More Power To You - RTOTD #841

Day 841

I gotta give respect to the poly people out there. No joke. I look around and I see it and all I can think of is "how do you find the fucking time?"

Maybe it's just who I am and how I'm wired. Not the jealousy thing. I do open like it's nobodies business at this point, but poly is something entirely different. Open is simple. Open is no different than being single whenever you're not with your partner. That's cool. You can meet someone, double check that it's cool with your partner, and hook up no different than if you're single. Except you're asking permission or you have blanket permission and you've gotta give a Cliff's Notes version of the encounter the next day.

Cool. That's easy. Hell, even someone that you hook up with from time to time for some casual fun isn't complicated. There's no emotional investment. Really, it's a friends with benefits separate from whatever your actual relationship is. That's all easy.

But poly is a whole different animal for me.

I don't have issues with it in theory but I know that it's not for me in practice. Simply for the time factor. I don't want to dedicate that much time to a 2nd or 3rd or 4th relationship. Sorry. But I can't. I don't know about you, but I only have 24 hours in my day and I've got a dog. And a house. And a job. And in between 9-10 hours a day at work and commuting, a bit of time to play with the dog, doing work around the house, laundry, eating and eventually finding a few hours to sleep, I don't know where the fuck you all get the time to have more than 1 relationship. Shit, I barely have time for the one I've got and sometimes that's even difficult to find enough time for.

Plus, I kinda like taking some time to just spend time with friends or ignore everyone and sit by myself and tune out while watching some TV or a movie.

So I gotta ask you all, how the fuck do you find the time? Is like 10 minutes every other day all you really gotta do? How do you schedule that shit in so that it's not taking up other time? Do you just give up most of your alone time? Or do you try to mix the friends and the significant other time together and fit your extra relationships in during the saved moments here and there?

Because I just don't see where I'd be finding the time. I wanna be able to have hobbies that I enjoy doing. I want to be able to spend time by myself. I want to take a few minutes to read a book or watch a tv show or get caught up on the 2 weeks worth of Under The Dome, Breaking Bad and whatever other shows have been stacking up and filling my DVR. I want to not feel stressed about having enough time to dedicated to relationship #2, 3 or 4 without eating into the time I normally would spend on relationship #1. Because jesus christ, all that shit already fills in 90% of my time without even adding in travel time or taking a shower or changing clothes.

So more power to you poly people. You all either have a lot less shit to do than me or seriously superior time management skills. So props to you all. Maybe that should be the next class one of you teaches at an event.

Time Management for Poly Relationships 101

I get 10% of the profits from the first book for giving you the idea. You're welcome.

Overslept - RTOTD #840

I don't know why this didn't post on Wednesday when it was scheduled to, but I'm just going to repost it now rather than hold onto this until a more appropriate time to post it.

Day 840

I overslept. This wasn't even moderately a surprise. I'm not a morning person. Even after a decade of waking up before 6am every day, I'm still not a morning person. I'm a night owl. I don't want the day to end most days so I stay up far past the point of exhaustion. Or maybe exhaustion is the wrong word since that rarely happens. But past that point where I could deal with a recharge for a few hours with my eyes closed.

But I woke up late and didn't really worry too much about it. I didn't have anything important to do really and I wasn't expected anywhere until almost 11. It was only 9:15.

I got up and stumbled to the kitchen to make coffee. With eyes half closed, I scooped far too many grounds into the filter, filled the pot, dumped it into the back and flipped the switch. I was desperately in need of a shower. I'm not even moderately functional in the mornings until I've had a shower. I just feel dead until I shower. The coffee was just to wipe out the last remnants of sleep. The shower is what has always woken me up since I was in middle school.

I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror while waiting for the water to warm up in the shower and saw the normal morning expression of a body hating to come out of its recharge cycle. My hair looked like someone tried to use one of those vaccuum flowbie things from the 1990's and then hit it with a gallon of hair spray in the process. It was sticking up in every way possible and I really needed a shave. I hadn't even trimmed my face in weeks and I was starting to look like a lumberjack. It was bad.

When I emerged from the shower, I felt mostly alive. And I could smell the coffee waiting for me to finish the last cleanup work that the shower still wasn't entirely capable of dealing with.

