Why I Hate the MTA (Part 3)

Less than two hours ago I left my house for an evening of celebration as a good friend turns 21 (six minutes ago. Happy Birthday L!). She decided to celebrate in Manhattan, with pool and a bar later on. There was a restauraunt involved too, but I had a prior obligation for that time.

I left my house at 10:09, aiming to meet with a friend and catch the 10:30 ferry. I arrived at the bus stop at 10:16, all the while looking through the treeline in my way to watch for passing buses. None passed, despite being a minute late. The next scheduled bus is at 10:49, thus pushing me back to the 11:00 boat.

My friend waiting at the terminal was kind enough to stay until this boat instead.

44 minutes passed. The bus arrived at 11:00 on the dot, as the boat is leaving. I got on anyway, assuming that I might catch the 11:30 ferry instead. I told my friend to go on without me, I didn't want to hold them up for a full hour because I'm running late.

While on the bus, I immediately noticed that the driver was busy talking to a friend of his, a middle aged woman that can't seem to shut up. Judging from the way he drove, he was caught up talking to her and now had to make up for lost time.

I arrived at the terminal at 11:06. Quite a bang-up job from the talkative driver that couldn't understand punctuality and urgency. The next boat was, in fact, at midnight. Rather than waiting, and arriving at the pool hall at 1AM, I called, wished L my best, and walked up the bus ramp for the next ride towards my house.

I was in luck, a bus was parked in it's loading zone. As I walk to the half full unscheduled bus, the driver pulls away. I waited another 20 minutes in the cold. The next one showed right on time, at 11:30. Apparently the only way to catch a bus on time (sometimes) is to catch them at the first stop.

The rest of the trip was quiet. I got off the bus at 11:40, I got in at 11:47.

Total time spent out: 99 minutes.

Total time spent in buses: 16 minutes.

Total time spent in transit on foot: 14 minutes.

Total time spent waiting: 53 minutes.

Total time unaccounted for: 16 minutes.

From this breakdown I can ascertain that the average trip time for a (literally) five minute ride is roughly an hour, and more importantly, that the MTA LITERALLY stole 16 minutes of my life while it was eating the other 83 with nothingness.

Fuck you, MTA.

I'M GOING TO RIP YOUR ARM OFF AND STUFF IT UP YOUR ASS...

...after you've been in an oven for five hours and your flesh has been devoured by a half dozen predators to your kind. Poor turkey being put away for storage.

It's Thanksgiving, and I am finally at my house for the first time in three years for the holiday. It's strange to be back, but Thanksgiving is one of the few holidays I enjoy. I don't enjoy it because of the parades (don't watch 'em), or the specials (March of the Wooden Soldiers never really interested me, but even that was canceled this year for football), or even the food (which is awesome for the first 20 minutes). Thanksgiving is one of the rare times my family acts civil with one another, and for this I couldn't be more grateful.

I don't much care that it celebrates when European settlers took advantage of native peoples, as they did in nearly every place they visited. I don't care that it is a day of mass genocide for turkeys, especially since they are specifically raised for this purpose and can no longer live in the wild on their own. I don't care about the looming destruction and economic stroke that will ensue tomorrow. All that matters to me is that my family finally worked like one that functions. I spent the day with my loved ones, and they acted like ones I should love. That's something worth celebrating.

That's what I'm thankful for. That's all for today. Happy Thanksgiving.

Sex vs Cloning

Sexual reproduction is a staple of the human condition. It's an amazing solution to many of life's problems, the cause for even more, and sometimes just something to do depending on the people you ask. It's the way to spread STDs, including Herpes, HIV, and Pregnancy. This last one is sometimes useful, but far more often a 9 month punishment for both parties involved (or perhaps just one, if the father was a scumbag or dies).

For those who seek pregnancy, perhaps cloning is a better alternative. You know almost exactly what the child will be like straight from the bat, and while playing with genetics, you can custom engineer your child to be everything you want. A left-handed, orange-eyed, flat-footed boy with a large frame? Clone the author and tweak the brown down from his eyes, there you have it!

Should cloning ever become fully accepted by society, it would not replace sexual reproduction. It is significantly more fun, and there's an air of mystery about what the child will be. You can never tell if the child will come out healthy, or in some cases, who the father will be. There's the widely romanticized aspect of it. Valentine's Day was completely built around it, and Halloween is rapidly moving closer to a second glory day for sex too.

