Obnoxious Jerk

First, but not Foremost

October 5th, 2018

Perhaps the first super-hero character I ever made anywhere, quite possibly for the old Marvel Super Heroes Role Playing Game, was Firebomb. This guy was born with, yes, psionic abilities, but they were more physical than mental in scope. He could either move things or catch them on fire with his brain, sort of a telekinetic / pyrokinetic combo, I suppose. And I dug the character a lot.

Which is probably why he's wound up in most incarnations of most super-heroic things I've written, at least eventually. Strangely enough, I haven't directly plugged him in to my Variant Earth 13 material, though he's actually got a place there, in the form of the Universal Squad team. Yeah, I know, they really need a better name. But, sometimes, I fall flat there. Sorry!

So, naturally, it was a cinch that he wound up being the very first character that I built to roam about in the City of Heroes, back when the game was originally brought online. I mean on its very first day! Oh, sure, I didn't pre-order the thing, so I didn't get to play in its beta, or its pre-release event, but I should have if only to shut people up who thought that a badge of superiority.

Sometimes, I really hate nerds. Anyway, I found that the name I wanted for Firebomb was, in fact, taken. This was a bit of a conundrum, so I wound up calling this fellow Captain Char. The screenshots I took of him way back in the day are pretty awful, and they were taken before I knew how to edit out all the interface bits from the game. Which is why they are zoomed in and so pixely. Sorry about that.

The reason I went with an actual, different name was that one of my biggest pet peeves in this game, or any other online game, or even every single digital community I have ever belonged to, is when people just can't let a name go that someone else has already taken. I absolutely, positively despite seeing a name with random punctuation appended to it, or surrounded by Xs or Os.

You know the type. You'll be wandering around some forum or digital landscape, and you see some guy calling himself Han Solo' or xx Sephiroth xx or -Wolverine or whatever. I always make a point of 'pronouncing' the little extras in their unoriginal names when talking to them, which seems to irk them to no end. I guess unoriginal clods hate having their unoriginality waved in their cloddy faces.

The punch line, here, is that this is where the name for Dash Apostrophe came from. And, being the ultimate showboating loudmouth, everyone on the Infinity server saw his name - and his gibbering - just about everywhere. Thus, people who felt the same about those unoriginal names got a good chuckle, those who didn't were extra butthurt about it, and fun was had by, well, me.

But I digress. As per the norm. In time, I eventually abandoned Captain Char to play Crazy Hate, who had a completely broken power that wasn't nerfed until I had exploited it for all it was worth. I'm awful, I know. But the point is this guy fell by the wayside. I eventually rebuilt an actual Firebomb on a server outside Infinity, the one I created most of my folks on, once the name was freed up on the Freedom server.

Fitting, eh? I powered the revived Firebomb to level 50, and then once his name was freed up on Infinity, I moved him back over there. I guess whoever had it there had since deleted their own. So, I finally came full circle, and this guy once again became my primary blaster - that being a character who excelled in dishing out ranged damage, but was relatiely frail otherwise. The 'glass cannon', as it were.

Installments in this series:
01 | 02 | 03 | 04 | 05 | 06 | 07 | 08 | 09 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14

I'm Lovin' It ™

October 2nd, 2018

I love developing a stress headache from getting so angry that I'm seeing red before I even leave for work.

I love almost dying twice because my onramp to I-70 west is so short and inundated with halfhearted patchwork repairs that nobody else seems to know how to drive on the thing.

I love having my boss' boss constantly roaming around my bench since my boss didn't bother to come in today, glaring at me condescendingly as if struggling to justify having to actually pay me for work - even though the company doesn't pay half of what said work is actually worth in the first place.

I love being driven up the wall by the Tea Party Princess while I work, trying not to stab anyone as she hums some godawful song right next to me as loud as she can for no discernible reason.

I love getting condescending emails from my boss while she's blowing off work, operating under the assumption that I don't know what I'm supposed to do, the giant pile of work heaped up on my bench clearly indicating otherwise.

I love repairing the results of other people's sloppiness for three hours out of my day.

I love my stress headache transforming into a full-blown migraine as a direct result of the Tea Party Princess' obnoxious humming transforming into her singing some insipid song at the top of her lungs for fifteen minutes prior to lunch, apparently because she's so bored that she has to make everyone within earshot miserable.

