My Version of Hell

If hell truly does exist, I know exactly what my experience will be like. Aside from the expected burning, torture, sodomy and Golden Girls marathons, the bulk of my horror will be in the form of progress bars.

I will be sat in an uncomfortable chair, at a desk with a computer. The computer will be doing something. Installing a program, exporting music or downloading really awesome porn that I'll never get to see. And there will be the progress bar, showing how far along the process is. I expect the initial bar to last a few millennia, as I stare at the monitor; begging, pleading, screaming, insulting and attempted punting of the computer to make the damn thing move faster.

And then it will near the end. 98%. Just a couple decades left to wait! 99%. Maybe one more decade of waiting. And then, a dialogue box will pop up saying something to the effect of "Windows has encountered an unexpected problem and needs to close. Would you like to send an error report?"

At last the breaking of my soul will be complete. I will have gone totally and completely mad. A raving lunatic with no hope of regaining my former sanity. And then the Devil will probably make me do that about 15 more times in between the before mentioned standard tortures.

Moral of the story: Progress bars are assholes and I hope they die. Thank you

I hate you. Yes, you! The one reading this. I hate you.

Recently I've discovered that I hate everyone. With only one exception, my Mother. There is nothing you could ever hate about her. But I really do hate you. I hate people and I don't want to be around them. When people gather, they like to talk, and talking sucks. There's never anything good to talk about.

Now I will list the people that I am hating the most right now. These are all personal friends of mine.

Brandy: I hate you. Your constant phone neglect has sent me into an emotional rollercoaster of disappointment, excessive happiness, complete and total rage, and warm feelings in my pants' region. I can't handle this kind of emotional (insert synonym for the figurative "rollercoaster" mentioned earlier because I can't think of another word and I don't want to be redundant) . Plus you don't cook me shit.

Jenna: Your obvious, overwhelming sexual desire for me is as apparent as your gargantuan breasts in one of your many excessively drooping neckline shirts you always wear around me. After you visit me and then leave, your "playful" way of making me rub your boobs over your shirt was cute at first and now has crossed that friend/sexual object area that we've treaded masterfully these 35 years we've known each other. I hate you.

Dan: I hate you. Your constant unavailability due to school work and your (formerly) devout girlfriend is annoying and takes away nearly all of our drinking time. And your car is beat up. I hate your fucking car too. He gets in one little fight and totally backs down and now it's damaged for life because it wouldn't stick up for itself.

John: Your unhealthy, sociopathic obsession with getting healthy is annoying. You live 3 minutes from me, and you have lots of days off of work. You could easily come over here (or me go there) and we could bomb through a bottle of booze and have a great time playing Mario Kart. But nooooooo. There is SUGAR in the booze. I sure would hate to ruin your mental illness about wellness by having some FUN! I hate most of you. The goatee was cool. I don't hate the goatee. And Jettas are girls cars.

Facebook Moms: I hate you so much. Due to the constant attention needed by those nefarious little bastards, most of your day is consumed by making sure they don't smash the TV with coffee table, or stab themselves while running with a pair of scissors. (which, by the way, is the most fun time you can have while holding scissors) So, nearly all your posts are about your devil spawn. Now, kids on the whole aren't totally evil. However when they are around me, they become more evil than Pat Robertson. I'll pick up your babies and one of three things will happen. One, they will puke on me. Two, they will drool on me. Three, they will scream their bloody heads off when I touch them, like I punched them in the face, even though I didn't, but I want to because they start crying, trying to make it look like I did punch them in the face and are trying to get me in trouble with their Mom. I hate you and I hate your children.

Adam Savage: I hate you a whole lot. You get the majority of the screen time because the producers find you charming, relatable and funny, when in fact, we all know that Jamie is 50x the scientist you will ever be. Only, Jamie get's 1/3 the screen time because he has the personality of a roofied woman at a bar.

