You foooooooool!!!

Update-o-rama!

What's this? God has come down to Earth in the form of a monte carlos sandwhich? Yes, you heard me correctly, this website, along with every other in this crazy old world has been updated. What with, you ask? Ketchup.

First off, there is a new COMIC in the COMICS section. There is a link somewhere in the previous sentence but I won't tell you where. This is the long-awaited sequel to episode one of the Dimens, this time with even more action, though slightly less than that movie about the intelligent fighter planes. You know the one. It's new. More action than My Dinner with Andre though, though perhaps less emotional action.

Also, there is THIS :

Yes, that new embarrasingly repititious animated gif is trying to tell you a secret. I have finally completed my latest 3 ball workout video, and much like the magazine handed out by comatose elderly Christians, it is titled Awake. But beware. Awake does not harken the awakening of the soul towards zombie Jesus, but towards the dark art of juggling, and the political realization that the stationary body is a stationary mind. It's all very deep and filled with those neo-hippy style revelations, except without the hair or the bead or the weirdly decorated footbag, or the oddly pervasive scent of ganja, though perhaps with just a little rambling intensity.

I will let the juggling speak for itself however. That is, once you see my amusingly formulaic animated gif and read the brief and surprisingly unhelpful introduction on THIS page. That's THIS page, for those just tuning in.

Bur that is not all! I wish it was, but oh god, those internal demons won't let me be. I hate them, hate them and their painful update-loving ways. They won't get out of my head! They have cute little address carvings that they bought at pottery barn as well, so they're not on the way out anywho.

Yes, in addition to a new comic and juggling video, my devilsticks bit has been updated with tonnes of new beginner and intermediate videos, an instructional portion lifted from my own page (originally coded by Mark Weston and hosted on the vicfootbag.com site), and new clips of some easy, hard, and interesting tricks.

But wait, there's less. A little less. The articles have now been pushed off the page, which means it's time to move them into my archive. Check out the illegal plagarism section above. More funky fresh internet comedy, misplaced political rants and whining await HERE.

To celebrate, I thought it was time to dredge up that fetid corpse of low-grade comedy, the top ten list! These things are so crazy, you never know what's going to happen! Will there be a reference to current events? Will there be one really long entry and one really short one? Who can say? The laughs never end with the Top Ten List. This time, however, I include not 1, not 3, not 16, but 2, count 'em two unecessarily self-referential top-ten lists.

Here they are, in numeric order:

No. 1 (imagine Paul Shaferesque intro music and awesome 3d animation of a list floating around in some kind of non-descrit backdrop)

Phil: Here we go, with tongight's top ten. We have, the top ten "Random Humorous Lines Drawn from other Top Ten Lists"

10. Not until Katie Holmes gets out of detention.

9. Botulicious.

8. A bear. No, a spider. No, a spider-bear.

7. Daniel Bashiel Warner, president of Liberia between 1864 and 1868.

6. Something mentioning either Spongebob Squarepants or Fashizle.

5. A Haircut.

4. Reaching the end of the dimly lit street, Edge peered back over his shoulder. Nothing still. He clutched at his stomach once more time as he shambled forward down, down, down into the alley, the dust kicked up by tiny whirlwinds that crashed around him like tiny silvery waves. At the end of the street Edge tripped. Lines of silver crossed in front of him, thatched like a steel net, a fence staked to the ground, looming high above him through the haze of night, of dust and of blood. He looked to the top of the fence and around. Barbed wire, glass, more dust. But behind him, the gloom. Nothing to go back for. Nothing to go back.

3. Terri Schiavo'd.

2. Walk up to the deacon and scream "I've got the lettuce!" then hide under the central table until they work it out.

And the number one randomly extracted phrase from other top ten lists:

1. Chainsaw.

(laughter and clapping. Lial does that thing where he tosses the card and it makes a shattering noise. Shafer laughs. Doug repeats: "Chainsaw." He does this another 16 times or so, every once in a while accompanied by some kind of noise on the keyboard. Finally, he looks up, stares into the the ceiling with a slow, mounting horror. "No!" he says, "Not again!" but it is too late. The theme starts up and there are more incredible 3D titles. "It's time for another top ten list!")

Tim: All right then. Here it is, tonight's other top ten list.

(pause)

Tim: Here it is, the-- oh, this is going to be funny. Here it is, the top ten all-age, all nation causes of death! This is based on a 2002 World Health Organization report so get ready for hilarity.

