delusion of your own gracefulness. Do yourself a favor and quit NOW. Or hopefully you are reading this in time to never start in the first place. Dance Dance Revolution is a one of the largest factors responsible for giving geeks a bad name. So many geeks are drawn to DDR’s illusion of social acceptance, not realizing that to the rest of the world it’s just a big neon sign that says “Look at the stupid geek.” Stay off it, at all costs. Save up those quarters and pay for some real dance lessons. Gather a couple of geek buddies, buy yourselves some new threads, and head out to a nightclub together. Even a wallflower at a club has a better chance at getting a date than any freak on Dance Dance Revolution. And if you see any other geeks on DDR in the future, be sure to do what I do and sack them. They’re giving you a bad name, and besides, it’s for their own good. Preserve and protect the good name of geek. Join the opposition of DDR.

NEWS - SotD UPDATE

I just realized I've been neglecting to update my Site of the Day list. So to apologize, here's a quick rundown of the five new additions I added today. Don't know if I'll have time to post anything else substantial today though. Monty Python in LEGO: That's right, the entire Camelot musical number from the Holy Grail acted out identically to the movie, but with LEGO characters. They actually put this on the special edition DVD release of the movie too. Teddy Borg: This is what happens when a bunch of MIT students get bored and have spare computer parts laying around... Duct Tape Fashion: Buy the latest apparel made entirely out of duct tape! Schroedinger's Cat: A translated and modernized version of Schroedinger's "cat theory". A pretty intense read. The Principia Discordia: In case that last link was too much for you, here is the complete bible on the worship of the goddess of confusion. Enjoy!

COMMENTARY – Theater-going advice for stupid people.

Looks like I’ll be postponing my Animal Crossing article another few days in light of several events over the weekend that I feel are more deserving of commentary. A friend of mine celebrated his birthday this weekend and for some reason threw his party on Friday, and we went to the theater to see Daredevil. So let’s see if you caught all that. We went to the theater on the opening night of a movie on a holiday Friday, Valentines Day no less. There was not a parking spot within three blocks. People were parked behind the theater, at all the surrounding restaurants, on the sidewalks, in the handicap spaces, in the fire lanes, in the road, legally or illegally there was a vehicle just about anywhere someone could slam on the brakes and throw it into park. What are all these people doing here? Well, watching a movie obviously, but what brings them all here now? Surveying the lobby while I waited in that endless line for overpriced popcorn, I broke the crowd down into three distinct major categories. Well, there was also the freak playing Dance Dance Revolution like he was having an epileptic seizure, but we’ll save him for his own special commentary later. The date couple was one of the more obvious and prominent groups, seeing as it was Valentines and all. How much more uncreative can you get than taking your chick out for the old “dinner and a movie” routine? I understand this is a tried and true method for getting to suck face for two hours in a dimly lit room, but if you’re serious about the girl and are interested in anything more than getting in her pants, then put a little more thought and ingenuity into your date than dinner and a movie. There are so many other things you could be doing together that would do far more to improve your relationship than sticking your tongues in each other’s mouths in the dark. If you’re too much of an idiot to think of anything else, then it is recommended that you don’t breed and pass on your obviously mentally inferior genes anyway, so you should forget the whole dating thing now and stop crowding the theaters. The second noticeable group were the “opening nighters”. These are the people who waited in line for a solid month to see Star Wars, not thinking that they don’t sell more tickets than they have seats for in the theater, so the guy who showed up five minutes before the movie started who bought his tickets earlier that week is sitting but two rows behind you and is laughing at you. What’s so important about seeing a movie the night it comes out anyway? Will it somehow be better or different than if you saw it a week or two later? Are you deathly afraid that you will get to work on Monday and somebody at the water cooler will ask you that dreadful question, if you saw some new movie or other over the weekend, and you’d just have to hang your head in shame and admit that you haven’t? Or perhaps you’re just one of those people who has to be first in everything, and you can’t stand the thought that, heaven forbid, someone saw a movie before you. Whatever your case, it’s pathetic. Go read a book or something. Maybe a dummy’s guide to computers so you can stop using AOL. If being the first person to see a movie is that important to you then I suggest you seek counseling. But you better hurry to book the good times with the psychiatrist, before someone else beats you to it. The last and by far most annoying group were the theater rats. A close relative to the mall rat, these adolescent punks anywhere from 9-15 years old were underfoot everywhere you went. It was like an infestation. How did they all get here? They obviously can’t drive. But in all fairness, I can’t rightly blame the kids. Children are stupid. No fault of their own, it’s a simple lack of life experience. To them, hanging out in crowded places like theaters and malls is “cool”. If the mall or the theater weren’t crowded, it would probably cease to have such popularity among them and they’d flock to whatever the new “cool” locality was. Who’s really at fault here are these children’s parents. They don’t feel like taking the time to raise their own children, so rather than spending time with them, they drive them to the “cool” places and dump them off. Then when they hit high school they wonder where their kids picked up the drug habits, the foul language, and the disrespect. I’m sure you aren’t thinking that all the rated R movies they snuck into when you dumped them off at the theater while they were young impressionable children had anything to do with it. You may find this regrettable and unfortunate, but unlike some animal that can spit out offspring and then kick it out on it’s own a few months later, you are stuck with your children for 18 years. You are responsible for everything they do during that time, and if your children turns out to be delinquents because you neglected to spend enough time with them and they learned everything they know instead from the TV, movies, or their likewise misguided friends, you have no one to blame but yourself. You’re probably the same people who didn’t listen to me about not dating if you can’t think of anything better to do than dinner and a movie and went ahead and had children anyways, and now you don’t know what else to do with them either. Well that’s what you get for not listening to me. So there you have it, you can add the movie-going experience to the list of things that would be better if everybody listened to me.

