Blogs - bblakeney

Well, it happened again. On virtually every news site, the grim headlines are there: "NYC Crane Collapse Kills Two." This may sound familiar - it happened a couple months ago in mid-March, when a crane by the UN Building collapsed, killing seven. In the wake of the accident (read: Fuck-Up), New York's Building's Commissioner resigned, and the building inspector in charge of the site was arrested for flubbing the site's safety inspections. Mayor Bloomberg then authorized a $4 Million program to bring in 20 specialists to inspect cranes and building operations and 'all that shit' - because what problem isn't solved by throwing money at it? They even passed a piece of legislation requiring a city building inspector to be on site whenever a crane is erected or lengthened. Of course, they rescinded the requirement, but hey! Uncle Sam knows best.

So was anybody really surprised when it happened again? To be honest, I was, a little. Surely our infallible government couldn't have allowed the unthinkable to happen TWICE. Yes, yes, they can. And do, quite often, apparently. But, in their limitless wisdom, City Officials have taken steps to make sure this doesn't happen again [againer?] - BY BANNING CRANES IN THE CITY. Fantastic. That's like saying you're banning condoms because a guy who wore one on his head got his girlfriend pregnant.

SHIT'S GONNA GO WRONG IF YOU USE IT WRONG. This is not a terribly complex endeavor. It's an over-sized Erector set that you're being paid a fuckload of money to assemble. Don't cheap out on it - 10 Grand of extra metal is worth investing in, considering the alternative is a gajillion-dollar lawsuit and jail time. In the meantime, don't ban cranes in the city. What're we gonna do, "investigate alternatives"? That seems to be virtually all the suits do these days, and you know what? It's done us about as much good as a bag of hair. If these guys could make this in 1887, and these guys could make these in 2560 B.C., then the fuck's your malfunction in 2008?

All I can say is, "Welcome to the country of attention diversion." Since the advent of civilization, politicians have known that all they have to do is wave something shiny, expensive, pretty, or breast-y in the face of the public, and they're as good as distracted. Yeah, it sucks that the only way to forget about the last fucked-up thing is for us to be confronted with an even more fucked-up one, but such is the mechanism we've let 'em create. Oh, well. Maybe soon they'll cut to the chase and we can just give them the money so it doesn't cost anymore lives.

--b

Well, I just updated the Survivor page. Life's been hectic lately, so I haven't been terribly compelled to work on the project, but I got inspired recently. I've got some of the script done, so then it's going to go down to making myself a sandbox level and seeing what I can code.

You can check out the update and the mod here.

Cheers!

--blakes

I was watching Cinemax the other night (late) and after Serpico they aired this priceless ad for 300. 

A couple goes through a toll booth, and ask the attendant if this is Jersey. The attendant, a portly, bald Arab-type looks at the man driving and they get into an exchange quoting lines from 300. It ends with the guy going, "THIS... IS... SPARTA!" And then, after a beat of the girl in the passenger seat looking thoroughly puzzled at the male-ness, the guy goes, "Yeah, this is Jersey."

Priceless.

 If anybody's seen this, send me a link if you know where I can find it! If you haven't, just get Cinemax. It's so worth it. 

Well, yesterday, I took shrooms for the first time in ages. My friend came back from Santa Cruz two weeks ago with about an eighth of huge caps and stems, although we couldn't meet up until yesterday. Now, I've got a fairly fierce cold, but shrooms are probably my favorite drug, so I took some anyway. He told me they were amazing; very visual and, quite frankly, "the shit". I started out with a single cap, because like I said, it's been ages. So when, after a half an hour, nothing had happened, I got a little suspicious - not to mention over-eager. About half the bag and an hour later, I started feeling it kick in. A little loopy feeling in my head, colors and shapes blending together, but it still didn't take me where I wanted to go. So I took the rest of the bag. Why not? I thought, Gerrit was full of shit - these are weak. An hour later, and I was tripping to beat the band. I turned on some Massive Attack, and I actually started seeing the songs. I was playing Hitman: Blood Money, but I just aimed at the ground and watched the wall textures move in and out of each other in intricate green and black swirls. Then I got hungry. So I stumbled into the kitchen, and of course, my dad's in there cooking something for himself. I ask him what he's making, he says "Toast and Tea." I, of course, found this extremely hilarious and start laughing and saying the words over and over again.

But then it stopped being fun. Headache, nausea, frustration, the whole nine yards. I didn't puke, thankfully, but I got one of the fiercest cases of the spins ever. I lay down, but the room was still moving around me. Tried to go to sleep, no luck. It was just this never-ending merry-go-round on my bed. I have a sneaking suspicion that the prolonged consumption was what did me in - you know, a tiny bit, then a big bit, then the rest of the bag over the course of two hours. I ended up watching three movies while I was trying to fall asleep, and now I feel horrible. Argh, drugs. 

So I'm trying to figure out how to word this blog post. My ex-girlfriend is visiting me from out of state and I thought I'd share that on the blog, but I'm trying very hard to leave out any incriminating details. Which is decidedly tough, because you know my name. Anyway, as soon as I make it make sense (I've written it, but I haven't edited it enough. I generally don't edit my posts, but then, I generally don't write about other people close to me), I'll post it.

