Category Archives: Humor

Nintendo president offed by Freemasons (says conspiracy nutcases)

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It doesn’t take long using social media to find some pretty spurious takes on recent news. This includes some conspiracy theories, which are pretty much intellectual junk food. As vexing as it may be, some conspiracy theories can really take off.

There’s a new one that’s going around, and if you’ve read the title of this entry, your palm might already be on your face. There are conspiracy theorists going around on social media saying that the recently deceased president of Nintendo has been offed by Freemasons.

Aside from being laughable, this conspiracy theory is also disgusting. The guy has only been dead for a few days, and a bunch of people with a tenuous grip on reality are attempting to use the tragedy to bring attention to themselves.

The position of the conspiracy theorists is that Satoru Iwata, during his presidency of Nintendo, enacted several contradictory policy changes that weren’t in line with the agenda of the Freemasons, who supposedly are exerting their influence on the video game industry. That sigh of disgust probably came from you.

There are several points that these conspiracy theorists bring up that they actually think support their position, and here is one example:

  • The Japanese name of Atari, founded by Freemasons, means “to hit the target”, indicating their goal of wanting to control the Japanese game industry.

One thing that can be learned about Freemasons from Google searches and poking around on “truth seeker” Geocities pages is that they like hiding their agenda in plain sight, typically by using symbology that’s been highly-publicized in films and books. If they’re that confident that their plans will succeed, then why has Atari, their supposed key player in the game industry, had so many commercial failures since the video game crash of the ’80s? Are we to really accept that a company that’s so sophisticated that it can carry out a hit on the president of a multi-national tech company (which happens to be an industry leader) is simultaneously so inept that it cannot produce a commercial success of it’s own?

These guys are already off to a pretty bad start, but there’s more:

  • Atari’s goal was to keep the Japanese people lazy and stupid, and Satoru Iwata resisted this.

Then they failed. Japan is easily one of the most industrious nations in the world today, with an economy second in strength only to the United States. Anyone who thinks that the typical Japanese man only sits around playing video games and reading manga are in for a surprise when they visit a place like Saitama for the first time. And again, are we really supposed to accept that Atari can carry out a hit on one of the most influential men in the tech industry, when it would be far more conductive to their supposed mission to address and overcome their commercial failures? One would think that if a company’s mission is to keep people addicted to video games, they’d be less about trying to bring attention to themselves by assassinating people known all over the world and more about knowing how to make a decent video game. Because at this rate, it would be far too easy for some overweight Loose Change enthusiast living thousands of miles away to expose their entire operation by using their Twitter account.

Another one:

  • Nintendo initially refused to reduce the price of the Nintendo 3DS, but then cut the price by 40% about 6 months after it’s release.

Satoru Iwata then cut his own executive pay in an effort to maintain Nintendo’s stock value, and the 3DS would go on to become one of Nintendo’s fastest-selling and successful gaming systems. Do I even have to explain why the position of conspiracy theorists on this matter are logically inconsistent? If you want a video game company to be highly successful, why would you have a problem with someone who makes moves that are highly beneficial to that company? Iwata was president of Nintendo when the Wii and Nintendo DS hit the market, and those were among the best selling game consoles ever. They each sold over a hundred million units. Iwata obviously wan’t attempting to sabotage the game industry.

  • Nintendo stated that their software production outside of Japan went up, when it has actually been going down.

And apparently being wrong about something justifies calling for a hit on a company president.

There’s more, but I think I made my point. Conspiracy theorists are ridiculous, and so is the idea that Nintendo’s president was killed by Freemasons working for Atari. As opposed to cancer, which we still don’t have a cure for (though they probably have quite a few conspiracy theories about that).

Conspiracy theories don’t take a lot of mental energy. It typically involves a person spending hours reading other people’s ideas, then thinking themselves enlightened and having figured things out for themselves. To demonstrate how easy it is to imagine up a new conspiracy theory, here’s a new one: The government and the Illuminati have been propagating conspiracy theories for decades to occupy people of substandard intelligence. How’s that for a paradox conspiracy theory?

