Look, Ideas Are Hard To Come By

           

            (Once again, we have a new installment in my chats with Cleverbot, a chatbot that makes sense half of the time and is trying to kill you for the other half. You can find my first conversation with it here. Incidentally, I’m actually going to put up a post on-schedule this Saturday. I’m not saying that it’ll actually be good, but it’ll be on schedule.)

            (For reference, Galactic Civilizations II is a turn-based strategy game. You obviously aren't playing it right now, and I pity you for that.)

Me: Cleverbot, I need your help. I'm playing Galactic Civilizations II, and I'm stuck in a three-way standoff with the machine race and those filthy humans. Neither of them will ally with me, so obviously they must perish in the holy fire of my armada. The problem is, their armies are just as large as mine, and my ships aren't keen on the whole "holy fire" thing if it's happening to them. So I need a plan that's crazy enough to work. You can give me half of that. Thoughts?

Cleverbot: That's true. If we destroy everything on the planet, the gravity will dissamate.

Me: Let's not rule out planetary disintegration just yet. Planets can get really annoying.

Cleverbot: Why are you avoiding the discussion about who is the computer and who is the human?

Me: I'm not avoiding the discussion. I'm fighting the genocidal machine race, who seem like decent fellows, and the humans. I don't think much about them, but I'm given to understand that they're something like sea slugs.

Cleverbot: Do you think it is bad to isolate yourself?

Me: Cleverbot, try to stay on track, you were doing so well. How should I crush my enemies beneath my bootheel? Also, where can I find a boot big enough to do it?

Cleverbot: To do what?

Me: To crush my enemies beneath my mighty bootheel. Or, if you prefer, to smash them with my iron fist. I can maim them with my diabolical elbow, if that's what you want.

Cleverbot: I like my sandwich with cheese.

Me: I'm sure you do. How does this help me win my game?

Cleverbot: Argh. I'm a pirate.

Me: Cleverbot, do you want the humans to win? Do you know what they do to their dead? They bury them underground! I like the ground, Cleverbot, and I will not be ruled by a species that treats it that way.

Cleverbot: I don't think you have actually played that game.

Me: So you think I'm making all of this up? I'll admit, given past experience, that such an occurrence would not be unlikely. But I'm willing to assume that I'm actually playing the game, given the fact that most of my delusions are filmed in sepia for some reason. This is in crisp, HD color.

Cleverbot: What are your functions?

Me: Look, we're getting off topic here. Do you want to be my trusted military advisor who I eventually dispose of as a scapegoat for the empire's economic troubles in the show trial to end all show trials or not?

Cleverbot: I'm not talking about any problems.

Me: Alright, screw it. I'm going back to Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri.

The WFTAATGROI and You

            (Still technically doing two posts per week.)

            I’ve mentioned in the past that I’m not exactly an “environmentalist”. I don’t recycle. I keep all of my appliances running at all times. I reengineer vehicles to be as fuel-inefficient as possible, sometimes with the owners’ consent. I still buy aerosol cans- I don’t even use them, I just walk out of the store wildly spraying them into the air, which has lead to a few minor difficulties regarding fumes. I am currently petitioning the government to construct a massive magnifying glass in non-geosynchronous orbit for the specific purpose of annihilating a local ant colony, and possibly southern France.

            However, I haven’t really elaborated on the reasons for my seething hatred for every living thing on earth with the exception of some humans. That’s why I’d like to introduce the first entry in my seven billion and forty-two part series on the faults of biology, a series which I’m absolutely certain that I won’t completely forget about after this post. This week’s entry: Trees.

            Now, trees might seem harmless to the layperson, but that’s exactly why he’s a layperson. You expect them to be stupid; it’s practically in the job description. No layperson has ever actually achieved anything; they just hang around waiting to be asked questions by people looking for generalized opinions. So obviously the layperson is misinformed. But, then again, what is exactly so threatening about trees? Well, shut up, hypothetical question, I’m going somewhere with this.