Commentary: Valentines Day Special! Why the Roman Empire was so great.

I was sitting at my desk at work, finishing off my Animal Crossing writeup this morning when I got beaned in the head by a small sack of Hershey Kisses. I initially jumped up to locate the culprit, but then decided to just sit back down and be content to eat them instead. It wasn’t until I had already eaten half of them that I noticed the little heart-shaped note taped on the back, reading “Happy Valentines Day!” Holy crap! I had completely forgotten! Here I am writing about Animal Crossing and missing out on the perfect opportunity for some holiday satire! Well, Animal Crossing will have to take the back burner and wait until Monday. There are bigger fish to fry today. Valentine’s Day. What a stupid idea. A holiday where couples can shower each other with gifts ostentatiously to make anyone around them that remains unattached feel sorely aware of their absence of a significant other more so than the other 364 days of the year. It’s not like couples need a special day for this. They do this every other day anyway. So why does this holiday even exist? Well, today, it’s what we call a “Hallmark Holiday”, just one more day for manufacturers and retail outlets to capitalize on by convincing us we need to spend all our money on things we don’t actually need. But let’s instead look at the origin of Valentines Day. The holiday is named after a Catholic Priest who lived in 3rd century Rome. The Emperor at the time, Claudius II, decided that single men make better soldiers than those with wives and children to worry about, and so decreed that young men were not allowed to marry. Valentine however continued to perform marriage ceremonies, and was eventually discovered and imprisoned. Then he and the jailer’s daughter supposedly fell in love, and he wrote her a love letter signed “From your Valentine” shortly before his beheading on February 14. He was then later declared a saint and February 14th a holiday. Embittered individuals could stop there and say that this holiday should then instead be about the beheading of lovers than a celebration of love, but I’m not finished yet. This holiday conveniently replaced another ancient Roman holiday, traditionally celebrated on February 15th, known as the Feast of the Lupercal. On the eve of this holiday in honor of the Roman god of fertility there was a tradition of drawing names, where the young men would draw the name of a young woman from a jar, and the two would become a couple for the following year. Ah, now I see that I’ve perked up the ears of all those despondent souls out there. And here is exactly what I propose. Let’s take this holiday back to it’s Roman origins. It would work out better for everyone. Rather than this holiday of exclusion, we could instead turn this day to the benefit of all. Everyone would have a significant other by the end of the day, Hallmark could still make cards to be used in the lottery drawing, and most other retailers would benefit as well, as now everyone would have a date to buy gifts for and no one would be sitting at home wallowing in pity instead of buying stuff they don’t need. It’s a scenario where everybody wins. Let’s return the Feast of Lupercal! Everybody write your congressman, let’s see if we can make it official.