I'm done typing now. It's 5:30 am and I hate the stupid clock for being so late/early. If you were not mentioned in the list, trust me, I hate you too. I just didn't have time to write about you. Thank you and have a pleasant day.

Why Nintendo Is Laughing Their Asses Off At Microsoft And Sony

Most "hardcore gamers" (God, I hate that term. Sounds so ridiculous and makes us sound like fanatics or worse...) have written off poor ol' Nintendo for their most recent console, the Wii. And I don't blame them in the least. Nintendo has taken the road less traveled and started appealing to the casual circuit of gamers that weren't getting any attention since around the Super Nintendo days. There weren't a lot of pick-up-and-play games during the Playstation 1 through XBox 360 and PS3 era. And as the graphics became more advanced, so did the controllers and so did the games. Most games were so inaccessible to someone who might just walk up to a controller sitting on the couch.

Now, Nintendo has seen the hardcore market fully saturated by Sony and Microsoft and knew they needed to take a new route. It started with the Gamecube and has now moved onto their enormously popular Wii console. The Gamecube was never tremendously popular. It wasn't the most attractive little box to have sitting in your entertainment center, but it was a great console and I had a wonderful time with mine. But I digress....

So, Nintendo comes up with this fancy little motion controller that you can wave at your TV and it does wonderful, magical things that can only really be explained by studying the Necronomicon or joining Scientology. But it got people off the couch and got people who had never played a video game in their life, to pick up that little remote.

It was a gamble, no doubt. Trying to appeal a console to an entire group that has never been into playing video games. But, as all smart people should, they bet on black and won. And they won big.

Despite what most gaming folk believe, Nintendo has never lost money from any console they've ever made, including the Gamecube. Sure it didn't perform as well as the other two systems did, but they still made a hefty profit while poor little Microsoft's original XBox lost over a billion dollars during it's lifespan. Yep...that's right. A BILLION dollars lost.

I am losing track of where I want to go with this stupid post. I hate that I can never organize my ideas correctly. A problem which will forever keep me from ever writing for a publication that more than 10 people read...ANYWAY!

Why is Nintendo laughing at mega giants Sony and Microsoft? A good place to start would be to check the all time best selling console/handheld games list. Among the top 20 best sellers list, 18 of them are, in fact, made by Nintendo themselves. (The other two being Gran Turismo 3 and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas) Now I know what you (non-existent) Microsoft and Sony fanboys might say right here. "But Casey. Those probably count all the games back in the NES and Gameboy days when they had no real competition!"

To which I must reply, that of the 18 best selling games of all time, 12 of those games have been made in the last seven years. Now, let's take a deeper look at why Nintendo is laughing so incredibly hard. Take the game "Brain Age: Train Your Brain In Minutes a Day" This silly little game was made to train your brain a little and maybe kinda help you think better, possibly. This fun little game was developed, marketed and shipped on the hefty little price tag of about half a million dollars, total. Selling for $30 a piece, it has gone on to sell 18.7 million copies. And hopefully my math isn't failing me here, but that should add up to about $560 million in profit.

Now we shall take a look at the best selling game of the two mega consoles of this generation, made by studios in their particular house. (As in, made by either Sony or Microsoft) And that game is no doubt, Halo 3. Halo 3 sold a very impressive $8.1 million units. That is exceptionally strong for a console game that sits with a $60 price tag. So, let's do a little quick math here. So, at 60 bucks and selling 8.1 million, the money made from the game comes to around $486 million. But now we must all factor in the $40 million it cost just to develop the game. (not counting TV ads, print ads, packaging, and shipping) So, without all the extras we'll say the game made about $446 million bucks. Not too shabby.

A piece of the Nintendo laugh comes in at the fact that "Brain Age" mentioned earlier is that it's only the 3rd best selling game on the Nintendo DS and 7th overall. The two games above it being Nintendogs and New Super Mario Bros. also made those ridiculous piles of cash. And this is just on their silly little handheld system! Let's take a look at the Wii now.

The top 3 best selling console games of all time happen to be Wii games. Those being Wii Play (27.4 million sold) Wii Fit (22.6 million) and Mario Kart Wii (22.5 million) Analysts have put the cost to develop a Wii game at about $8-9 million or so. Much much less than the $20-30 million per game it costs the Microsoft and Sony consoles. So, we'll do some quick math yet again with Wii Play and Mario Kart Wii (Wii Fit has the balance board in it and costs a hundred bucks. I have no clue how much the balance board costs to make so I don't want to use it in the example) Both of these games sold at $50 a piece. So we are looking at $1.37 BILLION made from Wii Play and 1.125 BILLION from Mario Kart. Subtract out the 8 or 9 million for development costs and hell, take out another 10 million for advertising both games and you still have two games that made Nintendo a billion dollars each. Just two games.

The list can go on and on about how much Nintendo makes on their games. Sure, the system is full of crap games that are made because of the small cost of development and people are trying to make easy cash. But in the world I live in, I always look at scoreboard. And scoreboard says that every single Nintendo executive is swimming around in their own Scrooge McDuck style money vault.

And now, Microsoft and Sony have both seen how large Nintendo's money vaults actually are and how much money they are losing. They really want a piece of that action. So, Sony has developed it's own motion sensitive controller that will be coming out soon and Microsoft is releasing their Natal system that uses a camera mounted on your TV to sense motion. This is a last ditch, desperate attempt to get in on that casual gaming market that Sony and Microsoft had forgotten existed. Only time will tell if these new gadgets will pay off...or if it will be too little too late.

Wow this was written like crap. Oh well, I liked it. Later.

Fannin Eleven

This is going to be a really odd post for me I think. You all are probably going to think I've lost my mind or have finally gone off that deep end you all have seen coming for years now. But I assure you, I'm quite sane (relatively speaking) and whoever reads this thing needs to check out this family. I posted a link to their Youtube channel a long time ago, but I doubt anyone really looked at them. So, the point of this post is to try and show how wonderful these people really are.

Fannin Eleven are a family of 11 brothers and sisters that are very musical. They all sing and most play an instrument of some kind. They have a Youtube channel where they get their family together and sing popular songs. But this isn't just some cheesey group cover they do. The rearrange and cover the songs, making them their own. A number of their videos are full acapella and (in my opinion) are the best ones. Just listening to the harmonies in their voices, the strong leads they have sing the verses, it's just incredible.

The audio quality in the videos isn't that great. It isn't terrible but definitely not great. And for me, this is a terrific thing. When they sing, they sing to the microphone on the camera they use to record and I love it. If they had studio/professional sound, I think some of the magic would be lost by their songs. It has an amateur-ish quality to the sound that really makes it feel real. It's all done in real time. No punch ins (with the exception of the Jason Mraz song. They split it up between the family) and no fancy editing or filter work is done. It's just raw, pure singing of this family sitting around the kitchen table. It's just magical watching a family this close do something so creative and so wonderful.

However, the greatness of these videos doesn't just stop at the singing. The videos themselves are fantastic as well. They very well could just show themselves sitting around the kitchen table and singing and I would be happy as hell. But that isn't what they do. Mixed in with showing them all singing, there are always clips of the family doing some activity together. Whether it be playing Wii or DDR, a hilarious session of them biting into lemons and limes and watching their reactions, to just old family photos or video. The videos are inviting and wonderful and everytime you see one, you wish you were apart of the family.

So, basically what I am saying is....all of my readers, you need to check out this family. Give a song or two a listen and I'm quite confident you'll find the happy and joy that I do whenever I watch one of their videos.

www.youtube.com/fannineleven
www.fannineleven.com

Sorry, even though I've been interneting forever and a day, I still have no clue how to make clicky links. Please just copy and paste into your browser. Sorry I suck!