So, LJ. I could use your advice.
And the great thing about you internet, is that when I ask for your advice, I usually get some, instead of attempts at being talked out of my dreams.
Despite setbacks, I've managed to save about a grand (which, despite Obama's best efforts is more in dollars than it is in euros) and at the risk of jinxing it, my dreams are getting closer to affordability than they used to be.
Hell, at this point, instead of going to just one part of America, I was thinking of maybe travelling around the American way, by rail. Years ago, that would have scared me. But if I've learned one thing in the last few years, it's that I'm more than capable of surviving and travelling by myself in a strange country. This plan is a little more ambitious, so of course it's a little more costly. But there's a feeling in my gut that tells me it's what I should be doing.

Working in the garage pays when there's work, and the complete lack of a girlfriend/life/vices cuts down on overhead tremendously. But I keep getting this feeling that I haven't exhausted all my options, that I could be doing more, even though I don't know what. So I'm asking you, what can I be doing to either get me on my way to America or help me to afford the trip.
Seriously. I'd be giving blood right now if it weren't for the hypoglycemia. Sabrina suggested putting a paypal button up on here, but it would feel weird/wrong taking money for nothing.
So I'm just asking, does anyone know what I could be doing, or how I can try to make some more cash?

Oh, Ireland. You are an embarassment to the century.
Locals try to save tree stump they believe depicts the Virgin Mary.

My mother believes Mary appeared at Fatima and Lourdes. I'm not sure where I stand on divine manifestations, myself. Considering those statues of Ganesha that drank milk and that statues of Buddha that emitted light, if these things are real and happening despite supposedly incompatible religions, then it's probably the work of what Keel dubbed the Ultraterrestrials. If they exist.
That being said, I'm inclined to agree with Denis Leary, in that the Holy Mother has a big enough budget to be able to afford to show up in much grander and more spectacular appearances than on the back of a piece of burned toast. If she wanted to, she could turn up at the premier of the new Harry Potter movie bitching about how even though she hadn't read the book, she still got spoiled for the Dumbledoricide.
Showing up on tree stumps and half-eaten breakfasts and road signs would make more sense of the manifestation were of a relatively new divinity. Like L. Ron Hubbard. Oh, we know Scientology isn't exactly strapped for cash, but one look at the production values of Battlefield Earth and it's clear to see why Tom Cruise keeps his own production company.
But seriously, if some divine being manifested itself in your cornflakes, surely it would more likely be the work of a being that was just getting started, flexing its miracle muscles and going "Lookit me! Look what I can do!", while the older, more established gods that parted seas and conjured golden bridges out of thin hair just snort "...Fuckin' n00b.".
And surely if the divine has seen fit to manifest itself in your cornflakes, then surely the only message it's there to convey is that you should finish your cornflakes? That being the case, not finishing breakfast and instead inviting the Vatican over to deem it a miracle is going to look bad on your CV come judgement day?

In other news, there is no other news.
The celebrity bloodbath seems to have ceased for now (I am a little concerned for Michael's kid Paris. Like the Hound of the Baskervilles, the media have turned their blazing eyes and dripping jaws on her, with her father's freshly-stripped carcass still dangling from their teeth, as if to say "Heyyyyyyy, soon as we're done with Miley Cyrus we can have this one for seconds!"), work is thin on the ground and my brother seems to have settled into the role of a Once-A-Week Dad depressingly quick.

You know what feels odd? Outliving your idols.
Admit it, at the back of your head, you didn't think it would happen to you. I mean, look at me, big David Bowie fan. Has the concept that someday I will be watching his memorial on TV while the tossers who couldn't give two fucks about him while he was alive rush out and snap up every one of his CDs they can get crossed my mind?
Not really. Like everyone else this generation, I always assumed I was living at the end of history, and I won't outlive any of the people I admired growing up because we're all going to be wiped out together by nuclear fire, a flaming meteor or giant crabs invading the Earth.

Which reminds me. Things I would like to see in either Fallout: New Vegas or Fallout 4:
1 - Horses. I've talked about this one before. When it comes to traversing huge, sprawling in-game landscapes, Shadow Of The Colossus-style transport is the way to go. Considering the wild west style they were going for, equines were somewhat conspicious by their absence.
2 - And/or vehicles. Which no post-apocalyptic movie is complete without. I don't necessarily mean turn the wasteland into Liberty City. On the contrary, I was thinking something more like Jak & Daxter 3, where the vehicles (mostly buggies and jeeps) were few on the ground but all the more handy because of it. I'm not thinking of Mad Max's V8 Interceptor here (as jaw-droppingly awesome as that would be), but something more along the lines of the Landmasters from Damnation Alley or the aforementioned off-roaders from Jak & Daxter.
3 - Weather. Just to add an extra element of danger to the environment. In other games, weather is just incidental. An innovative feature would be to make the player not only aware of the weather but have to take it into consideration when journeying. Acid rain that can burn, radioactive ash falling like snow, or a heatwave that could make you pass out if you're not stocking enough water.
4 - More radio stations. And the ability to import some of your own tracks wouldn't go unappreciated either.
5 - Cross-platform online multiplayer. Speaks for itself, really.
6 - Rockets. One thing that I only recently noticed. Despite the amount of retro-futurist 50's nostalgia, apart from the lunar lander in a museum, the space program (and the optimism surrounding it throughout the 50's and 60's) didn't get much of a look in. It'd be interesting if there were a mission where you had to help a bunch of armchair astronauts scrounge up the materials required to get one of those old retro-looking rockets spaceworthy, then sitting back and watching lift-off.

And now I better do this, in case it looks like I forgot. Five words given to me by Sabrina are:
Motorbikes.
Blasphemy to say when you not only come from a family of mechanics but also work in a garage, but I just think bikes are cooler. And better for someone like me who doesn't have a family to feed and/or play taxi to. I think there's a giant glaring difference in the number of people who have a car and the number of people who need a car.

Genesis
I'm going to assume she meant the band and not the book of metaphors. Phil Collins-era Genesis I've been listening to since before I can remember. My dad was into them, and in those long, boring Sunday drives when I was a kid, I'd just sit and look out the car window while the fantastic and otherworldly music kickstarted my imagination. Peter Gabriel-era, I discovered on my own. My Dad had none of the stuff from that era, and I actually discovered Gabriel's solo stuff long before I ventured into his Genesis days.
What's surprising is how different they sound. Surprising, because these days when someone goes solo, their stuff sounds IDENTICAL to when they were part of a group. Mostly because going solo these days just means someone's already swollen ego needs room to expand, so they just pretty much continue to be the band without the band. I mean, look at Beyonce Knowles. There's no difference to the shite she's churning out now and the shite she was churning out with Destiny's Child. Ditto Justin Timberlake. All that happened was their egos got too big to allow them to share a spotlight with anyone.
But there is a distinct difference between Gabriel's Genesis stuff and his solo stuff. His Genesis stuff was more experimental and showy, with songs inspired by his dreams. His solo stuff was extremely personal, less experimental and more refined.

Flag
Some people think the Stars & Stripes on my userinfo is either a silly joke or bitter sarcasm. I've said it before and I'll say it again, nobody ever believes anything I say except for the things I don't mean. Personally, I believe the Pledge of Allegiance (and the "under God" part of the Pledge) should be optional. I just choose the option to have it. In college, I got a lot of shit from idiots who had the thing confused with a swastika. I could have just taken the thing down and bent over for someone else's misconceptions. Which is pretty much the opposite of what the flag stands for, so no thanks.
The Irish flag, not much I can actually say about it. It features two of the ugliest colors in the spectrum and is usually only seen being waved by fuckwits up north or those rare occasions there's a World Cup on we're actually in.
Oh, and with a red pen, a blue pen and a ruler, I had so much fun pissing off armchair fuckwits in school by drawing the Union Jack. Not for any particular love for Britain, but if you can't physically fight someone, the least you can do is ruin their mood.

Hair
You know, I'm reasonably sure that if women went bald, we'd have a cure. Kinda like how if men could give birth we'd have (A) an epidural that actually worked and (B) much bragging about never taking one, not even that time we had quintuplets. I know some women do lose their hair, but not on the scale that would produce an effective treatment by the weekend.
I would hate to lose mine. I wouldn't even know where to begin looking for it.

Leather.
One of the few materials I actually feel comfortable in. Denim, cotton and leather. That's usually about it, really. And it's not a bad list. It looks good, it feels good, it's sexy, and sometimes makes hilarious noises under the proper circumstances.

"May cause drowsiness."
"May cause drowsiness."
Well they sure ain't going to be sued for false advertising. I slept in to around four! Good thing it was a day off. See, as some of you may or may not no, I have a heat allergy. I don't really get it when I've been to America because they have air conditioning and it tends to be a dry heat, but in this stupid country with its stupid weather, it tends to be like being stuck in a sauna with a fat guy. It gets to be impossible to sleep at night, because for some reason it's even hotter.
So it brings out my heat allergy in the form of hives around my ankles. And so I took something for it. It was either that or start hacking everything below the knees with a paint stripper (your doctor may not recommend this, but don't ask him, because he'll still insist on charging for his opinion). And it "may cause drowsiness". In the words of Denis Leary, it should say "Don't make any fucking plans".

In other migraines, my brother moved back in with us.
No, not the one in Wales. My older deadbeat. With kids. Who insists he "needs his space". Not sure why his space has to be our space and not the space where his kids keep their space, but there you go.
If I may do a great disservice to F. Scott Fitzgerald, I'll now say that in my younger and more vulnerable years my friend gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. "Darren", he said. "One of two things happen to girls whose dads walk out on them when they're kids. They grow up to be either complete sluts or absolute fucking man-haters".
His opinion, not mine. But I do agree that we do project issues with our folks, subconscious or otherwise, onto members of the opposite sex. Because our folks tend to be our introduction to gender roles, and it's hardly our fault if they give us a bad lesson. For instance, men whose mothers raised them right don't tend to be chauvinists or misogynists. Men whose mothers were abusive, doormats or trash tend not to grow up to be Alan Alda. They fuck you up, your mom and dad. They don't mean to, but they do. A bad parent will do it pretty extensively. A great parent is one who only manages to minimize the damage.
I know Ellie thinks the sun shines out of her father's ass, and I'm not going to sit here and let him fuck her up with his selfishness. All the prick does between trips to the pub is sit on the couch watching repeats of Friends. Thank God I moved the playstation up here next to the computer.

*sigh* All I'm doing is working so I can afford to get the hell out of here. But this shit better damn well be sorted out by the time I do.

I was stunned to see the front page of the newspaper yesterday. Photographic evidence that Debbie Rowe really was a mother to Michael Jackson's kids, and not just a Womb For Rent. and I'll say it again, I was stunned. Stunned, I say! Not at the story, mind. But the simple back that somebody actually printed an item about Michael Jackson that they backed up with proof. With real photographic shit-thee-not evidence! Never before, in my lifetime, have I experienced anything of the sort. I mean, my whole life, when it comes to the media and Michael Jackson, I've heard more believable knock-knock jokes.

Something else spotted while reading the paper (I do it sometimes as an exercise in masochism and to justify my occasional bouts of misanthropy). Number one, it's getting harder and harder to tell the difference between a newspaper and a women's glossy magazine. And second, while browsing the sex advice column for ideas/titillation (don't pretend there's any other reason) I noticed an odd difference between the English and Irish ones. For starters, the English one seems to be getting pushed slowly more and more towards the back of the newspaper, only a few classifieds away from the sport. The Irish one, on the other hand, seems to have gone from being buried in the back more towards the middle now. Also, while the English ones mostly seem to be about guilt over flings and uncertainty over fidelity, the Irish ones seem to be more full of women complaining their men don't please them, and men anxious over not being able to please their women.
Maybe the English are settling into the 21st century ennui of recession and the lull between the flavor of decades, while the Irish are still in denial, still determined to live out bullshit Sex & The City lifestyles and make all our Jimmy Buffett fantasies come true. That's the problem with this stupid little country, we're like the little girl playing in Momma's shoes (Lookit ME! We're just like a REAL country!).

Here's one for ya. Wayne Doherty, a 32-year-old father of two was blown away with a shotgun outside his parents' house. Apparently, he saw some gang members loitering around the place, went up to say something and that was it. Like that bit in The Dark Knight where some cop walks up to a parked truck, says something to the driver and then up pops the Joker, no words, chuck-chuck BOOM! and he's gone. Quick and brutal and awful as that.
They were calling this town the wild west on the radio this morning. I dunno, the Wild West at least had sheriffs. Sheriffs who weren't afraid to dispatch a bit of six-chambered law. What do we have? A government trying to make blasphemy illegal. Ah, you think I'm joking. "Come on, Darren! What bullshit! Church and State are seperate!". Maybe in the good ol' U.S.A., the least crazy part of an increasingly batshit world. I'm afraid that the move to outlaw blasphemy in Ireland is, in fact, real. And I heard about it from Sabrina, who usually takes my psychotic outburts at this shithole with a pinch of salt (or a fist to the shoulder-blades).
If this were America, those bastards would already be scheduled an appointment with a needleful of potassium chloride. Meanwhile, a collection of what Lenin called "useful idiots" would be campaigning that America should be run by the church. Because that's what usually what happens in places where people's ideals have yet to turn on them. Oh, and for those of you who missed it the first time, it was like this.

You fuckers want blasphemy? Here, have some. I think Jesus, if he was real, and really was the son of God, was a pretty fucked up guy. Half his head would have been full of the complete knowledge of the universe, knowledge he knew he couldn't impart to these stupid, selfish idiots he was trying to save. The other half of his head would have been filled with human frustrations, human fears, human failings. He hung around with losers and scumbags and whores and the diseased, and whenever any of them actually listened to what he had to say, they deliberately misinterpreted it as being told to go kill.
So yeah, Christ was pretty fucked up.
Arrest me. Hell, at this point, I'm even entertaining the notion of turning myself in to a Garda station and confessing to blasphemy, just to see the look on the Garda's face when he tells me to fuck off out of it and stop wasting his time.

Here's a thought, for all you good Christians reading this. Say a bus is bearing down on someone better than you. You only have enough time to shove them out of the way, but in doing so, you'll get yourself killed in the process. Now, when I say someone better than you, I mean someone you love, or an idol. Would you give your life for someone you thought was better than you? Most people probably would. Most people, would probably give their lives to save an equal, too. Someone who wasn't better than them, but not worse, either.
But how many people would give their lives for someone who was worse than them? Someone way below them. Someone not even worthy of contempt, let alone sacrificing your life for. Say it's not your hero or loved one that bus is bearing down on. Make it a rapist, a serial killer a pedophile. Would you shove them out of the way, or would you probably, like me, bring popcorn?
It's a no-brainer, really.

Which is the whole fucking point of the story. Even if you're an athiest, you can still get the moral of the story. Which in this case was that a sinless man didn't die for the imagined "sins" of soccer moms and stock brokers and dog walkers. You get a good guy who takes the punishment intended for the unrepentant scumbag, why? Because he loved the scumbag, even though he was a scumbag.

So long as you only believe in "salvation" for people who agree with you, you'll never be Christ-like, so you got some balls naming your faith after him. Until you can get to the point where you would push the murderer and the molestor out of the way of that bus, you are kidding nobody by calling yourself Christian.

Right. Bring on the blasphemy squad. Stick me in a cell with the guys who blow away family men for shits and giggles. So long as you caught them too, I don't mind.

Dear Ireland:
You suck.
No love,
Me.

P.S. No, really. The weather is crap. The money is worth slightly less than soiled toilet paper. The streets are full of shit and piss. And the people are small-minded, unromantic, selfish drunks. And that's just the politicians, who can't sell us out to France and their Lisbon treaty bullshit fast enough.

I'm out of here. I'm going to go live in a real country. Where shithole countries are considered urban legends and they have more seasons than just "June" and "Winter". Where a poor, black kid can grow up to be a rich white millionaire. Where even a potato can get itself elected President. Twice!
Where they have a real national anthem. I mean, none of this "Soldiers are we whose lives are pledged to Ireland" bollocks. Excuse me, was there a draft nobody told me about? Listen, asshole, when I want to be a soldier, I'll join a real army, thanks. An army that has actually fought, ideally. If you're going to be neutral, the only acceptable neutral is Chaotic Neutral, thankyouverymuch.
I mean, at least theirs starts with "Oh say can you see", which is a much better opening line. It's like a Francis Scott Key shot of Franz Ferdinand - "I say, don't you know!".

I'm sorry, but America just has all of my favorite things. Movies, guns, Batman, porn, comics, Springsteen, beef jerky, root beer, Jack Daniels, Jack Bauer, Jack O'Neill, Jack McCoy, Jack Bristow, James Brown, Tivo, a space program, Stephen King, nuclear fuckin' weapons, Summer Glau, napalm, jukeboxes, the death penalty, air conditioning, John Philip Sousa's Greatest Hits, cornbread, skyscrapers, Hawkeye Pierce, Harley Davidson, Mariska Hargitay, Michelle Obama, Mormons, Moon landings, missiles, aircraft carriers, exceptionalism, Johnny Cash, and all the good TV shows.

What does Ireland have? Guinness (which turns your shit black), great writers who had the good sense to fuck off out of here and write about what a shithole they came from, bipolar weather, nothing to do but drink, U2 (who have the good fortune and good sense to spend most of their time away from here), stew, potatoes, pre-natal alcoholics and one of the highest rates of suicide in Europe.

All jokes aside, it's perspective and your environment that makes all the difference. Last time I was in America, on a road trip to Vegas, looking out the window I saw the biggest, longest train I've ever seen in my life. I see trains here all the time, though. Like the tiny, pathetic, often-broken DART. And last time I was on one of those, a bunch of scumbags threw a rock through the window and cut my mother's face with the glass. Now, for all I know, the guy driving the train I saw in America probably hated his job. Doesn't diminish that even without knowing it, he was still sitting in the saddle with the reins of a titanic monster, heads and tails above the feeble cockroaches I'm used to.
That's the truly incredible thing about America. The amazing inventions, structures and accomplishments for such a short history are so matter-of-fact, so commonplace and humdrum to the locals as to be downright banal. And that's the thing that blows my mind, that you can be surrounded by wonders and still find it as dull as I find these, tiny, grey, vomit and spit-caked streets.

I'm glad that ever since Obama got elected, I haven't had to hear I'm wrong for loving America. I haven't heard "You know, America's a very racist country" once. You know, unlike here, where over a hundred Romanians were hounded out of the country for being Romanian (How dare they? The bastards). Why, I even heard rumors than an American tourist can now actually get into a cab without it being driven by a political pundit on his lunch hour.

But at the end of the day, it simply comes down to this: Ireland gave me depression, America gave me a dream.

The weather finally broke like a fever, with a fortnight's worth of rain in a night. Of course we have flooding in July, we're Ireland, stupid.
It was inevitable, really. The heat was just getting ridiculous. I couldn't sleep the last few nights, it was so damn hot. I had to sleep in the damn-near buff. I can't understand why it would somehow be hotter at night than in the day. Surely nights are de facto colder because of that whole planet-turned-away-from-the-sun thing? But we live in stupid Ireland. Things will go out of their way, even fly in the face of science to annoy you. That's why it's the Land of Ire, it's a pain in the ass just existing here.

