Y'all a Bunch of Troll-Beasts

I'm sorry. I can't stand it anymore. I have an announcement to make to the office. You all are, without exception, a bunch of horrid troll-beasts. Please, have a seat and allow me to elaborate.

Christine, there is no reason to belch aloud fifteen times a day. I'm assuming that there is nothing medically wrong with you, other than your troll lineage. When you belch, your lips vibrate, almost exactly like Homer Simpson's. Do you want to be a fucking cartoon character, Christine? Keep your gases inside yourself, for everyone's sake.

Barbara, you do not need to constantly fart and then laugh about it. It's not that funny; in fact, it's rather sad. Your farts smell like death and brewer's yeast. I can't imagine what you put into your body to make it manufacture an odor so repugnant. I don't want to ever smell any of your farts again.

I feel like I'm the only one who has the slightest idea what constitutes proper office etiquette. And before you say something, Hilda, just because I don't constantly talk about the health of my vagina does not mean that I'm a rich person. I make just as little as you do. I just learned long ago that there are some thing that you do not share with one person, let alone the whole office.

Ted, if you show up tomorrow smelling like a sack of wet Indian food, I swear, I am going to throw up. It's called deodorant, Ted. Apply it liberally, or at least hose yourself off before you walk in the door.

Sandy, I don't understand how one person can produce so much garbage. Do you ever consider the impact you are having on the environment? Of course you don't; you don't see anything wrong with drinking ten diet cokes and then throwing the cans away. Goddamn it, I put the recycling right next to the trash can! I did that for you, Sandy! Fucking try, just a little bit.

That's all this is about, really. I just want you people to fucking try to act like civilized human beings. Pretend that you're meeting the President or Ted Nugent or whoever the fuck you people respect. Would you burp in Ted Nugent's face? Well yes, I know you would, Christine, but I'm talking to the other troll-beasts. There's still hope for some of them.

Well fine then. Keep ignoring me. Continue to be troll-beasts. If you can't manage the slightest sliver of self-respect, then I'll keep referring to you all as subhuman monstrosities. I may work with you all, but I have my dignity. I can keep my bodily gases from noisily escaping my orifices. I'm not a human trash machine. You all can go eat some cigarettes. Troll-beasts.

There's too Much of Everything

There's too damn much of everything out there. Take music. There are more genres than I have fingers and toes, and that's too damn many genres, lemme tell you! I haven't bought a record since 2005, and it was a Flaming Lips record, and for that I am truly sorry. I don't know shit about all the streaming services. People don't buy music anymore, I guess, unless it's on vinyl, because people like to waste their money. At this point, I'm convinced that music is for hipsters because nobody likes to waste more money on intangibles than hipsters. Get off my lawn, hipsters! Take your Korean noise pop and shove it up your ass.

There are too many damn tv shows out there as well. Netflix is full of shit based off of other shit. You want a cyberpunk Game of Thrones full of gratuitous nudity and violence? Well then, watch Altered Carbon. Are you yearning for an eighties pastiche of Stephen King and Stephen Spielberg? Watch Stranger Things. You like raunchy cartoons like Family Guy? Hello Bojack Horseman (which is better than Family Guy). Every network has a big budget show. SyFy has the Expanse, which is wonderful, but I don't want to pay attention to every goddamn episode! Give me old school Star Trek, where I could enjoy a one-off about Riker catching an alien STD on a pleasure planet. I'm subscribing to five different streaming services, for chrissakes. Why is that? How did it come to this?

Movies are just as bad. I haven't seen a non-superhero movie in theaters in five years, and I don't even like superheroes that much! Last year, a Justice League movie came out with Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman in it and nobody saw it! Every year we get a Star Wars film. Evey year Marvel pumps out another flick. I used to see good movies in theaters like There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men. What the fuck happened? Do they still make movies without superheroes in them?

