Gender: Male

The Beginning of Things:

“So my birthday is shaping up to be pretty good!  I’m getting a Playstation 3, a $100,000.00 Inheritance, and…”

The End of Things:

“…I’m going to a strip club with my…”

Down for the Count:

“…Mother.”

It is impossible to hear such a thing without having one’s brain fracture.  Hopefully I will be able to perform simple arithmetic again within a week.

January - Light Blue

February - Pink

March - Green

April - Light Purple

May - Lime Green

June - Red

July - Dark Purple

August -Light Orange

September - Light Yellow

October - Dark Orange

November - Dark Yellow

December - Dark Blue

I think this info would be useful to elementary school teachers, mainly.

1. Realize that the Big Bang is not actually being recreated in your stomach and that everything is totally fine.

2. Remove a popsicle from the freezer (INTERESTING FACT: I prefer lime or grape).

3. Put on some music.

4. Think about something nice.  Ladies (or whatever gender personally strikes your fancy) work well.

5. Curse yourself for letting your popsicle drip all over the linen covering your “desk.”

6. Eat popsicle in a hurried manner that will cause brain freeze, thus giving you something else on which to focus.

7. Go do something more constructive with your time rather than freak out over nothing (INTERESTING FACT: I chose to spin records).

This is an incredibly round-a-bout way of alerting any front page readers (Do you exist? Hello and Howdy!) that there are actually mixes on the “Mixes” page.  A bunch from SMiRK, one from DoubleGinNTonic, and very soon one from myself (see 7 above) that is not existing solely as a dusty tape in a cardboard box somewhere back in Buffalo, NY.  This should be updated rather frequently due to my friends being far more prolific than I.  There is still a chunk of SMiRK’s back catalog to be posted in the coming days and weeks and there should be a live tag set between Tonic and I sometime after the 28th as well.

And, as I approach the first real break in classes since I started this site, I hope to get at least a few real posts up here before February.  Maybe.  I’ve said this all before.

Hugs and Kisses!

Example:

“What is Love?

Baby Don’t Hurt Me.

Baby Don’t Hurt Me!

No More!”

See?  That is some heartfelt shit.

It starts with the Mind/Body problem and Substance Dualism and Descartes and all manner of philosophy I could not for the life of me give a shit about at the moment.  It leads back to it because it is a necessity that it does for mundane reasons.

There is a a drink to my right, a Manhattan, made by myself.  It is perfect.  Not a “Perfect Manhattan” because those are rather… lacking in perfection in my opinion.  It is perfect because I made it and it meets my expectations.  This is a digression.  There is also a black notebook, my phone rests on top of it, and an Ambien rests next to that, white and slender like a grain of rice.  Its size does no justice to the potency contained within.  All manner of things are scattered before me, and all manner of things are scattered in my head.  Not so much scattered even, but stuffed to the point of maximum capacity and bits Here should go with bits There and of course they certainly don’t.  I close my eyes and a flowchart forms on the insides of my lids as one thought leads to another with the hopes that the initial notion will get to its final destination and remember why it wanted to get there in the first place.  Rarely does that actually happen but in turn I am presented with new ideas that lead to new chain reactions.  The occasional and best outcome of this is mental exhaustion.  The needless bits and pieces will die from lack of attention and fade away leaving only the most important, valuable, and urgent glimmers of thought to formulate to a somewhat concrete degree and imbed themselves in memory for later recall and contemplation.  My notebook, Post-Its and whiteboard will likely collect the detritus that may possibly be recycled at a later time into something more useful.

This has all been a digression.  I have vaugely lost where I am going.

Wait!  Wrong.

I know where I am going with this, I have simply forgotten how I wanted to get there.

Right then.  Okay.  My brain is full.  I’m sure this may be understandable to others.  That feeling of overload, too many things going on at once.  So much going on at once that any other idea such as “Hey!  I should relax!” is bounced directly back out into the open air without a moment’s consideration.  Try as hard as you may, you cannot push your finger through concrete.

