Herly Shert.

Him, Myself, and the Other Guy

2008-05-18T22:23:00.045-06:00

I wonder if everyone else also perceives the following split, temporal personalities in themselves.

Past Self -- weasel. Does nothing but the bare minimum and always stays up late following his nose and leaving me tired as hell.

Present Self -- martyr. Always dealing with the mess left behind by Past Self. After making it through the mess he left me in, I deserve some time following my nose. So what if I'm up until one million o'clock? Future self will be fiiine.

Future Self -- poor fella.

And so it goes... right round.

Gamers are like sharks.

2008-02-05T01:20:00.018-07:00

Being a gamer feels like being a shark, whose best tool for interacting with the physical world just happens to be a gaping maw of razor sharp teeth. If a shark wants to check out that diver, it bites it. What else would it do? Rub it with its flipper?

As a gamer, my best tool for interacting with the world is often a set of razor sharp actions. I know it looks bad when I throw people out of cars and gun down hookers, but no one gives me a handshake or kissing button. :-(

Even Mass Effect, which featured conversation and a more nuanced moral spectrum, made me feel like a shark. During a conversation with a character that did something horrible, the dialogue option, "You should die for the things you've done," appeared. I thought, "Yeah! I'm taking this guy to prison, but he should know how terrible I think his actions were." So I made the selection and watched in horror as my character shot him dead at point blank range. I felt guilty, but my last save was too far back to correct my moral lapse.

The world through the eyes of a shark:

AvV

2008-01-11T02:31:00.004-07:00

I watched I am Legend with a few friends tonight and one of them asked whether the aliens from Signs or the vampires from Legend were more believable.

Legend's vampires were hard to get behind, but imagine being an alien capable of intergalactic travel and deciding to invade a planet 70% covered with lethal acid. And it rains this acid. And its inhabitants drink, swim in, and are 60% made of this acid. Would your attack strategy be to sharpen your fingernails, run around buck-fucking naked, and scratch your enemies to death?

Fuck Signs!

Herlo, world.

2008-01-06T12:11:00.005-07:00

I thought it would be good to separate my rambling from my art. It's a little "cart before the horse" given I have no idea what my capacity for spewing text really is, but dammit, what if someone else wants "erlanter.blogspot.com"?

Anyone who's tried to setup a username online (e.g., Gmail, Live, or a Diablo II character) knows how common it is to discover a seemingly random jumble of letters is meaningful to some other asshole. Really? Someone else already took "xgerbhf2s26"? It would be incredible if it weren't also so fucking irritating.