I love said migraine being further reinforced by the guy who refills the vending machine slamming sodas into the soda machine as loud as he physically can, even though he knows he's not even supposed to be in here until our lunch break is finished, because the room is too small to support the dwindling amount of people that work here and his giant cart full of overpriced garbage.

I love being insulted to my face by Professor Beatshiskids, right before he goes on to hold another sermon for the Tea Party Princess, hovering behind my bench as he does so.

I love a lot, and the work day isn't even over yet.

Of the Criminal Sort

September 28st, 2018

My favorite archetype while fighting and/or committing crime in the City was the mastermind. Sure, I enjoyed my sword-slinging stabber for justice, my fire-blasting burninator for freedom, and my plethora of psionic types, but nothing managed sheer mayhem like the mastermind. I could closely emulate that with the Jerk (what with all his spider-bots), but doing so took a lot of work.

Masterminds were basically a 'pet' class, a relatively soft character who surrounded themselves with minions they could summon pretty much at will. The weaker three were good for cannon fodder, the medium two were often possessed of numerous useful abilities, and the big one was a good match for your own ability. Or, if you had the Thugs set, you could occasionally summon a horde.

I had one of those, Mister Really Long Name, as well as Hate Ball, who utilized Mercenaries. But I think my favorite overall was Three Dollar Bill. This madman had Robots. These things were relatively tough, made with the pew pew pew, and could easily run rampant over everything. I never quite managed to get Three Dollar Bill to level 50, but he was fun every time I broke him out.

Already somehwat sturdy, robots could make force fields around themselves, which you could readily augment by having the force fields power set as a secondary ability. One that I am already quite familiar with, if you've been following my weekly, nerdy posts about my various avatars in the City. This made them nigh-invulnerable, especially when grouping with even more masterminds.

And that's really when the City of Villains went off the chain. A bunch of players summoning their gaggle of goons all at once could pretty much steamroll over most everything. Sure, you'd have to keep summoning them back up as the individual robots or thugs or soldiers or demons or zombies or ninjas or pirates or whatever were defeated, but these legions made it impossible for enemies to focus on you.

And since the mastermind is constantly buffing his allies, his minions, and his allies' minions, these waves of criminals quickly made a circus out of things. Not that this was a bad thing, of course. Abject bedlam was a great way to blow off steam, which I needed to do a lot when I was working at ADT, back in the day, before those scumbags laid me off. But I digress.

Note to self: fix that link to the ADT post sometime!

Installments in this series:
01 | 02 | 03 | 04 | 05 | 06 | 07 | 08 | 09 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14

Loungin'

September 24th, 2018

I've been generally nerding it up here on the Jerk of late, gibbering about this and that regarding a bunch of obscure stuff that matters to probably just me. Thus, I've raided my telephone in order to find something a bit more cute and fuzzy to share with you, whoever you happen to be, in the off chance that you could use something a bit more heartwarming to brighten your day today.

So, here's more fun pictures of the three pound curmudgeon that lives in our house with us: Crawford! In this particular collection of rabbitry, he's not really doing much. In fact, he's pretty much had it with our monkey business while these photos were being taken, so he might seem like he's not a completely spoiled little brat. But, rest assured, that bunny is spoiled rotten.

Not Eraserhead

September 21st, 2018

The previous two heroes I've gone on about from my days in the City of Heroes were what I called 'challenge' characters. You know, those folks who have one or two underperforming power sets, with which I forced my way through the game solo, for the most part. This, of course, because I am stubborn, and wanted to prove my favorite, if difficult characters could be built to work that way. Somehow.

Probably my earliest such character was Psychophant. Well, the other Psychophant, because the original was deleted in favor of a second Psychophant after a particularly harrowing group mission I'd participated in involving zombies. Lots of zombies. Well, they were accurately Frankenstinian horrors that plagued the lower levels of the game, but still, I called them zombies because zombies.

Anyway, the original Psychophant was like Mesmeroticist, who was also built after I replaced him, in that he was a mind controller. Instead of the empathy power set, however, he had force fields as a secondary ability. And whether teaming or soloing, that combination was a bit too awful for even my liking, and thus, he was deleted in lieu of a 're-rolled' Psychophant.

