the En Route gun violence special

in which I speak candidly and passionately about the incident involving guns over the past several weeks. I also speak about hatefulness (again) politics (again) and one of the myriad reasons I love video games. It may or may not come together in a coherent way by the end. enjoy!

Benetton

The Escapist : The Big Picture : Skin Deep

The Escapist : The Big Picture : Skin Deeper

so what's the point of me showing you these videos about how race and color are perceived and what they mean in the context of modern society? why would i show you videos about why race is a social construct rather than a scientific fact? why is racism in gaming important? why is there a double standard about hollywood racelifiting, and why is it a necessary evil? this. this is why

900 FREE GAMES?!? IS THIS REAL LIFE!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?

that's not a typo. you can drop everything you're doing RIGHT NOW and play around 900 classic arcade titles in your web browser even if you don't have the time to DIY your laptop into the ultimate home arcade! the good people over at the internet archive have along with the folks at JSMESS taken on the task of preserving these classic titles for posterity, and most of them are in good working order! all you need to get your dig dug or galaga on is:

• a computer;
• an internet connection; and
• the desire to be awesome and not a n00b

by virtue of being in the drewniverse right now you meet 2 of the qualifications. the only question is, do you dare to be awesome and not a n00b? i know i do. for the non-n00bs, in order to run the gmaes in browser just click the "run" link under the pic in the top right corner.

right there

now if you'll excuse me, i have to go.... uhh...  water my dog.... *goes to the internet arcade*

ps, here's the link for the real mvps

The Hunt for Red October

so the good (no pun intended) people at NIKE finally caved to the incessant ranting and raving by incessant ranter and raver and professional full grown baby Kanye West and made the Air Yeezy II "Red October" available to the public: a sudden and surprising phenomenon which lasted all of about 11 minutes. see, the shoes which yeezy had spent the better part of 2013 shouting about incoherently at radio and tv interviewers had achieved  a status that every product not designed for McDonald's style mass production lusts for: they had become a white whale. an urban legend. a unicorn. a sort of holy grail for every sneakerhead, taste maker, and twitter teenage millionaire to fawn over. they were to the shoe canoodler what, say, "Nintendo World Championships '91" is to the retrogamer, or Action Comics #1 is to the comic collector: a piece of fandomonium trumped up by the real thing i want to talk about here: artificial scarcity.

which makes the Red October worse than action comics #1 as unlike the Yeezy, it was printed in 1938 with ink made from black people and whale infant blubber.

what artificial scarcity does is take something that's is actually common/easy to produce/super inexpensive and by withholding large quantities of it (like OPEC does with oil) or only making a relatively small number of product (like holofoil pokemon cards) drive up the price, or, as is the case with this particular shoe spike peoples desire by making it unavailable for no reason whatsoever. like the McRib. NIKE clearly did this with the red october. let's look at the case a little more closely. 

artists depiction of the red october

NIKE collabs with YEEZY on the air YEEZY. they only make about 3000 pairs and sell them at $225. they make like $800,000 on them (according to kanye) (they couldn't have made more than $675,000 because that's how math works). BIG SUCCESS! YAY! COCAINE SHOWERS FOR EVERYONE! the resale value on the air Yeezy tops $1000. so because of the success and obvious demand demonstrated by the resale value, NIKE commissions the air YEEZY 2 and sells them for $245. however they (strangely) push back the release schedule for the shoe's signature colorway, the "Red October". YEEZY then does what he does best: complain about all the success he isn't having!

that's what he's best known for right? all the not success? right?

he goes on the breakfast club in ny "why they won't release the red octobers?".  he goes on sway in the morning "WHY THEY WON'Y RELEASE THE RED OCTOBERS?! YOU AIN'T GOT THE ANSWER SWAY!" he goes to england. ENGLAND! "i'm trying to be the next louis vuitton... of shoes, but NIKE won't release the red octobers". this creates a buzz in the fashion world. "why won;t nike release the red octobers? how do they look? where can i buy them? when will they be available?" are all questions you were likely to hear if you perused the sneakerhead sites over the past year. what this does is create a ground swell of deman for a shoe that Nike knew they would not have pressed more than a few thousand of. with millions of people demanding them and only thousands pressed (for pennies, btw) they could charge a factory direct price of $245.  that's a brand new XBOX 360 with kinect and watch_dogs!

i DO have a birthday coming up...

