| 19/4/07:
Day of Judgment I think I've already mentioned
that my current day job involves entering birth
certificates. I've also already mentioned that I
tend to make up stories about families based on
what few details are available in the data. I
felt it would be worth expanding on some of the
ways in which I do that. Get ready to feel judged
and violated!
If the
father is older than the mother, then he
is obviously an evil moustachioed Victorian
era-style villain who has forced an innocent
flower of girlhood into marriage so that he can
take advantage of her sweet mauve envelope for as
long as it takes to get bored of her, at which
point he will start being unfaithful, but will of
course whip his wife to death if she does the
same. This is unless the father is older than the
mother by a really big margin, in which case he
has 'mid-life crisis' stamped on his forehead
and/or has married a gold digging harlot.
If the
mother is older than the father then
this is obviously the result of some erotic
thriller folderol in which a scheming older woman
has seduced a handsome young stud in order to
lure him into a web of intrigue and murder. Of
course these being birth certificates indicate
they had a child so presumably the innocent love
of the young man has helped her see the error of
her ways.
If you
live in Moranbah then you are a moron,
because Moranbah must be where the morons live.
If the
father's place of birth, mother's place of birth,
place of marriage and current address are all in
the same town, they are the most boring
people in the world.
If the
father is from a foreign country (I'm
talking proper foreign, like Italy or India or
something non-English speaking) and the mother is
Australian, then he is clearly a greasy wag who
has come over here to take our jobs and steal our
women.
If the
mother is foreign and the father is Australian,
then this is obviously one of those marriage of
convenience dealies where the evil manipulative
asylum seeker is just trying to get her visa and
will be out the door with a swarthy hunk on each
arm the moment her new passport arrives.
If both
parents are foreign, they have eloped.
They will some day both be murdered by the
mother's angry dad who was trying to suppress her
natural feminine free spirit and force her into
an arranged marriage.
If there
is no father listed, then the mother is
of course a huge slut. If she's under 17 then
she's the main character in a bleak coming of age
drama made by the BBC, as well as being a huge
slut. Bonus points if there's a big fat 'given up
for adoption' stamp at the bottom.
If both
parents are under 18 then they must be
one of those developmentally retarded teenage
couples who think cling film can work just as
well as a rubber johnny. If they live in Moranbah
I will nod sagely to myself.
If the
parents are not married, or have more than four
kids, or if the father's occupation is listed as
'labourer' or 'farmhand', or if the given address
is a caravan park, they're rednecks.
If
they're not married and have the same surname (and
it's come up a few times) then they're also
rednecks and are seriously committed to the whole
redneck thing.
If they
have more than 10 kids (alarmingly
common in rural Queensland it seems) then they
are absolutely demented rednecks who need to be
neutered before they do any more damage. If one
or more the children is named something along the
lines of 'Joe Bob' or 'Lu Ann' then it's time to
carpet bomb the entire district.
If
someone has the same name as a celebrity
then the only possible explanation is that they
really are that celebrity in hiding and the
person we see on films and television
masquerading as them is a lookalike persuaded to
adopt the role after the original became
disillusioned with a life of glamour. There's
probably some kind of agency in Hollywood that
sorts all this out.
If the
father has a really awesome name, like John
Steele or Jack Blaze, then they are a
retired action hero who married their love
interest. The child for whom this birth
certificate is filed will one day be kidnapped by
nazis.
If your
name is 'Bertha', you are fat.
Seriously.
You're really fat.
- Yahtzee
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11/04/07:
Ice Ice Baby
How to
tell if you are drowning in a frozen lake
You feel that
people walk all over you
You just can't
seem to keep warm no matter how many coats you
put on
You feel
sympathetic when professional women talk about
'the glass ceiling'
It feels like
everyone you meet these days is a rescue worker
shouting at you through six inches of solid ice
You don't get on
well with any of your friends because they are
all fish
You are not on
fire
You tend to
regard people who are not drowning in frozen
lakes with nostalgic envy
You frequently
experience breathing difficulties
You ask your
best friend why he didn't invite you to his
birthday party, and he replies "I kind of
assumed you'd have suffocated to death by
now"
You are never
thirsty
You feel left
out at Christmas and family gatherings
When people ask
how you are you reply, "I'm drowning in a
frozen lake, you bloody fool, how do you
think?"
