My Current State of Affairs

Hello all!  It has been a while since I have last written about almost anything, so I guess now is as good a time as ever to just write about what is going on in my life.  The calendar just turned over to November, and it's becoming that very special time in the college student's life where they start to not care as much about their classes as they probably should.  I can only speculate as to the reasons why I feel like this, one of the reasons is probably the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday (which I have already weighed in my opinions on before), but it can also be due to the fact that most students have been at school for around 10 weeks already this semester, and that is a fair amount of time to be burnt out.  In my case this year, it may be due to the dangerous ailment known as senioritis.

I still love Hand Turkeys!

My senioritis is lying itself on especially thick because this is my last semester of college, in a little more than a month I will be a college graduate, and just like every other grown-up out there.  It is actually a little scary in general, I enjoy being a child and I don't feel like a lot of the things I do on a daily basis work very well with the working adult schedule.  But instead of just regurgitating what has been said before, I will just link to my buddy Toninho's article where he basically covers all that needs to be said.  More importantly than my whiny little tangent there is that I have yet to know what I am going to do once I become a so-called adult.  I have never really had a lot of ambitions growing up, and I've rarely had an answer when people asked me what
I wanted to be when I grew up.  In general, I made math my college major because I felt that I wasn't old enough to decide what I wanted to do with my life, and since I was talented at math I would just do that and it is an open enough subject that I would probably be able to jump into anything with it.  Well, four years later I nearly have my math degree, and I was mistaken when I thought that companies would be excited to find someone with a math background, they mostly think that I know how to program.  Having said that I have found myself stumbling upon what seems to be a very exciting path in life, at the career fair at school I happened to talk to a consulting firm that was very interested in hiring math majors and other problem solvers!  It was very exciting and I even had an interview with them last week!  Hopefully I will hear back from them soon and it will be a positive response, but if not I think I'll manage to come out okay.

Aww shit!  I could have just learned math from this picture!

While waiting to hear back about the job I've found that I have come across two new addictions (well, one is just a renewed addiction.)  The first is that I have found myself watching a lot of Spongebob Squarepants again, I love cartoons and some cartoons just transcend age and continue to be funny and entertaining no matter how old you are, among the ranks of these cartoons are Spongebob, Doug (obviously on those two), Hey Arnold, and Rocko's Modern Life, while the middle two are still good because they spread positive messages in fairly well-told stories to children, the latter two are the finest examples I have ever seen of a show for all ages.  Both shows are capable of hiding little pieces of adult humor seamlessly into their episodes and you wouldn't even know the difference as a child.  Take for example, the episode "Karate Choppers" from the first season of Spongebob.  When I watched it a month or two ago I remembered it as being exactly what it seems to be at face value, a story about Spongebob and Sandy doing karate with each other.  But now that I am more mature, I watched the episode and was surprised to find that the entire episode is a slightly veiled euphemism for sex, I won't go into how it is, you can watch the episode yourself.  But for now you can help yourself to seeing how much subtlety Rocko's Modern Life lacked.

As for my other new addiction, it comes to me directly from Toninho.  For a long while he has been urging me to play Batman: Arkham Asylum, and I have never found the time or a copy to play with, but recently I was able to borrow it from another friend of mine, and it is almost life changing.  Up until this point as far as comic book characters go, I have primarily been a Spider-man fan, and have had a moderate respect for the Batman, particularly from his movies (especially the one from the 60s!).  But I have found that not only is Batman: Arkham Asylum (and it's sequel Batman: Arkham City) a great game, but it also does a great job of giving in-depth descriptions of nearly all of Batman's most powerful villains.  I think that is my favorite part of the game, finding all of the information on the villains of Gotham City and being able to learn about the true story of the Batman.  Playing through the game, I have found that although the Joker is the most popular villain and probably is the most interesting, my favorite one is the Scarecrow.  It is likely that my taste for him comes from the parts he is featured in in Arkham
 