It was a walk home, recently, maybe only half an hour ago.  A visit to a close friend, an appeal for advice and a need for a second opinion on the fine print of something that could have a coarse impact.  Far from the only thing fucking up the pan, it was what set me off so I figured I should attempt to get it handled.  Well, I got it fairly well sorted.  To a point.  Everything else is still crankily sharing too small of a space with too many self important ideas which causes all sort of mumbling and grumbling and… and I think I have got my point across on the whole “Hey I have things on my mind I am unique obviously no one else deals with these things so here I go with analogies.”

And so it goes back to the Mind/Body problem and Descartes and Substance Dualism.  It also goes back to Functionalism and I would Imagine at least one other “-ism” that I simply forgot to mention before because frankly the topic (well, really just the first few sentences.  I don’t think there is a topic per se) isn’t really the point as I’m quite sure there wasn’t really a point to begin with.

On this walk home after a visit that came after some sudden consternation I finally pulled some things out of the ugly ham salad my mind had become that I could perhaps whip into a paper that I don’t want to write for a class I don’t have to take.  And, maybe, after a few calls tomorrow I will learn that I can in fact NOT take this class without too much of a penalty in an area of concern in my life.  And that will be that.  And if I need to take this class to avoid upheaval elsewhere then I will have roughly five hours to root through my notebook and Post-Its and whiteboard scrawlings to slap something together because rarely is the truly useful stuff ever the stuff that deems itself important enough to take up lodging in my brain.

Things I definitely need to do tomorrow that I will not be able to make calls to get myself out of or convince myself are unnecessary:

• Clean my Room
• Convince TV Repair Man that fuzzy edges, dark borders, and poor screen geometry are not “features”
• Go to the Chiropractor

The Manhattan is two sips shy of full.  The Ambien lies in the same place.  My mind feels purged.  “Firebrained” means nothing and sounds pretentious.  It does sum up how I feel in these moments and I feel like that is reason enough to let this stay regardless of how I feel about it tomorrow, a week, or a month later.  Maybe I won’t regret this stream of consciousness babble at all.  A release is a release.

*RING*

Me: “Luna Video Games!”

Dude: “Hey, could you tell me which one of your stores is better?”

Me: “Um… I guess that depends on if you’re looking for anything specific.  Both stores have a lot of different stock.”

Dude: “…”

Me: “…”

Dude: “…”

Me: “So uh, you know, they’re both good…”

Dude: “…”

Me: “…”

Dude (yelling to an unknown person): “WHO POOPED?!?  ELENA?!?”

*CLICK*

Me: “…”

Mike.

He’s a caricature of one of those dudes you see on ESPN hurling beer kegs over impossibly high brick walls.  A top-knot ponytail caps off a disturbingly proportioned body that is obviously fueled by a breakfast of whole, live horses.  His eyes vibrate and bug out while the rest of his being courses with nearly visible energy.  He is a nuclear amphetamine bomb and I am scared shitless of him.

He walked into the store one afternoon looking as high voltage as ever.  My gut instinct told me to hit the fucking deck but all I managed to do was squeak out a pathetic little hello.  Having been acknowledged, Mike made a beeline for the back counter.  He was ready.  He wanted some high fives.  He wanted to trade in some games and pick out some new ones.  Most importantly he wanted to talk DEALS.  What kind of DEALS we could offer him.  He wanted me to call the owner and ask him about special DEALS for a good customer.

Mike’s voice is a form of sonic torture.  It always sounds like he is talking through his teeth.  His volume and pitch rise and lower at random, and he stretches syllables on a whim.  He sounds like a ‘roid raging Billy Mays.  Seconds into a conversation with the man and I’m usually squirming due to the effects.

Mike stared intently downward at the Nintendo DS games in the case by the register.  He traced his finger around on the glass while muttering about how we have a “certain clientelle” and we should work out a rewards system.  I shook my head in agreement, afraid that he might punch my heart otherwise.  I had absolutely no intentions on cutting him a deal though.  Asking me to do so is a surefire way to guarantee someone will never see any money come off of their bill.  Instead I tallied up Mike’s credit, named him a figure much lower than actual value, and then made it seem like he was receiving star treatment by telling him that I would almost double that amount.  He wound up feeling like he was “in”, I ended up giving him just over half of what anyone else would normally receive.

