In memorandum.

This is one of my favorite comedians, Neil Hamburger, sharing a few jokes on the late Michael Jackson. I saw this on DVD a few years ago. One of the dudes I watched it with kept yelling, "What the fuck? What the fuck is this fucking shit? This isn't funny! What's his fucking thing with Michael Jackson? What the fuck?" I guess he saw it later, though, and thought it was hilarious.

Today is the big game!

I'm so excited about the big game today.

I put together some wontons, they're ready to drop in the deep fryer when we want them.  My girl made some kind of delicious Jell-O treat.  We have people on the way bringing chips and beverages and other assorted goodies.

Yeah, it's going to be fucking sweet.

We've got a 4th level Dragonborn wizard, a 3rd level Dragonbord warlock, a 3rd level Tiefling fighter, and a 2nd level Dwarf warlord.  I'm the dungeon master, and i've got some sweet tricks up my sleeves.  Last time the party got jumped by a bunch of kobolds on their way out of the town they were fleeing on account of various horrid scandals, of the dead and sexy variety, and of the robbing an entire tavern variety.

I'm pretty excited.  Today's game is going to be rad.

I heard there was some kind of sporting even on TV today, too, but I'm not into sports.

Cheap Sci-Fi

I really dig science fiction. Specifically, I like cheap, used science fiction paperbacks. I love combing thrift stores for sci-fi. I think it's sweet scoring a bunch of cheap sci-fi at garage sales. Fifty-cent book racks outside of bookstores make me happy, and actually going inside a used bookstore with a good science fiction section makes my head spin with awesomeness. If the pickings are scarce, as in the case of thrift stores and the like, I tend to just grab any sci-fi paperbacks that are older than I am and not terribly long (my attention span is short; I'm unlikely to ever read a single Dune novel); if there is sci-fi aplenty, I tend to pick by length first, cover second, and price third. The most expensive books I buy are still just a few bucks, about half of what a new mass-market paperback book costs.

I love cheap sci-fi for a bunch of reasons. I love the price, because by my calculations I'm paying mere pennies per hour of entertainment. I love the smell the smell of old books. I love discovering things long forgotten and out of print, and I love finding classics from big names for next to nothing. And I'm a nerd who likes science fiction.

I like hard science fiction, rooted in actual science, and I love fantastic, completely unrealistic science fiction. Indeed, part of the appeal of some cheap sci-fi is its shlockiness. I tend to lean towards rockets and spacemen sci-fi rather than sword and sorcery fantasy, but I've always had a fondness for speculative fiction in general, and I sometimes use sci-fi as a blanket term for the whole gamut of genres encompassed.

There are so many books that I've read and forgotten. There are so many fragments of sci-fi books in my head, unattached to any title, author, or even storyline. There are so many good books with stories that I remember quite well, even though I have no recollection of what those books were called or who wrote them. There are great books that I can't recall the names of, but I can recall the authors. What the hell is that Harry Harrison book, the first part of a trilogy, that's a lot like 1984, with a dude, aided by a network of underground conspirators, running from a corrupt government and their massive web of oppressive lies? 'Cause that one was kickass!

To help myself remember the books I read, and to share my geeky passion with the interwebs, I started a blog called Cheap Sci-Fi. You can check it out at http://cheapscifi.blogspot.com . Should you feel the need to purchase one of the books I've read, there are links to buy the books, but you really should just go find your own. There is an overwhelming abundance of cheap sci-fi out there for the finding. I'm not one for having a bunch of stuff, so if you know me in real life I'll give you any of the books I've already read if I still have them.

Should you find yourself in a used bookstore, checking out their sci-fi section and being unsure of what to buy, I've got two words for you: Ace Doubles. Bigger stores have sections of them, and smaller stores have them mixed in with the rest of the books. They're easy to spot, though. Just look for the books with the blue and red spines. The stories tend to be great, and the books themselves are super rad: each one is two books stuck together, so you read one and then flip it over and read the other one starting from the other side. The covers are sweet, too, and you get two of them. They're really expensive compared to some of the other stuff I buy, but that just means they cost a few bucks. A store in a heavy foot traffic area will charge more than one on a less-traveled street, but I still only ever pay around three dollars for them.