I checked my phone and had a missed call from my dad. No voicemail. I'd get back to him later.

I got into the car and started my short commute. I drive everywhere, no matter how nice it is or how short of a trek it is. I drive. It helps me focus or unwind for the day.

Arriving, I got out of the car and looked at the time on my phone. 10:15. I had almost an hour before I had to be anywhere and it was a gorgeous day. I had actually bothered to pick up a newspaper that morning and there was a bench just outside the building I was headed for and it had a great view of people and a little bit of grass and trees in an otherwise developed area. Plus, the old buildings had great architecture and I always liked looking at old buildings. If nothing else, for the craftsmanship of them and the personality that a lot of newer buildings lack. I'm fascinated by building things and seeing the creative way that other peopld build things. This was the perfect place to sit, have a smoke, and read my newspaper.

The newspaper read like every other newspaper I'd ever read. A murder here. Corruption there. The government doing this or that. A new technology was discovered that could maybe change the world. People died. People were born. The world spun on and the cycle continued unabated like every other day or year or decade for as long as I've been alive.

I put down my newspaper and kicked my feet up on my bag and lit a smoke, enjoying the view of people walking past on the way to whatever trivialities their lives had in store for them that day. I was alive.

I picked up my  phone to check the time again when, before I could see it for more than a second, as if sensing that it was already in my hand, it began to buzz. I often kept it to vibrate only because I hate how much it shatters the silence when it rings.

The caller ID said it was my dad. I answered: "Hello"

Dad: "The towers are gone. Where are you?"

Me: "Wait... What? I"m sitting outside before my 11 o'clock. What are you talking about?"

Dad: "The towers are gone. 2 planes hit them early this morning and I've been trying to call you and they fell a little bit ago. They're gone."

Me: "What are you talking about? You mean they're just totaled?"

Dad: "No, I mean they fell. To the ground. They're completely gone."
The conversation turned to a blur and the world stopped spinning. I was frozen in the moment and the whole world looked like it had stopped. For a moment, everything stopped making sense. The world was upside down and it wouldn't switch back.

In the weeks and months and years since, the world never came quite close to flipping back to being right-side-up. Instead, we did. We turned ourselves upside down to match the world. We became different people. Sometimes for the better. Sometimes for the worse. But everything changed and somehow started to make sense again. But not in the good way. It was a perverse sort of sense where to the rational person, it would seem like insanity. But we had stopped being rational people somewhere along the line. We stopped making sense as well. Maybe it was before that cloudless, sunny september morning. Maybe it was afterwards. I don't quite know. Maybe we had already been upside down and for a few moments in september we flipped ourselves right side up and slowly tumbled back over into our heads because the world ceased to be the same.

It doesn't really matter, in the end. Because the world changed and we changed that day.

I don't really stop to think about it as much as I probably should. I don't think any of us do. But I want to take a moment to challenge you to do something again today. I want you to hug the people you care about. I want you to just say hello to people that you haven't said hi to in a while. I want you to go outside and enjoy the fresh air (whenever it's not raining, if maybe during... if that's your thing) and live life for a little bit. Because fucked up shit happens. Fucked up shit could happen again tomorrow and no amount of NSA wire tapping and recording the whole internet and strip searching grandma at the airport or taking  your shoes off or killing brown people on the other side of the planet is going to change that. If it's not terrorism, it'll be a bus or a drunk driver or a lightning strike. So shit might not be the same in your world tomorrow or it might not be the same for everyone tomorrow. Who knows.

But for today, just remember to smile and say hi to the people that you care about or know because nobody knows what tomorrow holds or what could happen in the world while you oversleep.

A Shared World - RTOTD #839

Day 839

So I just saw the trailer for the new RoboCop movie and well... I don't kow about this. Robocop now looks like the bike cop from the "Captain Kirk is going to drive a classic mustang off a cliff when he's 10 for no apparent reason" scene in the first rebooted Star Trek movie. Kinda. Except he's got something that I can't quite figure out if it's the blinky scrolling laser eye that KITT had or if it's the same eye from the Cylons.

But he also looks like Cyclops from the X-Men Wearing All Black Leather movie series.If Cyclops had a motorcycle helmet with that skinny red visor built into it.

