Barretta

I have a problem with playing first-person shooters on the computer, and that problem is that playing a good FPS with a keyboard and mouse is like going out to pop off a few rounds, and then deciding to hold your rifle by clasping both palms around the middle of the barrel and pulling the trigger with your tongue.

Pfhor the win!

All Roads Lead To Sol, but my SPNKR and I are clearing a new path through Juggernaut and Hunter alike. Fatum iustum stultorum.

I’m up to my neck in S’pht compilers and Enforcers and have one clip left for my MA-75. Indeed… for carnage, apply within.

For your perusal, when I stopped listening to music that makes people foam at the mouth.

• I stopped caring about Radiohead after OK Computer, which was the last time I understood the band not to consist of Thom Yorke, a laptop, and seventeen million screaming sycophants.
• Achtung Baby was the last time that U2 did not make me break out into hives. If we’re going to be honest, all we really needed from U2 was a never-ending tour supporting The Joshua Tree, which was the high-water mark for a tide that is, now, apparently receding forever.
• Halfway through Funeral, I discovered I was constitutionally incapable of listening to hurdy-gurdy. Is it just me, or is it impossible for dudes in culturally incorrect flat caps not to make out with girls wearing black tights under green skirts with brown shoes when this music is played? Goodbye, Arcade Fire. You have assisted hipsters who cannot grow non-wispy hair on the middle portions of their cheeks to hook up with their female counterparts, whatever they are, and I cannot condone it, as it is weakening the gene pool.
• Björk was never good. Never good. Understand me: never good.

I live in North Carolina. I’ve lived here for more than a decade. I’ve spent most of my life in the pursuit of higher education. I was a cryptologist for the Navy who went through a linguistics school with a forty percent washout rate that is considered comparably difficult to an operational nuclear physics program. As a result, I am fluent in Arabic, and nearly conversant in Latin and French. I’m working on Greek. I intend to be a professor of classical literature. I don’t claim to be the smartest or best-educated guy on the planet; I’m not. But whatever I am, I am not unusual. I have many friends who are writers, artists, teachers, poets, engineers, professors, architects, and librarians. They live here.

Every time I hear that sneer of superiority, the unjustified egotism of the usually Northeastern urbanite who displays repulsive socioeconomic prejudice by dismissing the region I live in as uneducated, I can’t help but wonder: do you know you’re so much better? I have been to New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Miami. Wonderful places, all. When I was there, I believed in those cities, and I believed in their people. I saw homeless and the mentally ill on the streets, I saw the blatant racism and sexism displayed by catcalls and talk in the streets, and the vast gulf between the rich and the poor. But I did not blame these cities for that—because that is everywhere, not just in cities, not just in the country, even if it seems more obvious to a stranger than a friend.

This is a great country, and it’s a country I believe in, but when I turn on the television, I see my parts of the country treated as if they were worthless. This mostly by people who have never been, whose understanding of them is based on talking heads of the news media and the attitudes of their peers. The South you think you know is not mine: I live in one where we don’t spit on our countrymen. Worst, though, is I have to hear this not only from the television—which is unavoidable—but from people that I otherwise like.

People who consider themselves educated and nonjudgmental, but cannot resist speaking of my part of the country, my countrymen, and by extension me, as a group of yokels. Rednecks. Red-state gun-toting inbreds who wouldn’t know a liberal democracy if it slapped them in the face. I get that enough from people coming in from out of state, who come here for college or the arts and music scene but can’t stop sniping at the locals long enough to see this place for what it is.

The last thing I need is more of that, making me angrier, ruinin’ my good days. Do me a favor, guys, if you’ve got something further to say about this—don’t bother. I’m done with the attitude. But by way of explanation, if you get an unfollow, and you think you might have done a little of this kind of talk—might just be why.

Is there anything more satisfying than knowing that the RA you hated in college married an ugly chick?

edit: Wait, damn, never mind. He’s just dating an ugly chick. But, on the upside, she really did fall out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down.

They say, I suppose, that beauty is a fixation on surfaces, but I’m not sure that’s true. After all, when we say a girl is pretty—and not pretty in the way that makes her good to put between glossy magazine pages, selling blush or wine coolers or white capris, but pretty in a way that includes dark spots on her skin from the sun and the way the wind off the sea lays her hair wrapped flat around the slender muscles in her throat—we are saying something about how she makes us feel about ourselves. We speak of the ocean the same way, when we are at our wisest—we see the sun flash on the water as it sets and we say, “Look at how pretty the sunset is,” but really we are talking about how the sunlight through the whitecaps, the blue currents beneath, the green flash, the tireless waves, and the high wind in the purple clouds make us conscious of the deep and noble tides that draw and move our own hearts. How indiscernible vastness of beauty in the sea and sun and sky and the warmth of a lover’s breath stir unexplored depths in ourselves.

I’ve noticed that since I’ve had less activity recently that I’ve lost quite a few followers (by quite a few, I mean about a hundred or so). In order to speed this process—because honestly, most of you are pretty terrible—here are some of the unpopular opinions that I have that upset people.

• Fibromyalgia is basically bullshit.
• Things that are irredeemably stupid: tanning agents, overseas weddings, sobriety events attended by people who aren’t in AA, fur-lined soft boots/galoshes as a fashion statement, The Rules, The Game, Stephen King (oh, that one’s even going to piss off my friends), LARPing, “genuine replicas,” Anne Rice, the New York Times Bestseller List and pretty much everything on it, wearing camouflage, wearing tank tops, listing “hiking” and “the outdoors” as hobbies, hair extensions, Mumford & Sons.
• I’m not sure universal adult suffrage is a great idea. I’ve been thinking about this, and I’m thinking maybe we should pull a Heinlein and only allow people to vote if they’ve completed a term of government service. Maybe involving blind applications. Something to think about. One thing I’m definitely convinced of, your opinion shouldn’t be valid as the next guy’s just because you have a pulse.

Let the flames begin?

They ask me why I am so calculating; they ask me why I don’t express myself, express what I feel, and I say:

And I say:

I say: