So, fun times. I'm what you'd call a method author: when I'm writing about something, if possible I like to try it out IRL to make sure that I'm giving an accurate account. In most cases, though, I just do research. (I do know how to make my own tear gas and nitroglycerine, thanks to getting access to reserve materials from a university I don't attend by dint of having asked for them on a day that their computers were down.)

So, I'm shortly going to be working on a story which involves a lot of lethal trap setting. Obviously there aren't a lot of those that I can actually try out, but with the access I have to Rob State University's drama department workshop, I can build a few of them so long as I don't get caught and dismantle them afterwards.

I've been going over schematics for a nail gun trap, where if you step on a board a nail gun beneath it will fire upwards at you. I'm pretty sure I worked out how to do it in a way that will realistically work.

Then today, while working on a completely separate nonviolent project, I managed to inadvertently shoot myself in the index finger with said nail gun. The really sad part is that I didn't so much go, "HOLY #@$)@# I JUST SHOT MYSELF WITH A NAIL GUN!" as "Hey, now I know how my victim will feel."

So, yeah. It's been a strange week.

The first-aid kit bandage fell off, so I used duct tape to make a new one.

It's not a Band-Aid. It's a MANdaid.

Another epic win for Rob State University.

We had a massive snowstorm yesterday. As in, when I went to bed, the world was full of green grass, and when I woke up there was six inches of snow. I said, "Screw it," and drove to school - doing the speed limit, mind you. Apparently I'm literally the only person in the entire country that understands that your car will not instantly crash and kill you the second you go above 40k while there's a single snowflake on the road. Everywhere else in the province, bus services were shutting down, and my hometown set the record for most collisions in a single day, with over 230. I then attended a few classes, drove Robette home, then went back to the school for even more classes.

I'm the shop foreman for my drama class, as I mentioned previously. That means that while the others are rehearsing, I'm in the shop loudly cursing the sawmills who keep giving me warped wood to build perfectly straight set pieces with.

Apparently, while I was in there, the university board decided that it could face litigation if it didn't let the professors go home before the weather got too bad. So they literally went around the entire school and kicked everybody in the building out, cancelled all of the day's classes, and sent the whole staff home.

What this means is that Robette's roommates all come home, tell her that the school is on lockdown and everybody's left. Robette assumes that this means that I'm not at the school, and since I'm not at her house, that means I've gone home. So she texts me to double check that everything's okay.

In fact, as it turns out RSU really doesn't care if I die, apparently, because even though there I was blasting Alexisonfire and using several noisy power tools, it doesn't occur to them that I should probably be evacuated along with everybody else, and nobody stops by to let me know about the lockdown.
Meanwhile, my parents try to phone me to tell me not to come home, on account of everybody everywhere getting into massive accidents.

This all would have been fine, if I hadn't accidentally left my phone in my discarded sweater, and decided to work late. The end result was that I emerged from the drama lab to find the school deserted, much like the first paintball episode of Community. I also discovered that Robette and my parents had phoned each other, and when it became apparent that I wasn't anywhere that I was supposed to be, they drew the seemingly obvious conclusion that I had quite possibly died somewhere, and were in the process of worrying themselves sick when I remembered that I didn't have my phone, and saw the really disproportionate number of missed calls that I'd received.

The end result of all of this is that I think that what probably happened is that the school took a peek into the drama lab, said, "Wait, that's the guy who kept moving that table. Let him die of weather conditions, he totally deserves it."

Well played, RSU. Well played.

While I was supposed to be writing an essay last night, I happened to stumble across a game called Alter Ego. If you'd like to try it, here's the link:

Alter Ego

What this basically is is a simulation of your entire life, presenting you with a really astronomical series of choices that will affect your future development as a person. (Since my essay was about the development of self, I decided that tooling around with this for a while would count as doing 'research'.)

For my maiden voyage, I decided to try and play as close to myself as possible, just to see what would happen.

I was pretty interested to see how the game would interpret my personality choices, since I routinely manage to bend personality tests into pretzel shapes without actually intending to do so. (No joke. When I was eighteen, I actually took a standardized personality test from a professional neuropsychologist. After about 150 questions, which I did answer completely seriously and to the best of my ability, what I got back was a sheet of paper telling me that the computer had analysed my answers and determined that I was lying. So apparently as far as standardized testing is concerned, I'm not a real person.)

With this in mind, I wanted to see how well this game could accommodate AlterRob.

AlterRob had an interesting life. At the beginning of the game, he was issued a personality test. Keeping the above anecdote in mind, AlterRob attempted to game the system, and openly admitted that he would not be taking the personality test seriously, then proceeded to lie on every single question after that. He refused to come out of the womb until he was forcibly removed, because, hey, it was warm and comfy, and free food. Following this, baby AlterRob basically developed randomly, as a result of the game not letting me choose mood/action combinations like, "Angrily fall asleep," "aggressively don't notice the dog" and "passively hit the other child in the face", forcing me to try other things. AlterRob was not what you'd call a prodigy, managing to master only the skills of manipulation and standing up, without ever apparently learning to crawl, figure out what a mirror was, or get over his fear of strangers. Though he totally had his parents wrapped around his chubby little finger, AlterRob wasn't always so successful. Other children stole his toys and abused his niceness, then his pet goldfish died and his mother stole his stuffed bunny and never gave it back. Oh, and then he was hospitalized for severe gastro-intestinal burns after drinking an entire bottle of cleaning solvent.