That said, cloning takes away the excitement in exchange for reliability. You know EXACTLY what the child will come out as, and that it will be healthy (as long as you get it from a legal practitioner. Those back-alley cloning devices have a long history of mutations. Extra thumbs and webbed feet, the works). This isn't to say that romantic images of a man, a woman, and a geneticist can't exist, or that they shouldn't. This is only saying that the world has not yet taken it's first step towards complete asexuality. Some have embraced it, good friends of mine identify with no popular sexuality, and just love everyone without a thought of genitals. Many will fear it, I'm sure Westboro Baptist Church will protest it, like they do soldiers' funerals. Regardless of one's stance, it will provide an interesting alternative.

This in mind, it must be stated how well this will boost our economy, especially in the event of universal health care. The sales on latex, lambskin, petroleum jellies, and a number of other related objects will skyrocket while pregnancy tests, chloroform, and abortions will drop dramatically. Trojan stocks will replace Microsoft, Coca-Cola, and GameStop (this time of year) as the shares to own.

Really, the short end of the stick comes to the poor GYNOs who lose out on the price of birth and pregnancy, unless they are able to adapt to the changing world. All dates will be predetermined, and all expecting parents will be ready sooner.

Licenses would be required to get a baby implanted, and more importantly, renewed to keep the child. Actually, this should already exist, as it would reduce the costs of welfare, housing, and most other issues relating to the lack of population control.

Did I believe in the devout ways of the religion I was converted to for vanity's sake at the age of 7, I'd be more old fashioned in my methods. No matter what pro-cloning advocates will push for, I'll stay steadfast in the old ways. It's okay for a baby to happen without implanting a hand-grown fetus of myself, even if the world will miss out on twice the greatness over a longer period of time. It's fine to run the risk of a child coming out with heart defects, blindness, and severe autism if it means that I can keep those damned scientists from thriving and killing religion.

...or, perhaps, it's just because religious nuts love sex. Ask the clergy.

I'm not saying cloning is a viable option, or a realistic one. I'm saying that something must be done to fix these problems. Two of myself would think much more abundantly than just one, I see no way that we couldn't solve our issues this way.

Rain Delays, but substitute "rain" for "sleep."

I apologize for not posting last night, I came in and fell asleep relatively quickly. Today probably won't be too much better, though there's a chance I won't be completely wiped out from fatigue when I get in. If this is the case, then I'll post something special. If not, it will have to wait for tomorrow.

I have to be on a boat in an hour, which means I have to leave in less than a half hour. Usually these posts take me between fifteen minutes and an hour and a half, I will not have time to even rush out a half assed filler piece for the sake of upkeep.

Merry Un-Birthday and/or Happy Birthday to all.

Not about to see your light...

I used to sing in a few bands when I was younger. Nothing big or special, but it was fun. One was semi-serious, and at the same time more fun than the previous attempts. That was in high school, when I still had time to sing/practice/whatever. I haven't had time to sing seriously since, and my voice has changed since. It's not that I haven't been singing (I sing constantly at work, waiting for the bus, when playing Rock Band, most other places), but I haven't been singing with a band.

Yesterday I worked sound for Live Band Karaoke at my school, and eventually got to perform. It's been so long that I've lost stage presence, and my voice started to give after a short period of time. It made me realize how much I miss being in a band, and how much I need to practice if I'm going to keep that tone of voice.

I'm naturally on the line between baritone and tenor, but my range goes down to high bass when I need it to. I'm more naturally inclined to sing something like Stone Sour or Godsmack over many of the bands I force myself into (my favorites are Coheed & Cambria and Rise Against right now, alto and tenor respectively). I'm used to pushing into that range now, it's not a big deal.

I didn't do something within my normal comfort zone though, I went for something fun. I screamed like I used to, singing "Mother" from Glenn Danzig. It was great for the first verse, and most of the first chorus. Then my voice cracked when I pushed my break with higher screams than was natural. I kept it for the most part later in the song, but it wasn't the same.

This means I need to scream with my full throat more often, and also that I need to find time for a band. Probably after I'm finally finished with college. It will be just like old times, but new.

