Getting to First Base With Some Papyrus

May 20, 2009 7 Comments read Makeup

In February, I attended a Microsoft Party with Jez. Well, well, well, I am finally getting around to post about it. Here at Mellzah Entertainments, Inc, we are committed to lightning-fast reporting about moments of interest by which I mean lightning-fast when I discover the paper that I wanted to scan that had been hiding under a stack of unread Servo magazines.

Soooo for this fancy schmancy party, they rented out Quest Field. On the field itself, they had a soccer game, a few football-styled bounce house athletic events, and a bit where you could attempt to kick a field goal. I was wearing inappropriate shoes, so I was saved from that humiliation. However, I got to hold the ball for Jez, who continues to blame me for his slipshod performance and lack of an “I’m A Sports Superstar” medal to take home and show off to his supercrush.

Inside, they had bands performing, a karaoke area, a 360 game room that was totally dominated by dudes, and temporary tattoos. I almost, almost convinced a man from Germany to get a temporary tattoo tramp stamp but he bailed at the last second. Jez got a fish, and as per my white trash leanings, I got some bitchin’ snakes on my forearm. We then went and got photos taken that got posted to the MS internal network and thusly I have never seen them–Jez posed with the cheerleader pom poms and made a fetching kick, and I did the Heisman pose with a football. JEZ, I WANT THOSE PICTURES.

We wandered around a bit and happened upon a ‘Lipsologist’ station–now, I’m not a believer in much, but I AM a believer in getting people to do things that they find embarrassing and stupid, so I roped Jez into doing this with me.

This Lips Scientist had a bunch of white cards and lipsticks laid out on a table with the instructions that you are to apply lipstick and kiss the card at least twice. So far, so good. Except I didn’t have any lipstick on me as I wasn’t carrying a purse and I’ve already learned my lesson about keeping them in a pocket, and there’s no way in bleeding hell I’m putting used lipstick on my face. I might as well jam my tongue down the throat of everyone there and play Herpes Roulette. I found Jez one that looked brand new and still wiped off the top layer to safeguard him from strangers, and I kissed my card with the remnants of whatever I’d put on before I left the house.

Jez went first, and she told him a bunch of stuff about him that he didn’t agree with, like that his relatively large lips mean he lives life big and bold, that he’d be a great public speaker/entertainer, so on and so forth. (P.S. She wrote my name, not me. I know how to spell my own name, thank you very much.)

When I handed her my card, she gasped and grabbed me a chair. “You have ghost lips“. But what does that mean?

Sooooo ‘ghost lips’ mean I’m exhausted. Overworked, frenzied, etc etc etc and not that I didn’t have any fresh lipstick to wear, amirite? The Lips Scientist must have assumed, by virtue of my attendance, that I am a Microsoft employee (HA!) and thusly that I put in 80+ hour weeks; she told me that I am to take a vacation by myself ASAP and do NOTHING. Which, frankly, sounds like one of the deeper pits of hell to me. By myself? No way to communicate with anyone else? Doing nothing? Hi, I will go stir crazy and murder someone by the second day. No, madam, I need to get laid. That is what I need.

I honestly don’t remember what the last two bits on the card were in reference to, but it’s exceedingly kind of her to note any stretch marks that I may or may not have, and their normalcy.

She then told me that had my prints not been so light, she would have gone further in depth about how I am obviously a gifted storyteller, with a demanding and exacting personality, and not even slightly a cheap date. This stuff? Sure, I’ll buy it. The ghost stuff, not so much.

She then handed me her business card and told me that whenever my boss lays something on me that’s too much, I should feel free to tell him no, because my Lip ScientistDoctor told him I’m supposed to be living stress-free, and he can call her to verify. I have not done this thing as I’m not overwhelmed by the urge to have all of my coworkers view me as a dingleberry.

The important lesson here is that I can be mistaken for someone who works at Microsoft.

If My Mom Read My Blog She Would Be Ashamed

May 18, 2009 21 Comments read (f)Art

Yesterday was Arts & Crafts day at poetrix618’s place and the craft of the day was collage coasters.

As we flipped through magazines and tossed out more and more twisted and ridiculous ideas, Anne told us she’d had a dream recently where she saw jimhark playing (strip?) poker with a mutual female acquaintance, and that, overcome by rage in the dream, she started beating on this girl, punching her, pulling her hair, and twisting her nipples. When she later told Jim about the dream, his only question was, “What were her nipples like?” I piped in and told Anne she should have said this girl had nipples the size of dinner plates, bologna nipples, nipples larger than the actual boob, just to make Jim sorry he’d asked. We cackled about it for a while like the hens we are and got down to business, by which I mean we made coasters that will make our guests uncomfortable.

amazoni made this one. In case the photo is too blurry, it reads “Snap! Oh no she didn’t”.

After this, she did a statement piece on love among zombies.

As usual, I did something weird and creepy, and then made something even weirder and creepier and inspired by Hitchcock.

Anne continued to flip through magazines and found a series of pictures of a snake swallowing a mouse. We pondered a few different things–putting a hat on the snake, having it swallow a double-decker bus…these things seemed funny but not quite right. I believe I was the first to suggest that this snake ought to be swallowing a cock, but we were all in immediate agreement.

I give you: Snake Swallowing Cock Topped With Dancing Girls. It is truly difficult to capture its majesty with The World’s Oldest Cell Phone, and for this I apologize. It will be on display in my apartment as part of my permanent collection for those who wish to inspect it more closely.

