My thoughts on Overclocked: A History of Violence:


-McNamara sucks at conversation. Badly.

-Addendum: McNamara is entirely Too Nice for New York City.

-Addendum to the Addendum: He even makes sightseeing depressing. "I once talked strung-out vet off of one of the rooftops along the skyline. They gave me a medal for it. A few years later, he's in prison for murdering five people." He says this while standing in the middle of the street, too.

-Dr. Young is a douchebag.
Also, Dr. Young is an old guy. And, obviously, a doctor. So he's a douchebag with experience.

-Nurse Tamara Needs To Not Be So "Efficient." Seriously, this woman all but goose-steps down the hall.

-My God, but that is one fugly annex building on the hospital. 

-They totally stole the doors for the cells from a submarine.

-If your mental institution is anything but a modern facility, just don't go there. Victorian age buildings almost always garuantee fucked-upness.

-Detective Moretti is by far the most likable character, aside from McNamara. (And no, I'm not biased.)

The only thing I can really complain about is the voice acting, which ranges from decent (McNamara and Dr. Young) to pathetic. (...everyone else, basically.)The game's translators also missed a few spots. ("Geshlecht" instead of "Gender" on one of the patient files, for example.) Other than that, I can't really complain. The graphics aren't exactly glorious, and the lip-syncing is just about nonexistant, but the backgrounds and animations are perfect.

More later, when I get further into the game.

Hello, internet. For the two people who read this thing, I figure you should know why I haven't updated for a month. I was too busy doing the following:

-Working from 4AM to 4PM to cover the shift of a coworker who just didn't feel like showing up for work.
-Working that same shift after said coworker returns and destroys the last company vehicle we had by falling asleep behind the wheel while driving on a major highway.
-Being sexually harassed by a balding, fifty-year-old man who works in the Command Center.
-Being accused of sleeping with a Supervisor (by my Supervisor) because he drove me through my rounds when I was too tired to drive and observe my surroundings effectively.
-Being constantly hounded by my Supervisor ("Don't worry, the guys already told me how you don't do any work.")
-Filing a fucking grievance against my Supervisor in the hopes of getting him to at least ease up on his assholish ways. (This won't get done for a few days.)
-Being written up by my Supervisor for having to leave early due to illness, despite the fact that it didn't happen on his shift and it isn't even his responsibility.
-Possibly getting a promotion and then subsequently losing it because of the above write-up.

Of all the things that bug me, though, it's the last two that are the worst. I'm happy for the guy who got it--he's a good guy, and he definitely needed the pay raise that comes with the position. (Then again, who doesn't need more money these days?)

I just wish I would've been told about who got the promotion by the people who were in charge. I had to learn it second-hand from another officer.

Now, instead of looking forward to a promotion, I get to look forward to trying to remove the write-up from my file, which may or may not even be possible. I may only be able to add "comments" to it that no one important will read, and it'll still count against me.

Meh. I need a drink.

I live a weird life. Not weird as in bad, just...weird. For example: Last week, a goose calmly walked in front of me in a parking lot, squatted down, and took a crap. Directly in front of me. And then he made eye contact with me before waddling off to his posse waiting for him in the grass. That kind of weird.

These days, the weirdness comes from work more than anything else. It certainly doesn't help that the people I work with are insane.

Today, work was normal. Mostly. I mean, no one got assaulted by a goose, so I have to assume that it was a normal day. We did have Pass Down notes for shift, though, which is new. (Pass Down notes are things you actually pay attention to when reviewing a fellow officer's report before signing off on it and relieving them from duty.) I had to go play postal worker for a few employees on opposite sides of the metropolitan area. One destination is in the West Bottoms of KCMO where the American Idol auditions were last week, and the other is on the old Santa Fe Trail and requires wizarding skills to access. Both are warehouses in industrial parks and both require I be there at a certain time. (7PM and 10PM.) Northern destination is KCMO, southern near I-35 is Santa Fe.

This is what a logical person would do.

This is what I did since everyone forgot how to drive and decided to crash into each other on I-35. I then proceeded to get lost, curse at the douchebags behind me with halogen lights on their cars, avoid deer, avoid geese, and then nearly get rear-ended by a car with halogen lighting.

KCMO was the easy stop. I got there at around 7:50, anyway. I just had to deal with the officer there who, while not being directly insulting, manages to offend by sheer stupidity. Whenever he does something, he feels he has to explain to me why, even though the reason is always obvious; for example, he once gave a five minute speech on how to gas up the company vehicle.

No, really.

He also talks like George Bush. (A fellow officer and I are trying to figure out a way to get him to say "We have found weapons of mass destruction!" without...you know, being obvious about it. I'm just afraid he'll explain how he got that accent or something.)

Half an hour later, I finally walked off, possibly in the middle of one of his explanations. 

And this is where it gets fun, since Santa Fe Trail Dr. is right next to a highway, train tracks, an industrial park, and, for some unknown reason, a lone ATM. By this time, it's dark, foggy, and the streetlights only made the fog orange. I finally managed to find the damn place just after 10PM, parked the truck, got out with the Papers of Vital Importance, and buzzed in for entry.

