You going to build 8-bit sculptures that you couldn’t already do with Lego anyway? You expecting it to not play like Lego? It’s very much like pulling wool over your eyes telling you that it’s not exactly what it is.

Coommmeee ooonnnnnn.

I’ve been playing this awesome game on my iPhone called Triple town. It’s a cool twist on the old “match three” formula and I suggest anyone give it a play.

Here’s a picture of Elijah Wood’s older brother (he really isn’t) as Superman. Apparently he’s in a bank, probably to stop it from getting robbed. But who needs to prevent robbery when a nearby fan wants a picture. huh? huh?

The New Trailer for the next game in the world’s greatest videogame franchise was released, and we were all better people because of it.

Not exactly a way I’d want to die.

And now I should be sleeping….

I woke up this morning and had a craving to write something the Ef down. (geddit?) The problem? I never had any actual inspiration. So here we are. It’s late, I should be sleeping — TIME FOR SOME NEWS.

Hiedi Klum and Seal divorce. That’s probably pretty sad, because they seemed nice. Hell, I remember being incredibly jealous of Seal the moment I heard they got married. But now that it’s over, I suggest we all look back to all the nice memories, in a medley as performed by youtube.

Since we’re on the topic of Divorce, Let’s Segue to reuniting.

 Justin Bieber might make dashing career move into Maturity in a weird way? Even if this is the strangest rumor I’ve heard about him so far, I’m pretty sure I’d want it to happen.

And here’s this little bit of news that’s completely debatable.

Before I end this post. I remember a time when this way completely and utterly fun. It was my Job to write Ef. and it was doing well. We were getting the traffic that it needed in order to go places. I was the most trustable thing out of anything I’ve done in my career so far. So who knows if it will show it’s head again, or still be a thing of the past. I don’t know what the future is going to hold. But only time will tell.

[Edit: last night I didn't really have anything for 2Live Crew reuniting. In fact it probably writes itself. Something about the music that they represented seems a hell of a lot creepier when they get older. yknow....

Same goes for Jersey Shore for that matter. It doesn't really matter how smart they claim to be, How they're represented on television isn't going to do them any favors in the long run. Even if you're a scientist, if you going to be a drunken mess of an ape on television, you're never going to be taken seriously. ]

…an idiot. I know this because I live with myself on a regular basis.

Now before you go on saying “Michael, stop it. You’re not an idiot.” Then you must not know me very well. Because I am. I do stupid things on a regular basis. If only because I don’t know what I’m doing.

I really, never have any idea what I’m doing… ever.

Well that’s probably a half-true. I have life goals, ambitions, wants… needs. Sometimes it’ll happen at the expense of loved ones. They’ll get hurt, mad, whatever the outcome in which it will be terrible is. And I will sit there and wonder why. Honestly, where does ones hostility come from? I’d really like to know, because I’ll never understand it.

I get my gut feelings and act on them (Because they haven’t failed me yet. really, I have an impressive track record of gut feelings/premonitions/psychic hobo jobo.) and I’m never truly aware of what will happen. Lately it’s always been bad. For some reason instead of playing it cool, like I should have been doing in the first place, I felt I needed to act on it! And in the end, I made things go off the deep-end.

I’m an idiot.

It’s actually because I stopped knowing what’s going on. Things were fine until something weird happened, then I slipped and fell on the Panic button. And when I panic, that’s never a good sign, it usually involves the people around me watch as I crash and burn… because really? What are they going to do. Never mind if it’s very important to me. Because what’s expected of me is to do something that I really can’t do. really. can’t. do. REALLY.

Need I say it again.

Honestly, I have to rely on people seeing me for what I am and knowing that I’m trying my best. Because honestly, this is really starting to take it’s toll on me daily. No matter how much I try to ignore it.

Maybe this is what people will want out of me from now on.

Yeah I said it, and I can’t really take it back. If I feel like I’ve been walked all over and emotionally manipulated. Then who am I to judge? I’ve tried that, It back fires because I NEVER judge.

Back to the drawing board, keep my mouth shut, and wait a little bit longer. if I’m lucky.

because everything else, just doesn’t feel right. not right now.

I say ‘dreams’, because it’s not really nightmarish. I suppose it would be if I were afraid of them. Which I kind of am, but there’s a bigger aura of indifference. As if we have an understanding that we can exist, just not get in each others way. (Again, this is about the closet. I felt threatened. They had to go! It was an invasion of privacy!) That’s not to say that They haven’t been scrazy. The much larger spiders are always going to freak the fuck out of someone. But I’ll be damned if I didn’t say it was fascinating.

