He's back and he's turned a new leaf. Behold! Bubba attempts to appease the mouth breathing masses. Yes. That's you.
Sex and The Zune HD
As I usually am on a weekday eve, I was pwning noobs in the Haloz last night when BC Kinetic asked me about my column. We got to discussing the vicious aversion I seem to have to writing it these days and his comment was that "you can’t please everyone." It occurred to me that there was a fair chance that BC was just wrong. Maybe you can please everyone. Maybe a regular column can be composed with such flexibility, creativity and positive crowd-pleasing genius that every single person walking the earth that reads it would say “Wow! Bubba Rawks!"
So, in an effort to appease all, on a quest for populist treatises revered by the masses, in a shameless attempt to appeal to the lowest common denominator and garner more attention than Killthrash, here is my opus to ... Sex and The Zune HD.
Love him or hate him, revere his philanthropic efforts or detest his ruthless, exploitative, monopolistic business practices, Bill Gates knows how to turn a buck. The formula has been pretty standard now for three decades; figure out what Apple is doing and throw money at the problem until old people buy what you tell them. If any young upstart companies try to horn their way in on the action, then just overwhelm them with superior litigious skills, bully them into submission with copious amounts of cash, or flat out steal their shit and let the lawyers sort it out. In the spirit of this type of robust competition, Microsoft introduced the Zune in November of 2006. The hardware was ugly and prone to early failure, the software sucked, and people like Caesar ("I love my Zune and can't take when people try to subvert my MML authority") quickly fell into line and started buying them en masse. This is because people are sheep and Bill Gates is the Shepherd.
Which brings us to the sex portion of the column. For those concerned about a quick pivot to bestiality in their interwebz reading -- fear not. The point here is not to talk about banging sheep, but to point out the lengths men will go to disbelieve every lesson they have ever been taught about common sense in return for some trim. Kari Ferrell has been getting a lot of press lately because in exchange for some flirtatious chatter and the random handjob, she has the disturbing tendency to defraud, rob, swindle and embroil people in her phony oncology issues.
She is a whack job.
I don't want to get into too many personal details about how this story came to my attention, *cough -- "Bobby from Rutgers" is my nephew-cough* -- but I read enough about this goofy broad to recognize an ugly truth about myself. I dig the crazy.
In fairness, the iPod is not for everyone. Some people prefer the flexibility that a Zune brings to an all Windows environment. The proprietary software brings all the transcoding power you need to turn nearly every piece of electronic media you have into a portable format you can use on the world's most ubiquitous operating system. That sort of convenience is a strong draw to people without access to thousands of like-minded technophiles like we enjoy here at 2o2p. If something goes wrong with my iPod or my Sansa media player I can usually count on Tank finding me an answer to the problem before I can learn the appropriate tech-speak to even ask a customer support rep the question. Not everyone has that luxury.
The Zune HD promises more of the same ease of use while integrating the XBL marketplace and tying together content from your 360 to your Zune. While specs are sketchy on this ability, I know that taking my Hexic high score on the plane with me to Chicago is a powerful draw. That's just the kind of geek cred I crave. Add to that features like HD radio, tagging of songs like GTA IV fans learned to love from Zit! and HD video out and you've got a powerful contender to the handheld music throne.
Kari's kind of crazy was a perhaps a tad more extreme than some men might find attractive, but I still get it. Sure it's annoying when you wake up after "forgetting" to call that one-night stand back and find a brick in your windshield. The girl who makes you leave the window open to the backyard where her parents are barbecuing while you have sex on their bed and she insists you only refer to her as "Slut" and "Whore" might be odd to some. The stranger you tried to help get away from a guy accusing her of pickpocketing, who licks blood off your face while telling you how much she "loves barfights," is not everyone's cup of tea. The cocktail waitress that offers to "cut the tits off" another girl she "saw you looking at" might seem like a risky choice to some. When the young lady in question starts reprogramming your GPS because a restraining order prohibits her from going through the tolls at the George Washington Bridge, some people get nervous.
But not me. And not the kind of men that are willing to fork over chunks of their life savings to tatted up Asian chicks that hand you bar napkins with "I want to throw a hotdog down your hall" written on them.
While it's safe to say that no significant portion of your 401k will need be liquidated to afford a Zune HD, a final price point has not been decided yet. Still, let typical pricing models prevail and we can estimate that somewhere between $200.00-$350.00 will land you one of MS's next gen's media players. Portability, flexibility, integration with a large number of systems you already have around the house, and early access to that most coveted of Geek Toys, the Next Big Thing, could be the reward for Zune HD early adopters. The downside includes getting a product that the folks at MS are still beta-testing on you while they are busy trying to make it obsolete in another two years. Scheduled for release in the Fall of '09, you could have until 2011 before the Zune HD goes belly up and into the discontinued pile at Best Buy.
And ultimately, that's the knock on the wing nut too. She is not fine wine. This act of hers will not age well. Genre porn and the short con are not jobs that reward longevity of service. The early pictures of the hotty on the Smoking Gun will soon be the first of a series in a PowerPoint Slideshow entitled "Faces of Meth." So pick your crazy lady carfeully. I suggest roadtesting her for a few years before making the ultimate commitment. My wife and I lived together for 11 years before we got married. I still am careful to avert my eyes when hot women are around but if you aren't a little afraid of waking up with missing body parts then you just aren't enjoying life to its fullest.
Now onto the questions!
In deference to the fact that he never gave up hope and his questions are funnier than my answers usually are, I'm making this an All-Snuphy-Question-Extravaganza.
Snuphy asks: Where the fuck is Bubba?
Central Jersey -- about a 40 minute train ride from New York and Philadelphia. Cheesesteaks on one end of the Northeast Corridor Line and civilized life on the other.
Snuphy asks: Does plentiful ingestion of Natural Light while gaming make a person extra “regular”?
First off, get a man's beer. Secondly, if your dumps are blocks of concrete without the beer then alcohol can mess with absorption of salts and water in the small intestine enough to smooth that move, but you could also wind up with a ripping case of the beer shits. Please don't ever follow up on this question with more information.
Snuphy asks: If I meet a bunch of guys online, chat with them for almost a year, and then agree to meet them at a hotel in another state, am I gay?? Or just in a clan??
Gay. This should only be an issue though if you already live in the Midwest. If you do, you're within easy driving distance of the LAN anyway so come on out to the Chicago Wyndham O'Hare and taste the rainbow. Afterwards move in with BC or me. We've got gay-friendly towns and accepting attitudes towards all lifestyles.
Snuphy asks: I’ve come to realize that I am a crappy gamer sober, and a shitty gamer shit faced. But there’s an intoxication range between sober and shit faced where my senses are heightened, my pants are off, and my skillz are drastically improved. How do I learn to identify that range? And how do keep myself in that zone?
Man are you asking the wrong guy. I have two speeds. Stone cold sober and head-butting-the-regional-vice-president-so-that-he-knows-I'm-no-ass-kisser. Viva la suckage and hook up with MJ for some drunkfest fun
Snuphy asks: ...on the occasions I inadvertently game until 3:42 am, how do I prevent my children from waking up at 7. Or, if my darling progeny do awake early, how do I prevent my darling wife from then shaking me while lovingly grumbling “get the fuck up dumb ass?”
All right. You're going to need to take the batteries out of your Co2 detector, enough garden hose to run from where you park the car to the kids' window and duct tape.
Got to have duct tape.
Big woots to Snuphy and his band of hooligans for livening up a dead thread and being the catalyst for getting me off my ass. If you want your questions ignored for month's at a time feel free to post them here.
