13,971 Forum Posts by "gumOnShoe"
Probably hardest year of my life yet, but worth it.
I don't work for an evil empire anymore protecting fucks who don't deserve it. Instead I've got a very important do-good job, details of which I'll keep to myself, but chances are if you're in the states I've made your life better or someone I work with has.
Also, life is far more enjoyable when you're not on the internet 24/7 babysitting a bunch of people. For those of you who don't remember me I used to mod this place, by which I mean I was pretty pretentious thought I new better than all of you and mostly just told people to shut up and then listened to them bitch to me over pm. Turns out, it didn't matter much. Jokes on me.
If there's a problem with getting older and having a job its that you have to compromise between having fun and being fit if it at all pays well. I like fun way to much, so I'm a fat slob. That's what I should probably focus on changing next year so I don't die in a gutter.
And that's about it.
I own more board games than any other 12 year old you know.
I play a shit-ton of netrunner, the best card game out there.
And I do a lot of good for other people everyday while trying not to fuck up too badly.
Oh, married and all that jazz. Get to travel the world, the country, etc. Life is good. Except that I'm undeniably fat.
That's why I bought DDR for my wife. So that I could delude myself into thinking I'd use it for exercise. Ha.
Take care newgrounds, maybe check in another 5 years from now when definitely no one will notice me.
@eyelovepoozy (assuming you're still here), hope your having fun with those cranes still. I was a total dick to you back in the day. I can't say I didn't feel you deserved it, you always rubbed me the wrong way, but being a douche to you still wasn't cool.
That's all folks.
Peace,
Gum
Fin
Teapot is (C) 2014
----
Thoughts & Criticisms welcome. This is something a little more final. Figured I'd come back to the forum I had TomFulp make back in the day and share where I am with my skill and what not.
Truth is, I sucked when I used to write here and most people that write here suck at writing. But that's ok. You need someplace to suck where not everyone is judgemental and you have the capacity to share and learn from each other. After that you have to figure out what people who are good at writing actually do. That usually involves reading a lot of anthologies. I recommend starting with a subscription to the New Yorker if you're not into picking a big fat book of stuff or not sure which big fat book to pick up.
Looks like some of you still come here but the forum doesn't move at the speed I would have once hoped it would. Site in general doesn't seem to be moving at the pace it used to.
If there are any veterans or castaways as I'd consider myself it'd be cool to hear from you and what you're up to these days.
But I'm not enjoying it. I don't want to forget who I am. These last years may not have been perfect, but they are my years. Blake is stealing them from me, and he's stealing my possible future; worse he’s engineering me. The logical part of my brain kicks in again. They erased my phone call memories when they weren’t active, after I’d gone to sleep. Anything I want to remember I'm going to have to hold on to right now. I start recalling what I can, what I have left. A cruise to the Caribbean, the sound of steal drums and the feel of plastic pool chair stripping beneath my back as I stair up at the night sky, but I can't remember a single dinner; my first date with my wife, a hockey game is sketchy, I can't remember how we got there; the way I proposed, no that's utterly gone; fine, something else... but something else eludes me. Think, David!
I can't. So much appears to be gone already. The holidays I know must have happened are nothing but vague impressions of what should have been. Birthday parties haven't happened since I moved to Pittsburgh and first shared a flat with Blake. I knew Blake even then, but that was a different Blake. A Blake that I can only hope existed before I put myself in this infernal contraption.
"Take your fucking fountain of life and give me back my mind!"
"David, that's not how this works. You signed a contract."
"No, he signed a contract. Whoever I was before I put myself in this machine. You're destroying me."
"I'm finding you the love of your life, David. You could show some appreciation."
"Appreciation? Yeah, Blake, that's exactly what you deserve: a big fucking thank you. Thank you for erasing my fucking mind and basically killing me. Thank you for stealing everything that makes me who I am so that some pathetic version of me can meet some pathetic woman who couldn't stand the idea of the fucking unknown."
Wink, "You're welcome, David. You know, between you and me, this version of you sucks. I've lived 32,569 separate lives with you around, and I've got to say I'm doing you a favor. Man the fuck up."
I'm out of the chair. The veins in my fist throb and my aim square on Blake's cheek as I lean into my punch. The thought of destroying him is the only thing left to me now. But I don't connect. The bowling ally goes into midnight mode, lights shutting down and black lights flaring. My fist goes right through his face as if its not there. He smiles and his teeth glow.
Through the sound system, "You can't kill me, David! You can't even touch me without my permission. This is inevitable. Do you understand how much power I have?" Blake swings his arms back and all of the pins in all thirty six lanes explode out into the lanes; glowing a phosphorescent purple. "Do you know how insignificant you are?" The pins take to the air and begin to spin around us, a tornado. "It's over David. Your anger was the last thing I needed. You’ve let go of all of your other memories. I win." A pin comes flying out of the storm towards my head. I duck, but another gets me from the side. I'm swept off my feet into the hurricane of wood, smacked left and right. I catch the dizzying sight of the bowling ally as it all fades into a painful black behind three hundred and sixty pins.
* * *
Brrr! Brrr! Brrr!
