Originality

Gee, I wonder where the RE 4 team came up with their Ashley Graham character design.

CLAMP School Detectives

CLAMP School Detectives is a stupid anime adapted from a manga that I watched a long time ago. It’s about these three highly effeminate grade school boys that work as the school council at a school for geniuses. The one thing that kept me watching this show to the end is how ridiculously outlandish everything in it is. After I watched the whole series and deleted it off of my computer, I saved one episode, the most outrageously unbelievable one of all, episode ten.
It goes like this: Suoh is tired of Kaichou’s bullshit slacking in his council duties. He challenges him to a baseball match with a deal that if he wins, Kaichou has to finish his damn paperwork. And also for whatever reason, Suoh will be playing alone on his team and Kaichou’s team will be composed of kindergarten girls. Intrigued? Probably not. Well if you enjoy wasting your time, I recommend it…

Part 1
4:52 - Solt? What’s solt?
6:14 - Akira blushes seeing Utako ,(a girl.) Oh please, he’s the gayest one of the three.
7:15 - Suoh hits some balls pitched to him by a pitching machine into a bucket that’s about at shortstop length from home plate. Holy shit! If someone was actually able to do this they would be the best batter ever.
8:18 - Nagisa practices her swing. Yeah you’ll be in the major league in no time.

Part 2
1:45 - The concept of “invisible runners” is explained. Well that’s great, only a few problems like tagging an invisible runner, forcing out an invisible runner, an invisible runner stealing a base, and sacrifice bunting for an invisible runner.
4:22 - Suoh hit’s a fly ball and Kaichou gives a team member verbal commands where to run to and stand, thereby catching the ball. From that far away the two person’s perspectives of the ball would be completely different even if Kaichou was right behind his teammate giving the instructions it would still be a one in a thousand thing. Try throwing a ball to your friend and verbally guiding their movements to catch it, it’s stupid. And if it was that easy for Kaichou to get this girl to catch the ball just through instructions what does that say about *her* abilities?
4:54 - Announcer describes how Kaichou calculated the exact trajectory of the ball upon impact with the bat. BULLSHIT! That’s even more impossible than just eyeballing it.
5:15 - Suoh displays some really good pitching skills. And he’s also just as good at batting. Um… no. In reality pitchers have much lower batting averages because they devote most of their practice time to pitching.
6:00 - Kaichou strikes out. He can instantly calculate where a ball will land but he can’t hit it with a bat?
6:30 - Suoh shows some impressive fielding abilities. Do you know how impossible it would be to field an entire baseball field by yourself? Virtually every hit would be a homerun.
6:45 - More bullshit.
7:25 - Nagisa Gets a hit but trips over her bat. Luckily Suoh catches her. It takes anywhere from 1/2 to 2 seconds for someone to fall down. And you’re telling me that he sprinted from the pitcher’s mound to home plate within that timeframe?

Part 3
1:30 - Umpire yells “Batter outo! Game set!” Game set is what they say in sports like tennis, jackass.
3:03 - Kaichou is a bastard.

Final Fantasy VIII Followup

I know I really unloaded on this last time but it’s just so horrible. This is all about the final boss of Final Fantasy VIII which I didn‘t cover prior.

So you’ve defeated Adel without using any GF attacks; you’ve beaten up a dragon by swinging a sword once a minute; you’ve stayed awake through Laguna talking to you; and you’ve somehow managed to thwart the game designer’s attempts to royally screw you. Now you’re at Ultmacia’s Castle. Think you have what it takes to beat her? Well if you have every GF, they know every move and are all at level 100, your characters are all at level 100, are maxed out on the best spells, and equipped with the best weapons, and you are maxed out on all restorative items, then you might have a snowball’s chance in hell.