The task of picking out two Xbox games that appealed to him was quite daunting so he asked for my help.  He began to make a horrifying noise, somewhat like whining, when I spent a moment to finish updating something in our database.  I didn’t want to see what followed that sound so I dashed out to the racks wearing a big old toothy smile, sweating puddles.   He wanted something that would be good for multiplayer, and something “different”.  I attempted to lighten the mood by cracking a stupid joke and suggested he maybe consider “Finding Nemo”.  He actually picked it up and gave it serious consideration.  I wasn’t laughing inside as I thought about what it might be like if he tried to return it.  In the end he left with “Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows”  and “Half Life 2″.  I, much to my confusion, received a dollar tip.

Three days later Mike returned and wanted to know if “Boss Man” was around.  I told him the owner had the day off.  He poked around the store a bit and then left.  I can’t honestly say that he looked shadier than usual.  When a dude is already turned up to 11 how much further can you really jack him?  Mike shows the extreme of every emotion all at once;  Pure, raw, intense insanity.

Mike had come in early and left quickly.  I felt good about having that taken care of while the day was still young.  Of course, that’s when it got weird.

A gentleman with a whiskey trot and a sinus problem walked in a few hours later.  It seemed as though he was on no less than a gram of meth and a handle of booze.  He loudly sucked air in through his nose in short, pointed bursts and his words were thick and syrupy.  With him he had a black trash bag that he placed on the counter.  He wanted to make a return and he let me know it by haphazardly waving the receipt in front of my face.  It was for a used Xbox, and he wanted sixty dollars.  My ears began to understand the words dripping out of his mouth and I had to let him know that all sales were final, just like it said on the bottom of his magic slip of paper.

Someone owed him sixty dollars.  Instead of accepting cash as payment, he accepted an Xbox and a golden promise.  I was dumbfounded.  I imagined being in that position.  I tried to grasp the level of inebriation I would have to achieve before “returning someone else’s shit” sounded like a proper debt payment.  I explained that the best I could do would be to give him our normal buyback rate.  I had never seen this person and the date of purchase was over a month ago.  Curious as to what I would pay him, he emptied out the bag completely: one Xbox console, one official controller, one MadCatz brand shit pad, the required hook-up cords, and one copy each of “Gauntlet: The Seven Sorrows” and “Half Life 2″.

Mike popped into my brain.  If mental images had a quantifiable weight and size, a physical presence, it would have burst directly out of my fucking face.  Did this man steal something from Mike?  Am I going to have any bones broken today?   Or most importantly, is this proving all of my wild assumptions about Mike?

I told The Snort I could throw him a twenty for the items, no more.  A look of passive disappointment spread across his putty face as he mumbled something about selling it on the street.  It took him two tries to get the Xbox back into the garbage bag, the first of which nearly sent the system crashing through the display case and three shelves of Gameboy games.  He stumbled out of the store and I expected that to be the end.

It was seven thirty.  I was finishing up the last few projects I had going and slowly started to close the store down.  A man walked in with a black garbage bag.  He set it down on the counter and let me know that he had an Xbox he would like to return.  For cash.  I told him, much to his absolute amazement, that he probably also had a copy of “Gauntlet: The Seven Sorrows” and a copy of “Half Life 2″ that he was looking to sell as well.  His face froze.  I’d love to be able to say that he looked like he had just seen who-and-what, or  that he had just heard that so-and-so had done such-and-such.  No dice though, he was perfectly blank.  I took this time to clue him in to recent happenings and explained to him that he would be receiving no money until I figured out what in the shit was going on.

He became quite upset at hearing this.  He explained to me that he had just purchased this from someone for sixty dollars because they told him he could return it here.

?

The receipt clearly showed that the original price of the used Xbox was $59.99.  The dude was heartbroken.  He told me stories of how he had no need for an Xbox.  He tried to rationalize his actions.  I was going to combust if I listened to anymore lunacy so I presented The Sap with two options:  Either take the stuff and go away, or leave the shit with a phone number and maybe we would call him and give him some money back.  He left everything and departed the store, surely searching for a place to make with the tears.