Consciousness: LIVE AND STREAMING!

I should've started typing this earlier, when things were still fresh in my mind and I was awake enough to form coherent sentences. Too late now, I suppose.

There wasn't too much that sparked writing today, or at least not much that really fits into what I'd write here. I could go on a fanboy tangent about the music to a certain game involving foliage and cadavers, and how it's more awesome than most other games and everything on the radio, but that would be a waste of a post.

Not that posts can really be wasted, as they're an infinitely renewable resource for me. I could type about anything and make it fit in here, technically. Doesn't mean it'd be good, or even worth the time it took to type it, but it's not really a waste of a post.

Ugh, heartburn. Do yourselves a favor and don't destroy your stomach/esophagus with caffeine and energy drinks, even if it's just a weekend binge. You will regret it for the rest of your life. Eventually it'll get to the point where drinking water to dilute it will only make it splash higher, and you're stuck with: Milk (yum), Tums/Rolaids/Calcium pills (not so yum, depending on flavor), or Prevacid (just as bad as the stomach acid). Learn these words well.

I hate one word responses in messages, just like I'd hate "k" in texts if my phone could do that sort of fancy thing. If I wanted to talk to a wall, I'd probably talk to a chain link fence instead. Better for the eyes, and much better at responding than "k" or "fine."

Freaks is a lame movie, or at least the parts I saw. It has a legendary sequence of lines, but really it doesn't seem like it it should be praised as much as it has. The same is true for There Will Be Blood (though honestly I like that more as time goes on) and Napoleon Dynamite (which I hate more as time goes on, when I didn't much like that ass clinging turd of a film to begin with).

Some people look better with hats, dresses, and button down shirts. Probably not all at once (or maybe, depending who you are), but in various situations. I was talking to a friend earlier who said she needed more dresses, specifically for a trip to Greece. Said person seems like a dress might actually fit her personality better, as she's light-hearted and airy. A coworker of mine looks almost like a different person without his hat, but that might be just feature recognition with an artificial feature. I like button down shirts, but not all the time.

This stream wasn't as interesting as it would've been if I started an hour earlier, or at least I don't think it is. I want to listen to something. Maybe read a bit.

Ubercon (less brief)

Every year I go to Ubercon, I find something awesome and worth bringing home with me. This year I played more new games than ever previously, many brand new to me. So now I'm going to review these games. If you don't like this, and want me to go back to my usual tone of writing, then piss off for now and come back tomorrow. My full roster of games played now follows, with previously unplayed games marked:

Martian Fluxx*
Uber-Fluxx
Monty Python Fluxx*
Are You a Werewolf?
Disney Apples to Apples*
Plants vs Zombies*
Smash Bros. Brawl
Wii Bowling
Revolution!*
The Tee-Shirt Game*
DJ Hero*
Rock Band: Beatles*
Three Dragon Ante*
We Didn't Playtest this Game at All*
We Didn't Playtest this Either*
Win Loose Banana*
Zuma's Revenge*

I'm fairly certain I'm forgetting others too, but this is most of what occupied my time at this convention. Besides the Fluxx's (which really shouldn't be explained without a deck of cards handy), most of these games were either new or revisions of games I've already played or own.

Therefore, I will not be discussing Tee-Shirt Game (Apples to Apples with pictures), Rock Band: Beatles, Zuma's Revenge, Brawl, Are You a Werewolf?, or Wii Bowling. If you're disappointed or don't know these games, I might write about them down the line. The Looney Labs games (Fluxx and Werewolf) will probably each receive commentary down the line eventually anyway. That said, this was Ubercon for me.

Apples to Apples is a fantastic word game that plays on senses of humor and reality, matching nouns with adjectives. That said, Disney Apples to Apples is an atrocious, steaming brown lump on the unspoiled lawn that was AtA's legacy. I know it's geared to a younger audience. The audience I had played it literally, which didn't seem in the spirit of the game. More importantly, the game itself seemed too much like a marketing gimmick, rather than a spin-off game that needed to be made (unlike RB:Beatles and Monty Python Fluxx, which are awesome for existing). Disney Apples to Apples sucked the humor out of the game and replaced it with Hannah Montana, who is the new Hitler card. I stayed for the whole game in hopes of improvement. I was disappointed.