COMMENTARY – DIGITAL NATURAL SELECTION

I’ve never had a computer virus infect my system. Alright, in all fairness you could say that’s not hard to do when one hasn’t had a computer for a virus to infect for about two years, since the roof collapsed on it and buried it under the snow. Hey, didn’t I say that was a sore subject and to never bring it up again? Thanks a lot. Geez. But continuing on, I would like to add that none of my closest friends (who DO have computers) have ever been infected by any sort of virus either. We spend far more time online than the average computer user and do the same things everyone else does with their systems, yet we remain unscathed from the very same plague of viruses that take out countless users every day. How is this possible? It’s quite simple, really. Computer viruses, much like viruses in the real world, are a tool of natural selection. Natural selection is a way of weeding out the weak, sickly, and stupid. Imagine that in the real world, some disease or other infects a herd of animals, let’s say caribou for our example because caribou is a fun word to say. All of the caribou get sick, and the smaller, weaker caribou in the herd will die off quickly, while the bigger, stronger caribou will ultimately be able to fight off the disease and survive. These bigger, stronger caribou will then be able to continue reproduction, while the smaller, weaker caribou will no longer have the opportunity to do the same, being as they’re all dead. This way, the smaller, weaker caribou genes are weeded out of the herd, and the herd is ensured that only the bigger, stronger caribou genes will be passed on to future generations. So natural selection is a good thing. The same applies to the digital world. There are those who know how to actually use a computer, and then there are those who use AOL. What computer viruses do is weed out the people who have no place on the internet in the first place, and free up the bandwidth for those of us who do. Allow me to specify some of the more common forms of digital natural selection found on the internet, and how they are benefiting the internet community as a whole. Look out, Outlook: The vast majority of people fall victim to email viruses. This is because they’re stupid and open emails from people they don’t know with suspicious attachments while using Outlook with the preview pane active. Where are these people’s common sense? If you get a package in the mail when you weren’t expecting it, with no return address, and it’s leaking some sort of oil, smells funny, and ticks, do you just open it? You know you would. You’re just that type of idiot. Curiosity got the better of you. You were enticed by the email’s subject line on how to get rich quick working from home while enlarging your male organ with a bonus free lifetime supply of Echinacea, so you clicked on it. You clicked on it, and now your computer doesn’t work. Imagine that. The Virus Self Checkout: This one is probably my favorite. These are the people who think they’re cool and know what they’re doing because they figured out how to download, install, and even run a P2P networking program like Morpheus or Kazaa. They then start downloading all manner of files just because they can, probably not even knowing what half of them are, and are surprised when they get infected by a virus and are clueless as to how it could possibly have entered their system. What amazes me most about these type of people is no one is sending them a virus, they’re downloading it themselves. Some geeks out there think it’s funny to share a folder full of viruses on P2P networks, and then just sit back and laugh as they watch users connect and willingly download them to their own machines themselves. Here’s a quick general tip for you: If you’re downloading a program, game, or movie, and the file size shows less than 1MB and has the word “installer” in the filename, you’re a moron. SOL, AOL: AOL users are in a special category. Hackers are aware of the stupendously lower average IQ of AOL users as compared to any other ISP, so on top of falling victim to all of the above tricks, AOL subscribers are also the typical prey for credit card scams. This isn’t a virus per se, but in the context of natural selection, you can view these hackers as the predators picking out the weak and sickly. Here’s how a typical scam works. AOL Bob gets an email saying “Free porn! Click here!!!” Thinking that he’s special and not realizing that some spammer sent this same message to about everyone in the AOL directory, AOL Bob clicks on it and is taken to a dummy page created by our digital crook. This dummy site doesn’t actually even have any porn, and is nothing more than a form reading something about congratulations, you’re about to get free porn, but we need your credit card for age identification purposes only. So AOL Bob foolishly puts in his credit card information and clicks OK, and his life savings is sent straight to the crook, and AOL Bob doesn’t even get any porn out of it, because there never was any there to begin with. Now there’s a get rich quick scheme that works. Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood Watch: Broadband access is becoming quite prevalent nowadays. Who wouldn’t like a speedy fast always-on internet connection, right? Hackers certainly love for you to have it too. Most people just leave their computers on when they’re not using them, and don’t realize that with a broadband connection, that’s like leaving your front door wide open and hanging up a big neon sign saying “HACK ME”. While you’re at work and your computer is running idly at home, some hacker could be doing any number of things to your system, from dropping viruses onto your hard drive, or deleting, altering, or stealing your files, to completely taking over remote control of your system. He could then use your system to hack into another system, let’s say for example a bank, and then the FBI will trace it to YOU and come knocking on your door, while he makes off with the money. And now you’re in jail, because you left your computer on while you were at work. Too bad for you. That’s the basic rundown of internet idiocy and digital natural selection at work. If you have found yourself victim to any of these, especially more than once, do yourself and the rest of us a favor and sell your computer and get a typewriter, or a Mac.