You list your
address as 'a frozen lake'
You have
suddenly lost all interest you had in angling
Your name is
Grigori Rasputin
When people tell
you that their relatives have drowned in frozen
lakes you find it difficult to feel sorry for
them
- Yahtzee
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3/4/07:
Temperature Rising
So I'm office
temping again. I'm afraid I weakened and relapsed
back into an old habit. For the third time in my
life I am entering data for an Australian
government department. I come in at 8:30, sit at
my desk and enter birth registries all day.
It's awesome.
I've forgotten
how much I love data entry. The wonderful
monotony of it, the musical clicking of
keyboards. I love having my conscious brain
deactivated by a mindless repetitive task and the
rest of it drifting off into the wonderful lands
of make believe. Also I like having somewhere to
go during the day to get away from Sarah's new
cat. And they pay me for this shit.
But you have to
do something to relieve the monotony or you'd go
completely insane, I guess. Firstly I can write
crap like this. Secondly I can make up little
stories in my head based on the details of the
stuff I'm inputting.
"Ah, this
30-year-old widow married a 50-year-old
farmer," I say to myself. "Clearly the
loss of her first true love made her cynical and
now she marries for security. Perhaps one day she
will meet a randy Scandinavian stablehand who
will show her how to love again."
"There was
a gap of 10 years between this couple's first and
second child. Obviously the passion fizzled out
pretty fast but it has recently been re-awakened
after they started attending swinger's
parties."
"This
mother has 14 kids already and just gave birth to
twins. This family will either implode or get
their own sitcom."
Also, if you
have a silly name or there's something vaguely
amusing in your details, I assure you I will show
it to my colleagues and they will all laugh, and
we will all think you are a twat. I'm thinking of
the guy whose surname was Foreman and whose
occupation was also Foreman. And then there's the
woman named Cox who married a man named Box. I
wonder if she ever went by both names, and in
what order she put them. I wonder if it was part
of what initially attracted them or if it just
came out later as an amusing and eerie
coincidence.
Also, did you
know that Shane can be a girl's name? One family
thought so!
You know that
bit in American Beauty where Kevin Spacey's
character starts working at McDonalds and loves
it because so little is expected of him? I can
totally sympathise. Like, I wouldn't want to be a
pilot, because if I show up to work drunk I might
fly into a mountain and kill hundreds and go down
in history as the douche who killed hundreds. But
the worst that might happen in my job is that the
file of some woman in some database no-one ever
looks at might wrongly attest that she is really
a man.
Data entry is
the secret to happiness. Check it out.
- Yahtzee
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21/3/07:
Smoke In My Face
Australia has a
serious case of nanny state going on. Have I
mentioned this? Well, it bears repeating. Right
now the Australian government has gotten so
patronising that they might as well strap every
single citizen into high chairs and bring
spoonfuls of nutritious non-fattening vegetable
mush to their open mouths with the accompaniment
of aeroplane noises and pleasing coos. It's that
bad.
Sorry, people of
Australia - your elected representatives think
you're all collectively a bunch of dangerous
halfwits who have to be directly instructed not
to mess with cutlery or will be plunging toasting
forks into their beerguts the moment the
metaphorical figure of authority's back is
turned. This is pretty much the first thing that
caught my attention when I was first absorbing
Australia's culture and the sheer volume of
public service announcements that flit past the
TV screens. I'm OK with the one where the guy
tells you to eat more fruit and vegetables, at
least we can all agree that fruit and vegetables
are good for you, as needless a sentiment it is
to endlessly parrot. I'm less OK with the one
about how men should stop slapping their wives
about. It's a sensible enough cause but I'm
uneasy about its unspoken implication that
domestic abuse against men either doesn't exist
or doesn't matter. It's this new one I've been
seeing lately that makes me want to speak out.