I swing my arm heavily at the alarm clock and miss. I hit the edge of the side table with my funny bone and am shocked completely awake. When I’ve cradled away the pain in my arm, I start to deal with the pain behind my temples. I’m thirsty too, and the light seeping in under my door is killing me. After swinging my legs over the side of the twin bed, I absentmindedly fish for my jeans with my feet.
From the other side of the door Blake shouts, “Could you get that already?”
What? Oh, the alarm clock’s still going. I turn the fucking thing off, 5:36am, and switch the lamp on. My jeans aren’t at the foot of the bed. They’re closer to the door, and given that I’m still wearing a shirt that reeks of beer I likely barely made it to my bed last night. My memory is a little foggy of the event, but the “Happy 26th Birthday. Call me.” that I can see in sharpie on my left hand brings me back. Oddly, there’s no number. And I don’t know who left it. I find I don’t much care either.
Getting cleaned up is a half hour struggle, but I manage. The sharpie came off reluctantly. When I walk out in my suit Blake’s chilling in his bathrobe in an Ikea recliner shoveling rice crispies into his mouth. “G’ Morning” he’s says around a spoonful.
“That was some night, huh?”
“Sure was buddy, but you’ve got to get to work. You’re going to miss your train.”
“Train?” something tickles me.
“Yeah, you know, the train. The one that takes you to your job... every morning”
“Oh, that train. Sorry, I think some motrin. Killer headache.”
Blake holds up a bottle and shakes it. It makes the noise empty bottles always make: disappointment. “Sorry, we’ve been out for a week. You should pick some up on the way to the train stop.”
“Sure thing… Man, I feel like I got in a fight and lost.”
“Just get out of here, David. You left your briefcase in the corner by the door.” So I did. I grab it and shout a “Later” over my shoulder as I step out into the hall. An elevator ride brings me down four floors to the lobby that smells distinctly of mildew. I could walk to the train stop, but it’s far enough I want to drive. I hop in my truck and swing by the drug store on my way. Five dollars thirty seven cents lighter, I step up on to the platform in the lamp light as the day begins to break. My train stop companion this wonderful morning is an old guy who hasn’t shaved in a couple days. His hair is all Einstein and he’s holding two plastic grocery bags. One of them has milk, the other who knows. We avoid talking for the ten minutes it takes the train to show up.
I’m on second and handing my ticket in. It’s a half hour ride down into Pittsburgh, to the bank where I work. Here, the train is a train. There it’s a subway. And even this early in the morning the train is packed. The seats are doubled on either side of the aisle and the few that could be open are occupied by book bags and purses. No one makes eye contact or smiles, so I make my way past all the strangers to the place where the two cars divide and lean back against the robin blue metal wall as the train jerks forward. It’s early enough that this space isn’t occupied, but that won’t last too long. I brace myself against the wall as the train makes a turn and tries to force me over. My head is still killing me, so I fish in the briefcase for the bottle of pills I haven’t opened yet.
When we get to the next stop, I’ve managed to pull the security cotton out of the bottle of pills I bought. I dry swallow two and stash the bottle in my briefcase. When I look up she’s standing there smiling.
"Let me show you," his ball returns to the style and he picks it up. He drops the ball, but it doesn't fall, just like the tea pot. He winks and picks it up again. He waves towards my lane and a ghost image, slightly translucent of the me from five minutes ago appears before my lane. I notice the force lines that generally only exist in physics diagrams appear in my former self's directions like holograms. They sprout into pencil thin being all around my body and the ball, measurements representing the speed and momentum of my moves stand beside every single ray. It, five minute-ago me, breaths and a wave of new arrows ripples off of my body as a pendulum, slide, release. And now the curve forces appear around the ball as the larger momentum arrow carries it forward. When the ball strikes the first pin, arrows leap into existence, representing the action the pins are undergoing. Blake snaps and we're watching it in slow motion as everything misses the pin on the left and the pin on the right. He snaps again and playback resumes full speed. Blake waves his hand as the arrows dissipate around the motionless objects. The disappointed copy of me disappears leaving only the two pins still stand at the end of the long ally.
Blake gives me a moment to take in what I've just seen, and being fairly logical things are clicking into place. Either I'm crazy or-- I look up at Blake as he takes a pull, naturally, on a pipe. Smiling he says, "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever else remains, no matter how unlikely..." His eyes literally glimmer at me behind a puff of smoke as he waits.
"This is a computer simulation?"
"Elementary, my Dear Watson. But it goes further than that. This was a simulation of you and your wife. You paid us to run digital copies of yourself against the millions of women in our database. Of course we narrow it down based on some initial seed testing and compatibility questionnaires; but, for each woman we had to run you against her thousands of different times in varying situations. For instance this particular woman, who is similarly being run against other individuals, passed 56 lifetime tests against you before failing here. Failing in this case involved a teapot. That's actually fairly tame considering what her copies were capable of in other scenarios with other men. This is ancillary to the point I’m trying to make, though. The goal at the end of this is not just love, but contentment across a lifetime relationship for the real you that's waiting somewhere up in reality. Eventually, you will pass the thousand tests with a single individual. You'll have a perfect game, as it were."