and the final piece to the false scarcity puzzle? have a cool person seen in it. like macklemore at nye!now all the stans are drooling on their eminem cds and hair bleach, b/c the unicorn is real and maybe, just maybe the great unicorn masters will let them stroke it's mane for a few minutes (you don't wanna know what it did with the horn...). then suddenly a tweet announces that they are available, and 11 minutes later artificial scarcity proves it effectiveness again. (hell they were on ebay and hour later and going for upwards of $16,000,000.00!!!!!!!!!!)

above: macklemore just despising all the fame and success rap has brought him.

i guess the greater point i'm trying to make is i heard the rib sandwich was coming back on tuesday!!!!!! sign a bruhva up for that!!!!!!!!!!

thesleeplessmanlaments

"And then there's Leroy Smith. Now you guys think that's a myth. Leroy Smith was a guy when I got cut he made the team - on the Varsity team - and he's here tonight. He's still the same 6'7" guy - he's not any bigger - probably his game is about the same. But he started the whole process with me, because when he made the team and I didn't, I wanted to prove not just to Leroy Smith, not just to myself, but to the coach that picked Leroy over me, I wanted to make sure you understood - you made a mistake dude."

-michael jordan

can't sleep. need to. gotta drive tomorrow. but i think this is one of those times where the thing i need to do is being overshadowed. i have come to a realization this late at night/early in the morning: i need motivation of a certain very specific nature, and to be honest, it's kinda hard to talk about. which is why i've decided in my infinite wisdom to tell it to the drewniverse.

i must admit, i am not confident my writing is more as gooder than it used to was, so don't not make with that bad talking about it.

what motivates you? money? praise? the respect of your peers? maybe it's just the knowledge that you did whatever it is you set out to do. perhaps the promise of a better tomorrow fuels your drive. well, cousin, none of that pretty shit works for me. i tell myself i'm gonna earn a nice salary and nothing. just nothing. i don't care about money. i never believe people are being totally honest when i receive any sort of praise. and even if they are, praise makes me physically uncomfortable. and what in the blue hell is respect anyway? you can't rightly quantify it. there ain't a unit by which you can gauge the amount of respect you get. "hey Shiz, you wanna go out tonight?" "sorry Keef, i'm about 7 centarethas short on respect today. i gotta hit the gym and turn in early" is a conversation you've never heard. ever. and even if you think you got it, you can never be sure that it's genuine. i mean, what guarantee do you have that niggas have the same opinion of you when you're out of earshot? none. nada. sorry but your peers? they're the most likely to form negative opinions about you because they see you all the time. they know the crust of you. they see you at your worst in the most high stress situations of your respective lives. eff the respect you think you have. i've heard more foul shit about people from the ones who they see on an academic and professional level in the past year than i ever have. you know what i don't hear a ton of? respect. next please. and tomorrow isn't promised so that doesn't motivate me. trust me i've tried. i wake up on a daily basis with the promise that i'm going to better myself that day and go to bed every night vowing not to repeat the same mistakes the next day. guess what happens the next day. no, guess. if you said the same old bull, congratulations, you get a cookie. 

it's not even a cookie for real. the cookie is a lie.

so what motivates the masked warrior? i warn you, this is gonna sound really shitty. like really shitty. it may even cause your opinion of me to change, but dammit, i think i can handle the shift. if not i can always remove the mask and walk around in anonymity. my motivation is simple: spite. that's it, really. i don't want to be rich or respected or even "happy" whatever that is. what drives me is the desire to throw my successes in the face of whoever i perceive to have doubted or misunderestimated, misjudged or undermined my talents and abilities. and hell, it worked for michael jordan, who attributes his drive to win in no small part to the collection of grudges and emotional wounds both real and perceived he amassed through his career (he even thanked leroy smith, the kid he was left off his high school roster for, albeit [half]jokingly, in his hall of fame induction speech). look, i don't hold grudges. my christianity kicks in really hard in that department, so i can't help but forgive. but i never forget. you dare to tell me something, act in a way, hell, even hint at a suggestion that you're better than me, that you don't think i have what it takes, that i'm not good enough? congratulations, you just became the target of my vitriol filled success missile.

i write my success in korean. keep reading to find out why....

