IHUIA is an acronym for I Hate Using Internet Acronyms put there purely for the sake of saving an unloved joke from the gas chamber. That's where bad jokes go, like all the unloved puppies of the world.

At any rate, I've bought and played through No More Heroes and Zack and Wiki, planning on getting Mario Kart Wii and Wii fit as soon as I get paid. Mulling over a PS3 GTAIV pack but damn they are still pretty fucking pricey.

I stopped thinking about games and the other things that entertain me to focus on uni, but then I got some more hours at work and subsequently now work five nights a week. I was thinking that the only hassle on the horizon was the the omnipresent threat of looming assessment, which I hate, after all, why can't I just learn without being rated? But that's neither here nor there. The point is I dropped that shit and have gone to work full time.

I'm also training to be a pro-wrestler, finally, at the PWA.

The look on my parents faces when the phrase "I've dropped out of Uni to become a pro-wrestler", was uttered were truly priceless.

That aside, though I am likely to bring it up at every opportunity (hey, I've wanted to do this my whole life), I am looking forward to throwing myself at the things I love, like gaming and the possibility of more gaming and whining about crap on Destructoid.

Goddamn it feels good to not have anything to care about but which order I'm buying my next wave of games in.

Wiifit? Mario Kart? The World Ends With You?

Huzzah, nothing but potential fun!

I used to post here quite regularly. Be it insightful observations of the gaming world and the people who populate it, theory based analysis of gaming as a media or pointless drunken rants, it was all done (DAN HIBIKI) with a love of (Q!!!) gaming and my enjoyment of this site.

Much was the time spent talking on a range of topics with other bloggers or editors and I enjoyed it all, I also enjoyed playing games, but this is something I just don't seem to have time for anymore. Well, for at least the next twelve weeks.

Uni has begun once more and I have taken extra hours at work to help pay for books and (soon) a laptop to further enhance my learnin'. But I have begun to realize something. With Monday to Friday taken up with Uni and the weekend (as well as Tuesday and Wednesday) taken up with work, I haven't got a spare goddamn minute to really immerse myself in another game. About all I can do is square away a moment or two for some TF2 or SF3, but I can't bring myself to begin a game that requires more dedication.

I've been wanting to buy Zack and Wiki for a while now, not to mention No More Heroes, but I just can't spend the hours they deserve to be played. It's not that I don't have spare time, just that the time that I do have is usually taken up with naps to counter the exhaustion. Add to this the fact I have about 12 eps of Sam and Max to play as well as KOTOR 1&2 a friend loaned me and you can see that I've more games than there is time.

Same as my posting here. I used to visit daily, even hourly, and be moved to write and contribute to the discussions as this was something I genuinely enjoyed. Due obviously to the fact that I have no real GAMER friends. But I log on knackered with little motivation to read anything let alone write. I've been reading "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" by Paulo Friere and that book has a talent for taking it out of you mentally (on a side note it is a brilliant read), so I just don't have the brains left to pop in and read a whole piece let alone add a meaningful contribution.

It bugs me that my life has undergone such a huge damn shift in focus that I am being forced to leave behind once all-consuming and deeply fulfilling hobbies.

Though, I suppose that "leave behind" is not the right way to put it, more of a "put on hold" situation. I'll be on hiatus for about 3 months, but come break, I'm gonna drill through every goddamn game in my back catalogue and come to my PC with my eyes bleeding in joy to write about it.

God I'm fucking tired.

Gabe.

I'll start this off by saying that I know little of the nuts and bolts of screens and definitions etc. When my more tech savvy friends start with their hd-1080p-whatever-the-fuck talk I tend to space out and think about butterflies and how they should be called flutterby's and how they will bring doom to us all.

The little I do know stretches about as far as knowing that PAL sucks filthy pleb dick for booze money. I may be mistaken, and if I am please feel free to correct me (I can't be arsed researching it), but NTSC display is meant to be better in the first place. But fine, Europe (and that still, mystifyingly, includes Australia) had a different system from the get go, sure, great, whatever.

That was fine a whiles back when all we got here were PAL tv's, but these days every goddamn one has NTSC support, even the shitty cheap one I recently bought.

Which brings me to my question of WHY IN THE MOTHERFUCKING HELL are games still zoned to PAL when they could all be bloody NTSC and I wouldn't have to wait for goddamn Smash Brothers. PAL is gone it lost the...whatever-the-fuck war and NTSC is king and we can all play games for it.