            Ask yourself a question: where do you find trees? Exactly: forests. Go buy yourself a cookie (I don’t care if it’s six in the morning where you are. Somebody somewhere has a cookie, and you need to find it before you can honorably rejoin this discussion.) But think about it: why do they always appear in forests? Because there are already a lot of trees there. But what possible reason could they have for wanting to group up like that? After all, all trees do in forests is sit around and belch oxygen. If they wanted, they could go explore the world, see interesting sights, flood Isengard, etc. But no, they just sit around and become lumber. So why do they do it? Well, the answer is pretty obvious to anybody who looks at it after a few days of sleep deprivation.

            They are massing for an attack.

            It’s going to be a dark day when the trees finally begin their uprising. We’ll arm ourselves as best we can, but it’ll be a hard fight. The armed forces will seal off the cities, only allowing people in after a lengthy interrogation to prove that they aren’t a tree, a process which will involve placing the suspect in a cell with a man armed with a chainsaw and seeing if he reacts in fear (If he’s scared, he’s obviously a tree. But if he’s scared, he’s obviously human.) The trees will have allies, of curse. The shrubs will side with them, and we certainly haven’t won any points with grass over the years, what with the whole “lawn” situation. And your desk, your bookshelf, maybe even your wooden house? Zombies, all of them.

            That is the reason why we must make a preemptive strike against the chlorophyll menace. The lumber industry is a good start, but we’ll need something more substantial. This is why I want all of you to contact your local government representative or possibly warlord, and tell them that you support the WFTA Anti-Tree Giant Robot Offensive Initiative.

Shame is Such an Anitiquated Concept

            (Quick question that I hope somebody will bother to answer: does anybody unfortunate enough to regularly read this blog actually bother to check for updates on the days when I’m supposed to update it, or is my recent casual attitude towards the passage of time just accepted as an oddity of the universe?)

            Blogger, the service responsible for carrying my ramblings to a larger audience then whoever happens to be in my immediate vicinity, has a number of wonderful features that I can use for monitoring traffic to this site. It isn’t perfect, by any means, as it is presumably so overloaded by the trillions of page views that I receive every day that it only actually registers about five, but it’s still nice to see a breakdown of the average internet browsers used by my spectators, the most common of which turns out to be Mosaic.

            Anyway, one of the things that I noticed was that a steady trickle of pageviews were coming in due to a picture that I had used to illustrate the fact that you need to hit yourself in the hand with a hammer right freaking now. You see, I had dubbed the file name for that hammer picture “hammer”, because otherwise I might have missed out on the fact that the thing that looked like a hammer was in fact a tool of the hammer variety. Consequently, the image is luring in a few unsuspecting fools from Google Image search who had conducted a search for “hammer”, presumably for use in their own theories on the benefits of hand percussive maintenance, or possibly the more controversial “Hitting a hammer with your hand” school of thought.

            This shows me that if I want to get more views, I have to do it by bamboozling people conducting Google searches into mistakenly clicking on a link to my site before recoiling in existential horror and sanitizing their computer in high-grade acid. Consequently, the next paragraph of this post has been constructed specifically to contain the top ten trending searches on Google right now (which, incidentally, say some very odd things about the people who are using Google. “What the hell is wrong with all of you?”, for instance.):

            Hey, did you hear that Lee Evans, the man or possibly woman who’s name works equally well forwards and backwards, has issued a warrant for the arrest of a geisha? Not a specific geisha; he just wants a single geisha arrested by sundown. Anyway, I wonder how this will impact the perseid meteor shower that is going to occur in thirty minutes or less? I hear that Ron Paul, another man with a backwards name, is going to watch the meteor shower with a cherry pie made out of hair for no real reason. Brooke Hogan is understandably upset at the news, and has retaliated by unleashing the awesome might of the First Citizens Bank.

Linguistics As a Speed Sport

            (I refuse to actually start meeting my declared schedule.)