The basics of what he says make sense to me, but something nags me. "I don't remember signing up for this."
"Well, you wouldn't. We trimmed those memories away, as we'll do for your actual live self up above and out there once our algorithm converges on a match."
Cutting memories out seems drastic, but once the simulation is over, I, or someone who I was will get what he wants. Maybe that's all that matters, but this particular simulation is over now. The pins have fallen down. The ball is hanging out at the end of the gutter. I feel useless. This whole world is falling over and I suddenly realize how close I am to the gutter. I sit down heavily on a plastic swiveling chair, and I can't look Blake in the eyes when I say, "I'm dead now aren't I? You're going to have to kill me, or at least unload me like everything else. Like the cat, the mall, or some stop light." I feel the vertigo in my chest, the way you sometimes feel when you look into the night sky and realize just how far everything is away from you; that if gravity were to turn off you'd go flying out into nothingness and die gasping for breath with your corpse floating through infinity forever. But this uncomprehending emptiness seems far more permanent. I'm ones and zeros somewhere. My subconscious feels weak, and I'm wondering how it is that I am here to wonder at all. How do I have any sense of perspective at all if I'm just simulated data. And I have no way to express any of what I'm feeling in words because I've lost the will to even speak.
But Blake says, "No, I'm not going to kill you. When you die, you get to die better than most. By law you're a sentient process."
I feel momentary relief. "Then what will you do with me?"
"Let you keep on living," he smiles, "without certain baggage you might say. For instance, the traumatic telephone calls you made to emergency services when you thought your wife was having an aneurysm. That's something you could do without."
"I never made a phone call, I was too--"
"You were too surprised by a teapot? Too surprised to care for another life? No. You had the decency to try and end the relationship, as you perceived it, civilly. You couldn't let her just die when she collapsed. It was only later, after the ambulance never came and you'd fallen asleep scared out of your mind that those memories weren't active. We pruned them from you. Then your very inventive mind covered up the holes with a logical sounding explanation. It takes time to begin a transform sequence on an environment and we tried very hard to keep you very interested in other things; but we weren't lazy in dealing with your mind either, David. You're far too valuable a resource, so we need to recycle you."
"If it’s all the same to you, I’d prefer to be reused."
"It doesn't matter, David. What you don't remember pretty much never happened as far as you’re concerned. For instance, what kind of car do you drive David?"
"A dodge pickup," the thought is lightning quick.
"Right, and you got it when?"
"My dad gave it to me... after I graduated college," and the thought is turning sour.
"That was how many years ago?"
"At least eleven...," I remember when he gave it to me. I'd just finished school three weeks earlier, and I'd been helping my father fix the fence that kept his dogs in yard. Nonchalantly, he brought up how proud he was to have his son graduate. I was busy with my fingers in the dirt, pulling up old hooks that kept the chickenwire, now rusted, close to the ground so the dogs couldn’t sneak out when excited by a bird. Between the rust and time the fencing was only held down in a few places and so it needed fixing. As we worked together our conversation turned to my interviews, some of which were a state or four away. I mentioned how I was worried about having to share a car with my brother, that at some point we’d be in a jam. And my dad said, Ain't that the truth, but you're mom and I have been talking about that. We've been thinking about a new vehicle, and we'd like you to have the truck. You'll need to be able to get yourself around anyways. It's got another few years of life in it. I snap out of my reverie.
Blake is grinning even more, "Eleven? That was thirteen years ago. The truck did have a few years of life, but not even eleven, David. If I were a betting man, and in this case I am, I'd bet you a million dollars that memory is starting to feel so much more like four years ago, isn't it?" Blake just keeps rubs it in. "Congratulations, David, you've found the fountain of youth. Very few people get to enjoy this sort of thing."
"Of course," I reply. It seems the only acceptable response. Why not a train when presented with disappearing Lamborghinis? Blake walks to the door and holds it open for me, looking expectantly. I'm not sure I want to follow him, but I'm not sure I want to stay outside where things are disappearing either. Maybe I've gone crazy. Maybe Blake is a wizard. Maybe I died when the teapot hit me. Maybe something in Blake's eyes tells me that none of those things is the whole answer, and that the bowling ally is a little more inviting than it seemed to be when we were hurtling towards it. Maybe as I move through the door, he follows. It seems impossible to say that even though I've observed all these things that any one of them is certainly true. The door, its tinted windows blocking out the hill and sky behind us, swings shut. As I walk further away and peek over my shoulder I can't tell if the light is being swallowed by the lamps overhead or if Blake, myself, and this bowling ally are the only things left.