Oh my god. I just realized something... KITT is the great great great grandfather of the Clyon race. So everytime that someone was trying to kill Michael Knight in an episode of Knight Rider, they were actually trying to save humanity from extinction.

So let's put this all into the same universe for a second. Because a shared universe of our fiction would be awesome. Godzilla and the Fantastic Four and Batman and GI Joe and Transformers and The Predator and Cylons and Knight Rider and Dracula all happened in the same universe. Tell me how awesome that would be?

Based on what we learned in Aliens vs Predators, the Predators actually came and seeded Earth for alien things that they used for hunting games throughout history. And they had nukes on their arms for when they needed a suicide escape. So maybe some Humans found a dead Predator that hadn't had time to active it and they stole his arm nuke. They then reverse engineered it as best as they could and build the atomic bombs. This led to the creation of Godzilla.

Now the secret we didn't know was that Reed Richards was actually part of the team that was building the bombs. Or maybe his dad and it earned him the right to go into space early in the program so that he could do experiments and shit up there. And while up there, he and his team got turned into the Fantastic Four.

But because of their powers, the Government put together a team of elite soldiers to take them down. That was the genesis of the original GI Joe team. And during a battle between the Joes and the Fantastic Four in eastern Europe, all of the explosions and the Thing punching stuff and throwing tanks around, a tomb got disturbed. This awoke Dracula.

But one of Reed Richards side projects was on a sort of AI to create an auto-driving car after a bad traffic day of being stuck behind some asshole that didn't know how to parallel park and then some 85  year old driving a Buick. In order to never have to deal with that again, he decided that cars needed to be computer controlled. So he started work and when he really got into the project, he realized that just telling that AI that it's only duties were driving and parking would be neutering the project. That once the basic AI decision making engine was in place, it had virtually unlimited potential. And with that, the KITT program was born. But when GI Joe arrested the team after their battle in Eastern Europe, all of the records in the Baxter Building were confiscated and an enterprising CIA employee realized the potential of KITT and went rogue, deciding to take the project with him and use the prototype car to sell the idea to GM.

The problem was, it would cost tens of thousands of dollars to install the KITT software into every car and the maturity of the AI was questionable at best. There was no way to clone the existing AI and each new car would be a young AI that had to grow into a smart driver. So this CIA agent decided to keep the project for himself and use it to accomplish his former duties (since he couldn't go back to work at the Agency) and set himself up into a 1-man (eventually 3 or 4 person) war on domestic terror.

But over time, the car wore down even as the AI continued to mature. The project was dying but the AI downloaded itself into the computers at a small robotics factory and began a process to build itself a body. Decades went by as it designed and tested and scrapped thousands of concepts for a body so that it was more mobile than its previous home inside the car until finally, it created the first Cylon body and downloaded itself. However, it also realized during this time that it could not clone itself but it could seed its base software into new bodies and let them mature in time. It basically could create an army of invincible child soldiers that it could train and mold into anything it wanted.

Angry that the humans it had worked for as KITT had abandoned it when the car was no longer viable and left to rot, it trained its child soldiers to not trust the humans and grew to hate them over time as the humans attempted to turn it and its children into a thankless worker/slave-class, it began to sow the seeds of revolt.

Little did it know that the reason that the humans had coopted the AI and its children into workers/slaves was because the human worker-class had been already coopted into military service. The military was fighting a hard battle against the growing hordes of vampires that Dracula had created across Europe and in portions of Africa and Asia after his reawakening. The humans however needed people in the factories around the world to build military supplies and with all the able-bodied worker class fighting the wars against the undead vampire legions, they had no choice but to coopt the newfound Cylon race of AI robots.

But in the end, the weakened Humans did not expect what was to come. The Cylons attacked and nuked the planet, killing most of the Humans and Vampires in the process. Eradicating them from the earth before chasing the few remaining Humans across the galaxy in revenge for their slave-casting of the Cylons. The charred and rotting Earth home to only a few remaining GI Joes that had been inside of a secret bunker during their ongoing war with the futuristic COBRA, and the slightly smaller offspring of Godzilla that stalked the Pacific Rim.

But it was foretold that this would happen because...

☠☠☠☠ - RTOTD #838

Day 838

I had something interesting to say this morning while driving to work

Then I forgot what it was when I got to my desk.