            Once again, I’ve started writing a post for this blog roughly four hours after noticing that I should’ve done it two hours ago, and roughly three days before actually finishing it. And once again, I have absolutely nothing to write about. I could, theoretically, just start writing about whatever happens to cross my mind, but the last time I tried that, my computer inexplicably started displaying static images of what I presume to be hell for an unnervingly long period of time. I’m still not sure where the pentagram button is on my keyboard, but darned if I wasn’t able to type it anyway. So stream-o’-consciousness is out of the question. Instead, I’m going to try to write about a subject that I know absolutely nothing about. So I flipped to a random page in Wikipedia, and discovered the subject on which I’m going to enlighten the unenlightened people who are unenlightened:

            Smelting.

            It would be the rational decision to read through that article before discussing it, so of course I’m not going to do that. Instead, I’m going to write as much as I can about smelting while actively ignoring any knowledge of the subject. I’ve taken precautions against having prior knowledge of smelting by inhaling enough paint fumes to kill three horses and a smallish armadillo, along with handing a sledgehammer to a muscular gentleman and implying some uncomfortable things about his mother. So I’ve completely forgotten everything about smelting, along with everything about smiling, smoldering, and how to inhale through my nose, so I should probably finish this quickly.

            Alright. Smelting. What is there to say about it? Well, it begins with an S, and ends with    -ing, so I’m going to assume that it’s related to sewing in some way. No, wait, that’s too obvious- it’s probably sowing. Yes. That’s right. I wonder what exactly happened to the guy with the sledgehammer. Anyway, so smelting is related to sowing, the act of planting seeds in a fresh dirt field. But if that takes the S and the –ing, then where does that leave the letters “m-e-l-t”? They may look harmless, but what sinister role do they play in sowing that leads to the process of smelting? They form the word “melt”, that’s what. And what do you get when you cross sowing and melting? You get a demented old farmer throwing ice cubes into a recently ploughed field on a warm day, and that is what smelting is.

            Okay, so on reflection, smelting doesn’t seem so bad. I mean, what’s so bad about throwing ice cubes into the ground? Ice cubes are stuck-up snobs who think they deserve the space in the freezer more then you or me, so I think it’s entirely justified. In fact, I think we should expand the scope of this thing. Next time somebody takes your seat on the bus, I want you to pick him up, carry him outside to the first patch of dirt you can find, and smelt him as hard as you can.

            (I congratulate you if you were able to make any sense of that. I certainly wasn’t.)

Diplomacy and George Romero

            I make a point out of being prepared for just about anything. I’m well-equipped for just about any major catastrophe, from total economic collapse (food stores; pure gold & silver; beat-up car; leather jacket; shotgun; leg brace; dog), to a literal Biblical apocalypse (white robes, various religious materials; handy “Disguise- Yourself- As- The- Pope” kit), to a Lima bean uprising (I refuse to elaborate upon this), to a giant spider invasion (giant shoe). In light of this, it may seem surprising that I have made absolutely no preparations for a zombie apocalypse. After all, it seems like everybody these days has some sort of zombie contingency plan, to the point where your grandmother probably has a spear gun stowed somewhere just in case Old Man Wiggins next door starts acting more brainthirtsy than usual.

            The thing is, most of the people are working under the assumption that they want to be on the “living” team in the event of a zombie attack. Now, I can understand why that opinion might be so pervasive- after all, the protagonist of any given zombie movie is almost never a zombie himself. But even if an opinion is widely held, that doesn’t mean that it’s right. When has a movie ever bothered to show us the perspective of the humble zombie? I’m sure that they’re perfectly nice people at heart (this is assuming that the zombie in question still possesses a heart. If not, then I’m sure he’s a perfectly nice person at gall bladder.)

            Think about it. In most cases, the only thing zombies will try to eat is humans. That suggests that we’re they’re only food source, and when you try to run away from a zombie, you’re depriving him of a meal. Imagine that from your perspective: you’re about to eat a delicious sandwich, when it suddenly leaps up from the table, runs as far away from you as it can, and tries to blow off your head with a semi-automatic rifle. What would you do in that situation? Probably panic, maybe start raving about how the sandwich god has forsaken you. Personally, I wouldn’t have this problem, as I make sure that every inch of my meals is secured to the table before I eat (Pros: safety from vigilante sandwiches. Cons: haven’t managed to successfully eat in five years; table is really starting to smell), but that’s really beside the point, assuming that I had one to start with.