The Xbox is still sitting in the back room, the two games resting on top of it.  A pink Post-It note with a phone number is affixed to the green center portion of the console.  No one called us or came back.  Mike hasn’t been seen since.  What was going on?  If it was stolen surely Mike would have come in to let us know, right?  If The Sap had honestly paid sixty dollars just so he could turn around and NOT make sixty dollars he would have followed up, right?

Who knows!

The best that Treg (the owner) and I could figure was that Mike wanted to return his system for cash, probably so he could purchase PCP hair ties, but didn’t want to show his face.  He used people who had never been to the store before to attempt the scam, thus keeping his image clear.

That’s not what was important however.  What was worth noting was the bumbling idiocy involved at all levels.  If this was a scam, the cover up stories were laughably bad.  If it wasn’t a scam then people are much sillier than I ever imagined.  The strangeness of this little episode had already been trumped before it occurred.  Much weirder things have happened while I’ve been at work.  This incident sticks with me though as a cute reminder of the bizarre logic and thought processes that people will operate under to get what they want, and the outcomes it can create.

OH!

Always make sure the potential profit margin outweighs the risks of your entrepreneurial venture.

Taking multiple accelerated on-line courses at once is a really bad idea.

Alternately, It is a really great idea.

I’m not sure which.  The end result is pretty awesome (16 weeks in 4!), but I question whether entirely losing one’s social life for a month is better than having a slightly reduced one for three months.  Especially in San Diego.  Especially, especially in Ocean Beach.  Especially times 3 when you have just recently stopped taking where you live for granted.

Anyways, two of my three intersession courses are now completed and I feel oh so sunny because of it.

What was my point?  Oh right.

During that month I feared that this here site was dead right out of the gate.  An emergency trip to Buffalo and a lack of internet access upon my return home did nothing to alleviate these concerns.  I spent a month concerned about “ideas” and “topics” and conforming to some sort of “standard” for the site.  In short, I thought too much about it.  I think too much about a lot of things.

Sitting under the sun this afternoon, having a coffee and reading comics (”Planetary” is awesome), I decided to just write.  That’s all.  Write shit. It’s so much easier when that’s the only goal.  I pulled out my totally pretentious black notebook and flipped through the pages.  “Fuck! There are tons of things in here I could ramble about,” I thought to myself.

So that’s it.  A mental restart.  Less worry.  This doesn’t mean a ton of updates, but it does mean I won’t kill off every idea I have.  Even if it ends up just being a few sentences or stupid pictures.

BONUS:

Here are some things jotted in my notebook which will not be expounded upon:

“Burger King: The Saddest Place On Earth” (this is an exaggeration, but only slightly)

“Organic Toaster Pastries - Blueberry” (they were good)

“She Bop @ Treg’s” (fun night, great track, <3 Cyndi. Why the note?  I don’t know!)

Otherwise known as “Old Shit”. 

In this episode I bring you three masterpieces rediscovered via Photobucket while working on my last entry.  Two works are “as is”, created during my MSPaint period (roughly 2004-2005).  The third is a remixed and remastered version of an ancient Photoshop project.  In this version my sworn enemy heaps shame upon one of my most favorite artists.

Without further ado.

The first number is the result of a late night conversation with a friend.  The focal point of our discussion was an idea for a video game.  This was the only piece of concept art produced:

“A Bear Victorious” c. 2004

This next work was for a friend.  Not much else is remembered.  Probably for reasons.

“An Unlikely Hobby”  c. 2005

As for our final piece?  When your muse appears you don’t argue.  Even if you feel really dirty afterwards. 

“Sudio: Gustav Doré remix” June 1st, 2008

The “Magnetic Lasso Tool” and Dante’s laurel wreath did not get along.

This is the Roman numeral

In English it is pronounced the same as the Arabic numeral

It is not pronounced

This is important because this exists

While this does not

Best,

The Luna Video Games Team

P.S. - Please do not hit your mother and go to jail for 6 days ever again.