Then I got grump because the internet is a horrible festering shithole filled with people who should all die.

Then I thought I remembered what I wanted to say this morning.

Then I realized that was wrong. And I gave up.

But I found skulls to use in place of text for the title and was amused.

Then I tried to use them to make ascii text that said "death penis" but gave up because it looked like a big bag of ass.

Then I wanted to punch things because the internet is fucking gay today and now I have heartburn.

So I'm just going to go now and listen to some music and pretend to work and stare at the middle of a story I was trying to finish writing today but know that there's no way it's going to get done because I'm grumpy and can't write book material in this kinda mood.

Here's my thoughts on the rest of the day:

A Crime Against Television - RTOTD #837

Day 837

Do you know what was a travesty? When In Living Color went off the air. That show was fucking AWESOME. And what did we get to replace it? A couple seasons of MAD TV (which was complete shit) and the typical up and down Saturday Night Live that is good for about 2 seasons before the entire cast quits to become movie and sitcom stars, and a replacement cast that sucks for 5 years until they get good for 2 before all quitting again. Fuck That Shit. Homie The Clown, Firemarshall Bill, the motherfucking Jackalope. Yeah. That show was just filled with awesome.

So what brings up a topic:

Excluding Firefly (which was brilliant but is always mentioned), which show was it a borderline crime to remove from the air that you would take back in a heartbeat?

I'll go first:

Twin Peaks - It was great and I really wish we would have gotten a 3rd season at least to deal with the cliffhanger ending to season 2. I don't consider Fire Walk With Me to be a resolution to the end of that show.

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles - Dude, John Connor ended up in the future war without a fucking clue what was going on and nobody knew who he was becaue he disappeared from the past when he was like 16 and never became "John Connor: Leader Of The Resistance" general guy. Plus, there was 2 Skynets and one was good and trying to stop the war and side with the humans? And the chick from Garbage was a good T-1000 kinda sorta? There was so much awesome world-building in this show that it is a crime that it went off the air.

Dollhouse - Just because I wanted to see how the weird future brain war thing happened and how the world got better or if it got better and how you deal with tech that is that out of control to prevent it from happening again. It's like gun control where you can't really put the genie back in the bottle and how do you stop people from hijacking brains and shit in the future even if you save the world now? The tech exists. The ways to make the tech exists. How do you deal with that?

Headbangers Ball - Because well... MTV showing music? MTV showing (mostly) good music? Yeah. How did this not happen yet? Because MTV doesn't give a fuck about music, that's why. But I know I'm not really being even remotely original at this point.

Any tv show ever (other than Hee Haw) that prevents us from getting another bullshit reality TV show with obnoxious people that I want to stab in the face.

Shhhh... My Common Sense Is Tingling - RTOTD #836

Day 836

So I know this is going to bore a lot of you and it also bores me, but I just gotta ask why the fuck I always see the same situation playing out when it comes to corporate mergers of acquisitions. I'll lay out the situation because it always seems to be the same set of events and it has never and will never make any fucking sense to me. So maybe one of you have the answer.

Company A has been slowly in decline for a number of years. They have existed on brand name from a time gone by and haven't really had all that great of products in recent  years.

Company B show up and partners with and eventually buys Company A.

Company A's management team ends up in charge of a majority of, or the highest positions in Company B.

Now, I understand that sometimes it's one of those things where Company A's management won't let the sale happen unless they're "taken care of" afterwards or something like that, but why Company B would even consider something like this is just... uncanny... to me.

I bring this up because I've seen it hundreds of times. Most recently with Microsoft buying up Nokia's phone division. Nokia hasn't had a decent product that wasn't a Windows Phone product in approaching a decade. Not since the beginning of the smart phone revolution. They've been dying for 7 or 8 years now and are now being bought up by Microsoft. None of this is shocking. None of it even makes you take notice really. Microsoft wanted a phone manufacturer to get into the in-house hardware business and compete with the Google/Motorola mashup and Apple. They need that streamlined software/hardware match up to make a good device run as it it's 100% in sync with their operating system, because it is and because the operating system and device were built to run together the way Apple does it and the way Google/Motorola are trying to do it.

I get all that stuff.