Plants vs Zombies is a computer game made by one of Ubercon's sponsors, Popcap Games. They make lots of games that play like crack, and bring down GPA's and productivity in businesses. PvZ is no exception, loaded now on the main computer in the office I work through. It's a simple defense strategy game in which you protect your house from the zombie apocalypse with the help of your friend "Crazy Dave" using mutant plants. If you aren't immediately interested, you might be a Cylon. Since coming back from the convention, I've beaten this game 1.5 times, and am tearing through the two dozen minigames. I expect to be able to work again in a few weeks' time.

Revolution is a board game that plays like a gambling addiction. Rather than rolling dice to move pieces, you place bets and bids on various people around a city. If you win these people, you get more control over the city. When the revolution is over, the person with the most control wins. It took five minutes to learn, and it was worth the hour of game play. It probably isn't for everyone, but I enjoyed it.

DJ Hero is a game I should hate. I should loathe it with all my being, as it symbolizes a franchise that should have died when Rock Band came out and nailed it to a tree. DJ Hero is a game that shouldn't ever be considered playable or fun. I don't know why I love it so much. The controls are overly complicated, yet dramatically simplified from that of an actual turntable scratch setup. The mixes are pretty awesome, and I'd be a liar if I said there weren't a few I want on disk. The harder difficulties are actually VERY challenging, and work more senses than any other Hero simulation game so far. I shouldn't like it on principle, but I do. Fuck you, Activision.

Three Dragon Ante, like any other gambling card game, is reasonably simple and addictive in base. Since it's rooted in D&D, it's more complicated than it should be. It's enjoyable, and relatively cheap compared to most D&D paraphenalia, but it's really a matter of personal opinion as to if it's worth getting. Play it once for yourself. I don't think I'd buy it.

We Didn't Playtest [These Goddamn Games] are amazing for the stoner/internet/college demographic. They're nonsense, in the form of 100+ cards when meshed together. They make little to no sense, sometimes end within 20 seconds of dealing out the opening hand, and have a tendency to make people's heads hurt when they lose the ability to reference themselves, others, or the cards verbally. It's amazing for the amount of random [something] that's been packed into the game, but this makes it impossible to play competitively. There can be no strategy. There is only luck, Dragons, Ninjas, Secret Attack Kittens, and Voting. I don't know if I should love this game for how fun it is (probably) or despise it for how terribly designed it is (probably not).

It should be said that I did not spend the entire convention playing games, though that's obviously the focus of this particular event. Most of the other things were far less interesting, or already discussed earlier this week. That's not what anyone really cares about though when reading about a gaming convention. You don't care about the amazing, two foot high food. You don't care about the lovely hotel rooms with TV's nicer than mine. You don't care about the trip to Dairy Queen and Burger King (who get hitched and produce a sushi place somehow) on the last night of the event, though you'll probably read about that sometime this month. This weekend was about the games, and that's what I'm giving you.

So play them. Especially PvZ. That's fucking badass.

Ubercon (in brief)

Ubercon was fucking fantastic. While I have never been to a bad Ubercon, this year somehow seemed to make all the others I've been to previously seem less fun. It wasn't that the games were better (many were the same as previous), or that the people were different (some were, but many weren't), or that I did better in the games I played (lost miserably in most of the ones I've never played, and didn't do as well as I normally do for the ones I have played). Ubercon is not really a convention, it's an annual bonding session that builds a community of people who love to play games.

I was able to play many games I've never experienced before (including my new crack, Plants Vs Zombies. I love you, Pop Cap Games), for free(*), and made several new friends. These things are more valuable to me than most people would realize, but that's for another post.

The other wonderful perk this year was the hotel. The Holiday Inn had Harold's New York Deli attached, which is renowned for portions bigger than a child's body at prices that are very fair when considering the amount of food you get. One day my party decided to order pancakes. Three manhole-cover sized pancakes show up five minutes later. We end up calling in some friends (bringing the group to six) to finish off two of the three. The third was brought home and to the office I work in to share with my coworkers. It was the coolest thing ever.

This is your brief. Part 2 comes tomorrow.