The first problem with being able to beat the game is in your characters. Prior to getting to the castle I was always moderately aware that the characters were weak and there was pretty much nothing you could do about it. But at the end it becomes painfully obvious that they are all just worthless pieces of garbage. They literally can’t do anything except attack unless they have a GF equipped to them. GFs boost your character’s stats and make it possible to use magic and items as well as summon the GFs themselves. If the characters are that fricking debilitated without the GFs, why do you have to use them at all? Why don’t you just play as the GFs? It’s like everyone is on life-support or something. In short, if you want your characters to be worth a damn, you will need to acquire as many GFs as you can. Now where do GFs come from? They come from sidequests. I’ll be the first to admit that I get easily distracted by sidequests; provided one thing, I actually find the sidequest. In Final Fantasy VIII you have to scour the entire world to find them and most of them are really cryptic in their locations and/or dead-end once you do find them. Why the hell would you rack your brain over trying to find sidequests? Well it doesn’t even matter because once you’re in the castle you can’t really do any more sidequests or even shop for things that you need because some dipshit decided it would be a great idea to put barriers around all the towns.

This is a good time to bring up the second problem which is your characters’ items and magic. As I just said, you can’t shop anymore which means that all items you will be getting from now on will be from winning battles and stealing from enemies, that is if you have the correct GF to steal. If you don’t already have it then tough shit. (And the funny thing is you still get paid money for doing your job, money you can’t even spend.) Your weapons will also no longer be upgraded because you can’t purchase the upgrades. Normally you would find the correct parts from winning battles and then use them to upgrade characters’ weapons at a shop. This is moronic because a lot of the parts you can’t even find. Presumably they would come from some enemies you haven’t fought. There is something like seven generations of upgrades but most of my characters only made it to the third one even after going through the entire game. Who wants to go around searching for these elusive enemies to get weapon parts? Even when you do find an enemy that you know has a part you want, there’re no promises that you will actually get it after the battle. Now the problem with the magic is that you will need a lot of it and you will need the best spells. Since you never learn spells, you have to collect them from enemies and “draw points” that are scattered all around the world. You don’t know what spells are where and it just turns into yet another shitty gimmick to get you to run around aimlessly for hours on end.

The third problem is of course the boss itself. The bullshit starts the second the battle begins. Instead of having the three people in your active party show up in the battle, this stupid bitch picks three characters at random for you to use in the fight. So actually preparing for the boss by equipping all of your GFs to your active party members is completely useless because you‘ll end up getting like one character that‘s decked out for battle and then two characters that are useless because they aren‘t equipped with GFs. You could always spread your GFs around but then you just have six OK characters instead of three good characters. The boss also has four stages which is stupid. Why do Final Fantasy bosses always have to have all these stages? Why can’t it just have one fucking stage and then after you beat it the shit ends and you know the game is over? (After I beat the third stage I seriously thought it *was* over. It wasn’t. What a cruel joke.) Your only effective offensive weapon, (GFs), are only useable in the first stage. After that, If you try to summon them they instantly die. Speaking of dying, when one of your characters gets KO’d and you leave them that way for more than a few seconds you get a message on the screen that says “Absorbed into time.” Then the KO’d character disappears and you can’t use them anymore. Absorbed into time? What the hell does that even mean? Could Stephen Hawking maybe explain that one to me? When the character gets absorbed… whatever, another random player from your group appears to take their place. WOW! How magnanimous and benevolent of the game to allow this to happen! For the first time ever in the whole stupid game you actually get to toggle characters while in battle. This is still asinine because you don’t have any legitimate control over it and which would you rather have; your characters die/disappear and cycle through until you run out and have a game over, or be stuck with only three characters that you can revive consistently for an indefinite amount of times?