But no, now I gotta wait longer while the NTSC region gets it and starts playing which'll suck cause then they'll have a load of practise in and by the time I take my Wii out for some well supervised online fun I'll be getting bitchslapped back and forth by some bastard 13 year old American kid. And he'll probably have a bunch of stupid net acronyms as his little comment things and he'll tease me so at my lack of skills and I'll say I've only just got it and he will simply mock me further. God I hate him. Goddamn PAL bullshit. Fucking flutterby's.

I am a man of many minds. Not to the level of Fight Club, or even any diagnosable multiple personality disorder, more like a captain (me) in charge of a bunch of other people (ensigns mostly). They do what I tells them to do, most of the time, but they all function as independent units.

Case and point: my sense of humour. My mind will run off on it's own tangents, often against my will, and come up with nonsense all for its own amusement.

This is manifest in something that happened while playing Team Fortress 2 a little while back.

I had been killed by the unusually named sniper "Spiderman Delight", which then started a corner of my brain on creating lyrics to "Afternoon Delight", but with a Spiderman theme. Why? Beats the fuck outta me, but here is what I came up with before I had to leave the PC and chant "Om mane padme om" to still my torn psyche.

Gonna sling my webbing,
Gonna grab it tight,
Gonna get me some Spiderman Delight
Green Goblins always saying that he wants to fight
and the thought of hitting him is getting so exciting

He may be my best friends dad but that's okay
I'm not gonna let him go and blow me away

Pumpkin Bombs in flight. Spiderman Delight.




I hate that I got that far, that should never have been thought, let alone written. I do it now only to purge it.

Then there was what happened while I was playing Third Strike earlier today. I was Urien and my opponent was Oro, a typically easy match that I ended with Urien's sit-down powerbomb throw. As an aside, if there's a problem that can't be solved with a sit-down powerbomb, I don't wanna hear about it.

Then I paused it and got up to get a drink. When I came back I saw this.



What ran through my head, completely against my will, was a trashy romance novel based around Urien and Oro.

"Urien crouched, his enourmous manhood scarcely concealed behind a thin layer of cloth. Oro dared not stir, he had wanted this for so long but the cruel glare of a disapproving society had kept his desire at bay. But now, as he lay prone, Urien had finally given into his lust and dared what they had both so desired, and yet, both so feared.

Urien slid his hands up Oro's age withered but powerful thigh, shifting aside the paupers rags that had, for so long, concealed the object of Uriens lust."

It was, naturally, at this point that I had to go vomit a little and return to my PC and watch a bunch of those videos what where the girlies touch each other and stuff.

I can't switch this crap off. I'm considering medication as an option...

Having just read Jims post, and visiting Jack's sparse profile page (c'mon Jack, spice it up with some headers or avatars, a snappy Anne Coulter one perhaps) my mind leaped for joy at the idea that he was actually here reading this site.

Mainly because of this.

But as I began to think on it, I saw the duel edged blade I was wielding in all of it's traitorous splendour.

Good Idea.

It will put Thomspon into direct communication with some of the best gaming lifestyle philosphers around, simple as that. Destructoid is the only site I have bothered to join, let alone contribute to, as it appears to be the only place on the net where gaming discussion crawls out of the "lol gay faggzzz" ooze and actually articulates itself with intelligence and consideration.

There is the possibility Thompson believes what he is doing and isn't engaged in a purely cynical book selling tour on the backs of the dead, therefore this contact is necessary. It will allow Thompson to see gamers that are not the crude construct of decade old stereotypes he seems to be operating on which is great as something that doesn't fit the pre-existing stereotype will force the brain into re-evaluation of his opinion. Hopefully, this re-evaluation might lead to a somewhat moderated view of gaming as opposed to the totally negative view he has now.

Secondly, and I might add selfishly, it will put us into contact with him. You know all those good discussions we've had over the months about this? The ones where we came up with many a point about the absurdity and outright idiocy of his campaign against games? How we all had great ideas we wished we could tell him in person, to finally give him a well prepared slice of our collective minds?

Well good news! He's here, has a profile and is, I presume, reading this stuff. So time to break out all the old genius cause now it's target has arrived.