Luckily, AlterRob survived this particular adventure, and successfully transitioned into nursery school, where he was afraid of all of the other children and spent a lot of time crying. He was forced to help with household chores, despite his fervent wish to stay inside and watch cartoons. This development ultimately proved to be a mistake on the part of AlterDad, because while gathering sticks, AlterRob was kidnapped and tortured to death by a child molester.

Needless to say, this was a pretty disturbing result, and not just for the reasons you might think. See, as a three-year-old, I apparently went wandering downtown all by myself for a few hours, and was apparently completely unfazed when the police showed up. Apparently this just goes to show that I'm such an improbable person that all parallel-universe versions of me tend to die right out of the starting gate.

I'm going to take another run at it, as "Michelle," the name my parents were going to use if I had turned out as a girl. We'll see how FemRob turns out.

I played that game...

I was cautious (similar to how I am in real life) and ended up having my mom die during my college years, my dad becoming an alchohalic afterwards and then myself being left at the alter right before i went into old age.

And then I died.




Needless to say I am beginning to worry about the rest of my life.

If possible, Michelle had an even rougher life than AlterRob did. I decided from the get-go that Michelle would give absolutely zero damns about anything in her entire life, ever, because I'm compulsively overanalytical, and I wanted to see what my diametric opposite would do. Interestingly, this compulsiveness actually made Michelle a pretty awesome child, if you don't count the fact that she burnt her house down. She was pretty much hailed as the smartest and friendliest baby in history, the only negatives being that she routinely injured herself as a child, and often beat the living piss out of her classmates. Come to think of it, the game took an almost perverse pleasure in reminding her that she was a drastically unhealthy person throughout my entire life.

Unfortunately, this trait wound up being Michelle's undoing after she hit puberty. She became assertive and demanding, and managed to permanently piss off her parents by getting drunk, lying, and sneaking out to parties at every conceivable opportunity. The hottest guy in school turned her down for being ballsy enough to admit that she liked him, and her friends routinely abandoned her for pointing out that premarital pregnancy was probably a bad plan on their part. Her mother and father pretty much cut her out of their lives completely, and found every possible opportunity to remind her what a terrible person she was. She was also way too busy getting hammered to actually find a job until she was about thirty-three, and only survived because the crazy street woman she impulsively helped turned out to be a millionaire who set her up for life.

Interestingly, despite me attempting to make the worst choices possible at every juncture, and in spite of the fact that literally every other guy she dated was given the backstory "a stripper you met at the club", Michelle managed to maintain her virginity for the entirety of her life. Bizarrely, this was due to the fact that she ruined every single relationship she ever got into by immediately attempting to cheat. What this actually means, according to the game's logic, is that if you're a big enough whore nobody will sleep with you. Since she wasn't married, Michelle also wasn't allowed to have any children, so according to Alter Ego's logic, promiscuity is actually the best possible form of birth control. All things considered, though, that's probably for the best, given that Michelle had no home, no family, and no job since she repeatedly got herself fired for destroying her boss' office whenever he made a sexist remark.

Michelle ultimately died in her mid-thirties, because she simply didn't give enough of a crap about her abdominal pains to go see a doctor. Turns out she died of an ulcer, because apparently there's nothing more stressful than living a selfish, hedonistic life with no cares whatsoever. I honestly can't tell if that's poetic or retarded, but I'm strongly leaning towards the latter.

My girlfriend told me she loved me and then a few clicks later she left me at the alter, decide bitch

Just me or is it a pretty short game? I spent like most of my adulthood finishing collage and finding / pleasing the girl I had only to have her leave me at the alter before I died of old age shortly after

Yea i found the first part of the game (the kid part) was incredibly long. Then when you became an adult you have to choose whether to finish college or do other stuff.

Yeah, the adult portion is disproportionately short. I blew probably 3/4 of Michelle's young adult phase just trying to get a job, only to have the company go under literally one turn after she got hired.

I quit while I was still at infancy....ADD much? lol

Incidentally, for all of you guys that are reading this, if you find something interesting on the interwebs (like this) that you think I might have a good time screwing around with, feel free to make suggestions. I'm always open to new life experiences.

I died as a kid at first, whoops!

Played again then died an angry rejected old man. (in a car crash)

Why couldn't I be ghey D:<

I have to hand in a philosophy paper tomorrow. We've been discussing God's role in the Holocaust, and my professor (and pretty much everybody else in class) is of the opinion that God can't be all-powerful, because if He was all-powerful, He was obligated to prevent the Holocaust. Instead, they assume that God didn't prevent the Holocaust because He's actually completely powerless and simply lacked the ability to do that, and that when it comes to tragedies, His only real ability is to show up and suffer alongside us in our grief.

I disagreed with this idea, because it's totally illogical if you believe anything else in the Bible. So I wrote a paper logically proving that their idea of God literally destroys the entire religion from the ground up. Plus, I make the case that suffering is not actually all that helpful in times of distress. Their idea is that by being completely powerless, God's enemies will take pity on Him, and that'll forestall the violence, but my point is that this obviously doesn't work, since this methodology obviously didn't prevent the Holocaust.

Now, when I'm submitting a paper, I generally include a picture on the title page, just something to make it aesthetically nicer. I'm considering using this, but I'm not sure if it's going to get me in trouble:



What do y'all think?

I think that would be frowned upon. But it is a really funny picture.

Their argument is actually pretty crappy. I've seen that argument for there isn't a God but I think it is widely accepted that if there is actually God he is pretty dang powerful (since he created a bunch of stuff). Just some people don't believe there is one or others believe he doesn't give a crap.