I Found a Unicorn!

Okay, I didn't actually find a Unicorn, and I can't be credited to any of these findings in terms of the proof of Unicorns. I did, however, use the internet to find an animal I didn't know about, and am now taking credit for it because I can. So, here we go. We've all wished that Unicorns were real. Some people will argue to the grave that they are, but you know what, they are unfortunately just idiots. Because, and I'm going to just say it, Unicorns aren't real.

I'm sorry, Unicorn lovers, I know I've hurt you, but give me a chance to redeem myself. Here's what I think happened. Unicorns did exist, once. But there was that whole "Unicorn horns are magical and provide crazy powers to the person that posses it" thing. So, the Unicorns got together one day and just said "fuck this shit, I'm going home." I mean, wouldn't you want to get away from people who are constantly trying to kill you? So what did they do? They went somewhere humans couldn't follow. They went back into the ocean.

Being mammals, however, they didn't turn into fish. They used their magical horn power to speed up evolution and grew flippers and tails, and into the water they went, away from human hands. The swam out into the coldest parts of the world, where there was tons of ice, because they like white stuff because as Unicorns that was their colour and all. And they hid. They swam around doing ocean Unicorn stuff, reproducing and making more and more ocean Unicorns until someone stumbled upon them on some ocean expedition.
So Unicorn lovers. Here's your Unicorn. It's called a Narwhal. Embrace it.

Saving the World, RPG Style

Role Playing Games (RPGs) drive me crazy. I love them, but seriously, they can be infuriating. I mean, let’s take a look at the go-to RPG story structure. You are nobody. You live a crummy, normal person life in a normal person town with normal friends and a normal culture. Then shit hits the fan, someone you know and possibly love is kidnapped, hurt, or put at risk of serious harm in the not-too-distant future. Then, you kiss normality goodbye and begin a quest to stop the rampage of destruction that is now plaguing your world and putting your lifestyle or normality at risk.

So, off you go, to save the world, acquiring skills and learning how to become the most epic warrior of all time so that you can confront evil head-on. Sometimes you band together with some other people, sometimes you go it alone. Who cares, you’re suddenly awesome, and you’re out with a pure heart to save the universe! But you don’t necessarily know that. You might think you’re just out to help a friend, or out to help your town or your community. But eventually, you always end up saving the world.

So why does this annoy me? It’s about the structure. A good RPG has anything from 50-500 hours of game play built into it. The main story is anything from 8-20 hours of this total. So what’s with the other 480 hours? Well, that’s the most important part of any RPG! That’s all the shit that you can do while saving the world when you don’t quite feel like saving the world. Someone lost a puppy. Go find it! Someone needs a haircut. Buy them scissors. Someone wants a mine full of zombies and walking skeletons cleared so he can steal the treasure that you’re going to go steal in the process of clearing the mine for him. Go clear the mine.

What makes this awesome? The whole time you’re out collecting bottles of water or catching fairies or chasing puppies, the evil power that is destroying the world is apparently sitting on his ass eating grapes and jerking off. He’s the laziest villain ever, because as you are rising to power, he’s just hanging out saying to himself “I’m going to wait to make my next step in global domination until someone comes to throw a wrench in the machine.” He has no drive, no ambition! He’s just hanging out waiting for you to roll up into his space and stab him in the back before he reaches global domination.

What I expect from a RPG and a villain is this: “Warrior, while you were out collecting some chickens for the farmer that let them all escape because he’s lazy and left the gate open, Super Villain X decided to kill the king and took over the kingdom. Way to waste time.”

That’s what I want in a RPG. Someone, go make that game so I can lose at it for collecting horse poo in a jar.

The Mario Years

I have been thinking about Mario Bros. lately. I can’t tell you why other than the simple fact that sometimes I just get stuck in a thought process and can’t escape it. Then, when I’m trapped, what started as something simple and stupid, i.e. “why does Luigi always help Mario save Peach when there’s no reward for him? Mario gets cake, and Luigi gets nothing?” evolves into something far more detailed, like the rest of this piece.