News - Good news is no news

Currently working on a new article aimed at all those poor guys with abusive girlfriends and/or wives, titled “How to piss off your chick obsessed with Animal Crossing”. However I feel I need to take my research home and verify it before actually posting it, so be looking for it later this week. So for filler space today I give you Dan’s Deep Thought of the Day: “Don't you hate it when you're lathering your hair when in the shower and all of a sudden the water temp changes on you? You freak out and feel so helpless cause what can you do? You're blinded by the blasted shampoo and that dang shower curtain is just waiting for your flailing body to run into it, become entangled in it, and make you fall to your twisted shampoo-y doom. Well SCREW THAT.” See what else goes on in the freakish mind of Dan.

Reviews – Gamecube – Gauntlet: Dark Legacy

That’s right, I’m doing reviews now. Why? Because I have nothing better to do with my time than to complain about things I don’t like or to try to sell you on things that I think are cool, that’s why. I’ll be reviewing all manner of things in the future, but today’s victim is the Gamecube game “Gauntlet: Dark Legacy”. It’s actually a cross platform title and not a Gamecube exclusive, but I don’t have a PS2 or an Xbox, so it doesn’t really matter to me. Anyways, I have the hookup for free game rentals, so I’ll just grab whatever every now and then and play it, since hey, it’s not like I’m spending any hard earned money here. Last night I ended up walking out with Gauntlet. I walked it back this morning. My synopsis of the game in one sentence would have to be this: “Same old Gauntlet, but with new and improved homosexuality!” You have your same old character classes with the addition of a few new cheesy ones like the Jester, Knight, or Dwarf, a couple of combo moves to keep you entertained for maybe five minutes, but other than that, it’s the same old Gauntlet all over again. I’d say even if you loved the old Gauntlet, you’d tire of this game in under three levels. The graphics are nothing to get excited about either. It’s the same old thing, slightly better rendered. Most of the sound effects are even identical to the N64 Gauntlet. The storyline is identical as well, but that’s typically the last thing anyone who plays a hack and slash game like this thinks of anyway. It almost seems to me like they just polished up their old game to give it another go, with no further effort than that. The monotony alone of this nearly identical sequel would be enough to make you return it in under half an hour, but that wasn’t enough for the folks at Midway. They don’t want you to throw their game out for mere boredom, no, you must also feel some sense of outrage or disgust to accompany it. This is where the single most noticeable change they made to the game to set it apart from previous Gauntlets comes into play. It would appear that the only thing they made a major effort to change was the character movement. You no longer have just some plodding brutish warrior wildly swinging an axe around the battlefield. No, now your character has the addition of a flamboyant skip, or has a dumb wussy looking special attack, or cries like a girl in the heat of battle. The manliness that was the only thing that kept a guy playing this game in the first place is now gone. Big masculine brutes used to sit in front of the TV, clumsily holding controllers in their meaty fists for hours, playing Gauntlet with such phrases of joy and excitement as “Me beat monsters with axe!”, “Food is good!”, or “THUNDER HAMMER go BOOM!” This solitary motivation to play the game so you can beat the hell out of things like a man has been replaced with a bunch of pansies skipping around the acid fields like they’re going to a picnic. What the hell were they thinking? Obviously the folks at Midway have been watching way too much Nickelodeon to have that level of homosexuality permeate that vacuous emptiness between their ears where their brains should be. Not to mention, who plays hack and slash games anymore anyways? It was a dying breed on the last generation of consoles. Get with it and make a first person shooter Gauntlet already. And PLEASE, no Spongebob Warriorpants this time. Now for the ratings. I have created a set of standards by which to measure games on a 1-10 scale, and I will additionally throw in a variable attribute distinctive to something the particular game does outstandingly well or poorly in that doesn’t quite fit in one of the standard categories. I will then graphically display the scores using Klingon military rank symbols, just because I can. So without further ado:

Graphics: 3/10		Overall Score
Sound: 3/10
Gameplay: 2/10
Ingenuity: 1/10
Replay Value: 1/10
Flaming Homosexuality: 10/10		2/10

This game barely beats out any game with a pop singer or “Mary Kate and Ashley” in the title, and only because it has a history of masculinity, even though it was sorely destroyed with this title. Do not under any circumstances rent this game unless you have serious masochistic issues.

NEWS - Anybody seen my contacts?

I put these neato little online status indicators under my contact info, so you can see what instant messengers I am logged into at this very moment! Cool, huh? The MSN one doesn't seem to be working correctly, but go figure, I can't get the messenger to work right at the moment either. Coincidence? New site of the day also, Windows RG, for "Really Good". Definitely worth a look. ;-)

COMMENTARY - Hypocritical Couch Patriots

I don’t pretend to be even mildly interested in politics. I can’t handle the politics in my own office, much less concern myself with the affairs of the rest of the world. Ernest Benn once said “Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy.” I tend towards straightforward honesty, which unfortunately has no place in the world of politics, hence I just keep largely to myself. So does my outward lack of concern for the affairs of our nation, the world, and just people in general make me uncaring and unpatriotic? Hardly. Well… okay, perhaps uncaring, but I have enough problems of my own without having to worry about yours too. But what of patriotism? Does my generally detached stance on the state of the world around me make me unpatriotic as well? Maybe so, but then I put it to you that most of you are no more patriotic than I am. Let’s take a look at the definition of “patriotism” according to Webster: “Love of country; devotion to the welfare of one's country; the virtues and actions of a patriot; the passion which inspires one to serve one's country.” By this definition, we can identify several distinct levels of patriotism. There’s the red-blooded patriot, whose devotion to country is so strong that he is willing to put his life on the line in its service. Then you have the friendly neighborhood patriot, the individual who may not give his life in the service of his country, but at least finds what ways he can to make his country a better place, through volunteer work, donation of time and resources to worthy causes, and the like. Then there is the category of patriotism that most accurately describes the bulk of the American population, the couch patriot. This is the person who watches the US bomb the hell out of some country on the evening news and says, “Yeah, go America!”, while waiting for Friends or Seinfeld reruns to come on next. These are the people who pay the boy scouts to plant American flags in their front yard on patriotic holidays because they’re too lazy to do it themselves and likely don’t even possess an American flag of their own. They are the same type of people who only go to church twice a year, once for Christmas and once for Easter. I have no problems with the couch patriot, so long as one doesn’t come along and hypocritically accuse me of my lack of patriotism. Honestly, what have you done for your country? What makes you more patriotic than me? Just because you’re more vocal? According to Plato, “Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something.” Talk is cheap. Want to show your patriotism? Do something. Buying a t-shirt or bumper sticker with the American flag on it doesn’t count, either. Any fool can sit in his living room and comment on the President’s State of the Union address, or Colin Powell’s testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, but does that make you anything more than a couch patriot? I don’t think so. What I can’t stand even more than a hypocritical couch patriot though, is the flagrant capitalization on patriotism and terrorism. I remember the commercials after September 11, “Show your patriotism and buy our product, help keep America’s economy rolling”, and crap like that. It made me