We pick lanes 19 and 20. The operator isn't here, nor the usual Sunday morning crowd, but with a literal snap of his fingers Blake turns the monitors on and our names are already filled out. Blake's is 19, mine 20, which put's him on my left. We unpack our balls in relative silence, toweling them and setting them on the tray. He nods to me to start. I take my position at the last dots, counting over by memory. I raise the ball and feel the weight settle in my arm. I focus on the pin, on the side I'm going to aim for, and breathe deep until my mind settles. I settle into the trance I always feel, but can never control before I get a strike. And then I'm sliding forward slowly, my arm swings back like a pendulum, then forward, and my right foot crosses behind my left, up into the air as I release the ball. It lands softly, speeding powerfully towards the right side of the center pin. They explode, in all directions, as they should; but when they settle, far left and far right still standing, seven and ten. I frown, but repeat realigning myself. A deep breath, forward, pendulum, sweep, release. It goes strait down the middle. And now I'm agitated.
But Blake is standing and gestures for me to sit. He sets his ball down just in front of his lane as he stretches, popping various joints in his arms, fingers and back. Then he rests a foot on his ball and gives it a good shove. It crawls down the ally at a measly 7 or 8 mph at my best guess. He begins speaking. "Life is like this, David. Slow and unintentional. But when it's right..." the ball hits the first pin, the pin goes to right and the ball goes to the left. The rest is dominoes. The monitor shows a set of 10 gun-slinging bandero pins. Then a bowling ball with a sheriff's pin is shot out of a gun. The pins fall over as they try to get away and a big red X flashes on the screen over the corpses. "... but, when it's right, it's perfect. What you had with your wife wasn't perfect was it?"
I look down my lane, and the two pins are still standing. It reminds me of the teapot.
"You and your wife were a seven-ten split, David. Oh sure, the physics looked good, but the moment that ball was put in motion it was all bad. We just had to let it run to find out."
I shake my head. "Let what run?"
Blake is there, in his bowling shoes, shiny, in his red bowling shirt, pressed, that he wars every Sunday. He peaks in before I can block his view. "Oh, I see," he nods, eyes alive. He pushes his way in; walks over to the table casually. I'm ready to scream at him as he reaches out to take the pot, to do what I know is wrong, to break her, to call the maggots and the flies, to open the windows and let her smell out for once and always. To do what I've asked him to do.
He takes it away easily, like it's meant to be taken away by him and with one movement of the arm catches the drops of water in the spout. The sun is still streaming in through the window. Then, "She threw this at you?" I nod. "Life goes on. We'll clean this up, later." The silence of the room is unbroken as he sets the teapot down on the table. He looks at me questioningly, but the dots aren't connecting. So, eventually, he says, "Come, lets get you some fresh air." He walks out the still open door.
I'm outside without quite knowing how I got there; my bowling shoes on, bowling bag in hand. Blake is halfway down the driveway, passing my wife's flower garden as if there's nothing the matter on the way to his red car. I look back. My house stands framed against the bright blue sky. I can see into the window, where the teapot was; where a vacant space remains surrounded by empty possibilities that are all dead to me now. This isn't home anymore. It’s a shell of what it was, just a place with memories I want to bury and forget. I turn back towards Blake and the red car.
"David, it's really time to go." I nod, it seems to be true. But something is off. Red? Blake drives a green beat up Subaru. I double check and it’s not a Subaru. It's a *red* Lamborghini. Odd that a detail like that can slip by you even when it’s staring you right in the face. He notices me noticing and says, "This isn't the strangest thing that's happened. The question is, do you want to stay here?" And he knows the answer is obvious. I don't. I want to leave, and I don't care much if it’s in a Subaru or a Lamborghini as long as I get out of here. My legs carry me towards the car, the weight of them pulling me forward. I read once that walking is really just applying force to pendulums. That you don't push yourself forward as much as letting the swing of your leg pull you forward. It seemed silly at the time, but today that's exactly what walking feels like.
It, the car, sits low but there's a comfort to the sleek leather that I've never felt before, the way the seat conforms to my body's contours. The engine purrs to life, keyless, and we're sliding back out of the driveway, past the mailbox. A thought comes to my mind as the car pulls off the curb and settles.
"What about the body?" it comes out unbidden, almost hysterically. It’s an antithesis to the numbness I've felt the last three days; like noticing that your hands are shaking after you get into a car accident even though you could have sworn they were steady. The houses on our street seem to loom in judgment over what I'm doing.
"It's Sunday isn't it?" Blake asks. I know how many times the sun has set while I stared at the teapot.
"Yes," I agree. It's Sunday.
"Then the body can wait, right?" he says as he maneuvers the car to a gentle halt.
"Can it?"
"The way I see it everyone else ought to be busy in Church on a normal Sunday morning, right?" I nod. My thoughts are prickly like the outside of a kiwi fruit. They tickle me, but don't quite stimulate. Blake continues, "Then we ought to have time for a game, at least one more before you leave this town."
"Leave?"
"David, even if the world worked the way you thought it should you wouldn't be staying here. Now I want you buckle up and watch that bush over there." Bush? David gives me an exasperated I’m being serious stare so I turn my head.
