Zangief was a Communist Nazi

I'm going to make it one of my New Year's resolutions to not post links to things I find on BoingBoing. Until 2005, however, I've got this, which is part 2 of Electronic Gaming Monthly's "Child's Play" series. The idea is you get a bunch of pre-teens -- the "Playstation generation" -- into a room with old school games like Galaga and Mike Tyson's Punch-Out, and encourage them to make scathing commentary about the quality of gameplay, controls, and graphics.

Bobby: A duck ate me.

EGM: A what ate you?

Parker: A pink duck.
...
EGM: What if we told you the ducks were supposed to be dragons?

Everyone: [Laughs]

It's like shooting pink dragons in a barrel.

Morning Grow

If you're an internet geek like me, you've probably seen this game. It's called "Grow", and the idea is to drag the little items onto the ball so that they interact with each other in the most interesting and spectacular ways possible.

If you're even more like me, you've driven yourself crazy trying to figure out the optimal order to "grow" things. Well, at long last, I've found the solution. I wish I could say that I discovered this myself, but unfortunately, I had to resort to combing through posts on random message boards. So, without further ado, I give you the solution to Grow:

robot
egg
ladder
sun
mountain
fan
pipe
tornado
gyro
comm satellite
engine
tv

Grow in good health.

Coming soon to a theatre near you: live-action hentai

I saw a commercial on TV the other day for that movie, "Elektra". I had two initial reactions to it:

1) This movie is going to suck. Big time. 'Twill make Daredevil look like The Godfather.

2) Is it just me, or does this look like it was heavily influenced by hentai? See especially the tentacle monster that Elektra seems to fight/confront(/get raped by?). I feel like I'm taking crazy pills, here.

Of course, it's not like I watch hentai in my spare time or anything -- I'm too busy watching C-SPAN. Ok, so I do, but only enough so I can make jokes about it with my fellow geeks.

Oh, and mom? You don't want to know what hentai is. In fact, just forget you read this whole thing. *Neuralizer flash*

Cures what ails ya

Holy shit. I can't help but think this is some kind of joke or something, or at least not as amazing as it sounds.

Numa Numa

I knew there was a reason I still checked Newgrounds.

Here it is. It's my new favorite Internet earworm. I suggest watching it with the subtitles on so you can be driven crazy (like I was) trying to figure out what the hell language that is. It looks like some hybrid between Italian and French and sounds like Portuguese. What the hell?

Alright, I'll tell you. It's an oft-overlooked Romance language, Romanian. But I think this song is gonna put Romanian back on the map, linguistically speaking.

And just to round things out, here's a link to the video the band, "O-Zone", made. It's cute, in a Power-Rangers-anime-Backstreet-Boys kinda way. Personally, I think the fat kid dancing in front of his webcam is better, but that's just me. Apparently, this song is big in the European club scene. So get in on the ground floor now, my fellow Americans. The Romanians are coming.

Oh, and here's a link to a translation of the lyrics ... into French. Chew on that one for a while, suckas.

Stay in school

Just finished reading a George Carlin book my mommy gave me for Chanukah. S'called "When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?" It's pretty good; not his best stuff, if you ask me, but pretty funny nonetheless. He takes on the normal topics -- euphemisms and politically-correct lingo get a thorough Carlinizing, as well as random topics like scabs and toenails. Anyway, in the spirit of George Carlin, here's a little rant about something that I thought of on the way to work this morning...

All throughout the first 23 years of your life, people are yelling at you to "stay in school". Parents, teachers, DARE officers, pro athletes, cartoon characters, you name it. We hear "stay in school" or "knowledge is power" or "education is the key to success". Then you get a little older and it's "go to college", "get a degree", "study hard", and so on. School, school, school, 24 / 7, from every direction. Everybody's telling you to go to or stay in school.

Which is all well and good, but they're forgetting something. See, the emphasis shouldn't be on staying in school and getting so much education that your brain explodes. Here's why; here's the big secret they're trying to hide from you but is obvious to anyone who's endured that much schooling: school isn't that interesting. It's true. It's a tool, a means to an end. But that gets forgotten in the stay-in-school frenzy. School becomes the end itself. Which, you know, is kind of a problem, since you do actually have to leave school eventually (unless you go into academia). When that happens, you've been so focused on staying or getting into school, you haven't really thought about what you're going to do when you get the $150,000 piece of paper saying that you're now more educated than any of the losers you went to high school with.

Which is really why they want you to stay in school so long -- to stay out of the workforce until you're 23. It gives those aforementioned losers with GEDs the chance to work 4 years at the company you're now applying to (entry-level position, of course -- everyone's gotta start somewhere!) and become your boss.

Ain't that a bitch?

The second stupidest question I've ever been asked

Background info: People can use our website to view their 401k, transfer money around, etc. etc. Unfortunately, there are many many stupid people who don't know how to work their computers. So I get calls like this:

Stupid Lady: "I was logging into your website, and this box came up asking me if it wanted to remember my password. I clicked yes, but I don't want it to do that. How can I get rid of that?"

Me: "Well, you understand that that's a feature of Internet Explorer, not our website?"

Stupid Lady: "...Oh. But I don't want it to remember my password."

Me: "Well, that's fine, and I can tell you how to get rid of all the stored passwords internet explorer remembers for you, but if you're relying on that feature for any other website, it'll delete the stored passwords for those sites, too."

Stupid Lady: "...Oh. Well, what if I use a different computer?"

Me: "If your password isn't stored on that computer, it won't auto-complete it for you."

Stupid Lady: "But will it get rid of the stored password on this computer?"

Kind of funny, in a tech-support-geek-nightmare sort of way.

Now playing: Halo 2. Pretty good, for a first-person-shooter. However, it does have one glaring fault -- no in-game map, and no compass to point you in the right direction. I get lost a lot.