Another big thing that has happened in my life was that my second oldest brother (I have two older brothers) just recently bought a house with his girlfriend and they moved in and bought a puppy!  I am very happy for him, but it does do something to point out a lot how much I am different from my brothers.  They have both stayed around the area where we grew up, for school, for work, and now for living, but as I was getting to earlier, I have no idea where in the world I am going to be in a couple months, it is really weird.  They have also both been in long term relationships (one is married) and then you look at me, its not that I am unbearable to look at (on the other hand, maybe it is) but I haven't had a whole lot of luck with women in recent days.  It is probably been for lack of trying, it has been some time since I have really shown an interest in anybody in particular, and I don't know if its my problem or that of everyone else, so I'm gonna go ahead and blame it on everybody else.  All I have to do is continue to be the great catch that I am and someone will come fishing for it.  Well, I figure that is about enough to talk about for today, hopefully I will be able to blog again more often and maybe even come up with some more good ideas.  So I'll catch you all later.

Get off my property you damn kids!

Return of Project Yancey: Doug En Vogue

To the surprise of myself and likely many other people, the students of the Bluffington School actually do care about fashion (which is obviously reflected in their everyday dress.)  This is shown off by Doug walking by Bee Bee, Connie and Chalky looking at a teen fashion magazine during what is presumably their recess period.  After Bee Bee does her typical insult at Doug for being regular, Doug lets us in on his secret wish of wanting to be more like Dylan Farnum from the hot new teen drama, Teen Heart Street.  The next scene finds all of Doug's wishes coming true as he is watching Teen Heart Street, and sees the heartthrob, Dylan Farnum himself, wearing the same exact green vest and shorts that Doug always wears, and it's all while Judy does some mindless counter-societal blabber that Doug obviously pays no mind to.  As we lose ourselves in Doug's imagination, some fashion show is talking about how cool Doug is and how he is a total trendsetter.  With this perception of his new-found coolness in mind, Doug goes to school planning to not say anything about it, but everybody else is wearing the same clothes and point out how he is wearing the "Dylan Farnum look", obviously forgetting that Doug wears the same thing every day.

Dylan Farnum, such a hunk

 He decides to confide in Patti about his plight, but for lack of a better term, she simply doesn't give a fuck.  As Doug's frustration works it's way toward critical mass, even Skeeter is wearing the Dylan Farnum look.  Since Doug is more than a little insecure, he invites all his friends over to see how his closet is full of the same clothes, but it backfires and everyone thinks he is just a crazy Dylan Farnum fanatic.  We are now interrupted by another awesome daydream, where we see the same scene from Teen Heart Street featured earlier, except with Doug saying all the lines, and Connie and Patti get creeped out how Doug thinks he is Dylan Farnum, and that is because he is a marionette being controlled by Dylan Farnum himself.  Now critical mass has been found so Doug goes shopping for some new clothes, and the guy at the store tries to hook him up with the hippie look, a rapper's outfit and even a disco suit, but Doug hates all of them.  Now things get really interesting, another clerk (looks Jamaican but has a deep Indian accent) comes over and tries to figure out what the deal is then short stubby Jewish-sounding guy comes to help out as well and Doug does his patented "scream and run away" move.  Having decided to fuse elements of all three styles from the store Doug comes out wearing one of the most amazing ragtag sets of clothing I've ever seen (don't worry it will be pictured below) and keeps kicking a soccer ball against a picture of Mr. Farnum on the wall.    Now we find out three more things about Judy, first that she reads crazy magazines where people dress like Doug is now, second that she actually has some understanding about how copying moves things forward, and lastly that she has some soccer skills.  As she runs away to plan what seems to be a performance piece where people get naked and grunt at each other (too young to know what porn is I guess.)  Doug soul searches and realizes he doesn't care if he is trendy or not he just wants to be himself, which is just in time for him to not be trendy anymore because the new style is Skeeter's typical clothes.

I just found my Halloween costume!

