In My Day, We Called It "Being A Spoiled Little Shit"

So it's pretty hard to read a news site or turn on the television without hearing about the spoiled little shit who killed four people while driving drunk and only got probation. The reason? He suffered from (and I am not making this up) "Affluenza". According to his attorneys, the spoiled little shit named Ethan Couch was brought up in a consequence-free environment by his parents. And the judge bought into it. And so now in Texas a spoiled little shit is free while an entire family was buried. All because his parents are apparently worthless when it comes to actually being parents.

What a spoiled little shit looks like

And what did this spoiled little shit do before he killed four people?

Earlier on the night of the accident, June 15, Couch and some friends had stolen beer from a local Walmart. Three hours after the crash, tests showed he had a blood alcohol content of 0.24, three times the legal limit, according to the district attorney's office.

But hey, he grew up under the non-existent thumb of over-permissive rich douchebags. So he must not be able to use logic, comprehend basic concepts of right and wrong, or rationalize that it's wrong to steal beer and drive drunk. Let alone kill people. Probation for all!

Wonder how this would have gone down if a poor, black kid had killed four people? I think we all know probation wouldn't be on the table.

People Are Insane

So a few months back I mentioned there is a new drug making the rounds called Krokodil. It's a mixture of codeine and harmless things like gasoline or paint thinner. It has one major side effect: your skin falls off.

Of course it comes from Russia, where they'll apparently drink or inject anything for a momentary high. But to their credit, at least they didn't shoot the drug into their genitals. Because, y'know, your skin falls off

According to José Sotero Ruiz Hernández, an official with Mexico's National Institute of Migration, a 17-year-old girl in Puerto Vallarta presented lacerations to her genitals that she said were caused by her addiction to krokodil.

"The young woman who used this drug had an infection that had rotted her genitals. It wasn't sexually transmitted. She said she'd been using krokodil for the last two months," Hernandez said, according to a Huffington Post translation of Mexican newspaper El Periodico Correo.

It's not like it's hard to find out that this shit rots your skin. How far past the pale do you have to be to willing shoot a flesh-rotting cocktail of crap into your business?

Oh, here's why they do it:

It is significantly cheaper than heroin, and reportedly ten times as potent.

I guess in their minds, the "cheap high > rotting junk" equation makes sense.

And This is Why I Hate Flying

No. Fucking. Thanks.

I need to become a billionaire so I can travel everywhere by luxury train / massive yacht.

Nice save by the pilot, though.

This is Awesome

As video games become more and more realistic, shouldn't the consequences of your actions also become part of the game? Not your in-game actions, your actions outside of the game.

To wit, and from the fine blokes at Deadspin, here is what happens when you swear while playing NBA 2K14 on the Xbox One.

Now, it should be pointed out that had the Rage King calmed down for a few seconds, he'd have likely realized you can turn this feature off. Still, I think it's pretty cool.

And they aren't the first ones to do it. The FIFA series has this as well. Swear too much in career mode while playing and you get a stern letter from your club's owner. Which I found out first-hand playing FIFA 13. I might have a slight swearing problem. Which is to say it's a big problem. So turning this feature off may be a good thing for me going forward.

But think of the possibilities. In any multi-player game, you could design the game to react negatively to someone using insulting language. See how many times someone says "fag" in Call of Duty if it results in them being left with only a knife for an hour. Something to think about...

Movie Review: Rollerball (1975)

“You can't make me quit.” – Jonathan E. (James Caan)

Director: Norman Jewison

Writers: William Harrison (short story and screenplay)

Producer: Norman Jewison

Studio: MGM/UA

Major Stars: James Caan, Maud Adams, John Houseman, Moses Gunn, John Beck

I was worried going into this viewing that I would find myself disappointed the way I was with Logan’s Run. That a 70s sci-fi movie that I loved growing up would fail under the weight of those rose-colored expectations.

That didn’t happen here. Rollerball is still a solid sci-fi movie, one with a message. It doesn’t redefine the genre, but it carves its own niche into it and can hold its own with today’s flashy additions to the genre.

The plot is pretty straightforward. In the near-future, a handful of mega-corporations run the world. They provide all the basics of life and in return simply ask that the people let them run things as they see fit. To further distract the masses, they run a game called Rollerball where each corporation has a team. It is a hyper-violent sport that not only entertains the crowds but reinforces the idea that individualism is useless, that no one person can rise above the masses. It’s like if Mussolini ran a soccer league where all the players carried spiked bats.

On the Houston Energy team is the most popular player in the world, Jonathan E. (Caan). He starts to receive pressure to retire. No one will tell him why. His decision to seek out the answers drives the film to its conclusion.

Caan is great as Jonathan E. Jonathan begins the film content in his role as a player. He is a product of his world; a contented worker bee with a rudimentary education. But as he is pressured to retire, his eyes are opened to how rotted the world has become. Libraries are gone and now fully digitized, but information is constantly lost. Executives are awarded “privileges” where they can do things like take someone’s wife for their own (which happened to Jonathan). The Corporations run the world with unchecked power but rely on a faulty master computer for guidance.

That makes for one of the great moments of the movie. Jonathan demands to question the master computer in Zurich to find out why things are the way they are. Once there he is informed the computer has lost all the information pertaining to the 13th century, but that it doesn’t matter since the only thing of interest then was Dante. At which point the computer starts to babble incoherently. Jonathan realizes the computer is hopelessly corrupted, just like the world it has spawned.

And yet he doesn’t give in. The whole movie is, in part, a message about the individual fighting to claim their uniqueness in a world that tries to nullify it. The rollerball matches Jonathan competes in get more dangerous. His best friend on the team, Moonpie (played wonderfully by John Beck) is attacked during a match against Tokyo and intentionally placed into a permanent coma with a spiked glove shot to the back of his unprotected head. Jonathan is offered power, money and women. He is even offered back his wife, the one taken away from him by the Corporations so many years ago, as the ultimate bribe. All of this if he will simply retire.

But Jonathan won’t do it. Mostly because no one will tell him why they want him gone at first. But by the climax, he won’t do it because he sees everything the Corporations touch as rotted to the core, including the game he loves. The only thing he has that is untouched, that is his, is his name. And he won’t give that up.