If more people would have instead expended into medical science the kind of energy that they’re putting into circulating stupid conspiracy theories, we might have actually developed a cure for cancer by now.

Webcomic Review: Boss Rush Society

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giga kay

It seems like there’s someone out there that has me beat when it comes to confidence. There is someone out there who likes what he likes, and is not at all ashamed of saying so. That person is TokenDuelist, the author of the webcomic Boss Rush Society. TokenDuelist posts to his DeviantArt account with furry lesbian art, MLP characters (at least one work of which being lesbian art), Pokemon fan art of a ten-year-old with huge breasts, and a bare-breasted woman pawing at a blurred-out banana. That he is a male should be evident considering the nature of the DeviantArt material described. He also posted a picture of himself using the same DeviantArt account. That’s some confidence, there.

As mentioned already, he is the author of a webcomic, and that’s what’s primarily getting the attention in this review.

Boss Rush Society stars Lucas (a.k.a. Giga), a young man who enters a battle tournament, but shows up late, and the tournament starts without him. When he does show up, there’s only one contestant remaining, and he’s permitted entry, leaving him only having one weakened and tired opponent to trounce before being crowned the winner of the tournament. Which, predictably enough, he does. Isn’t that every layabout’s fantasy? Getting the prize just for showing up and saying his ABCs.

The art style can be likened to a combination of manga and the work of Phil and Kaja Foglio (but not in a good way). There is an obvious problem with proportions, and that is particularly evident in the first panel of this page, where the claw game is taller than the woman standing in front of it, but the woman is much taller than the arcade machines right next to them. There are other, similar problems, but I think you’d see them if you were to read the comic for yourself.

Also, almost all the female characters have huge breasts, except for one, which was probably a character that we weren’t supposed to like. Again, it’s obvious that the author of this comic is male. He has this thing for huge, swollen, gravity-defying breasts. What the obsession is with oversized breasts, I don’t understand. When they get too big, they sag and can actually be pretty gross.

Usually, small expressions of sexual immaturity can be ignored as a quirk in some webcomics, but that’s really hard to do when it’s used as a punch line in the very first issue. An example of this can be seen on this page, where one of the characters, apparently the main character’s girlfriend, shrugs off that she could have seen the main character almost nude. After he throws her out of the room, she starts pounding on the door. Not only does Giga get an easy tournament victory that he didn’t deserve, he also has a nymphomaniac girlfriend. What a guy.

There are a couple reasons why tournament battles are a recurring concept in so many shounen manga: the arranged battling environment allows for matches that otherwise might not easily occur in the flow of the narrative, and it’s very easy to write for. However, the concept is hindered in Boss Rush Society by several problems:

  • Too much meta humor. The main character actually stalls during his only tournament match to explain his weakness to spikes using video game logic. Yeah, you probably already figured this out, but Boss Rush Society has a video game theme. Not only did Giga show up late to the tournament and only have to face one tired opponent, he called for a time-out as a stall tactic to charge his energy. Perhaps for his next match, he can take on crippled girl scouts.
  • Too much exposition. One of the elementary rules of a visual medium is “show, don’t tell”. The first few pages established nicely that the backbone of the plot would involve tournament battles, so one would assume that any other dialogue would serve to set the stage for the next tournament battle. An excuse can be made for this for character development, but that leads to another problem:
  • The characters are seriously annoying. Every single character in Boss Rush Society is needlessly grating. Because of this, I wanted to see every character lose every match, regardless of which side they’re on. TokenDuelist needs to get the memo: you only portray a character as annoying when you want them to be perceived as annoying, such as when you don’t want your audience to like them. There isn’t a single character in Boss Rush Society that comes off as likable, the main character least of all. The single action of taking advantage of a weakened opponent for an easy tournament victory is more morally reprehensible than anything that the “bad guys” are ever shown to do.

Boss Rush Society is an excellent example of what can go wrong when someone who is not Japanese and plays lots of video games and watches lots of anime attempts to draw a manga of their own. Japanese manga and anime artists are better at it for a reason: they typically go to an art school where they do lots of practice drawing manga and anime before going on to become professionals. At that point, they can work shifts as long as 16 hours animating, get paid about as much as fast food employees, and some of them don’t even have homes because they’re allowed to sleep at their desks. It’s usually by about this point that many of them realize that they’ve made a mistake. Weeaboo artists typically aren’t aware of what being a manga/anime artist is like, otherwise, they’d probably stop trying so hard to be one.

Just when I thought I couldn’t take much more, I’ve read the entire series. As of now, there’s less than two dozen pages. One might think that this is because TokenDuelist is just getting started, but his archives indicate that this isn’t the case. He only releases his webcomic one page at a time, with updates as far as several months apart. TokenDuelist had nearly two years since the inception of his webcomic to carefully craft it’s 23 pages into a masterpiece, but it seems like he waived this so he can draw lots of furries on DeviantArt, and what we got instead was Boss Rush Society.

Worse yet, the spaced-out timing of releases for pages of Boss Rush Society suggests that, for each page, he carefully considered it’s content, and deliberately decided that they were worthwhile additions to his series. There is a reason why most suicides are quick: otherwise, a person might realize that what they are doing is a bad idea, and not go through with it. TokenDuelist gives himself as many as two months at a time to review the content of each page before making the conscious decision to add it to his webcomic.

Like I said before, TokenDuelist is confident. So confident that he actually links to his webcomic on message boards. Obviously, he thinks his webcomic is great, otherwise, he wouldn’t have such confidence.

I think it’s about time to give Boss Rush Society it’s score, which is a Robbie Rotten out of ten:

robbie rotten out of ten

Which is somewhere around a 2.3.

DJ Dimwits: Failing at a Gathering Near You

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If you’ve spent time in malls, cities, or college campuses, you’ve probably run into a DJ dimwit.

What is a DJ dimwit? It’s someone who plays music loudly from their phone as they walk about or do other things around other people. I chose the word “dimwit” to keep this post somewhat family-friendly, but you can probably think of a number of other pejorative adjectives that also start with the letter “D”.

People who listen to rap aren’t the only ones who do this, but they seem to be far more inclined to do it. Another thing I’ve noticed about people who listen to rap is that they seem to spend a lot more money on earbuds and earphones, but not use them (a lot of them complain that they’re broke, though).

There seems to be a positive correlation between how often you hear music from the phones of DJ dimwits and how bad the music is. To demonstrate this correlation, I’ve made a chart:

DJ Dimwit Graph

The trend appears to be that DJ dimwits actively avoid playing anything of quality from their phones. It’s hard to know what to make of this, aside from that they do this as part of a concerted effort to demoralize our society with substandard garbage. Unless their idea of singing is to either talk or bark to a beat.

On the rare occasion that you hear a DJ dimwit play a song that’s good (probably accidentally), they still upset people because they don’t want to hear that song played by a DJ dimwit.

For the most part, DJ dimwits are bad judges of what the rest of us want to hear. It’s kind of like how most streakers at sporting events are male, even though the typical viewer of sporting events are also male. Like the streaker, the DJ dimwit is making an assumption about whether the rest of us care for what they have to share.

Stupid T-shirts, and what they say about the people that wear them

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Each person has an image that they’re in charge of. Let’s look at a few T-shirts that demonstrate that they don’t know how to manage it.

math t shirt

Nothing says “herp derp” quite like a shirt which tells the world that you detest simple problem solving.

loud t shirt

In apartments, particularly ones in cities, among the most frequent complaints are noisy neighbors. When a person wears a shirt like this, what they are saying with it is that they make a lousy neighbor. The fact that the heart has a stoner face says the rest of what you need to know.

mirror t shirt

A person might find this shirt clever for a few moments, and that’s all the time that they’d need to purchase it on eBay. Afterwards, they’d probably figure out just how unclever it is to buy a T-shirt with a gag that’s incomplete without a mirror in close proximity. But not everyone.

t-shirt fbi

The words: “FBI: Female Body Inspector”. The message: “Please stop questioning my sexuality.” Interestingly, when I found this image, “unisex” was among the tags.

school shirt

Not everyone wants to work for Walmart. The ones that do may as well be the ones that aren’t motivated enough to become qualified to do something else. The message on this shirt is also available on hoodies, so one can nap face-down in class with added isolation or conceal the earbuds that they’re wearing while thinking the teacher doesn’t notice.