sick. Here we are in the wake of the most tragic act of terrorism our nation has ever witnessed, and all these businesses jump at the opportunity to exploit “patriotism” to make a quick buck. They should be ashamed. I believe that particularly over the past couple of years, the definition of patriotism has been horribly mutilated into something it is not. It has nothing to do with spending money on “American products”, which more than likely aren’t made in the US anyway. Pasting American flags all over your house, car, or body does not make you patriotic. Pretending you are concerned about current events in America that have absolutely no impact on you does not make you look patriotic. It just makes you look phony. The explosion of the space shuttle Columbia is a good example of this. The thing was built on 30-year old technology, patched together with decades old spare parts. Most people don’t even drive cars in that condition, and we’re strapping rockets to these things and launching them into space, expecting them to come back and land in one piece every time. Does anyone else see an accident waiting to happen? I will save the rest of my thoughts on America’s space program for another day, but what I’m getting at is why should I have to spend the entire week pretending I’m deeply impacted by an accident waiting to happen that finally did? Sure, I feel some sorrow for the astronauts that lost their lives, but every one of them knew the risks involved with their chosen occupation, and knew that a tragedy such as this was always a possibility with every mission. I didn’t actually know anyone on that shuttle, so honestly my emotions toward it end there. Yet somehow people feel they’re more patriotic if they appear more emotionally in touch with any major event in the public eye. Well, it doesn’t, so stop it. Unless you’re a pregnant woman or have some hormonal imbalance, you have no excuse. Patriotism is nothing more than an emotion, and it is felt differently and acted upon in different manners by different people. There’s no need to be phony about it, or be ashamed because your patriotism isn’t the same as your neighbor’s. Don’t let any marketing ploys aimed at your hard earned money or overly dramatic news broadcasts tell you how you have to display your patriotism. True patriotism can’t be given to you. Have your own sense of patriotism. Okay, this post turned entirely too serious, so in an effort to reverse that I’m going to close with a haiku about llamas. Majestic llama, adorned in thick purple fur, what an acid trip! And that’s all I have to say on that.

NEWS - Unionizing Monkeys

Eh. Dismally little time to mess with this today. See, I don’t actually have a computer of my own at home (LONG story and a sore subject so please don’t bring it up again, thank you) so I mess with this solely from work. But occasionally my employer asks me to work at work, and today would be one of those unfortunate days. That’s the bad news. The good news is I’m playing musical cubicles today and will end up with a new job function even easier than my current one. I didn’t think this was physically possible, but they never cease to amaze me with the mindless tasks they can find for us to do in our little cubicle farm. They should train monkeys to do this. After the initial training, the primates would represent a significant reduction in payroll, the monkeys wouldn’t need benefits or insurance or pre-paid tuition, and there wouldn’t be a union to gripe all the time over trite and meaningless topics such as the dress code and what the official work time is. Well, unless the monkeys eventually unionized of course, but I wouldn’t expect them to do anything more than throw poop around the office until you zapped them with a tazer and gave them a banana, after which I’m sure they’d go back to work since all they probably wanted was a banana in the first place. So there you have it folks, the moral of the story is feed your monkeys bananas and they won’t unionize and throw poop at you. Wait, no, what was I talking about before? Oh crap. WORK. Right, gotta go.

