Obnoxious Jerk

A Bit On The Nose

September 7th, 2018

I've gone on about two of my favorite City of Heroes characters of late, but I haven't touched on City of Villains, yet. The City of Villains was an expansion to City of Heroes, which allowed you to play the role of a villain, instead of a hero. Which I'm sure sounds obvious, but I figured it needed to be said, in case one or two of you out there were utterly unfamiliar with the source material.

The setting was an island chain whose government had been knocked over by a terrorist organization known as Arachnos. They were sort of like Cobra in a sense, in that they were a critter-themed villain group comprised of countless minions, most of which were filed away into specific ranks - each with their own, special costumes and abilities. The leader of this group was the kook known as Lord Recluse.

While your villains were generally unafilliated, aside from vaguely being tolerated by the group running the islands, you could build a literal member of this organization as an 'epic' character archtype once you finished the story with another character. And thus, you can see the replay value / addictive tendencies mixed into the game, because it just kept giving you more, the more you played.

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Once I'd earned access to the epic villain archtype, I built a Crab Spider Soldier of Arachnos, which comes with a cybernetic backpack thingus and the extra limbs there, each of which is basically a blaster! While struggling to name my latest creation, I found an alias which should have been taken a long, long time ago, and was inexplicably still available. And thus, the Obnoxious Jerk was born!

While I paid light lip-service to role-playing in the game, mostly in the map chat or such, I never really embraced it as much as I did with the Jerk. I wasn't downright rude to other players, but I was, well, quite obnoxious - even when otherwise being helpful! And the jerkiness extended to every aspect of the character, from hogging the limelight while teaming to wearing the most distressing of costumes.

Or almost nothing, when it came down to it. I'm sure I was more than a little bit annoying when I broke the Obnoxious Jerk out, which was frequently when not building up some of my other villains in the City of such. But he was simply too fun an opportunity to pass up, whether steamrolling over the good guys, vexing my fellow players, or even trying to out-smarm my main character, Dash Apostrophe!

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

I Warned Them

September 6th, 2018

I put up with a lot from my coworkers, the company I work for being a binder full of lawsuits waiting to happen. They regularly spout off, whether in the building our outside, on the clock or off, in the break room or ostensibly working. They complain about people of other genders, races, nationalities, sexual preferences, religions, and just about anything else that trips their triggers.

In my effort to stay employed, I don't actually comment on this. I actually did complain to my boss on more than one occasion, and naturally she proclaimed that nobody she knows on our floor would do that, and that even if they were, nothing can be done about it without me putting my name on a written complaint to the ombuds-person. Jeez, that's an unwieldy word, there, isn't it?

Despite the company having a strict 'no retaliation' rule, not to mention any number of policies prohibiting the behavior I'm describing to you here, were I to make a written complaint about my coworkers, I'd be out of a job. Not only would I be ostracized by just about everyone I work with, but the pathetic union who purports to represent us without doing anything for us would insist I be fired.

This for, you know, ratting out my fellow union brethren for breaking the rules. It's a pretty messed up situation.

But the one thing I absolutely, positively will not tolerate is proselytization. I am not in that death trap of a building to be preached at by some ignorant twit or another, particularly when they don't practice what they preach. Especially when they haven't got the slightest meaning what the text behind their gibberings are actually trying to tell them. No, I'm there to make money, not church buddies.

So when these obnoxious Bible cards started appearing in the restroom, I simply threw them away. Repeatedly. Day in and day out. But I guess whoever was leaving them (*cough* Professor Beatshiskids *cough*) thought this meant that people were taking the message to heart, and began to pepper our entire work area with the accursed things. So I, I have had enough.

Thus, my handiwork. I'll be drawing intentionally crude, obscene, and overall offensive things all over these cards wherever they turn up. Eventually, someone in management will notice the horrible things, and we will likely have a talking to. When this happens, I'll be asking why someone is attempting to convert their fellow coworkers, thus making the joint an even more hostile workplace.

The resultant fallout should put a stop to this altogether. But if not, I have many Sharpies ™.

Don't Try This At Home

September 4th, 2018

I am infested!

