It just is. Stop using it. I'm talking about the make-up stuff. I've never seen it look good.

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It's not that I don't like chocolate. It's true I don't really care for it, and never buy anything chocolate outside of the cookie realm (which is something I rarely visit as it is). However, I think chocolate is overused in anything it's in. I like chocolate chip cookies, but it seems like every time I have one there's giant chunks of chocolate in them. That, to me, is not good. It's like finding chunks of garlic in your pizza sauce.

Chocolate is a lot like garlic to me. It's something there to enhance the flavor, to add to it. If I drank coffee, I'd want to season it with chocolate. It's a compatible flavor. Just like garlic and tomato sauce. My favorite nationality of food is Italian, so quite naturally I like garlic. Even so, the idea of eating a bulb of garlic repulses me, as it does most people, and it is the same with chocolate. The major difference (to me) between eating pure garlic and eating pure chocolate is that the garlic is healthy, whereas the chocolate is detrimental. The minor difference is that chocolate has caffeine.

It all started one Easter Sunday in Pennsylvania. We were there visiting relatives, and there was not much to do. I received a chocolate rabbit, about half the size of a real rabbit. It was not solid, it was hollow, but it was thick. I tried to eat the entire thing. I don't remember if I was successful or not. Ever since, I have not liked chocolate all that much.

To me, chocolate is a spice, like cinnamon, although I like cinnamon a hell of a lot more.

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At work, we've got a candy basket. Lately, there's been a lot of Snickers, Milky Ways, and 3 Musketeers bars in there. People are generally aware that I'm not too fond of chocolate. However, I did notice something about these bars. In the order I've listed them here, they are just fewer and fewer ingredients. 3 Musketeers is just chocolate-covered nuget. Milky Way adds caramel to 3 Musketeers. Snickers adds peanuts to Milky Way. I wonder, why do they have names that vary more than the ingredients of the bars?

Well, it's better than the whole "lite" thing. Have you seen these? Candy bars boast fewer calories but same great taste because they have "Lite" in the title. Well, it's true the "lite" bar has about 2/3 the calories of the regular bar, but it also is only 2/3 of the bar. It's just a smaller bar. So, the reason it tastes the same is because, ounce for ounce, it is the same. There's just fewer ounces.

I think a lot of people do that. "Lite" ice cream contains 50% more air. Cool whip "lite" just has a smaller serving size. This is part of the reason I avoid confections. Next we'll discover they're using cyinide as a preservative. "The bar that lasts longer than you."

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For some reason, the "violence in video games breeds violence in reality" issue keeps coming up. You know, because we didn't have violence in reality before violent video games. The wild west is just a fairy tale some game developer came up with. War is just something that we play over the internet with up to 64 other players on a laggy server. There were never any serial killers before the 1980's. Nobody ever snapped and opened fire on an unsuspecting crowd with a sniper rifle until Grand Theft Auto 3 came out. There just wasn't any violence. Video games invented it.

In that slashdot thread I just linked to, one anonymous coward wrote: "when i was a child (i was born in 1939) we would take large pieces of lumber and smash frogs on the head. we had no video games back then." I'm sure that's not a devaluation of life. If you go back another 50 years, killing people was a popular thing to do. It was something people would brag about. Many legends from that time. The fact of the matter is that the past has always been more violent than the present. While it's true that people may take inspiration from a movie or video game when deciding what style to kill in, the decision to kill is pretty independant of that. If a guy hadn't seen The Matrix, he would just kill in a different fashion.

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On a whim, I looked it up on eBay, and sure enough, someone is selling the Brooklyn Bridge. He's actually only selling deeds for 1" sections at $0.99 each. They're novelty deeds, but that's not the way it sounds. Honestly, if anyone buys it thinking they're actually getting ownership of a 1" section of the Brooklyn Bridge, they deserve to lose much more than $2.49 (price after S&H). My favorite part is about the toll booths.

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Argh! My beautiful 3-day weekend is over! I'm going to cry now.

Also, the forums are back up. You may resume not posting anything there.

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Today is July 4th, Independence Day. What better way to celebrate our independence from a country we currently like, than by blowing up a part of our own? It's your civic responsibility to set fire to small, hand-held explosives for amusement and entertainment (redundancy, yay!). Please do not blow up the cat... or the dog, although it's much more tempting to blow up the cat, which is why I mentioned it.

I should note, the forums are down until Monday.

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We are a lazy society. Everything we do seems to be an effort towards less work. The acronym is a testament to this. People make up new acronyms on an almost hourly basis. We even abbreviate our curse words. It's no longer "Fuck You", it's "F U". Sometimes I wonder if the person is just talking about Fun University.

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