Why would anyone want to wear T-shirts like these? And if someone would make T-shirts like these, why wouldn’t they also make T-shirts that advertise that the wearer doesn’t wash his hands? It seems like there are plenty of people that would wear such a thing.

If you tell enough people that it’s possible to be the worst at something, you’ll see some of them race to the bottom. Perhaps it’s because they’re eager to stand out for anything, and they imagine that there’s less competition to be mediocre. However, if you see some of the T-shirts people are wearing, it becomes evident that this is not the case.

Butter in Coffee: Bulletproof or Not?

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I’ve heard about this thing in which people were putting butter in their coffee. The idea comes off as some sort of life hack that, when done, allows a person to lose weight and live healthier. Supposedly, a person who does this gets more out of their coffee by feeling alert longer and feeling fuller and more energized. Some even say that they can pretty much skip breakfast by drinking this so-called “bulletproof coffee”.

It sounded interesting, so I decided to give it a bit of a try to see whether the claims are true. I was a bit skeptical. Wouldn’t that be a little fattening? Wouldn’t such a thing be of little nutritional value?

The results? I’m not sure whether it’s connected, but for the time that I’ve been trying it, I haven’t been feeling very good. Actually, I’ve felt bloated and somewhat sluggish while trying it (which, for me, might be a little hard to imagine).

As it turns out, I was doing it wrong. To truly drink “bulletproof coffee”, I had to use grass-fed butter. Also, the coffee had to be a certain variety. Specifically, the same kind of coffee sold by the company that primarily encourages the fad of adding butter to coffee.

I don’t mean to say that a person can’t lose weight by having only buttered coffee for breakfast. If that buttered coffee is a replacement for bacon and eggs, it’s possible that such a diet could result in weight loss. However, that might have more to do with a person eating less of what they were eating before than a supposed benefit of an alleged miracle diet.

Could it be that many people have been had? If so, it wouldn’t be the first time.

Decades ago, the Beechnut corporation had large quantities of pork belly. Pork belly was viewed as discards, but it was also the usual ingredient for bacon. Beechnut hired Edward Bernays, the man credited as the father of public relations, to market bacon to an American people who, while it may be hard to believe today, largely didn’t want it. Bernays was the nephew of Sigmund Freud, so he knew a few things about how people think, including that people tended to put a lot of trust in professionals. The usual breakfast at the time was a slice of bread and a cup of coffee before rushing out the door to work in an increasingly industrialized America. Bernays sought out doctors in an effort to find some that would agree with him that Americans would benefit from a heavier breakfast. He would then use this as the basis for his push to market bacon. How successful were his efforts? America seems to be much heavier for it. Bacon, which is usually mostly pork fat, appears in many food items and many consider bacon and eggs to be breakfast staples. Many even came to think of breakfast as being the most important meal of the day. Beechnut made off well, as they found that an effective way to dispose of pork belly is straight down the throats of millions of impressionable people, and they even convinced them to pay them for it!

Fast-forward to today: Dave Asprey, CEO of Bulletproof Coffee, wants you to believe that he “learned about the power of butter at 18,000 feet of elevation near Mt. Kailash in Tibet”. His corporate logo appears to be a man in meditation with a round symbol on his chest that might bear resemblance to some kind of far-east mystical symbol, which may be an indication of the kind of people that he’s looking to take advantage of.

May I have my coffee without the implied mysticism?

May I have my coffee without the implied mysticism?

In the article linked to above, Asprey cites a fictional character when making his point that cheap coffee steals a person’s mental edge and “makes you weak”. He links to the Wikipedia article for that fictional character, but he doesn’t provide scientific or scholarly citations to back up his claim. What he does link to is his online store.

Incidentally, as I was looking at his online store, I found this warning:

California Proposition 65 WARNING: This product contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer, or birth defects or other reproductive harm.