Why I Hate the MTA (Part 2)

I'm waiting at an S44 bus stop, one of my usual stops. All commuters have a handful of stops they spend more time waiting at than they do on the bus they're waiting for. A well built man in an MTA coat comes to the stop, looks at the schedule, and groans. We talk for the duration of our wait.

Apparently this man works for a main dispatch in Queens or Bronx, despite living on Staten Island. He used to work locally, but the money moved and he was willing to tack on a few hours in travel time. He tells me that the bus run we were waiting for was probably removed in secrecy, as the MTA has been looking for ways to cut corners. Any schedule run that does not have a minimum average capacity is slowly being phased out, despite the schedule's statements otherwise.

This is distressing to me. It means that certain hours immediately after the morning rush and late at night will have little to no service, unless there's an exception to this for late night buses by way of compassion. Two months from now I will understand that compassion is absent from this corporation.

After 40 minutes of waiting, we finally get on the bus and go our own ways. Our communal misery binds us in the time it's there, building a community around our hate for the very company that we each have our own individual stakes in. While mine was only to get to work (now nearly an hour late) and the $20 I put down on the MetroCard that sits in my pocket like a lead weight, his was actually his livelyhood. Much in the same way that one does not become an IRS agent because they love money or the government or chasing after people, he's in it because he has no choice.

In the most simple way possible, the MTA of New York is monopolizing my city. It isn't just about transit anymore, it's about time. I can't walk to work in the hour it sometimes takes to wait for a bus, but that hour of my pay is still gone none the less. It eats and eats but is never full, and becomes a bloated mess of fat and waste. It becomes something that no one ever wants to get involved with, but they have no choice.

RANDOM WON'T STOP PLAYING GOO GOO DOLLS.

In the late 90's and early 00's, the Goo Goo Dolls were on top of the world. They had one album that successively scored number one singles for a full four years. Dizzy Up the Girl is a fantastic album, and it earned them their spot. Normally this would lead to an album's constant play killing the band, and turning their albums into Frisbees. Not the case with these guys. Thanks for not fucking your own music up for me. Windows Media Player seems stuck on them, but that's fine with me tonight.

Today I was at a wedding and I realized that architecture is more important than what a location houses. Churches that feel narrow but overwhelming play more heavily on Christian guilt (specifically Catholicism, but it's all over the place, really). This is not how to lead sheep, shepards. You want them to feel welcome and invited.

This church was actually much more modern, and very open. It was structured like an ampitheater with a single level. The altar was centered with space behind, making the audience feel like they were equals with the altar. This is a nice change from the jumbo-claustraphobia rooms.

My feelings on religion are difficult to put into words, and I'm too tired to really place them to print and do any justice. Last night's post was somewhat halfassed and unedited, I don't want to do that two nights in a row.

Instead, I'm enjoying "Sympathy," wishing it was written in a tuning I'm likely to leave a guitar in.

Tomorrow night you get one of the following: Ubercon, MTA #2(now with logic!), or a requested post from months ago. The last one will be fun, but time consuming to write. We'll find out tomorrow I suppose, won't we?

Oh, "Acoustic #3" is on. Good night.

Why I Hate the MTA (Part 1)

New York has a wonderful mass transit system, one that ranks above most other cities (besides London and San Francisco, I'm told). We have an intricate network of subways that link the city together, a web of buses that grid the pavement, and boats. Boats are awesome, as we're an island-city. If we were more fancy and pompous, we'd be an archipelago like Hawaii and Japan.

That said, I can't stand the Metro Transit Authority of New York. The MTA is notorious for disrupting schedules, moving off the designated times, and placing buses at terrible intervals after dark. This is mostly a problem for Staten Island, as we get the short ends of all sticks, as we rely solely on buses.

"Oh, but Andrew, you're wrong. There's a train too."

That train is worth half a steaming pile of animal droppings. It does not travel along any vital locations of this island, only caters to residents on the Eastern coast, and has a schedule worth all the ducks in the Sarah desert. It only qualifies enough to be thought of because it's mostly free if you avoid the last stop (a residential township) and the first stop (the only direct way into Manhattan). This train is less useful than a mucus encrusted Kleenex.