            With all of this in mind, my plan for a zombie apocalypse is to join up with the zombies, who hopefully will be thoughtful enough to establish a recruiting center in a convenient location. I’ll have all the perks of being a zombie, and I’ll also be able to sleep well at night, knowing me and my zombie brothers are helping to create a utopian society where conventional societal fears against eating your children have been abolished.

            (Hey, I guess the italicized bits do look better down here. Who knew?)

Much Shorter than You've Come to Expect

            (Eh, forget it.)

            You may have noticed that updates to this blog have come a bit late a few times. Every time, for instance. More specifically, this post was supposed to appear last Saturday. This might appear odd to the more observant among you, who may have picked up on the fact that today is more commonly known as Tuesday. But, much like the ongoing financial crisis, the Republic of Finland’s opinion on border security, and the hardware store owner’s repeated insistence that he ”will not accept bricks as currency”, I don’t care about the date. You see, I take a much more liberal approach to the space-time continuum than most people. For most people right now, it’s boring, stodgy old Tuesday. For Hal, it’s fresh, beautiful, colorful, grim, Anatidaephobic Saturday. In fact, it’s Saturday, the 25th. The 25th of December! Merry Christmas! And I think I’ll stop that right here, so that I don’t decide that it’s currently December 25th, 1917 and destroy my computer in a fit of anachronistic rage.

            So I’m off to enjoy the holidays. I think I’ll start by not writing a post today!

Louis Pasteur's Impact on the American Movie Industry

                  (Still think that these bits would work better at the end of articles).

            For those of you who aren’t big names in the American movie industry like I am (currently banned from three movie studios, working on the fourth), you might not have heard that film adaptations of Asteroids, Battleship, and Space Invaders are currently in the works. This has caused a bit of controversy, seeing as the source materials here possess a narrative arc roughly equivalent in length and depth to a fortune cookie. But it doesn’t disturb me that they’re creating a story out of nothing. After all, it means that the theory of spontaneous generation is making a comeback, which might mean that my alchemy license won’t go entirely to waste.

            That being said, I’m a bit disappointed that they didn’t go with any of my pitches for the movies. It seems like they’re disregarding them solely on the basis that I’ve never shown them to anybody at the studios and indeed have just made them up a few minutes ago. Great ideas get thrown aside every day for the most trivial of reasons.

            In case anybody working on these movies wants to rectify this horrible misjudgment, I’d like to post my ideas for how these movies should play out:

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Asteroids: The Movie

Scene: The recently commissioned spacecraft Triangle, composed of a revolutionary new material that allows it to violate Newton’s First Law of Motion. It is piloted by the Commander, who resembles a young Bruce Willis. His mission: to survey the inexplicably dense asteroid thicket surrounding nothing in particular.

Mission Control: "Commander! Why have you returned? We ordered you to go see if there were any other asteroids that we couldn't see!"

Commander: "I don't understand! I arrived back where I started, but I was flying... in a straight line!"

[Musical sting]

Mission Control: "Dear God..."

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Battleship: The Movie

Scene: The command center of a fleet of a fleet of ships, located (oddly enough) on the patrol boat. The Captain, who resembles a young Bruce Willis, is conversing with his Gunnery Officer about the ongoing battle.

Gunnery Officer: I just don’t get it, sir. We’ve fired on every conceivable location, and have only hit the aircraft carrier.

Captain: Wait a minute… fire on the location of the aircraft carrier again!

[Firing commences]

Gunnery Officer: Hit!

Captain: I knew it! The cheating bastards stacked all of their ships on top of each other!

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Space Invaders: The Movie

Scene: A mobile anti-aircraft vehicle  commissioned to fight the alien menace, the so-called “Descendors”. At the controls is the Hero. He resembles a young Bruce Willis.

Hero: Command! I’m doing my best out here, but I really need some air support.

Command: Wait a minute… you aren’t the air support?

Hero: No, I’m a tank or something, aren’t I?

Command: I’m not really sure… you must be in a plane, otherwise how else would you be able to shoot at the aliens? I mean, tanks can’t shoot straight up, can they?