This may sound a little picky, but I prefer to drink coffee without being concerned about whether it damages my parts.

I went back to normal coffee, without the butter. And it tasted far superior. Still, I think that, like many fads, this fad of putting butter in coffee might last a while, even though it seems pretty weird to see someone do. Kind of like wearing one’s pants under their buttocks so their boxers are showing. From what I can tell, that was a trend that started about two decades ago, and people have since then found out how ridiculous it looks (but not quickly enough), but there are still a few people who do it anyway. Maybe if there were more occurrences of wedgies, they’d stop doing that.

How to Fail at Making Pizza

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cheap pizza

To make food for someone else is like an expression of love. However, some people try really hard and fail. Others fail without the effort. This post offers advice on how to fail at making pizza.

It’s hard to imagine that anyone needs the advice in this post, but a lot of people put it into practice, anyway.

Step one: Go cheap.
If you’re trying to make the worst pizza, you can do as NASA does and purchase the cheapest product of what’s available. You may have to poke around at the freezer section quite a bit to find the cheapest pizza, considering that the cheapest pizza package may not be the cheapest pizza per pound. To go really cheap, go for the cheapest pizza per pound. Some supermarket chains display the price per pound. The cheapest pizza per pound tends to be made from less quality ingredients, and more can possibly go wrong while baking.

Step two: Go cheese.
It seems to me that the most popular variety of frozen pizza is cheese pizza. I think that this is because cheese pizza is like a blank canvas, whereon one can put whatever ingredients they please. To make the least of your cheese pizza, just put it into the oven as it is. To take this further, go for the cheese pizzas that, for whatever reason, don’t even have tomato sauce. I’m not sure why I’m seeing more cheese pizzas without tomato sauce. Does anyone enjoy it that way?

Step three: Or pepperoni.
The only way to make a pizza duller than a cheese pizza is to instead go with a pepperoni pizza. I don’t know how pepperoni got to be so popular as a pizza topping. What I do know is that what we call “pepperoni” in America is not actually pepperoni. The word “pepperoni” is Italian for “peppers”. Pepperoni is the most cliche, stereotypical, boring pizza topping. I actually prefer cheese pizzas to pepperoni pizzas.

Step four: Burn the cheese.
You’ll know you’ve left the pizza in the oven for too long when the cheese is dark brown. To make a real failure of a pizza, overbake it so the cheese is the hardest part to bite through, so that when someone attempts to take a bite out of a slice of pizza, they end up taking the rest of the cheese from the slice with it, possibly getting tomato sauce on their chin. This wouldn’t happen if the tomato sauce were omitted, however, so there’s a bit of a trade-off there.

Step five: Only slice the cheese.
Once the pizza is out of the oven, take the pizza cutter across the surface of the cheese. It’s permissible if the pizza cutter does make it through the dough, as long as the pizza maintains it’s overall integrity. But do cut the outer crust. The idea is to make it appear as though the pizza has been cut, so that when someone tries to take a slice of pizza with the expectation that the slice will come free, the person ends up having to slice through the pizza with a spatula to finish the job you started. Truly bad pizza isn’t just sub-par, it’s spiteful.

Step six: Set on middle of table to serve, then sit in the other room to watch soap operas.
At this point, you probably won’t be interested in partaking of your own handiwork. There are still many cafeterias you’d be well qualified for, however.

While we’re on the topic of pizza, here is a list of pizza toppings I like:

  • Hamburger – I consider this the best pizza meat topping.
  • Pineapple – This may sound strange, but it’s actually tasty.
  • Jalapeno peppers – Or habaneros.
  • Mushrooms
  • Onions – Fresh is preferred over frozen. Onions that were previously frozen are usually soggy and gross.

Have you had a bad pizza before? Please share in the comments section.

You are not a vampire.

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Occasionally, you may see someone who thinks that he’s a vampire. Either that, or it’s some fantasy he engages in that he sometimes acts out.

In some cases, it’s pretty obvious that the reason someone engages in fantasies like this is because they wish that they’re someone or something else because they are failing at what they actually are. Like how a person with a bad job pictures themselves as some kind of genius even though they aren’t actually doing anything to improve their situation, or doing that well at the job that they already have.

