EA Sports presents eSPORTS ’14

That’s right. A video game about people playing video games. And why the hell not? As long as eSports are being recognized as professional sport, why shouldn’t they be able to have a game made out of it?

Think about that for a second. Imagine creating a character that plays video games, but not just any video games, but other EA sports video games. There’s a repeating image kind of redundancy about it, but that’s what professional gamers do for a living sometimes; why shouldn’t EA try and capitalize on that, and make the players in the game play other EA video games? In fact, they should make the capability to make their players play other EA titles as egregiously priced downloadable content, so that they can make even moar moneys!

But back to eSPORTS14. There’s so many directions that a game like this could be developed. Like FIFA, you could choose a nationality; the Koreans and the Chinese would be stupidly overpowered in talent and capability, but have single digits in charisma, marketability and personality. Europeans would score high in charisma, marketability and arrogance, and South American nations would have a 99 in trolling ability, and nothing else except maybe FIFA. And since North America is pretty much EA’s stomping ground, they would be given a fairly balanced kit to work with.

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How much the HWARDO bullshit has snowballed in a decade

I was having a Facebook discussion about the term “Orientals” as an inappropriate descriptor for human beings, but eventually things went awry as they often tend to, and then before we knew it, it was hijacked by the topic of martial arts Zubaz pants, and jokes about Rex Kwon Do. And whenever I hear about Rex Kwon Do, it makes me think about the farcical business model of overnight Tae Kwon Do schools that emerge out of nowhere, with oft-debatable credentials of those who run them.

I like to call them McDojos. Gimme money, and I’ll feed you bullshit and a black belt after you’ve paid enough.

I’ve endured my share of McDojos as a kid, and I’m fairly confident that two of the three places in which I “learned” martial arts were McDojos in their own right, with the third one actually having a very legit headmaster, although he taught in all of maybe a handful of classes while I was there. So maybe all three were McDojos, after all. Well shit.

Anyway, when I was still living up in Virginia, and still working for the newspaper where I started my graphic design career, I remember this one ad I made for a McDojo that stood out in particular, because out of all the McDojos I’ve ever seen in my life, none had, well, marketed in the paper in the first place, but had boasted as much bullshit as I’d ever seen in my entire life like this one did.

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Was this really necessary?

Anyone who notices the sites that I link to might notice Me In My Place, which sure, at a cursory glance looks like a pervy site full of girls running around in their underwear.  And I’m not going to deny that I don’t not enjoy seeing girls running around in their underwear, but in all honesty, I like the concept of the site, and as someone who hopefully will show some improvement in photography, I find the site as sort of inspirational as well.

When I look at the site, it’s not because I’m trying to get my jollies, I’m viewing as a fan and admirer of their art.  What kind of twisted person would actually link their personal arousal preferences on their own blog??

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Are there any other cities like this?

I was sitting in traffic the other day, which is a fairly common occurrence to those that live in Atlanta.  Whenever this occurs, inevitably, I, or someone like Jen often asks “why is it always this bad?”  The question is pretty redundant, because we all know the answer to it, but it’s partially frustration and partially the fact that there’s really nothing else to say when you’re stuck in suffocating Atlanta gridlock.

Aside from the sheer lack of surface streets leading to a massive reliance on the highways, if you were to ask me, I’d tell you that the biggest problem causing Atlanta traffic is simply Interstate 20, which slices neatly through the middle of Atlanta, going east-west.  At three points in the Atlanta highway system does I-20 intersect, and at any given point during the day (or night), those will inevitably be the worst points of traffic.  The I-85/I-75 connector probably gets it the worst in both directions on a daily basis, but the west intersection of I-285 and I-20 is notorious for predictably horrific traffic, especially for those traveling southbound; it’s incredible how people needing to travel westbound on I-20 manage to choke out and congest four lanes across 10 miles of roadway on a daily basis.

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The Big 10’s logo sucks

The Big 10 is a pretty big deal in the world of collegiate sports; it’s no secret that amongst all college sports, football and basketball reign supreme in terms of popularity, and the Big 10 represents strongly in both.

But when the day is over, I can’t take the Big 10 conference seriously. It has nothing to do with the fact that it’s been over ten years since any sort of National Championship has been brought to the Big 10, or that Ohio State has turned into the Buffalo Bills of college sports, or sour grapes at Michigan for getting a referee-aided victory over Virginia Tech in the Sugar Bowl.

No, I can’t take the Big 10 conference seriously, because their logo is absolute rubbish.

I mean seriously, look at it – it sucks.

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Sometimes I feel like Bill from King of the Hill

There was once an episode of King of the Hill somewhere in the 13th season, where the non-Hank plot of the episode was that Peggy, Dale and Minh realized that Bill was the perfect representation of the every man in the United States, and basically that anything he liked was worth putting some chips into on the stock market. Discreetly, of course. After a while, the troika began to make some money on stock market, and started to enjoy some of the luxuries that an influx of cash provides.

Eventually, it slips to Bill that he’s the guinea pig to them, and once made aware that his decisions had impact on others, the talent of inadvertently picking stock market winners vanishes as he becomes overly self-conscious of the things he likes, and the troika not only starts tanking at the stock market, they ultimately lose all their luxuries in the process and come back to zero.

Now there’s absolutely nothing to be proud of in comparing myself to Bill Dauterive, because in the show’s hierarchy, he’s the world’s biggest loser, in spite of his unknown wealthy background, fluency in Cajun French, and numerous talents, hidden because he’s the show’s punching bag. But in context of this post, I do feel like I can sometimes relate in being somewhat of an everyman.

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1,000

Typically, there’s nothing special at all about particular numbers, especially when it comes to recreational hobby blogging.  But I’m a fan of baseball, where numbers make the world go round, and where nice round ones are championed and celebrated at every opportunity, and I’m also a pretty sentimental guy who often times puts more stock into something than really should be deemed necessary, like nice round numbers.

But anyway, this is a very special post to me, because it happens to be the 1,000th post I’ve made to my beloved brog.  Now I’ve been brogging a lot longer, since there were about nine years prior to moving it to a WordPress format where I was doing it prehistorically, but since WP is nice enough to do all the number crunching for me, and display it in a prominent area in its dashboard, I’ve always been cognizant to the ever-increasing numbers throughout the past three years and change as I’ve made my best efforts to try to post something on a workday basis.

I genuinely do take a good deal of pride in this superficial number, because frankly, I’m hard pressed to find anyone like me who blogs as a side hobby, remotely close to dedicated as I do.  Obviously, I’m not saying that these people don’t exist, but I sure as hell don’t know any.  I hate to say that I have no faith in others, but the truth of the matter is that I shrug and mentally make bets in my head whenever people start a blog, to how soon it will be before they ultimately abandon it; I really hate to sound so pessimistic about it, but frankly nobody’s proven to me the ability to go half a year, much less over three years, before their posting weans off, the novelty is gone, and then the desire goes outright kaput.  I’m not criticizing people, and I’m not blaming people, because recreational blogging isn’t necessarily hard, but it’s pretty unfulfilling if it feels like nobody is reading, you’re not getting paid for it, or you simply run into writers’ blocks.

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