Yeah, it's been like six months since my last post. Shh. I haven't had much to say, at least not that I'd feel comfortable saying in a fashion that anybody but those "in the know" could understand. Enh.

But obviously I'm posting now, and if anything was going to do it, it'd be politics; and seeing as we've just exited the political season, this seems like the right time to be writing about them. Still, when it comes to politics, only one thing really gets me interested enough to write.

This time the big deal is California's Proposition 8, which passed by a fairly narrow margin, amending the state Constitution so that gays can't get married there. This was actually briefly legal recently, when the state Supreme Court decided that a law criminalizing it was made of bullshit and vinegar and violated said Constitution; so there was a big push among people suffering from head-in-ass disease to fix that.

One of the big contributors to passing Prop 8, at twenty million simoleons, was the Mormon Church, a body incapable of detecting irony at ten paces and apparently blind to the common and fucking idiotic argument that legalizing gay marriage will lead to polygamy and hot dog sex as well as a plague of locusts o'er the land with a dash of hellfire. Because, you know, that twenty million couldn't be more usefully (not to mention appropriate, religiously) employed feeding starving people or tending to the sick. I guess Jesus wasn't about that kind of stuff. There are actually some movements demanding that the tax-exempt status of the LDS church be stripped, and I think rightly so - part of being tax-exempt is that you're politically neutral, you fucking twats - but that's actually neither here nor there even if I am angry over it.

There are some points of good news. For instance, it sounds like challenges to Prop 8 will probably see it overturned on account of its villainy, which means that this particular battle comes out as a wash. There's also the fact that Prop 8 passed 52-48, a fairly close call if staggering for a place like California; but a similar ballot measure passed in Arkansas just 57-43. Arkansas, for crying out loud. Combined with a nearly total defeat of the Republicans this time around I don't think we're that far from a repudiation of this kind of religion-draped-homophobic lunacy - say, 10 years, and we'll start seeing a national recognition of gay marriages on equal footing with straight marriages.

But here's the thing that really amuses me despite the tragic realities. See, for the past, oh, two decades or so there have been right-wing religious pundits who have promised god's terrible wrath on people and places that supposedly did evil. Pat Robertson is famous for this. He, for instance, said that god might inflict disaster on Dover, Pennsylvania after the famous Dover trial ruled that ID could not be taught as science in public schools. He said something similar about Katrina, that the destruction of New Orleans was a result of that city's immorality. Oh, and we shouldn't forget Jerry Falwell, on Robertson's 700 Club, claiming "that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way - all of them who have tried to secularize America" were guilty of causing 9/11. So apparently the way you can tell if you've done something against god is that he kills a bunch of people and ruins a bunch of property unrelated to the wrong-doing.

So, uh, what the hell are these huge Californian wildfires about? It must be Satan, trying to trick people.

Sometimes I get the compelling urge to yell at stop signs for being so god damn presumptuous ("No, you stop!"), always telling me what to do. Usually I don't. They're public servants, after all, and just doing their best to ensure a safe flow of traffic. Still... they've made a powerful enemy. Someone needs to moderate their tone. To the radical max.

And don't even get me started on the Mexican stop signs, being all "alto!" Yeah, I know I'm tall, a mass of gaping Turkish school children illustrated that nicely. No need to rub it in. Jerks.

I'll bet British stop signs say "Kindly pause here for a moment, old bean, just to see if there's any cross-traffic. I say, that would be... uh... piping, er wot? Blimey!" Good old British stop signs.

So, watch Pat Sajak's reaction near the end of this video. You'll know it when you see it. Trust me. He's now my hero.

STFU - "Set the frank under." Used strictly in reference to giving a frankfurter as a Christmas gift, as in "STFU the tree."

WTF - "Where's the frank?" Employed by those who cannot find their delicious present.

LOL - Lord(s) of the Lasso. Refers to cowboys particularly adept with lassos. Also an upcoming game which is basically just a rebuild of Master of Magic with all references to mages replaced with cowboys and the magical research aspect replaced with lasso-technique research.

ROFL - "Revenants? Only For Love!" Used by those who mistakenly believe revenants, a form of sentient undead, arise from their graves strictly for reasons of love, be it unrequited love, the failure to stop some threat to a loved one, etc. In reality, revenants arise for revenge, which would make a good bumper sticker.

BTW - "Boris, that's weird." In Soviet Russia, this stands for "Weird. That's Boris?"

Canada - Not an acronym, but an abbreviation of the country's full name, "Radada."

