According to a study in Canada, it can be beneficial to give homeless alcoholics a free glass of wine EVERY HOUR between 7:00 am and 10:00 pm. That’s 16 drinks a day. According to Jeff Turnbull, one of the authors of the study, “Once the craziness of their alcoholism is under control, their wasted lives on the street turned around, they’re interesting people and all that destructive behavior is behind them.” Fair enough.

But while Canada is footing the bill to keep the homeless wasted enough to behave, the bobbies over in London are super pissed at Kate Moss regarding her… ahem… alleged cocaine use.

I don’t want to live in a world where we give our homeless free booze but punish our supermodels for snorting cocaine.  I always sort of figured blow was like a tax write-off for models. Is the problem that cocaine is like CHEATING for models? Like cocaine is to modeling as steroids are to baseball? I guess I don’t understand the modeling industry very well. The way I see it, if we should give homeless people sixteen free glasses of wine a day, then we should give supermodels a free gram of coke a day too.

I play a lot of video games. I like to shoot nazis and monsters and sometimes just regular people. I’ve been Tony Hawk and the God of War, all with potato chip crumbs falling onto my sweatpants.

I really like Katamari Damacy too. Like… a lot.

But there’s a whole batch of games that I’ve always made a conscious effort to avoid: RPGs. I played an early Final Fantasy game a few years ago that totally sucked me in, which is what they’re supposed to do, and for a couple of weeks that was all I did. I like games where you shoot stuff because you shoot stuff for a little while and then you go do something else. You can play Katamari Damacy and roll stuff up for just a little while. That’s how the game is meant to be played. Katamari Damacy isn’t supposed to be an immersive experience that supplements (or REPLACES) your actual life. Games like Final Fantasy Online tend to play a much bigger role in their players’ lives for extended periods of time, and that part of the reason why I’ve avoided them for so long: I’m absolutely petrified of getting sucked in.

Another reason I’ve avoided them for so long is that I think magic is kind of gay. Spells, wizards, tunics, potions… none of that really does much for me, and they are all cornerstones of the RPG universe. I’m not into mutton or mana.

So maybe that’s why Second Life piqued my interest – an online RPG mostly devoid of magic and mutton. I’m not totally clear on what the point is of the game yet, but that’s never particularly rigid in games like these. It seems like you can pretty much do whatever you want. There’s a complex in-game economy and people are willing to pay game money for a lot of stuff, so I guess you can conceivably do whatever the hell you want as long as people are willing to pay you for it (if you want to make money in the game at all). You can buy land and build on it, so you could run a business or something. You can create objects in the game and sell them to other players. Or, if you’re like me, you don’t really care about any of that crap. If you’re like me, you’re interested because the game is completely fucking free.

(more…)

I wish I had something more to say, but it’s tough to follow an act like that.

I was at a coffeeshop a little while ago buying some juice and a bagel with cream cheese. I went there mostly for the juice because I’m sick like an animal over here and I figured the vitamins and all that crap might be good for me. So I’m sitting there at the coffeeshop waiting for my bagel and sort of staring blankly in the general direction of the cashier, when all of the sudden she starts coughing. My eyes snapped into focus and I saw something very ordinary, very everyday.

The cashier was coughing into her sleeve.

It took me a few minutes to fully grasp the significance. I sniffled a few times, and felt my temples throb (assumedly with mucus, or some other kind of sickness-related fluid I don’t know about), and then it hit me. Yeah, it’s not particularly attractive to cough all over your shirt, but it’s probably worse to do it all over your hands, right? You don’t grab door knobs and handrails with the crook of your arm, do you? This makes sense. Cough into your god damned sleeve. I turned to my roommate with my epiphany.

“That’s such a good fucking idea!” I said.

“What?”

“Coughing into your sleeve.”

“Yeah. It’s a food service thing.”

So apparently the food service sector has been hip to this for a while. A quick google search shows that the health sector are also aware of the benefits of sleeve coughing. So when the hell is this gonna catch on with the business casual crowd? Nobody at the office wants to get sick, but everybody comes to work sick and coughs all over their hands and grabs everything in sight and then BAM! Here I am with a brutal cold.

The moral of the story is this: cough into your god damned sleeve.

New flash cartoon!

Here’s what used to be on this page.

Here’s some other stuff too.

This is a test with a picture in it. Super dooper.

This is a test.  It’s also a rant about how whenever people drop shit in a mailbox they always let it slam shut and then reopen it to make sure their stuff slid down the chute.  Has anyone in the history of mail ever opened the chute up to find their package somehow mysteriously still resting in the slot?  No.

It’s not like this makes me mad or anything.  It just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.