Paul: I have my hilarity belt and hilarity boots on, Dave.

Jeff: Great Paul. Great. Boots. Heh heh heee!

10. Malaria

9. Lung Cancer

8. Childhood "cluster" diseases!

7. Tuberculosis

6. Diarrhoeal Disorders

5. Chronic obstructive pulmanary diseases!

4. HIV/AIDs!

3. Lower respiratory infections

Yemen: Lower respiratory.

Paul: Heh heh heh.

Yemen: Lower rrrrespiratory.

Paul: Lower.

Curusoe: Lowwwer.

Paul: Heh.

2. Cerebrovascular Diseases

And, the number one cause of death among all age groups across all nations is.... drumroll please...

Paul: Katie Holmes?

1. Ischaemic heart disease!

(laughter, throwing of cards. Shattering noise)

Paul: Ha ha.

Totoro: And Paul?

Paul: Yeah Dave?

Totoro: Paul, that actually--and I kid you not--that actually beat out Road Traffic Injuries, Low Birth Weight, Diabetes, Hypertensive heart disease and -- I swear to god -- self-inflicted injuries rounding off numbers 11-15. Just below that in many countries is of course gunshot wounds. Heh heh.

Paul: Funny, funny stuff.

Erkle: You got that right.

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NEW COMIC!!!!

That's right folks. Finally, our website is entering the 21st century. Webcomics are the new platinum, and the old platinum is Strawberry Quik. Which is still pretty good, but not as good as platinum. In the long run.

This is an old comic series of my brother's called THE DIMENS. I will be putting up a new issue each week or so until the series is done or I die.

THE DIMENS is here.

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Commentary : This game is so awesome, it actually shoots additional awesome out of my elbows directly into the sun, hastening its collapse. The game is hard too, which is odd for games these days. It starts off extremely easy and by the end, you'll wish you were dead.

Current Mood : Mysterious.

Current Song : "Yo yo yo yo yo check it out yo yo yo yo yohhh yo yo yo check it out. Peace."

Flags of Doom

Whoa?

Flags of Doom is a game my friend Michael and I made for Windows 3.1 It went online, sold thousands of free downloaded copies and made us the millionaires we definately are not today.

The story is a deep and delicious one, like McCain's cakes after the war, but you can just ignore it if you like and go HERE. I wouldn't reccomend it though.

You see, in 1981, Randy Glover became addicted to drugs. That is, the drug known as "Donkey Kong" or in modern parlance, cocaine. Being addicted and also infused with a radioactive compound known as Radioton 13, Glover set out to create a new game with his Atari 400. After an early 6-level prototype, Glover was hired by Glovetek, the company that later became Epyx to make gloves in the shape of famous religious figures. When this tanked, he made Jumpman.

I played Jumpman as a kid in the group home where I grew up. It was mind-blowing. Every level could have different rules, whole different strategies, new complex patterns to memorize. I believe it was the first game to have an enemy that forced the character to jump (something brought into the Megaman universe years later), to make the player build the level during play (!), to have clones that copied your exact movement

s and so on. It required thought and quick tapping, which was fairly unique at the time.

I gave the game a top rating in Non-X-istant Magazine for many years, and always wanted to be able to create an ideas game like that, even be picture of a real card, ha ha fore I had a computer or could think self-aware thoughts or know the meaning of the word "game." Everyday I put on my "I want to make a game because I am so utterly pathetic, beat me up now" t-shirt to school (which was surprisingly warm) even while playing such exciting games as "hockey cards" and "be attacked by bears." Also Rainbow Brite and My Little Pony. That's right. I'm so comfortable in my masculinity that I can admit that to you. And that I beat up the cyclops. But's that's another story.

It was in the West Edminton Mall that I had an epiphany. Well, I had $40 at any rate.

You see, I had already wasted a great deal of money on various game making systems. I have never had the patience to learn a programming language, or a language, at that rate. I'm typing this through a neural interface at the moment. And then I saw it. The game I wanted to buy at that moment.

It was a simple idea, really. I was in the hugest mall in all of Christendom, I was 10, or 14 or 6 or something and I had not yet bought a video game. It was as if the godess Hebe was laughing at my folly. How could any geeky, middle-class Canadian boy not have a new video game when at Canada's biggest mall? Why if boys like me had not bought useless video games, we would have plunged into a depression in the 80's and a continuous cycle of stock market crashes in the 90's and 2000's. Thank goodness I bought a game and prevented all that. The game was called Klik and Play, and it appeared to allow one to MAKE THEIR OWN GAME! And I wanted to make a game so badly it hurt. No, wait, that was the beatings from being such a nerd. No, actually, it was the game making. So I bought this product and added the CD to my collection of bootleg Sierra games.

So before I go on let me make one thing clear.

Maxis with Clickteam has made either the best or second best game making program for the common middle-class fan-boy. I'll say that again, but I won't bother writing it. It also happened to be buggy, crash-prone and extremely limited.

I tried to make a jumpman inspired game, but was neither inspired nor a jump... man. I used pre-fab grafics, and I think the idea was basically giant cards. Yeah, that's pretty much it. Giant Cards. THEN IT CAME TO ME THE DISEMBODIED SPIRIT OFRANDY GLOVER. This spirit, who shall remain nameless, broke my CD drive. And then it broke my friend Michael's CD drive. And then it drove the last son of Sir Emil Henberbaum mad, cascading into a cycle of self-destruction, transforming his famed self-love into violent self-hate. And then I ate some chips and I saw a monkey and bigfoot came to stay in my house.

Some time in the middle of all that, Michael and I decided to make a game based on Jumpman. I cannot believe that Michael was also a fan of that game, especially after what Randy did to our CD drives, but, we had no access to our bootleg Sierra and Interplay collections, so there was nothing better to do, and no way to use the pre-fab graphics. Neither of our hardrives had been robust enough to hold the whole 60 megs of space required for the object libraries. Instead, we set about to create our own lovable characters based losely on Rainbow Brite and Kierkegaard. Michael also made ships that used multi-colour shading, and we constructed a Jumpman-like bullet that chased the player around. It was tougher than the Jumpman bullet due to programming error (it would keep after you even after you dodged it) but that just made the game more fruster--more interesting. So we started building a game, inventing crazy level after crazy level. And when we were nearing 100 levels, it became clear that we could really go all the way. Have sex. As long as you define "sex" as "making a baby" and by "baby" you mean video game with more that 100 levels. So, we created all orgingal graphics and sound effects (much like how a real baby is made), created extra levels and secret levels and jammed them into our baby like an addict jabs Donkey Kong into his or her veins. We called it Flags of Doom, because flags are inherrently doomful and set it on a giant Space Fish because Michael had a fish fixation. Too bad he's dead now. The full storyline for the game is on the instructions page HERE.

We put the game on a website and people began downloading it.

But it has been a long time since that game came out, and it's time to resurface it. With tar and nutmeg. So I had "sex" with myself just enough to update Flags of Doom with new levels (this time even more secret), more challenges, some bug-fixes, and set it up so you can play on Mr. Internet.com. Directly. You have to download the "Vitalize" plugin from Clickteam, which turns their new-version of Klik and Play (now "Multimedia Fusion"), but you can now play the game in your browser ONLINE! On the 300000000000000000000000 k an hour internet Mr. Superhighway.com! WOW!

Check out the GAME, HEEEEERE.

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Commentary : This is just a link to my 4 ball video. The video is not very good, but it does show off a lot of original tricks that I really should work on more often. It was more to remind myself of this stuff than anyone else. Which is the purpose of the internet : Personal stuff with absolutely no value to anyone else.

Current Mood : Pancakes. Flat, but drizzled with butter and sugar syrup. So fatty and sweet I suppose, like my long-lost narwhale lover. I should watch how much I reference narwhales.

Current Song : NARWHALES!!!! Apart from the Banacek song, of course.

NEW 4 Ball Video : Blake's 4 Ball Jam

Yes, it's a 4 ball video. Nothing too amazing, just some playing around with some ideas, put together into an interesting montage. It should be good for beginner and intermediate four-ball jugglers, as none of this stuff is super hard. It's the kind of trickery I prefer, however, more-so than period twelve siteswaps and ass-catches. My upcoming 3-ball montage should be a little more my alley. It's RIGHT HERE!

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Commentary : This should really still be on the front page, since it's the only legitimate piece of writing on the site. Still, I don't make the rules, I just make them.

Current Mood : Physically on fire. I don't mean to use any figurative language here, I am actually physically on fire. And it really hurts. Emotionally.