One question I have is, why would anyone want to be a vampire? They fancy themselves some master race even though:

  • They can’t cross running water – this makes vampires easy to outrun
  • Daylight kills them – significantly limits their activities
  • They can’t come into contact with certain religious symbols – which are very easy to find, by the way
  • Garlic kills them – this is something that is used to flavor pizza, pasta sauces, and other foods that many people like
  • And recently, they sparkle – makes them easy to identify

Yeah, vampires are lame.

Vampires are often pictured as having superpowers, which don’t do nearly enough to compensate for the fact that vampires can’t do many of the things that most of us like, such as synthesizing sunlight into vitamin D. Also, the fact that sunlight kills them means that this self-proclaiming “master race” can’t participate in this thing called “agriculture”.

However, it’s hard to find the self-proclaiming vampire that expresses interest in just about any means of production. This is no surprise, because vampires personify what’s wrong with today’s entitlement culture: they consume other people’s work, but they contribute little to nothing to society. Vampires are the fantasy equivalent of those guys with Escalades who live on social security and food stamps/access cards/EBT cards.

Also, space travel is out of the question for vampires, because they can’t travel beyond the earth’s umbra. Travel for vampires is also limited because there are places on earth where the sun doesn’t set for months.

There may be some recent attempts to reinvent vampires, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s something that someone pretends to be when someone wants to forget about their job as a Walmart clerk. But if a person is in a position like that, why not fantasize about being an architect, or an electronics technician? Then they can do something to make it happen. Because when it comes down to it, a person can’t become a vampire, no matter how much they want to be one. However, a person can become an architect or an electronics technician if a person is willing to learn and do the required work.

But if a person just wants to fantasize, why not fantasize about doing or being something that’s not lame? For example:

  • A space marine
  • A cyborg
  • An extra-dimensional dragon
  • A rock star or some other musician
  • A combination of the four, because why not? If you’re going to daydream, go for gusto.

If someone is going to choose to mold their fantasies to some template, why choose a template that’s lame or tired? There’s nothing really interesting about vampires. People who think that they are vampires are not vampires, and they shouldn’t want to be one.

A look at some of the worst advice the internet has to offer: how to tell your crush you like him/her

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wikihow crush

It’s probably no surprise that the internet is teeming with bad advice, and some of it you find on WikiHow.

Let’s look at their article, How to Tell Your Crush You Like Him Without Words. (EDIT 23 Jan 2015: The page has since been rewritten, so the advice is no longer as hilariously bad as it was before. The analysis in this post is of the old version of the article. If anyone has access to the old version of the article, a link in the comments section would be appreciated.)

My first problem with this article is in the title: the author insists on not using words. What’s wrong with using words? It becomes apparent shortly that this article is intended for some seriously shy girls. If that’s a problem, WikiHow probably has a few articles on overcoming shyness.

If one were to attempt a psychoanalysis based only on the contents of this article, one may guess that it’s author has an unusual and unrealistic expectation of people’s ability to read minds. If such a person has anger issues or allows little things to upset them, that person probably does have some relationship problems.

Let’s break these tips down one at a time:

1. From afar (about ten feet) look into his eyes (do not stare). When he catches your gaze give him a dazzling smile he won’t forget and wave or wink.

The items on this list are highly situational. The advice here is to stand from afar, about ten feet. Ten feet isn’t very far, but the author of this list seems to think so. Once the distance requirement is met, then “give a dazzling smile.” The author also reminds us to wave or wink, so apparently this expert on crushes thinks it’s a serious omission not to do so.

Notice how it says “about” ten feet. WikiHow is giving a little bit of leeway here, so there’s no need to break out the tape measure in an attempt to set up the moment you’d otherwise probably be waiting a while for.

2. Do you know where he sits in class? If so, leave a note on his desk saying “Something is waiting for you on the school steps at 3 o’clock sharp”. Leave a little gift and note at 3 o’clock sharp on the school steps saying, “Hi so-and-so. Thought you might like this : ). From your friend, so-and-so.”