Since GFs don’t work in this battle you’ll be using the next best thing, magic. I hope you have a lot because it takes a lot to do any damage as well as a lot of time. As you’re playing along and casting spells you will get messages from time to time on the screen that say something like “Irvine’s Fira blew away.” In layman’s terms that statement means that Irvine just lost all of his Fira spells and can no longer use them. So basically what you’re telling me is that I have like a bag of magic spells and every so often a gust of wind comes by and blows one away and it sails away on the breeze like a leaf in autumn? My ass! That doesn’t make any sense at all. I could understand if it was blowing away items, but magic? How the hell do you blow magic away? It’s like they were so out of ways to make this totally impossible for you that they had to resort to completely illogical guerilla tactics. This is horrible. It’s only a matter of time before everyone’s Cure and Revive spells get nailed, and then what? You’re up shit creek. Theoretically this means you could play through the whole battle, get to the last stage and then lose just because a random number generator made you lose your last bit of revive spells. Not only do you lose random spells constantly but your characters’ stats incidentally go down too. This is because the way a GF allows you to boost your stats is by allowing you to equip spells to them. Equipping a spell to a stat makes the numbers of that stat go up; the more powerful the spell, the higher the numbers go. Should the equipped spell “blow away” the stat returns to it’s normal crappy digits. With all of this stuff going on, the final battle is reduced to a war of attrition. Those are fun right? People love those! I literally played for four hours in a row trying to beat the last boss of Final Fantasy VIII. That’s not four hours of trials, that’s a single try. Yeah, it lasted four hours. Can you imagine sitting down to fight one boss that you know is going to take at least four hours to beat. Why would you do that? I beat the first three stages and made it to the final stage but to make the long story short, after going through all of that I just didn’t have the resources to continue fighting so I died. After four hours and then losing, I wasn’t upset at all. I was actually relieved. The game just wasn’t fun at all anymore, only a grueling and mind-numbing trial that I was glad to be free of. Even If I knew of a way to beat Ultimecia I wouldn’t try it again. That’s how horrible it is. This is the only way you should ever play FF VIII…

Back to School

Back to fucking retarded bullshit.

I go to the San Francisco Academy of Art University and they keep on screwing me over. More on this later. First, an anecdote.

There’s this guy in my Thursday Alias 3D modeling class. Son of a bitch I hate Alias! You can’t just use the program. Every single execution involves some ridiculously circuitous fatality input.

Me: “Teacher, I can’t get this surface to revolve. I held down Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Tab+Space bar+Page Down+F8+Num Lock+W like you said.”

Teacher: It’s not Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Tab+Space bar+Page Down+F8+Num Lock+W, it’s Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Tab+Space bar+Page Down+F8+*Backspace*+W.

AutoDesk products suck ‘cause they expect you to memorize a bunch of command shit. I don’t have to hold down 20 buttons in the correct sequence to move my card when I’m playing solitaire. Why don’t they just have us model things in Dos prompt? This is off topic. About this guy, have you ever been in a class where you’re struggling and then there’s someone in the same class that makes it look like it’s as easy as falling down stairs? Every time we do an assignment he turns in something about 20 times more complicated than what he was asked of. Seriously, if we ever get told to model a human being, he would probably spend a lot of time putting hairs on their ass or wax in their ears, maybe some dandruff. He has clearly had experience with this program before. When someone asks a question about something in class, (directed at the teacher), he finds it very hard to not respond. Shut the fuck up! No one asked you and you’re not teaching this class. I’m still trying to figure out *why* he’s taking this class and I can come up with three answers:

1. This is the one and only class he’s taking this semester and after it’s over every Thursday he spends the entire rest of the week at home really getting off on reading the Alias Studiotools book and using the program because it’s just so much fucking fun.

2. He failed the class last semester, is retaking it, and just looks smart to us noobs.

3. He already took a class on Alias and realized it’s the only thing he’s good at so he keeps taking it so he can show off and be an asshole.

Now that I’m done talking about Alias, let’s go back to being screwed by the school. When I say “I have to talk to the shit-heads tomorrow,” my mom and girlfriend know that I’m saying I’m going to call someone in AAU administration. I nicknamed them shit-heads because I have no reason to believe that their brains are not composed of fecal material. They always fuck everything up. Here’s a list of everything major over my time here I can come up with off of the top of my head.

Failed to register me for housing.
Failed to provide me with internet while in housing, (while enrolled in an online class.)
Failed to give me information about X Y Z.
Failed to register me for the correct classes.
Failed to register me for classes at all.
Failed to provide me with a locker.

