If My Mom Read My Blog She Would Be Ashamed

May 18, 2009 21 Comments read (f)Art

Yesterday was Arts & Crafts day at poetrix618’s place and the craft of the day was collage coasters.

As we flipped through magazines and tossed out more and more twisted and ridiculous ideas, Anne told us she’d had a dream recently where she saw jimhark playing (strip?) poker with a mutual female acquaintance, and that, overcome by rage in the dream, she started beating on this girl, punching her, pulling her hair, and twisting her nipples. When she later told Jim about the dream, his only question was, “What were her nipples like?” I piped in and told Anne she should have said this girl had nipples the size of dinner plates, bologna nipples, nipples larger than the actual boob, just to make Jim sorry he’d asked. We cackled about it for a while like the hens we are and got down to business, by which I mean we made coasters that will make our guests uncomfortable.

amazoni made this one. In case the photo is too blurry, it reads “Snap! Oh no she didn’t”.

After this, she did a statement piece on love among zombies.

As usual, I did something weird and creepy, and then made something even weirder and creepier and inspired by Hitchcock.

Anne continued to flip through magazines and found a series of pictures of a snake swallowing a mouse. We pondered a few different things–putting a hat on the snake, having it swallow a double-decker bus…these things seemed funny but not quite right. I believe I was the first to suggest that this snake ought to be swallowing a cock, but we were all in immediate agreement.

I give you: Snake Swallowing Cock Topped With Dancing Girls. It is truly difficult to capture its majesty with The World’s Oldest Cell Phone, and for this I apologize. It will be on display in my apartment as part of my permanent collection for those who wish to inspect it more closely.

So this was the sort of silly, giddy mood we shared. All of a sudden, I was struck with inspiration. When I completed my half-marathon, this memorable comment exchange happened:

Shadowstitch: Good lord, I would have died. Flopped over the side of the bridge around the second mile, and been eaten by sharks. poetrix618: Lake Washington sharks?… would love to see that. You’d prolly just be diddled by some pale, overweight dude in a rubber shark mask, tho. teh_dirty_robot: What is Jim doing in the lake?

Anne and I have laughed about that ever since. We’ve asked Jim to wear a shark mask for Halloween with some scuba gear and we’ve been merciless in our teasing. All of this culminated in one masterful piece of collage:

It will add to the experience if you whisper in a wounded little girl voice “Three fingers are TOO MANY.”

Also, yes, the manatee and the fat girl are battling over the pizza and the ice cream.

Almost the moment I finished this collage masterpiece, Jimhark showed up. He was…less than impressed with all of our afternoon’s toils. We then told him about bologna nipples, and we all started joking in earnest.

After a while, we decided to go to Laughs to catch a show, and for Christ’s sake, who do we see in the parking lot but the girl whose nipples we had been unfairly maligning all day? I was already cracking up as I approached the group, and Jim tossed out a remark about ‘bologna sandwiches’ which screams “HI WE HAVE AN INSIDE JOKE”. Comedian Jesse Case picked up on this immediately and wanted to know what we were talking about, insisting that it wasn’t fair or nice to swap inside jokes in front of people. I tried to explain it was a joke that we had about someone’s nipples and he got mock-offended, stated that he had normal-size areola and stalked inside.

We didn’t give it much more thought until Jesse went onstage and opened with a rant about our bologna joke, going on and on about how clearly it was an inside joke because no one eats bologna in Kirkland, it’s a food-stamp meat, we couldn’t even pick a quality meat and then we tossed off some bullshit response about how it was about nipples and that he doesn’t buy it, and on and on and on. WE. WERE. DYING. I laughed so hard I couldn’t breathe. Tears were running down my face. I imagine I changed colors. I can’t even begin to convey how funny and ridiculous the whole thing was. And of course, the rest of the audience is turned around looking at us just DYING in the back, because THEY weren’t the bologna sandwich nipple bastards.

My Middle Name Is ‘Sucker’.

