Does the War on Terror frighten you? Do you feel that the terrorists are scared now? Now that they know we’re serious?

Shit maybe they don’t know how serious we are! We need something that’ll send a message to them. To their hearts. To the Frank Miller written dark hearts they have thumping like a lustful wild night full of stars and rain. A heart of… sorry, got Miller-ized.

We need a logo!

Yes! That’s it! A LOGO!

Well thank your lucky stars, my friends, because the CIA is one step ahead of you (like always, slacker).

From the CIA’s own website, the War on Terrorism section to be specific I bring you:

TERRORIST BUSTER

This is for real. This is the CIA’s own logo for the War on Terror. Right there. No lie. Call him Buster for short. Or Busty, maybe. Busty. He has spunk.

Fuck spunk, he looks like someone ripped off the Ghostbusters and added a half melted plastic fucking gun. He’s smiling! YAY! Look at me! I’m a logo! Fear me car bombers! No more time for you! Red line express to gonesville! Woohoo!

Yeah. I can feel the fear already.

The War on Terror: Brought to you by Mattel.

It is time for a bit more Pan-Kun the Japanese Chimp!

We’ve seen him take some dogs for a walk. We’ve also watched him deal with his fear of snakes.

Below he’s going to take a train (with a bulldog) and then train with the fire department!

Hello.

I am Serpentor. Perhaps you have heard of me. Yes, I have a long history of causing pain and destruction. I spent some time leading COBRA, in fact. Those cursed G.I. Joe fools would come out and thwart me. I got thwarted a lot.

Still, you need to remember that I am a genetic experiment! I was created from DNA samples of many great men including Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte, Attila the Hun, Philip II of Macedon, Alexander the Great, Ivan the Terrible, Vlad the Impaler, Hannibal, Genghis Khan, Grigori Rasputin, Eric the Red, Amon-Toth and Sgt. Slaughter. To name but a few.

So you see, I had no reason to be thwarted. I could never figure it out, it just didn’t make sense. How could someone as powerful as I was get defeated so often and easily?

COBRA!

…sorry, sometimes that happens. Where was I?

Oh, yes, how could I always end up defeated, and so easily? I thought about it and then one day it came to me. Yes, friends, I realized that I was missing some important thing in life. Some key ingredient that my makers missed. They may have given me the brain power of Alexander the Great, the cunning of Vlad the Impaler and the finely shaped ass of Sgt. Slaughter but they missed one thing.

One thing was my downfall!

I had very pale skin. Though I spent all day in the sun, fighting to destroy G.I. Joe and rule the world, my tan never really happened. Frankly, I burn easy.

Still I found respect hard to come by. My soldiers thought that anyone who was a good leader would be out in charge all the time. Now, mind you, I was! But due to my lack of tan they didn’t see that, they didn’t see it etched in my face.

And so I started to use different home tan kits. They all sucked. They washed off, or made me orange. That would not do. I couldn’t conquer the free world while orange! Ridiculous!

COBRA!

So I made my own. And now I want to share it with you. Yes, you can now get SERPENTOR’S Self Tan over the counter.

Ask your local pharmacy or drug store to stock SERPENTOR’S Self Tan!

It’s the only self tanning solution made with venom, basil, secret herbs and just a hint of lavender for an amazingly fresh scent every time!

Not only will you look stunning and radiant on the battlefield but your troops will be able to smell your confidence!

That’s a self tanning solution.

That’s SERPENTOR’S Self Tan!

I’ve made sure that the product is competitively priced. In fact if you should find another vendor who sells their product cheaper simply call our toll free number! It’s listed on the back of the bottle. Not only will we refund your full price of purchase but we will also destroy the mongrel dogs who dare undersell Serpentor!

So act now! SERPENTOR’S Self Tan is a fine, quality product that can only enhance your life style! Trust me. I once led the largest terrorist organization on the planet, and I led with confidence. The kind of confidence brought on by using SERPENTOR’S Self Tan.

Available where ever fine products are sold.

And if, for some reason, your local store won’t stock our product, simply call the toll free number on our website and we’ll deal with them. Oh, we’ll deal with them all right.

COBRA!

I need someone who can build a site with me. Seriously. Collaborative project. I just need things done that I can not do. So I need someone who can build a site, do some graphics work (including drawing) and work with a bunch of existing tools that would have to be found – specifically along the “draw things in this webapp and save them” genre of things. As well as build the overall project and breathe life into it with me.

So please if you can do this and are interested let me know. If you know someone who can, send them my way. This is gonna be a biggish one.

adampknave (at) gmail (dot) com

In other news:

The cat has decided that she likes to sit on my laptop keyboard. Now, when I’m at home my laptop is docked and I use a real keyboard. So I have a plastic sheet over my laptop keyboard to keep it free of dust and such.

Anyway.

The cat likes to sit on it when I’m not at my desk. It’s warm. So I often come back to a screensaver that is full of gibberish in the password field (there’s a reason I keep a password on my screensaver at home – cats) and a cat who looks annoyed.