Lastly, what about video games? Five-thousand games debut on Steam every day. Everybody plays multiplayer shit where you run around aimlessly for fifteen minutes until someone shoots you from behind a tree half a mile away, and then you wait ten minutes to respawn. Hipsters have taken over the gaming industry now. I don't want to play a goddamn game about how you found your grandma's cat murdered by elves, rendered in glorious 8 bit color. What happened to fragging, damn it? Where have all the Quake-killers gone?

I'm old, damn it. This world isn't for me. Youtube and Twitch and Smartphones are for the next generation. Excuse me while I lumber off somewhere to read the paper in my outhouse. Let me know when it is five o'clock. That's dinner time.

Nerd Column: Defending the Last Jedi

The Nerd Column is a feature I've add to the blog so that I can participate in mindless pop culture debates and save my vast readership from more anti-Trump posts and the heartwarming confessional poetry of the Goon. First up: Undeserved criticism of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, the only Star Wars film to feature a jedi milking a giant blue sea monster with human-like breasts, therefore making it my favorite.

The Last Jedi had a controversial reception from Star Wars fans. I personally enjoyed it more than any Star Wars movie since the originals. Most of the criticism stems from three main points, which I will go over below.

#1) Oh my God, they killed Snoke and we never really knew him! Spoiler! The Last Jedi really didn't give a shit about fan-theories. Big baddie Snoke was speculated to be the Emperor reincarnated, Darth Vader, Darth Plageus, Jesus, Gollum, or even a fucking hologram by the collective wisdom of the internet. Instead of doing something stupid, director/writer Rian Johnson has Snoke murdered half-way through the film by his protegee, Kylo Ren. Let's face it, people: Snoke was a stupid character. He was exactly the same as the Emperor. Does this sound familiar? A deformed dark side master lures a young jedi away from the light side of the force. Rian Johnson fixed J.J. Abrams mistake by killing him off rather unceremoniously. What satisfying explanation did people expect? How do you explain Snoke's missing presence during all the other Star Wars films? There's no good answer, so having him go out like a jabroni was the best thing Johnson could have done.

#2) What they did to Luke was character assassination! So Luke Skywalker has a moment of weakness when he finds out that his nephew Ben Solo has been playing around with the dark side and briefly considers lopping Ben's head off with his laser sword before he can pretend to be Emo Darth Vader. When Ben wakes up to see pyscho-Luke looming over him with an ignited lightsaber, he causes the room to collapse around them and escapes. When Luke comes to, Ben/Kylo has burned down his jedi academy, and he's so overcome with shame and guilt that he runs away to a penguin-inhabited planet to die like a mangy old hermit. Luke wouldn't have done all that shit! scream the critics. My childhood is irrevocably ruined! I think people are missing the point of Luke's arc. He was already the hero of the original trilogy; now he's the reluctant mentor coming to terms with his mistakes. Did fans want to see Luke take on Kylo Ren or Snoke in an epic lightsaber battle? Did we not get enough pointless lightsaber battles in the prequel trilogy? Mark Hamil is an old man, and he's not going to be bouncing around the walls like Yoda on crack. Before Lucas turned the Force into a superpower in the prequels, it was a mystical... force that bound all living things. "Wars do not make one great," said Yoda in Empire. Well we all know that Yoda was a goddamn hypocrite, but Luke learns his lesson by the end of the film, sacrificing himself to provide a distraction so that the rebels can escape, and he does it in a way that adds to his legend rather than his ego.

#3) Rey isn't a Skywalker/Solo/Kenobi/Palpatine, how is she so goddamn powerful? This is a weird argument to me. In the prequels, we see that there were thousands of jedi, implying that the force is not the exclusive property of the Skywalkers. Having Rey not be from a royal lineage makes her more of a hero in my eyes. Haven't the Skywalkers fucked up enough shit already? Like Snoke, people are really just pissed that their fan theory turned out to be untrue.