NEWS - Don't look too hard...

The search engine is up and it does work... but then again there's really nothing to search for yet since it's all on this one page still. Nevertheless, it is there, for future reference. It does put sponsor links at the top of your search results just as all the sellout search engines like Yahoo, Altavista, Lycos, and even Google now do. But hey, then again, it's a free service, what more do you want?

NEWS - Big Brother is watching

I tacked on a free stat tracker to this page yesterday afternoon, hence the addition of a new annoying banner ad at the bottom of the page. I took a look at the traffic reports this morning, and as I suspected, no one can actually find this page. Why does Blogger even ask you when creating a blog whether you want your blog to be public or private, when you can’t find them either way anyway? After I touch up the somewhat sloppy code in the default site template, I’ll add some meta tags and see what I can do about getting myself in some search engines. It’s about maximizing the return value of my blog. I won’t be satisfied until I know that I have wasted the time of enough visitors to equal at least 100 times the amount of time I’ve put into actually writing in it. I’m also going to be implementing a new naming structure to all my blog entries to give a brief overview of it’s contents in the title, to aid in the use of the search engine I’m also going to try to stick on the site today. I don’t really need one right now, but for someone who hates blogs I sure update mine a lot, so I can see it becoming very useful in the near future. This of course will likely result in yet another banner ad, but hey, what do you want for free service? At least there aren’t any pop-ups. Stupid pop-ups. I hate them almost as much as I hate cats.

NEWS - Sites that don't suck

In keeping with my delusion that my blog is somehow different from everyone else’s and actually has a religious following by a fanatic audience hanging on my every word, which in reality can’t possibly exist seeing as this blog hasn’t been up for more than, oh, two hours, I will be updating my recommended sites roughly daily with the Official Site of the Day. I will not always announce them and may just throw them onto the list with nary a word, so keep your eyes open. Regardless of whether I write a detailed post about it or not, if it is on my list you can be assured that it is a site worthy of bookmarking for yourself. Only the finest sites on the web make it onto my list. Each entry is carefully screened before acceptance by a panel of judges consisting of me... and... well, okay just me. But hey, at the least you can be sure it’s better than reading people’s lame blogs all day. I started the list off with three entries. If you’re a console gamer, you NEED to check out OverClocked Remix. Therein you will find over 3GB of MP3 remixes of all your favorite game theme tunes, dating back to good old 8-bit NES titles to current releases, and they ALL rock. (They DO actually screen their entries by a panel of judges. :-P ) Uh, just do them a favor, and don’t download the entire site in one night like I did and force them to pay for costly bandwidth overages. *irk* Then there is the Fantastically Adequate Hamster Republic... uh... you’ll just have to check that one out for yourself. Google was on the template I used for this blog by default, but I decided to leave it anyways. If you are using another search engine, you should desist and immediately switch to Google. I’ll spare you from me going off on a detailed explanation on why you should do so. Just trust me and at least give Google a try. You can come back and thank me later. ;-)

COMMENTARY - Blogs are dumb

Blogs are dumb. For starters, what's with the name "blog"? Was "weblog" too long with the whole two extra letters? And if so, why not call it a "webl"? Okay, I suppose if you HAD to shorten "weblog" because you have some sort of aversion to words with two or more syllables, "blog" does sound better than "webl", but I still find the entire premise of abbreviating the word in the first place ridiculous. My other complaint about blogs is, who really cares what you have to say anyway? It's like a discussion board, minus the discussion. Most people probably stumble across your blog by mistake, spend about two minutes reading it out of nothing more than curiosity, and then most likely decide you're boring or an idiot, or possibly even both, and since it's a blog and not a discussion forum, they silently move on, leaving you to your delusion that people actually find your thoughts uplifting, enlightening, or entertaining in some fashion. This is why I find blogs ludicrous, and believe that all who operate such are fixed on some fallacy of their own self importance. What's that? Why do I have my own blog then? Shut up.