Trying to sleep in that heat, I had a lot of stop-starts. I'd start dreaming, then get snapped back to waking, and drift off again with the dream still fresh in my head. Was very disorienting. The dreams featured zombies, and I wondered if that was why I kept waking up. Was I having small, short nightmares? A nightmarette?
It had to have been the heat, because zombies don't scare me. In fact, like most single white straight boys my age, I am quite pathetically MUCH more prepared for an invasion of fictitious monsters than real belligerant humans.

I'll tell you what does scare me, though. And it's the game of Team Fortress that God's been playing, lately.

See, the good Lord has gotten into this frightening habit lately. One where, instead of taking into consideration age, infirmity or karma, He has instead opened the divine phonebook on a random page, put one hand over His eyes and with the other randomly started poking names and going; "Live, live, die. Die, die, live. Live. Die. Live. Live. Live. Die. Live. Die. Live. Die. Live. Die, die, die, die, live, die, die. Live. Die. Live wishing you were dead. Die. Live, die. Die. Live. Live. Die."
And it scares the living piss out of me. I mean, Heath Ledger wasn't even sick. And Michael Jackson had work to do. So, here's what I think we should do. There's a lot of folks I like, and God will only take them if I don't see it coming. Because He's a prick like that. So, I figure we should list off people we like. Just to tell God "Hey, hands off. I'm watching you. Go shoot Winehouse.". With the added bonus that when these people eventually do pass away (hopefully a long time from now), by announcing it here first, we don't get accused of crowding the bandwagon later.

Okay, so. Old(ish) folks I like and want God to keep His hands off: David Bowie. Lance Henriksen. Patrick Stewart. Michael Ironside. Diane Keaton (Don't laugh, but unf). Bob Newhart. Clint Eastwood. Al Pacino. Jeffery Deaver. Terry Pratchett. Steve Martin (you never know, he might start being funny again). Richard Dean Anderson. Lou Reed. Sigourney Weaver. Terry O'Quinn. Mister Burns. Victor Garber. Sam Waterston. Peter Gabriel. Bruce Springsteen. Neil Gaiman.

Now, I know most of those aren't all that old (and in at least one case, fictional) but Michael Jackson was younger than my folks. And his carcass is currently being stripped to the fucking BONE by the media, who by the way, make vultures look downright anorexic.

And now for one of the single most important videos you will ever watch.

So yeah, aspirational TV. Soul-crushing, dignity-leeching, self-esteem-draining television. Hey, look at the pretty people and their fantastic lives! Maybe if I buy the goods and services advertised throughout and starve myself stupid enough I can be just like them! ...Why would you want to be. Would I trade my life for Tom Cruise's? Hmmm. Pros: Loaded, works with most of the Hollywood legends, Katie Holmes to pin to the headboard. Cons: Short, hounded by paparazzi, a registered trademark of the Scientology corporation (all rights reserved) and everyone thinks you're weird.
That last one I've been familiar with since the first day of school right up to eight seconds ago. My life, rut-stuck as it is, I actually find preferable to (most of) the ones on TV. I think I'd hate to roll the dice on fate and wake up one day as someone else where the most important thing isn't to know yourself but to fit in. As horrible as this never-ending stream of conscious rattling through my head can be, to be one of those awful people drifting between impulses and sensation and not self-aware would be a living hell. To worship at the altar of The Box. Oh television! Tell me thy commandments so we might obey!
Thou shalt be effing loaded.
Thou shalt live in a big house in a rich area.
Thou shalt drive an expensive car.
Thou shalt be pretty.
Thou shalt be witty.
Thou shalt be pretty and witty and gaaaaaaay.

Most of the TV shows I watch could hardly be called aspirational. We got terrorism on 24, rape, murder and molestation on Law & Order and its offspring, serial killers on Millennium, international espionage on Alias, hard lives on Firefly and being completely fucked over by the cosmos on Lost.
...So what do I take from shows like that to make them worth watching?
Well, for 24, there's the idea that the kind of person you'd need to be a war hero in the War on Terror is one that can't afford to be particularly heroic. It's not a black and white world, enemies lurk in the grey, and since they only emerge from it to suicide bomb you, the only strategy that works is to enter that moral no-man's-land and fight them there.
Law & Order tells you that people will do anything, anything to fuck one another over. Often over the smallest things. There is nothing that exists that's so awful that no human being has done it. Odds are, they have. Twice. But in every instance of true evil, you'll find true heroism not very far away.
Millennium was all about being socially conscious, and the burden that comes with being too responsible to bury your head in the sand. The price you pay for that may be misery, but the battle for people to do good and feel safe will always be one worth fighting.
What I took away from Alias is that people always are and always will be more complicated than they appear. Nobody in your life is just window dressing or a supporting actor, they have their own personal universe too. Good people can do bad things, and bad people can do good things. People can change a lot about themselves, but at the end of the day, their own nature isn't one of them.
Firefly had a lot to say, on a whole range of issues. For such a short series, everything from God to war to feminism to religion to free speech to mental illness got a look in. Much like South Park, you learn something by every episode. Whether it's that every man who got a statue must have been some kind of bastard or another, or how to properly interrogate a buffet table.
Lost... Well, you take from Lost the same thing you took from Alias. Just with a bigger cast. And polar bears. And we fat guys rule the universe.

Discussed at the garage: the theory that Michael Jackson had faked his death. And presumably, did a slightly better job of it than Tupac Shakur. I said that's what they said about Elvis, to which my folks remarked, wow, it really is like when he died.
Which means you can probably look forward to a slew of sightings for the next three decades. Although, you might wanna give those a little more thought than a quick dismissal, since MJ's appearance was a lot more conspicuous than an overweight diabetic with a Southern accent. There's plenty of those just walkin' around, like the ghosts in The Sixth Sense, not even knowing they're unpaid impersonators. But you spot a Michael Jackson lookalike, who else is it gonna be? Hyde? Bill Kaulitz? Posh Spice? Bjork?
...Hang on. It just struck me what an un-teutonic name "Bill" is. Eh, maybe it's short for Wilhelm. As in The Kaiser (which, if I could live my life over again, is a nickname I would so want to have had in school). And don't say I couldn't pull it off, I've got the whole German background on my side.
"Dude, this party's dead."
"Don't worry, man, we got The Kaiser coming over, he's bringin' the beer, the blunts and the bitches."
"Sheeee-it, nigga, that's all you had ta say!"
"Stop it, you're white."
"Sorry."

As I'm coming out of the meds, I'm finding a strange change in my emotions. Not that I'm feeling more, but that what I am feeling is sharper, better defined. Like the blunt edge has been taken off my emotions. Like a sword coming out of its sheath.
But though my emotions are returning to the sharpness they had before the pills, the control over them that I learned on the meds is still with me. Now when something provokes me, I can feel the edge to it, and part of me goes "It would be so easy to get angry/sad/depressed/rant/cry about this, but I'd rather not if it's all the same, thanks."
And I'm laughing more, that's another thing I've noticed recently. Laughing stronger and harder, even at things I've already seen. Like Eddie Izzard's queue of murderers, I was nearly on the floor in hysterics, even though I watched the tape years ago.

And speaking of funny.



Sad fact is, your money probably woulda been safer with the Joker than the bankers. He'd have only set it on fire, instead your pension's financing a floating cocaine party off the coast of Aruba. And then Obama would storm in on the Obamamobile, save your money and toss Joker back in Arkham, but unfortunately, not in time to save Biden from being disfigured and turning evil.

Nobody listens to my movie ideas, no matter how great they are.
If they only dead. I'd start by cleaning up the planned Cowboy Bebop live action movie. Fire Keanu, replace him with someone who's actually Jewish to play Spike. You know, I'd want to get an unknown actor to play Spike, and still have Steve Blum dub all of Spike's lines. Ask me why I don't get Steve Blum to play Spike, it's because he doesn't look a thing like him. In fact, he looks like an evil Joss Whedon. Or Charlie Higson, now that I think about it.
For Faye, I'd want an Asian actress. And I heard a rumor once that Lucy Liu wasn't the only Asian actress working in the entire Western hemisphere, which bears looking into if true. Again, you'd probably want to go with another unknown. Probably a native Singaporean.
Hollywood hates filling up movies with unknowns. They assume people wouldn't see a movie if there's not a star in it, and sadly, this is one of the few things the suits are actually right about. But to keep them happy, I'd cast Hugo Weaving as Jet in a cold second. He would nail it, hands down. Might have to bulk up a little, though. And I wouldn't care who they got to play Ed, so long as she was young, cute and completely odd (like Michelle Jovovich in Fifth Element) and most importantly, could type with her toes. And, of course, nobody's forgetting Ein.
Script-wise? Fuck the origin story. Fuck trying to stand alone. Fuck appropriating ideas from the original you like and filling in the blanks with your own bad ideas. Odds are, if you're paying to see this movie, you already know who the characters, what ship they're on and what they do, no introductions necessary. Basically, like Serenity. I'd just make it a big stand-alone episode of the series, on a big live-action budget.

