Deacon hasn't missed a newspost in ages, so he'll probably get one out the door before the day is up. I actually read toothpastefordinner, and while I'm happy that some people are being surreptitiously directly here, I am also very, very cross with Jibble. It's not so much that he went behind our backs to work for drew; it's not even that he spent all that time entering in the text of a thousand "drawrings", that's just the sort of job autistic freaks like Jibble are designed for. What bugs me is that he sold himself cheap. The only compensation he received was a link back to UAC? That shit probably took him at least an hour and a half. From now on Deacon and myself will be acting as Jibble's agents, and anyone requesting his services will have to pay him a living wage plus various convenience charges and agents' fees. His work on UAC is more or less complete, and this website serves as a sort of resume for him, that's why we never paid him to do it. We continue to not pay him because he's our friend.

I've had a lot of time to myself recently, since I'm again on heroic probation (nothing to do with the events in today's comic). I had been hanging around Deacon in the afternoons but he got fed up with me eating all of his peanut butter m&m's and locked himself in his room, only giving the key to Ilene. So I started to hang out with Gordon. Usually I try not to be seen in public with either Gordon or Deacon, but sometimes you just have to swallow your pride and head off the mall with a tubby, smelly, depraved and sorry excuse for a self-proclaimed metrosexual, because Target is having a sale, and they're way cooler than Wal-Mart. Through my observation of Gordon over the past week or so, I've drawn some very disturbing conclusions about mankind in general.

It seems to me that most people are living their life as if it were an RPG. And as has been scientifically proven, all RPG's are a big fat waste of time. So why are we turning the miracle of life into nothing but a waste of time? Loots. We're all obsessed with making the game easy, it doesn't matter how boring, repetitive, or outright stupid and useless the process of leveling is, because we know that once we reach level 60 (or 99 if you're a squaresoft fan) and retirement/pension, nothing will be able to stand up to our might and accumulated enchanted flapdoodles of greater dilly-dallying, or astrophysics degree, if you've chosen the mage class. And the road to lvl 60 can be expedited too, all you have to do is choose the right class and skill tree, suck the right dicks, invest your points in all the right attributes at all the right times, and you can't lose. Just as in RPG's, there are differing play styles, there's the utter perfectionist, trying to win every battle without dying once, loading and re-loading from the same savegame hoping to breed that elusive gold chocobo, hoarding potions and leveling up against fodder in preparation for the final epic battle against Superbadguy that turns out to be a cakewalk. Then there's the happy go lucky true adventurer, meandering off into the dark and dangerous wood before he's even reached level 10. He sold his armour for a stylish leather cap and spent all his money gambling at the track. He'll probably end up dead 33 times before level 25, but so what, it's only a game, right? Anyway, most of us probably fall somewhere in the middle, attempting to sample a bit of everything the game has to offer.

In MMORPGs it's even worse. Take for instance WoW, you scrimp and save so that when you finally reach level 40 you can afford that mount that is as much a status symbol as a BMW 5 series. You join a guild or a clan and develop a twisted sense of fealty to your mates. Maybe you even find love and marry some tasty piece of night-elf who'll never actually age, bear children, or turn into a fatty. MMORPGs are, in a sense, even more similar to life, as there is always somebody with more time to waste than you, who has spent days upon days of playtime fighting the same enemies in the hopes of getting that one coveted item to drop. Everyone but the most powerful characters on the server are more or less useless. You can't simply explore the world, you are too weak. That's the way it is with life. SP RPG's on the other hand present the false hope you actually can become the most powerful snake charmer in the land, but as soon as you do, the game is over. There's no point in continuing, but then, there was no point in starting. Random battles (one of the most hated game mechanics in history, I believe) echo the essential randomness of the universe, but they are not really random in that they always happen eventually, and the enemies you face are always pretty much the same. Most RPG's never really challenge the player, and there are too many ways for the player to waffle the system by exchanging time for power. At least in the end, there's nothing you can do to save Aeris anyway.

