Hi there. My name is Mike but most people call me Fruvous. Pleased to meet you.

Last few days have been decent. Still seems to be my destiny to feel like utter crap for an hour or two a day, no matter what. Oh well, that’s true of a lot of people.

Although in my case, caffeine does not seem to help. I get the feeling that the reasons I feel so bad have to do with dehydration, sinus pressure, and bad sleep, and those are not things you fix with an ice cold mug of diet cola.

All you can do is get through it. Drink water, try to convince your sinuses to drain, shake the last grains of sand from Mister Sandman out of your head, and keep it together till you feel better.

Kinda feels like every day I fall apart in my dreams, and when I wake up, I have to put myself together all over again. But luckily, that’s gotten a lot easier due to the recent strides in recovery.

I have fewer parts, and they fit together a whole lot better.

Check out this extremely decent bit of satire from Extremely Decent Films.

Good God, Cracked. A massive DIV tag? What is this, 2003? It’s called IFRAME people.

Anyhoo, I thought it was a pretty good piece. Slightly wobbly, but the writing is quite good and the guy’s performance is solid. He is believable as one of those relaxed yet perky and friendly types that corporations use as their spokespeople, yet he also drops the satire hammer hard too.

Reminds me, of course, of this classic bit. One of Lily Tomlin’s finest SNL performances, and just the kind of “delivering extreme damage with extreme precision” type satire that I love.

It’s the kind of satire that digs deep into the topsoil of the zeitgeist and taps directly into people’s anger about something and articulates it in a way that provides both catharsis and a wakeup call.

Often, the most important things are the hardest to deal with precisely because their very importance makes them the most stressful and painful and upsetting things to think about.

Satire can help solve that riddle by using comedy to release the pressure and tension, and give people the breathing space they need in order to deal with things.

Hence, the combined awesomeness of The Daily Show and Colbert.

We still love you, guys, even though you abandon us over and over again on the paper thin excuse that you also have lives.

A likely story.

I have been struggling with the urge to nap lately. I think it’s because I have been drinking way too much diet cola and that tends to mess up my sleep patterns.

So I end up getting super tired in the middle of the day, and it is very tempting to retreat into the warm (if not entirely safe) oblivion of sleep, and its magic ability to let you skip time.

The urge to retreat like that is strong, and I won’t claim that I won’t ever succumb. That kind of unrealistic expectation of oneself is part of the destructive “all or nothing” thinking that plagues depressives, and is a surefire recipe for failure.

Which is kind of the point. Resolve that whole fear of success thing.

After all, if you succeed, people will expect you to just keep on succeeding, like, forever, and that is just way too much pressure, man!

Better to get all relaxed and comfy in the warm embrace of total failure. That way, nobody expect anything from you ever and you can hide from everything until the day you die.

Here’s a pretty good talk about women and video games :

I will be talking more about my thoughts on the subject in tomorrow’s THE DEAL, but in general, I think her analysis is quite good. Like most feminist analysts, she makes the mistake of oversimplifying the motives and emotions of men in order to make them better fit a villainous mold, but she does it a lot less than many older feminists, and a lot of her points are spot on.

Video games are still mostly made by and for men, and not just any men, but male nerds, with all the issues inherent in being a population of omega males with high intelligence but low social IQ and hence not a lot of luck with the ladies.

I don’t agree that the Euthanized Damsel is primarily about a licence to commit violence against women, although that is definitely in there.

It is primarily about cheap pathos. It reminds me of the scene in a Western where the white hatted hero realizes his valiant steed (or trusty wonder dog) is too injured to go on, and so, with a single manly tear in his eyes, he has to put it out of its misery.

It works because it connects two strong male tropes, sacrifice, and the need to do what has to be done. A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, and all that.

Admittedly, though, this only elevates the women in these games to the status of beloved pet, or at best, ethnic companion. But it’s a step up from being merely a prop, a lust toy, a figuring on a pedestal, or a mere meaningless distraction from doing important man stuff.

I was going to do a video reply to the her vid, but unsurprisingly given what she has been through, comments are turned off.

Oh, and finally, today;s vid by little old me.

I am quite happy with it. It took four hours to make, but it’s a lot closer to that high density high quality high stimulation content I have been seeking than I have gotten before.

If anything, I may have overdone the “trimmings”. Oh well, the middle step between “too little” and “just right” is always “too much”.

Tomorrow, I tackle misogyny!