Painting Ourselves Into A Corner

Apparently, the 80's are finally back.

Now, I remember when people started saying that the eighties were going to come back, somewhere around January first, 1990, and I remember thinking that was a horrible idea. Hot pink is horrible, especially on men. So are big hair, legwarmers, speedos, and every single album made in the eighties. It's essentially a black spot on the history of humanity- the final decade where people made up their own lame ideas instead of having computers do it for them.

Is it just me, or does it seem like the period between "current fashion" and "retro" is getting shorter and shorter? In 2010, we'll have people pining for 2009, because everyone will be so nostalgic for the year the robots finally rose up and kicked our collective fleshy asses. Don't believe me? Would it help if I told you they're bringing back 90210? Does it make you weep yet? What's next, the X-Files? Humanity has run out of ideas, and we are painting ourselves into a tiny, tiny corner. 

Somehow, we'll delude ourselves that everything really is modern and better, as we watch The All New Adventures Of The Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air and In Living Color 2.0, on our giant HDTVs, tomorrow. We'll elect Zombie Reagan for president, and eat our Dippin' Dots, and sing along with the theme song for 21 Jumpstreet, and die a little inside.

This Is What I Was Born To Do

I have a fantastic lot of projects to do right now, which is why updates are a little spotty. It's okay, though, because most of it is code, and code is what I was Born To Do.

My employer wants a social networking site, which is hilarious, because social networking doesn't really fit our business model and because everybody and their grandmother wants their own social networking site.

My other employer (Fancy) wants video uploads, so that people can upload their steamy hot pornography to a server, so that other people who want pornography of the steamy hot variety can watch them. Having seen the site this is supposed to be similar to, I'm pretty disgusted, because every person who uploads themselves naked to the site looks like a gorilla. It's enough to make you want to burn your eyeballs out, with a gun that shoots fire.

Finally, I have to fix plunk's computer, which is crappy and slow and runs windows, barely. In the meantime, I have EIGHT. GIGS. of her pornophotography sitting on my computer. In a shared public folder. I hope there's something incriminating in there. I really do.

Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor, Your Smoking Hot

All of a sudden, banks are collapsing and people are rushing to get their money out. I've got this weird sense of deja vu; I can't quite put my finger on it, but I know I've heard of this kind of thing before.

Now, the bank in question is IndyMac, which is basically a made-up pretend bank, made entirely out of wishes. As long as "wishes" means "risky mortgage loans Countrywide wasn't able to sneak past Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae's watchful eyes". Seeing as how those two government entities themselves are in some serious trouble, we're basically going back to Hooverville Junction, except instead of cardboard boxes everybody will be squatting in luxurious, hastily-built McMansions. I'm actually not seeing much of a problem. Heck, I should get out there right now and claim my very own three-story foreclosure brothel, which I will populate entirely with poor girls who bit off more than they could chew.

Trust me, I know a lot. Time to "invigorate the economy".

More Of The Same At E3

I'm pretty busy this week, but I'm at least keeping up with the three big console players at E3. In general, Microsoft is throwing around their massive wallets full of smaller wallets full of cash to try and snap up as much exclusive content as possible, including a movie download deal with Netflix; Sony is playing conservatively with their massive, massive processor and just now realizing that their bulky geek candy is capable of connecting to the internets, where people download pornography; and Nintendo will probably release a game where all you do is stand on one foot, which everyone in the world will buy twice.

I have to say, I'm looking forward to a lot of the PS3 titles. InFamous, which basically looks like somebody watched Unbreakable sixty billion times and then decided to make a video game about Thor; LittleBigPlanet, which is the only game anybody actually knows is in development for the system; and Fallout 3, because you can never get enough apocalyptic wasteland in your peanut butter. I'm sure I'll kill many hours with these, if I can keep the boy from playing "Wii Hop" or whatever for five minutes.

Do You Not See This?

Are you fucking kidding me? It's one week after Burger King, embroiled in a bitter battle to keep tomato growers underpaid, decided to be a big company and fork over the extra pesos. All good, right? The tomato growers get to eat higher-grade dirt, and CEO John Chidsey gets to sleep alone, with the Burger King, in his gigantic four-poster princess bed, in sexual congress.

Oh, wait. That would be the Gay Fairy Tale ending. What we want is reality.

Well, friends, the reality is that all of a sudden somebody rubbed their smoked salmonella all over them tomatoes. That's right. Huge megacorpoconglomerate forced to pay slightly higher than slave labor leads to sudden epidemic disease scare in the EXACT SAME INDUSTRY as the pay increase.

I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but I am pretty sure this can't be just coincidence. It's way too pretty.

Vegas Wins Subprime

Congratulations, fellow gamblerholics and people who moved to Vegas to get started on your career in the adult movies: we win subprime. According to all the news numbers, Las Vegas stands at the top of the US market of housing price drops.