My neighbor's orange cat is crouched timidly by the side of the road. It's thinking about crossing the road. Its tail sweeps lazily by the wilting bush in the warm Sunday sun. Blake presses the clutch and manually shifts to drive. In that moment, the cat looks at the car suspiciously and then raises a paw to cross the road. It's very there. And then it isn't because it disappears. I think, gone, poof. The thought crosses my mind like a giggle and then is lost as the gas pedal kicks acceleration and I'm pressed back into the bucket seat. The houses, mailboxes and perfectly trimmed bushes speed away. We take the turn onto the main road in a 40 mph drifting skid that Blake has no right to know how to pull off. And then we're speeding down an empty four lane thorough fair. The businesses are all still there, mostly. But every now and then a street light pops out of existence like the cat, or a sign disappears before we're past it. Blake must notice my discomfort because he says, "Pay no attention to the men behind the curtain, David. Just focus on the bowling ally for now."
"It'll be there?"
Blake takes his eyes off the road as we near seventy and run a red light. He smiles. "I sure hope so, David. I'd hate to miss our last game."
I notice my left hand is gripping the seat and my right the ‘oh shit’ handle above the door, but I don't bother to move them. I'm not one for speeding through a school zone, but with the world literally disappearing around us in fits and stutters David doesn't even blink at the sign. Soon we're up to seventy-five with the engine roaring. The road around us is bordered by rapidly disappearing trees. It’s an uphill climb, but the bowling ally will be down on the other side where our road dead ends in a T. We crest the hill and I look out on the valley below. The places where buildings once stood are now vacant holes in the ground. I can even see the shape of the parking garage that's no longer below the mall that isn't there either. We hurdle through an intersection that's missing its traffic lights and the hills thankfully steal away the sight of the missing buildings. We cross eighty, "Blake? The road." But in the two seconds it took me to say that we've reached eighty-four.
A flattening and then a dip in the road cause us to catch some air. The car lands smoothly, and a fresh burst of gas causes us to climb up to eighty-five. Blake laughs, "Where we're going," –eighty-six and I can't close my eyes—"we don't need," 87 and the end of the road is right in front of us—"roads." And as he says the last word we’ve crossed the sidewalk and are well into the Bowling Lane’s parking lot. His hand pushes the gears into park. My mind tells me I should be hurtling towards death and pain in a rolling car, but all I feel is the light lift of the seat's stuffing as the force that pushed me back into my seat disappears like the cat and the signs. When I take in my surroundings, I see we've come to a complete rest instantaneously. It's as if the car never moved. And the bored way Blake is looking at me as he flicks a piece of lint off of his shoulder I'd believe him if he told me it never did. Instead what he says is, "Nothing like a quick demonstration to prove the laws of physics really have deserted you, David. You ready to find out what this is all about?" He must take my silence as acceptance. "Good, then it's time to go bowling. Hop, hop."
I open the door and step out. My right hand is shaking slightly from adrenaline, but my left is steadied by the weight of my bowling bag with its 15 pound ball. Physics hasn't forsaken me, then. Blake steps out too, and then the car steps out of the world, gone as well. "You'll be taking a train," he explains, "after the bowling."
Teapot
Blake is coming soon, and I haven't touched it yet. I know I shouldn't. It is tipped over in mid throw, suspended in the middle of our dining room, a lash of water droplets hovering in a pitched arc, catching the light, three feet and seven inches over the glass table that I am walking around while taking care not to step on my wife. The distance is three feet and seven inches. I've painstakingly held a measuring tape tight, so as not to touch the teapot, but still get the distance. I've passed my hands over, around; I've flicked the lights.
Still, it hovers.
Wires, updrafts, smoke and mirrors: there are none. It is simply there, a teapot, three feet and seven inches above the table set for two; flowers wilting in a vase. Yet, it was an angry ball of teapot when it was thrown, by her, at me. And then it just stopped in the middle of the room; she just collapsed, onto the beige carpet in her red silk dress. I haven't determined yet if the teapot is in the exact center of the room, my measuring tape is too short. I'd need to leave the house in order to get a long enough one. I haven't gone out for three days. I've not even been to work since Thursday; the night when the teapot was flung into stillness. The phone rang endlessly Friday. I let it. How do you explain you can't come to work because you have a teapot suspended in the middle of your dining room, and that your wife had simultaneously sunken to the floor into unconsciousness? That you haven't called the police because you think they'll blame you for what's happened?
I can see her face through the table. This moment strikes a memory, a fable. The table is like a glass coffin, from where I'm standing. I approach her, a quarter of the round table's circumference. As I lean over I realize I'm looking at her, really looking at her for the first time in more than three days, three weeks, three years. Her bangs have fallen off to the side of her face, soft. Her forehead still has the same three freckles as the day I met her. Her cheeks are still flushed, her lips still look soft, kissable. Her eyes are closed. Her nose is small, unobtrusive, beautiful. I lean in, my lips inches away, centimeters, millimeters. They are still warm, soft. Her mouth is still wet, but there's no response, as if she is asleep. But even then, there's no breath, she doesn't move. And now I know she won't; that this isn't that fairy tale. She's just an empty shell.
I find it odd. There are no flies or maggots burrowing into her skin, no blood trickling from her mouth. Her lips are not blue and her skin has not faded to that waxy dead skin white. The anger that was there, in her face, when I told her what I'd done, what I didn't want anymore without really knowing what I wanted; that anger, it isn't there. Just her.
I hear a knock.