Perhaps I am not drawing enough parallels here. You know that girl who is so uptight about marrying the ideal husband and having children at the exactly the right point in her life, 24, optimising her diet for the pregnancy, and doing god knows what else to ensure that her baby will be "perfect"? That kid is her avatar in an RPG. (MMO)RPGs can bring out the uptightness in even the best of us. It's a very rare few who use their potions whenever they feel like, spend gil like it ain't no thang, and don't agonise over whether to purchase the +1 mithril codpiece or save up and hold out for the +2. I wish I could say I was the easygoing type, like Bruce Willis, but I ain't. I spent damn near 80 hours in Final Fantasy Tactics, I got Cloud, his sword, and I leveled him up from 1 to like 70 or something insane like that. What do I have to show for it? It's not even an interesting story to tell. Thousands of people did basically the same exact thing. Maybe their battles played out differently, but it doesn't matter. And once again, why do we do it? Loots. In our cars, or back at our rented or owned domiciles, we maintain a stash of useless, cheap, manufactured crap that must be vigilantly guarded, protected, and increased for no real reason at all. So that's what most people become: shallow, personality lacking, generated avatars in an RPG that doesn't even exist, and without any of the pretend skills and abilities, too.

Too much iron in your blood can kill you. Too much irony, unfortunately, has no medical effect. Otherwise George W Bush would be doubled over in agony from signing a bill that simultaneously allows sex-phobic parents to filter DVDs and sodomizes file sharers. Buried in the article, just like it's buried in the legalese of the bill, is this little gem:

The bill makes it a federal crime to use video cameras to record films in movie theaters, and sets tough penalties of up to 10 years in prison for anyone caught distributing a movie or song prior to its commercial release.

It goes on to say that the maximum punishment for using a video camera in a movie theater is three years in prison--six years for a repeat offense. A more pessimistic person might predict that someone will be prosecuted under this law for using a camera phone in a theater, and a truly cynical person might posit that they won't even be filming the movie.

The bill also specifies that a person with a single prerelease copy of a film can face up to three years in prison. To put things in perspective, in the bill's author's home state of Texas, theft under $500 is a misdemeanor carrying a fine and no jail time. Which is to say that this new law encourages real theft over copyright infringement. Why would you risk jail time for a shaky screener with no sound when you can walk out of a store with a physical DVD and risk nothing but a fine?

It's the same kind of thinking that makes consensual anal sex between two men a crime in some states, punishable by prison time and, inevitably, non-consensual anal sex. People are watching movies without paying? Call the FBI, this is much worse than stealing.

If I were in government, I'd make being stupid a federal offense. You want the police to force people to pretend it's 1985 and the internet doesn't exist? Bring some lube, because your new cellmate isn't big on foreplay.

Corporations are like people. When they're young, they learn and adapt to their environment. As they age they get fat and complacent and want everything to stay the same as it was back before their wife, kids and mortgage sucked all the fun out of them.

The MPAA is a crotchety old man with false teeth waving a cane on his porch and screaming at the neighbourhood kids to stay off his damn lawn. Unfortunately for society, the cane he's waving is a $45 million lobbying budget, and "his" lawn is actually every lawn in the city. And he's a pædophile.

The one redeeming thing about old people is that statistically, they're closer to death than real people. However, some of them take a long time to die and make everyone miserable while they're doing it. In the same way that we need legal (and, cost permitting, humane) euthanasia for the elderly, we need a mechanism of breaking up decrepit old corporations that have outlived their usefulness. Or at the very least, some sort of corporate nursing home they can be committed to where they can whither away in private, and the rest of us can pretend they're already dead.

The last thing you should do with an old person is humour them. Nanna may not mean anything by it when she says she don't want no coloured boy washing her unmentionables, because times were different then, but no matter how much you nod and "uh huh" before leaving the room you still have to let the poor kid do his job.