But nobody listens to me. Why do you think they're getting the idiot behind Casino Royale and Quantum Of Solace to make the Green Lantern film. Which, I'm telling you right now, is going to suck. Green Lantern has always been something of the fourth Marx Brother to Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. Getting Martin "Xanax" Campbell to put audiences to sleep with his tale isn't going to break him out of that anytime soon. Oh, to be a fly on the wall at those production meetings...
Campbell: "I just wanna say, I am psyched about this project. I couldn't be more enthusiatic, determined, revved up and ready to go! ...What the hell is it?"
Producer: "...Uh, Green Lantern."
Campbell: "Right! ...Who's he, then?"
Producer: "Well, he's sorta like an intergalactic police officer."
Campbell: "Oh, so it's like Men In Black, with superpowers! That sounds interesting! We'll have to do something about that."
Producer: "He gets his power from a ring he uses to create objects and force fields and the like using the strength of will. The ring was given to him by a dying alien, who crashed to Earth."
Campbell: "I like that, I like that. We open on the alien's ship crashing - it roars through the atmosphere in this big fireball, then it hits the ground, KABOOOOM!!! A massive explosion! And that's it. It's very important we get all of the action out of the way in the first ten minutes of the movie, or we'll never get the audiences to leave."
Producer: "But the script calls for plenty of battles with his arch enemy."
Campbell: "Don't worry, I already had that figured out. We'll just have him get his ass handed to him in every fight!"
Producer: "But he's supposed to be good in a fight! One of the best!"
Campbell: "We'll have him do stupid things. Like using his ring to create a pair of ear muffs, so he can't hear his enemies sneaking up on him, that sorta thing."
Producer: "His love interest..."
Campbell: "Hasn't been cast, I know. We'll make her CGI. That way she'll be slightly less two-dimensional than the women in the rest of my films. Also, what kinda name is Carol Ferris? That sounds like a real name! Screw that. We need a name that's so bad, so preposterous, so brain-bleedingly goddamn DUMB we can't bring ourselves to use it anywhere but the credits."
Producer: "...We could call her Mustang Sally? Susie Q? Waltzing Matilda?"
Campbell: "No, I got it! Miss Tuesday! We reveal her first name in the credits as Ruby, and you'll hear the groans from here to Pakistan! Now, you mentioned an arch-enemy before."
Producer: "Yes, Sinestro."
Campbell: "And what's the deal with him, then?"
Producer: "Well, he starts out as another Green Lantern from a different part of space, but his idea of upholding the law and keeping people safe from fear is through dominating them. Essentially, he's a fascist."
Campbell: "Hmm, sounds like a realistic motivation. It'll have to go. We'll change it to him trying to corner the market in an abundant and value-less resource, like dung."
Producer: "That doesn't make any goddamn sense."
Campbell: "People won't care, not when they see all the wonderful goods and services being advertised througout our film! Like when Green Lantern takes the lovely Miss Tuesday to Starbucks for coffee, and while showing her the website for United Airlines on his Sony Vaio laptop, he gets a call on his iPhone, telling him to invest in Abercrombie & Fitch. What do you think?!"
Producer: "...I think it's shameful that prostitution is illegal and yet somehow being that much of a whore isn't. And I think I'm going to go next door and see how Whedon's Wonder Woman film is coming along."
Campbell: "That hack?! Please! You know, I sat through two whole hours of that Firefly movie, and between the explosions, the shoot-outs, the fights, the space battles, the gripping plot and believable villainy, I didn't see a single fucking can of Pepsi! Not one."

2009 sucks. No, really.
I'm starting to wonder if the trade-off something as awesome as getting Obama into the White House was major league suckage for the rest of the year. Michael Jackson dead. Dom DeLuise dead. Entire cast and crew of Twilight not dead. Jade Goody canonized. Sarah Conner Chronicles cancelled. Wire In The Blood cancelled. Susan Boyle everywhere. Octomom. Iran eating itself alive. Australia barbecued. Lady Gaga. North Korea nuclear. Swine Flu everywhere and overblown like a slightly less annoying Susan Boyle, when the real plague was the outbreak of Boxxulism across the internet. That stupid Wolverine movie.

And me, still on this island. Like an unsexy cast of Lost.

My parents kept saying that Michael Jackson's death reminded them of Elvis'. Well, not being around for that, I found it more like Heath Ledger's, or Bernie Mac's. You know, that same lousy timing, that same thing Eddie Izzard talked about, that whole "It happened one night and you woke up and went, "What? ...I was watching that! Is it over?".
That's just like with Diana, too. I woke up and was told she was dead, exact same thing with Michael Jackson. And bear in mind, in the garage I work in, I hear a LOT of conversations that start with "You know who's dead?", so you get a little desensitized to that shock. So it seems the only way to get me is with a major celebrity and right when I'm just waking up. No wonder I have trouble sleeping - every time I do it's a gamble, God playing Russian Roulette with someone's childhood hero or an inoffensive non-train wreck actor, comedian or musician.
And then there's Amy Winehouse, Britney Spears et al suspiciously bulletproof.

So yeah. 2009. Bit of a mixed bag so far, really. Okay, let's balance it out with some good things.
A superhero in the White House.
Good Star Trek movie.
Member of Twilight cast almost killed (better luck next time?)
Good Terminator movie.
Good Terminator series, even if it did get shafted.
I discovered Criminal Intent, which stars Pvt. Pyle, the mom from Stir Of Echoes and Randall Flagg.
I'm getting on top of my debts and will hopefully be able to afford to get to America soon.
I discovered Jim Beam & Coke.
And a porn star who looks like Summer Glau.
My birthday didn't suck.
A Sony Reader to help cut down on my book bulk-buying binges.
27 is a lucky number (Although try telling that to the 27 Club).
U2 next month.
Arkham Asylum the month after that.
New Jeffery Deaver novel in July.

And this made me laugh my ass off. I'm so glad he's coming back to do the part again.

New Disworld novel in October.
New Stephen King novel in November.

God dammit. I guess they can say anything they want about him, now. Not that anything stopped them before. It's my brother and his girlfriend I'm sad for. They wouldn't have met, wouldn't be in Cyprus together right now without him. Now, if we could all divide into two camps - let's have all the exploiters milking death for cash over here and all the Jade Goody turnaround hypocrites over there. Think I'm going to avoid the more cynical areas of the internet for a while.

Okay, I make long posts.
But can you blame me? We're living in the goddamn age of Twitter. If your life can be blogged in a single sentence, then there's something seriously wrong with it. And that's rich coming from me. Even when stuff's not going on with me (which is most of the time) I still think. I'm like a camel, I fill my hump, go for a few days and piss it all out at once when I can't hold it anymore. I'm like the anti-Twitter.
Twitter's like blogging for the attention-deficit disordered. No wonder celebrities and MTV love it. I'm like, for fuck's sake, call me when you're no longer allergic to paragraphs.

Started playing Fallout again. The DLC is coming out soon, and I figured I could do with remembering how to play it. When you've been out of a really good game for a while, you almost forget how good it was, and how well-deserved the accolades and praises are. Even just simple things like being able to spot a mountain in the distance and head towards it with the intent of climbing to the top once you get there. The unrestricted freedom to explore.
Other games come with contrived excuses in the forms of raised bridges, locked doors and the ever-insurmontable obstacle to end all obstacles - the waist-high fence. It is trumped only by the invisible wall in terms of sheer impassability. But there's none of that in Fallout. The whole wasteland is yours to explore. Whether or not you can survive it, that's up to you, not the game.
Okay, I'll admit Terminator Salvation made me hungry for a little post-Apocalyptic action. And since the actual TS game sucks, I'll happily play this instead. And with the announcement that there's going to be a new game titled "New Vegas" on the way, this is a very good time to be a gamer. Fallout goes to Vegas! Weapons-grade awesome. But before it goes there, it's making a brief stop in Maryland.

...Which is looking more than a little Silent Hill-ish these days. And ahhhhh, I fucking love that steel guitar need the end of the trailer. There is no cooler-sounding and distinctly American instrument than the steel guitar. The second you hear those strings, you know it ain't Norway you're standing in.

Just reminded myself. Did a quick check of where I stand financially. Which is actually a little bit better than I thought. In fact, if I'd planned a little better and hadn't had that €600 setback recently, I could probably have afforded to go to America as easily as next month.
Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda. Although the heat of an American summer isn't exactly the most Irish-friendly of climates, I think I'd prefer being roasted alive on a spit to having to endure the entire month every radio station here is going to spend on playing THAT FUCKING MUNDY SONG!
"July-ly!-ly!-ly!-ly!-ly!-ly!-ly!-ly!-ly!-ly!-ly!-ly!-ly!-ly!-ly!-ly!-ly!-ly!-ly!-ly!-ly!-ly!"
EITHER ADD SOME LYRICS OR SHUT THE SUPREME GRAND FUCK UP BEFORE I PUNCH THAT FUCKING STUPID HAT OF YOURS ALL THE WAY UP YOUR ASS YOU ANNOYING BASTARD SON OF A BASTARD'S BASTARD'S BASTARD!!!

...Eh. Could be worse. Could be BellX1 and their latest rip-off of Talking Heads greatest hits.

