hodge podge III.

Let's play a game.
On the topic of ISIS: check this out.
Thoughts?
Look again.
I ask you:
is this not the most HUNG OVER promo photo in the history of the biz?!
a.)we got two guys crashed out on a ratty couch, with their feet up on the coffee table next to an overflowing ashtray.
b.)dude in the middle looks like he's having difficulty standing up.
c.)poor Aaron Turner can't even look you in the eye; he is regretting what he said last night.
d.)wicked bedhead on the far left.
e.)general signs of over-indulgence: unshaven. bags under eyes. everyone's lookin mean and tired.
f.)where are they crashed out? an abandoned house? notice, also, the shades are drawn against a punishing morning sun.
g.)the photographer even went as far as to use a nausea-inducing lens to heighten the hungover-ness of the scene. Notice the warping around the bedhead's er, head.
h.)coup de grace: whiskey bottle hidden in the far-right corner.

Congratulations, ISIS. You are hung over for posterity.

---

I am often not a nerd. Usually I go out and do things. Once in awhile, tho, I have these... attacks. Entire weeks go by when insomnia lays me low and I am trying to fall asleep to the rising of the sun, and trying to drag myself out of bed before sunset. I end up feeling bedraggled and sick and upset with myself for losing a day. Embarassed to be seen by housemates, knowing that they probably conclude that I am a lazy ne'er-do-well. This is when I sometimes end up playing a lot of computer games.

So put yourself in that state of mind, back where I was about-- four weeks ago. Around that time I aquired a copy of The Sims. Yeah, that game. The one that was released with like six expansion packs, each one costing $20. Not only is the game entirely based on the pursuit of buying your little simulated people more things, you are paying very real money to buy those virtual things, which you must then purchase again virtually while playing the game. And your Sims don't even get to progress past first base. Yeah, one long kiss between hubby and wife and a dialogue box comes up asking if you want a baby. Talk about killing the mood.
I didn't know this when I started. I built myself a wicked punk rawk girl, with the torn-up clothes and wicked 'daredevil' career path and maybe bisexuality. And fuck no...! She doesn't need to buy a television; she can get by with a boombox and a fish tank. Television is for bourgeois fuckers.
Well, it turns out that in this game of life, you pretty much need a television. Television-watching, inexplicably, is considered a social activity. Your neighbours come around and eat your food and then want to talk. But you can't have a conversation sitting down unless you are watching tv. So.... my punk rock girl would come home from a long day of daredevilry, try to call over a neighbour for some social time, but then be too exhausted to stand up. So she ends up sitting quietly on her couch, staring off into space while the neighbour eats her can of beans. Too tired to even dance. Pretty soon she is lonely and bored. The fish die.
At this point, in real time, it is three in the fucking morning, and I am feverish and anti-social, and I am playing this game, and realizing that I have created a miserable, poor, lonely girl who breaks out into sobs every three hours, and spends the rest of her time muttering to herself like a subway psychotic. My gawd. I realize this is one of the most macabre fucking moments in my life, having woke up and six in the evening, having not spoken a word to anyone all day, having not even fucking bathed, and then having played this game where I am playing the role of a crazy shut-in that prods the dead fish floating in her aquarium and tries to seduce the pizza delivery guy by coming to the door naked.

That shook me up, and the next day I bought sleeping pills and went to work and bathed and made conversation at the dinner table.
Today, in between work and play and reading and writing, I started a game simulating the house I used to live in with three other male friends. We lived in a townhouse on Jane and Finch, with graffiti on the walls and a hookah in the living room and piles of recycling in the kitchen. According to this game, by day four we have started to tear each other apart. A.J. boos me when I play guitar in the dining room. This naturally causes some household tension. Shoumik is unemployed, and thus gets trapped with the lion's share of the household chores. Rob is drinking every night. That's just not healthy. The guinea pig has died. We have no way of paying for food, so we are eating scraps off of the previous day's dinner dishes.

It's too bad this game doesn't let you buy marijuana. That might make it easier to play as a counterculture hippy.
Maybe those capitalist bastards will include that in their next expansion pack.