The new Psychophant, the one I stuck with for the vast majority of the game, had force fields as a primary power set, and psionic blast as a secondary, making him a 'defender' instead of a 'controller'. This allowed him a lot more physical controls of enemies, mostly involving knocking them all over the place, as well as his shooty mental powers to make them stay down once they stopped.

He was also a difficult character to play solo, but he did wind up teaming a bunch over time, and not just with my friends' characters. That wasn't my intent with the guy, but what can you do? I liked the vibe Psychophant had, though, even if I tried to make him the creepiest costumes that I could with the system's character generator, again and again. Included here: the nipple rings ensemble.

I still liked the mind control power set, though, which is why I ultimately created Mesmeroticist. Thus, I was playing two mainly psionic characters at about the same time, which was probably because I was on a big psychic kick at the time. Mind you, I was working on a complete rewrite of my Manual of the Psi RPG book at the time, so that may have had something to do with it. Probably.

Bonus nerdery: Psychophant written up for the nerd game I support on my nerd site. Complete with even more screenshot imagery!

Installments in this series:
01 | 02 | 03 | 04 | 05 | 06 | 07 | 08 | 09 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14

The Black Light Room

September 20th, 2018

Though I have to spend my half hour for lunch at work within the break room, since I ostensibly have to eat lunch every day, I've been trying to find alternate spaces within which I can hide during my regular breaks. For the longest time, I was camping out in the junkyard next to my work space, because nobody ever went in there aside from me, and forlorn engineers looking for discarded items.

That all changed when the ~~lead janitor~~ ~~incompetent head of maintenance~~ busybody hall monitor jumped all up in my business for doing so. It wasn't for safety or anything, he was just showing some contractor around, and felt the need to try and make his genitals look bigger, or something. Maybe he should just buy a sports car, since that's what most midlife crisis douchebags do.

Anyway, since simply taking my breaks at my work bench wasn't a good idea, what with all the chemicals and so forth, the search continued. And I think I've arrived at a spot that works for me. This is the black light room, which is usually dark save for, you guessed it, a black light. It's a very small, constrained space, but it actually has excellent air circulation, which is definitely a good thing.

The air conditioning is regularly on the fritz in our building, as our maintenance man, he doesn't know how to maint. I guess all the safety concerns I've made over the years about the building not having a fire alarm or being inundated with asbestos has been eating into the company's budget for keeping our death trap of a building, uh, somewhat functional despite being a death trap.

But I digress, as is my wont. The point is that this is a nice, relaxing place to hole up for a few minutes each day, where I don't have to hear the Tea Party Princess or Professor Beatshiskids or Stroke Boy or the Conservative Kingpin or any of the other mental midgets I work with go on about whatever race / religion / nationality / age group / gender / whatever else has their boxers in a bunch.

The Battery Odyssey

September 15th, 2018

So Friday sucked.

I was cut off from my overtime the day before, so I decided when I came in to work Friday, I was going to go home early. I was feeling awful, after all, and thought I could surprise Brenda by spending a few extra hours with her on a slightly longer weekend. So I bailed at ten in the morning, taking a half day of vacation, but made one quick stop on the way home first.

It was at this point that my car decided to fail on me. I found that, upon attempting to restart my Fit, it did not wish to. So I began to process this in my head, in order to keep from panicking while stranded fifteen miles from home, and narrowed it down to three things. It had to either be the battery, the starter, or the alternator. Not much narrowing, I know, but still.

The way it was cranking led me to believe the battery was the culprit, though. This because a) the lights would dim when I tried to start the car, only to resume illumination a few seconds later, and b) that battery was half a decade old. Thus, it seemed testing the battery was the easiest way to narrow things down further, but there was just one problem: I had no tools.

Since my metric wrench set and ratchet set and pliers and wrenches and screwdrivers and everything else were sitting pretty in the tool box resident in my garage, I had to heave myself up about a mile to the nearest Home Despot in order to secure what I needed. It was the closest place that would be likely to sell tools, so that's where I went, even if it was already oppressively hot out.

