Dear Woman Standing In Front Of Me In Line At Arby’s Who “Can’t Wait” To Try The New French Onion Beef & Swiss Sandwich,

I know what you’re thinking, lady. It’s 12:30 and we’re both in line at Arby’s in the food court at the Merchandise Mart. We’re in the same boat here. We’ve paid for our food and are clutching our receipts, occassionally looking at the number at the top and wondering how long it’s going to be before we’re sinking our teeth into a delectable mix of beef, swiss cheese and, of course, onions. We’re both hungry, both on our lunch breaks. But that is where the similarites end, because you evidently “can’t wait” to try the new French Onion Beef & Swiss Sandwich.

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It’s over, folks. Seriously. This has gone far enough.

I’ve been a video game dork for pretty much my entire life. I’ve had a computer since I was probably 7 years old. I played Oregon Trail and all the early Sierra adventure games. I had an Intellivision and an NES. I blew it with the next generation and got a Turbo Grafx. I never had a Super Nintendo or a Playstation. Hell, I just now got a Playstation 2. Okay, I kind of suck with buying consoles, to be honest. Seriously. Who the fuck buys a Dreamcast? Whatever. The point is that I’ve been a gamer my whole life, and this is the first time I’ve felt like video games might actually be bad news.

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I spent all week poking around on the internet, looking for something that rules. Then all of the sudden, at 5 o’clock on a Friday, I stumble across a video of dogs moving really slowly to pulsating dance music. Someone is looking after me. Thank you, whoever you are.

slow dogs (via WFMU’s Beware of the Blog)

… and that was the last time he ever bonged red wine! Anyway, enough fun, people. Let’s get down to business and figure this thing out. Hey, relax you guys, will you? I was just kidding about the “enough fun” thing. You look like a couple of scared kids. Any of you guys want a beer? Something harder? There’s some pills in that box right there. Go nuts.

Not you, Zig.

Anyway, the record is going over like a cream dream, boys! We’ve been hoppin’ and boppin’ to it all around the office for days. Even the interns are asking about it! It’s got the goods! Cool but clean, rebellious but radio friendly… I think we could milk a good 3 or 4 hits out of it, to be honest. In this industry, we say a great record has to “pop.” Well guess what, guys? This record pops. Hell, this record does more that pop. It pizzops. I don’t go in for all that “izzle” crap, but it’s true. This record’s got the pizzops, baby! Anyway, the label is totally psyched to work with you guys, and we really, totally want to make this thing happen, I can’t stress that enough, but, well, there’s a problem.

It’s your name.

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– Assistant Producer, Editorial

– Copywriter for website (rolling meadows)

– Editor, writer, content manager

– Assistant Editor

– Freelance Research and Writing (Chicago)

– Managing Editor Position

– Assistant Internet Copy Editor

– Magazine Editors/Writers

– magazine layout (west town)

– Video game columnist (Chicago, Il)

– ISO experienced writers to write reviews of pre-released music albums (Chicago)

– Print Production Assistan (Chicago Loop)

Jack Bauer has done a lot. He’s killed like a billion dudes and he’s really good at stopping terrorism. He can triangulate the shit out of pretty much anything and sets up a hard perimeter like nobody’s business. Oh, and he’s good with like every weapon ever and he knows how to disable nuclear warheads and one time he got addicted to heroin when he was undercover busting a drug cartel. Now he can tack another line onto his already-impressive resume: selling japanese snack thingees.

I was sitting on my actual couch in my actual living room watching a Kelly Clarkson video on MTV, when all of the sudden it hit me: I should not be doing this. I should be doing something proactive, something that means something. I should participate in the beautiful cycle of creation and destruction, darkness and lightness and rising and falling and golly… it’s like a dance, isn’t it? I walked to the bay windows in my apartment and watched the cars go by. A plastic bag caught a gust of wind and soared majestically through the ether. I thought about Baudelaire and made a promise to myself: I will look up Baudelaire and find out who he is. Then I sat down in my swivel chair, logged in, and started looking around. Luckily, it didn’t take long to find the object of my desire.

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It’s called “Good Tattoo, Bad Tattoo.” Let’s start.

Korn saved my life, bro. This way I’ll never forget that. The signatures were traced off a t-shirt I got at the mall. If my dad sees it he’ll beat the fucking shit out of me, but fuck it – I’m totally gonna move out soon anyway. When I’m sixteen i’m gonna get legally emancipated and then I’ll get an apartment where I can do whatever the fuck I want and listen to Korn as loud as I want and nobody can say shit about it. Fuck, I gotta go. Meet me in the parking lot at Taco Bell later… we can pop some adderalls and go light a fire in the park.

I don’t have anything snide to say about this because it’s the best tattoo I’ve ever seen. Seriously. The babe is smokin’ and gameboys are cool. I’d like it if maybe tetris was on the screen or something, but whatever. Maybe if there were flames in the background or there were like some skeleton hands PLAYING the gameboy that could make it better, but it’s pretty much fine the way it is. This tattoo rules.

When I told my girlfriend Jo that I was going to ironically sign up for an MMORPG, she scoffed. “Yeah, right,” she said. “See ya in a month.” I tried to tell her that no, she had it all wrong. No! This was going to be hilarious! An MMORPG! Ha! I really felt (and still do feel, to a certain extent) that there was no way I was going to get sucked in and end up playing in earnest. And yet here I am now, three or four days later, kind of speeding through this blog so I can log back on. That’s probably a bad sign, but it’s easy to rationalize away as an inclination to do “more research.”I also mentioned the game to my friend Leif, an avid MMORPG player with a particular penchant for Final Fantasy Online (parenthetical footnote: I interviewed him once about Final Fantasy – check it out here.)

“Yeah dude, it’s pretty cool. Everything in the game is created by players in the game, so it’s pretty much anything goes,” I said.

“Oh, cool. So it’s like The Sims Online, but actually fun,” he said.

“Yeah. It’s like The Sims Online, but with porn.”

Speaking of porn, Wired featured an article recently on the phenomenon of in-game porn (link). Seems that a couple of in-game entrepeneurs took it upon themselves to create a porno mag in the game by hiring female players in the game (or players who claim to be female, anyway) to pose for pictures, then created a porno mag object in the game which they are now selling. Not that I’m personally interested or anything… I’m just saying, you know, it exists… cough.

So anyway, I told Leif that I had been playing the game a bit. I’ve expressed vehemently anti-MMO sentiments to him in the past, so I had to qualify it for him.

“Yeah, I’ve been playing it a little,” I told him. “I wanna make fun of it on my blog.”

“Man,” he replied. “Making fun of MMORPGs… on your blog.”

Touche.

But enough pussyfooting around. Let’s get into it already.

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The Chicago Redeye is a consistently awful paper (if you can call it that), but I think they’ve outdone themselves with today’s headline. I wonder how long it took them to come up with this gem: