Test Drive: the Führermobile (day 1)

Today I took the Führermobile for a drive. I hadn't driven for four years, and it was kind of confusing for the first few minutes, but I guess it's kind of like coding HTML: you can't forget how to do it.

Parking was the hardest bit, but surprisingly I got it right on the first try (mind you, I was checking which pedal was the clutch just five minutes before that). The car's small on the outside, but big inside (not "big as an SUV", but big as "I can fit inside it without having to practice ninjutsu for two years", which given my size and the car's size is quite an achievement. You can never go wrong with German cars...), it's quite responsive, offers a great view of the road (it's got a short snout) and you can notice by the sound and vibrations if you're revving up too much or you are getting on the curb/off the road without it being noisy or bothersome inside. Yes, it's a bit old (about 18 years now), but it isn't gasoline-thirsty, I can get it for free and it comes with a tape deck, which is awesome for my metal tapes which I can't listen to anymore in my computer but I still keep around, just in case.

Tomorrow I'll take the Führermobile for another drive.

Forging the furnace for the final grand slam! (Ta-dadada, ta-dadaaaa!)

It was the end of the fucking line...

Sunday about 6 am. We were at the end of the fucking line.

The place was, in a metaphorical way, where old, rusty, battered cars with oil leaks go to die. In a non metaphorical way, too, if you substitute cars with people and oil with... er... oil, piss or "I don't want to know" -yep, time doesn't treat people kindly, I suppose- and wrinkled instead of battered; it's not a cheap whorehouse, it's just some sort of human junkyard where people who were in their youth or middle age in the 70s go to drink and dance, or mess with their prosthetic hips, or whatever.

So, there we were. It was a lot like the bar in the hotel in "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas", but instead of peanuts there were popcorn bowls and those little salted cookies. The reptiles, I mean, people inside were the same, though, but worn out. All this show of light and colour, carried to our brains with EnhancedVision(tm), i.e.: a visual enhancement obtained after drinking beer, vodka and mezcal and watching Bollywood and cheap-ass ninja movies before going out.

Then a thin, wrinkly woman who might be in her late 30s or in her early 60s (the kind of woman that ages worse than a can of tuna left open in the jungle) comes towards me and asks me something. The horror... the horror! I answer with some faux-Kazakh nonce words from Borat (from the naked fight scene, more specifically) and my pal comes up with something good: "My friend is Serb!". I play along, and he claims that my axe-shaped and celtic cross shaped pendants are Serbian decorations for bravery or something like that. She freaks out, walks away and we laugh our asses off.

Which goes to show that in a dump where young, idiotic people go to fuck with elderly people because of -you all probably can guess- their money, good things can happen too if you are willing to make up surreal stuff!

NORSK ARYSK BLACK METAL et al.

So, I've been to a couple of concerts lately. One was last weekend, the other was some months ago.

On 19th April this year there was a Black Metal concert. Dark Embrace (a local band) and Watain. Dark Embrace has improved vastly over these years, and it showed in the concert. Watain were awesome, also. No, they didn't splash any blood on stage (both the stage and the concert room's floor were wooden and it would have been a hell of a bloody mess to clean up), neither did they display goats' heads or anything like that, there were some inverted crosses, black candles, incense and all that stuff, and the music was great, mostly songs from their latest album, "Sworn to the Dark" (which was sold out, unfortunately). The concert was at the Dublin Irish Pub, in Carballo. Great, comfortable place, with cheap but good booze and food!

Last week (21st June) there was a grindcore concert with Extreme Noise Terror, Nashgul and Machetazo (these last two ones are local bands). Great concert, lots of fun, my ears ringed a couple of days afterwards. There were lots of people dressed up as zombies, with some spare limbs to throw around (much to the Extreme Noise Terror folks' mirth). It was at the Capitol concert hall in Santiago, it used to be a cinema and therefore is a great place with lots of space and good accoustics: something you won't find in my hometown. Here it's the Opera House, the Colisseum or a small, crummy place.

Speaking about Santiago, I don't know what's wrong with that town, it's as if noone there fucked and had kids, because it looked that the concert-goers were the only young people in town. There was only one metal pub, with a Lord of the Rings theme, which isn't an intrinsically bad trait if it wasn't coupled with: the place being a very small one (I'm rather large and I hate being in cramped spaces), full of people and most of these folks being that kind self-appointed nerds. You know, the ones who can talk about MMORPGs, heroic fantasy or Final Fantasy. The ones who prostitute what was once a badge of honour, that is, having arcane AND useful knowledge (mostly about computers), which is what a proper nerd is, not someone who has read Death Note seven times in a row. That is a masochist with no life and no balls to get into real SM. Fucking bastards.

Now, how did I get here?

The recently departed and the undead

Gary Gygax died two days ago, at the relatively ripe age of 69. Taking into account what kind of people read this blog, I think he doesn't need an introduction... but I'll say he's the guy who made Dungeons and Dragons, just in case.