The latter of the failures is an interesting story. I only have three days of classes a week. Please don’t let that confuse you into thinking I have a lot of free time. In fact my classes are so project intensive that I don’t really have time for anything else. I probably shouldn’t even be writing this right now. Anyway, the administrative building isn’t near where I live or go to class so going over there is a very time-consuming ordeal when you have a constant supply of all-encompassing homework. I don’t even feel comfortable taking the time to go grocery shopping which I can almost do across the street. In other words, going over there is going to be a rare event. I would have to do it though if I wanted a locker. Now lockers cost $20 to rent and I knew that some people had already acquired them There is by no means a shortage of lockers either. I put it off for as long as I could but the work piled up fast and I absolutely needed somewhere to store my projects and supplies in the building. I couldn’t carry all of my stuff on the bus anymore. I found some time to go down to administrations and asked for a locker. The girl at the desk said they weren’t selling them at that time, she didn’t know why, and she didn’t know when they would. Fuck AAU. OK fine. If you don’t want to sell me one I’ll just take one. The next day I bought a black combo lock that matches the ones on the lockers, found a locker without a lock, and bingo… free locker of my choosing. Maybe I’ll buy a legitimate one at some point but I don’t know *why* or *when*.

Here to stay until Evil Paul comes by with bolt cutters and all my stuff gets impounded.

I consider it reparations...

Final Fantasy VIII, ya know?

I get pissed off about a lot of video games but that doesn't mean that I really hate them. But I think I may actually genuinely hate this game.

Final Fantasy VIII is different from any of the other Final Fantasy games I’ve played. For one, you actually have a job that you get paid to do. You’re not just some unemployed schmo running around aimlessly. You can even climb the corporate ladder by achieving higher ranks to get paid more. Or you can unclimb the corporate ladder by achieving lower ranks to get paid less. When they explain this in the game they basically say, “do stuff in battle to change your rank.” Gee, thanks for clarifying that. Anyway, you are a Splinter Cell dabbling in international espionage. No really, you are. Kidnapping, assassination, and sabotage are all included which brings me to my first point, they expect you to do some really complicated shit. Entering the codes to detach the president’s car from that train is like hacking five retinal scanners in a row in Chaos Theory. On this one part, when you have to blow up a missile base, You run around literally mashing buttons on random control panels until you initiate the self-destruct sequence. Then you have to go to another consol and sabotage the missiles. For this part your character doesn't tap some buttons and then say "OK, done." You actually have to manually interface with the computer as if you were using a real computer. You have to flip through a bunch of tasks that you don’t really know anything about and make the correct changes while the base draws ever closer to it’s eventual destruction. Ultimately I don’t even think it makes a difference.

Derrrrrr... I'm the Jumbo Cactuar. My HP is higher than numbers can go. You'll spend hours trying to get me as a summon because I have a mustache.

The game seems like it’s designed to keep you from actually accomplishing anything. The characters keep passing out and going to a “dream world” where you play as a trio of soldiers. The first time this happens you don’t really know what the deal is but you do know that whatever this is, is either something that already happened or just a dream. So if that’s the case, why the hell do you have to play during them? Things that occur in this reality have no bearing on *my* reality, and I don’t know these soldiers. Why should I even care? This isn’t getting me any closer to my ultimate goal. Just make it a talking scene and leave interaction out of it. There’s also a time where you get thrown in prison and a time when you’re just stranded at sea, floating around on the academy airship. You're just stuck until it runs ashore. But this pales in comparison to all the times you’re asked to go find various people. You’re asked twice to go find the same person. How stupid. Cid is supposed to be the leader of the academy so why is he M.I.A. half the time? And why do *I* have to find him? Why can’t I just go beat the shit out of monsters like I was playing an actual Final Fantasy game or something? Then there’s the time you have to find the Galbadian Captain in Balamb. It took me like two hours to find that fucker! Balamb is probably the smallest town in the game. Even if you know where he is you can’t search that area without talking to like a dozen people in the correct sequence. The problem was I couldn’t find all those people. Little did I know that the two blurry parallelograms submerged halfway into the street in the background were apparently doors, not that that’s the answer to all your problems. Oh, did I mention that you’re trapped in the city until you can figure this out? You know what? I just changed my mind. The last level is the *biggest* waste of time. This is the sorceress' castle. First of all, the castle is so fricking dilapidated who the hell would live in it? Is the ultimate evil sorceress some kind of insane cat lady? Once you step in the door you lose every single command that is actually useful to you; magic, items, aeons, even being able to save the game. You name it, and you can't do it. The only thing you can use is attack. Well that sucks ass! I need that shit! I need all of it! Well, to get it back you have to fight several minibosses; one for each command. If that wasn't bad enough, you have to explore an overwhelmingly large castle and solve overly-complicated puzzles while constantly being thrown into random battles that you have to run from. Doesn't that sound fun?! What a fun game! Imagine if you're playing Myst and you're just trying to walk around an island to identify and solve puzzles but every 15 seconds the screen goes black for 10 seconds. Who's stupid idea was it to put monsters in here? You can't even fight them until you get some commands back! The minibosses that you have to kill to get your commands are scattered all around and usually require a solved puzzle to get to. When you beat one, you get to choose what command you get back. I thought this was cool at first but it's actually not. Every boss is different and you don't know what you're going to need to have for the next one. You have to basically guess and do trial and error. Actually I guess as long as you get your aeons back it doesn't really matter what happens after that but still when I came In here I expected to fight the boss and beat the game, not dick around for another three hours.