There is no smell of death in my nose. No, instead her perfume, her just out of the shower smell, and something else… stale mint tea teases my nose too. It had been forever since I'd mulled over these smells. Perhaps, forever since I last bothered to notice them. I remember more the smells of hotel rooms, cheap chocolates, fading passions, dim lamps and ten light switches which couldn't brighten the room. The light of a summer's morning streaks in against the pot.
The knock, again.
What had I wanted? Certainly not this. I wanted her to be happy. No, that's a lie. I wanted to be happy, I'd forgotten what made me happy, and even more hadn't allowed myself to be happy. The truth was, I didn't care much what made her happy anymore. And so, finally, I thought ending it would fix everything. Dinner for two, tea beforehand, a conversation, we'd go our separate ways. We weren't who we were. No, she was still who she was. I've just blinded myself. I can still feel her lips. Is this what I--
Knock. Knock. Knock.
It grabs me this time. I stand up, and turn to look at the door. It's several paces away, paces that I find myself taking without much conviction. I open it.
Continuing my anyone other than Hilary would be swell campaign:
At 11/13/14 08:41 AM, SadisticMonkey wrote: So, you didn't actually read the link and why what she said was dumb, you just read what she said and agreed with it.
No wonder you like her.
I totally read it. There are loose assertions in the article that doing such a thing would bankrupt the program; whereas I'm totally in favor of making money for the program from tax collection rather than charging the people who needed help even more. You know, wealth distributions, burning kitties, punching pandas. Sounds great to me.
But hey, Friedman studied economics for more than '10 years' (and has a nobel prize to boot) so I'm confused as to why you don't think he isn't automatically right on all things economics.
Because there is evidence to the contrary:
At 11/12/14 10:07 AM, Light wrote: I'm as liberal as they come, but honestly, with corporate money still being an inordinate influence in American politics, how effective do you think Warren would be? How do we know that she won't just be another Obama, someone who used a liberal facade to get elected? There are a lot of problems that a Warren presidential candidacy could/would run into that can't easily be addressed.
She's actually got a record, spearheading the consumer protection, etc. Obama was really just a legislator. He certainly voted a specific way to fool us, but she's actually got a record and comes from a background where she studied this issue. But there are similarities: warren was also a Harvard professor, at a point in her life she didn't believe either party should dominate, etc.
When I voted for Obama, I knew he wasn't as far left as I was, and I knew he was bulshitting us to an extent, but at the time he did seem like the best option available. Whether it was republican racism, antipathy towards "liberalism", or just general fuck-wadery the stonewalling (reference to the racist-confeterate-south entirely intentional) of all legislation tied this guys hands. And he was too naive to realize he needed to lead instead of concede. And then he also turned out to be far more right-leaning than I expected him to be on issues where he'd promised to do otherwise: internet freedoms, women's rights, health-care reform (let us not forget this was a Heritage Foundation plan, better than nothing but still not great), and many other points. He's often conceded policy for politics and in general just been a weak leader. Its been very unfortunate.
But I do not believe Elizabeth Warren to be any of those things and she has a strong history of standing up against the things Obama constantly caves on. But, but but I could be wrong. I'd pick Sanders over her any day if that guy actually ran. But he may not be electable. And I'd probably pick Warren over Clinton. Clinton has the same aura that Romney/Bush did to me: wants to be president for the sake of being president. Warren & Sanders actually have agendas. The most we could hope for out of Clinton is another push on healthcare, but I'm not sure we'd get that.
At 11/12/14 12:20 PM, Feoric wrote: Warren will never survive the primaries if she decides to run, she's really bad at performing well during televised debates. Dems are better off with her staying in congress until she can secure a Supreme Court or District Court nomination. Warren filling in for Ginsburg would be sublime.
Well, she's definitely running. We'll have to see if her television performance has improved. That is the sort of thing, that with practice, can get better. Better as a judge? Maybe. Law School Professor =/= Judge necessarily.
At 11/12/14 08:10 PM, Th-e wrote: I feel that someone like Chris Christie would be better than Warren.
You feel like a guy who shut-down a public high way in order to punish someone who disagreed with him would be a good president? God help us. Chris Christie is like a fat Nazi. He rules by intimidation.
At 11/12/14 08:40 PM, orangebomb wrote: The last thing we need is a fringe politican like Warren or Sanders to be nominated for the Democratic ticket. Obama already gets a lot of heat from the opposition, (and that doesn't include the race-based ones) and he's on the center-left, just imagine how much gridlock and flak they would get if someone on the far left would be president. As for Warren, her record is already spotty to begin with, not to mention that her claims of her ethnicity not matching up.
We would lose a lot more supporting a fringe pipe dream than what we are doing now, especially when things are better now than it was in '08, how much better is still up for debate.
Obama is center-right; so I have no qualms with electing yet another democrat of any kind. We'll see the same issues. Republicans will just obstruct everything because they are incapable of working with others. They've turned politics into a min-max game, and frankly they should all be kicked out of the country for it. The ethnicity thing doesn't really matter to voters, its just something to harp on. Most people I know have someone in their past that was native american. One of them is even related to Pocahontas. I'm not surprised she wasn't aware of the awkward percentage laws and I really don't think its a situation that matters. It's like pointing out she had banannas for breakfast. Yeah... So?