Mario and Luigi started in 1983. They are plumbers, or at least they were, because since 1983 they haven’t had any time to hold a single plumbing job given the fact that they are always busy rescuing Princess Peach from the clutches of a dinosaur-turtle that seems hell-bent on bestiality-rape. Since Bowser showed up, I’m assuming Mario and Luigi had to sell their plumbing company just to make ends meet. Those overalls aren’t free, and both Mario and Luigi seem to enjoy colour-coding what they wear with whatever power they have acquired. That means they had to buy their default overalls, white and red for fire power, blue for ice, frog suits, penguin suits, and then small versions of everything in case they can’t find an Alice in Wonderland type growth mushroom to wear their adult overalls. So I think it’s safe to say they are currently out of the plumbing industry, and have been so out of practice since 1983 that they probably couldn’t even re-open a business even if Princess Peach managed to hire some guards that weren’t tiny toadstools to protect her from Bowser.

So how do they make money? I think this is why Luigi always helps his brother save the Princess. I know that Mario is doing it for cake, which I firmly believe is a metaphor for sex, but I think Luigi is looking at the big picture. Worst case scenario, I’m sure Princess Peach has enough money to offer up some sort of reward for saving her. Best case scenario, Mario marries Princess Peach and lets his brother live in the castle with them. Honestly, I think the latter would be the best case scenario. I don’t think Bowser would keep trying to steal Princess Peach if Mario and Luigi lived with her. They would be an enormous deterrent, given the fact that they keep hurting him every time he tries to steal her. I mean, in Mario 64, they even threw him into exploding spike balls until he needed hospitalization and quite possibly extensive surgery.

Which brings me to my next point; throwing Bowser into spike balls must be hard. He’s heavy. I mean, he’s a giant dinosaur turtle with a spiked shell that’s at least twice the size of Mario in the original Mario Bros., and about 100 times the size of him in Mario Galaxy. By Mario 64, Bowser was about 10 times the size of Mario. That’s a lot of throwing power. To make things even more interesting, Mario spent some time doing community service work in Mario Sunshine. There he would run around with this interesting water-cannon backpack that would fire enormous amounts of water on pollution scattered across the city and neighboring areas. I would assume that the water cannon held about 50 cubic feet of water before Mario had to go find a nice clean water hole and fill it up. Water weighs roughly 62.5 pounds per cubic foot. That means Mario is not only lugging around 3125 pounds of water, but he’s pulling off triple jumps that are well over 3 stories high at the same time.

So why is Mario still fat? He jumps 3 stories high carrying 3125 pounds of water and about 200 pounds of body fat. How is he still fat? He must have some serious metabolism issues. Either that, or he has such enormous muscle mass (which is very likely given his strength) that it has to roll on top of each other and shape itself like fatty tissue in order to fit into his short little body. I mean, we’re talking about a guy that breaks brick with a light tap of his closed fist. This little guy is strong.

I don’t really expect answers to these questions. I would like them, but I don’t really expect them. I guess I’ll just have to go day-to-day in being unsure. But on a final note, what kind of dinosaur is Yoshi? And also, why when he’s hatched from an egg, is he already wearing a saddle? That’s just strange.

Anon

I wrote a post a few years ago titled "Anonymous." A just reread it, and I must admit, I have drastically changed my opinions of the situation. I'm not saying that I was wrong before, I'm just saying that at the time, I hadn't discovered the power of Anonymous, or Anon as I know him now. Here's the older article:

Anonymous

So here's my new opinions. Anon is an amazing creature. He has more power than anyone I have ever known. His reach extends farther than any political leader, his influence felt everywhere. He has the power to open doors that no one else can open, and he is not confined by the rules of the world. He breaks laws, he cheats the system, and most of all, he is never held accountable for his actions. Anon is, for lack of a better explanation, the God of the Internet.

