It’s Hard Being Black And Gifted

If you ever want to peer deep into the heart of darkness and find out how white people really get down, go on a trip with them out of town to play in a softball tournament. There was a drunken parking lot barbeque that was broken up in a mad scramble after someone thought the cops were coming (the two black guys in the group BOOKED IT and I was all prepared to claim that I was just there delivering Chinese food), a 1:00 AM drive to the casino with seven blazed white people crammed into my clown car (one of them won almost $600 by betting on his jersey number in roulette…who wins that much playing ROULETTE!?!), enough second hand pot smoke to fly me to the moon like Alice Kramden, a white guy killed me in NHL 10 and a black guy killed me in Madden after I hustled everyone in Street Fighter 4. I seriously ran through the whole gauntlet of racial stereotypes this weekend in Niagara Falls; it was nothing if not educational.

And tons and tons of no-homo moments throughout that will remain unmentioned. All I’m going to say is that if you’re looking to pick up chicks, there’s better venues to do it than the SPN Provincials. (But if you’re looking to get raped by big burly men that look like washed-up retired MMA fighters, then by all means, give it a shot.)

One notable story was when I was having a conversation with a friend and his newly pregnant girlfriend back at the hotel, which I was handling rather well – I was rolling with some jokes, a funny story about my at-bat in the last game that dominated the attention of the entire room, and just overall killing it and showing how cool of a dude I was. At some point they mentioned that they had just seen Finding Nemo and found it to be an excellent movie. I then immediately prepared to ask them if they’ve seen Up and then move to the always solid “Man, the room got really dusty in the first 15 minutes of that movie, didn’t it?” line, which is always bankable for laughs. Only I couldn’t get the fucking MISCARRIAGE bit out of my head, and I suddenly grew this horrible fear of bringing up this scene while talking to someone that was actually pregnant. I just shut down as all these different worst case social scenarios looped in my head, staring straight ahead with my mouth agape after they mentioned Finding Nemo, and just completely dropped a nuclear bomb of awkwardness into the entire room. Absolutely Hiroshimaed that conversation dead – it dropped to the ground like it had just taken a Mirko Cro Cop shin right to the temple.

Also, while I was watching a feature on the prospects of the upcoming Ottawa Senators season on TSN, the anchor lead into it by singing the theme for Lowered Expectations – a series of horribly unfunny skits from MADtv, for those of you that (thankfully) aren’t familiar. Remember how the guys on The Score were peppering their segments with insane Lazy Sunday references only days after it had come out? This is like the complete opposite of that. By making decade old MADtv references on television, you are proclaiming to the entire world that you are (a) completely dated and (b) a huge dork. Good job TSN, way to stay connected with your douchebag viewership.

I also recognize the irony of making a Cro Cop reference and then calling someone else dated. I guess we’ll just move onto the links portion of this post so I can get out of here quickly.

– In the spirit of Motivational Wolf, I bring you Philosoraptor.

– Natural Born Killer is the rather well written chronicle of a man who has decided to embark on a mission to kill every NPC in Fallout 3, good or evil. It’s a pretty morbid and interesting read, especially if you’ve played the game, and also a great tribute to the depth and level of detail that Bethesda Softworks put into this open world setup.

– Another neat tribute to Fallout 3 game design is this replica of the AER9 laser rifle from the game. There’s also a whole lot of other game props on that site as well, with all of their builds documented thoroughly in pictures – make sure to check out the epic Big Daddy from Bioshock build, and my personal favourite, the Portal gun.

– Sonic’s back, in a new 2-D game codenamed Project Needlemouse, which makes me pretty happy considering the franchise should never have moved to 3-D in the first place. It wasn’t a coincidence that all 3-D Sonic games sucked big time. “Project Needlemouse” is also probably the gayest codename of all time…or at least until Nintendo announces work on “Project Fat Italian Plumber.” Although maybe I shouldn’t be so quick to assume it’s really Sonic.

– Finally, here is Nicholas Cage’s head Photoshopped onto a Superman action figure and here is his head Photoshopped onto Andre the Giant’s body. Good times.

Sometimes I wanna throw it all down and get lifted