It seems kind of strange that I would choose this episode, but stick with me because I have some interesting things to say about both the world of teen dramas and the world of fashion, so enjoy the ride.  The first topic I'll touch are the hilarity of teen dramas.  The trendy and cool kids would watch all kinds of these shows when I was in my younger days, but i was neither trendy nor cool, so I never was able to get myself inundated in the worlds of such shows as Dawson's Creek, Seventh Heaven or The OC.  I found myself preferring to stick to cartoon and typical sitcoms that would be conveniently timed when I got home from school.  This does not mean that I never watched and enjoyed a teen drama, because that is completely false.  I am a lifetime fan of the show Boy Meets World, but rather than having watched it when it was a new show, I got into it when it was syndicated years later.  It would be easy to say that being able to connect to the geeky little brother Corey Matthews was the reason why I was able to get into the show (mainly because I am, in fact, a geeky little brother).  It would also be easy to say that I like the show because Mr. Feeny is the Atticus Finch of television.  Yet, neither of these were the reason I found myself so interested in the show, the truth is that I watched nearly every episode of the show because I am in love with Topanga Lawrence.  She is a geek's dream girl, she is very smart, can hold a conversation, is very attractive yet approachable and to tell you the truth the weird name thing kinda turns me on.  We would just have to do something about the whole saving herself for marriage thing.

Oh Topanga, you tease...

The next topic to touch on is fashion, which shouldn't be too long of a discussion as I am still daydreaming about Topanga.  My typical day-to-day dress isn't very flashy, I would usually be found wearing a tee shirt with the partially zipped or unzipped hoodie, jeans and my trusty Adidas sneakers.  I've recently found myself taking a little divergence between given days, for some cases I have been starting to attempt to look nicer and wearing collared shirts more than typical (I'm still not "cool" enough to pop the collar), but have also found myself delving into looking at and even buying some more geeky tee shirts.  My favorite geek shirt was a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles shirt I was able to get for $10 at www.teefury.com, which has become one of the sites that I make sure to check once a day.  Other than that I really haven't noticed any particular fads in fashion as of lately, everything seems to just stay the same all the time without any drastic changes.  It isn't like what you are wearing sets you apart as much as people make it seem like, the real world isn't like The Warriors where you obviously know who knows who just by a quick look at their garb (for the record I would choose to be in the Baseball Furies if I had to choose, sorry Warriors, you are the best but leather vests aren't my style.)  So, that is that, I am going to go back to fantasizing about Topanga Lawrence now.  Until next time.

The Furies in all their face paint and glory.  Watch this movie.

Alternative Universes

A week or two ago I was watching The One with Jet Li, on the whole it was a pretty crappy movie with a few kinda cool fight scenes, exactly what I was expecting to see.  The best part of the movie though was that the premise revolved around the existence of alternate universes, which is a topic that always seems to find itself running through my head often, usually in humorous ways.  An alternate universe can take on all sorts of different personalities or traits, for example one of my friends is always very proud of his creation of the "Sombrero Universe" in which everything is exactly the same, except everyone is wearing a sombrero.  So I will continue to talk about some of my thoughts on alternate universes.

Only in the Sombrero Universe!

My first creation of an alternate universe myself was to imagine what all the people I know would be like in this alternate universe where everyone's personality is the complete opposite of what it is like in real life.  The perfect example of this came when I was talking with a friend about a professor, we were discussing her getting help from him at his office hours, and how in general he was just a fantastically nice guy.  I started asking her how she would respond if instead of being his own nice self, when she went to his office hours he all of a sudden became a total sleazebag who makes awkward sexual advances toward all the girls struggling in his class for improved grades.  This is when his alternate universe alter-ego was created, he still would become a professor, but he would be a horny bastard who has a reputation for a lenient policy on extra-credit.  It is left to assume in this alternate reality he gets all the dirty student-teacher sex he could ever want, but enough about that, lets see who else exists in this alternate reality.  Jennifer Aniston is still America's tough-luck sweetheart, but its only because she is a massive whore, and Angelina Jolie is a complete sweetheart who just happened to find her true love in Brad Pitt when he was with slutty Jen Aniston (oh what a twisted web we weave).  But by far my favorite character in this alternate reality is alternate reality me, who actually writes quality material (other than bullshit about sexually deviant alternate universes), and gets loyal readers.

For your extra credit assignment you must play with my dingaling.