How 'bout you get an office and stay there the rest of the game. That way everyone will know where the hell you are!

There’s no shortage of instances where the game tries to get you to buy something useless for an exorbitant amount of money. Rent a car! Buy fuel for the car! Buy a map position indicator! Buy a hint! Under no circumstances should you rent a car, unless you just want to explore some place just before shutting off the game. If you’re going somewhere you can drive to, you should just walk and get exp from battles on the way. You absolutely do not need a position indicator for what happens to be the world's smallest dungeon. And even if I was desperate enough to buy a hint, what makes them think I’m going to save the game after spending 50,000 Gil to gain whatever information? It’s not like I’m going to forget what I was told if I reset the game.

Your battle party consists of three characters. You can’t switch them during battle. You can’t switch them out of battle unless at a save spot or prompted by the game. You can’t exclude the main character from the party. (It's like they removed an entire dimension from the RPG genre.) The characters in the game never learn any skills or spells, (except Quistis sort of). Instead they “draw” spells from enemies and sometimes these weird glowing miasma things that are scattered around. When they draw they get X number of whatever spell (usually about 5 to ll), meaning they can use that spell X amount of times before it runs out. After that, your out unless you draw or refine some more. Have you ever played a game where you went around picking spells off of trees? That’s just weird. And it sucks because when you get some rare and powerful spell , you don't want to use it because once you do it's gone and you may or may not get it again. Anyone can use any spell just about as good as anyone else. That kind of robs the characters of their individuality. I guess that's why they have overdrives. They can also all summon any GF (or Aeon) as long as you assign it to them. The spells and Aeons can both be swapped between characters which you practically have to do every 10 minutes in the first half of the game because you’re constantly toggling between two teams of characters and everyone is basically useless without an Aeon. You can actually summon an Aeon an indefinite amount of times in a single battle so there’s not even any point in fighting normally. And after you’ve used and swapped spells around a dozen or so times you forget who has what and end up looking through pages of spells during a fight only to realize that that character doesn't have what you needed. And since the game’s in real-time all you really accomplished was giving your enemies a couple of free shots at you. That’s another thing. Real-time menu-based RPGs are just a stupid idea. If movement has been eliminated from all battles and attacking happens when you choose something from a menu then there should be turns. If time is an issue in battle then just make it a fucking action adventure game. It’s not fair to make you rifle through a bunch of pages as fast as you can, trying to locate and select what you want to happen. All that does is remove strategy from the game. It's like playing chess against a computer and instead of taking turns when moving players’ pieces, the computer just keeps moving its’ pieces until you make a move.

In battle, I love how the cursor is white and transparent. It makes it so easy to tell who or what I’m selecting. As if the menu boxes obstructing my view of the characters wasn’t enough. When you beat a boss, instead of getting an ass-load of exp, the game says “Fuck you” and gives you three “Didn't receive EXP” boxes. Seriously, what the hell?! Why?! What’s the point of fighting if you don't get exp? How did they all fail to learn anything from a fight that lasts 30 times longer than a fight where they do learn something? All it does is make you have to go get in random battles to get the exp that the game basically robbed you of. Fuck that!

