A Tutorial: How to Enjoy Guinness at Home

Step 1: Don Guinness Hoodie. I also have Guinness pajamas, but it's not bedtime yet.

Step 2: Locate Guinness Messenger Bag. 

Step 3: Remove Guinness bottle opener keychain from said bag.

Step 4: Obtain bottle of Guinness and remove cap using aforementioned bottle opener.  

No substitutes.

Step 5:  Remove Guinness glass from cupboard.

Step 6: Locate and inspect Guinness pouring spoon.  Oooh Shiny.

Step 7: Use Guinness pouring spoon to fill Guinness glass with Guinness.

Step 8: Chug & Enjoy.

My Adventures in World of Warcraft, or How To Use A Meat Shield

Ah, the MMORPG, the Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game. They have become a household concept, even for the non-gamer. Anyone who has access to the interwebs has heard of World of Warcraft and its legion of over 12 million players. Even homemaker websites geared toward soccer moms and housewives have ads spashed all over them about the wonderful World of Warcraft (which I'll refer to henceforth as just "WoW").

There's more than just WoW. There's literally hundreds of MMORPGs. I won't list any here because well, you're on a computer right now. Look it up yourself. It's called "Google," sheesh!

Each major online game has its own community full of elitists; people who think they are superior because their online game is THE BEST and they are among THE BEST *in* that game. People who play other online games are just facerolling, knuckle dragging parameciums who, because they also think their own game is the best, are generally considered to be assholes by everyone else. (Yes, it is okay to note the circular logic and parallels to religion here).

*Facerolling is a derrogatory term used to describe the playing tactics of another player; one who is so bad that it can only be rationalized by imagining that the player uses his or her forehead to hit the buttons on the keyboard.

My own personal Journey has left me in a peculiar place. My very first MMO was Final Fantasy XI, where I played a cute little Tarutaru for 5+ years. In this game, everyone thought WoW was the ultimate evil.

I had to retire my beloved Tarutaru because Final Fantasy was becoming too time consuming.

 Not in the sense that I became addicted and all my time was going into it, but in the sense that I didn't have the patience nor the time required to accomplish anything at the point in the game I had reached.

I experimented with a few other online games, none of which held any lasting interest for me. They lacked the appeal that Final Fantasy once held.

I was urged by a few friends to try out WoW. My mind reeled at the thought. WoW was for facerolling elitist parameciums!

"But it will be fun," they said.

I decided I wasn't really a turncoat if I only tried out the 10 day trial. After all, one must infiltrate and assess the enemy before making an attack.

Then, I became the enemy.

Six months later, I have a level 60 gnome rogue on Alliance side, and at the behest of my super awesomest friend, have started a character on the Horde side; a Blood Elf rogue. Sexy. Pigtails too. Double sexy.

Now that I've admitted to being a turncoat, I will also admit that while there are a lot of facerolling parameciums in WoW, there's also a lot of cool people. But still, my main purpose for playing is to have fun with my friend. He plays a Blood Elf too, by the way.

Male Blood Elves are the metrosexuals of the gaming world. They are so vain that they make teenage girls look oblivious to their self image. They also have an evil streak a mile wide. This is exactly why a Blood Elf was the perfect choice for my dear friend. That and, they've managed to bring back the scrunchie. Yes, you heard me, the scrunchie. As he's explained it to me, "He's more woman than your average woman, and more manly than you'll ever hope to be."

Now, his Blood Elf is a level 85 Paladin...the knight in shining armor type...the...evil...knight in shining armor. This is great for someone like myself whose character is only a level 40s Rogue. While I'm quite capable of making things bleed profusely by sticking them with the pointy ends of my daggers (I'm really good at that), I'm a bit lacking in the erm...sturdiness department. Rogues were never really cut out to handle a good mauling.

This is where my evil Paladin friend comes in. I quickly stab angry monsters to death while they're distracted trying to beat up a guy that can handle the onslaught like a trooper. I guess you could say he's my meat shield.

Personally, I think he gets off on it. Kinky bastard. I mean, who volunteers to be the meat shield? The kind that enjoys a good beating...as long as you don't mess up his hair or get blood on his armor in the process.

Now, back to those paramecium types. Sometimes they take great joy in picking on people of lower level on the opposing "side" (remember, Alliance vs. Horde). There has been at least one occasion where I was in stealth mode, hiding in a dark corner in hopes of leaving my character unattended so I could go tinkle in the little girls room, and the evil interlopers found my hiding spot and attempted to have me killed.