First off, I'd like to start by saying HOLY FUCKING SHIT, SCIENCE!!!!!!111twelve
Speaking of which, you know what I want, and I'll probably even get it within my lifetime? An everyThing. Don't bother googling, I just made it up. It sounds like a really cool product name for what I'm thinking of. Last night I was in bed, watching Law & Order on my laptop (more on that in a sec) and I thought about all the files on the external HD. Some of those files, I've hung on to in some way or another for a very long time. For instance, I think I still have one or two songs I got off Napster (FUCK! I'm older than than Mickey Rooney's balls!) and back then, it took at least twenty minutes to download a three megabyte file (if you weren't doing ANYTHING else at the time) and we called that fast.
But those files, through various copying and pasting and an avoidance of the Ship Of Theseus paradox, have been with me. Much like how some of the books and CDs and even video tapes I've had since I was younger are still around. And so I wondered, how many of these files (music, comics, episodes of TV shows, movies, books, games) am I going to still have around when I'm an old(er) man?
My external hard drive is a terabyte and roughly about the size of a thick book. By the time I'm fiftyish, all the information on that will probably be available on a device the size of my phone. I'm picturing something that's a combination of ALL the various gadgets peppered across modern life consolidated into one single device. Your mp3 player, your phone, your laptop, your reader, your gps, your games system, all in one thing - an everyThing.
Now, every time a new product comes out, the manufacturers are the first to claim that that's what they're selling, when common sense tells you that this kind of ubiquitous all-in-one device is still a ways off (and even when it DOES get here, it'll still be longer before ordinary saps like you and I can afford one).
But yeah. Will our lives be as full of files and software as our grandparents were full of miscellenea? And here's a weird thought - what'll happen to them when we die? Will people be leaving their files and folders to loved ones in a digital Last Will & Testament? Times change easier than people.

Though I wish the times right now would hurry the fuck up into winter. It's too damn hot to even sleep at night. Hell, the sun doesn't go completely all the way down, I've noticed. It just sorta slips under the horizon and lurks there for a few hours, giving itself away with a pale glow instead of shadow. Kinda like at the Artic Circle.
Sure as fuck doesn't feel like the Artic Circle. I wish. Is it true they'll actually pay people to live in Alaska, or did the Simpsons Movie lie to me?

Here's another feeling old moment. On the way to the cinema with my Dad yesterday, there was a Top 10 countdown on the radio, and for a moment, I stopped and tried to remember the last time I even looked at the charts, let alone cared about them. And it's odd, because when I was younger, it used to matter. It used to matter a lot, which band/singer was doing better than which other bands/singers (I fought in the Oasis/Blur war, and if you love me, you know which side I fought for).
Now that I'm older, it honestly is incredibly hard to think of things that could more pointless and irrelevant. Why the hell would CD sales matter? People only buy CDs if they're worth buying or are too dumb to know better. And the best music, the music that's worth paying for, usually doesn't even chart. Certainly don't get played on the radio. Hell, some of the best songs I have ever heard in my life weren't even released as singles.
You look at the charts, and if you like music, it's an exercise in masochism. Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Lily Allen (Myspace has MUCH to answer for. Fuck Craigslist!), Kings Of Suck Leon. ...Actually, "Kings Of Suck" sounds like a pretty cool name for a modern day Spinal Tap-ish band. Too bad modern day Spinal Tap-ish bands are soooooo 2002. And would probably just feature Jack Black playing the same unfunny fat obnoxious loudmouth shithead that he plays in everything (you know, Jack Black).

Speaking of suck, a few thousand idiots got what they deserved the weekend when they were dumb enough to spend money on tickets to see Britney Spears, then fumed that she mimed her way through the whole gig. So basically, these people spent a-hundred-and-something on watching a stripper with kids at home miming to some bad music and couldn't even get close enough to stuff notes in places.
And you know what really sucks for them? If they'd just gone to a strip club, not only would it have been cheaper, not only would you have been more likely to get a private dance from the stripper, but unlike Britney, the girl doing the dancing (A) probably actually needs the money, (B) is more likely better-looking and (C) probably mimes and dances to Britney's, uh... "music" better than Britney does.
Personally, I'd rather have seen Mel B's act. Oh, I know she's not Geri, but she tries so hard to get my attention, God bless her, and she sure damn well succeeds.

You know. In another moment of feeling old, I find it kind of funny how, once upon a time, probably around the time I was still in school, men would have given vital parts of their anatomy to see Britney's bits. They would have been the Holy Grail of the internet, more coveted than The Anarchist Cookbook, Dancing Baby or bukkake videos before the West knew what bukkake was. Yes, folks, once upon a time, men actually FAPPED to Britney Spears. ...Although we didn't call it fapping back then, since Sexy Losers hadn't gone fully viral yet and with Beavis & Butthead still fresh in our minds, it was still just spanking the monkey.
But now, now we've seen Britney's unmentionables. and Paris Hilton's. And Lindsay Lohan's. And Vanessa Hudgens. In fact, I think we may be getting to the point where if you're a female celebrity and your bits aren't easily viewable with a quick google, people might start to think there's something wrong with you. (At this moment, I would like to extend, huh huh huh, to Sigourney Weaver my deepest and most sincere thanks for doing A Map Of The World. I was waiting to see those ever since the bathtub scene from Ghostbusters II, and you didn't disappoint. I thank you from the heart of my bottom.)
And so, though it took the internet the better part of a decade to produce, we finally saw what we'd been craving when we were horny teenagers. And when we did, we greeted the pictures not with the thunderous compulsive masturbation that we once would have, but instead with a sorta "...Ew", followed by a quick dismissive "Meh". Now, someone could say there's something kind of wrong, almost Freudian if not Kinseyian (it's not a word, but fuck it, I'm using it anyway) that a man can dismiss so rapidly what was once a burning fantasy. ...It's actually kinda sad, really, treating a woman with no more regard than a dirty magazine. Almost enough to make you ashamed of your penis. ...Not me, though, I was already ashamed of my penis, but for different reasons =p

So yeah, watching Law & Order last night. One was the Criminal Intent featuring knackers. I will never as long as I live, understand the American thing of romanticizing knackers. I don't even understand why the fuck they're considered an ethnic minority in England. They're just white guys allergic to jobs. It would be like declaring rednecks in trailer parks an ethnic minority. They're what knackers ARE here, complete with trailer (only since we do everything on a pathetically smaller budget, it's caravans instead).
But in films (especially films made with American money) they're lovable rogues, living off the land, still wild and can never be tamed - they're like Gypsies! No, asshole, we have those, and they're called Gypsies, usually from Romania. What we have here is home-grown white trash. I knew this guy who had a big fight with his wife over them - she was insisting they're a real ethnic minority with a unique culture. His point of view was that they were a bunch of dirty, low-down, tracksuit-wearing, car-stealing, drug-dealing scumbags. And I'm inclined to agree. And it's not even racist for me to say that because guess what? They're NOT another race - they're a bunch of white guys with the misfortune to be on this island, just. Like. Me.

Then there was the Special Victims Unit with the three women who raped a male stripper. The thing about this episode (and possibly even the point they were trying to make) was that you've probably already decided whether or not it was even rape depending on what's between your legs, based on that one sentence alone.
Can women even rape men? In a non-statutory way? In a joking way, it's easy to say "Of course they can, ever heard of fanfiction?". In in the other, real-life, dead serious, flesh and blood way, it's so bafflingly hard to say, because men and women, we're just so damn different. Comparing men and women, it's like that bit on the Simpsons where Lenny and Karl are arguing over which is better; Muhammed Ali or anti-lock breaks. Men and women, most of the time all we really have in common is two arms, two legs and a head, and even then not always. Hell, most of the time plenty of us get along with and better understand members of other species than we do the complicated mind of the opposite sex. I never had trouble understanding my dog, but fuck if I haven't had the same share of arguments with women that any man has.
Anyway, back to the episode. On paper, in black and white, rape is two people + one "No", and it doesn't matter who supplied the "No", just that it's there. And as grey a world we live in, the Law can only afford to deal in black and white. I mean, there's a very male part of my brain right now that wants to joke "Dude, you got raped by Diane Neal, for fuck's sake. Would you like your Luckiest Bastard In America medal now or do you wanna wait for the President to confer it?". And then the other part of my brain (the part connected to the part that doesn't want Sabrina to punch me in the balls next time she's in reach of them) goes "Hey. It doesn't matter if a woman's rapist came first in the 100 Sexiest Men poll, he's still a fucking rapist.". After all, women showed up at Ted Bundy's trial and swooned when he looked their way, and his victims would have been lucky had that sick fuck only stopped at rape.
Like I said, it's different for guys. The possibility that we might get raped anywhere outside of a prison setting never even crosses our minds. And even in those rare moments where we are forced to confront the possibility of such a thing ever happening, our first image is the Freudian nightmare of being submissive to another man's sexuality - never a woman because hey, you'd be crazy to say no, right?

I'm going to ask some of the men reading this to conduct a little thought experiment. Think of a woman you wouldn't want to have sex with. And dont say there's no such woman, because that's just a silly jockish attitude that plays on the idea that all men are sex hounds who can't be raped by a woman because we'll stick it anything warm. So, picture that woman. Someone who repulses you, preferably mentally, not physically. Like for me, for example, it's Amy Winehouse. Or someone who has an STD and is going to pass it to you while you're helpless.
Now, we're going to have to impose a circumstance that prevents even the most jockish of you from doing what a rape victim NEVER would - brag. Let's say you're in a relationship with or engaged or married to a woman you LOVE absolutely. Someone you would never cheat on. So if you ever try to talk about this, you know nobody's going to believe you because you're a guy, you must have wanted to cheat on your girl, and this ridiculous idea that you were raped is just a pathetic attempt to have your cake and eat it too.
Now you've experienced the feeling of being unable to come forward, because nobody will believe. Everyone will just think you MUST have wanted it, you're a guy! At this point, substitute "guy" for "slut" and you'll have a pretty good idea how a female victim feels in this stage of the proceedings. Suddenly we've stopped cracking jokes. It's not funny when nobody's on your side. Nobody will believe you, and you can't prove anything even if they did. Oh, and the system is going to set up entirely on the side of your attacker, by the way. The law failed to prevent them from assaulting you, but it WILL do its best to protect them from your accusations.
You can't turn to your girl for help. Even if, by some miracle, she actually does believe that this was done to you, without your consent, and you didn't want it - for the rest of your life you will wonder if she really believes you or if there's a part of her that will always suspect you wanted what happened all along. But you'll never bring that up, because it'll destroy what you've got if you were lucky enough to save it.