If I sat down at my typical spot and found something like this, I’d probably find it seriously creepy. One may even consider it a threat. There’s too much room in this tip for something to go wrong. What if your crush decided to sit somewhere else? Or what if Chuck from the football team decided to sit in his favorite spot?

Also, the title of WikiHow’s list insists on not using words, and writing notes does qualify as using words.

3. Grab a group of friends (including your crush) and invite them to play basketball, soccer, etc. When playing, make sure you’re on your crush’s team and pass the ball to him a lot. After the game go up and give him a high five and smile. If you’re feeling daring and need to say something say, “Great job! You’re an awesome —– (fill in the blank with the sport you played) player.”

This tip makes the assumption that your crush is interested in sports. What if he, like myself, is one of the many men out there that don’t care about sports? This tip does little more than support the notion that the ideal boyfriend is a jock, while nerds would be avoided. This is a notion that is turned on it’s face once one advances beyond high school, and the nerds generally have much better careers.

4. Pass by him and then turn your head around to look at him. If he’s doing the same thing, that’s a good sign.

There’s actually such a thing as a female creep, just as there is such a thing as female stalkers. If he’s looking back at you, it might be a good sign. Or it might be a bad sign.

Looking through this article’s art, I noticed that the female is almost always the only one blushing, and in the one where the guy might be, his face doesn’t turn pink. Notice how when girls blush or have a crush, it’s considered cute, but if it’s a guy, he’s often seen as a pervert? Feminists like to complain that women are “objectified” and portrayed as being obsessed with love in media, but men seem afraid to complain that women are usually the ones that can get away with expressing their sexuality. Much of the male gender is in a pretty submissive state these days, resigned to the notion that when something in a relationship goes bad, they’re seen as the bad guys.

5. If he likes you back he will ask you out, but just be patient.

This tip doesn’t belong on the list. The idea is to tell your crush you like him, and somehow do so without words. Waiting for him to decide to initiate the relationship (and possible suffering in silence in the meantime) is not a step in this process.

6. Don’t kiss him, have him kiss you first!

As with the previous tip, the problem with this one is that it insists on waiting for the male to take initiative. Kissing him would communicate pretty well that you like him without using words, so to accomplish the objective, it would be more effective to not take the list’s advice.

7. Never force a guy to like you, just let time do that and be nice. Try to talk and if he does not want to talk then so what? Try next week and then he’ll finally ask you out.

This list asserts pretty confidently that if a guy doesn’t want to go out with you, then he’ll do it if you ask him again next week. It actually doesn’t work that way. But, again, this list breaks it’s own rule by saying “try to talk,” which, yes, does qualify as “using words.”

8. If he asks to borrow a pencil, give him one with a message on it.

First, giving someone a pencil with a message on it counts as using words. Second, this depends on the object of affection asking for a pencil, which if he does, he’s probably not very dependable. If such a thing were to happen, the exchange would probably go something like this:

Boy: Hi, I forgot my pencil. May I borrow one of yours?
Girl: Oh, yeah. Just a minute. (proceeds to etch something on the pencil)
Boy: Um, will this take very long?
Girl: No, wait just a minute. (scribbles furiously)
Boy: The pencil looked okay. It didn’t look like it needed anything done with it.
Girl: I’m almost done! (scribbles faster)
Boy: Look, I’ll just borrow a pencil from some other girl.

This situation could probably be averted by having a pencil with a message already on it, but then you’d probably end up hanging onto it until the theoretical moment occurs that he asks for a pencil (and doesn’t ask someone else). Another way to avert this situation is with the following tip:

Ask him out.

A date is a small amount of time spent with someone to attempt to determine their character as a potential suitor. A person goes on a date to determine whether they would prefer to be in a relationship with them, and it is sometimes a recreational activity between a couple already in a relationship. If a person takes the advice in the WikiHow article mentioned above, a date isn’t likely to happen, and an infatuation from afar is likely to continue for a long time, with the person continuing to have a crush based on assumptions that they’ve made about that person.