So, after trundling uphill that far to get twenty five dollars worth of tools, and then back to my car, I disconnected the battery. This took a considerable amount of time, during all of which I was cooking on the asphalt, under the sun, easily stewing in my own juices at over a hundred degrees. Fun! Having secured the battery, though, now it needed testing.

Throwing it in the bag I usually use to carry my lunch and laptop and other sundries from my car to work and back, I lugged it towards the nearest car battery store. This was an undertaking, for sure, because car batteries are heavy, yes, but they're even heavier after lugging them over a mile. Under the sun. In the heat. Against traffic in one of the busiest mall areas in the Dayton area.

I stopped at one point to cool off under a tree, laying down in the shade despite the overwhelming amount of traffic passing by. I may have passed out for a short period of time. I may have also suffered a slight malfunction in my body at the time, as well, the less about which is said the better. At any rate, I eventually made it to NTB, which I despise, but I was also desperate, so there you go.

They tested my car's battery, and lo and behold: it was dying! Thus, my intuition proved correct. Yay! The bad news, however, was that the guy did not have a replacement for my car battery available. Boo! So now, I had to walk to yet another store to pick one up. I called ahead to make sure they had one first, though, a process which took about a half hour, since they kept hanging up on me.

Trudging to the Wal-Mart, the last place on earth I want to spend money, much less car battery amounts of money, I got the new battery and dumped the old one in their store, and then hauled my carcass back to the Fit at long last. Already exhausted, overheated, and incensed, getting the new battery in my car went remarkably well, despite my throwing everything around in a winded huff.

Once I'd relatively secured everything (I do need to double check all of that, I imagine), the car turned over for me effortlessly. Finally. So I at long last drove home, arriving seven hours after I'd originally planned to, and threw myself into the shower. I was filthy, in more ways than one, and had to soak my everything. Including my feet, which were now covered in blisters.

So I'll be feeling the effects of Friday for a long, long time. Ugh.

Punny

September 14th, 2018

Two weeks ago, I gibbered on about the various 'challenge' characters I built while playing City of Heroes. I suppose the game was easy enough that I felt a compulsion to take the most difficult power sets, or combinations therein, and work them into effective characters. The advantage of doing this was typically that they were unlikely to be 'nerfed' by the developers for being overperforming.

Characters that had any sort of mind-affecting power were usually at the forefront of such difficulty, mainly because the developers already felt the concepts were too powerful to begin with, or something. I ultimately wound up making several characters possessing such abilities, as since they weren't primarily devoted to dishing out damage, they were definitely a challenge to play solo.

The main psi-themed character of mine was the Mesmeroticist. I found the silly name amusing because it was punny. If I remember her backstory correctly, she was supposed to be introduced to a psychologist during a job fair at high school, but the facility instead booked a parapsychologist by mistake. Years later, she'd mastered the art of mind control and used it to fight crime!

Of course, with City of Heroes, you could take not one power set, but two: a primary and a secondary. The secondary could often make up for the primary's shortcomings, unless you took something wholly inoffensive. Empathy was one such set, which had nothing but 'buffs' for allies, and no 'debuffs' to make chewing up the imaginary criminals you'd be trouncing go down any easier.

So I went with the combination of mind control and empathy for the Mesmeroticist, who soloed her way through the game very, very slowly. Sure, she could have just latched onto one team after another and blazed her way to level 50, the game's maximum, but where's the challenge in that? And yes, when she did so, Mes was the ultimate team player, since that's what those powers were designed for.

But no, I fought for every single one of Mesmeroticist's experience points, and maxxing her out took forever. But you know, it made me really appreciate the character overall, so I suppose she was ultimately one of the favorites I ever played. Even if she wasn't on the 'main' server I housed most of my other folks, simply because I'd long ago filled up my 'home' server, Infinity.

Bonus nerdery: Mesmeroticist written up for the nerd game I support on my nerd site. Complete with even more screenshot imagery!

Installments in this series:
01 | 02 | 03 | 04 | 05 | 06 | 07 | 08 | 09 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14

I Should Have Been A Detective

September 10th, 2018

Just a couple of days ago, I'd mentioned that apparently one of my coworkers thinks our place of work is the appropriate locale to recruit gullible saps for his church. I even shared an image of the Jesus cards he's leaving all over the joint, whether in the restroom or on various communal worktables or even in the break room. And, obviously, I stated my distress at this behavior.