So, that's when I send a little message to my friend. Within 3 minutes, he's there, slaughtering the transgressors with extreme prejudice, teabagging their corpses, and waiting for them to spawn back to life so he can slaughter and teabag them again. Rinse, repeat. Now that's what I call having a "homie's" back.

Lesson: Never mess with a girl gamer who's weaker than you...especially when she has to pee. She just might be best friends with the most evil level 85 Blood Elf Paladin on the server. If you do mess with her, You will get pwned. Then teabagged. Then pwned again. Here endeth the lesson.

Color Blind

Ahh, the joys of color blindness.  It's a strange disorder.  

It's not like Herpes or the Flu, where when you have it, you just KNOW. People with color blindness usually don't discover there's even an issue until someone in their life decides that having a unanimous agreement on the color of an object is life's highest priority.

This brings us to the meat and taters of this week's topic: color blindness pet peeves!

Pet Peeve #1:  Color nazis. If I call something "blue" and it's actually teal or turqoise, cut me some slack. You're lucky I'm even on the correct side of the color wheel.  

Pet Peeve #2: Don't tell me women can't be color blind.  Yes, I've heard the same thing before; women are carriers of the gene, but they can't have color blindness.  That's a load of crap. While it's especially rare for women to be color blind, it's not unheard of and it's not always caused by genetics. And, last I checked, I had all my lady parts.  Whether they're pink or coral, I can't tell.

Pet Peeve #3: Asking for opinions on colors within the same family.  "Should I wear the olive green shoes or the forest green shoes?"  Green is green is green. Correction: I can see two shades of green; light green and dark green. 

Pet Peeve #4: Testing my color vision with random objects like it's a trivia game. Unless I'm exceedingly drunk, doing this will only anger me. I may get the color wrong, but at least naming colors incorrectly isn't as debilitating as being a complete idiot.

Pet Peeve #5: Assuming I can't see color at all. True black/white color blind people are almost non existent. When people point out basic colors to me like I don't know the difference, I always want to talk LOUD...AND...SLOW  as though they're a foreigner learning English...or just stupid. 

Pet Peeve #6: Color coding when there are more than just a few parts. My christmas tree is a color coded 200 piece puzzle of shame and anger. Nothing says "It's Christmas" quite like a glass of spiked eggnog and a rage induced aneurysm while putting the tree together.

Now, I'm not one for total pessimism so I will state that there are some slight advantages to being color blind. 

Advantage #1: "Wow, you're an artist and you're color blind??" Yes, I like hearing that.  It's like hearing, "Wow, you're quadriplegic and you slam dunked that basketball?"  Heck yeah, I AM that awesome.

Advantage #2: I don't have to waste my time with clothing.  There's no matching or color coordination going on in MY closet, no way.  ALL my pants go with ALL my T-shirts and anything that isn't in those two categories are basic colors.  None of that "teal," "coral," and "beige" nonsense. 

Advantage #3: Some colors are really ugly from my understanding. "Baby Puke Green" or "Baby Shit Brown" are inconceivable to me, really. I'm actually pretty glad I don't have the color accuity to be reminded of baby excrement upon viewing a specific color.

Sometimes, colorblindness can actually be pretty dangerous under certain cirumstances, as I will illustrate:

My car's battery died and it needed a jump.

The wires and felt markers around the terminals had faded and/or become really dirty, so the usual red/black color scheme had become something than can only be described as two "ish" colors.

I stared at the battery under my hood for what seemed like an eternity.

I decided that the positive was on top and the negative was on bottom, as was the geography in my mother's car.

Like a nurse giving a direct blood transfusion, I connected the two batteries and expected the life of my mom's battery to magically get sucked into my car's.

That didn't happen.

Instead, I saw smoke and smelled something I imagine being similar to what the Grim Reaper would squeak out of his bony butt after a night of gorging on Taco Bell.

The jumper cables had caught fire. I panicked.  No, really, I panicked.

After regaining some semblence of sanity, I grabbed the first thing I could think of to help me:  a mop.  I smacked at the wires with the mop until they broke free of the battery.  Disaster averted.

Since then, I have started doubting my color acuity even more.  I can still tell red from green in well lit areas, but from now on, if something will explode or cause death because of a mix up in colors, I stay the hell away from it.

Just for shits and giggles, I browsed around on the interwebs to find a good color acuity test that could actually show the process and the scoring...just so you know exactly what it is I'm talking about.

This was after I attempted to put the little tiles in order, colorlogically speaking.  And yes, my monitor is calibrated.

A perfect score is a ZERO.