I was ambling out of the house at 5:20-something in the morning, stumbling towards my car in order to get to work after a nice, four day weekend, when it happened. I stuck my key in the car door, and made the apparent mistake of inhaling. Something made a beeline for my windpipe at that precise moment, zipping from wherever it was lurking into my throat right as I took in two lungfuls of air.

I'm amazed that I didn't wake the neighborhood with the resultant retching. I'm further amazed that I didn't throw up as my body continued to revolt while whatever was in my windpipe wriggled around in an escape attempt. My amazement is off the scale, in fact, that I didn't violently throw up due to the ceaseless hacking and sputtering I engaged in during the next four hours of its struggle.

You're reading this, of course, so you know I somehow managed to survive my battle with Suicide Bug. I guess it finally gave up the ghost, and is slowly decomposing in my lungs as we speak. Or, alternately, it finally made it into my foodpipe and became a bit of additional protein for your friendly neighborhood Jerk. Don't know, don't really care. Just glad it's done tormenting me.

Or is it?

Note: that critter pictured here isn't what actually tried to murder me via divebombing my respiratory system. Or, again, is it?! I just managed to take a photograph of what was, ostensibly, a baby mantis, and felt like sharing it. At least, I think it's a baby mantis, because it doesn't look like any grasshopper I've ever seen. What am I, an entomologist? Read a book!

The Pixels Less Traveled

August 31st, 2018

I'd mentioned last week that I was an avid player of City of Heroes while the game was still live. I had built literally hundreds of different heroes, villains, and whatevers with which to adventure within the various terrain generated by the City's developers. Some of these characters stood above their brethren in my eyes, however, and saw major 'face time' as they gobbled up every moment not spent adulting.

Unlike a lot of City players, however, I tried to avoid the so-called Flavor of the Month characters. There were regularly combinations of power sets that one could take that were readily game-breaking, and one could usually run roughshod over anything the City could throw at you. The problem with investing your time in a character like this is that, inevitably, they're going to be nerfed into oblivion.

As is often the case in my life, I liked to march to the beat of my own drum while lurking in the City, and would act contrary to popular wisdom. Dash Apostrophe notwithstanding (since they never did figure out how to neutralize the regeneration power set), I had a tendency to build 'challenge' characters, folks with one or two power sets that were considered vastly underperforming, if not impossible to play solo.

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The tanker archtype was built to be tough defensively, yet soft on the offense, the better to hold the line while other characters squished the bad guys. The worst primary power set amongst these characters was ice armor, as it was primarily built on avoiding being hit, as opposed to withstanding damage directly. And ice melee was universally believed to be the worst tanker secondary, for its output was abysmal.

So barely a year into my life in the City, I took it upon myself to build a tanker using these power sets: Crystalline! Crystalline is Becky Abrams, an inventor who developed and miniaturized a technology to instantly freeze water, doing so in a variety of useful shapes. Drawing moisture from the air, she could wrap herself in an icy suit of armor, craft ice-based weaponry, and even freeze opponents on the spot!

Though it was incredibly slow-going, since nobody wanted to team with an ice tanker, I ground on Crystalline until she hit the max level in the game - and then beyond, once the 'end game content' was released. Naturally, as other power sets were nerfed into oblivion, her utility became more apparent to the unwashed masses, and eventually she had all the adventures alongside other heroes she could stand.

Bonus nerdery: Crystalline 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

No, Seriously

August 30th, 2018

How do you really feel?

When Superheroes Let Themselves Go

August 24th, 2018

Back in the day, I used to play a game called City of Heroes. It was right up my proverbial alley, in that I'm a big nerd about super heroes, to some extent. This was the first massively-multiplayer online game devoted to this subject matter, and when it came out I had no choice but to pick it up. I even got a few friends of mine hooked on the thing, thus causing us to lose thousands of hours to the pastime.

The game was set up so you could build all kinds of different characters, and go for broke with them. Hundreds of different power combinations, millions of different costume combinations, and a rather leisurely learning curve meant that I tried out just about everything I could possibly think of over the course of my time in the City. But one of my characters received a lot more face time than the rest.