The buses, on the other hand, are a whole other beast. It's important to note that I have semi-environmentalist tendencies. One such trait is that I will use mass transit in almost every situation when possible. This becomes impossible after 10 PM, as many buses will run hourly at this time or have no night hours at all. One such bus is the S62, which runs along Victory Blvd.

Last night a cluster of my friends and I went to a restaurant/diner (same one referenced in the Yankee's Suckfest) and finished up after midnight. This normally isn't an issue, but no one in this particular group drove. The bus I would've used to get home stopped running fifteen minutes prior, and the only bus in the area still in operation was the aforementioned S62. This bus had only passed three minutes prior, and the next scheduled run was in 57 minutes. One goddamn hour.

We collectively decided that it would be better to walk the length of Victory Blvd. rather than wait for the bus in the cold. For any readers not from this area of NYC, this is a very long street with many hills. Normally they don't seem so bad, but normally one is in a motorized vehicle. The six of us marched on, passing something like two hours' worth of scenery. As we neared our destination, the bus finally passed. One friend commented about it's worth, and I pointed out that we would have paid $2.25 after waiting an hour to save five minutes. The sense of triumph thickened for me.

At this point, I'm still recovering from the night. It's not that I'm unable to walk two miles in the cold, it's that I haven't in a long time. Had I expected it, or had it been earlier in the day, I would've been fine. When you're working on the fumes of zombiehood, however, two miles feels closer to five.

Maybe I'm bitter because this happened to me. Maybe I'm an instigator because the MTA deserves to get ripped into until they provide better service at a lower price (as they did five years ago). Maybe I'm just sad that something that should be so influential could turn out to be such a menace to the people that keep it alive. I'm too tired to make sense. I'm going to fucking bed. I'll post more of this when I'm conscious.

Avoiding Absence

This weekend (and the week so far) have been rather hectic, and I have not had time to post to this page. I apologize for the first of likely many times. In substitute, I offer something I wrote recently for class. It was written in about a half hour, so I'll pretend that half hour was devoted to this page. Enjoy. Entitled "Staten Island."

----------------------

Staten Island is the quilt warming the legs of New York City, made up of unique patches that grow more uniform the lower you look. On the top you find the grays and browns of midtown Manhattan and Harlem, mixing with the greens of forestry and the racial rainbow of the rest of the world. The yellow of the Ferry serves as the final extension to keep it hanging on to Manhattan’s lap.

As your eyes move down the quilt you find more green, less brown, and slowly realize the colors have less variance.

At the center there’s a gray patch, of both industry and blight. This patch was spray painted green, but the gray will never disappear in your lifetime. The superficial attempt at beauty is shunted into obscurity by the overwhelming cancer in the air, a last remnant of the Old New York.

At the bottom the colors are bleached and muted, as the color of free thought and action is drowned out by the immigrants that fled Brooklyn via the Guinea Gangplank for fear of change in demography and the failure to adapt. These patches should be snipped off, but were tacked on too near completion. Now the oranges and eggshell whites of blown out, taped up Guidos and silicone breasted bottle blondes with botched botox are weathering the whole quilt, like the effects of prolonged exposure to the sun, except the sun isn’t shining here.

Staten Island, contrary to popular belief, is not forgotten. It’s widely ignored. This is why.

Why I hate the Yankees.

I hate sport fans that don't realize that they themselves are not on the team. "WE" didn't win. The Yankees did. A sizable chunk of them don't care about New York. They care about their paychecks. Get over it.

To be fair, it's not fans of all sports, or even all fans of baseball. The truth is that I just really hate Yankee fans. I hate that so many of them are ready to fight tooth and nail to defend the honor of a group of grown men who get paid millions of dollars to play a game. I don't care what city they represent, the representations are not accurate. If they were, the mid-west would do much better, and Japan would be a force of nature.

No, I hate Yankee fans because they're angry about the game they "love." They're mean spirited and violent. I was at a diner when they won the World Series almost an hour ago. Two M80's went off in the parking lot because some drunken asshole got too trigger happy over the team that probably represents his small penis' victory. The folks I was with were terrified, we felt the rumble through the wall and the flash shone through the window. Do explosions represent all that's great about a man hitting a ball with a fancy stick?