you don't even have to mean any harm by it. hell you can even like and honestly respect me, but if i get that twinge of doubt from you, better believe i'm grabbing whatever brass ring you thought my arms were to short to reach. hell i might grab the harder to get brass ring just because, fuck you! you don't tell me what i'm not capable of! don't believe me? i once went on a three game win streak against a close friend of mine who was more talented than me because he said i couldn't beat him... in a game of pickup basketball. and you know what? he's still better than me, but he would never be able to say it again. he got real mad and wound up throwing the ball away, but still...

hell you don't even have to suggest it! if i think you might be perceived by other people as better then me, that someone else might doubt my abilities next to yours, even if the thought never entered your mind, too bad, i got a missile for you, too. ask Devin Roundtree. who is that? just the guy who was making straight A's in my department back in undergrad. i made it my personal mission, even though he was a cool guy who had never personally given me reason to believe he doubted my ability as a student, to never let him get an A that i didn't match. two year later, i go from academic probation to graduate with honors and you know what? my last three semesters in school i was a straight A student. and every waking moment i vowed he wouldn't be better than me.

even in video games! if a friend of mine beats me in a PvP game whether its a tourney fighter or a sports game or RTS, whatever, i'm prone to make them play me until i win. i've come to blows over this.

artists depiction

and it takes every bit of reasoning in my body to not start training for the octagon. not because i'm into the idea of getting face punched and armbarred for fun, either. here;s why. i'm a 12 year old red belt in Tae Kwon Do when it comes to my 12 year old attention that TKD would be an Olympic sport starting in 2000. that was all i needed to hear to run to my instructor and inform him of my intention to train for the 04 Olympics because, you know, i'd be the shit by then. at this time i was fully prepared to make this sport my whole life. i told my folks that i was going to korea to study at the Tae Kwon Do university in Seoul. all i wanted in life was to be great at TKD. you know wat my instructor says? "IF.... IF you can beat Sam,  i'll prep you for the Olympics in 04" my 12 year old world was shattered. no more TKD university. no more Olympics. no more serious TKD. why? because my 12 ear old brain didn t recognize the challenge. see, sam was in his mid teens, and the closest i'd come to beating him with my 12 year old ability was not getting my ass handed to me. i could SORTA hang with him, but i wasn't in  mid teen form at 12, i'd not even started t grow into my body yet! (i was already about 5'6" and over 200 pounds). i got my black belt, but all my fire was gone. and today, 1.5 degrees and a teenager older all i want to do is shove that if in mr. kempka's face SO HARD by bludgeoning grown men until they say uncle. and twist their limbs outta socket for every fight i should've been more into. and it takes every bit of civility and higher learning in me to not do that.

and you know what the fucked up part about kempka's "if" was? i stood almost head and shoulders over everyone else. i could beat his brother, who was my age. i wasn't allowed to face most people 1 on 1. the adults would strategize to face me last on sparring days in hopes that id be worn out. you know, from ass kicking.when he needed a hitman to humble somebody who thought they were too good for the discipline side of martial arts training, he didn't sic sam on em. it was me! i was the hitter! i was the one who humbled that ass. if only he'd said "WHEN you beat sam" instead of "IF you beat sam" the little orientation speech we got when we first got to hofstra might have included "... and Olympic athlete" and i would've quietly fist pumped to myself.... and now i really wanna fight....

... like this.  this is how i wanna fight

OK so what am i writing all this for? other than the fact that this was swelling my melon and keeping me awake i gotta admit something, and it's a thing i've only just come to fully accept. the simple truth is i've developed a far to structurally sound wall of fuck it around my vitriol center and thus no fuel has been able to reach my motivation ducts. it was a combination of too many good things and a few devastatingly hurtful instances happening in quick succession. the same minor slights that got me in law school (too a little too long on those recommendation letters, didn't ya,professors??) and fueled my pre law school weight loss (i know you can't recognize the sexiness, college girl. you don;t have to say it. i'll  show you how sexy i can be [side note: yeah, so my desire t not fall into the diet related health pitfalls my uncles, pops and grandfather did was the reason. the girl was the catalyst]) no longer seemed to work for me. nothing did.

recently, the mortar that held the fuck it Wall together evaporated and the vitriol has started to seep through. and with the mortar now up in the clouds, something punched a hole in the brick. for the first time in almost a year and a half  i felt the twinge again. hopefully it wasn't just an apparition. i NEED a new Leroy Smith. my old one's are broken.