One of the most retarded problems this game, (and every other FF game has), is how useless status effect spells are. If you’re fighting an enemy that’s susceptible to blind or sleep it’s not worth casting them because the enemy is weak and the battle will be over sooner if you just attack. If you’re in battle with something that can kick your ass and is going to take a while to beat, the enemy is immune to the spells. Actually when you use one of those spells on an immune monster it will say “miss.” Well *was* it a miss? You don’t know! Why can’t it just say “immune” when the monster is immune and “miss” when you miss the monster? They’re different words. I don’t think if I look up “immune” in a thesaurus that “miss” will be listed as a synonym. If you don’t see through the game’s lying quickly, then you may end up wasting a lot of moves trying to do something impossible. Speaking of lying, the game does it every once and a while. Back when I was looking for that captain, some shithead told me to go look in the “town center.” There is no town center! I had figured that out before he even said that to me. Another time after beating Edea the second time, she escaped through the floor of the room I was in and someone said, “The auditorium is below here.” It's not. the auditorium is on the same floor. Unless there was some kind of bizarre spacial anomaly going on, it’s not going to be under us, ya know?

STUPID.

But wait, I've saved the best for last. This is by far the worst problem in the game. In fact It may be the worst problem I've ever seen in a game. When you go into lunatic pandora for the second time and save the game after beating Seifer, you can't get out until you beat Sorceress Adel. Don't ask me how you're supposed to know that. The first three bosses are relatively easy. Then you get to Sorceress Adel. Hopefully all of your characters are oh, somewhere around 55 or 60 in level. Otherwise you get annihilated. Don't ask me how you're supposed to know that. Most of my characters were around 30 and 35 in level. Well that's a problem isn't it? OK I guess I might be able to level-up from random battles inside lunatic pandora. Well, no you can't because for whatever reason every enemy you kill there will only reward you with one exp. Don't ask me how you're supposed to know that. Now lets review; I am grossly under-level for beating this boss; I can not leave the immediate area; I can not level-up in the immediate area. SO HOW THE FUCK AM I SUPPOSED TO FINNISH THE GAME NOW?! I guess it's really my fault. Clearly I should have seen this coming. I should have been able to predict all of that shit because I'm a fucking psychic. I just spent 40 hours on a game that dead-ends. It doesn't even make any sense. If I was the correct level to beat Adel it would have made the previous bosses look like jokes. Were those weak bosses just there to lull me into a false sense of security? This isn't just a gigantic game flaw, I seriously think It's some kind of sadistic trap. Think about it. Someone decided that this would be the only place in the game where you can't level-up. I guess I'll have to make a note of that so that I don't repeat the same mistake when I have to play the entire fucking game over again. I'm being melodramatic. I actually had a save file just previous to the mistake. Ha! Take that you bastard!

Here's "sorceress" Adel. I don't know about you but I'd have to be pretty wasted to not see that this is a dude. If this is a woman why doesn't she cover her shame in battle. By shame I mean her highly defined pectoral muscles.

Premium Cruise Internet

I just got back from an Alaskan cruise with my family. How could I complain about that? Watch me. Everyone present had something to complain about but this was my problem, the internet. When I envisioned being on the cruise I was thinking, “Well I’ll just bring by laptop and if the ship doesn’t have free wireless I’ll just buy a subscription. How bad could it be?” The short answer was *unbelievably* bad.

