Goddammit

Seriously, my heart just fucking broke.

Facebook zombie mastication

It’s not only a great song title, but also what happens when half of your friends tag you in a generic Facebook questionnaire and you, not wanting to become the black sheep – and desperately wanting to take a break from writing your short story – join in on feasting upon each other’s deep, dark secrets.

“Rules: Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it’s because I want to know more about you.”

I somehow doubt it. Anyway, without further ado:

1. The short story in question is a ghost/horror story, and it’s creeping me out as I write it. I’ll probably be up all night, not because I’m that talented of a writer, but because it’s due by noon Tuesday and I’m about halfway done. Once it’s finished, I’ll probably post it on here for you to read. Actually, just go ahead and read everything that’s on here already. Please. For the love of god, I need braaaiii- I mean, feeeeedbaaack…
2. The first album I ever purchased for myself was the Spice Girls’ debut, because that’s what all the cool kids were doing. Chumbawumba’s Tubthumpin’ shortly followed suit.
3. I kick myself whenever I remember the now-embarrassing things I did as a little kid. Oh, well. Live and learn. To never buy Spice Girls albums, I mean. And to never agree to play the lead role in your first-grade production of Bambi.
4. I’m slightly obsessive-compulsive. When I’m in control of the television remote, the volume is either a multiple of five, or two of the same number (i.e. 11, 22, 33, etc.). Where I put what in my pockets is another big one. It’s a system best left unfucked with. Oh, and I used to organize everything in my room – and I mean everything – at right angles. That’s another childhood thing.
5. I often envision what it would be like to have shootouts in large buildings – not with real guns, of course, just paintball or something. I tried using a map of my high school to virtually recreate it in Unreal Tournament. Only recently have friends pointed out how extremely inappropriate that was.
6. The first band I ever called a true favourite was System of a Down. I lost interest shortly following Steal This Album!, but their first two albums still have a place in my heart. I’m currently in a polygamous relationship with Tool and Meshuggah. The sex is both mysterious and brutal.
7. Six months later, I’m still not over my last actual relationship. Its final weeks were both mysterious and brutal. I’ve never wished anyone dead, but some people simply do not value their own lives, or the lives of others.
8. On that note, I’m a really sensitive, emotional person, which has its ups and downs. I have a strong personal code of ethics which I don’t exactly enforce on others, but I feel that tolerance, patience, nonviolence, humility, honesty, and compassion, to name but a few, are grooves that we can all rock to.
9. My high school ambition (aside from staging mock shootouts, of course) was to become a cartoonist. I still doodle quite frequently.
10. Cartoons are one of my favourite artistic mediums, following music and literature. I can’t imagine ever being too old to enjoy them. I’ll watch just about anything, from Family Guy to The Powerpuff Girls (don’t laugh; anything with Genndy Tartakovsky‘s funny name on it is pure gold) and far beyond. I really wish I was more into comic books and graphic novels, though.
11. I’m a night owl – not so much anymore, but in my last year or two of high school, and the two years following that, I was practically nocturnal. As Trent of Daria fame once said, “The night holds the key.” The longest I’ve ever stayed awake for is three days, the third day of which I almost passed out stepping off a bus.
12. I drink alcohol (mostly beer, Rickard’s and Keith’s) and smoke the odd cigarette, cancerous or otherwise, but that’s about it. Those are probably the lesser of evils compared to some of the food I find myself eating. I recently posted the recipe for my Super Bowl chili experiment. Check it out.
13. I still bite my nails from time to time. It’s gross, I know. On a somewhat related note, I hate my teeth and jaw. I hate them so much. Now let’s never speak of them again.
14. I have an inch-long stitch on my right index finger. When I was very young, I dropped a large plate – this counts towards embarrassing childhood memories, mind you – and, from what my parents tell me, ended up with quite a shard of glass embedded in my finger. I’ve never broken any bones, however.
15. I’m able to find men attractive – well, handsome would be the more appropriate term – although I’m as straight as the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. Examples include Zach Braff, Paul Banks of Interpol, Sam Fisher of Third Echelon, and Han Solo.
16. I don’t know much about science at all, let alone quantum physics, but I’ve followed the progress of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider very closely. I find it very intriguing, for some reason. Hopefully they’ll have it back online and destroying the universe in no time.
17. It is my firm belief that Half-Life 2 stands alone as the greatest achievement in the history of video games. Few can compare, and Valve is also responsible for most of those. That being said, I’m a bit of a PC elitist. Consoles are well and good, but not as earth-shattering as the fanboys make them out to be.
18. I often feel very lacking in time, as do most students, I’m sure. There simply aren’t enough hours in a day to accomplish everything I’d like to.
19. Travelling is one thing I definitely haven’t done enough of. I’ve lived in every province in Canada, excluding the territories, but I’ve only ever been out of the country once – this past summer, I went to San Francisco for a week, which was incredible, minus the aftermath (see #7). My travel wish list includes Europe – England, specifically; Dubai, and the rest of California.
20. I often find myself down in the dumps with many worldly concerns, things completely beyond my control. Recent local events are a prime example. Another common theme is any widely-accepted way of thinking or system of doing things that I find completely absurd. I had a really hard time deciding to go to college because all I could think about was the inanity of spending two years and thousands of dollars earning a flashy piece of paper that claims I have an education. I still believe that, to some degree. No pun intended.
21. My two favourite authors are Douglas Coupland and Kurt Vonnegut, may he rest in peace. Very few writers have ever spoken to me like they have. Of their many excellent works, I recommend Generation X (absolutely essential) and Hocus Pocus, respectively.
22. It’s currently 2:22 am. No shit. I really need to wrap this up so I can finish that story.
23. Although I wasn’t as interested in them then as I am now, I remember hearing about the disbandment of the Matthew Good Band and feeling really sad. To this day, I’m not sure why.
24. Frisbee is what I like to refer to as my “Zen activity”. Before I moved away for school, my friends and I, with nothing better to do in a small town, would spend hours at a Tim Horton’s located next to a grocery store. Past 9:00 pm on any given night, the entire grocery store parking lot would be empty, so one night I brought a frisbee to coffee, and the rest is history. Nothing calms and centers me quite like tossing the disc for a couple of hours.
25. Speaking of my friends, I love them. As Jaime and others, I’m sure, have remarked in their own lists, my friends are my family. I’m not just talking about the guys – you know who you are, girls included – but the fine folks I’ve met since moving here and starting college as well. I love and respect all of you dearly, and I’m very fortunate to have you.