I didn't know it
was possible to be both liberal and right-wing at
the same time, but that's the only way I can
describe the Australian government's hatred of
smoking. It marries the exaggerated coughs of the
staunch anti-smoker with the mindless fury of a
Klan rally. There was that law passed that banned
smoking within distance of any public building,
complete with accompanying ad campaign depicting
healthy beaming children ring-a-roseying around a
fertile green playground without the slightest
hint of irony. They started ordering cigarette
companies to put fucking enormous health warnings
on the packet, and when the smoking public
continued to not fall into their happy slave
drone template, they then replaced the warnings
with nauseating full-colour photographs of
heavily diseased body parts, ostensibly the
results of smoking, which achieved nothing but
putting me off my lunch every time Sarah left her
empty fag packets lying around my desk.
The people
behind this seem absolutely fucking convinced
that cigarette smokers somehow don't know of the
possible health risks and if they could just get
the poor victims of the now non-existent tobacco
advertising to even glance at a fire and
brimstone health warning it will be enough to
cause an epiphany straight out of a Jack Chick
comic. The possibility that someone might take
the warnings with the healthy skepticism they
deserve and continue to smoke responsibly for the
benefits they feel smoking gives them as part of
a rational, informed decision doesn't seem to
register.
So, having
decided from the tobacco industry's stubborn
insistence on not going bust anytime soon that
all smokers must be functionally retarded, the
Australian nanny state have created a new
anti-smoking ad campaign directed at the
functional retard demographic. Here's the
tagline.
"When
you smoke, you inhale over 4000 chemicals."
This is
pathetic. The break-dancing forced-smiling
brightly-coloured-jumper-wearing busybodies who
preach anti-smoking in school assemblies are less
ridiculous than that. Okay, they might want to
make you kill yourself but at least they're
direct, and cheerful. This scaremongering tagline
is just a very basic and obvious piece of
information put through the wringer of inference
and dodgy phrasing.
'Chemical' is
one of those words that means practically fuck
all, but is loaded in the average person's mind
with negative imagery. You think 'chemical', you
think of beakers of coloured liquid and dry ice
being downed by a cross between Christopher Lloyd
and the current Pope who then gleefully inspects
the vestigial arms suddenly growing out of his
lower back. Or perhaps barrels of
glow-in-the-dark goo that Captain Planet villains
use as fishing floats. But 'chemical' by itself,
upon examination, is utterly meaningless. It's
like saying 'substance', or 'element'. Saying
that a smoker inhales over 4000 chemicals is as
meaningful as saying that fun runners pass over
4000 different kinds of rock, and because that
rock may contain dinosaur fossils, said fun
runners are at risk of velociraptor attack.
Who wants to bet
that one of the 4000 phantom chemicals referred
to is 'air', or 'water vapour'? Let's not even go
into how the amount of smoke inhaled from one
cigarette, when divided between 4000 substances,
would leave such a tiny amount of each that any
negative effect each substance may have on a
human body would be virtually non-existent. No,
let's forget all that because the advert has more
carefully phrased warnings for us.
Examples are
given of the chemicals we are apparently
practically swigging neat every time someone has
a quiet puff two doors down. "Acetone,"
it says, while a sick-looking woman is filmed
coughing unhappily through a bluish filter,
"Used in paint thinner. Cyanide. Used in rat
poison."
It gets even
better. Lacking something more conveniently
dreadful to tell us about, like a hidden glass
capsule of the ebola virus in every filter, the
marketers attempt to fire a neurone in our empty
minds by telling us what unsavoury characters
these utterly minuscule quantities of chemical
have been associating with. It's a tactic with
all the credibility of smearing a political
candidate by revealing that he once shook hands
with a friend of Adolf Hitler's dentist. Need I
remind anyone that cyanide occurs naturally in
apples? By the Australian government's logic,
when you eat an apple you might as well be EATING
HANDFULS OF BOILING TAR.
Fuck, this is
fun, let's try applying this logic somewhere
else. Hey, did you know that your shampoo
contains polysorbate? Well, did you also know
that polysorbate derivatives are also used in
Clorox floor cleaning products? Every time you
wash your hair with shampoo, you might as well be
DUNKING IT IN UNDILUTED BLEACH. And let me assure
you that shampoo is chemically speaking a hell of
a lot closer to floor cleaner than cigarettes are
to paint thinner.