Bonus Bull) Bombs don't fall in space/Holdo Manueveur/This movie's too PC! Alright, people are nitpicking at this point. Sure, bombs don't fall in space, but there's no sound in space, either, and Star Wars movies have never cared about scientific accuracy. It's fantasy, not sci-fi. As for the second, I never really understood the objection. How do we know nobody's tried kamikaze lightspeed ramming before? Maybe the First Order didn't expect it because the Rebels have almost no ships left at that point. Suicide attacks don't seem like the Rebellion's way. For the final criticism, you're just an asshole if you object to a more diverse Star Wars Universe.

Hanging with the Goon

You all like sticks? I sure do.

Howdy partners, its been a good adn long time since teh Goon laid his eyes on teh interwebs and told folks about this sorry mess called Life. Last time I spokee to ya'lls, I was thinkin' bout heading down to Mexico to rescue Hernando from Vanilla Ice and his crew, but taht got called off cuz I was busted fer drunk drivin' wit out me pants or shoes on. Sense I also had one pound of Cokecain in my truck, theys was gonna put teh ol' Goon away fer a very long time. Luckily, I am three-quarters cousins wit Attorney Gerneral Jeff Sessions, an after I wrote him a long letter about how drugs an teh liberal media have ravaged our family, he let me off teh hook by arranging to have teh door to me cell be left unlocked, inablin teh Goon to escape. Now I'm on teh run, just like Hernando was, though I don't think Vanilla Ice is after me, far as I know. Don't tell anybody, but I'm hidin' in teh ochard, eatin' worms and rotten apple skins an' waiting till teh coast is clear an I can start my ol' time life agains. Sam discovered me one day pissin' on an apple tree, an he putt me back to work picking up prunings. Now if none of yas have ever pruned an apple tree, its mighty hard work, lemmee tell ya. You have to shape it like a South-eastern Indiana lady, that is, like a pear that's about to explode out its bottom-side. I done F'ed-up too many trees last year so Sam don't let me prune none. Pickin' up sticks is my business now. It is my life.

When I close my eyes at night, I sees sticks. When I look at my fingers real good, I sees sticks. When I eat dinner, I sees sticks (sometimes I eat sticks, so that's why taht is). I counted teh stick piles in teh orchard one day an I counted four-hundred and twenty-seven an three-quarters. What are we gonna do wit all them sticks? Well, we're gonna bury them. Some, we're gonna burn. Others, we're gonna haul to teh dump. Even more we will feed to teh chipper. Any thats left I'm a gonna build a house out of to live in full-time. I has had enough of trailer livin. I has embraced teh outdoors.

That there above is me me prototype. Do ya think I can cajoule any perty ladies to come an touch my pillow snake in the humble confines of this dwelling? I think, if teh Goon makes a point to brush his teeth and comb teh worms outta his hair that he has as good a chance as anybody. Tilll next time, God bless.

How Much of You Do the Big Four Own?

Not what I was going for, but oh well.

Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook are worth a combined 2.8 trillion dollars. Despite all that cash, they all pay well under the corporate tax average in the US (Facebook only pays a 4 percent tax rate!). All that revenue is going to a small number of people--Facebook only employs 23,000. Sure, you might know a lot of people that work at an Amazon warehouse, but how much are they getting paid? Is our increasing servitude to these four companies worth the disruption they cause the economy when one of them puts yet another company out of business? I don't think so: these companies are vast data mining operations that sell every piece of info they can glean from you to the highest bidder. In the futile interest of reducing the onset of the surveillance state (hah, it's been here for a while), I'm going to examine my usage of the four aforementioned companies and figure out if I really need the services they provide.

Amazon--I've had a Prime membership for three years, but I don't really need it. I don't order a whole lot from Amazon. Their streaming service is my least watched app--none of their original series have grabbed my attention, and the exact same movies can be watched on Hulu. I do use a Firestick to watch TV, but you don't have to have Prime to use one. It is awful damn convenient to order books from them, since there isn't a bookstore in my vicinity. However, you don't need Prime to order stuff. I think I could cancel our Prime membership, if I can talk my wife into it.

Apple--I've never purchased an Apple product. I used to have an Ipod, but it was given to me by my sister. Apple's entire strategy is to design nice-looking products and charge a lot more for them than they are worth. Since I've resolved never to get a smartphone until it is government-mandated, I have little use for them. Their PCs are shit, and tablets are for children. As far as I'm concerned, the world's most valuable company ain't worth shit.

Facebook--Facebook also sells a product that I'm not interested in. It was fun in Facebook's nascent days to check out girls and keep tabs on friends while I was in college, but as an adult I have no use for fake news and shitty design. Seriously, every time I log in the whole interface is so terrible I have to wonder what all those billions are being used for; I assume Zuckerburg is building an underwater lair in the shell of an old volcano. If you care about somebody, visit them in person or call them on the phone. Stop putting your life up on Facebook for them to data mine at their pleasure. My profile picture is the face of William Riker, and my birthday date is listed as January 1st, 1901. The only reason I have a profile at all is for my business. Otherwise, I'd never use Facebook.

Google--Ah, and here is where my snarky attitude and smug superiority fail me. I use Google for everything. If I have a question, I google it. This blog is provided free of charge from Google Blogger. I have 10 gigs in my Google Drive, 10 gigabytes of music and writing that I've done over the years. My email account is a Gmail account. I do use Firefox as my browser instead of Chrome, but big whoop. Youtube is full of nerds commenting on bullshit, but that doesn't mean I've never uploaded a video myself. I suppose I could backup my data on multiple hard drives like I used to in the past, but it is so damn convenient to be able to access the same document on multiple computers using Google Drive. I'm probably not going to change my email, and this blog ain't moving. Perhaps I should start using Bing to look up shit, but Microsoft is basically the granddaddy of the big four, and is Bing still around? Fine, Google. I surrender. Please don't sell my secrets. I swear they aren't worth anything.

Weightlifting: 2018 Goals

Remember this stupid commercial?

2018 is the year of hypertrophy, the year to add muscle mass and not worry about how much I squat, bench, or deadlift. Due to the back injury I've written about here, I haven't been able to squat or deadlift without pain for a while, so the focus on bodybuilding is a side effect of that fact. Increasing volume and intensity comes before adding weight to the bar. Here's the program I've been doing lately:

Day One: Chest/Back--I've been using only three exercises, the bench press, cable row, and pulldowns, alternating the two back movements. I don't feel like I need more variation than that, since I've always had big pecs naturally, and the upper back doesn't need anything besides vertical and horizontal pulling. I've never seen the need to do direct trap work.

Bench press: 5 to 6 sets of 8 to 10 reps, starting with at least 50 percent of my max, and going up into the 70 percent range.

Cable row/pulldown: 5 to 6 sets of 10 reps.

Day Two: Shoulders/Arms--Currently, I'm not doing much overhead pressing, since the bench press takes care of the front delts, and my manual labor job is hard on my shoulders.

Side laterals: 3-5 sets of 10 reps.

Dumbbell face pulls: 3-5 sets of 10 reps.

Barbell/DB curls: 5 sets of 10 reps.

Pressdowns: 5 sets of 10-12 reps.

Day Three: Legs. No heavy squats, but split squats (essentially a lunge with one foot on a bench) are a decent replacement. Considering getting a leg press, but I don't think I need one.

Split squats: 5 sets of 10 reps.

Leg extensions: 5 sets of 12 reps.

Leg curls: 5 sets of 10.

Dumbbell calf raises: 5 sets of 12.

And that's it. I do this routine once a week, sometimes switching up exercises. I might do a strength block in a month or two to switch things up.

New Old Music: Wish There Were Some Air

A very old song about drowning underwater (not really). I think it's one of the better singer-songwriter pieces I've done.

Writer's Block: Life without Squats

I look at my power rack

and see a rusted frame

a weak monument

to the greater ambitions

of a less-compressed spine.