Single tear.

On love and relationships

This is great, I know exactly what this means.

This is great, I know exactly what this means.

Happy Chinese New Year… ?

The Oregon Trail

A nostalgia thread on /b/ reminded me of a game I’ve always heard a lot about from other people’s childhoods, but never played myself: The Oregon Trail. I do recall playing its Yukon-based successor and failing quite miserably, but with age comes experience, so I decided that it might be fun to check out Oregon and then either get bored of it, or succumb to dysentery. So, without further ado…

In keeping with the game’s realism, I decided that it was more plausible to have Kevin, CJ, Evan, Mike and Pat kill a banker and assume his identity, because that’s definitely something we would do. This starting profession didn’t grant us any skill bonuses (e.g. medicine, wagon repair, tying dames to railroad tracks) nor score multipliers (this isn’t an arcade machine, it’s my laptop, and I’m going to feel awesome when we win regardless) but $1,600 goes a long way… in 1848.

Matt (does that really sound like an authentic 1848 name?) outlined for us the necessary purchases, which amounted to a mere $550, but personally, I was ready to grab one of those rifles from the top shelf and shoot Matt in the fucking face. I mean, we already got the banker; one more death on our hands isn’t going to matter. We’re going out of town anyway.

“April 1, 1848: You started down the trail with 6 oxen, 10 sets of clothing, 400 bullets, 3 wagon wheels, 3 wagon axles, 3 wagon tongues, 1000 pounds of food, and $1,050.00.”

“Wagon tongues”? Sounds sexual.