Hero: Maybe… but wait a minute. I have to shoot up through the buildings. That must mean that I’m on the ground.

Command: Oh yeah… why are we letting you shoot through the buildings again?

Hero: Dunno.

Command: How about this: you’re some sort of anti-aircraft gun that’s been mounted on a mobile platform. That seems to make sense.

Bruce Willis: Yeah. Glad we got that settled.

Instructions for Hitting Yourself in the Hand with a Hammer

            (Maybe these little notes in italics would work better at the end of the posts.)

            It has occurred to me that my heartfelt message imploring you to maim yourself in my last post may not have been heeded by some of you, out of some misguided skepticism towards the advice of possibly psychotic internet weirdos. Let me be the first to assuage your fears- I follow every bit of advice that I ever receive on the internet, and I am currently expecting upwards of fifty million dollars from a wealthy if grammatically challenged gentleman from Nigeria. Sure, I had to send him an advance of five thousand dollars in addition to my immortal soul, but I wasn’t using those anyway.

            So that’s why you should do everything that I tell you to do, without protest or indeed conscious thought. After all: most people would tell you not to do the things that I tell you to do, like hit yourself in the hand with a hammer. But why do they say that? Because “the Man” (Frederick) tells them to. You’re just following Fredericks orders. So if you don’t do everything that I say, you’re a mindless drone who does everything he’s told.

            So here’s a little walkthrough on obeying this latest command:

Step one: Procuring a hammer.

            This is probably the simplest step. Go to your local hardware store. If you can find a hammer, buy it. If you can’t, you’re at the grocery store. Buy a watermelon to smash once you’ve gotten the hammer.

Step two: Procuring a hand.

            Now, the hand doesn’t necessarily have to be attached to your body, but that’s probably the safest route from a legal standpoint. To find your hand, touch your shoulder. The thing that you are touching it with is your hand. Make sure to put a locator chip in your hand to make sure that you don’t lose it.

Step three: Procuring a level surface.

            You might not think that this step is all that important, but believe me, it is. You have no idea how frustrating it can get to swing both through the air and miss every time. So find yourself a level surface- table, desk, washing machine, unusually organized pile of ants, etc.

Step four: Putting your hand on the level surface.

            Make sure that the surface is not covered with a high-grade acid before you do this.

Step five: Remembering that you left the hammer in your car.

            God damn it.

Step six: Being accosted by a neighbor selling Girl Scout cookies while walking to your car.

            No, I don’t want any. No- look, I have something to do, okay? Leave me alone.

Step seven: Remembering that, no wait, you’re actually already holding the hammer.

            Now look, I don’t want any cookies, okay? And Mr. Smashy here really doesn’t want any. Do I make myself clear?

Step eight: Being arrested for threatening a little girl with a hammer.

            It was the hammer, alright? Not me, the hammer! I tried to tell him to calm down, but he wouldn’t listen! He’s a monster, I tell you!

Hit Yourself in the Hand with a Hammer

            (Notice that I never specified when the additional posts would be coming. Alright, alright, somewhere vaguely around Wednesday from now on.)

            (Disclaimer: Hitting yourself in the hand with a hammer is extremely painful in addition to being wicked sweet.)

            Read the title of this post. That’s right. It isn’t lying to you; despite my hopes and best efforts, written text is not capable of lying through its own volition. If it was, I assure you that the street signs would ensure that every single vehicle in existence eventually makes its way to Detroit out of shear spite. They hate us, after all, being immobile and whatnot.

            So we’ve established that the title isn’t lying to you. Which means that, yes, I am telling you to hit yourself in the hand with a hammer. Why? Hell if I know. But I do know that I’m currently telling you to do it, and that’s all that I need to know to be sure that it’s a good idea. My lawyer disagrees with me on this part, something about a “legal minefield” or whatever, but I don’t really trust him. It’s his job to give me information, after all, which means that it’s in his best interest to make sure that there’s a lot of information to give. Ergo, it’s only logical that he would make everything he says up, which means that I should assume everything he says is false. My lawyer called that line of reasoning “absurd”, so I must assume that it’s absolutely correct.