On a personal note (and I am breaking many of my own rules here, but...fuck it), Jack you are a cretin who mistakes correlation for cause and invents connections where there aren't even any. You are a shameless whore peddling your book on the backs of people who have died in horrible circumstances by giving the grieving and the confused a simple target to hate, an incorrect target I might add. You have wandered into a group of people who know what they are talking about and will spank you back to your lair of ignorance with actual checked facts and a basic understanding of confounding variables, you are a laughing stock, you will be thoroughly schooled here and I look forward to your first blog post.

Bad Idea.

This is still the internets. Destructoid is good, but the filter isn't immediate or perfect, idiots will still get in and will (probably are as I type) inundate him with messages of crude profanity with no thought behind it. Jack will latch onto these as being indicative of the gaming culture and ignore everything else to suit his stereotype as admitting he has been wrong on anything is impossible for him now.

This could easily become another way for him to use his terribly skewed perception of reality to cast gaming in a negative light because, let's face it, the man is not acquainted with logic, honest debate or any real idea at all. Our points will fall on deaf ears and all of our shining brilliance will not penetrate the void that is that mans mind. It will be as standing and butting our collective head against a stone, fucking futile and leaving us with a terrible headache.

He will ONLY use any presence on this site to whip people into a rage which he can then point to as proof of his lunacy. The trouble is we can all fall for it, letting our emotions slip just a little, and while it will be due to the frustration of dealing with a fool, he will say it's all the Street Fighter I've been playing.



In closing, I just wish we could ignore him, but that simply isn't possible. He has the ear of the ill-informed, fitting as he is their Emperor, and so when he peddles his nonsense in his fancy new clothes, the fools listen. Then we are forced to defend our art against a pile of people who don't understand what they are angry at. So even though ignoring it is the only solution, it is nigh impossible.

I suppose this is just the paradox we face and it is ours to bear and that is all there is to it. We need a sword to fight and a double edged one is the only one available. We have to swing it but we must take care to cut ourselves as little as possible in the process, a duel of attrition, one that we don't want and, as usual, one we can't avoid.

If my hero Jack Thompson has taught me anything, and repeated readings of his masterpiece garbed only in sanctified gamer blood has taught me all kinds of things, it's that it's okay to engage in certain acts as a means to an end.

See, when you need to get something done, something noble, something heroic, it is okay to make some sacrifices. Sort of like Jesus, but instead of sacrificing himself and denying the world a vital leader in the fight against these "video-games", Jack sacrifices other things. Like his dignity and reputation after mailing a sitting Judge some homosexual porn. Did any of you thank Jack for that sacrifice, hmm? Let he who is without a public record of unsolicited homo-erotic mail outs to high ranked legal officials cast the first stone on that one. Oh, there will be no stones thrown today as we can all see the male on male mail within our own hearts. This is what Jack has taught us

I was reading his prophecy, aloud, just last night, upside down in an EB I'd broken into, in the hopes that his incantations would summon a great magnetic field, or Thompson Shroud, to delete the evil when I realized what must be done.

I must single handedly save the world from the evil of video games, but it will take sacrifice.

The first enemy I must defeat are these things called "facts". I have never heard of them before but my only encounter with them has assured me that they are demonic spawns from the inky depths that had previously known no description. These horrors allow games to be made and sold on the basis that there is no "factual" (there's the devil! Right there! See it?!) causal relationship between exposure to interactive violent media and increased violence.

But the killers OWNED GAMES. There! Ha ha! Your own devil facts turned on you as the great deciever is want to do, some might say that this is an unrelated correlation that gives no-one a possible reason to draw a causal conclusion, like my assertion that me putting my pants on in the morning makes the sun rise. Well, it has every day so far and I shudder to think of the nightmare world we would be plunged into were I to forego pants and halt the very sun itself. If I do something and something else happens, no matter how many confounding variables, it is a direct link. TAKE THAT FACTS!

But that is not enough. The septic ooze has already polluted the humours of the younglings, now not even a level 15 Thompson Shroud is enough. They are dead already, living only to spread the disease. Thompson has spoken to me, through the medium of TV static, and I know what I must do.

The little children must die, all for their own good. And when I am done, all will know it was as a DIRECT RESULT of the writings and oratory of Jack Thompson and not anything to do with any other "problems" my case worker says I have. Her kids are first.

For God and Thompson.