HSTA - Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act. A piece of legislation passed by the US government in 1930, it raised United States tariffs to historically high levels.

COL - Coughs out loud. Used when one coughs audibly. Others cannot hear it through the Internet, so why spare them the information?

BRB - Not an acronym, but an onomatopoeia. It is used by those who are trying and failing to suppress a belch.

ROFC - Rolling on the floor coughing. As above, but used only in extreme bouts of coughing.

Ur - Not an acronym, but a city in ancient Mesopotamia. A reference used exclusively by doctoral candidates in the field of archaeology.

DAFOCROFCMFAOWDAOYCP - "Died after falling out of chair, rolling on the floor coughing my fucking ass off. Why didn't any of you call the paramedics?" Accusatory statement usually typed by revenants who succumbed to some sort of pulmonary affliction. Those who read it are, in technical terms, fucked.

Dating would be a lot easier if I were good-looking. And gay. And had access to reliable accelerated cloning technology. I already get along great with myself, and really who could be more loyal to me than I? (The answer: mecha-Jesus. But that is not the point.)

Sadly I must lumber on, straight as the day is eleven, and uncloned and so forth.

I believe I have made enough chimps cry at this point, though to be honest I feel less like writing than ever. There's some difficult stuff I'm facing right now is all. Sooner or later things will clear up. Possibly. For now, though, enjoy this phrase written by Christopher Marlowe, who knew the score.

"Why this is hell, nor am I out of it. Think'st thou that I, who saw the face of God and tasted the eternal joy of heaven, am not tormented with ten thousand hells in being deprived of everlasting bliss?"

Also, by demand:

Yarr.

Something I've been pretty into lately, on account of having refreshingly little to actually *do* with my time, is speed running. This is not, as many of you who know me and my deep love of intense physical exertion might expect, some sort of personal challenge in which I am training for a foot race; instead, as many of you who know me and my deep love for bullshit time wasting might expect, looking at videos of nerds even bigger than myself (not physically, of course, but that's impossible anyway) beating games in as short a time as possible. This is a pretty intensive field, apparently, since some of the records catalogued by the speed running community beat out the old ones by a matter of frames, two or three, which is about a tenth of a second.

Speed run videos are pretty interesting, and Google Videos hosts a *ton* of them. They're usually pretty short, fifteen to forty minutes, but there are a few, like for the original Super Mario Brothers game, which are five minutes or under and an even smaller number, like the Chrono Trigger video, which are multiple hours long (four, in the case of Chrono Trigger). The thing that makes them interesting, usually, is that they're focused around finding every possible glitch, every method of shaving down and perfecting timing, and the absolute bare minimum of work needed to be done to beat the game. There are two schools of thought about speed runs. The first is vanilla playing, which is just somebody playing normally and unaided, while the second is tool-assisted, which uses things like frame-slowing to allow people to perfectly time moves and compensate for the limitations of human reaction times. I personally fall into the "as long as it looks neat, whatever" school of thought. Tool-assisted runs are often more interesting, since they allow the player to perform "holy crap!" moments and maneuvers that look easy but are basically impossible to recreate.

But apparently trying for the fastest time isn't enough for some of these people, so they make up variant rules. The simplest is usually 100% completes, where they find every item, kill every enemy, and so forth so that the game is literally 100% done. One I just found out about is a passive run, which is where one cannot kill enemies except for those that have to be killed - boss monsters, basically. The movie where I saw this was for Contra 3, which is very impressive considering that in that game, there are approximately 10 billion enemies in a level, half of which are on screen at a time firing wildly and randomly, and one hit will kill you. So naturally the guy beats it without dying, In 15 minutes. And there's one level where he has to shoot down an enemy helicopter using his rifle and hanging from/jumping between rockets that are being fired at said helicopter. Awesome. Another variant, mostly used in games that are quite long, is single segment running, where one does everything in a single sitting without saving or reloading.

I think the thing I like most about speed running is the fact that these people devote what must be dozens of hours to figuring out all these glitches, or mastering the timing, or whatever, and for it they get - what? Nerd respect? Possibly. People shouting "fuk u looser, ur cheter" at them on the Internet? More than likely. Basically they do it for what amounts to the love of the game. These people play the hell out of these games. And for a lot of games, it makes for a ridiculously entertaining watch.

Walking across the quad to a test for which I was unprepared, I was struck by the sudden impulse to stop and shout, "Look at me! I matter!" But as always I controlled myself and merely walked on.