Last night, while doing a routine segment with Will from Tested, We found something. It was colorful, decently sized, ugly as hell. A spider crawled it’s way into the kitchen doing whatever it felt like doing. We stopped ourselves, watched, decided we had to kill it. I armed myself with a broom, and while not liking the idea of getting closer to the creature I gripped it tightly and prepared to jab.

It jumped and out of it’s ass came a ladder of cob-web. It skittered it’s way up, into the ceiling, and away from us for good. There was no moment of freaking out, not finding myself suddenly awake. just puzzled at the bemusement of a ladder.

Spiders, Man…

I’ve written enough in this past year to feel content with my ability. I like the way I write. I am unique as long as I care to think that way.

I sit here going back and forth between sentences and paragraphs, editing, adding, and deleting. what’s okay to say? What isn’t? you know, I think I should just shut up and go to sleep. maybe I’ll delete this when I wake up tomorrow.

[EDIT: OR JUST EDIT IT RIGHT NOW]

Ideas, Projects, things we used to do. It was wonderful to have that. I miss that. I appriciate the friendship of intellectualism rather than the Dudebro Douche-osity of the modern man. Locked away in our creative storm. was something we’ve all been a part of since high school. A sad, lackluster experience of a group project passionately known as ‘Intense Phenomenon’.

As the story goes… Eccentric, secret fight club, computer technician John Nicol was the one that brought together an idea that we were all into: Animation Club. a rag-tag unlikely group of individuals brought together with our love of drawing. We gathered the people, we thought of the name (Cananime) We even built the website. We were ambitious children with the idea of making a movie. Even if we had absolutely-no-fucking-clue.  We didn’t care though, it brought us together, it gave us ideas, we developed the story as a team just proving that we could, even if it meant we were also complaining about it behind our own backs.

The Story was simple. Loser-face Edward Damplin with hardly any friends and hardly anyone to call his own, uses his super genius to create a computer program modeled after the the girl in his class he can’t help but be infatuated with called Eve.  Naturally, when you’re that smart, you create the sex doll instead of stalk right? What’s creepier? Eve eventually becomes far too smart and uses the internet to infect the lives of everyone else, with intention of bringing on a world wide dementia that will ultimately lead to humanities demise? I’m not really clear on that part… but it’s there.

The absurdity of a typical anime mixed with creative adolescence, I think we all knew it was never really going to happen. Probably because we were going too far with a lot of the ideas. Ed’s friend was a boy in constant schizophrenic discourse. When you’re young I guess you figure insanity is hilarious. The poor 16 year old (who’s name I forget) was riddled with crazy person stereotypes. Tinfoil hat, abusive father, constantly bullied, talking makes no sense, it’s anyone’s guess how Edward managed to find companionship in this guy, but they were best friends to the end.

There were bully characters which had some sort of 3 stooges complex. With the exception of one of them being a complete asshole the other two were eventually conditioned to be a complete joke. The Antagonists to Edward, which is only natural for a hero to the story to have, but their inclusion seemed more and more unnatural. It’s amazing to watch something go from completely bad-ass, to Saturday morning cartoon.

It makes me wish I remembered some of the conversations that happened during these meetups. Someone talks about a great idea for a character, then the rest of the group consistently jokes about how “hilarious this would be, if…” Then you watch as the enthusiasm immediately leaves a persons face as they awkwardly laugh “hahahaaa… That’s great.”

The crux of absurdity was the science teacher Professor Dookie. (I think this was around the Budwiser, “WHAZZZAUP” Era.) A character created just to be there. A science teacher by trade because this is science fiction. A quirk of loving raisins but hating grapes, so plans on using his scientific genius to create a raisin plant and never have to deal with grapes again.

May, or May not also be a pot smoker.

You can tell a lot from a person based on the characters they want to create, a personality can really shine through when rolls out their ideal character. It never really occurred to me until now how troubling some of these people seemed. Or even how hard I was on others. The love interest of Damplin was a pretty but introverted girl. It seemed modeled very much off of Angela, the only girl of the animation club. We didn’t actually like her at the time. Her style was sailor moon and she came off as bossy, later on she became an inside joke. When the entire group wants something actiony and epic, and one person just wants to throw a little love in there, you get over ruled an singled out.

But to be honest, she was an ugly duckling story waiting to happen, and I do wish I was a little nicer… even if I still want to keep the inside joke.