May 12, 2009 26 Comments read Games, Reviews

I will admit it. I bought Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust out of nostalgia for the days when Eric Stacey and I played the original while his parents weren’t home and we had to guess at all of the questions you had to answer to prove you were of age to play. It was a twenty dollar impulse buy. It was a mistake.

I like kitsch. I like bad movies. I occasionally enjoy bad games. I was able to derive genuine enjoyment from Sneak King. I thought, “Why not, Melissa? At the very least, it will be funny.”

No. No, it isn’t. It isn’t funny and it isn’t fun.

The writers clearly felt they were clever dudes, and filled each loading screen with an absolutely HI-larious tip, like “You’ll never be able to convince your girlfriend it’s good for her just because it’s filled with protein” and “Real girls are scary anyway” and “Buy a copy of this game for your grandma on her Birthday[sic]” OH HA HA HA HA HA, gentlemen!

The first time (yes, you read that correctly) I played this game, I put about an hour of time into it trying to even FIND the first mission as the minimap AND the camera both suck, and for my time and efforts, I got stuck in some geometry and had to start over. Instead of ripping the disc out and flinging it across the room, I decided that in order to punish myself for my rash purchase decision, I would play the game through to 100% completion and then destroy the disc.

I spent a not-insignificant number of hours playing this game. Here are my grievances. The game entertains the notion that it’s a sandbox style game; in order to complete missions and collect all of the little fucking golden statuettes scattered across the map, you need to execute parkour-like moves up and across buildings and every surface. Unfortunately, the controls are utter shit–unresponsive and inconsistent, and the geometry is also inconsistently designed. Ledges that you should be able to jump to and things you ought to be able to climb on are blocked off by invisible walls that shimmer when Larry slams into them at full speed at a height that will kill him as you can’t recover from a fall. If Larry runs anywhere near a moving golf cart, he turns into a boneless mass and flops down on to the ground. The AI consistently walks and drives into corners, and gets stuck in geometry until eventually they disappear. Larry looks like a poster child for Axe body spray, meaning I’m fairly sure that any time you’re not watching him onscreen, he’s off raping someone. Everyone else just looks freakish. There are characters roaming all around the world map, but you can only interact with specific people on missions, so the NPCs repeat the same two sentences over and over “Watch the hands, mister” and “Hey! I’m walkin’ here!”. You’d never know they paid well-known actors and actresses as voiceover talent unless they advertised it because the cut scenes are so atrocious that all you can focus on is how terrifying everything looks in-game. The dialogue is terrible. I’ve had funnier looking things come out of my various orifices than anything that happened onscreen.

However, my largest grievance is this: I collected a lot of statuettes in the hours I played. I was working my stats up to several different achievements. I saved my game (and there are not many places you can save your game which is also a hunk of shit) so I could take a dinner break, and when I went back to load my game…something had glitched and all of my progress up to the save was gone. WHAT. THE. FUCK. WHAT THE FUCK WHAT THE FUCK WHAT THE FUCK!?!

I will NOT redo all of that work. I don’t have the time to play through to 100% completion in one sitting, and frankly, that’s a punishment even I don’t feel I deserve. So, I leave to you, dear friends: What do I do?

*edit* I have called Gamestop and they will give me eight whole dollars for the game if that affects your vote one way or another.

Nom or Vom: Super Sunday Second Serving Poll with Grilled Cheese Fillets and Corn Ice Cream

May 10, 2009 25 Comments read Nom or Vom

Fish and cheese? I dunno, man. I dunno. And it’s cheap fish and cheap cheese. Like a home cooked filet o fish with the cheese inside the breading. Fish stick scientists have maybe gone too far.

Poll #1397795 Would you eat this? Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 41

View Answers NOM NOM NOM 13 (31.7%)

VOM VOM VOM 28 (68.3%)

And then there’s sweet corn ice cream. The taste of sweet cream and sweet corn, together at last. Is “just escape” on the lid meant to entice you to escape in the flavor of the ice cream, or escape from the ice cream, down the aisle, and out of the discount grocery store you found it in?

View Answers NOM NOM NOM 20 (48.8%)

VOM VOM VOM 21 (51.2%)