 Pace (italian; pronounced PAH-chay, means 'peace') 

So just after I stopped posting last night/this morning, I was conking out in bed when I got a serious stomach cramp. I got this crazy sweat going and I started shaking, so I decided to walk the forty paces to the crapper, but as I'm going there, I pass out for about five seconds and crack my head against the wall. Grabbing my head and dead on my feet, I shuffled into the bathroom, and tore through my medicine cabinet to find some Pepto. And I was out of it! Son of a bitch. So before I have time to think, my gut thrashes again and I leap six feet onto the toilet just in the nick of time. The hot water bottle's in the other bathroom, so I try to reach the faucet for the bath, but my gut's blowing smoke. As I'm hammering out on the toilet, I'm reaching for the faucet, trying to keep my ass over the bowl as I run the bath. Suffice it to say, I didn't do an amazing job. So after the first bout of explosions, the ice-cold sweat kicks in again and I have to get in the tub. So I'm sitting in the bath with my shirt still on, waiting for the hot water to reach my stomach, when suddenly the bends kick in again. I lurch up to hop out of the tub and onto the toilet when I slip on the bottom of the bath and land straight on my ass. Now, I'm not a heavy guy, but the force of my weight was apparently enough to make my butt loosen up, resulting in me pulling an inverse tubgirl all over the bathroom. So here I sit, sweating and shaking in a bathtub filled with feces, wondering how the hell I'm going to start cleaning this up. Not one of my happier experiences. 

 So today I did nothing but smoke cigarettes, drink Pedialyte and eat Oyster Crackers, quite the cure when you couple them with True Crime: NYC and Just Cause. Both of those games are pretty terrible, but they've each got some cool elements that make them worth playing.  I'd write more, but I'm still pretty damned shaky on account of having emptied my body of every loose stool and fluid in it via my asshole. 

Hasta Manana. 

Well, once again, I can't sleep. I'm watching Chato's Land, a cool old movie where Charles Bronson plays an Apache being hunted for the murder of a racist sheriff. Bronson's jacked in the movie, even though he's 51. It's got some really powerful undertones to it, though - some of the members of the lynch mob formed to take him in start doubting their mission, especially when the civilized hunters show themselves to be more barbaric than the prey. But so far, Charlie's laying siege to 'em pretty well. :) The movie's giving me some good inspiration for Survivor; Chato (Bronson's character) has to ambush and kill the vigilantes any way he can, despite their superior numbers. Then they make an example of his friend - the only way they have to put the squeeze on him. The whole movie's this crazy microcosm of our society. The mob curse Chato for being an animal and a savage, but they rape his wife and burn his friend alive. They also fight amongst themselves, giving some insight into what a life-and-death situation can do to a group when things aren't going as planned.

I found a pack of 27s in a jacket I hadn't worn in a couple weeks, but I've gone through half of 'em already. I don't know why I smoke so much - maybe it's because I've been trying to quit. 

I drew some sketches up for Survivor, and as I was working on them, I thought of some cool story hooks for the mod. Has anybody heard about Real ID? It's basically a national ID card similar to the papers in the phrase "your papers, sir," uttered by pretty much every Nazi ever in film. It's not a passport, which we use to identify ourselves as members of a nation when we travel to other countries. It's not a driver's license, which we use as proof of our ability to drive. It's a document used to limit our freedom, a card used to track us wherever we go that can be accessed by any computer tied into the national database which - should they have their way - would be any DMV in the country. Not only that, but it consolidates all your records - Social Security information, Birth Certificate, Driver's License no., Passport Information, Travel History, Voting Registration - EVERYTHING, into one little card. You hack ONE DMV in Bumfuck, Kansas, and you have access to any human being living in the country. Scary, huh? Well, you can get the truth over here at RealNightmare. Don't worry, I'm not affiliated with them, and the link opens up in a new window. That's another thing that fucking pisses me off - when external links open up right on top of what I'm reading. 

Holy Shit, Bronson just plopped one of the guys who raped his wife on the trail the mob's heading down - except he set his dick on fire. Crazy shit. I'm gonna try to sleep now.

 Peace. 

So I've been trying to figure out what I should use for my avatar. I found it really hard to do - it's kind of like those personality profiles where you're supposed to sum up your entire twenty years of experience into a little subject line. 50 Pixels... That's like ten words, tops! Maybe more like five! So when it came down to it, I really didn't know what I should put there. What tiny image defines me as a person? I swear, nothing's easy in this world. I know this: I like to drive, I like action movies, I like mixed martial arts, but I also like poetry, and paintings, and sensitive crap like that. How can I capture that in a little logo? So I scoured the web using everything that I could think of: cars, girls, music, paintings, art, metal slug gifs, the ace of spades, all of it. Finally, I came up with my brand new avatar, a painting by Roy Lichtenstein called "In The Car". It's pretty awesome; aside from Roy Lichtenstein being one of my favorite artists, I figure the picture is pretty darn close to everything I want to sum up. There's a full-size one here, I'm sure you can figure out what I cropped and edited.