Emptyeye

I had fun tonight. More tomorrow. For the moment, here, have Gil Thorp’s head exploding. Thanks to This Week In Milford for the image. Good night.

Yeah.

• My original idea for today, that thankfully never got past the concept stages, was to release a new song and hype it as my best work to date. The actual song would have been a cover of “Never Gonna Give You Up“. I reserve the right to do this in the future (As I’ve mentioned in a serious manner before, his vocal range is generally similar to the range at which I’m most comfortable singing).
• Speaking of “Never Gonna Give You Up”, Youtube had my favorite prank of the day, taking you to the video for the song in question whenever you tried to watch one of their Featured Videos. Honorable Mention goes to Dancing With the Stars, where I’ll admit I didn’t catch on until about halfway through the segment.
• Continuing to speak of “Never Gonna Give You Up”, fully two thirds of search strings that led people here today were Rick Astley-related. I find this highly amusing.
• I note that my Project Wonderful ad campaign for some reason didn’t update at all today. Weird. I tried raising my overall spending limit a bit, so we’ll see what happens with that.
• Speaking of Project Wonderful, tomorrow I’ll be replacing the Donate button with a small ad. As I mentioned yesterday, literally anything I get out of that will be an improvement over the donation button.

I really didn’t intend for this to be a regular feature, but nonetheless, here we go.

• I found out this weekend that my aunt owns a vinyl copy of the album Whenever You Need Somebody, which is best known for having this as its lead song. I’m pretty sure this makes my aunt like 20 years ahead of her time, or psychic, or something.
• I also found out earlier this week that in my NCAA tournament pool at work, I am second-to-last, with two of my Final Four teams (Including my national champion) eliminated. I am in excellent position to make a huge comeback and take the whole thing!
• I found out yesterday that I play DDR badly when I’m tired. Oh well. Obviously I’ll just have to sleep a lot between now and Saturday.
• Don’t forget to vote in the poll I created yesterday!

Just a quick note saying Happy Easter to all you who celebrate the holiday! Happy Holiday that Corresponds with Your Religion if you’re not Christian. And Happy Candy Day if, like me, you’re not particularly religious at all.

In the early-to-mid 90s, I was a big professional wrestling fan, specifically of WWE, then known as the WWF (And before we go any further, yes, I know professional wrestling is “fake” in the sense that everything is predetermined. Do I come up to you and go “DUR HURR YOU KNOW IT’S ALL FAKE, RIGHT??” when you and your family/co-workers/whatever are discussing Lost, or Kyle XY, or your favorite scripted show? No, I do not. Then please don’t do the same to me and my pro wrestling fan brethren. Thanks.). I’ve gone in and out of wrestling fandom since then, mostly due to college friends that were huge fans, but regardless, I tend to lurk and occasionally post on the WrestleCrap forums.

My inspiration for this particular blog post actually comes from two sources. The first was a topic on the Wrestlecrap forums titled “Accidental Pushes” (In wrestling parlance, to “push” someone is to throw your resources behind them, give them lots of screen time, the quality spots at shows like the closing match, make them your champion, etc. etc. etc.), and the link goes directly to my post in said topic. If what I’m saying there looks like it may as well be in Russian to you, I’ll translate: “This could be more accurately phrased as ‘Steve Austin gets really lucky that Jake Roberts happens to be playing the character of a Born-Again Christian at King of the Ring ‘96′…” and the rest is pretty much the same.

The second inspiration was the AIM away message of a friend from college, basically lamenting the predictability of wrestling nowadays, and missing the Monday Night Wars (Wikipedia was the only thing I could find that accurately summarized it. *Muttermuttermutter*) where WWE (I’ll be calling the company “WWE” from here on out, even though they were actually “WWF” during the timeframe in question) was forced to be on top of their game due to the competition.

Here’s the thing, though. The Monday Night Wars really weren’t as epic as people remember. Indeed, outside of the brief shining moment for a year or two when WCW was top on the world, that company’s entire existence was plagued by incompetence. The Monday Night Wars officially ended in 2001 when WWE bought WCW, but I would argue that I knew WCW was finished as early as 1999, watching the Hulk Hogan/Ric Flair First Blood match where, as multiple people have said before me, “They started bleeding and it didn’t count.” Even then, I got the impression that WCW was a complete mess and was barely trying at that point.