I remember wandering around in Phoenix's totally awesome Copper Square, which is kind of like urban shopping, except more sexlike. I walked into a pawn shop that was closing its doors and holding a huge liquidation sale. As I browsed musical instruments and shotguns, the clerk made small talk with me. And by small talk, I mean I elicited his confession that Las Vegas was totally growing faster than Phoenix. I forced him to say, "We're number two". Which made me giggle in the store, because I thought he was talking about poop.

If you drive down some random streets on the south side of Las Vegas, you'll find millions of crackerbox McMansion communities, each development of which has about two residents. All the rest of the houses are totally and completely empty, because nobody actually wants to live in Las Vegas except for meth junkies, alcoholics, and aspiring transgendereds who are also prostitutes. After the subprime crisis hit, all the construction companies went "oh noes!" and watched as their gigantic housing projects did not form Voltron, as well as not getting any residents ever.

Personally, I think the solution is simple. Every single one of those houses should be turned into one of the three things we can't seem to get enough of in the valley: convenience stores with slot machines, music venues with slot machines, and casinos with cigarette girls (slot machines optional). If there's one thing Vegas has an awful lot of, it's old people who live their entire lives in front of the spinny flashy money eaters; why not open more venues to cater to them? Just like real estate, you can never have too many places to put video poker.

Taco Bell Submits To My Dastardly Whims

Merely months after McDonalds brought back the McRib temporarily, somebody at Taco Bell corporate finally got hit by my orbital mind control lasers, because they have brought back the holy grail of taste with the Club Chalupa. But what's this? They've changed it up somewhat to appeal to discerning restauranteurs. By calling it the Bacon Chalupa. And making it out of more bacon. I'm pretty sure they're setting a trap for me, where they will lay down a trail of Chalupas in the desert in order to lure me back to their cheap condo.

Oh, I'll put up some resistance at first. I'm not the kind of girl that you can just bring home with promises of deliciousness and expect to get past fifth base. But eventually, Taco Bell will brush my hair away from my ears, and whisper to me seductively, and tell me I'm pretty. Maybe the morning after I'll feel that bitter little twang, the sickening symphony of rationality telling me it was just the heat of the moment. But then I'll be full of bacon. I'll take the top down on the way home, and the chilly morning air will follow me the whole ride.

Absolut Peach

I'm totally not above shilling a product I believe in. For absolutely no money, I will extol the virtues of self-administered HIV tests, flea and tick spray, and fingerprint removal kits, as they've all been godsends to me at some points during my life.

Absolut Peach Vodka may not have been as useful to me as those other things above, but those are the things you buy during the "oh, shit" moments. On the other hand, Absolut Peach is something you buy when you want a little decadence. When you open the bottle and smell it, it's not like they waved a peach over the top of the bottle. It smells like the entire state of Georgia uprooted itself and came over to your house to get totally wasted. With a little orange juice, it's like a brief taste of divinity.

The only thing I hate about it is that there's no "alcoholic-sized" bottle option. With a little determination, you can polish the whole thing off yourself in just a couple hours. Dirty pool, Absolut. Dirty pool indeed.

America The Costly

Ah, subprime. You can hear the venture capitalists screaming in their uneasy sleep as the mortgage-backed securities they used to use to clean up after a steamy session of solo sex plummet in value, like so many used lottery tickets. Hell, out of my back window I can see places that young, stupid couples used to call home. Now, they're like the older prostitutes in a brothel; working double-hard to show that their new, reduced foreclosure value is a good deal, an economical lay for a john with less discerning tastes.

On top of all that craziness is that demon banshee ethanol, the new monkey on the back of the energy economy; a magical elixir sent down upon us from the Corn Goddess herself to keep the truck lanes flowing with overpriced grain and clandestine nuclear waste. Never mind that the grain and milk are more expensive because the Corn Goddess wasn't slutty enough to put out enough produce for both the rice racers and the cattle. You can't blame the farmers; they'll grow whatever crop keeps them from going into debt.

A week or two ago, I heard that gas prices were going to hit $4 by summer, and I pretty much ignored it. That's what we've learned to do recently, collectively as American citizens in a badly mismanaged federation; just ignore the doomsayings and hope that there's enough of a country left at the end of this reign of apathetic terror to rebuild. It was a shock to come back from a long drive and see the pumps had jumped by a quarter, seemingly during my travails. I don't know about you, but I'm going to stock my acorns for winter and hope that somebody is smart enough to blow all this over.

Amazon Secretly Loves You

Shortly after Big Media tried to diss Apple's iTunes by supporting DRM-free music downloads on Amazon, we now see Amazon staging a new software and game download service. Unless you're really against paying for music, software, and the like, the thought of Amazon rolling out a digital download service has got to feel pretty sexy for you. I'll tell you this- if they ever move into DRM-free, standard format video downloads, I will love them unconditionally forever with what I keep in my pants.