Dash Apostrophe is a biker who, while moping in the desert one night after his girlfriend dumped him, got hit by a falling space rock. Torn apart, his dismembered body lay buried under the earth for decades, until itinerant college students, using a metal detector, found a portion of said space rock wedged into his skull. Suddenly regenerating an entire body from that old bone, Dash returned!

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Reborn in a world literally overflowing with super heroes and super villains, Dash did what any sensible person would, once he realized that space rock could heal any injury in mere moments: he got in on the action. Having that space rock forged into a sword by an old buddy, Dash began carving up scofflaws for fun and profit. And since his sword healed them afterwards, they couldn't sue for damages!

This is Dash Apostrophe, here, detailed thanks to a couple screenshots I took while the game was still live. Yeah, City of Heroes is no more, its Korean owners deactivating it because it wasn't making enough money. Which is odd, as all of their other games tank after about a year, and the City was raking in cash, year after year, hand over fist, due to the considerable fan base that remained. You know, like me.

I liked the game and my goofball slice-and-dice hero so much, in fact, that I dressed as him for Halloween, back in 2007. Why haven't you heard about this until now, you ask? Well, for one thing, the pictures are embarrassing, and another, I'd actually lost them until I started rebuilding the Banality into the Obnoxious Jerk. As I am continuously humiliating myself online anyway, I figured why not share 'em.

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So there you have it. Some nostalgic images of the most infamous, showboating loudmouth in the City of Heroes, as well as some photos of a tubby clown emulating him. Minus the leather jacket, which Dash wore incessantly once the developers introduced one that didn't suck. Oh, and the ability to change costumes once you'd created your hero. Yeah, it was a perpetual work in progress, but I loved it.

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

Animal Cracker Activists

August 21st, 2018

Bleary-eyed, I stumbled to my bench in the death trap I ostensibly work at, feeling as though I hadn't managed nearly enough sleep, as is always the case. You would think by now that I'd be used to functioning on five or less hours of rest per day, with a day or so during the weekend to play catch-up. Of course, I was a barely-functional insomniac for years, so naturally I would assume five is more than enough.

The moment I began to determine what I'm supposed to be doing today, the Tea Party Princess began gibbering, loudly and incoherently, at her bench. I used to sit a far, far distance away from the Tea Party Princess, which meant that I only had to deal with her bigoted and farcical rants in our break room, which is why I regularly take my breaks as far as I can from said break room while still being on the premises.

Not remotely ready for this yet, I nonetheless girded my loins, and prepared for another screed about liberals, or immigrants, or welfare recipients, or whatever else had managed to get her bloomers in a twist this time. Imagine my surprise when, out of the blue, she looked at me wide-eyed, and blurted out that PETA had forced the Barnum's Animal Crackers people to change their packaging to no longer feature animals in cages.

I found this remarkable, because PETA is a terrorist group full of animal-killing hypocrites, so I can't imagine anyone actually taking anything they say to heart, much less 'demands'. Furthermore, animal crackers aren't, uh, animals, so they're out of PETA's jurisdiction. Thus, with my brains already running out my ears, I had to wait until my first break to look this hogwash up, and this is what I found.

So, apparently PETA making suggestions magically transformed into demands in the minds of the right-wing radio scumbags that the Tea Party Princess dotes on when not excoriating the 'fake news' all the neo-Nazis are on about these days. And then I had to hear about it, at considerable length, all through the morning today. And you people wonder why I hate this dump and almost everyone in it.

You. People. Wonder.

Alex Jones Lost the Info Wars

August 6th, 2018

After an inordinate amount of time spent by activists repeatedly asking Big Media whether or not his terror campaign against the parents of mass shooting victims was against their terms of service, amongst various other odious acts, Apple was the first to finally answer that question - namely by booting Alex Jones and his vile conspiracy theory tripe from the iTunes store.

Like dominoes, social media sites followed suit, as Spotify, Facebook, and YouTube didn't want to look like they condoned, say, death threats against government officials. Thus Chunky Monkey, the man who inspired a crazed gunman to combat-assault a pizza parlor to uncover a child sex ring in their nonexistent basement, can now only spread his filth on his own sites.