So this was the sort of silly, giddy mood we shared. All of a sudden, I was struck with inspiration. When I completed my half-marathon, this memorable comment exchange happened:

Shadowstitch: Good lord, I would have died. Flopped over the side of the bridge around the second mile, and been eaten by sharks. poetrix618: Lake Washington sharks?… would love to see that. You’d prolly just be diddled by some pale, overweight dude in a rubber shark mask, tho. teh_dirty_robot: What is Jim doing in the lake?

Anne and I have laughed about that ever since. We’ve asked Jim to wear a shark mask for Halloween with some scuba gear and we’ve been merciless in our teasing. All of this culminated in one masterful piece of collage:

It will add to the experience if you whisper in a wounded little girl voice “Three fingers are TOO MANY.”

Also, yes, the manatee and the fat girl are battling over the pizza and the ice cream.

Almost the moment I finished this collage masterpiece, Jimhark showed up. He was…less than impressed with all of our afternoon’s toils. We then told him about bologna nipples, and we all started joking in earnest.

After a while, we decided to go to Laughs to catch a show, and for Christ’s sake, who do we see in the parking lot but the girl whose nipples we had been unfairly maligning all day? I was already cracking up as I approached the group, and Jim tossed out a remark about ‘bologna sandwiches’ which screams “HI WE HAVE AN INSIDE JOKE”. Comedian Jesse Case picked up on this immediately and wanted to know what we were talking about, insisting that it wasn’t fair or nice to swap inside jokes in front of people. I tried to explain it was a joke that we had about someone’s nipples and he got mock-offended, stated that he had normal-size areola and stalked inside.

We didn’t give it much more thought until Jesse went onstage and opened with a rant about our bologna joke, going on and on about how clearly it was an inside joke because no one eats bologna in Kirkland, it’s a food-stamp meat, we couldn’t even pick a quality meat and then we tossed off some bullshit response about how it was about nipples and that he doesn’t buy it, and on and on and on. WE. WERE. DYING. I laughed so hard I couldn’t breathe. Tears were running down my face. I imagine I changed colors. I can’t even begin to convey how funny and ridiculous the whole thing was. And of course, the rest of the audience is turned around looking at us just DYING in the back, because THEY weren’t the bologna sandwich nipple bastards.

My Middle Name Is ‘Sucker’.

May 12, 2009 26 Comments read Games, Reviews

I will admit it. I bought Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust out of nostalgia for the days when Eric Stacey and I played the original while his parents weren’t home and we had to guess at all of the questions you had to answer to prove you were of age to play. It was a twenty dollar impulse buy. It was a mistake.

I like kitsch. I like bad movies. I occasionally enjoy bad games. I was able to derive genuine enjoyment from Sneak King. I thought, “Why not, Melissa? At the very least, it will be funny.”

No. No, it isn’t. It isn’t funny and it isn’t fun.

The writers clearly felt they were clever dudes, and filled each loading screen with an absolutely HI-larious tip, like “You’ll never be able to convince your girlfriend it’s good for her just because it’s filled with protein” and “Real girls are scary anyway” and “Buy a copy of this game for your grandma on her Birthday[sic]” OH HA HA HA HA HA, gentlemen!

The first time (yes, you read that correctly) I played this game, I put about an hour of time into it trying to even FIND the first mission as the minimap AND the camera both suck, and for my time and efforts, I got stuck in some geometry and had to start over. Instead of ripping the disc out and flinging it across the room, I decided that in order to punish myself for my rash purchase decision, I would play the game through to 100% completion and then destroy the disc.

I spent a not-insignificant number of hours playing this game. Here are my grievances. The game entertains the notion that it’s a sandbox style game; in order to complete missions and collect all of the little fucking golden statuettes scattered across the map, you need to execute parkour-like moves up and across buildings and every surface. Unfortunately, the controls are utter shit–unresponsive and inconsistent, and the geometry is also inconsistently designed. Ledges that you should be able to jump to and things you ought to be able to climb on are blocked off by invisible walls that shimmer when Larry slams into them at full speed at a height that will kill him as you can’t recover from a fall. If Larry runs anywhere near a moving golf cart, he turns into a boneless mass and flops down on to the ground. The AI consistently walks and drives into corners, and gets stuck in geometry until eventually they disappear. Larry looks like a poster child for Axe body spray, meaning I’m fairly sure that any time you’re not watching him onscreen, he’s off raping someone. Everyone else just looks freakish. There are characters roaming all around the world map, but you can only interact with specific people on missions, so the NPCs repeat the same two sentences over and over “Watch the hands, mister” and “Hey! I’m walkin’ here!”. You’d never know they paid well-known actors and actresses as voiceover talent unless they advertised it because the cut scenes are so atrocious that all you can focus on is how terrifying everything looks in-game. The dialogue is terrible. I’ve had funnier looking things come out of my various orifices than anything that happened onscreen.

However, my largest grievance is this: I collected a lot of statuettes in the hours I played. I was working my stats up to several different achievements. I saved my game (and there are not many places you can save your game which is also a hunk of shit) so I could take a dinner break, and when I went back to load my game…something had glitched and all of my progress up to the save was gone. WHAT. THE. FUCK. WHAT THE FUCK WHAT THE FUCK WHAT THE FUCK!?!

I will NOT redo all of that work. I don’t have the time to play through to 100% completion in one sitting, and frankly, that’s a punishment even I don’t feel I deserve. So, I leave to you, dear friends: What do I do?

*edit* I have called Gamestop and they will give me eight whole dollars for the game if that affects your vote one way or another.