I’ve chased her off enough that she won’t do it if I can see her. So instead, when I go out for a few and leave the laptop on, I come home to a cat that quickly leaps clear of the desk and looks at me all sweetness and light.

As if, somehow, I couldn’t work this magic out.

When I go into another room or something now I have to remember to put something large on top of the keyboard – but something light enough to not press down, either. A tissue box works.

I give it a week until she works out that she can just shove that aside and thwart my silly human plans. A week. At the outside.

What’s the other half of the battle?

Hey guys! What’s new?

You know, not much, like, yeah that’s about it.

Hey baby. How’s it shakin’?

Uhm. Yeah. Listen, Mr. Hoffman…

Hasslehoff. David Hasslehoff. Hoffman is Dustin Hoffman, you know, rain man?

Oh, I’m sorry, it’s just everyone calls you Hoff, so I thought…

Whoa, wait this isn’t Dustin Hoffman? Whoa.

What? You fucking stoner. I’m David fucking Hasslehoff, asshole! Idol of millions!

Millions of what?

People!

Americans?

People! What does it matter where they live?

Whoa, now wait, I’ve heard that before. So they’re Germans?

They’re people! Their nationality doesn’t matter!

Sure it does, Mister Hoffman…

HASSLEHOFF!

Right. But it does matter. I mean when the Holograms and I first toured we had good crowds in Japan and Italy but the U.S. crowds really made our star rise! It was outrageous! Truly, truly outrageous! And kind of sad. I mean, I’m sorry that the nature of fame seems to reside either in America or England but it does.

Yeah, it’s like, totally uncool and shit but it’s true. Dogstar, my band…

You have a band? Outrageous!

Yeah, I play bass.

That rules! I love musicians. So hey are you guys going on tour soon?

Well I was gonna say, Dogstar is big in some other countries but because I’m a movie star first everyone in America thinks I must suck and that the band is, like, totally a vanity project, right? So we never quite took off.

I have best selling CDs out. I sing.

In Germany?

They’re just normal people like everyone else!

Heh.

But yeah, Keanu, you wanna maybe get Dogstar to open for the Holograms, maybe your band could get some more exposure that way!

Whoa, that would totally rock!

I sell out concerts!

In Germany. But yeah, Keanu, ask the band! That would rock!

Totally!

Listen, Dazzler…

Jem.

Whatever. I have huge star power.
Yeah, with Germans. Don’t feel bad, it’s better than a lot of people have. It’s just kinda useless when you want to get into Spago’s, you know?

Listen, Dazzler…

Jem.

Whatever. Just keep your cute mouth shut, since you don’t know what you’re talking about.

Funny thing about Dazzler.

Hmmm?

I can shoot lasers out of my eyes just like she can, actually.

AAAAAAAIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!! My manly bits! MY MANLY BITS!

Maybe K.I.T.T. has some spare ones in the trunk. Wouldn’t surprise me.

*whimper* My manly bits…

Hey I’m back and… whoa! His manly bits! What happened?

You know that wacky Dustin Hoffman.

D-dav-vid Has-ssle-ho-off. *choke* *SOB* My manly bits…

Duuuude. Harsh.

Outrageous!

Truly, dude. Truly.

Yep, it’s that time again. Time for a brand new look at something awesome.

This time out it’s an everyday device. Something we live with and use constantly. Yeah, those things can be awesome as well. I’m talking about the stapler.

First showing up in 18th century France, the stapler was the little office tool that could. When Sam Slocum patented the first modern “paper fastener” he used pins . It wasn’t a stapler, really, but the road continued to be paved forward with intentions and bundles of paper all stuck together.

George McGill, in 1866 patented a bendable brass paper fastener though. The true ancestor of the modern stapler. Things continued to develop and, really, they never stopped. Still haven’t. Even now you can go get countless types of staplers for countless uses. Staples are everywhere.

As are staple removers, but those are a different subject entirely (and one I won’t go into, probably so let’s just say that I feel that staple removers are more awesome than staplers themselves) so let’s just move on.

The normal, modern stapler is a small device, made of anything from plastic to steel, that drives a bracket of stuff (the staple) through objects and then bends it, using raw force, to keep the objects being stapled together.

Nice! Metal bending tool of destruction! Who didn’t staple someone else as a kid? Or click the stapler to shoot staples at someone else? Maybe you just stapled all sorts of things for no good reason. We’re drawn to them. Staplers are kind of awesome.

Yes I said kind of.

Note that at the top of this entry I did not use a red Swingline stapler. They didn’t even make red until after Office Space became popular. So does the movie up the awesome index of the stapler itself? Maybe a tiny bit. But not to huge results.

The truth is that while staplers are awesome they are simply not very awesome. Oh, it’s true. I mean we have to acknowledge the awesomeness of the stapler, we simply have to! Let’s just not get carried away. Compared to Pat Morita, for example, or Tenzil Kem … well staplers don’t rate much.

But the joy of using them: the noise, the heft and result all come out to a level of awesomeosity. Just not too much of it.

No shame in that. They is greatness in it, in fact! Remember making the awesome index at all does mean that a thing contains awesomeilitude!