I don't know how high the scale goes, but 99 is as far as it'll go for telling you how bad you suck.

If you care to take the test yourself, here's the website. 

Cats are the devil, mama!

Kittens are notorious bullshit artists.  When people think of kittens, usually (unless they're serial killers) the first thing that pops into their heads are images of precious little four legged puffs of fur that exist soley to make humans act like idiots over their cuteness and dangle string in front of their faces.

Well, they're WRONG.  Kittens use their cuteness as a distraction from their real agenda: to slowly fray the ends of sanity of every cat owner on the planet.

Knocked over grandma's clock? Oh...but how can you stay mad?? She's so cute!!

Hacked up a furball in your slipper?  Cute.

Shredded the bottom half of your brand new living room furniture? Dammit, still cute.

They have the ability to make us more pissed off than a badger in a fun house hall of mirrors, yet we are incapable (in most cases) of causing bodily harm to the furry little bastards.

Why, you might ask, do I have this outrageous opinion that kittens are pure evil wrapped in snuggly fur?

Flash back to 1991.  My best friend's cat had kittens...cute little calico wads of meowing fuzz.  I remember the one she kept was named Mischief. The one I acquired was named Patches. In a few moments you will realize the misnomer.

Patches was Satan in feline form.  A day didn't go by where Patches wasn't causing my mom or my step dad to scream and curse the kitten's existence.  I, on the other hand, was way too young to have to deal with such nonsense as "pet responsibility," so I was far from realizing the terror this cat truly was - at first.

Here is a *short* list of the horrors we experienced at the hands of Patches, a 6 month old kitten.

-Patches would utilize god-like strength and dexterity to jump to the highest point in a door frame, latch claws, and slowly slide down the wood.  One time he was startled in mid maneuver, and actually managed to get stuck *to* the top of the door frame.

-Patches took great joy in making me afraid of the edge of the bed.  To this very day, I am uncomfortable with letting limbs dangle over the side of the mattress.

-Patches once fell into a bucket of white paint, and after climbing out, ran all over the fully carpeted two story apartment.

-Patches nearly destroyed a wedding cake worth several hundred dollars. Mom used to make them as part of her job as wedding planner.  Well, this cake ended up having an oddly placed plastic cherub to hide the huge bite mark the cat left behind after he literally dove into the cake. Mom swears to this day Patches smiled at her before making his escape.

-Patches smashed my mom's favorite anniversary clock.  It was no light thing and it was well towards the inside of the shelf.  It was clearly intentional.

-Grandma once spent a few days at our place watching Patches while we were gone on vacation.  We came back to find grandma sitting by the door with her coat on and her bags packed.  She warned us that she would never babysit "that demon cat" again.  We still don't know what Patches did to her.

-This one isn't necessarily evil, but worth mentioning.  My step dad was laying down for a nap. Patches sat on his chest. Every time my step dad opened his mouth on the inhale of his log sawing snore, Patches quickly stuffed his paw down the cavernous maw, presumably trying to reach that dangly thing in the back.  You'd be surprised how long it took before the step dad woke up.

-This is the smoking gun, irrefutable proof of why Patches was Satan in furry disguise.  The evil cat was cooked in the broiler of an oven and SURVIVED.

This deserves telling in more detail.  The step dad was making hamburgers in the broiler.  He momentarily left the broiler open and turned away.

Unbeknownst to us at the time, Patches crawled into the back of the broiler where he began to nom on raw hamburger meat.  Step dad turned back and closed the broiler door.

Moments later, my mom began flipping out because the oven was making strange banging noises.  We were all afraid that the oven was going to explode.

Step dad opened the broiler and out flies Patches with smoke and singed fur trailing behind him. The cat was obviously traumatized, but otherwise okay.  No cat should survive getting broiled.  No MORTAL cat.

Inevitably the day arrived when I came home from school and Patches was nowhere to be found.  Mom had given him away to an unsuspecting family.  There wasn't much debate or discourse on the topic, but even as a small kid, I wasn't overly sad to see him go.  He was the cat from hell, after all.  I just felt sorry for the family that got duped into taking Patches home.

You would think that after all of that, I would never subject myself to that type of torture again.  I had a few dogs over the years, but my man person does not enjoy dogs. Because we worked different shifts, I was lonely.  What do I adopt? A kitten!

Not six months later, my boss talked me into adopting a kitten he rescued.  Two kittens!

Somehow they've managed to survive to adulthood.  I love them, but they drive me absolutely bat shit insane.

Cats: Mission Accomplished.