Nice grabby title, eh? I’m not in love with a stripper; far from it. She was just a catalyst, an ignition; the spark in a cylinder at the end of its compression stroke, the flame that ignites the fuse of my Roman Candle, the 1300° cherry that signals the beginning of the eventual cancerous demise of my respiratory system. Did you like how I impressed upon you that she was hot (one might say fiery) without talking about her with vulgarity? That I managed to make a joke about self-abuse while referencing my Italian heritage? That I utilized my smoking habit and knowledge of internal combustion engines to make a salient point that came across extremely well? It’s a little thing called “literary genius” and you can bask in my glory later; right now I feel like being existential.

Let me pontificate and obfuscate the point for a moment: in my haste to join the USAF and leave this if-there-were-a-god-he’d-have-forsaken-this shithole for a place that, oh, I don’t know, offers some prospect of a future beyond losing teeth and beating my non-existent wife to death with a soldering iron, I’d managed to forget all of the six or seven things I actually liked about this area (and it’s not cheap cigarettes). I grew up here, in southern Illinois; this is the sum of all my habitation knowledge, the place where my family has lived since people knew where my family lived (in America, at least). The area where my friends are from, though a fair few have managed to free themselves from the shackles of bigotry and gossip and move elsewhere, like intelligent people. I’ve lived and loved within a 100 mile radius of where I currently sit, unwashed and wearing a brown “Hey Irish girls come suck this guy’s dick” pub cap (and precious little else) at 4:36 in the morning on a fucking Tuesday. Yet I’d decided that nothing good comes from this area (aside from my friends, and of course the personification of perfection that is myself), having gone far enough back into my memory to remember that I even bought my first car out-of-state (Kentucky, of all places, as a matter of fact). Then last Saturday I somehow had the urge to pay a girl to rub her tits and vagina in my face and walk in on an angel.

A down-to-the-roots So. Ill. Girl, as a matter of fact, one who grew up mere miles away from (and only a few years later than) myself. I actually just sat and talked to her (in a strip club, where she worked, for fuck’s sake) for long enough that she managed to forget that the rotation had made its rounds and she was supposed to be back onstage (actually, it happened twice, the second time just before she gave me/I bought the final private dance of the night/morning), I lit us a few cigarettes (aside: Lucky Strikes and Zippo brand lighters are awesome and if you smoke then that is the brand of cigarette and lighter I expect to see you carry because I demand only the best from the useless fucks that surround me at the ashtrays), drank a fair amount of Crown Royal and Coca-Cola (no, dickshits, I didn’t ask if they had Royal Crown to mix my Crown Royal with, that’s a cheap joke and you should be fucking ashamed of yourself), and spent far too much cabbage on her. To be fair she was basically my description of “The Professor’s Personal Kryptonite” and I feel it was money well spent.

So I’ve spent the last few days wondering how much I’ll miss this place and the people that live in it (more specifically a certain person) when I leave. Surprisingly, the answer is “a bit” rather than the “fuck this shit I hate this place” that I expected. I’m having problems coming to terms with that. More specifically the fact that I now feel a slight urge to stay (nothing too substantial) and try my luck with some more local flavor rather than do the smart thing and go live in a place that is both statistically far more likely to contain gorgeous Irish girls and is somewhere I can work with things that I love (rockets, Sherlock, I’m talking about working in a space-related career field here).

I’ve started to go a little soft (not a dick joke) and that’s actually making me try to find something to do to stay awake (masturbate [this is a dick joke]). I think it’s time to act all deep and go stare at the moon. Or something. Maybe I’ll shed a single tear for lost dreams and broken vows while I’m at it.

Don’t read this last paragraph. I want to end with a somber and introspective moment that makes people think that my callous narcissism is a front for personality failings and repressed emotions, not my actual personality, because then maybe my blogo-cred will get me hipster girls. [If you just thought “Hey this guy wants some pussy” then congratulations, Dick Tracy, you caught The Underlying Meaning]

Okay, so it looks like constantly embedding YouTube videos on the front page isn’t going to work anymore because it fails to display the most recent video. So, from now on, I’ll be linking the videos instead of actually embedding them for watching right off the page. Probably a good idea anyway.

At any rate, this Monday’s Random Music is an awesome ambient/electronic piece from Kasabian called ID. Hope you enjoy it.

I’m still working on cranking out some Let’s Play goodness, but I keep getting distracted because as I play these good, old games that I seem to still remember so well, I find myself switching from one franchise to another in an excited fit of “oh man, this is cool, but THIS game’s got this part where…” and so on. Because I’m still in the middle of wrapping up my playthrough of Star Wars Dark Forces before I start on anything else, I thought I’d use this Thursday Youtube Theater to showcase one of the most prominent cutscenes that I remember from my childhood: the Intro to Command and Conquer Red Alert 2. The cutscenes in Red Alert were fantastic (everyone I knew as a kid thought General Von Esling was the shit), but Red Alert 2 upped the ante by featuring Ray Wise (Twin Peaks) and Barry Corbin (WarGames) as they stood powerless to halt the coming invasion of the United states by the power-hungry Premier Romanov. While I’ll be playing Red Alert’s Allied campaign long before I get around to Red Alert 2′s campaign (and then, later, I’ll do all of the Soviet Campaign missions too), girocraz posted the intro on his YouTube and I thought I’d toss it up here for you to take a look at. Enjoy.

No one is locking up T-Pain for popularizing autotune, and the Auto-tune the News series gave the phenomenon its second breath. From schmoyoho, the original Auto-tune the News pioneer, comes a new song with twice the hilarity of the popular series thanks to the relative seriousness of the topic combined perfectly with the over-the-top hilarity of a man(ish) scorned by his sister’s attacker.

Enjoy watching this 8000 times. You can’t watch it just once.