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I have returned home, and in my travels I have discovered something startling: crucifixion is delicious.

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Cracked's (yes, the magazine) website had a listing of things that could make people watch TV again. Thought I'd share a few of them:

















and my favorite...

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G

Craig Ferguson...

..is your daddy. Couldn't have said it better myself.

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Typically, I try to shy away from these "motivational" banners. I don't care if it is photoshopped, this brought a smile to my face. Also reminded me of myself as a child.

"I laugh in the face of danger! ...then I run and hide until it goes away."

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Most of you will see a polar bear enjoying a succulent dinner of beach whale. I see a roar of victory:

Polar Bear: 1
Cthulhu: 0

The noble polar bear: drinker of Coke and protector of our realm.

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Another oddity: goats climbing trees. Now, I've seen pictures similar to those before during my casual browsing before, but never thought to look into it. Apparently these Moroccan goats climb trees to eat fruit that the locals use for oil of some sort. According to that never failing pantheon of knowledge (cough), Wikipedia, "Goats are very coordinated and can climb and hold their balance in the most precarious places. Goats are also widely known for their ability to climb trees"

I've seen declarations of "photoshopped!" before in reference to similar pictures. So, for everyone's benefit, there's a video below of these guys displaying their mad skills.

Sparkle City Blogs

A few weeks ago, Steve over at Sparkle City Blogs letting me know that he was profiling my blog. What SCB does is compile all the local bloggers in the Spartanburg area in an attempt to create a sense of creative community. In fact, I'm very surprised this hadn't already been done, bu therein lies the problem with Spartanburg: the very first steps are one of those elusive in-your-face concepts that seem so simple that they must have already been taken when, in fact, the most certainly have not.

Steve's goal seems to be to create the seem sort of sense of community in Spartanburg that his site promotes. Many, many people, so many in fact that it's the official town motto, complain that there's "nothing to do" in Spartanburg. And while that appears to be the truth, half of the problem lies in communicating those things to do.

For some reason, even in the Information Age, details about anything in or around Spartanburg relies heavily on slight word of mouth, small groups, and cliques as opposed to active advertising. For example, a few art galleries opened up last night and sort of had an unofficial connected art party. Sounds like fun, right? Never saw anything about it. The only reason I know about it is because my co-worker new one of the people opening a gallery.

I know so many people who would have loved to go to that if only they had known about it. An old acquaintance of mine is putting togetherthe Spartanburg Music Expo and he's doing everything he can to get a wider word out there. He's contact radio stations, asked me to write something in the Herald Journal, physically posting flyers all over town. You know, old school.

So Steve's aim is to ignite a community to sort of fulfill the initial mission statement of Hub-Bub's intentions. He's trying to start up an independent newspaper, Spartanburg Spark (coughfor which I would love to writecough) to help see that goal through. I'm very much hoping it succeeds.

Last Wednesday, a blog meet-up was held at Interlude downtown. Four of us showed up, but the enthusiasm and collective optimism caught on like the clap. We all want the same thing and we're very excited to take a stab and this very large undertaking. My only worry is that the slow movement might be discouraging to some. I think if we meet, say, every two weeks, to sort of keep an adreneline shot of why we're doing this alive it would help keep spirits high and develop a concrete plan to go about doing this.

As ever, we'll just have to see. Should be interesting.

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"Earth House projects from Erdhaus, Swiss architect and team. Compared to traditional residential houses built on the ground, the aim of building an earth house is another: Not to live under or in the ground, but with it.

The earth house is a flexible construction which can be built according to the wishes of its owners, fulfilling the need for individuality, environmentally friendly construction and energy saving.

Modern earth-house architecture incorporates the latest interior finishing, such as contemporary kitchens, bathrooms and house-control systems."

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A cemetery in Galveston, TX post-Hurricane Ike.

Remember Galveston, aim for the head.

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Every wonder what your dowry would be? How Many Goats? Lets you know.

Dominican nuns will karate chop the faith into you!