I'm not a
smoker. I used to be, but I stopped. I had heard
they were good for anxiety and I had a lot of
that, but it was eating into my budget and I
wasn't really observing an effect, so I packed it
in. Maybe if I can get a regular income I'll give
them another crack. I have friends who are
smokers and I live with a smoker. I'm not saying
that smoking can't cause medical problems and I'm
not pretending to be an expert, but you know
something, Australian government? I'd far rather
be surrounded by all my smoker friends exhaling
directly into my throat than listen to
patronising, controlling dipshits like you. So
stick that in your pipe and ban it.
PS. I saw Hot
Fuzz last night and it was really good you should
probably go and see it too
- Yahtzee
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9/3/07:
Games Games I Love Video Games
I don't know
whether anyone else has noticed - actually I
doubt it immensely - but there have been an awful
lot of religious-themed ads running through my
Google ad presence along the left of the page.
There's been a lot of sites advertised that would
no doubt be of use to any passing Christians who
feel they haven't informed themselves of how
awesome this Jesus character was lately but this
is probably a very small segment of my audience.
This influx of
god squaddery is probably something to do with
the word Jesus being used in a title of a recent
update, the Google Ads robot brain apparently
still mystified by the concept of 'context'.
This, I felt, would not do. This is a site about
games. Well, actually it's a site about me but
I'm all about games so who cares. Thus begins
Operation Find Appropriate Google Ads Right
Soonish for Everyone, or FAGARSE.
The first step
is to make the title of this update a completely
unambiguous endorsement of gaming. The next step
is to fill the rest of this update with large
emboldened gaming-themed haikus. See if you can
guess what games they're about.
Fucking
headcrabs again
Swat them off with a crowbar
Never speaks, the douche
Lost
in Blackrock Spire
Shit, my stomach really hurts
Quick, get me a sock
Slapping
a fretboard
Nothing like real guitar, but
it beats jerking off
Why
are the doors locked?
Who is that batey fellow
in the welding mask?
Oh no
I've been killed
I'll just shoot up some red bats
Surprise! Back again
Is
that a beerstein
I'll buy it at a high price
Heh heh heh, thank you
I
am a white dog
Saving the world with brushwork
Whose friend won't shut up
This
fog drives me mad
Hey, seen my wife anywhere?
Nice hat, by the way
Must get
that S-rank
Cheerleading: a manly job
One, two, thr - fuck, missed
- Yahtzee
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24/2/07:
Critic's Corner
Guys. Female
guys. I've figured it out. I know how to make
television not shit anymore.
Oh but yes it is
shit. TV was bad when John Logie Baird was first
making playful dirty gestures in front of his new
invention and it's bad now. And the reason why it
is bad is because of the damn ratings system.
Let me quickly
explain how ratings work. A tiny percentage of
houses in the country have special boxes on their
TV sets and they have to record which members of
the household are watching the TV at any one
time, as well as the age and demographic of the
viewer. Each individual under this system
represents a few thousand viewers. These are all
added up and sent to the TV companies and if the
numbers are big they all come in their pants and
if the numbers are small they all shoot
themselves.
BUT this system
is inherently flawed because the only people who
have these magic viewer recording boxes are
people who volunteer. That means that only the
kinds of people who care enough about television
to want to volunteer for this kind of shit are
going to be represented in the figures. And let
me tell you right now - people who care that much
about television are greasy morons who like
Eastenders and genuinely phone in to vote for
their favourite Big Brother zoo exhibit. I know
this because most of the television we get these
days is geared towards the vital greasy moron
demographic.
What's insane is
that television is coloured by the TV execs'
obsession with attracting audiences while their
methods of identifying said audiences remain
woefully inadequate. It's like trying to gauge
your audience at a broadway show when only one in
thirty of them are illuminated and the spotlights
are all pointed at seats reserved for people with
down's syndrome.
So the answer is
simple. Find a better way to determine who,
exactly, is watching, and TV will become better
again. All those people like me and thee who just
tune in for Mythbusters and Black Books every now
and again who don't think that's worth getting a
magic ratings box for will finally get our say.