Current Song: "Hey Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby" by the A Bunch of Guys Wearing White and One Has a Kind of Askew Hat

This update has a lot to do with BC politics, so ignore it if you find Canadians as boring as a bag of toast.

So here's the problem with BC politics. We're all stuck in the stone ages. Get it? BC? B.C.? Ha ha!

No, I jest.

But yesterday I came up with an idea that is so obvious it merits being presented on an internet website that nobody reads. Essential services. I assume other places in the world have similar legislation, though apparently, BC is the only place in Canada where education has been declared an essential service. Or at least the attempt has been made. I'm too lazy to tell if it in fact has gone through. But the gist of essential service is that your right to strike is curtailed, at least effectively, if not completely, because no one could possibly live without education, except for the leaders of the free world who live in magical plastic bubbles that defend them from the deadly effects of knowledge.

Now frankly, this is not entirely ridiculous. In a sense, everything that improves our lives is an essential service. The idea that health care is essential and education is not pre-supposes that our health, our lives have more intrinsic value than the quality of life. This is obviously not the belief held by all people. For Chan Buddhists, for example, quality of life is the only thing, life has no value in and of itself, because we do not truly exist. For me, I see no intrinsic value in life. I don't kill people because it would cause suffering for the living (friends, family, sworn enemies), not because it would harm the person who was dead. That and I'm lazy. And a lazy coward. You can bet that if I was brave and energetic I'd kill people left and right, just to thin out the excess population. Assuming I could get into the Shell headquarters. You're safe as long as TV makes me docile and stupid. You know the kind of docile and stupid that leads to long, rambling internet articles that have nothing to do with the subject at hand.

But here's the thing. Essential services are being **CUT** by the provincial government, both the so called left and the right. Right when the baby boomers are entering the age that they need the most care, or as people go back to school. According to the government, that money is being "saved" so that future generations can use the services that are being cut today. Now I'm not going to bring up the fact that the last government had created the largest surplus in BC history, and that this money "saving" government created a huge deficit, or that the so called "deficit" they came in with was actually a "projected" deficit and that no reputable agency disagreed with the previous government's claim of having a surplus of money (you can see this book or this website or this website for those arguments). I may, but that's not my point. Frankly, people need that funding now, and there is no way to accurately predict the future. As a master's student in Sociology who has dabbled in enough history and political science to have some idea, I can say that there is little point in holding back funds for social programs, as it is easier to maintain a service than build it up again. This is exactly what future governments will have to do.

But the point is on essential services not budget cuts per se. Or, to reverse the equation, essential services are about budget cuts. The simple idea is this: if a government wants to declare something an essential service, they should be prohibited, by law, from cutting funding to those services.

It's a simple idea. If a government should be doing anything, it should be providing essential services. I can see no other purpose to the existence of a government than to provide services, and if nothing else, provide the essential ones. There are independent bodies for determining issues of law (the government should probably get out of that), independent bodies on regulation, and on the organization of various agencies. And if the government wants to cut something, it should not be services that it honestly believes are essential. If members don't believe that a service is essential, they shouldn't declare it such. But funding ought to be included into he definition of essential service, or else the term simply means "no striking" and thus no rights for the workers and no quality of access (since unhappy workers will likely quit or slack off, why not, since they can't get fair treatment anyway). To reiterate, how can the government possibly justify not funding a broadly-accessed public service that is defined legally as "essential." It is an ethical improbability.

So there it is. My obvious idea. Go fight for it, or think about it or send me hatemail.

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Commentary: This is basically just stuff about a wedding. It's really hard to justify putting up vacation pictures on a comedy/juggling site--it begins to feel a little like a blog. But hey, why set boundaries right?

Current mood? Entropy.

Current Song? Algasation Sensation -- The original remix with St. Augustine and the Balasong choral singers.

Photographs of things, Hooray!

Calgary is a wonderful place filled with Cowboys and weddings. Some weekend not long ago Kirsten and I went there and took in some sights, and some Chinese food, and some ducks. This is our epic story. Or something.

Kirsten wants tthe world to know that this page was done very quickly. But it contains A LARGE CORNFLAKE so be sure to check it out!!

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COMMENTARY :

This is my first article. Basically whining about my middle class woes. Believe it or don't but a friend actually READ this article and ended up selling me his larger monitor. That's right, whining pays off, suckers! My next article aught to be how my old jaguar or Cadilac convertable sucks and I totally need a new one. Or my Lebonese love slave. Or maybe my humour writing style. Yeah. I totally need another one of those.