My quest began after I realized that the internet was indeed not free. This in and of itself is stupid. Even Motel 6 has free Wi-fi. So what you’re telling me is that this cruise ship isn’t as good as Motel Six? Fine, I’ll just get a subscription, or whatever, and it will be worth it for the week. I was under the impression from the ship directory and the ship staff that you purchased “internet cards” at the “internet cafe” and then used them to log on to the internet. So I went to said internet café and found that everything I was told was a lie. First of all, the internet café was not a café at all. Internet cafes have croissants and hippies in them. There were none and the layout of the room looked kind of strange, like a classroom. I went to the front where there was a guy at a desk. I asked him about the cards. He said there were no cards, and that there was a minute rate or I could buy minute packages. He pointed to a placard on his desk that further explained. Then he added, “I’m actually teaching a class right now.” His latter remark confused me. I turned to see where his desk was facing. Most of the computers in the room were turned to face his desk and I saw that there was a grand total of two people in the “class.” At this point I'm thinking, "This is the shittiest internet cafe I've ever seen." The guy at the desk turned his attention back to the class and began to say something about layers. Layers? That means he’s either teaching photoshop or computer aided drafting. I’ve taken about half a dozen classes for various programs concerning the two and I can tell you that the time I’ve spent in them has been the most boring time of my life. It’s certainly not something I would ever consider doing on a cruise. These people don’t need to learn how to use photoshop, they need to learn how to take a cruise. Anyway, back to the internet. Now get this, the minute rate was 75 cents per minute. My first thought was “Holy shit! That has to be illegal somehow.” What can you accomplish on the internet for something reasonable like five dollars? Not much. You can barely check your fucking e-mail. Just the price alone dictates what you will be doing on the internet. You definitely will not be having fun on the internet because if you’re having fun you’re wasting time and time = money. Well I don’t know about you but I think the whole point of the internet is fun. That’s about 97% of the reason I use it. I would have just said screw it if it weren’t for one technicality; I wanted to talk to my girlfriend. My cell phone didn't work when we weren't in port and I sure as shit wasn't going to use the ship’s phones. That left one option other than mail; a *really fast* e-mail. I sat down at one of their PCs and started an internet session. To my absolute horror, I found that the internet was about as fast as dial-up if not a little slower. Now how they managed to get a broadband connection to be the equivalent of dial-up is beyond me. They must have had a crack team of corporate rapists trying to figure out how they could possibly get more money. "Shitty internet connections!" "Excellent idea Johnson. You've got a future around here." Come on! The price is already 75 cents a minute. Call girls are cheaper than that! Can't you just amputate one of my fingers? I just want to contact my girlfriend. What the hell is wrong with that? Why do you get penalized for talking to loved ones? You don't have to be such a fucking asshole.

I ended up using $7.15 worth of platinum diamond-encrusted internet But the only thing I did was read an e-mail and send an e-mail. If you're a math freak you might have noticed that 7.15 is not a multiple of .75 and that's because they actually charge you by the second. That means it's 1.25 cents a second. Now Laeci had sent me two e-mails. One was short and one was a lot longer. Here's a real excerpt from the first e-mail I sent on the cruise; "Sorry I don't have enough money to read your first e-mail." Isn't that sad? That sentence wouldn't even make any sense out of context. Well I could always buy a package of minutes. It's only $ 55 for 100 minutes. Wow, what a bargain! That sounds more like a one year subscription than a minute package. Any given AOL trial disk gives you more time than that for free. Go to hell cruise ship!

I do bite my thumb, sir.

My girlfriend bought me a deck of Shakespeare flashcards. Each one has a memorable quote of commentary from one of his plays. There is also a word missing from the quote. On the back of the card it has the missing word and the context of the quote. She started reading through the cards and of course we couldn’t get any right off the top of our heads. You pretty much have to already know the play. It’s not like you can infer anything from the Elizabethan sentence structure. You could insert any word and it’s an 80% chance that that’s a legitimate sentence. She read one that seemed ambiguously sexual and then said:

Her: “Elbows? I was thinking penis.”
Me: “Yeah, me too. Lets just insert the word penis into every quote.”

So here are my top ten favorite results of the above statement.

1. “Many a good [penis] prevents a bad marriage.”
---Twelfth Night

2. Octavius: “But he’s a tried and valiant soldier.”
Antony: “So is my [penis].” ---Julius Caesar

3. “There’s many a man hath more [penis] than wit.”
---The Comedy of Errors

4. “He has not so much brain as [penis].”
---Troilus and Cressida

5. “’Tis [penis] that doth oft make a woman proud; But God he knows, thy share is small.” ---King Henry VII

6. “Away you scullion! You rampallian! You frustilarian! I’ll tickle your [penis].”
---King Henry IV

7. “Thou wast born to be a [penis] to men.” ---King Henry VII

8. “To be slow in [penis] is a woman’s only virtue.”
---The Two Gentlemen of Verona

9. “Young men’s love… lies Not truly in their hearts, but in their [penis].”
---Romeo and Juliet

10. “Frailty, thy name is [penis]!” ---Hamlet