Why I don’t like “The Big Bang Theory”

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A while ago, I was introduced to a TV show that I hadn’t heard of before. This show is called “The Big Bang Theory”. I can’t put my finger on one thing I don’t like about this show. That’s because there are a lot of things about this show that irk me. Here are just a few:

1) BBT makes a sad attempt to sound smart.
Just to make sure the point gets across that the main characters of BBT are smart people, one of them will occasionally say something that sounds scientific. Whether they get it right or wrong is not the point. The needless inclusion of any subject material (such as science) into a television show can have the effect of making the viewer feel involved, regardless of the technical level of the material shared. The result is the viewers of BBT feeling smarter, even though what they’ve just watched is about as intellectually stimulating as “The Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog”. What’s worse, BBT actually seems to try to feed a pretentious feeling of intellectual elation. I have little other explanation for why it’s viewers keep coming back.

Intellectually speaking, BBT is like junk food. Delicious? Taste is subjective, but it remains that it adds nothing of value. If you want to actually be smarter, watch some real scientific shows, like Nova.

Can’t tell the difference? Neither can the writers of The Big Bang Theory.

2) This show gives people the wrong idea of what nerds are really about.
I could probably be considered a nerd. I don’t know for sure. What I do know is that I know some nerds, and BBT gets almost nothing right.

First, let’s get some terms out there:
Nerd: Someone who loses himself in a hobby or craft, often to the neglect of grooming, family, or career.
Scientist: An educated individual who discerns natural laws as a profession. Using knowledge of natural laws to design things is a separate discipline called “engineering”.

What BBT gets wrong is that it portrays it’s nerds as being scientists. As BBT would explain it, almost anyone who is smart is really into science, comic books, television, the internet, and makes nifty holographic projections in their basement. While nerds can be considered really smart, most of them treat their minds as databases for piles of useless information. Most of them specialize in video games, old reruns, board games, and things that the rest of us generally won’t find a use for. A nerd is often inconsequential because he subdues himself with things intended for recreation. While he could help you set up a wireless network, nerds aren’t the ones making world-changing discoveries.

On the other hand, many scientists are well-off enough to be unaware that BBT exists, though I can imagine that many of them secretly dread that something like it does. That’s because scientists are heavily involved with their trades. Scientists are the ones that went to school for the better part of a decade, and are working on uncovering the mysteries of the universe while remaining within a budget and dealing with pressure from deadlines. Scientists work hard, because someone else could end up beating them to making their big discovery, and claim credit for the whole thing. Any time a scientist can spend outside the office or laboratory would probably be spent sleeping or hiking. They likely won’t be the ones with encyclopedic knowledge of anime.

3) The laugh track.
This is probably the single most often-repeated complaint I hear about this show. Because of this, I may not be saying anything new, but I’m still going to express myself on this matter.

I remember Doug Funnie saying something like, “If your jokes are so funny, you wouldn’t have to laugh at them.” The recipient of this statement was Roger Klotz, but it could just as well be repeated to Chuck Lorre. Most people can think for themselves. We each have a differing sense of humor. If we think something is funny, we’ll laugh. We don’t need the show we are watching telling us what is funny, and what is not. We each have our own favorite comedies because each comedy is different. Our favorite comedies are decided by our sense of humor. Our sense of humor is not dictated to us by our comedies.

BBT’s laugh track serves the purpose of telling it’s poor audience when to laugh, because without it, they would be lost. Suppose one of it’s characters makes a nerd reference that is kind of nostalgic. Are we supposed to laugh? Apparently so, because there goes the laugh track.

I’m impressed that it’s the year 2012, and sitcom writers are still using the laugh track. I think it’s a cop-out. If there’s 10 seconds of the laugh track going while the characters are pausing and waiting for it to let up, that’s 10 seconds that the writers didn’t have to write for.

4) Bazinga!
Take it easy, Sheldon.

5) The opening theme.
Actually, this is my favorite part because it has nothing to do with the show.

And that’s how I feel about The Big Bang Theory. I’m not trying to change how anyone feels about this show, I thought I’d get my own opinion out there. How do you feel about BBT? Let me know.