I'm not sure you're aware of what her "fringe pipe-dream" is. I think if you looked at it, you might be surprised to find its not so "fringe" and its pretty damn rational. Oh, it pisses off people like sadistic monkey to no end, but that's how you know its a good idea.
At 11/12/14 09:31 PM, SadisticMonkey wrote: Warren is just a populist idiot who has an embarrassingly poor understanding of basic financial concepts.
Lets see what you're link is talking about; I hope its not about Milton Friedman shitting gold bricks.
At 11/11/11 11:11: AM ElizabethWarren wrote:
Elizabeth Warren made headlines last week for saying that she believed students should pay the same rate for loans as big Wall Street banks, 0.75%.
Oh, damn, that just sounds awful. Guaranteeing that our students aren't under mounds of $'s that they can't bankruptcy out of. I don't think a women who studied Bankruptcy for 10 years would know anything about how awful that was. She's clearly a moron. You're totally right. And that Milton Friedman guy is swell too. ;)
Mostly because she pisses off libertarians, but also because she's the person we desperately need. You look at someone like Obama or Clinton and you're looking at a politician. I still believe that Obama was better for this country, 100% so, than McCain/Romney; but I also believe he was one of the worst people a progressive/liberal party could have put forward and I think Clinton will be worse. Its not that they're on the wrong side of the aisle, its that they simply don't care about what matters most: the poor and middle class. The rich are fine. They do well for themselves, that's sort of the definition of rich. We don't need welfare for them, but the poor and middle class have much less buying power and everything has either stagnated for them or gotten worse over the last 16 years.
You look at Elizabeth Warren, or even Bernie Sanders, and you know you have a person who cares about protecting the people and about governing for the people over business interests. These people could handle a war if they needed to, but would keep the government's focus on improving everything on this side of the ocean.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Warren
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernie_Sanders
I'd probably vote for clinton over a republican, but I'd hate having to do it and I think we'd lose out as a nation for doing it. Let's get the right person in office this time.
It's cool. You're good at lying to them to.
But I'm not: Obamacare is good for you and the poor people who you pass by everyday without a thought or care for.
I for one support a basic right to health care for every citizen and visitor within this country. No one should have to die from a treatable disease because of who their parents are or what random number generator assigned them an intelligence.
Gokamehamehamehamehamehamehamehamehamehamehamehamehamehameha mehamehamehamehamehamehamehamehamehamehamehamehamehamehameha mehamehamehamehamehamehamehamehamehamehamehamehamehamehameha mehamehamehamehamehamehamehamehamehamehamehamehamehamehameha mehamehamehamehamehamehamehamehamehamehamehamehamehamehameha mehamehamehamehamehamehamehamehamehamehamehamehamehamehameha mehamehamehamehamehamehamehamehamehamehamehamehamehamehameha mehamehamehamehamehamehamehamehamehamehamehamehamehamehameha mehamehamehamehamehamehamehamehamehamehamehamehamehamehameha mehamehamehamehamehamehamehamehamehamehamehamehameu
The end.
At 12/13/12 07:59 PM, Painbringer wrote:At 12/13/12 07:54 PM, gumOnShoe wrote: Brand new dish. Brand new complex.Oh.
Then maybe the layout of the place is causing the snow to buildup where it shouldn't.
And by that I mean placing it low on a flat roof or something.
No idea, but we only had a little more than 2 inches...
At 12/13/12 07:52 PM, Painbringer wrote: I thought they did away with snow blocking reception in the last decade.
Maybe your complex still has one of those huge dishes from the last century.
Brand new dish. Brand new complex.
Had a 20 minute conversation with tech support about how If you live in the north snow can be a problem. Because, it accumulates on satellite dishes. Solution, wait for it to melt or $370 cancellation fee or $15 bucks just to have a guy come out and look at the dish (which they can't tell me where it is). Its not even my dish. It's the apartment complex's dish. Its community. And beyond that, I have no idea where the fuck it is.
Who the fuck sells a device that doesn't operate in the snow, in a place where it FUCKING SNOWS and two inches is enough to cause FUCKING FAILURE.
But, hey, for christmas I get a technician to come out in the morning and fix all my woes for 15 bucks.
Don't get dish. Fuck em.
*Except when it snows. In the winter
At 12/13/12 11:13 AM, joshhunsaker wrote: For funsies, I want to get a poll going on this:
Could you build and install enough geothermal devices on the earth to dissipate the required heat from the lithosphere to effectively destroy the core?
Remember we are talking about something that is actually possible to build/maintain not some wild fantasy "well if God and an army of magic carebears were to build it of course it would"
geothermal energy isn't gathered from the core. It's gathered from up in the crust. And the energy in the core has to do with the pressure the earth creates on the core and the rotation around the sun with gravity doing its fair share of tugging. So no, you'd have a better chance of spinning the earth to a stand still.