Resistance: Fall of Man (Sort of) Review and The First Person Shooter

I purchased Resistance: The Fall of Man this past weekend mainly because it was relatively cheap and I wanted to kill some time. Resistance was a PS3 launch title, and carries the weight as one of the console's titular releases. A console defining FPS (first person shooter) franchise seems to be a prerequisite these days, and Sony sort of siphoned some of the creative energy and fervor from the Call of Duty franchise. With the exception of 4, Call of Duty is a series of FPS games taking place during WW2.

Resistance, as if taking a queue from Harry Turtledove, places the player in a WW-esque setting, except a number of historical oddities prevented WW2 from happening. Czarist Russia shut itself off from the rest of the world. It went dark for a year. Apparently these creatures known as the Chimera took over. They were at first thought to be biological experiments gone wrong, but their advanced technology proves them otherwise. Long story short. It's taken over the East and all of Europe save for a small patch of land in England.

You play as an American solider part of a squad sent to aid the Brits in repelling the ugly bastards back to Hell...or France.

Using the theatre of WW2 intruiged me. I love the concept. The execution, however, leaves much to be desired.

To be honest, I'm not much into FPS games. Most of the games, Halo, especially, are bloated overrated games that get universal praise from non-gamer gamers (ie frat boys, the casual college hall gamer, and the 15 year old) despite the fact that most of them seep in a shared repetitive mediocrity. They all play the same for me. Same game with a different skin.

Don't get me wrong, I played Doom II when I was a kid. But FPS's weren't a dime-a-dozen back then, and I often just played with my friend Luke. This was back when your computer had to call your friend's home. So you had to hope to god that your friend's mother didn't pick up so that the other computer could answer and link the two of you up. It also had a chat system set up, so we also used that as a sort of chat room as well when we were bored of playing.

By and large, FPS games offer little else than haphazardly tossing your character into Integral Story Point A, throwing hundreds of variations on the same villain design with a small selection of weapons in the way of said character to keep him from Integral Story Point B.

This formula remains the same, only the placement of environmental obstacles and baddies change. And few of them tell a solid enough story to encourage you to find out what happens next. Some of these begin strongly enough, but by the climax of the game it descends into massacre after massacre, with the story rewards being so sparse that it hardly deserves completing.

A handful of variations on this formula prove successful, generally in the a third person format. Uncharted: Drake's Fortune and Gears of War come to mind, but both are wisely self-aware. In Uncharted, when your character is once more ambushed in the middle of the story, he audibly sighs and mutters to himself "Shit, not this again." It's a humorous moment that puts player and character in the same shoes. Resistance, despite it's initially promising premise, unfortunately is not among these titles. Not a terrible game, really. The graphics are crisp and the environmental textures remain particularly bold, but the game just runs out of steam after a while.

Certainly worth the weekend rental, but nothing more unless you find it in a bargain bin.

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"Stealing your co-worker's lunch is a downright contemptible act, that is, if it's perpetrated by someone other than you. But, if you've ever had your lunch stolen, you know the the frustration and anger it causes. You know the revenge and ill-will it inspires. And you know that no matter how well you try to hide your lunch bag at the back of the refrigerator, something's gonna be missing when you open it. Well, lament no more. The Anti-Theft Lunch Bag to the rescue . . .

Anti-Theft Lunch Bags are regular sandwich bags that have green splotches printed on both sides. After your sandwich is placed inside, no one will want to touch it."'






http://www.skforlee.com/independent_work/lunch_bag.html

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Why contraceptives are necessary...

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I finally get to sit down, after spilling my coffee all over everything...and this is the first thing I come across.

Caffeine. Now. I need.

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An extraterrestrial tries to blend in with humanity...
They're doing it wrong.

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This, my friends and fiends, is mad skill at work. May take a few of you a few run throughs to see what exactly's going on. No worries.



Also....The "Usefulness" of Bottled Water

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It's good to have goals, I think.