But why do I know this? Unfortunately, in order to explain myself, I'm going to have to break the first rule of Fight Club. I discovered the power of Anon when I came to the End of the Internet. It was here that Anon introduced himself to me by calling me a "fucking newfag" and generally breaking my unbreakable morale. Anon lives and thrives here, at the end of the internet, where common sense and intelligence goes to either die, or be born in secret and smuggled into existence before someone notices it and attempts to slaughter it. His home is 4Chan, and he thrives in /b/.

When Apple's stock crashed thanks to rumours that Steve Jobs had died, that was Anon. He managed to post so often that CNN believed Steve to be dead, and posted a story on it. Apple's stock dropped, and the mistake was realized. When that girl threw puppies into a river, it was Anon who found her phone number, her name, her facebook, her address, her family's addresses, and every other shred of personal information about her allowing the police to arrest her. And whenever anyone needs to find out who someone is, a quick post to /b/ gets you her name, facebook, phone number, AIM, MSN, email, etc. with one quick reply from Anon.

He isn't all-powerful though. Anon is lazy. He loves to help find people, and he loves to cause trouble, but more than anything else, he loves to do nothing. His usual responses are ones of neglect and hate. He is racist, derogatory, and generally an asshole. He would rather write "Penis" thirty times than answer a question.

Despite his setbacks, though, I have grown to love Anon. I respect him. He is a powerful creature, and I am proud to see him commenting on things I write. He's a good man, as terrible as he may be.

The Illusion of Hope

So Google just posted a link on twitter discussing their Project 10^100. If you don't know about it, it was an idea to change the world, having people from different countries all over the world submit ideas that would make the world a better place. Here's some information on the top ideas if you are interested in reading the back story before continuing:

http://www.project10tothe100.com/ideas.html

I have been following the project for a while now, and today, after I read their plans to give money to whichever idea wins the vote for "best idea," I must admit that my cynical nature took control and I couldn't help but feel disappointed in Google. Maybe it's my complete lack in humanity, or maybe it's just the fact that people have been trying to change the world for the better since the dawn of humanity, and we always come back to one thing: The world changes for the worse when money and power comes into the equation; The world changes for the better when blood comes into the equation. I believe the equation looks like this:

World Change > Blood ≠ World Change < Money

Take, for example, a perfect balance of this formula that can be seen on Google's Project 10^100. There is an idea in there to change the way we are notified about genocide. It states that we already have the monitoring tools to do it, we just haven't done it. It also states that it can be done so that we will have early-warning detection signs to prevent genocide. So the question I have, being the cynical and negative individual I am, is this: If we already have the technology to do it, why haven't we done it?

Since the genocide of WWII, all the major powers of the world signed that wonderful little piece of paper stating that they would never again let genocide happen. So here we are, years later, watching as 100,000 human lives are lost in a single night in Rwanda, watching as countless people are slaughtered in Somalia, and instead of intervening, we argue that we can't confirm that these events actually meet the definition of "genocide."

Why?

It all comes down to my formula. And the best way to look at it would be to use President Obama as my example. Obama has been documented, back in his Senator days, to be an extremely powerful advocate in regards to stopping global genocide. He was arguing constantly in favour of taking a stand against the atrocities in Somalia. Then he becomes President, and all of a sudden that argument vanishes. Why? Because now he makes decisions that impact the way money will be spent in the country.

Human life in a country that doesn't impact the direct economy is less valuable than the money that would be spent to stop the spilling of blood.

The point here is this: Genocide will never be fixed, no matter how much money Google pours into it. As sad as it may be, blood is far less valuable than money, and the only time that money will be spent to stop blood from being spilled is if that blood will directly impact the amount of money the decision maker will be receiving. So don't waste your time, Google. Just face it. People don't care about other people.

BP Press Release

Update on Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill – 26 June

Release Date: 26 June 2010

BP today provided an update on developments in the response to the MC252 oil well incident in the Gulf of Mexico

Subsea Source Control and Containment

A new method for controlling the oil spill has been passed over to the engineers at BP. The project has been titled “The Giant’s Stopper.” The primary objective is to build an enormous rubber cork that will be used to block the spill like the wine in a wine bottle.