Also in the category of cheap sci-fi is the science fiction magazine. When I had a shitty desk job, these things really helped fill the hours. The fact that they're full of short stories made them perfect for my short attention span and the, uh, "downtime". My desk was full of them. I even wrote a song about them. Seriously, if you sit at a desk all day, you should get subscriptions to both Analogand Asimov. They're a little more expensive than old, used paperbacks, but they're still pretty damn cheap, and still super awesome. I also really like Weird Talesand the horror rag Cemetery Dance, though they're relatively expensive.

I've read a lot of books and a lot of stories. I've read all kinds of shit, but I always come back to the science fiction. I guess maybe I've just always been a nerd, but I've always loved the stuff. And I love it even more when it's cheap. Cheap sci-fi rules.

Rocknroll Massacre.

Here's another attempt at some stop motion animation. I'm just figuring it out as I go, so I think I'm doing alright. Modeling clay on tin-foil frames. It gets a bit jumbled and confusing, but the whole thing tells the story of a guitar-playing monster who finds a golden skull and then gets attacked by a giant leech and a giant spider. He drills the spider's heart with a carrot drill, but soon has his arm ripped off by a lizard monster, who is then killed by a fly monster. Thanks to Melissa and Deb for the help.

In the world of the future.

This sweet program called FrameByFrame popped into my tubes the other day, and then today I had a terrifying vision of the future, as seen in the video below.

The Assbutts are some entertaining jerks.

We played a show Friday. We were the first band, and started a little later than we were supposed to, and ended up playing past the time we were supposed to finish. They cut our mics on the last song, and then turned the lights off after we finished. The guy who set up the show and the sound guy were kind of pissed, but people were pissed that they cut us off. We only had two more songs, it would have taken about 3 minutes (we generally play 15 songs in about half an hour). We had a bunch of people dancing, and then nobody danced for any of the following bands. That's pretty standard for us, though. People can't help dancing when we start playing. The best feeling in the world is looking out and seeing a bunch of people dancing and singing along. It's better than sex. Well, it's comparable, anyway. We would have had more people dancing if we would have played later, as there would have been more people at the bar and they would have been more boozed up and ready to dance.

We didn't play "Roger is a sex offender" this time, because we noticed last time that people seem to stop dancing when you sing about a child molester, regardless of how catchy the tune is. People really dug "Tony is a liar," though, and were screaming, "Yeah, fuck Tony!"

Here's a clip of us playing "No fault insurance." No fault insurance is a bunch of fucking shit. If you want mp3s there are a bunch of them here, and if you want more videos there are a bunch of them here.

Scamming grandma.

Yesterday, my brother called my grandma. He told her about how he was stuck in Canada because he had been in a car accident, and something about insurance fucking him over, and how he's going to need $10,000 wired to him so he can get back home. She had her Alzheimer's-ridden husband drive her around all day, first trying to get the money (the bank apparently gave her some shit about trying to access her own goddamn money), and then trying to figure out how to wire it to him. She went to Wal-Mart, but the employees were inept and didn't know how to handle that much money.

My grandma only has a land line and doesn't have caller ID, so she called my mom to get my brother's phone number. She didn't mention that she was trying to wire him money, because my mom wasn't supposed to know about how he wrecked his car and got stranded in Canada.

When she called my brother back to tell him about her trouble wiring the money, she found out that my brother wasn't in Canada. He hadn't even wrecked his car. The guy she had been talking to earlier wasn't even my brother at all.

She called the cops, who came to her house and asked her if she had lost any identification recently, and then told her that there wasn't anything they could do because no fraud actually occurred. It's apparently legal to trick somebody into wasting their day and trying to send you $10,000, as long as they don't actually send you $10,000.

One of the creepy parts of the story is when my fake brother asked her if she had the money and if she'd be home later. When I heard that, it creeped me the hell out because this creep I sort of knew, a friend of a friend of a friend, is currently awaiting trial for strangling an old man to death in his home during a robbery. He probably just asked if she'd be home because that was the only place he could reach her, though, not because he was planning on strangling her and her husband. The other creepy part is when my grandma said it sounded exactly like my brother. Even after she talked to the real guy, she thought they sounded the same. That could be because the crook knows my brother, but I prefer to think it was because she's old and losing touch. It's also possible that somebody targeted my grandma specifically, because people where she lives know who my grandpa was, and think the family has money.

People are creeps.