Naturally, his followers took this in stride, knowing the Constitution guarantees both freedom of speech and association, including the ability of citizens and corporations to refrain from either. After all, they wouldn't want the government to force them to say things they found unpalatable, much less to support organizations they disagree with using their hard-earned money, right?

Ha ha, no, they completely lost their minds.

Within moments of their content no longer being transmitted by the above platforms, much less having the kibosh put on their Pinterest site, Alex Jones' lieutenants bleated all over Twitter about how they had been censored. Immediately after that, countless followers of Jones, who were similarly clueless about how the Constitution's free speech protections actually work, jumped off that cliff as well.

Normally supportive of the free market and despising government interference of any sort, these people were repeatedly calling on the government to force these companies to resume transmitting content they deemed too toxic for their bottom line. Some went so far as to claim that now is the time to nationalize these companies, to guarantee that their holy huckster could continue to weigh them down.

And this from so-called conservatives?

The Great Banal Jerk

July 31st, 2018

What's all this then, you ask?

Way back in the year 2001, I started a web log known as the Great Satan. The idea was for me to ramble on about whatever I felt like at the time, and I wrote a bunch of material for the thing. Things transpired, however, and when I abandoned that site and the attached domain, I lost the vast majority of what I wrote for it. This despite me usually being a digital packrat.

Anyhow, I got the urge to write for myself again a few years later, and scored banality.com for a song. It seemed like a great place for me to continue transforming the static from my brain into digital bits and bytes and bleeps and bloops to entertain and enrage those foolish enough to follow my broken thought processes. I was apparently brain damaged at the time, after all.

I hung onto that domain for about a decade, give or take, until I passed it along to my significant other, Brenda. She has better uses in mind for it, after all, but this left me in need of a new domain for my highly irregular schedule of rants and raves about this and that. Poking around, I discovered that, amazingly, obnoxiousjerk.com was still available for purchase!

So what you're seeing here is the third iteration of my web log. I've imported all the old material from the Banality here, and I have cleansed it of references to that domain, for the most part. All of its posts are primarily web address-neutral at this point, save for those that needed to specifically refer to the Banality, in the unlikely event that I move this material to a fourth domain.

Even better, I found at least one of the old Great Satan posts I made, way back in 2003, so I was able to create a fifteen year continuity of sorts for my online writings, albeit one punctuated by vasts gaps of time where I was either not writing or not right in the head. And both occurred with great frequency in the time period between 2003 and 2009, that's for sure!

So welcome. Welcome to the Obnoxious Jerk! The idea here is to simply continue the same chicanery I engaged in on my previous two web log sites, so if you're at all familiar with them, this will seem like old hat. And if not, why, there's already a huge library of material for you to read, the better to get to know the author. Which means you, too, may be happily referring to him by the site's name soon!

If only the American media had a spine. If only.

June 25th, 2018

The media in our nation has chosen a curious hill to die on. When faced with a literal Nazi throwing children into literal concentration camps, simply to make his micropenis hard for once, they've decided that the true tragedy in this mess is how uncivil the discourse in this country has become. Sure, kids are being literally stolen by the government, but can't we all just get along?

No, you insipid douchebags, we can't. If my grandfather could straight-up kill Nazis doing this to other human beings back during World War II, we have not only a right, but a duty, to oppose Cheeto Jesus and his fascist grifters every single step of the way. It's not too late to handle this within the system, so everybody needs to step up and actually do their part, even if it's just mouthing off to these fiends.

But the media in our country, oh no. Instead of seriously calling out our government for doing things that we have literally invaded other countries over, they want to quibble about how mean we are being to each other, and whether or not filthy Nazi sociopaths should be allowed to eat in peace. Anything to avoid actually taking a stand against the crimes against humanity that Littlefingers perpetrates hourly.

So, overpaid media morons who lack a clue regarding how this works, let me make this simple enough for even your vapid, effete minds to comprehend. No, we don't have to treat those who steal immigrant children and sell them off to the highest bidder with kid gloves. And we sure as Hell are going to hound them everywhere we see them, because they need to be as miserable as those they've made to suffer.

Also, screw you for even making me have to explain this in the first place. Do your jobs, already.