Why do the lights shine on the paintings on the wall instead of down on the desks?
Why do the idiot girls (and one fag) think it's ok to drop their shit on a table, and walk out for over an hour? More importantly why do they think it's their right to get pissed about it afterwards when you've dumped their shit somewhere else?
And why is it so fucking small?
A lot of people are going to find it weird to see that I'm bitching about this city considering the love I used to have for it. Especially now after my trip to Montreal the problems with this city are glaring. I spent most of yesterday trying to figure out what was going on with things like the Scarborough RT, and the ridiculous waste of money known as the North Spadina extension, and even now the new even bigger waste of money West Bloor extenstion. It got to the point where I had a draft email I was going to send to Steve Munro about it and other questions I had.
That's not needed anymore. Turns out the TTC delivered a report showing they're a bunch of idiots. I mean, I had little to no respect for the TTC as is. Now I'm just so incredibly frustrated I don't even know what to do. The problem with the Scarborough RT is that from the beginning it was a mistake. It's an awkward orphan subway. Now it's going to be a slightly prettier awkward orphan subway.
First, the TTC needs to stop trying to pass off its pathetic ROWs as LRTs. Spadina, the Queensway and St. Clair MIGHT be able to pass as LRTs if they were given the traffic priority they were supposed to get. What's the point of giving them traffic signals if you're never going to turn them on and let the streetcars go first? That was supposed to be one of the main benefits of putting streetcars on their own right of way in the first place.
What is the fear of LRT? At grade intersections? If that's the case just tunnel under the streets and space out the stations more. The extra expense should be just what the TTC needs to see it as a good idea. I mean, billion dollar subway extensions that will take years to build are seen as good ideas. So why not up the cost of an LRT, and use it the way it should actually be used? Maybe then we might actually have the decent transit system we try to claim we have.
Fun fact: Streetcars can do something stupid like 80km/h. Too bad most of ours get stuck doing 25.
I'm in a much better mood tonight. Not today - tonight. I was in a horrible mood today. So horrible that I got nothing done for the first many number of hours I was awake and finally had to go ride a streetcar with Anna to try and remind me why I liked this city. Then I took a nap, had three separate nightmares (which I don't have normally), woke up and went into Dave's room to listen to him bitch about people. Then I ate Chinese food. Now the city seems bearable again.
Thursday I woke up with one of the biggest hangovers of my life. Not the biggest hangover of my life. That was the night I drank far too much Grey Goose in December. But it was big - big enough that I sleep for many more hours than I should have. Then I got to drive to Montreal.
I drove to Montreal straight, in the afternoon to evening, through what seemed to be three separate blizzards. Oh, and we had bad directions. Sure getting to the city is easy enough. A little bizarre once you're in Quebec, and it's snowing, and no one drives in a lane. But we got there. Then we had to find the hotel, and the real fun started.
First it should be noted that Adam forgot the sheet with the directions on them. No big deal, he phoned his dad. We'd be fine. Only, each single direction was wrong. Every turn that was supposed to be left was printed as right, and vice versa. That and it gave us the address on one street and had us driving on another, so we had no way to reference where we were going. After turning around the third time, we got lucky and saw the sign for the hotel on the side of the building. Then Adam got confused about how the valet parking worked. We got there just in time to watch Grey's, which was good because there would have been hell to pay if Anna and I had missed it.
There is a lot of funny stuff that happened after this point. However, I am currently a cranky pants. So I don't want to talk about it, or it will seem like it wasn't as fun as it actually was. So hold off on this until I cheer up again.
I forgot to mention to almost everyone that I was going to be out of the province for a few days over reading week. Now I'm back so mentioning this is moot, but I'm doing it anyway. I spent a few days in Montreal with Adam, Anna and Corey. It was my first time in Montreal and the first time I had a full reading week to take advantage of. We stayed at the Best Western, had lots of fun, yadda yadda yadda. I promise to actually prove to you that I did have fun. No really: Adam got molested by a francophone drag queen. I'm just not going to do it right now.
For the first time in my life, I'm not happy to be back home. I don't really know how to process this new feeling. I've been all over the world. I've been travelling for years. Every trip I would go out, have a lot of fun, and then come back home talking about how much fun I had. But I would be so incredibly happy to be home.
When I was in elementary school I was happy because it meant a return to my video games. Even when I got home from Tokyo, I was happiest about the video games. That sounds bizarre until I point out that both flying to and from Tokyo my seat had it's own TV and Super Nintendo for me to play with. In what I think would have been grade 8, I was happy to return to an online game I was playing with my friends and the Pokemon TV series. Only the online game was a bust because when I got back all my friends had spent march break doing nothing but playing, and I was left behind.