I am the deserving poor.

It's true that I make so little money that I don't pay taxes, but, on the other hand, It's difficult for me to edit video. There are many reasons for which, the most prominent of these being that my monitor is a lying bastard. A bastard and a glutton.

What my monitor eats is colour. Sometimes it likes to eat light, but only when it's in a zesty "wave" shape. My monitor steals that colour for it's own gluttonous, devious and possibly evil purposes, and what it gives back is yellowy crud. Dark and grainy like the inside of my aunt's liver, or an old Hitchcock movie, or a hunk of german rye bread. It doesn't matter what you put in there. Lightning, or robots, or fruit or humorous internet text. Everything it eats comes out dark. You can turn up all the

"brightness" settings you like. You can even turn up the appropriate colors on the video card controls. The really devious part about this is that if one thing is bright enough, another thing will be too bright. You can't win, and even if you do... let's just leave it at that. And what it loves to eat best is video footage. When you capture, everything is so dark, you can't even make out silver devilsticks. When you use that captured footage, everything brightens to a disquieting white. Good thing I'm so goddamn rich that I have access to a second computer.

"Now" you say, in that amuzing English accent you sometimes use when you are feeling particularly smug, "Why dost thou not purchase another screen-box, if thou ist so very wealthy?" I think you have a tendency to overdo it a bit with the thees and thous, but what right do I have to interfere in your comedy. You don't come over to my house and criticize my meta-commentary, do you?

Well, now I might argue that what I meant to say is that I'm rich in the relative sense. Only about 10% of the world isn't starving or a baby or otherwise without a charge account, and any other remaining percent are dead. I don't exactly have $200 to spend on a bigger glass box, especially when I can hog my girlfriend's while she's scrubbing the bathroom. But that wouldn't be a very good argument in the long run, since I did just buy a website and some gum and an expensive camera, and besides, it reveals the inequality of gender relations in the 21st century in a way that is too flippant to fully explore here.

No, the real reason, and here I blame the poor, is that I fear to.

Now some 80 000 000 tonnes of waste go into making a computer monitor, an accurate statistic that I just made up. Lead, and mercury and huge quantities of water go into each one. Just to aid the creation of the chip that is inside there, vast quantities of potable water were dumped out and slightly smaller quantities of sylicone were discarded. Glass is made of sand. You know who lives in the sand? Sand mites. And poor children. Who harvests sylicone? Not wealthy runway models, not robots, but children. Sometimes immigrants or guys with stubble and baseball caps. Basically, my last monitor kept thousands of poor people employed. This may sound like a good thing, but almost all of them are getting poisoning, losing their land for more industrial waste plants, losing waters to big, scary multinationals that either bottle it (as in the case of Coca Cola in India) or ship it to them thar silly-cone plants in great big gas-guzzling flying machines called airplanes, just to be tossed out with the mercury and the lead. And where is this stuff dumped? You got it, though I wish you would stop that silly English accent. In the landfills inhabitted by grubby, poor children.

So in the end, a new monitor would probably employ/hurl into sickness and misery several thousand more poor children. And those poor children will grow up to me the mass murderers and war lords of tomorrow, flying metal birds into them thar infadels. Or maybe becoming lawyers in Vancouver. Either way, buying another monitor is probably going to do them slightly more harm than good, and that's going to piss them off. And one day they're likely to spit on a transistor or poor extra lead into the housing or strap a bomb to the brightness knob.

Of course, maybe once I have some more money from my illicitly gained investment dollars, I'll buy another monitor after all. But not from one of those overpriced unionized rackets, but from some warehouse in Vancouver where the workers are given little slips of paper with smiley faces on them in lieu of pay. I'm just glad I have that second computer. And that I'm technically very poor.

"New" Devistick Videos: Proof that I am not as good as Germans

Well, not "new" per se, as these are, in fact, the first, but hopefully not the last.

Basically, over a series of 3 weeks, I found 3 sunny days ammounting to 3 hours of filming and dicked around with some satan sticks. This is not a resumé. I can perform many of these tricks, and many better than it appears here, but many of them are in progress. This is more of a sandbox, except with less pee and more cat feces. I hope both the sequence and the individual bits will be of interest to devilstickers, even those crazy Germans. Like Colonel Klink. That guy was just nuts. Hey! They're building a tunnel! You goofy old man!

Check it out HERE.

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