Fifteen minutes later, I'm still standing out there, hitting the button with a viciousness born out of extreme annoyance. I still had other stops to go to--y'know, like my normal route--and I'm wasting time waiting for this guard to open the damn door. Finally, I gave up, wrote a passive-aggressive entry in my report, and started up the truck.

That's when Mr. Santa Fe Trail Guard decided to charge up out of the blue and slam his hand into the side of the truck.

Now, it's after dark in an area where train tracks, truckers, and crazy train bums are often seen. Worse, it's dark out, and the fog is thickening  up by the second.

The guy's lucky I recognized the uniform. I was well on my way towards running him over.

He blinked, looked surprised, and then said sorry. I handed over the Papers of Vital Importance which he looked over. 

"This isn't for me." He said, trying to hand it back.

I gave him a rather disapproving look. "Yeah. I know. But it's for one of the guards here."

"He won't be back until next week."

At this point, I outright glare at him. What the hell am I supposed to do about that? I was just told to deliver the damn papers. Finally, he got the gist of my glare. "...I'll just hold them until he comes back."

After that, he tried to start up some small talk, possibly as a way to make up for our poor first meeting, but I ended up leaving almost immediately afterward anyway.

....God, that whole thing sounds like a quest out of Morrowind.

Alright, I'll be the first to admit that I'm a bit jaded. Growing up in a city proud to be the meth capital of the world does that to you. Hell, my neighbors make meth for a living and have their eight year old children break into houses and steal shit when their customers are in detox or lock up. 

Nothing surprises me when it comes to someone acting like a complete nutjob. Hell, I'm used to it. Random acts of crazy  are considered normal in my life.

But this? This scares me.

Christ, it's like a horror movie. Except real. What the hell was that guy thinking? Was he thinking?

Roughly a month ago, I went on a ride-along with a police officer in my district. What I saw and did is going to take more than one post, most likely with one post focusing on each of the interesting incidents that took place during the eight hour ride. Which will include:

-Traffic Stop With Ben Throttle Sized Man
-Crazy Mexican Lady On Drugs With No Teeth
-Crazy Cat Man That Lives Down the Street From Me In A Scary Abandoned House.
-Drunken Domestic Disturbance in Not!Spanish
-Traffic Stop With Drunken Man Who Confused 'Reverse' For 'Park'

I'll try and get this up before I forget everything.

So, I woke up late today and decided to go hang out with Sarah for awhile. Just as I get to my car, I hear this noise behind me. I look, and an adorable little chihuahua is sitting on the sidewalk, watching me curiously. I figure he's just the neighbor's dog that got loose, wave, and get into my car. I pull out of my driveway and start to go down the street. The chihuahua's following me. By this time, I realize he's not someone's dog; he's lost. 

Later on tonight there's going to be some ferocious storms, and I knew he wouldn't be able to withstand them. I picked him up, put him in my car, and made a side trip to Petsmart to buy a leash, a collar, and some food. 

It looks like I've been adopted.



His name is Sammy Maracas.

For those of you who are not aware, there has been a bitch of a case in New York over the shooting death of Sean Bell. Now, I may be biased more than a little by my current choice of employment...

...but how in the living fuck does the media sleep at night? There's two sides to every story, and I'm much more comfortable with having heard both sides, a trait I find that's common enough to be a bit heartening. People are not senseless beings; they actually do have some common sense, however buried it may be.

But they can be fooled. And they often are. I think this is one example of that. The above article paints the standard ZOMG!OPPRESHUN picture that everyone can easily understand. They even simplify it down further with the following subtext:

So, after hearing about the Westboro Baptist Church planning on picketing Heath Ledger's funeral for playing a part in Brokeback Mountain, I decided to go see what else these people stood for. Aside from, you know, attention whoring and using the word 'fag' every chance they get. I went to Wikipedia because, well...c'mon, it's within easy reach.

What I found ranged from the hilarious...

"The Westboro Baptist Church attributes membership in most religious groups, such as the Roman Catholic Church or Islam, as akin to devil worship."

....to the horrifying:

"The Westboro Baptist Church teaches that menstruation is a curse from God upon lustful women. Phelps teaches that God cursed Eve with a curse of blood. In the group's teachings if a woman stays 'pure' then she will never menstruate."

So, according to them, I'm not 'pure' because *gasp* I go through a menstrual cycle like every other healthy female on the planet.

These people really need to move on to the second half of the Bible. The part where God doesn't a bitchfit every chapter. (Then again, they'd just find Revelations...)

You know, I always personally thought that, while God's message is divine, the people he's got writing it down for him mess it up in the translation. He's probably not nearly as much of an asshole as His followers make him out to be.

At least, I hope not.

Insomnia sucks.

It sucks even more when you try to sleep only to have that blissful rest interrupted by a blood curdling scream of agony right outside your bedroom window. And when you finally get the courage to wake up your father in the next room (which is a bit like baiting a hibernating grizzly bear) and succeed in actually waking him up, you find out it's just a couple of cats dry humping each other on your back porch.

And then, of course, there's a thunderstorm. For dramatic effect.

*headdesks repeatedly*