Let’s go back to 1996 and to the title of this post. At the WWE’s King of the Ring 1996, Jake Roberts, playing the character of a Born-Again Christian (Which may or may not have intersected with Roberts’s real life at that point), makes a run to the finals of the KotR tournament, where he is unfortunately vanquished by Steve Austin. During his coronation ceremony, Austin breaks from whatever script he may have had (Most promos or whatnot don’t have exact scripts so much as a list of points the participants have to hit. How they hit those points is up to them. This is an excellent example of what happens when that exercise goes badly; it’s also where my current name on the Wrestlecrap forums is derived from) and ad-libs a line that goes approximately “You can sit here and you can talk about your John 3:16…Austin 3:16 says ‘I Just whipped your ass!’”

From there, the rest is history. Austin goes on to become WWE’s biggest star for a time, they sell millions of dollars worth of merchandise with “Austin 3:16″ on it, and one could argue that the Monday Night Wars are over before they ever really began. And it was all because Austin was lucky enough to have Jake Roberts for an opponent. Without Roberts, Austin never ad-libs “Austin 3:16″, and wrestling history may well play out completely differently.

Waiting in line at the grocery store yesterday, I heard a song on the store radio. The drumbeat sounded familiar, but I thought it was a little quick to be what I thought it was. It wasn’t until I heard the line “A full commitment’s what I’m thinking of” that my initial suspicion was confirmed.

Yep. I had been Rickroll’d. Offline.

Incidentally, my dad called while the song was playing. It’s a good thing he did, because I would’ve had a fun time trying to explain the huge grin on my face to the clerk had he not called (I was off the phone by the time my turn at the counter came).

Also, the Rickroll may be my favorite Internet prank of all time. Being a victim isn’t likely to get you fired as being redirected to some shock site at work would be, and it isn’t going to suddenly scream at you and potentially give you a heart attack like some other sites. All the Rickroll does is put a catchy song from the late 80s in your head, and we could all use more of those, right?

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to try and replicate Rick Astley’s sweet dance moves.

-EE

Way to choke on your own overconfidence, and way to forget the history that put you where you are in the first place(1). Enjoy your offseason, knowing that your 18 victories were for absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of things.

Much Love,
-Emptyeye

(1)- Pretty much no one (Outside of the Patriots) expected the Pats to win their first Super Bowl victory in Super Bowl 36 against the Rams. Likewise, just about everyone, forgetting this fact, all but crowned them Undefeated Super Bowl Champions before Super Bowl 42 was ever played. Dennis Green would’ve been proud.

You’ll all be delighted to know that “incompetency” is a word. Yes, this is important, for reasons that will become apparent as I start uploading my Ys I & II Let’s Play.

Speaking of Let’s Plays, watching Cornshaq’s playthrough of the NES game Rambo convinced me that this game may be the worst application of a license in video game history. I mean, you’ve got the Rambo license. You know, Sly Stallone, hugely musclebound Vietnam Vet, bow and exploding arrows? Apparently someone decided that a game playing much like Zelda II’s overhead sections, and set in Vietnam, would be the perfect use of the license.

Full disclosure: When I was little, I liked this game a lot. The music especially stood out to me; there aren’t a whole lot of tracks, but what’s there is great, and would suit itself pretty well to a rockout-fest Minibosses style. Re-watching the game as an adult, I still think the game would hold up pretty well as one of the better licensed games of its era (Admittedly not a difficult feat), and removing the Rambo license altogether would leave you with a solid adventure/exploration game that could hold up on its own merits.

But c’mon. Someone decided RAMBO would make a good Zelda II clone? All right…

This is why I’m not a game company executive, I guess.

Just an observation I made awhile back. You probably know “O Fortuna”, you just don’t know it by that title. It’s this piece of music, which is currently being used in several commercials. But seriously, anything set to “O Fortuna” just automatically becomes awesome. Gotta make a copy of something at work? Set it to “O Fortuna” and you’ve just turned an everyday workplace occurence into the most mind-bendingly epic event of the year!

It also occurred to me that, if not for the beginning, “O Fortuna” could serve as the pre-Internet (By about 100 years) prototype for those “Screamer” sites that were big a few years back (You know, “Look at this picture and find what’s wrong with it with your volume all the way up…AAAAAAAAAH!! [With a scary picture flashing for good measure]”). You get the big “O fortuna” beginning, then the whole thing gets really quiet for about a minute and fifteen seconds before….*WHAM!!* everyone jumps up the octave and it gets super loud and epic (It’s generally only this last part that’s used in pop culture, by the way).

-EE

“Democracy was such a bad idea.”

Context behind the cut.
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