Don't worry,
though, I'm not the kind of person to just
badmouth the existing system without offering any
reasonable alternatives, so here's my patented
idea for a better way.
The first thing
we have to do is put a little camera in the face
of every single member of the public. Now, a lot
of people are probably going to raise objections
to this system and that's why we're not going to
tell them we're doing it. We'll just do it to
every new baby that's born, and everyone who's
already alive will get one secretly implanted
next time they go to the dentist or something.
Sooner or later everyone's got one.
The little
camera will have some of the Nintendo Wii
technology in that it only turns on when it's
pointed directly at a TV. When it is turned on it
beams everything it sees to the newly-built evil
looming tower fortress on the plains of Scotland.
The two rather
major flaws with the plan so far is that a) it'll
cost a whole bunch and b) you'd need one tower
fortress employee for every single member of the
British public to record what they're watching.
Fortunately I've figured out a way around these
speed bumps, too. We'll just pick some countries
randomly that aren't doing anything important
(like, say, Mozambique and Canada), invade them,
plunder them, murder all their children to break
their morale and enslave them in the evil looming
tower fortress. Actually thinking about it we
could probably have each slave monitoring two or
three TV viewers at a time so whoever's left over
will be divided between the harem and being
ground into food for the other slaves.
The liberal
pussies among you are probably thinking something
along the lines of how my plan to make TV good
again involves turning the country into an
Orwellian nightmare society, but that just shows
what unhelpful naysayers liberals are.
Oh wait, fuck
it, scratch all that. We should just offer all TV
over bittorrent download instead of through the
neolithic analog system. Then you can just keep
track of who downloaded what where. I figure
since everyone already bittorrent downloads all
their TV anyway it wouldn't be much of a stretch.
As for the enslavement we'll have to think of a
way to work it in somewhere else.
- Yahtzee
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16/2/07:
Rock And Regardez
I can't even
remember the last time I wrote a short story, but
here we are. Be advised thought that I'm only
uploading it here because a magazine rejected it.
Anyway, it's called the Spirit of Rock and you can click on the
name to read it.
Also, I'm
informed that Trilby's Notes has picked up 4 AGS awards at the recent ceremony,
including Best Game of 2006, and that 1213 picked
up best non-adventure game (although it is an
adventure game if you think about it). Thank you
indeed to everyone who voted, I am unworthy of
your kindness. With this I am apparently the most
prolific receiver of AGS awards and nominations
for AGS awards, with somewhere in the region of
11 and 44 respectively. I've never been given the
Lifetime Achievement one, though. I suspect this
is because I am black.
- Yahtzee
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8/2/07:
Sweet Jesus
"Praise me and donate
me things you sheep! Bleat, motherfuckers!
Baa!"
- The Book
of Me
So, how are we
doing with 6 Days A Sacrifice? Having a good time?
Finished it? Having a good old think about the
plot? You'll see I've already stuck it into the
quick links at the top of the page. Well, the
Special Edition is now available, for the usual
sum of a 5 dollar donation. All the fun of 6 Days
with revealing commentary, expanded ending,
original soundtrack by grace of Mark Lovegrove
and one or two other tidbits I threw in to make
it interesting.
I've also
decided to introduce a bulk discount for new
special edition patrons. The scheme is called the
Chzo Mythos Discount Pack.
Details on the donation page, but basically it's
like this: send me 15 dollars and I'll send you
all 4 Chzo Mythos special editions - 5 Days, 7
Days, 6 Days and Trilby's Notes. That's right,
buy three, get the fourth free. It's never been a
better time to get into the 'giving me money'
trend that all the cool kids are into.
What's that? No
money? Well, I still have something for you.
Roushi has uploaded a slightly updated version of 6 Days that addresses
a couple of issues. If you have a mirror, please
update it.
Let's finish up
this entry with some nice fanart. Thumbnailed,
click for big.
 and  by El_Gostro
 by Alec Thompson
 and  by StanTheGarbageMan
 by Setasouji (possible
spoilers)
- Yahtzee
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