The project was developed by a California grape farmer named François Piere who moved to California from France with aspirations of opening his own vineyard. Monsieur Piere currently owns three factories that produce and distribute corks. His biggest seller is the rubber stopper.

Monsieur Piere developed The Giant’s Stopper plans when he was attempting to develop a new kind of bottle. He hypothesized that with a big enough cork, the oil spill could be contained by simply plugging the hole as if it were a bottle of wine.

BP is still slightly resistant to the plan. Discussions are underway weighing the cost-benefit analysis for producing such a giant rubber cork. A decision should be reached by the end of the month.

If the project does go underway, Monsieur Piere has offered for his company to manufacture the cork for BP. His terms were that we be allowed to place his company logo on the cork that would stop what he called “the biggest bottle ever.”

It appears that BP’s major concern with The Giant’s Stopper plan is the development of a big enough cork screw to remove the cork when a more permanent method of containment arises. Though the cork may work well for now, eventually all corks need to be removed, and when that time comes, who will be the one manufacturing and then utilizing The Giant’s Corkscrew.

The estimated length of the needed corkscrew is 47 stories high. As a matter of perspective, that’s about equivalent to a building that has 50 stories, except the corkscrew will be three stories smaller.

Cluck Cluck Cluck... ATTACK!

I've been thinking about vegetarians recently. Don't worry, I don't plan on becoming one. I think that vegetarians aren't doing their job to protect humanity. See, vegetarians are all about saving the animals because it's cruel for us to kill them, but I wonder if they ever stopped to think about what might actually happen if we really did just up and stop eating meat. Here's what I believe could happen:

The world is populated by about 23 billion chickens. The human population of the world is about 6.7 billion. That means that there are almost 4 chickens for every person in the world. That's the start of a pretty big problem if you ask me. See, we already occupy a lot of space on the planet. Do we really need chickens to be doing the same thing? I'm sure that some of you are thinking, "hey James, there are only that many chickens in the world because we grow them."

True.

But that doesn't matter. See, you are right, we did grow them, but if we stopped killing them, that doesn't change the fact that we grew 23 billion chickens! Now, think about this. A chicken lays an egg every 24 hours, on average. Let's just pretend that each chicken only sits on two fertilized eggs at a time, something we know to be untrue because, let's face it, chickens are like bunnies. It takes 21 days for a chicken egg to hatch, on average. It's now math time.

We have 22 billion chickens (we'll pretend one billion of them are roosters, though we clearly don't need that many roosters to fertilize our hens) laying 2 eggs that hatch in 21 days. That means in just 21 days, we now have a whopping 66 billion chickens all because we stopped eating them. The very next day, 22 billion hens can potentially lay another 44 billion eggs, and in another 21 days, we have another 44 billion chickens tacked onto our current 66 billion chickens. So, in 42 days, we are at 100 billion chickens.

Now, about 22 weeks after being born, hens can start laying eggs. When our first batch of hens can start laying eggs, thanks to just the 22 billion chickens we as humans grew, the earth is now populated with 1.386 trillion chickens. And that was just 22 weeks of 22 billion chickens breeding. Now we have about 66 billion chickens breeding, at a rate of growth of 44 billion chickens every 21 days. In just 21 days, a single batch of new chickens added, our number of 1.386 trillion chickens has already doubled to 2.736 trillion chickens.

Do you see where we have a problem yet?

Just 23 weeks after we stopped eating chickens, we went from 23 billion chickens to 2.736 trillion chickens. We, as a population of about 6.7 billion people, are now outnumbered by chickens 408:1.

So I ask you, what do chickens eat? Seed. What comes out of seeds? Trees and plants. What happens when chickens eat all the seeds? Trees stop growing. What happens when trees stop growing? No more oxygen. Who needs oxygen to survive? All life on Earth.

Besides, even if the chickens didn't eat all the world's seed, I don't put it past them to just attack us. I know chickens are stupid, but I don't think I could fight off 408 of them as they charged me down, beaks and claws ready for war.

So, don't be an idiot. Keep the chickens at bay. Don't become a vegetarian.