I gotta admit. After just a few paragraphs into that experiment, I don't like it. Not one bit. Maybe because I know what it feels like to feel accused, surrounded, isolated, bullied and disbelieved with every word. I understand now why us men don't think about things like this because we have the goddamn LUXURY of not having to. I can't imagine what it's like for a woman to have to think about this kind of thing for any length of time. To have this lurking in the back of your head when you take self-defence classes or get into a strange car or keep an eye on your drink.
We can't imagine it. It sounds to me like more than just paranoia, it sounds like living day to day under siege, to the point where the threat is all just background noise, as part of the scenery as the trees. Like living in Israel or Belfast, but of a much more alarmingly personal nature.

I feel so oddly politically correct. Not feminist, just... sympathetic.
And wondering if this kind of thinking goes through Joss Whedon's mind every damn day, and if so, how does he live with it? Yes, I'm sorry to end on a joke, but it's all part of my male psychological defense mechanism to defuse anything that makes me nervous or uncomfortable with jokes.

Infamous is pure, unadulterated crack.
Huh. Is there such a thing as adulterated crack? Think I'll call the suicide hotline and ask.
If you're all but one or two people I know, you'll know the unparalelled joy of driving around in games committing random acts of violence against civilians and fellow criminals, so what could be more fun? Having super powers and going around a city committing random acts of violence against criminals in a way that, for once in games, doesn't actually suck.
Although, the choice to be good or bad in Infamous is entirely up to you. Presently, I play the good side. As your reputation increases, people do things like take pictures of you on their phones, hang up posters with your face on them, that sorta thing. It's actually a pretty well-balanced game too, because as you get stronger, so do the challenges and the ordinance used your enemies.

In other games, I think I've gotten the hang of FFXI's campaign battle system. Basically, it's a free-for-all clusterfuck (much like real battles) and by "getting the hang of", I of course mean "not dying eight times every battle". The secret to staying alive is keeping your head down, taking cheap shots when you can and trying not to draw the enemy's attention (again, much like a real battle).
They've got some updates coming soon, in which there'll be new areas to go to war in and (I laughed at this) a new party system called Union. Funny, because you're fighting the Beastmen Confederacy. Silly Beastmen, it's spelt "Confederacah". So yeah, Union versus Confederacah. Should be almost as much fun as the last time they met and Exchanged Words.

Exchanged Words is about an eight on the Clusterfuck Scale, by the way. It's more severe than a Discussion or a Heated Debate, but not as violent and horrific as a Polite But Frank Difference Of Opinion. Such as World War II.

Ugh, don't remind yourself, Darren. Went to see Terminator Salvation again with my Dad tonight. There were trailers for Transformers 2 and the new Tarantino film. The latter of which prompted a reaction like this:

See, I worked in a video store too, only I didn't consider it everything I needed to know about film-making. No, I went to an actual film school for that. A shitty one, yes, but a real one. It stops me from making amateurish mistakes like trying to use a real car (with it's real glaring windows and real LOUD ENGINE) instead of a rig on a green screen. Amateurish mistakes like that. Mind you, if Uma Thurman was sucking my dick for roles because she's too godawfully untalented to get work anywhere else, I'd probably be pretty detached from reality too.
Also, I wouldn't make my dialogue mostly consist of liberal sprayings of the word "nigger" and then make out that black people love me so I can. Just because Samuel L. Jackson hasn't kicked your ass for being a pathetic white boy doesn't mean you're the same pathetic stupid racist too stupid to even realize he's a racist. Oh, Jackson. He's another one of those sad cases of People Who Used To Act But Now Instead Settle For Doing Impressions Of Themselves. ...Not even good impressions, either.
And then there's the Nick Fury fiasco. You see, as bad as Ultimate Marvel is, it was when they got to use Jackson's likeness that they crossed the line from ordinarily shit to Yet Another Symptom Of What Is Quite Ill With The State Of Western Civilization As We Know It. It's just the whole "Samuel L. Jackson IS Nick Motherfuckin' Fury - on PAPER!!!" seemed so unbelievably stupid and MTVish.
Comic book characters shouldn't look like Hollywood actors. It is one of the single most pathetic of cheap shots in a world of cheap shots. After all, who does Bruce Wayne look like? Christian Bale? Michael Keaton? Adam West? Answer - Bruce Wayne has dark hair and looks like however he was drawn that way by the artist du jour, because the comic artists should feel as free to interpret the character as the writers do. Not be told by Management "Hey, make him look Tom Cruise, we'll sell more!".


Coming soon to DC - the bottom of the barrel!

But let's just avoid talking about that and the inevitable financial bailout it would lead to. Here, have a real superhero.

No, really. As soon as I heard about the Obama-swatting-a-fly non-news, my first thought was "I bet you anything Peta's going to protest. Over a fly". And sure enough, they did. Over a fly. They called it an execution. Of a fly.
But they're Peta and they just don't like people. They actually like animals even less, which is why I could never support them, but yeah. I believe animals have rights (but the right to vote ain't one of them) and that insects have even less rights because flies are annoying little fuckers who make it necessary to have spiders in your house.
I don't swat flies when they bother me. I usually just open the window for them. Mostly for the karmic payoff, and hoping somebody up there will open a window for me rather than splat me. But hey, you know what else I don't do? Go around telling people what they can and can't do because my beliefs of what should and shouldn't be is SO MUCH MORE IMPORTANT than their free will and beliefs, right?

People, on the other hand, I'm not really bothered about swatting.
Like the prick from Twilight (I don't even like using his name. It's a prick's name. Like Chester. Or Colin.) who was nearly hit by a car recently. I'm sick and tired of people telling me "Oh no, he hates Twilight! He only signed up to hit on his co-star and he badmouths it in interviews and he hates having to be in the sequels!".
Oh, so what on Earth should I respect about him? His professionalism? His integrity? Liking somebody for disliking Twilight is a bit like liking someone for being right-handed. Oh, and considering actors get to charge millions for a few minutes worth of standing and talking, the fact that they have to sit in interviews for hours and try to sell the steaming great pile of dung they've just starred in as the 21st century's Citizen Kane is the only act of justice us mere mortals will ever witnessed visited upon the lazy and overpaid.
Oh, and everyone is contractually obligated to appear in sequels these days. It's the sad state of Hollywood. But hey, you know what? Kate Holmes was contractually obligated to reprise her role in The Dark Knight, but didn't feel up to it so had her contract bought out. That's what people do, buy their way out of contracts. Happens every single day of the year in all parts of the world. So the only reason why someone wouldn't buy their way out of a stupid movie series they can't stand is for the simple reason that they prefer the money to the dignity.

Oh, I can SOOOOO respect that. Yeah.

I had a dream I met Obama.
And it was well, ...rather like this. And you think I'm joking.

So, Iran. Hey, remember a long time ago when George Bush rigged the elections and thousands of people cried out in protest over the dictator's grasping of power before he began locking up protestors and shutting down the media.
Only that never actually happened, except in the minds of stupid people I had the misfortune to constantly encounter. Whom, by the way, I hope are getting a crash course in what a real tyrant looks like. Hey, don't mind me, I only loved America my whole life and had to endure eight goddamn years of being told I shouldn't because of stuff that wasn't even happening.
But it is happening, and it's happening in Iran. Like the rest of you, I'm watching. I don't know what you're hoping for. Me? I'm hoping they can depose Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with a minimum of bloodshed. I'm hoping the protests don't wind up the same way the anti-Iraq war and Scientology ones did (namely with the protesters going "Well, we showed up, changed nothing, didn't make a difference, went home and kvetched online about it"). If this thing boils over into full-scale national revolution, then it's better off happening sooner rather than later, as in before they become nuclear-capable.
Ahmadinejad is not just an election-rigging asshole. He is a fucking terrorist and a psychopath. And when I say "terrorist" I don't mean in some metaphorical sense of how he makes the world uneasy. No, I mean an actual balaclava-wearing, AK-toting, Jihad-spouting fuckwit. How a man goes from holding a gun to an American hostage's head in 1979 to running the country in 2009 is a testament to just how fucked their system is and needs to be fixed pronto.
This man wants the destruction of Israel. And again, no metaphors, as his apologists have claimed. Not metaphorically "deconstructing the state of Israel as a military power and transforming it into an economic ally" but as in the actual physical nuclear destruction of as many Jewish cities within missile range. We are talking about a man who denies the Holocaust but still thinks it was a pretty damn good idea. The last time we saw someone this batshit and dangerous, they were being kneecapped by Jack Bauer.

Made a mistake of looking at "Terminator 5" on the Terminator wiki. Two words - "citation needed". Terminator 5 to be "set in contemporary London". After Skynet figures out how to send Harvesters, Hunter-Killers and Moto-terminators back in time. And John Connor will go back in time and meet his mother. ...Who for some reason, is in the quite high-on-Skynet's-list-of-places-to-nuke modern day London instead of California where the series is ALWAYS set.
You know, that's not just a lousy idea for a Terminator movie (and possibly the second-worst idea for a Terminator movie after Rise Of The Machines). It's quite obviously the lousy idea of a fangirl who just discovered the franchise because it had hot sexy Chekov in it and who's only other previous dealings with sci-fi extend no further than Doctor Who. Because I haven't even seen the episode I'm talking about and already I know it's a Doctor Who plot.
Also, there's a well-established reason WHY Skynet can't send the big honkin' machines back in time, which you would know if you had seen absolutely ANY of the other movies, episodes, comics or games in the entire frickin' franchise. For fuck's sake, why don't you just have the Terminators *~sparkle~* in the sunlight? Cunt.