I also had a dream about a lost Chappelle's Show sketch.  The idea of the sketch was about how our cultures came to be the way that they were, and how weird the world would be if things were only slightly different.  The most prominent difference in my dream was the change that would occur in a Chinese Food Restaurant, nothing would be aesthetically different except instead of serving the same delicious MSG-packed Chinese food we are used to, all Chinese restaurants are instead, burger joints.  It truly was entertaining to watch all the Asian people standing in front of grills and flipping burgers and putting limitless amounts of ketchup and mustard on everything while yelling in their native language.  The only problem with this dream was that I am unsure if they also served french fries, and would have loved to hear them ask if I would like fries with that.

My thoughts exactly.

Thinking up different alternate universes can be tons of fun, and also finding what people would be like in the opposite world alternate reality.  The possibilities are endless, we could have an alternate reality where everyone is a surfer dude, so all the anti-society people would rebel by saying they prefer to ride small waves over the giant swells, and apparently there will be no such thing as a vegetable as all of the good farmland is a lot further from the ocean than any surfer would ever want to be.  There could also be the awkward silence universe, where everybody is expecting everyone else to speak next, so every time you converse with someone it is just a long awkward silence while you wait for the other person to think of something to say while they wait for you to think of something to say, and the length of these awkward pauses contain some kind of meaning in themselves so things can get done.  There are infinite possibilities of alternate universes, so if you have any good ideas comment with some good ones, and if I like your ideas I may expand upon them in a future post.  I'll leave you now with this interpretation of an alternate universe, courtesy of Mail Order Comedy, who now make the show Workaholics on Comedy Central.

Return of the Prodigal Son! (Again)

Hello all of my faithful readers (read: Toninho), I have taken a short hiatus from blogging for about a month, and there is so much I have learned!  Actually, not really, I have just stopped blogging because I had better things to be doing with my life than sitting in front of a computer discussing the better things I could be doing with my life instead.  So let us get busy describing and going into gruesome detail about the month that was.  This video will give you a good idea.


A few days after the last time I posted anything to this site I took the GRE (Graduate Record Exams), the test was more or less a repeat of the SAT and was just as easy.  After breezing through the entire test and likely doing just as good as I knew I should have, I was able to officially enter the life of a true adult.  And this new life as an adult meant beers, beers, beers, golf and beers.  It was a deliciously fun time for the next week or so, as I was not only trying as hard as I could to enjoy my life, but I was also preparing to move back in for my last year at college!  Instead of the packing that it is usually expected to be, my preparing was saying goodbye to all of my great friends back home and trying to follow through with as many fake plans as possible.  But time truly flies when you were having fun and the next thing I knew I was back in my parent's car getting a ride back to school (my car died so I couldn't drive it).

We there yet?  My Teddy has to pee!

This year is much more special than any other year of college though, because this year I am living off campus with some friends of mine and do not have a meal plan, so in short, I am responsible for not letting myself die.  To do this I have had to learn how to cook, and how to eat smaller portions because I don't have the money to feed my fat ass (I am actually quite thin).  This is going surprisingly well as I have yet to go hungry for a day since moving in!  But it also has the unintended consequence of limiting my blogging time (frowny face) because for some strange reason, survival takes precedence over sharing my life with millions of strangers via their computer screens.  Hopefully, I will become so adept at not dying that I will be able to return to form and put a few sets of ideas out, and I also have office hours for a Calculus on Tuesday's and since I don't expect many visitors I will try to get some writing done during that block.  Living on my own has been a blast, I have continued my trend of drinking a moderate amount every night that remains from the week after the GRE, which sucks because it is costing me a lot of money, and I am not exactly made out of 20 dollar bills.

Currently in my fridge.

I have also found myself becoming obsessed with video games that were made over a decade ago.  The recent three games I have been playing since moving back into school are Banjo-Tooie (remake on the Xbox 360), Jet Grind Radio (DREAMCAST!) and the original Metal Gear Solid.  I think video games are much like music and art, the new stuff is good, but there are many times when you need to look into the past and experience what came before to get a true appreciation for how things were meant to be (especially for video games since the technology of games directly influences what they are able to do.)  I am planning on following this paragraph with a few images you need to see, the first will probably be some picture from Jet Grind Radio, and the latter will be a video display of the psychic powers of Psycho Mantis from Metal Gear Solid.