Game was too short. That cortana/master chief love scene was so off the mark it made me want to barf. And there's something that's too smooth about the filters for multiplayer. There's also a total lack of balance and well placed weapon drops.
I don't know what this is, but it's not Halo.
That aside, what little campaign there was did play well, but of course, there was too little of it.
I'm actually disappointed now that the game is over, and I might go back to multiplayer reach...
Cool sound. Not my usual stuff, but I could listen to them. Sounds like you're doing good for yourself and I'm glad to hear its coming around for you. Keep up funk.
At 11/6/12 11:55 PM, Sword-of-Kings wrote:At 11/6/12 11:54 PM, gumOnShoe wrote: Not only has Obama won, but we might have another state:http://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/forum/4
http://www.ceepur.org/REYDI_NocheDelEvento/index.html#en/def ault/OPCIONES_NO_TERRITORIALES_ISLA.xml
Another state is beyond poltical, thank you very much person who has never been a mod.
Not only has Obama won, but we might have another state:
http://www.ceepur.org/REYDI_NocheDelEvento/index.html#en/def ault/OPCIONES_NO_TERRITORIALES_ISLA.xml
At 10/3/12 11:12 PM, Ronald-McDonald-LoL wrote: I don't get it. Cutting PBS support (0.012% of budget) is almost meaningless. I saw the comparison somewhere, it's like deleting text files to make room on a 600 GB hard drive. Pointless.
Look, maybe big bird just needs to go out and get a job, rather than hanging around a street all day pushing his communist manifesto.
At 10/3/12 11:11 PM, berthon wrote: He was rude, to Obama. And constantly tried to shut him up. He even at one point asked Obama a question, and let Romney answer.
The next time PBS sends a moderator, it'd better be big bird. Anyone else totally surprised that Romney said he wanted to stop paying for an educational children's show on public tv? How many stay at home moms think less of Romney for that comment alone?
At 10/3/12 10:57 PM, berthon wrote: But as the moderator, he has to say when people are done, and he didn't do that, when he told Mitt to stop he didn't, and because the moderator didn't actually stand up for himself, he let Romney get away with a lot of vauge bull shit.
I honestly don't know how you could have told Romney to shut up. He was downright rude at points.
At 10/3/12 10:57 PM, Sequenced wrote:At 10/3/12 10:53 PM, gumOnShoe wrote: What'd you have against big bird?NOT BIG BIIIRRRDD!!!! :(
Mitt Romney, likes Big Bird, he just wants to fire him. But srsly, they're great friends.
Is Mitt Romney, Mr. Roger's evil twin?
At 10/3/12 10:42 PM, Light wrote:At 10/3/12 10:38 PM, Travis wrote:I'm a registered Democrat and a very liberal one at that, and I must agree with RightWingGamer.At 10/3/12 10:38 PM, RightWingGamer wrote: Even ABC agrees that the President got his black ass handed to him. Good to see that things are looking up for Romney."RightWingGamer"
No bias whatsoever.
Mitt Romney verbally manhandled the president.
I don't thing Romney manhandled anyone, I think he just didn't stutter which was Obama's real problem. I don't know why he wasn't able to form a cohesive thought without interrupting himself, but it was pretty bad.
Romney was very vague, and I don't think you could accurately point to any one thing he would actually do to accomplish anything he said he'd do. And after a debate, if you feel like that, I think you need to seriously question your support for that candidate.
Also, Romney saying he'd fire big bird is honestly going to be the only thing a lot of people remember, and it just hurt his chances with every stay at home mom in this country.
I idiotically tried to update my ps3 over a wireless connection while staying at a hotel. oops.
Rightnow I'm watching a purple screen with the fabric affect and the stardust. I have no options and haven't done anything other than tell it to try to connect over the internet. Since its been a few hours, I'm assuming this was a complete and total failure, but I have no idea if its safe to restart the system or if I need to wait it out.
Usually after this much time, I'd assume it just went bad on the connection, but I don't know if I can harm it. I haven't seen a TOS or anything yet, for all I know its just trying to download the package. I have never attempted to upgrade before, but thought I'd try to do it so I could use netflix.
Whats up with this and should I be worried?
At 8/7/12 05:45 PM, hiddeninthecrowd wrote:At 8/7/12 05:40 PM, gumOnShoe wrote: pps. Now seriously, gifts or I blow up alderon.is the kickstarter for the ng anthology still existing
I think that's over with; but on that subject I'm holding a copy of the book right now, so I believe its possible to get a copy of the book. The last story ends on page 200, so its quite a bit of reading material. I consider Ekublai and the authors who participated to have sufficiently donated to the "gumOnShoe's awesome wedding pile of stuff." The rest of you... stuff or alderan!
For my wedding.
Commence the donation of your monetary assets to me now!
You're already late and this is not appreciated.
Signed,
High Emperor, Recently Wed, King of the Internets, and former Moderator of Newgrounds
gumOnShoe
ps. The below image is a reproduction of me and my spectacular bride. It is not an actual photo of us because it is not actually us and the people in it are far less godly then we are. But, it is the best a random internet search could provide your overlord in under five seconds.
pps. Now seriously, gifts or I blow up alderon.