Oh yeah, I got Infamous for the Ps3. Because Arkham Asylum has been delayed (again). >_>
It's kinda like GTA, with superpowers instead of guns. And there's a Falloutish karma system. I'm playing it good, or at least good as I can first time out. There's other similar games like Prototype and Bionic Commando out, because the games industry is also prone to the same thing Hollywood has, where similar movies come out at the same time. Infamous is your best bet, trust me.

Here's something I made earlier.



I actually really want to write a Ledgeresque Kefka. I want to try making the clown scary instead of ridiculous. A psychopath, instead of just psychotic. I know how I'd write him, I just can't think of a thing I'd have him doing.
Yes, I am asking for a prompt. Be gentle, it's my first time.

Normality ensues.
Managed to get a whole lot of fixing done. Resorted to having to take the hard drive out with the intention of backing it up and reinstalling Windows. And even that couldn't go easy, as the laptop chose the opporunity to choke on its own OS, so I had to go next door and ask the neighbors if I could use their computer.
Helpful as they were, they didn't have USB 2.0, meaning the task would have taken hours. So I just went for the really important stuff, the files that would be too terrible to lose (no, not porn) but while I was there, I found what I suspected might have been the offending program (deskband, something I use to control winamp from the taskbar). I deleted it, hoping that'll shift the blockage, and if not, I'll just do what I was planning anyway. Well, it worked (nice when something does) and so the computer was saved and nothing of importance was lost.
Also, downloaded a copy of Windows 7 and stuck that on the laptop, because Vista can suck my fat left one.

Moving swiftly on. Recently with the release of the FF14 trailer, I lamented that it probably wasn't going to be a sequel to FF11. Then I took a much closer look at the logo.



This isn't one of my sexual fantasy photoshoppin's, this one could really happen.

Anyway, if you haven't had the chance yet, you should check out On the Way to a Smile - Episode: Denzel. I didn't even known they'd animated this. I mean, I'd known about the FFVII "novels", though I considered them a rather lazy into the compilation.
I know, I know, saything something against the printed word? Sacrilege, of course! Well, it would be, if it were any other series. Or even a series told through any other medium. FFVII, by its very nature and its own origins is a VERY visual story. It was, if not the first 3D RPG, it's certainly the first 3D RPG anyone can remember playing. And one reason why Advent Children was so successful because we, as fans, loved getting to see how the characters and their world "really" looked, unhindered by the restrictions of 1997's technology. All (er, "both") of the other games and animation in the compilation also drew us with the visuals (don't say the things you liked best about Crisis Core and Last Order was the retconning of a perfectly fine origin story), but a written-word tie-in is surprisingly lazy.
There's no point in describing what Midgar looks like, for example - anyone who's reading your stuff already knows that. Hell, the ones who are going through the trouble of hunting down a translation or doing the translating themselves are the ones who could probably give you directions around Midgar. Mako Reactor 1? It's down the street, past the train station, turn left at the girl selling flowers, you can't miss it.
Now, if it were other series like Discworld or Harry Potter, it wouldn't be such a big deal because although being adapted to movies, they began as books. And you'll always get more in a book than you will in a movie. But on the other hand, if you take something that began in a visual medium and try to hammer it into a book, you're forgetting a picture paints a thousand words, so in just typing "Midgar", you're already 999 words behind the games, movie and animations. Are your words really better than Square's pictures? Come on. These people do shiny for a living.

You ask me, they should do more FF-based animations. I know Fullmetal Alchemist is their flagship manga/anime, but they were to release a whole series based on one of their games (a sequel to VIII? An adaptation of FFVI?) it would outsell the pants off the Brothers Elric. Oh, and I'm not counting Final Fantasy Unlimited because, well, who in their right mind would?

One last thing, but still anime-related, though I still haven't seen the first part of the new Rebuild of Evangelion series, I have found out that an English dub has been recorded. Alison Keith and Spike Spencer have come back to voice Misato and Shinji respectively (don't ask about Tiffany Grant. Asuka isn't the first part, but considering this woman bends over backwards to go to cons in her character's outfit and lend her voice to fan-projects, she is a a safe bet). Surprisingly enough, Amanda Winn Lee isn't back to voice Rei, who will instead be voiced by Brina Palencia. I don't know any of her other roles, I checked. And although, having heard her on youtube, it's hard to imagine her as Rei since she hardly sounds like her at all, if you've heard Amanda Winn Lee in literally anything else, you'll know she hardly sounds a thing like Rei either.

I.
Feel.
Like.
Shit.
Since I forgot my birthdays are cursed, everything has been consistently falling butterside-down all week. And to cap it off, the computer is fucked. Explorer.exe crashes upon starting, meaning I can't get in to do a system restore. My laptop hates my broadband, so all I have is this shitty 3g mobile connection. Which, by the way, is slower than me and DEVOURS credit.
I hate feeling bored, useless and defeated. And reminded of how empty and dull my life is without distraction.

Was an 80's child, a 90's kid and 21st century guy. What's next?
Unrelated but cool: a collection of military cadences.

This just happened:
Computer: "Come, sit in front of me, waste yet another day of your boring life, mwahahah!"
Me: "Shut up and show me naked women."
Phone: "Ring! The humble communications device went. RING! it did holler, knowing that since this was its only line and that its agent was watching, it was gonna HAM IT UP TO JEHOVY, MOTHERFUCKER! RIIIIIIIIIING!"
Me: "Hello?"
Dad: "Darren, you know all those books you have?"
Me: "...I vaguely recall them, yes."
Dad: "Who's the one you have all those books by?"
Me: "Hell, I don't know who you mean. Terry Pratchett?"
Dad: "Terry Pratchett, yeah. What was the last book you bought?"
Me: "Jeez, I don't know. I buy 'em by the truckload. Why do you want to know?"
Dad: "Oh, we're just talking about you, that's all."
Me: "Who's 'we'?"
Dad: "It's a secret."
Me: "...Right."
Dad: "Seeya later!"
Me: "Bye."

Why yes, there is a history of mental illness in the family, how did you know?
You know what else is crazy - this made me wanna play Sims 3 more than any clever advertising or rave reviews could have done. I know, I know, the theological implications are terrifying and yet, and yet, it makes sense. Think about it! God picks on you for shits and giggles, you pick on your Sims, and your Sims probably go on their in-game computer and pick on the microscopic simulations, who pick on theirs and so on and so on. The great cosmic multiverse is nothing but a long unbroken chain of divine bullying.
So next time you're angry with God, reflect happily on how some other being even higher up the simulation foodchain probably made Him wet Himself for laughs, which in turn inadvertantly caused the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.

In other news, never get into an argument with this guy.

It's only around £1.45 a lesson, though, well worth it.

I had a dream last night I was reading a book where, for some reason, all the chapter titles were spelt in reverse. I know it's because you can't read in a dream, but usually you don't notice that you can't read in a dream because you can understand what the words are supposed to tell you without being able to read them, in that way we're all somehow psychic in dreams. Anyway.
Anyway, it looked kinda like "Chapter One - Emit A Nopu Ecno..."
And I have no idea why I think it would be cool to put it in a book. Only you'd need a damn good reason, like the book is about schizophrenia and you're trying to give the reader a sense of disorientation, otherwise you're just being a pretentious hack. ...Not that being a pretentious hack isn't one of the most financially rewarding "careers" on the planet.
Said it before and I'll say it again. The jobs that require the least amount of work are the ones that pay the most. Also, the hardest jobs a human being will ever have to do? Disaster relief, disease and famine aid, refugee centre work, they're all voluntary. Does that seem right to you?

Anyway, so yeah, reading. Have put The Stand on my Sony Reader, because I lost that some time ago. Not sure where it went, but I think my brother has it. Oh yeah, and if you get a chance, a good short story that'll put the fear of dark places back in you is, well, The Fear Of Darkness by Thomas Lera. Worth a look.
Oh yes, I was wondering if the Reader can handle .cbr files so I could read comics on the thing. Well, it turns out you can, but as with many things in life, it's not simple. First, because graphics are bigger than text, the filesize is obviously bigger. Also, you can't put the images in a single file since the reader won't recognize 'em, you have to put them all in unzipped in a folder.
Anyway. Tested it with a chapter from "Blame!" and the latest Batman issue (more on that in a sec). Color comics are wasted on it, as the thing only displays in black and white (for now). But most manga is in black and white anyway. So while it is mostly a success, when the next model featuring a larget backlit full-color touch screen you can write on, I'll be in line for one.

Anyway. Batman R.I.P... Au contraire, mon capitan! Eeeeeee's back! I'm liking the way they're taking this. Especially the scenes with Alfred. "No, I'm not alright. My son has just died.", for example. The insisting that there be no funeral since it would only be some cheesey costumed parade that would rob the world of the very thing he spent his life trying to cultivate - a fear of Batman. And the relocation of the Batcave to the bunker under Wayne Industries is thankfully more practical than just taking cues from The Dark Knight. Bruce had his Batcave, Dick needs his. It'll be there waiting for him when he returns (it is a comic book death, after all).