On the next episode of Gangland we look into the GGs of Tokyo-to 

So, I am sorry there really wasn't much of a logical train of thoughts going into this post, it was really me just typing random things as they came to my mind so I could get back into the habit of blogging again, and to say things.  There are more things that I need to say that I hopefully will be able to get off my chest within the next few weeks.  But until then, enjoy my ideas and thoughts and appreciate the fact that this post was just me trying to waste an hour.

Talking to Walls

For some reason it took me this long to realize just how interesting the dynamics of arguments are.  Over the last few days I have found myself observing a few disagreements (political, personal philosophies, etc.) as well as over the course of my life.  Watching arguments from the third person is one of the most interesting things there is in life, because it can go on for hours without going anywhere.  Lets discuss...

First the methods of which people use to make others see their way in civil arguments are nothing short of hilarious.  My favorite of which is the method of raising your voice in order to intimidate(?) your opposition into adopting your mindset, this does nothing but anger and annoy them instead, although it does work when you are about 7 years old and you win the argument solely so you will shut up.  A close cousin of this strategy is the sarcastic agreement in which every response is a prompt "yup, yup, yup.  You are totally right!" before the person is capable of getting a quarter of their argument out.

Whatever! Just shut the fuck up now!

Another great method of argument is to go on the offensive, but rather than make any comments that are relevant to the topic at hand, you insult the other person.  This is a close second place because I don't understand how most people take this route despite how utterly irrelevant and ineffective it is.  Do you really ever expect that someone will agree with your logic that their viewpoint on fiscal policy (for example) is incorrect on account of their unattractive bodily features.  Most people are ugly and unfortunately for the people who adopt this style of debate, there has yet to be shown that there is a direct correlation between being ugly and being incorrect on every topic.

Sample Argument: Abe Lincoln's hat is stupid, ergo slavery isn't wrong...  See my point?

The last offensive strategy is to give precise logical arguments, possibly with evidence.  This would seem to any educated person to be the most effective of the three strategies I have mentioned, but those educated people would be severely mistaken.  This leads me to my title "Talking to Walls" because no matter which of these three methods you would choose to wield in your argument against the obviously incorrect opinion of your opponent, your opposition will maintain the same bullheadedness about their opinion that you hold for yours.

ACCEPT MY ARGUMENT NOW!

The result of this is things such as Carl Everett (I did love him on the Red Sox) denouncing the existence of dinosaurs on the grounds that there is no direct reference to their existence in the Bible.  His main argument against fossils are that they were created by scientists to confuse people, and I must agree seeing that creating rocks with intricate bone patterns that are the same across the world is a lot less trustworthy than a book which is taken to be true in some parts of the world to the same extent we find The Cat in the Hat to be true in America.  I'm not attacking the Bible or Christianity/Catholicism at all, I would probably be very comforted to find either to be true, but I just don't see why dinosaurs would be relevant in a story of guidance to humans who never simultaneously existed with humans.  I also could guarantee that the Bible makes no reference to the platypus, and I would like to hope that's not more smoke being blown up my ass either.

"The Flintstones wasn't real!"

Sorry about that rant, I found it a little funny.  It gave me a perfect example to show that both myself and Carl Everett would be mostly unmoved on this issue, and it shows the structure of a typical argument.  It also gives me an excuse to mention that according to Wikipedia he recently held a gun to his wife's head while she was wearing a Barney costume.  It also illustrates that arguing with people is fucking useless and I'm going to try to avoid doing it, it won't get anybody anywhere.

Lets hope Jurassic Carl doesn't wipe the smile off this young lad's face 

I Got Some New Digs

Check out the revamped page for I Sometimes Call Myself Chase Robertson (or ISCMCR for all you cool kids out there), they always say you need to keep up with the Jones's but in this case I'm keeping up with the Tonino and I didn't want it to look like I put more effort into Retentive Gibberish (even though it is fantastic and you should bring yourself over to that link which is now conveniently on your left!)

