We’re a generation of men raised by women. I’m wondering if another woman is really the answer we need.

—Chuck Palahniuk & Jim Uhis, Fight Club, 1999

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There are few things humans are more dedicated to than unhappiness. Had we been placed on this earth by a malign creator for the exclusive purpose of suffering, we would have good reason to congratulate ourselves on our enthusiastic response to the task. Reasons to be inconsolable abound: the frailty of our bodies, the fickleness of love, the insincerities of social life, the compromises of friendship, the deadening effects of habit. In the face of such persistent ills, we might naturally expect that no event would be awaited with greater anticipation than the moment of our own extinction.

—Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life

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Post tags: Alain de Botton, meaning of life, observation, quotations, what the fuck is wrong with us?, why can't you just be happy for me?

Really?

It is December of the year two thousand and eight and if you still have no idea what Really Simple Syndication is all about, you are a goddamn idiot. You’ve noticed the little RSS icon that pops-up in your location bar when you visit a site, right? Hey! Why look at that! The location bar for Super Secret Sunshine even has one of those RSS thingamabobs! Weren’t you the least bit intellectually curious as to what that meant? Even a teensy bit?

Then what the fuck is wrong with you?

Look, there is this neat thing that has been around for the better part of a decade that is now used by pretty much every web site in existence. IT IS FUCKING AWESOME. It allows you to gather up all your website bookmarks, place them in a special program, and then get notified when the website has new content. ISN’T THAT FUCKING INCREDIBLE? Furthermore, once you have read a story, you can mark it as read and never see it again. I AM IN SUCH ECSTASY THAT I JUST SCRATCHED MY FUCKING EYES OUT.

You have an account with Google, right? Right? Oh, come on. Are you retarded? You use the site a million times every day and you don’t have an account with the company? I AM SO FRUSTRATED WITH YOU RIGHT NOW I COULD KICK YOU IN THE NUTS. Go sign-up already. Go!

Once you have an account with Google, the rest should be pretty self-explanatory. Point your browser at Google Reader. Click on the a giant button that says, “Add a subscription.” Type in www.supersecretsunshine.com and press the return key on your keyboard. HOLY CRAP YOU ARE NOW IN THE FUTURE.

Did you just pee in your pants? Me too.

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Post tags: fail, google reader, how to use the fucking internet, intellectual curiosity, rss, the ship is sinking faster than you can bail it out, there is no hope for you

The news just crossed my desk that Bettie Page has passed away. She was 85.

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Post tags: beauty, bettie page, life, pin-up girls, youth

Now that’s what I call cynical.

Anyway. Super Secret Sunshine will continue, although it’s publication schedule may remain erratic for the time being. Anger is our fuel and, for all the beating our economy is currently taking, we are still giddy with excitement over Obama’s ascendancy. Go America!

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Post tags: a reason to breathe, cnn, hooray, it is a new age

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Post tags: big daddy, bioshock, drawing, file under things you don't want to run into in a giant abandoned underwater city

So, as we sit here now around the office conference table, hugging our knees to our chests and slowly rocking back and forth like a group of autistic fourth graders, our eyes stare transfixed at the television in the corner where CNN is going ape-shit celebrating its highest ratings in years. Those commercials? Fucking Super Bowl ad rates, I’m guessing. Rosaries, Buddhist statues, a rabbit’s foot, candles, crucifixes, incense, The Idiot’s Guide to Feng Shui, Wiccan amulets, The Kama Sutra, a menorah, a live goat, and a french translation of The Dead Sea Scrolls are scattered around the room. In the corner, a shrine to the Greek goddess Athena has been erected. We won’t even get into the depraved sexual acts to which we’ve submitted in order to fulfill some of the more obscure pagan rites. Desperate times, desperate measures.

We wish you all a Happy Election Day. Please vote for Barrack Obama. Heck, vote for him twice if you think you can get away with it. We’re note picky about the details, okay? Just get the job done.

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Post tags: barrack obama, election day, fending off the rapture, our only hope, yes we can

(link)

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Post tags: a reason to wake up in the morning, hope, obama, poster

THERE IS SOMETHING WRONG WITH A SOCIETY WHERE SOME PEOPLE ARE RICH ENOUGH TO USE OTHER PEOPLE’S BODIES AS FOOD PLATES.

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Post tags: naked sushi, republicans, rich people, why we will all be damned to burn in an eternal fire

I should preface this by admitting that I am not a huge fan of first person shooters*, although I have played quite a lot of them and enjoyed a select few immensely. If you were to rifle through my little black book of past hook-ups, you’d find the likes of Wolfenstein, Doom, Duke Nukem, Heretic, Quake, Pathways Into Darkness, Marathon, Unreal, Star Wars: Dark Forces, Rainbow Six, Ghost Recon, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Halo, Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, Brothers in Arms, Far Cry, Battlefield: Bad Company, and, of course, Resistance: Fall of Man.