Anyway to continue, Eve starts doing her shit and being a threat to everyone, I think she even kills the love interest. starts infecting the minds of high school students, hijacks the internet and starts doing shit with the world. It starts to look like there’s absolutely no hope for anyone. BUT this is where the crazy guy comes in.

You see, by some stroke of genious, el nutbar is far too messed up in the head for Eve to already screw over. So while she does try to work her magic is alters his mind enough for him to become an ADAM to the EVE. (you see where this is going?) He starts seeing clearly, becomes normal, grows some sort of power out of nowhere! it’s up to his to stop the threat, and let everyone live in peace again.

I think at this point we were imagining Dragon Ball Z or something. At this point Eve is all super physical form and ‘Adam’ gets to match that, there’s nothing left but Spirit Bombs and Kamehamehas. With all of this in mind we had to come up with a name, we tried many. They were all absurd, but I guess not as absurd as the one that kind of makes sense but kind of doesn’t to the whole story: Intense Phenomenon.

With that we were pretty much done. The animation club was loosing interest in itself, nobody was really getting a long all that well, but we took that idea and we put it under our belt. As dumb as the whole thing started sounding (every day), we were passionate about it. We knew it would never amount to anything, but it was going to be OUR conversation piece. The memory we will always have and talk about 20 years later in our lifetime.

Who knows, one day there will still be a time and a place for it, but from where I sit I like where it is.

I’m a little late to the party as usual, because I’m sure it’s already been talked to death on the internet. But yesterday, “Gizmodo Intern” Alyssa Bereznak complained about her love life. More so that she singled him out for being really good at a nerdy Hobby (The hobby in subject is Magic: The Gathering). It struck me as a little odd, after all this was an article being posted on Gizmodo WHICH IS A TECH BLOG.

There’s a demographic that reads the site that is already beyond nerd-dom, chances are there’s a good majority of readers on that site which play/have played Magic: The Gathering. Hell I’ve Played that game! Fuck, I still do! That is a SOLID card game! It’s a part of my childhood! But let’s think about this for a bit.

The thing you eventually do with a hobby, if your really into it, is make it something MORE. Jon Finkel knows this, He’s got a passion for a competitive game that is no different than Chess, or Poker. Alyssa Made the mistake of assuming the worst about him, because He’s a world champ.

I don’t want to attack her here, because maybe she didn’t mean anything by it. She’s since edited Finkel’s identity out of her original post. Which is great, because the damage is already done and the internet doesn’t forget these things. The point is she wrote what sounds like “distaste for nerds” on a blog for nerdy things. there has to be to a connection there in your mind that makes you think “maybe I shouldn’t write my follies on a dating website.” “How does my experience, relate to the iPad 3?” You see where this is going? It’s an act of personal life. You want to write about how you’re bad at dating? There’s a site for that.

This is one of the things where I start having a distaste for blog sites. I hate using the term but it does feel like outright trolling for attention. You can begin to imagine how much hits that post got from flocks of people wanting to post a hateful comment towards the offender. Maybe I just hate seeing it on websites that share some of my interest.

It’s like how I can’t stand Kotaku. Gamers as a collective are always trying to fight the stereotype that was created for us. Being sad perverted losers who don’t accomplish anything with our lives but level up to 99 and save the princess. As many people as there is so say “You know, a lot of us aren’t like that.” There’s always Kotaku to bring it down 20 notches and start system wars, or write about things that could be down right pornography, or even exploit something just because the word video game was used once in a totally unrelated way.

It’s that kind of writing that bastardizes the very core of what we are. If you use a popular website to single someone out, because you can’t look past what makes them unique, then that gives everything about you a bad name. You alienate a good chunk of us, and then all of a sudden your Ok cupid profile looks less appealing.

And hey, if you’re going to write about this stuff, AT LEAST know the people that you’re talking to.

So that was scrapped.

As far as other things go, the writing gig over at Geek-Badge is pretty fun. Did I mention that it’s something I get to check off of my bucket list? writing about games is super cool when you’re a geek that’s been playing them for a good amount of life.

There’s also that acting thing, that still happens to be around in the weirdest ways. But nothing big to actually talk about until the ball is rolling. And, if anything animation school is happening closer every day.

It’s a small update, I know, I’m sorry. but things of other nature are just happening. Can’t get excited over lots just yet, but I’ve been pretty tired for a while. Stressed out too.

It’s ok guys. Life is cool.