And speaking of comics, Anna Friel says she wants to be Wonder Woman in Joss Whedon's movie. You know, I like her. She'd certainly be a better choice than the front-runner Eliza Dushku (I don't get the hype with her. She's so bland.) but she'd certainly be a better choice than Beyonce Fucking Knowles, who'd just use the role as yet another opportunity to inflate he gigantic fucking ego.
Now, I know I keep suggesting her for virtually every role there is like the female Johnny Depp, but what about Summer Glau for Wonder Woman? After all, like Dushku she's part of the Whedon sorority and unlike Dushku, she's not the human equivalent of wet cement - interesting when new, indistinguishable after a while. Besides, can you imagine Summer Glau in a Wonder Woman outfit? There'd- ...I'm sorry, I've just come. Damn, can you hold on a moment while I go change my pants?

Sorry, thanks for waiting. Anyway, in the interests of being more articulate, here is a quick photoshop so godawful I can't bring myself to post it. Now now, I don't point how pathetic the stuff is that you ladies use for fappage fodder. ...Well, I do, but that's different. Just don't ask me how.
Ohmygod! Look out! It's a change of subject!

The line-up for Oxegen '09 makes me.... SO fucking glad I'm not going. It's not that it's bad, it's that it's so bad that radio station DJs who are usually incapable of feeling negative towards anything seem to be shuffling their feet and quietly hoping they have to report from it.
Lily Allen? Katy Perry? The Saturdays? ("Why are they called The Saturdays, Dave?" ('Cos they're fuckin' lazy, Dave.") Kings Of Leon? Lady Gaga? The Ting Tings? Glasvegas? Pete Doherty? Snow Patrol? The Coronas?
Look, it's nice that you got Blur, Nine Inch Nails and the Pet Shop Boys, it really is. But I'm not Andy Dufresne, and I can't crawl through the length of five football fields, just shy of half a mile, of shit smelling foulness I can't even imagine, or maybe just don't want to, to get at the good thing on the other side, no matter how good it is. I mean, even if Neil Tennant savagely bludgeoned Katy Perry to death onstage on behalf of gays, bisexuals and the generally good-tasted everywhere, would it be worth it? Would it be really worth it? Would it?

Of course it fucking would, you betcha. It's just so depressingly unlikely.

I mean, Jesus Herbert Walker Christ. There's something terribly wrong with a world where someone responsible for "U R So Gay" gets to share a stage with the folks behind "Being Boring". Now there is a truly beautiful song. A song so eloquent that when you listen to it, even if you're not gay, you can put yourself in that frame of mind, what it's like to live that life. To come to terms with yourself, to find courage to be yourself, just how difficult it is to actually find someone, and all the friends lost to the "silent holocaust" of AIDS. It's like the very last scene in Philadelphia.
I remember watching this episode of Cold Case once, which featured a gay man who was getting married, but wanted to close the book on the death of a former boyfriend before he did. By the end of the episode, the detectives did. Anyway, at his wedding he sees the "ghost" of the boyfriend who had AIDS, and there's this wonderful look, so bittersweet, he gives which says "I love the life I'm sharing now, but I also miss the one I had with you". It reminds me of the end of that song that goes "I never dreamt that I would get to be the creature that I always meant to be, But I thought in spite of dreams, you'd be sitting somewhere here with me." In my head, that scene and this song go together like milk and cereal.

Just one last musical item. The other day I heard an interesting theory that Peter Gabriel's "Up" is supposed to be a concept album. If you look at it with the early track "Growing Up" about being born and raised and the final track "The Drop" about death ("Notice how the city lights, Are like the nerves inside the brain, One by one, They're going out", which sounds like Alzheimers).
It's an interesting theory, and might actually have something behind it. Okay, so you've got "Growing Up", the beginning of the story (though not the beginning of the album, but nobody said it had to be linear). A person is born, discovers themselves, the universe and their own existence. "Growing up, looking for a place to live". In the next track, "Sky Blue", he gets to the same place I'm at, at a complete loss with total freedom. Can go anywhere, but can't find a direction. In "No Way Out", he's confronted with the death of a family member, probably a parent. He clings to them, bringing up childhood memories, begging them to stay alive. But the parent does die, which makes the next track "I Grieve", pretty obvious. He deals with death and loss, but learns to cope that it's all a part of life, which keeps carrying on.
And life does carry on. He watches "The Barry Williams Show", but is distressed at how petty and small people are. He turns off the television and starts to think there must be "More Than This". He becomes utterly convinced there is more to life, to the point where he expands his mind to become connected to the world and all the life on the planet. But his friends and family worry about his mental health and encourage him to seek help. In "My Head Sounds Like That", he deals with bi-polar disorder, living a quiet, medicated life. But in his connection with the world, all of his senses are magnified, to the point where even a tap dripping prompts apocalyptic visions (possibly the flood Gabriel sings across on songs scattered across other albums?).
In "Darkness", he faces his fears and insecurities with therapy. But in "Signal To Noise", the visions he had finally come to pass. A massive disaster, the flood perhaps, and the world changes. The world that turned to "noise" like The Barry Williams Show is gone forever, replaced by a world with substance and feeling where everyone is just as connected to the world and life as he is. As people make this "connection", they transmit it to one another like a signal they turn up and wipe out the noise of the old world. His premonitions of disaster/change are vindicated, along with his beliefs that there was more to life. At the end of his life, on board a plane somewhere, he looks out the window and watches the city lights below go out on by one, as do the neurons inside his brain. One life, like a rain drop. Where it goes, nobody knows. Every life is like a single raindrop in the storm. Each will begin, fall and splatter as we are born, live and die. We're all part of it. It's bigger than us, but couldn't exist without us.
We are what makes there more to life. We are what's more to life.

Holy shit, Detective Goren was the bug in Men In Black!
Never copped it until I saw Vincent D'Onofrio's imdb page. Even looking at a picture of him in the film, you can barely tell because of the make-up and the way he twists his face. Quite the underrated actor, if you ask me. You know, if they were going to put Bane in a new Batman film, he'd be perfect for the role. And when I saw Bane, I mean the terrifying criminal genius who broke Batman's back and is the only man who scares him, and not the fucking idiot from That Other Film.
I think if they Nolanized Bane, they'd play up the criminal genius aspect and downplay the physical size. He'd still be a large and physically intimidating person, but realistically so. And the Venom bit, forget it, they'd probably just substitute it for cocaine or something. But yeah, could work for a third film.

Anyway. Been watching a lot of Criminal Intent lately. How can you not like a detective who considers his most important investigatory tool his library card? Last night, the one I watched featured Michael Emerson from Lost, and about halfway through I began to slowly figure that there is no such person as Michael Emerson. Michael Emerson must be just one of the many aliases used by Ben, whom in this guise pretends to be an actor who plays a character on a TV show based on himself. Why? In case rumors get out of what a psycho he's been on that island, he can just say "No, you're confusing me with a fictional character on a fictional show", because that's just the kind of fucked-up crazy mind-bending manipulatin' that Ben would do. Usually three times before breakfast.

Anyway. Birthday! My folks got me a Sony Reader, presumably so I can start saving money and space on books. It's a very cool little device. A pity you can't write on it, but that's probably inevitable. Had a curry instead of birthday cake. And no, you can't put candles on a curry. Probably just as well. Not even The Three Tenors have the lungpower for 27 candles.
And speaking of blowing it out your ass, here's Charlie Brooker on the American news media, for all my American friends. Why? I figure an outsider's perspective on the people you're always talking about might just be interesting for you. ...Then again, I don't usually pay much attention to what foreigners think about Ireland, because nine times out ten, they're fucking wrong.





So yeah, breakdown. Over here, our newsreaders are either sexy or old and boring. Over there, your news anchors are all either sexy, old and boring, completely fucking crazy or all of the above at once.
God, I love America. Even your boring stuff is like something out of a movie. Not necessarily a good movie, mind. I wouldn't find Glenn Beck funny even if he had the redeeming characteristic of being a completely fictional over-the-top satire.

I got my Square Enix security token this morning. And if I'd had known just how complicated "safe" it makes logging in to FFXI now, I probably wouldn't have bothered. Thing should come with a warning - you will never be able to automatically log in ever again. Also, don't put one of the several different passwords you'll be using in the wrong place, or you'll wind up having to uninstall and reinstall the PlayOnline viewer just to be able to reset it. Is it worth eighty extra slots of in-game storage accessible from anywhere in the game?
...Well, yeah. Otherwise they wouldn't have sold out completely. I'm just choosing to be optimistic that Square Enix accounts will one day be useful for more than just making FFXI a chore to log into, and will enable you to tie forthcoming games to your account, such as FF14.

Oh yeah. Watched Pat Garret & Billy The Kid recently. Got me thinking "wouldn't this be cool if this was how Firefly ended after a seven-year run?". Characters like Mal, Zoe and Jayne shouldn't die of old age, but also deserve better than being shot by anyone else.
Mal's character was either gonna go one of two ways - he'd have wound up fighting the Alliance or Blue Sun and being if not the leader of, then certainly a high-ranking soldier in a Second Unification War. Or his bad choices and rotten luck would have finally caught up with him, forcing him down a path he can't turn back from. He'd end his days as an outlaw, with the fate that usually follows people who live by the gun, and Zoe being loyal to the end would probably take it that far too.
On the other hand, I like the idea of Jayne succeeding by accident, becoming a hero with a reputation he can't live up to. Maybe an accidental sherrif, like Lee Van Cleef in Beyond The Law. And so he winds up at a point where he has to go do the hero thing because Mal's been doing the outlaw thing. And so these two old guys, two old friends, two old rivals, they ride out one last time and end up killing each other. Not because of any real enmity or bad blood, but because in Joss Whedon's 'Verse, there are no happy endings, and this would be probably a better ending than they could have hoped for. If somebody's gonna shoot you, probably better a friend who knew your life than a stranger who'll brag of your death.

And now for something completely different: what your pets get up to when you're out.