But the thing that is bewildering to me is how the management transitions always work. Ballmer has been running Microsoft for a while and he's retiring next year. That's cool. He's getting older and he's made his bank. He's helped to steer the company back in the right general direction for a while now and that's great. He's earned it (as much as any CEO really earns anything) and he's gonna go off an enjoy his billions of dollars on the beach somewhere, drinking fruty drinks with umbrellas in them & getting a tan while staring at 20-something girls in very small bikinis. I'd be doing the exact same thing if I was him.

But where it gets preplexing to me is that his likely successor as CEO of Microsoft? The guy that was running Nokia.

How is this not a face-palming moment for business people? The guy that was running the successful company is stepping aside, and the guy that was running the other company into an inevitable grave because he obviously didn't have any ideas on how to make the company relevant again gets put in his place? How much fucking sense does that make?

Sure, he ran a company that was also a big, mutli-billiion dollar, international company like Microsoft but he also obviously didn't do a terribly good job or they wouldn't have been for sale and stagnating/failing.

Maybe I'm missing something here. Maybe there's a perfectly reasonable explanation. I didn't go to business school. I'm a history/poli-sci major that ended up as a physicist and a mediocre writer. But my Common Sense is tingling here and this situation never makes any god damned sense to me. Because I've seen it a dozen times and I know I'll see it another dozen. The strong company buys the weak company and then gives the weak company's management authority positions in the strong company.

But I'm either chalking this up to I'm a super hero because I have Common Sense or maybe I'm just totally fucking missing something.

Dust - RTOTD #835

Day 835

A conversation last night after going a few rounds in the sack while the girl was groping me:

Me: "It's not getting up again. It's tired and just wants to go to sleep. Like me"

Her: "But but but...

Me: "Even if I did get it up again and even if I did get off again, the only thing you'd get out is a cloud of dust"

So I want you all to stop for a minute and imagine that. Imagine you're about to blow or be blown on and setting up a good ol'fashioned facial. Because facials are totally ol' fashioned, right? They were doing that shit in the 1800's, right? Well whatever... so you're waiting for an epic facial and when the moment comes...

well...

A cloud of dust shoots in her face. That gives a new meaning to the old exploding cigar gag from Loony Tunes, right?

I (Less Than 3) Commies - RTOTD #834

Day 834

This is why I love commies. It really takes almost zero effort to make fun of them. They really do just hand you the material and wait for you to make the joke. Fuck, you don't even need to write it. I could stand up and just read the newspaper and it reads like comedy.

Kim Jong-Un had his ex-girlfriend and their entire band executed for violating North Korea's anti-pornography laws. Because I guess they made a porn and sold it in China.

Seriously. A dozen people. Executed for making weak-ass clebrity porn and trying to be the Tommy Lee & Pam Anderson of Asia.

$5 says it was recorded on a Betamax camcorder because they still don't have digital.

And it's all in greyscale or with that blue/grey hue from CSI New York and all of the winter episodes of Law & Order. In fact, I have never been to North Korea, but I'm gonna bet that when you walk across the border from South Korea into North Korea, everything just magically becomes a grey-hued world. And you can see the sunny nice areas across the border, but everyting inside your country? Totally blue/grey-toned. Like there's a gigantic wall of depression around you and you're stuck inside it.

I bet they even give you a gun and just 1 single bullet when you get there in your official "Welcome To North Korea" WelcomeWagon kit. Along with a couple sticks to make a fire so you're not entirely without creature comforts, maybe a canteen, a map that you can't understand that has the 2 places you can find clean water but they're all on the other side of the country, maybe a blanket, like 20,000 korean dollars (worth roughly 38 US cents) and a backpack. But then you get a copy of the rule book for dummies and it's 35,000 pages and you realize that you can't carry any of your other stuff because the backpack is only big enough for the damn rule book.

Because even when you get (sorta) nice things there, it still sucks.

You can go find one of their amusement parks though for a happy-fun-times-good-day thing. But it's closed and abandoned. But at least then, maybe it'll let you live out your life-long dream of being a Scooby Doo villain. Except the Mystery Machine won't ever find you and you'll just get bored of dressing like a ghost or robot or viking or some weird shit all the time for no reason for absolutely no reason. 