When high school had started I was happy to return to my friends. Cruises threw a major wrench in social planning. It's amazing how many people can break up and get together and break up again over the course of one week. And of course once I was in university, I was just happy to be not wasting time again.
Now I'm almost physically unhappy and it confuses me.
Watch This:
Then This:
So Unforgotten Realms Episode Seven was released a while back, coinciding with the release of the expansion pack for World of Warcraft. It is by far my favourite episode. It's also a perfect way to show that some people just can't deal or process change.
Keep in mind that I have NOTHING at all to do with Unforgotten Realms at all. Nothing. There is a name, and at that it's misspelled. Episode Seven was also my favourite episode. The Internet it seems, felt slightly differently. For the most part people seemed to love in. In fact on New Grounds it got front page, and has pages upon pages of great reviews. There are also bad reviews.
People who leave these bad reviews amuse me. Not that a bad review of something automatically makes you an idiot (almost all of Jem's reviews are bad reviews and idiot is the last thing I would think of her as). Just some of these people boggle my mind. So let's talk about some of the apparent problems with this episode. Pay attention, because it will justify my belief that the people who don't like the series anymore are crude, homophobic, sexist, teenage (or teenage acting) losers. Rob is so going to kill me.
First up is graphics. When the series first started people complained about the graphics as if it had ANYTHING at all to do with the humour. Rob shrugged it off, and rightly so. He said the graphics had nothing to do with the humour and to downgrade at rating based on the graphics was stupid. That said, Rob has now upgraded the graphics. I am in love with the new graphics. However people are now saying that the old graphics were part of the charm and now it's not funny because the graphics are good. Ok, go figure. Graphics still have nothing to do with the humour so I feel set in this argument.
The biggest amount of complaints come from the fact that it's not D&&D jokes anymore, but internet jokes instead. Let's look into this deeper. The first episode, which is apparently the BEST episode, had almost no D&D jokes or references. Don't believe me? There was the skit about the nunchaku, the skit about wizards that wear monocles (not D&D), the scene where Rob's character sleeps with a guy (not D&D), the NPC Wizard (monocle revisited, NPC script joke, and monocle revisited again). Let's stop here. With the "19+4" joke there were three D&D jokes total, with some potty humour peppered throughout the animation. And what else? AN INTERNET JOKE? OH NOES! The NPC script joke comes right from Der Dragon Warrior which is, hey look at this, the inspiration for Sir Schmoopy's graphic in the game. Well, didn't this just get interesting.
As part of the "Not enough D&&D jokes" thing is the complaint about how a lot of the jokes in Episode Seven were from the internet. Ignoring the fact that the episode was titled "Schmoopie's E-Buddies", I'd like to point out that I had not heard of ONE of those internet jokes and I still thought it was the funniest episode yet. The only thing I remotely understood was the aggro line joke, which was funny because it's an adequate representation of the illogical result of programming limitations in online games vs. D&&D. Which, if anything, should at least count as half a D&&D joke. Aside from that, I had never heard of Leeroy Jenkins, or the DBZ 9000 joke, or the Onyxia Rant thing. Those were shown to me after. After I had seen them all, it got even FUNNIER.
So then people said the problem is not that he isn't using D&&D jokes anymore, but that he's over-referencing these internet jokes. Well, the only reference to Leeroy Jenkins was his name and it still would have been funny if the name had been Phil, or Shane, or Steve. The 9000 joke was funny because it only happened once, as opposed to over and over and over and over again like in the original. And the only big thing was the Onyxia Rant which was still effing funny.
So what actually changed that's causing the problems then? I'll tell you but get ready for some people to get really offended and go nuts defending themselves. The only thing that has is the fact that Rob isn't vulgar anymore, that losers made the "Mike is Gay" jokes not funny anymore, and that the girl character got permanently cut from the cast because these straight, straight men couldn't handle a girl's voice.
So it turns out that nothing bad actually happened to the series. Instead, everything good happened and bad people couldn't deal with it. Oh and Rob, I'm sorry, but I had to. I didn’t want to do anymore French homework.
I'd like to say that today was the climax in what has been a series of bad weeks, but that would just be a lie. If anything, the climax would fall sometime near the end of this next week. But I don't even expect that.
So it's Friday night (well, Saturday morning) and I'm in my room. I haven't moved from my room in hours, with the one exception being to get the pizza from my good friend the pizza delivery man. I'd like to take this opportunity to talk about the possibility that I just might be a big loser now.