I know I should have written something about it yesterday, having enjoyed D&D for more than a decade, but it was a rather busy day at work, and I'm not too keen on composing panegyrics. Dead people are just dead people, anyway. I'll remember the D&D basic (red box) set fondly because "Dwarf" was a class, not a race, which, to the best of my knowledge, is a fact in real life. Especially in porn. Just like the little people involved in it, midget porn is a class of its own.

On a completely unrelated topic, the infamous Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) came back from the fucking dead last month (IIRC). Bloody hell, can't these fuckers stay dead? They went broke last year and some SOB had to give them $100 million to get them up and running. Now, if they had gone bankrupt in Europe they'd be royally screwed, but since this happened in the US, they filed Chapter 11, which grants them court protection, allowing them to stay in business. So much for "free market".

Humppa!

Today I feel several orders of magnitude lazier than usual, so I'll just do what I once vowed never to do: I'll make a post made mainly out of Youtube videos. So much for oaths...

But they are good videos, I swear.




And for those who don't like metal, there will be acid house.



And of course, there will be sport.



And now, for something completely different.

In Spain we have a saying that goes...

... "Those who go to sleep with children get up wet."

I'll explain it for those of you who insist of making a pedo joke out of that. One of the many annoying things children do, according to folklore, is piss all over themselves while they're sleeping, and it isn't because of a weird kink: it's because they are undeveloped humans unable to fully control their sphincters. Kind of like very old people with Alzheimer's, but the other way around and less forgetful.

The saying means that if you try something (ambitious) with unexperienced (and overall silly) people the results will probably be a piece of shit, a waste of your time, an embarrassing failure... I hope you catch my drift.

Today's piece is the story of one such failure. It takes place in the World of Warcraft, but it can be extrapolated to the real world. It features inexperience, inefficiency, disorganization, disregard for others' input and opinions a high employee... I mean, raider turnover and a blatant lack of knowledge of the medium, so I encourage anyone interested in leading a team (or taking one of those human resources bollocks courses) to throw away whatever they're reading and read this nerdish story so they'll know shit before they trip on it.

The whole thing started as usual, with an invite from a pick-up group for the Mana Tombs in Auchindoun (I think this would be the proper time to say that anything you can't understand from this paragraph onwards should be looked up here). The group was made up of a paladin (he dealt damage and healed a bit), a shaman (of the damage-dealing kind), a hunter (those are damage-dealers, always and no matter what they claim), a warrior (tank) and Yours Truly, a night elf rogue (damage-dealing).

After dealing with some Horde pests outside of the instance, we entered the entrance corridor to the Mana Tombs. After clearing the first few groups and slaying the first boss (a very easy one, the only secret to it is not hitting it while it's phased out, but most people never listen or think they know better, anyway...) the shaman politely said he's got to leave the group to go raiding with his main character, and in a couple of minutes we were looking for a replacement DPS, which shows the first few faults of character in the team members. The hunter didn't want another hunter in the team because he didn't want more competition for the hunter gear, so we ended up picking a shadow priest. On our way to the second boss, the repeated questions about the motives for the hunter not wanting another hunter in the team and the hunter's bickering (generally speaking, players whose main is a hunter are assholes, especially when it's a night-elf hunter, but I'll explain that later on) made the paladin leave, leaving us without a healer. From this point onwards, everything went downhill.

Proper healers being a scarce commodity in WoW, we had to "promote" our shadow priest to dedicated healer and look for another DPS, which this time happened to be a female human warlock. We got wiped once in a very silly and unexplainable way on our way to the second boss, which we toppled without any difficulty, and the hunter got the two-handed weapon he was looking for. The way to the second boss was marked, too, by what would be the leitmotiv for the rest of the instance: an arbitrary use of marks for crowd control, where focus wouldn't be the de facto standard skull, sap wouldn't be the coin and so on, and of course we had to ask many times before the hunter (who was the party leader at the time) explained what the fuck did those symbols mean. In layman's terms, it would be as if a cop used a pink smiley as a STOP sign and then gave you a ticket for skipping a STOP sign. Shortly after killing the second boss and a couple of stupid wipes, the tank, who had some talent points in the protection tree and thus was a proper tank, got pissed off and left and the warlock followed soon thereafter, so we had to look for another tank AND another DPS. The hunter promptly found a male gnome mage (male gnomes are generally stupid, stay the hell away from them unless you know them and/or they are from your guild and therefore liable for their screw-ups). I didn't like the way that was heading... with two assholes in the group, it was only a matter of time before they snapped because of each other's ineptitude and started cursing at each other, forgetting everything and everyone around them in the process.