I can still squat on my toes;

I can use the toilet like any man.

I can tie my shoes,

put on my socks,

lift the litter off the floor.

Lunges are a poor substitute;

leg extensions are for babies

and people scared of weights.

I console myself with the fact

that the Rock doesn't do squats.

My legs won't atrophy without them,

for it is not their destiny to be

balsa wood sticks.

As Jeff Goldblum said,

"Life will find a way."

And so I will persevere,

while my power rack gathers dust.

Good bye, old friend.

May I use you again some day.

New Old Music: Time Machine

A song about the underclass, married to a techno beat. No idea why I called it "time machine."

2018 Fake News Predictions

Look at this shithead.

As the White House releases today a controversial (i.e., bullshit) House intelligence memo alleging FBI bias in the Russia investigation, Pointless Venture thought we'd make a few predictions on future news/fake news developments for 2018 because why the fuck not? We're living in Trump's world, which means if you say something enough times, then it becomes true. Maybe at the end of the year, if we're all still here, we'll examine this post and see if any of these came true. Let's hope not!

Prediction 1: President Trump's true weight will leak to the press, and Sarah Huckabee Sanders will have to lie to Americans and say that the President does not weigh 300 lbs. Let's get this straight--the President is fat and full of orange dough. He does not weigh 239 lbs, and it's doubtful he's 6'3. I will give it to him that he must be a medical miracle, because he's still alive even though his daily diet seems to consist of KFC and charred steak.

Two men, clearly the same height.

Prediction 2: President Trump will be recorded using the N-word. He already called African nations "shithole countries". There has to be a non-negligible chance that a live mic catches the President using a racial slur. If this happens, cue all the GOP politicians defending Trump, saying that the President didn't mean it while his base continues to not give a shit. Tax cuts!

Prediction 3: The Piss Tape will be proven real and leaked on the net. Is it a little far-fetched to believe that Donald Trump went to Russia and paid prostitutes to piss on a bed that the Obama's slept on? I dunno. He seems to have paid a porn star 100 grand to have an affair and nobody cares. And despite what Congress would have you believe, his Russia connections are very real. Donald Trump, by all accounts, is a very petty, stupid man, having been filthy rich enough his entire life to avoid the consequences of his behavior. Therefore, we give this one a pretty high chance of happening.

Prediction 4: Republicans will continue to give no shits about democratic institutions. Mitch "the bitch" McConnell was recently quoted as saying "2017 was the best year for conservatives" in his entire career. Anybody wondering whether Trump will be impeached if the Russia investigation reaches a conclusion unfavorable to the President has their answer in the Senate Majority Leader's quote.

Prediction 5: Nobody will know what to believe anymore. We're basically already at this point. Sure, intelligent people are not distrusting what they read on Politico or hear on CNN, but since when have intelligent people made up the majority of the electorate? Apparently, a large number of people get their news from Facebook, which has done jack-shit to purge its newfeed of fake news. I guess when President for life Zuckerberg topples Trump in a bloody coup and forces us all to have social media installed directly into our eyeballs, we may finally see the error of our ways.

Prediction 6: Stupid people will continue being stupid. Remember when Jerry Sandusky was convicted of sexually assaulting young boys as a member of the Penn State football program? Remember how Penn State fans vehemently protested the NCAA's punishment, to the point that the NCAA erased the four year ban after two years? Football was all that mattered to these people; the terrible sexual abuse of children for a period of fifteen years by an assistant coach of the Nittany Lions may as well not have happened. Trump is the Republican Party's Jerry Sandusky. He's doing what he can to fuck over the marginalized, but team players are blind to these abuses because he's on their team. He's a part of their identity. Yankee fans hate the Red Sox. Everybody but New Englanders hate the Patriots. Logic doesn't figure into the debate. If it did, stupid people wouldn't be stupid.

New Old Music: Heart Beat

An ancient song from 2009 that I wrote for the woman that would become my wife.