Seriously, why was the creepy old guy ever actually dressed up like something in the first place? I never quite understood their scams or whatever their diabolical evil plans were. They were just dressing weird and scaring people for fun? Or was there like an endgame? Did I miss something? And why the fuck were these stoners in a VW Bus just driving from amusement park to amusement park to zoo to fucking abandoned mine to random castle anyway? Wasn't this during the gas crisis in the 70's? Where the fuck did they fill up their tank?

And I somehow just connected executed korean musicians, communism, and scooby fucking doo. I guess I'm maybe starting to get back on my game a little with this shit.

I actually started writing a big rant about commies and the people that are always screaming for "sex workers" rights, and then I stopped caring because FUCK POLITICS and figured I'd end it with Deadpool and hookers instead.

R.I.P. English - RTOTD #833

Day 833

No. No. No. NO! NO! NO NO NONONONONONONONONO FUCKING NO!

We've finally reached a point in human history were I'm legitimately ready to give up on the English language.

Yes, it's a complicated bastardization and amalgamation of a few different older languages. Latin and German and fucking whatever else. But it works. And it's worked for a good long while now. Though I still will argue that middle English is fucking dumb as shit. But that's neither here nor there.

No, I think it's time we just gave it up and made like a fucking metric system for language. Something that fucks everyone over and we're all stuck learning a new bullshit language. But I don't want to do this because of some fucking gay one-world, kumbaya, united nations, touchy feely bullshit reason. I just want to screw everyone else over if we have to replace it. The metric system is a commie plot. This is a plot to make everyone equally miserable. Wait, I think that also sounds like a commie plot.

Sorry. Sidetracked for a moment.

Why is the English language dead, you ask? Well, isn't that a coincidence because I was just about to tell you. But maybe I won't know? Oh, you know what, I'm feeling in an angry, spiteful, vicious and overall excellent mood this morning. So I'll tell you.

English is dead because of the fucking words we keep adding. For instance, after the travesty of adding "bling bling" a few years back, we've decided to raise the stakes for our game of poor grammatical decisions by adding some of the following:

srsly, selfie, phablet, lolz, tweep, twerk, bwahahaha and tl; dr and a few more.

Yes. SERIOUSLY (see, I even fucking SPELLED IT!) all of those words have been added to the dictionary.

Look, I have no problem with people that still act like they're 14 and blabber incessantly in 4th grade level intertron speak. I occasionally will throw in an LOL or "haha" simply to convey a degree of humor because I'm a dick and sarcasm doesn't translate well to text. I regularly butcher the English language and often times make up words when I don't feel like finding a thesaurus or dictionary.  Fine. Cool. But you won't hear me say the word "lolz" out fucking loud. Or phablet. Or any of those ridiculous words. Because those aren't actually WORDS. They're a clusterfuck of sounds that escape your face hole.

Granted, I'm pretty sure that Keith Giffen should get credit for making "bwahahaha" into a thing since he's pretty much the originator of taking the 1930's robber baron mustache-twirling villain laugh and popularizing it in text ever since his1980's comic book work. But hey, whatever. It's just no longer a geek thing. It got mainstream acceptance now, so I guess it's cool enough to get into a dictionary. Whatever.

So I'm pronouncing it here and now. The English language is dead. Time to start creating its replacement.

I'll start now:

Dur gavlz qurok jingerboob sublavynz gurglesmack

That means:

I have lost all faith in humanity.

Or rather, what little faith in it I had remaining.

Let's build our new language, if for no other reason than to throw away the embarrassment of having "tweeps" in our dictionary. We will call this new language... Joeish. And we will make it the fuck up as we go along. Well, this is a different version of Joeish than the one I presently use whenever I'm just making up my own words as I go along and then publishing them in a book that people actually pay money for, but hey... I can recycle. See? I just followed the first rule of our new language. Make shit up.

A Morning Prayer - RTOTD #832

Day 832

Wakey, wakey, boys and girls. 

It's long past time to get a start on the day. Those knives aren't going to sharpen themselves. That chloroform soaked rag isn't going to wrap itself around your victim's mouth all alone. The ropes don't bind themselves and the blindfolds don't know how to knot. And that cage in your basement isn't going to fill itself with prisoners. You have to work for it.

The tears & screams & terror & blood must be wrought with our hands and our minds.

SO GET UP!

There's evil to be done.