Look, I am not bragging. I mean, the list is embarrassing. Can you imagine what I could have accomplished with my life if I hadn’t devoted so many hours to completing missions that helped no one and bringing aid to people that never existed? You know, like, what if I’d actually gone outside my house and helped real people? Or devoted those hours to projects that would bring to fruition wonders the likes of which the world has never seen? I could have made a difference! I could have changed everything!

I am but a helpless sinner, awash in my own filth.

So, the first couple of hours playing the demo left me with an unpleasant aftertaste. I picked competitive play, of course, and it really is nothing special. I’ve seen it before. Many times before. Pick a gun, spawn, shoot, kill or die, repeat. I imagine it would really be something in a land where Halo or Call of Duty had failed to penetrate the public consciousness. But that place? It is a desolate wasteland overrun by giant, malevolent sandworms and ruled by a young, pouty Kyle MacLachlan.

Things changed a bit when cooperative play was selected. None of us expected much from it, our preconceived notions of what cooperative play means having tempered our enthusiasm. Lo, we were wrong.

Something new appears to be happening here, although I admit the possibility of it all having done before. I am not an encyclopedia. Nor do I do research. If I am unduly enthusiastic about things that have been done better elsewhere, you have my permission to laugh at me. I am only try to help, in my own meager way.

The beta only appears to have one cooperative level. But it’s not just a level from the single player game like one usually expects from cooperative play. Instead, the level has been designed as a series of pens. Like on a farm. And gates connect all of the various pens together, each pen connecting to multiple other pens. The sum effect being that each time the level is played, the experience is different. When the game loads, the server decides in which pen one’s party will begin the level and which series of pens will need to be conquered in order to beat it, keeping the experience fresh each time. Even better, there are enough pens so that they will not all be visited each play through.

To bolster the experience, three types of classes are available to the player: soldier, special ops and medic. Like Return to Castle Wolfenstein or Team Fortress, the idea is to foster cooperative play by creating a balanced, symbiotic relationship between the character classes. A soldier can deal a great deal of damage, but he must rely on special ops for ammunition. Special Ops will never run out of ammo, but has a better chance of survival standing behind a soldier’s energy shield. If either gets damaged, only a medic can heal them… sort of. It all kind of breaks down in practice, actually.

The first really fun match I played was as a soldier. Let me tell you, I shot those aliens fucking dead. It was great. I didn’t really know what I was doing at first, but what made it work was that someone playing special ops started following me around, fed me ammo, and stood behind my shield while carving aliens into little chunky bits. I needed his ammo, he needed my shield. It wouldn’t have worked if I had run around the level like an ungrateful jerk, but I intentionally moved slowly and tried to hold a position for as long as possible so that my shield would actually be of use to anyone who wanted to stand behind it. This gave him incentive to stick around.

After that experience, I tried special ops. What I learned? It’s hard to be a good soldier. I was really nice when I was a soldier. Most soldiers? Very selfish. They want your ammo but they don’t get that you have needs of your own. They hardly stand, making standing behind their shields nigh impossible. It’s a very one-sided, dysfunctional relationship. I didn’t enjoy the experience much, but I do now feel a lot more empathetic towards my ex-girlfriend. So there is that.

The problem, I think, is that soldiers don’t earn experience points for sharing their shields. I’m not sure how this could be measured, but doing so would really make it to the soldier’s advantage to, you know, cooperate.

Anyway, I then found myself in a game where everyone decided to be special ops. I don’t know if this was just because the server had randomly assigned them all to special ops and they didn’t know how to change their class, or if it was just the best way to be a lone wolf and essentially negate the whole point of cooperative play, but I decided to try medic.

Medics are weirdly powerful. Shooting aliens as a medic will restore hit points. Shooting teammates will restore their health. As a medic, friendly fire is impossible. The downside? There isn’t one. All of these activities will generate experience points for the player, making it easy to get through as the top player in the match. Medics may not do as much damage as a soldier, but they do enough. Combined with the ability for a medic to self-heal, it’s very easy for one to run around on the battlefield without the need to stick with the group.

Balance is obviously needed, but I could see cooperative play as the compelling feature of Resistance 2. I certainly have little interest in the competitive offerings, whose mechanics are so antiquated as to be infused with old man smell. I can see little reason for their inclusion, other than the fact that new shipments of fourteen-year-old boys seem to be deployed on an annual basis, fresh reinforcements ready to replace retiring, older models who have moved onto more sophisticated gaming fare less reliant upon repetition and reflex. You know, like Cooking Mama 2.

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Post tags: beta, how the west was one, impressions, playstation 3, ps3, resistance 2, video games, what would john wayne do?