Oh, I'm keeping up Fox!

The first change you should notice is the vomit-inducing pattern in the background, it is a series of bullseyes something, but I liked the way it looked and it sure beats the plain black.  I have also changed the fonts for a few things, both the font for the blog title, and for each of the post titles have been changed from generic-brand font, to looking like it was written by a 7 year-old.  I also set up a new right-side and left-side design so you don't have to strain yourself to scroll down a little further to see my massive set of labels on the right.  My last big change is adding a little excerpt about me in case if you are one of those people just discovering this awesome page now and don't want to read all the nice autobiographical posts leading up to this moment.  Well I just wanted to show and acquaint you with my new look, and don't be scared of change, most of the time its only superficial, just like every one of you out there!

I did this for you sir!

Only In Dreams

Hello all.  Once again I'm going to talk about sleeping trouble and general weirdness, possibly due to my lack of sleep as compared to my normal schedule.

It started about a week ago on Sunday night and I had to go to sleep to wake up early on Monday morning, but this was made hard by the fact that I slept rather late that morning so I wasn't tired at a normal hour to wake up at 6:25 without feeling like absolute shit.  When I decided that I was tired enough to try sleeping, I quickly found that I was wrong and fell into one of those situations where you try to sleep but get riddled with thoughts about what you should be doing instead (whether at that moment or in general).  If I am the only one who comes across this situation quite often please tell me because that probably isn't a good thing.  Eventually after about an hour and a half of hating myself for stupid things I've done in days past and telling myself that I'm going to partake in some new endeavors with my life I fell asleep.  That is when the real fun began.  I had a dream about some sort of really weird alien epidemic (possibly induced by playing Dead Space: Extraction earlier that night) and it started with a first person perspective of a woman being woken up, and in the shock of her change of state she punched the person who woke her right in the face. Once we established that that was her default response to being woken up, we met some other girl who spent her days laying in the middle of her pet Giant Venus Flytrap (now were getting into the weirdness) and that there is an epidemic that turns people into angry killing zombie-like aliens, but it can be kept in check by some measures.  This is when the first lady catches the epidemic but she is kept in check so she is a semi-alien but can still act coherently like a normal human.  This is when we hit the interesting part of the story, the infected lady gets woken up and reacts as she normally does by punching the other in the face, and this is when Giant Venus Flytrap Girl defensively grabs the infected woman and unleashes her pet upon her, the results were not pretty.  This freaked me out and woke me up, I was freaked out to the extent that I tried to rewrite the dream.  I don't know if I rewrote it correctly because I didn't dream again before being abruptly woken up for work (I didn't punch anybody).

That's some scary ass shit.

The next night I once again battled the same battle with my brain before going to sleep, but that is nothing to discuss at the moment because I once again had a survival-horror dream.  This time rather than an alien epidemic and fictional characters, the antagonists were light-fearing zombies and my siblings and I were the main characters trying to survive in a two-level warehouse I have never seen before.  This dream wasn't nearly as vivid as the last to me but from what I remember we had one light in the warehouse and were standing in it because we knew it was the only way we would be safe from the incoming horde.  It contained a lot of dialogue and I retained exactly none of it, but some action finally came as one of my brothers decided that our barricades were insufficient and decided at the last minute to run out into the darkness and down the hall to fix them, the dream then ended with my starting to venture off after him to help.  The world may never know if we found the light.

Imagine this with only one light bulb and complete darkness otherwise

This was strange to me in that it was the first time in a really long time that I have had notable dreams on consecutive nights, and was also notable in that I usually needed more than 2 hours after waking up to be vaguely useful.  The third night I tried to avoid the typical thinking myself to sleep by just staying up later until I was ready to sleep, which worked to some small extent.  That night I know that I had a dream, but I didn't retain any of it at all, all I remember about it was there was no setting, no purpose, no people and no words.  The dream was just a sequence of images being thrown at me randomly and the worst part is that I don't remember any of what they were.  I feel like something interesting happened in writing about this so I really hope that you enjoyed hearing about my dreams and maybe I'll try to tell them more when I have them.  Enjoy the song I named this after.