My options for a Friday night include the standard Fly, Crews, and Vice (with some Woody's on the side). Fly's hosting Pixelrox: The Myspace party. This causes problems for me. A few problems: I hate Myspace kiddies; I hate Jeffrey Star, and he's "performing"; and I hate Myspace kiddies. So that was out. Joey is gone home, and Anna is cuddling with Corey in her room so Vice is out. I might have considered walking alone to meet people there but they're either out of town or at Sonic. Peter Rauhofer is at Sonic tonight. Now I'm totally not a big enough queen to be into that religiously like some of my friends are, but I was still considering going. Until I realised that it cost $30 and my bank account is ($498.67). For those of you who haven't suffered through accounting at all the brackets around the value are the equivalent of a negative. Yes, thanks to the gift of overdraft my bank account is down $500. That of course doesn't count either of the Visas, the MasterCard, or the AMEX. Ya, I'm fucked. But at least I'm not realising that I might not be a big loser. I'm just broke.
I wrote a term test today for accounting. Accounting is one of those subjects where I will never understand how people enjoy it. It is not interesting. It is not exciting. It is useful in the sense that people need to know where there money is going. But even that use just barely justifies the suffering that is caused by the subject. That's not what's bothering me today though.
Tomorrow is Valentine's Day. I don't like Valentine's Day. Yes, it's probably because I'm single. But it's definitely not because I won't have a Valentine. In the past week I had four different people ask me about Valentine's Day. That's what bothers me. Valentine's pops up and everyone wants a Valentine. Now it is true that I didn't talk to most of these people for a period of several months. It's also true that I either have considered or am still considering dating them. But why does Valentine's Day have to be the push to get going? Is it because it reminds you that you're lonely?
Pfft. I have a never ending pile of homework that can do a better job of keeping me company than most of the people who consider themselves "datable".
We've all been told that scent is the strongest sense tied to memory. I'm not going to deny that. I'm definitely not going to argue that. I know good and well that power scent has over someone in an emotionally vulnerable position. The last two weeks have been emotional hell for me. Only this time my bed isn't an escape.
My bed is normally what I use to escape from the world. Over the last two weeks I've been feeling down. I had a friend come over one night and cheer me up. It meant a lot that he was willing to brave the disgusting cold that is Toronto at night. It worked well too – sort of. It was nice having him there. It brought a lot of emotional baggage I thought I was done with, but I was ok with that. It's nice having someone there at night. Physical contact is soothing. Besides, he smells really good.
Only the smell came back to haunt me. I was having one of those bad nights where your body is asleep but your mind is still half awake. It's frustrating. After arguing with my body for what seemed like hours, I finally willed myself to roll over and cover my head with my blanket. As soon as I had pulled the blanket down I was confronted by a smell. A good smell. His smell. It was calming. I was in a good place again. I remembered he could comfort me. So I rolled over reaching out to grab his arm and pull him close to me.
I took a second to realise I was only grabbing at pillows. I didn't fall asleep again after that.
To answer the most common question I've received lately: yes, someone did bite me at buddies. He also ripped my shirt. And all I got was thanks from a big black man (who wasn't actually security) for not crushing his head like I had originally intended to at the time.
The basic details of the story are that some drunk, trashy fag high on something was picking fights with the other trashy fags at Buddies. So I got fed up and knocked him down. Twice. He might also have what could only be related to that Indian Rug Burn shit we used to do to each other in elementary school from me twisting his arms around behind his back.
Now I need to go see the doctor to make sure I didn't catch anything from his bite. That'll teach me to be a hero.
I just got into a fight. Twice. At Buddies. I feel SO manly.
And I need a bandage for my leg. Faggots need to learn to do something other than bite.
[11:18:55 PM] joey: DIPLOMACY
[11:19:01 PM] mike²: DIPLOMACY?
[11:19:06 PM] joey: intense
[11:19:10 PM] mike²: I KNOW
That best sums up how last weeks diplomacy worked out. Going into the game had me on edge. I was worried about how things worked out. Because of the placement of the players, I only had to worry about three of the other nations: Turkey, Italy and Germany. Only up until that point Germany and England had been in a very strong alliance playing against my Austro-Hungarian/Russian alliance, and England was still a big threat to Russia.
Luckily the map worked out so that Turkey was no help to anyone else. Only it seems that he doesn't want to lose. Pity.
Italy ceased to exist as a national entity. He was a in at the beginning of 1902 and in an even worse position by the end of the Spring turn.
I was really interested to see what England would do. He appeared to be working with both France and Germany. I knew his eastern front would be occupied in Russia, but the rest of his military power had no where to go but into his allies territories. If he was to try and move more navies west he would end up too spread out like Russia. So when he decided to move into two of Germany's territories I knew the game just got interesting.