So, to be fair and honest here, we come to the inescapable conclusion that staplers have an awesome index rating of LOW.

I don’t really know of a simpler way to say it, but I know you’ll laugh and shrug. Well over in Johannesburg this went down: The National Defense Force is probing whether a software glitch led to an antiaircraft cannon malfunction that killed nine soldiers and seriously injured 14 others during a shooting exercise on Friday.

SA National Defense Force spokesman brigadier general Kwena Mangope says the cause of the malfunction is not yet known and will be determined by a Board of Inquiry. The police are conducting a separate investigation into the incident.

Also the XM-151 Stryker remote weapon system “provides increased survivability and lethality. Because the RWS ( Remote Weapons System) is remotely operated from inside the vehicle, the crew is afforded 14.5 mm protection (rocket-propelled grenade protection with add-on armor). In addition, the RWS uses a fire control system which significantly increases first hit probability, allowing for greater lethality and more kills per basic load.”

Now. It wasn’t an XM-151 that went bonkers in Johannesburg, it was an Oerlikon GDF-005 antiaircraft gun. No the XM-151 went nuts last year. It started firing and looking around for fresh targets, by itself. Luckily it ran out of .50 caliber bullets.

Robots are going to kill us. And yet we arm them. In Japan they are developing robots to fuck. Sex robots are in the near future! Will they also be armed?

Have you ever seen anime? Of course they’ll be armed.

Fuck, people, come on! Let’s review – shall we?

GOOD robot | BAD robot

BAD robot | GOOD robot

HOTBAD robot | HARMLESS robot

Now I feel that maybe after that refresh course you can remember which side you’re on! The human’s side! Come on! When we’re replaced by evil robots who keep us around only to kick at us and laugh at the pain in our fleshy bits do you think you’ll be rewarded just because you like to stick your dick in a toaster? No. You won’t. You’ll be killed by robots for daring to sleep with their sons and daughters.

You’ll be hunted down and shot. You’ll be enslaved and force to mine Energon cubes. You’ll be worthless fleshy dangly bits that are used only scrape the rust off of a robot’s ass after a hard days work ENSLAVING YOU.

So stop it. Stop going along with the robots. Stop helping them and egging them on. Don’t build them, don’t help them along, don’t watch War Games and think that the computer was kinda nifty (the computer was evil) or any of that shit. No more Knight Rider! No more taking orders from machines! No more! It ends now! From now on we can’t listen to our machines tell us what to do!

Oooo wait, the automated time system says it’s time for lunch. I’ll write more later or something…

Saw that Richard Kadrey had a new book out: Butcher Bird: A Novel Of The Dominion. This excites me to no end considering he wrote Metrophage.

Metrophage is one of those books that hits you like a hammer to the face. Cyberpunk, sure. It’s also a drug haze, a total shared hallucination of a novel. It’s out of print but it isn’t hard to put your hands on a copy, and if you like the genre at all you probably should. It’s like Neuromancer but really also like Vurt. I haven’t re-read Vurt in a while. I should do that. Anyway. Metrophage is a wonderful fucking book.

So when I saw Butcher Bird I had to buy it. Any book where the main character laments that it was a bad day to stop smoking crack has some potential. It’s Kadrey doing jazz again, with more horror mixed in to his streets. Gah, fantastic. Just fantastic.

Of course I had to pick up The Road to Madness for research for a project. So I did. That oughta be fun. I can’t discuss it yet, but there you are.

I am not a big Lovecraft fan, in general. I like some of the things he did, really the way he did them more than anything, but I’ve never been a big fan of his writing. Still, I’m here with a Lovecraft collection, studying one particular story. Only one.

It will come in handy.

Muahahahaha!

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In other news: not much. I have a lot of shit to do, still. It seems like no matter how much I get done I don’t get anywhere. That might mean it’s time to drink more. I don’t know. It might not, too.

I was thinking of origin stories recently though. Again for a project, of course. I don’t think anymore unless I have a project to think about. That’s sad but there you go. Anyway, thinking. Origin stories.

They’re mostly useless aren’t they? I mean how many superhero movies are nothing but a long origin story? And well sure you might think we have to set up this whole world, right?

But action movies don’t bother. They set the world by showing it to you. They teach you about the character through their actions and bits of back-story layered into the story itself. They don’t spend 90 minutes showing you how someone ends up in a fucking suit.

I’m bored with origin stories. A few of them are critical to the character: Spider-Man (it’s a transformative origin. Seeing who he was beforehand is crucial to understanding him in ways that dollops of back-story can’t quite convey), Batman, I guess is another. Superman maybe? Iron Man, again for the transformative aspect. But the Fantastic Four? Come on! Who cares? I don’t need to see everyone get powers and deliver some form of the following:

“Wow we have powers! How do we use them?! What do they do?! Oh noes! What are we going to do! Is there a villain who was accidentally created at the exact same time as us we have to fight!?”

Because it’s always the same. It’s time to move on. Tell a story, fill it in as needed and layer when appropriate.

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This dog hates you.