These are the same people that whenever they hear the name "Mets" go into an epileptic fit and magically get turret's' syndrome, explaining how the Metropolitans each suck off the biggest black men they can find before each game, so they don't feel insulted when the whole world tells them they suck dick. These are the same people who cannot communicate outside of baseball, even with their loved ones. This builds to the point where baseball metaphors and visits to the home games are all that a relationship is built on. Then they have the audacity to wonder why she cheated.

Fuck the Yankees. I like that something nice happened for New York, I love this city... but The Yankees? What good have they done? Have they housed the homeless? Have they ended the gang wars? Have they defended the country from whatever peril we put ourselves into at any given time?

No. They got paid many times more than the average college degree costs for one season of hitting a fucking ball with a fucking stick.

Fuck 'em, fuck the fans, and fuck whoever thought it'd be a good idea to give these assholes a parade. Do I see parades when my friends come home from Iraq? No. Who's earned it more? Easy answer, if you're not so blinded by the pinstripes. I can't wait to see every front runner and poseur who ran to Model's at midnight to stock up on the goddamn logo at that piece of shit parade, every liar who claimed to follow along the whole time. I'll be the first to admit that I don't give a shit about televised team games, and I'm not running out to get a Yankees hat just because they won a few ball games.

If the fucking Yankees represented New York, we'd all get paid a million dollars to work for five hours a day for 8 months a year. They're nothing.

Congratulations to the fans, congratulations to the team, and congratulations to my beautiful city. Now fuck off.

Ubercon prep filler.

Ubercon is this weekend. If you're in the New York/New Jersey area, you should go. It's amazing. From previous years it can be summed up as 48 straight hours of gaming (all sorts.) There's other stuff too (Harold's Deli, anime screenings, Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog as a singalong, etc.) but the gaming is really what matters.

I'm a geek, and I love it. I know of no other place where I can wake up at 3AM and play a "quick" game of Risk (3ish hours) and jump to Rock Band before my friends wake up. I'm not likely to see most of these games anywhere else, nevermind finding other people that play them. It's fantastic, and you should go. Look at their website (ubercon.com), register, and have fun. Do it.

That said, I should be packing for the weekend. Instead I'm typing to you. I demand you feel the love that pours from these keys. Tonight's not a productive night, even though I got in early from campus. I wasted time watching V (a full hour of my life gone for something that seems too compressed and rushed to be worth following seriously), and my continuing saga of trying to beat StarCraft's single player campaign ate another hour or two (if you play, Protoss 7 without expansion).

This is going to be a shorty tonight. One of the long-planned ones is coming up before the convention. Hopefully no more filler.

Prof. Lifeless

So my posting schedule got a little funky. I was aiming for one a day, but that fell through. Oops. I'll have something substantial tomorrow evening, when I hadn't been occupied all day.

Earlier I had an overhanging cloud of annoyance. When the people I pay money to (indirectly, by the time the school's had it's way with my bank account) don't take a course seriously, how can I be expected to return the favor? The one in question is brand new, and teaches a generic lab course. Normally I'd care minimally about someone's teaching style, everyone's got a unique thing that's all their own. This guy doesn't seem to have one at all.

He'll sit at the front of the class in a ball cap advertising another college he teaches at, half hungover and hardly interested. He'll scribble some equations on the board, put out a sign-in sheet, and look lifeless for the duration of the period. This seems like a fantastic idea to most, but if I'm paying for this class I'd like it to be worth the hundreds of dollars I'm being robbed of.

This said, the professor is a friendly enough man, who seems to care enough about the students to pull them to the side when they've missed many labs (though this might only make his job easier, should they drop the course), and I'm not an ideal student in this class. I show to this class late and leave early, knowing that I can get the work done just as easily at home as I could sitting on a lab stool at a counter disproportionate to the chair. The apparatuses are seldom used, and the measurements can be taken in ten minutes' time. I don't waste his time, and he doesn't waste mine. We have a silent understanding, as long as my name is signed in my handwriting.

I don't remember this guy's name (not that I'd post it anyway, as this might constitute slander/liable, even if it's true), but that might be the best way around this. He will not leave a lasting impression in my mind down the line. He will not have a name there. He will go to the special place in my heart where I keep the undesirables and un-notables of my memory. Limbo for the mental imprints, I suppose: a place to go when you barely exist, in a place where nothing really exists.