I had a good idea which of my bloviating garbage human coworkers was behind this chicanery, but I hadn't really escalated my counterproselytization efforts as of yet. Aside from one awfully and hastily made scribble, at least, but sometimes it takes me a while to really get going. And I hadn't seen any of his leavings for a few days, so it hadn't been at the forefront of my head static.

So, going about my business today, I wound up in the back room where the likely culprit usually works, as I had to apply some coatings to some things that I was supposed to fix even though, according to the management, that's no longer my job. But, nonetheless, there I was. So I ambled into the area where Professor Beatshiskids works, and went to grab some supplies, when I saw it.

That's some fine detective work there, Lou.

Professor Beatshiskids has been going out of his way to clandestinely leave any number of these obnoxious recruitment cards, or whatever on earth they're supposed to be, all over the building. He's made sure that nobody has seen him dropping these off, because rest assured, I have been watching him for a very long time, what with him being my prime suspect.

Despite all this effort, he literally taped one to his work bench, assuming no one would look at it, I guess? Yeah, I guess I haven't been being too hard on my coworkers. They really are, hands down, some of the dumbest people on earth. I suppose it's possible that Professor Beatshiskids doesn't know that abandoning his church leavings all over the building makes for a hostile workplace.

But somehow, I don't see that being the case. Perhaps, more appropriately, he doesn't care. And that's why I am continuing with my plan of leaving horribly inappropriate graffiti on these things whenever I run afoul of them. But I'll only be leaving half of the spoiled cards where I find them. No, the other half are getting crammed into the Bible he's got on another bench in his area.

Because screw that guy.

Twit No More

September 8th, 2018

For just shy of a decade, I've made use of Twitter. I found it sort of silly at first, and mostly just used it to amuse myself. In time, though, I found myself spending more and more time on the site, talking with a few like-minded folks, and poking insufferable ingrates now and then when they were really asking for it. It was a good time, and fun was had by all.

But recently, I've noticed the change. Of late, conservative nitwits have been bleating that they've been increasingly 'censored' on social media sites. This is stupid on its face, as, last time I checked, neither Facebook nor Twitter nor any of these other entities are owned or operated by the United States government, and thus 'censorship' is an inapplicable charge.

After all, I can't force newspapers to publish every letter I dump in their mailbox, nor can I make television stations air whatever videos I feverishly record. No, the rules are the same. Why should a site be forced to pay for the retention and transmission of content they don't want to? Why should they be prohibited from enforcing their terms of service?

And yet. So shaken by these charges, and then being dragged before the government to testify at a congress that is utterly ignorant of how technology works, Twitter has been bending over backwards to seem like they aren't unduly punishing conservative 'voices'. In fact, they have been letting these idiots run roughshod over everyone else, saying and doing anything they please.

And I'm tired of it. It's not that I can't effectively argue and mock into submission the morons that plague me on the site. I can give much better than I get about ninety nine percent of the time, but I won't stand for the rules not being enforced equally across their user base. That implies an uneven playing field, one that is tacitly balanced towards the worst trolls on the site.

This came to a head just a few days ago, when I repeatedly reported several users for directing bigoted comments towards myself and others, and then for threatening violence against my person. Twitter deemed that, 'in the context of the conversation,' their rules weren't violated. So, apparently, Twitter thinks that some hate speech and death threats are perfectly reasonable.

And this is the same site that, a few months back, suspended me for mocking the ludicrous 'flair' and fake medals that the former Sheriff Clarke wears, because I 'hurt his feelings'. If inflicting butthurt upon conservatives is an offense worthy of suspending their users, but conservatives issuing literal death threats aren't, well then, you've built yourself a web site for Nazis.

They even admitted to this before congress!

I'm not about to participate in such a vile enterprise. As such, I'm extricating myself from the site. I've grabbed a tool to delete just about everything I've published to the site, even if the Library of Congress has kept a back-up copy of such. The point is I'm leaving almost nothing for Twitter to make use of, in and of itself, that they can use to profit off of myself. Save for a few posts I seemingly can't delete.

And, naturally, a link to this Jerk.