Things were pretty chill in Independence, Missouri (and also kind of racist; everyone kept referring to Natives as “Indians”) so our party set out at “A strenuous pace”, encountering our first obstacle – the Kansas City River Crossing – on April 5. Can you believe ferries only cost $5.00 back then? Problem solved.

“April 7, 1848: Mike was bitten by a snake.”

Of course he was. I decided to give the party a day of rest, followed by a day of hunting so that Mike could enact his revenge on that bastard snake. Seven bullets later, we returned to the wagon with 200 pounds of food and continued on our way until we reached the Big Blue River Crossing on April 10.

Four feet? No problem. Let us ford, shall we?

What?! Are you kidding me?! You’d think that between murdering bank employees and deciding to travel cross-country with a bunch of dudes and animals, Evan would have taken a swimming lesson. But I guess four fucking feet is too much to ask.

Really? I was just going to pour out a jug of moonshine, but whatever. If mourning the late Evan Waterwings gets me some hot bare-ankle action from those bitches, I will cry my eyes dry. Postmortem, the remaining and less sucky party members decided to grieve constructively by slaughtering roughly 1,500 pounds of plains animals, 200 of which was kept for food, and two days later we found ourselves in Fort Kearney.

You know, the fact that these little encounters are written in pink text is suitable, because apparently I chose a bunch of pussies to travel with. No matter, though. Pat’s injury did little to hinder our progress for the next few days, as we passed Chimney Rock (phallic) and arrived at Fort Laramie (cigarettes, also phallic).

Further hunting proved successful (pointing and clicking on the animals you want to die isn’t that hard) but bad luck continued to haunt the party:

Rather than continue to mock my companions for their misfortunes, I started to fear for my own health and safety, wondering when God himself was going to strike me down for daring to cross His country. Clearly, the pace of our journey was taking its toll, so I decided to retire from “strenuous” to “steady”, and gave the party three days’ rest at Independence Rock.

The next leg of our journey saw us entering the desert, which was fairly uneventful compared to what the trip had been like up until that point. CJ fell ill with typhoid fever on May 30. We also traded four sets of clothing for 200 pounds of food at South Pass, allowing us skip visiting a nearby fort and instead take a shortcut to the Green River Crossing. Not wanting to risk anyone else drowning in their own stupidity, I shelled out another five bucks for a ferry.

So, July 4? An ox died. July 5? Not only did we lose the trail, whatever that means, but CJ broke his fucking leg. My earlier prediction of boredom was starting to come true, as The Oregon Trail quickly decomposed into this:

1. Massacre wildlife; travel.
2. Receive comeuppance in the form of snakes, disease or physical exertion; travel.
3. Rest and chat with local dumbasses; travel.

Goodnight, sweet prince. Let’s just cut to the chase:

• Gave a [Native] guide three sets of clothing in exchange for his help in crossing a river. The wagon capsized anyway, but no one was harmed, and no supplies lost.
• Mike was bitten by a snake. Again. And then he contracted cholera.
• Between the Blue Mountains (September 3) and The Dalles (September 29) we took the wrong trail, lost the trail, or found the trail impassable almost every other day. Oh, and Mike got dysentery.
• On October 2, Mike got lost. I couldn’t make this up if I tried.

And then, yeah, we finally reached the fucking Oregon or whatever, and my score was penalized for arriving with not five, but three party members, all in poor health. Y’think?! Maybe if I had had more say in choosing my traveling companions beyond suggesting their names – for example, asking “Can you fucking swim?” or “Would you find it difficult to ride a wagon for twelve hours a day and avoid snakes or broken bones?” – then this trail might have been a happier one, but no.

Of course, maybe Oregon was ultimately designed to provoke and frustrate, to give modern society a brief but bitter taste of the real frustrations suffered by brave American travelers during the 19th century. Perhaps the game should serve as a reminder that, thanks to the technological achievements of western society, the journey to find a nice parcel of land to settle on and raise a family is now no more arduous than the quest for knowledge.

Now let’s go surf the Internet.