The gnome called a dwarf warrior friend of his, who wound up as our tank, even though he was a DPS-specced warrior and not a proper tank, and that meant he'd lose aggro to me or to any of the casters very quickly, with potentially messy results. On our way to the last boss we suffered so many wipes and delays because of people going AFK, many times without even any warning, or pulling inadequately (e.g., pulling a group without clearing the patrols near it so that when polymorph or sap wore off they would aggro the whole fucking patrol, which added to deficient healing and crowd and poor aggro management would result in a wipe) that both the hunter and the mage snapped and started calling each other "asshole", "ninja-looter", "limp-handed", "fucking useless son of a bitch" and whatnot. After we (the other 3 team members) got them to shut up, we got to the room before the last boss, and after clearing it the warrior triggered an escort mission without asking anyone else, which eventually resulted in a party wipe, more insults between the mage and the hunter and me politely explaining that my gear was almost broken, that I had wasted two fucking hours and a half there for nothing and that I hoped I wouldn't hear from them anytime soon and goodbye.

To be honest, I can't imagine how the hell can anyone play a game for so long and still be unable to figure out the workings of his own character. Or is it that as soon as they're among non-guildies they forget the meaning of "respect"? I don't know which is worse...

Finally, I'll explain a bit about stupid races and classes. I have observed (and others have, too) that there's a rather large percentage among night elf hunters and male gnomes in general (in the Alliance) and among undead rogues and mages and blood elves in general (in the Horde) of stupid people. I haven't made any proper statistics yet, but if I ever have too much time to spare I'll do that. I think I can say in advance that male gnome characters' players are generally stupid because they probably think that an aged midget is funny and cool-looking, which it isn't. Being a midget is a fucking tragedy, it is only funny if someone else's the midget! How the hell can they interact with traders in the game if they are shorter than the counter?

I think I'll stop typing about that topic before it gets worse and about midget porn. More stuff, probably not about WoW and hopefully not so sad, at a later date.

The blackest day

Yesterday I read in a newspaper that the Church of Scientology had been granted religion status in Spain. That had happened in the last days of October 2007, with little echo on the media. I can only wonder what kind of nutcases granted that status to the Co$ without bothering to take a look at the accusations of extortion, fraud, brainwashing and even murder that have been filed against that so-called Church all around the world, or at the reasons why it's banned on Germany and has been kicked out of Greece. Or even failed to notice the fraud lawsuits against them in this country.

I can only hope that someone in the know of these events can gather evidence to topple an organization that seeks to undermine the rights of the citizens on every country they operate in and that is known for trying to destroy their critics, either personally or financially, through framing and frivolous libel lawsuits.

It could be worse, at least we haven't got shitty libel legislation such as the UK's...

Money is money, and dead people is dead people

A week and a half ago I had a very funny dream, featuring a machinegun and a mall. Surprisingly, the following day's evening my computer's power supply unit kicked the bucket. Coincidence? I think so.

My computer's PSU had been dying for a long time, probably screwing my computer components' lifespan. In fact, that PSU's death was the longest and most painful (if it was able to feel pain) I have ever witnessed (not that I have witnessed many deaths, or even any at all... when I got there, they were already dead and in a wooden box, or in a furnace!), only second to the life of some guy I bet 1 euro he'd commit suicide by 38 in a dead pool. Yes, I bet in dead pools.

Death is a funny, glorified thing, and I've got the right to make a profit, even if it's only 1 euro, which thanks to inflation shouldn't be enough to pay me a beer by the time I win it. Bastards.

Many people feel that betting on someone's death is a show of bad taste, because people are supposed to deal with death in a solemn, sanctimonious way. Most of these people are women, because they have "feelings", whatever that thing is, then there are some men who agree because they want to fall in the good graces of ladies nearby (in order to get laid, I suppose, I know some scummy people who would kill their mother and be sad about it to get laid, the desperate bastards), and then there are some idiots who are eager to get killed in gruesome ways for some silly abstract idea and they probably think it isn't cool to risk their asses for money if they don't get everyone's attention and admiration and then some, and they expect to be treated "with due reverence and respect" (sic), whatever that is. A stiff is a stiff, and I don't think it'll turn into gold ingots if you put it into a furnace... oh, wait, I unconsciously made one of those WWII jokes everyone frowns upon.

If death hadn't all that glorified bullshit aura and all that mistique around it, less stupid people would die in amusing ways and we wouldn't have the Darwin Awards for stupid people who succeed in removing themselves from the gene pool, like that poor bastard who wanted to disassemble rocket-propelled grenades with a hammer to sell the scrap metal. I'd rather risk being busted for illegal sale of weapons. Beats being dead any day of the week.

By the way, I was only kidding about that women's feelings thingy up there. There are times when you should be sad because of a death. That would be when a dog dies. Dogs are some of the coolest people around, and they have very short lifespans, which is a real shame. Also, when someone you know and you appreciate meets an untimely death in an unfunny fashion. I mean, if someone I knew died of a heart attack while fucking a hen I'd probably end up rolling on the floor laughing upon hearing the sad story of his demise.