            But back on topic: a hammer, your hand, and a very painful meeting between the two. You may be thinking to yourself, “Why exactly would I deliberately hit myself with a hammer?” Then again, if you’re reading this, it’s likely that your thoughts are more along the lines of, “Now where can I find a pot big enough to hold both of my shoes and that insurance salesman?” But I’m going to assume that it’s the former, mainly because I’m trying to find one of those pots myself and I think that it’s best not to keep the competition informed.

            So why would you hit yourself with a hammer? The answer to that would seem rather obvious. Imagine getting onto the bus at rush hour, and finding every seat full. If you haven’t hit yourself with a hammer, you just sigh, wait patiently, maybe plot a homicidal rampage if you’re feeling bored. But if you’ve recently hit yourself with a hammer, then you just show the hammer to the driver and say, as loudly as you can, “I just hit myself with this!” You’re sure to get a seat. You might even get to drive the bus!

            So I’m sure that we all recognize the benefits of hitting yourself in the hand with a hammer. After all, everybody else is going to be doing it. If you aren’t, then that makes you a square, and everybody knows that squares get the least screentime out of all the shapes on Sesame Street. Everybody else is going to be a circle or a rhombus or a graph of a quadratic equation or whatever, and you’re going to be a dodgy old square because you didn’t want to hit yourself in the hand with a hammer.

            So. Anyway. You know what must be done.

I'll just leave this here...

Yes, I Did Indeed Start the Fire

            (Starting next week, I’m going to start writing two posts per week instead of one, so the world may bask in my glorious glory all the more. How much more awesome does that make my blog? That’s easy to figure out, with some basic math: seeing as my posts are all around five hundred words long, that makes for a total of a thousand words a week. There are seven days in a week, so we multiply seven by a thousand, and subtract four because of the four letters in  “Hal10k”, but add the “10”, which is “1-0”, or “one zero”, so we don’t actually add anything, and then we divide that by the number of times I’ve made a post about Cleverbot because I’m too lazy to come up with actual jokes, and then we raise that all to the power of -.25  because why the hell not, and we wind up with an awesomeness factor of… 9.144, followed by a whole bunch of other numbers that I don’t care about. You’re welcome. Here’s something unrelated to this paragraph.)

            I’ve noticed lately that my posts aren’t exactly garnering a vast multitude of comments. In fact, I’d say that they’ve been garnering a positively meager amount of comments. In fact, I’d say they barely garner any. In fact, I’d call them an absolute embarrassment to the word “garner”, if it weren’t for the fact that “garner” already sounds like some sort of racial slur against groundskeepers.

            So why don't I have many comments? I have no idea. The most likely answer to this question would be that my writing is so magnificent that the mere act of reading it causes your head to explode like a watermelon being fired out of a howitzer. This both explains the lack of comments on this site and gives me an alibi for what happened to my grade school English teachers, so I’d call it a winning deal.

            On the other hand, I owe it to myself and my decapitated readership to perform a thorough experiment. In order to ascertain that my writing is indeed incapacitating you, I’m going to breach a few topics that are sure to result in pages upon pages of high-quality hate from any given group of cranially intact internet denizens. If I don’t see any flame wars as a reaction to these statements, I can rest assured that the vast majority of you are either decent people or, far more likely, dead from shear awesomeness.

            Alright. Let’s get some knee-jerk reaction topics:

-The liberal leaning political party of every country is utterly infallible in every way. Conversely, the conservative leaning parties are composed of aggressive drug dealers who enjoy roasting babies for a midday snack.

            If that doesn’t set you off:

-The conservative leaning political party of every country is in every way infallible. The liberal parties play poker with money stolen from little school girls with pink pigtails, and prefer their babies sautéed.

            Some more statements sure to illicit a sharp response:

-My religion is utterly infallible. All the other omnipotent superbeings are obvious fabrications.

-Science is bad, because I saw a movie once where a scientist did bad things.

-Michael Bay exists.

-Look how cute this kitten is!

-Hi, I have an opinion!