+

RQOD: internet dating

hmmm..... to be honest with you, i don't really care about this whole Manti hoax thing, so i won't be discussing my opinion on that. but i do like ESPN First Take [especially when they feature Ed "c'mon son" Lover as a special guest] and the Te'o hoax was one of the topics of discussion. as you all know, we here at the drewniverse believe in being timely so now that the horse is dead we won't beat it. we have more journalistic integrity than those ESPN talking heads, you see. but i did appreciate one of the points that was made during First Take's discussion of the issue. during the discussion Lover pointed out [well, to be fair Stephen A. Smith raised the point first] that it was a bit unusual for a young person to meet and fall for another person whom the have never met in person. the debate then went into whether Te'o was just swagless and naive [he is] or complicit and devious [he was probably willfully ignorant][so i discussed my opinion a little. sue me].

but i think they glossed over the most important question that their topic raised, and that question is threefold. first, there's the problem with the pressure we put on young people to succeed. now i don;t mean to suggest that i'm against a society that values achievement. i think merit based reward is a good thing when used right [i'm just not convinced we do it right]. but what we do here in america is put too much value on the reward. one of the theories for why Te'o was complicit, if he in fact was [like i said, he probably was just naive and a little willfully ignorant] is that he needed the story to garner support for his Heisman campaign. that this is even a consideration speaks volumes about the public psyche. nevermind that you've done your best, grown as a player and a person and are considered a lock for your dream career, none of that matter unless you get the achievement.

next there's the question suggested n the title. First Take, being that the talking heads are from a different generation, wholly dismissed [save for Skip Bayless] the possibility that Te'o could have legitimately connected with a person that he'd never had in person contact with. but is it possible to connect on a substantial level with a person we've never occupied space with? last night, while fake shooting people in the face playing Farcry 3 online, i witnessed two players who had never met before develop a friendship over the course of a single match to the point where they planned to "meet up" at a later date to play again. at no point did they plan to meet in person, but the connection was there.

finally, even if we concede that you can make a real connection with people whom you've never met, is it possible that the connection can blossom into love? certainly not, right? well, it seems that there are tons of examples of even online gamers falling in love with -- and even marrying -- each other based on there online interactions.

so here, after all of that, is the RQOD: can we be done with Manti's fake girlfriend now? please??

:-\

10 minute break pt 2: the redux

this is the point in my career where i start to think i might have been better suited choosing a different path in life.

i really like taking my break to write about shit that's on my mind rather than spending hard earned bucks on shitty kiosk food.

all my professors this year that i didn't have last year seem to really believe in their knowledge of the law, and don't get me wrong, they're really smart, but damn. you don't have to make a brother feel like an a-hole for not quite being there yet.

part of me wants to grow my fro back. i know i won;t be able to wear one again until i prove myself as a serious legal mind, so while i'm a silly 1L-2L i want to do it one last time.... also i wanna beat Ashley's fro

paying attention in class is for squares. like pants!

i figure that with my health, advances in modern medicine, and my future high income, it's not unrealistic to believe i could live to be 245-300 years.

there's this wicked awesome looking fan made Pokemon game that appears to run on the SFIII engine. if you're not creaming your pants 1) clearly you're not a nerd, and thus should reevaluate your life, and/or 2) you lack the vision to truly understand the gravity of that proclamation. let me spell it out: imagine you took the most bad-ass fighting monsters on Nintendo's roster (that are bipedal) and instead of having to wait your turn to throw an attack, you just had them go at it in a 1-on-1 no holds barred two round match. if that doesn't do it for you, just watch this. see.? wow...

was ithe only one that watched the pro bowl and thought: "wow. this is really really bad"

the madness of march

i took march off for a reason. it was my birth month, so to speak. it was, a march when i first donned the mask, you see. at any rate, it's the month i choose to recognize, so i keep it sacred and work free. i jest. i was "born" in march, but the reason i didn't post in march is because i really had nothing worth sharing. i was off on an adventure that turned out to be fruitless, but never you mind that. here is the update:
0- i completed the legend of Zelda
0- i discovered a new found talent for baking
0- i reaffirmed my hatred for politics
0- i watched cable
that was my march. oh yeah i almost forgot:
0- i got "born"
so with all this said, oh faithful followers, i return humbly to maintain the order of your net days. i will continue to follow the mission that i set forth in my initial post. and i will always continue to be your dark warrior.

big day tomorrow....