And he signs his name with a capital 'B'.....

I pushed the button and elected him to office and a
He pushed the button and he dropped the bomb
You pushed the button and could watch it on the television
Those motherfuckers didn't last too long


I'm sick of hearing about the "have's" and "have not's"
Have some personal accountability
The biggest problem with the way that we've been doing things is
The more we let you have the less that I'll be keeping for me


Well I used to stand for something
Now I'm on my hands and knees
Trading in my god for this one
And he signs his name with a capital G


Don't give a shit about the temperature in Guatemala
Don't really see what all the fuss is about
Ain't gonna worry about no future generations and a
And I'm sure somebody's gonna figure it out


Don't try to tell me that some power can corrupt a person
You haven't had enough to know what its like
You're only angry 'cause you wish you were in my position
Now nod your head because you know that I'm right... alright!


Well I used to stand for something
But forgot what that could be
There's a lot of me inside you
Maybe you're afraid to see


Well I used to stand for something
Now I'm on my hands and knees
Trading in my god for this one
And he signs his name with a capital G


Those are the lyrics to the Nine Inch Nails song Capital G.

I'm really starting to feel that way about Barack Obama.

A Few Complaints About 'Duke Nukem Forever'

First: read this post at Socimages.

Copy and pasted from that site:

Just to tally up, we have:

1. Fetishizing and infantilizing women by putting them in outfits associated with children.

1. Referring to their breasts as “bazookas,”  both objectifying women and equating  their bodies with a military weapon.

1. A lesbian encounter presented as titillation for the male viewer.

1. Watching women engage in sexual activity with one another, and even threatening women with weaponry to continue engaging in sexual activity with one another, is your reward. You deserve it – you deserve to be sexually gratified.

People learn by watching. This can be good and bad. It can make us more accepting of others’ opinions and outlooks, and it can also desensitize and normalize harmful opinions and behaviors. In regards to Duke, the latter is where the risk lies — the more one sees images like those presented by Duke Nukem, the more likely they are to be seen as what is acceptable and usual. Normalizing harmful, degrading, and insulting stereotypes of and behavior toward women seems like a high price to pay for a video game’s success.

That's the true problem with DNF, and is what makes it such a revolting game.

All of that has been said elsewhere at great length and nuance though, so I want to gripe about some other aspects.

The audio design in the game is awful.  Nearly everything in the game sounds like placeholder material.  Duke's voice-actor sounds like a bad imitator of the original character, the music is boring, the weapon effects are underwhelming, etc.  To quote Yahtzee, "If I didn't know the history of this game I would say it seems rushed."

All of that is better than the gameplay though.  What made DN 3d fun was how it seamlessly blended together insane numbers of possible actions.  Jetpacks, shrink rays, missile launchers and convoluted level designs meant that there always were more ways to beat a level or kill your deathmatch foes than pedestrian games like Gears of War could ever dream of.  DNF trades all of that in for the agonizing boredom of lame scripted sequences and hallway crawls littered with uninteresting set-pieces.

And for all of its boasting about 'interaction' and 'being politically incorrect' you can't even smoke the cigarettes from vending machines.  Bioshock let you do that.  WTF?

Bringing a dumbass to a knife fight.

Over at the RedState site there's a post titled 'The No Social Security Payments Myth'.

Here's a choice quote:

The fact is that absent a debt ceiling the US can, indefinitely, pay principal and interest on our debt — thereby avoiding default; obligations under Social Security and Medicare; and active duty military salaries. It can do this and still have $40 billion per month to play with. 

Really?  That sounds like a good idea to you?

The post's author then asserts that, "If Social Security checks don’t go out it will be because Obama has decided it is to his political advantage to hurt as many Americans as possible."

That simply doesn't make any sense.  I was going to write more but decided that sums it up.  That simply doesn't make any sense.  I compare this to bringing a dumbass to a knife fight because you can win a knife fight, or prevent the debt ceiling from being raised, using a dumbass.  He's still a moron and he still is wrong.

I'm shocked! Shocked to discover that Wired.com would collude with the military intelligence industrial complex!

Not really.

I feel...... accidentally deceptive o.O?

Looking over my page view traffic from the last couple months I've seen that nearly all of you are coming to this blog through image searches and clicking on pictures of Chell's (of Portal fame) long fall boots, or by searching for what song is playing in certain episodes of Jon Benjamin Has a Van.

*evil laughter*

Hope you enjoy the blog even if it's not what you were looking for.

The Children of Reagan

There's an article titled 'What is a "constitutional conservative" anyway?' over at Salon.com right now.

Here's my favorite quote from it:

Taking office in 1980 amid rising gas prices, a stagnant economy, and high unemployment, Ronald Reagan argued that government was not the solution to the nation’s problems, but rather it was the problem. Yet as Berkowitz has written, Reagan’s rhetoric deploring "unnecessary and excessive growth of government" implicitly conceded that there could be necessary and appropriate growth, and he in fact allowed taxes to rise and government spending to grow above inflation without sacrificing his principles.

Reagan's rhetoric didn't implicitly make an argument for growing government in any fashion.  To walk away from his speeches with that type of interpretation requires the same type of rhetorical hair-splitting employed by biblical apologists.


I'm grateful that Reagan did compromise on his professed principles.  The problem with the current crop of conservatives is that they take Reagan at his word and actually believe what he was saying.