I know you all miss when I post about things related to me and not about video games, Android smartphones, the best locations to park your car and scream at birds, the cost of bee-fresh honey at your local farm, cookies on dowels, noses on dowels, HA HA double rainbow, and emo-laden fusterclucks. I regret to inform you that it’s your goddamn lucky day, asshole, WE’RE TAKING THIS TO ELEVEN!

Unfortunately, life has been going pretty well as of late. I haven’t spun into an uncontrollable rage and killed a raccoon, the cats are still assholes, work is still work, and it’s not summer anymore, which saves me money on the unholy power bill. Add heaping tablespoons of Borderlands 2 play and some decent animu on tap for the fall season, and this is how childless twenty-somethings live it up. Of course there is still that looming specter of wedding stuff hanging overhead, but I try not to worry (read: men worry?) about it too much, it’s mostly under control, else if I have to get it under control I will. I’ve stayed out of a lot of the core planning for it because women want their day to be special, and so do I, but I feel like I am kind of a component to the wedding in a way, like, “We need to do this-and-this-and-this-and-this-also-that-like-that-more-of-this-PERFECT, now get in here and look good!” It’s a team effort, I know that, but the way I see it, I have two things going wrong for me, I’ve never been to or been involved in wedding planning (never been in someone else’s wedding in any form) and I am not female. Being female is a prerequisite for a wedding. Not that I doubt homosexual partners can throw crazy weddings too, but women dream about this shit all their life. I dream about going on some stakeout with the FBI while a naked half-monster zombie-baby tears through a bicycle on a pogo stick as Ron Swanson is grilling a stack of meat on a 12-mile-long grill that leads into a Red Robin where I am forced to make smiling burgers out of them to serve Sir Patrick Stewart and the cast of The Next Generation except Wesley because no one likes Wesley. Can I stage this instead of a wedding? Or can I stage this AT the wedding?

I don’t get out to the movies that often, mainly because I still am boycotting the MPAA for hiring that fraud Chris Dodd on as their CEO, but also because most of the movies that have come out have been trash. We went and saw Frankenweenie this weekend, and if you’ve seen one Tim Burton movie you’ve seen them all really, but it was very good. What I am actually excited to see however is Wreck-It Ralph coming out early next month. I know Disney is being Disney and exploiting the nostalgia goggles hard on this movie, even going so far as to create an actual game and arcade cabinet for E3, and fairly period-authentic “commercials” for promos, which some view as Disney “subtlety re-writing your childhood” but it’s really the closest-to-Pixar amount of fun Disney can muster on its own without Pixar, and even then they’re cheating by the fact John Lasseter is directing the film, but only because he is the head of Walt Disney Animation Studios, which really was the main goal for Lasseter all along, to make their animation arm thrive again. (Source for you Wiki-types: The Pixar Story Documentary) I for one, being a video game enthusiast and nerd, will enjoy picking out games I used to play when I was a kid from a room full of them, and there will be, because how else would they get a majority of us out for this movie?

One of the tricky things I’ve had to deal with ever since I started dealing in cats is arranging my office desk to not only contain my computer stuff, but also personal effects. At work, it’s easy, because there are no animals (except Jackson or Otto on occasion, both dogs) that are going to jump on my desk and break my figures and spread hair everywhere. I used to build Gundam models many years back and display them, until I got cats. Now they sit in the basement collecting dust, which saddens me, and while I could buy or assemble some kind of curio cabinet or closed shelf, we have only a finite amount of space to work with in this apartment. Most of the older cats know well enough not to jump into the shelves and mess with the figures and trinkets we both have on the bookshelves, but they don’t understand the desk, they constantly try to jump onto the printer and in turn smack against stuff on the desk. I had been rolling the idea around since we moved in to arrange the desks together in the room back-to-back so that they appear sideways from the entrance, but we ended up just sticking them against the wall. Surprisingly, it was my girlfriend who decided to move hers sideways yesterday, and I ended up following suit to remain symmetrical. The shelve splits the middle down, which works pretty well, but we have to tie up cables and make it so the cats won’t get caught in them and drop our monitors. Never mind kids, cats are pains in the ass when you have nice things.

Finally, a rather long piece about politics and the upcoming election. It’s a lot of TL;DR, so you can skip it if you want, I won’t be offended. I almost blanked it, but then I remembered that this is my blog and you can close your browser at any time you like.

Election Day is almost up, and I’ve tried to suppress by need to troll politics on the internet as much as possible, without much luck in some cases. I did decide that I am going to vote independent this year, most likely for Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party. I wouldn’t identify myself as a full-on Libertarian, especially since he was Republican during his governorship of New Mexico and during the Republican primary. After reading his record as governor though and his views on core issues, which I define to be domestic energy, budget/spending, taxes, and domestic affairs, he nails the head on everything I believe in as a fiscally conservative person, while renaming largely a social liberal on such matters as abortion and marriage-equality, which I support. I know Johnson will not win, that we will be stuck with the same do-nothing-horde-everything greedy politicians of both sides. But I don’t view this as “throwing away a vote” like many people of my generation might feel, that no matter what we do, we’re locked into a scenario where we HAVE to elect a Republican or a Democrat. We have many major independent parties out there with real agendas on how this country should run, and sure, some are very out-of-the-park, like Ron Paul’s 2008 campaign, but there are plenty of moderates seeking office that want to run on platforms that appeal to people who believe in real democracy, not a two-party dictatorship influenced by lobbyists and corporate/union thugs. The fact is, both parties serve their core constituents, the rich and the poor. They maximize the class warfare game to keep these two groups constantly in-fighting, always believing that the other is responsible for their lack of happiness and prosperity. Meanwhile the middle class, the bulk of whom are the producers and anchor the upper and lower classes, continue to see their happiness and prosperity erode as the rich exploit their results for profit, and the poor mooch off the money going into social programs. The simple fact is, if the middle class in this country all decided to “strike” and not work, both the upper and lower classes would collapse, this economy would collapse, and we’d plunge into a real recession with real consequences. A country that does not produce and only consumes cannot sustain itself over time. If farmers stopped farming and moved to the city to work in an office, there would be no food produced to eat, it’d have to be imported from another country. China is rolling in cash because we stopped manufacturing goods in this country and bought them from theirs. Say what you will, but this country slides further and further into ceasing to be a producer and innovator and is gradually becoming a consumer and a moocher. Why do anything when you can have someone else do it for you and reap the benefit? This mentality is killing this country, and our politicians are perpetuating it because it makes them rich, it makes them powerful, it makes them affluent. People bitch about corporations and fat-cat CEOs, yet they don’t say a word about high-paid football or baseball players, professional car drivers, or their local politicians. Chris Dodd? Financed his homes on the Countrywide sweet deal. Ted Stevens? Took kickbacks and free contractor work on his Alaskan home before he died. No one talks about these people, because they don’t dare bite the hand that feeds them, so long as medicare, medicaid, food stamps, section eight, and Uncle Sam is taking care of them. I get that, it’s a good policy, leave them alone so they leave you alone, but government and society has to change. Term limits, social program reform, health care reform, tort reform, judicial/prison system reform, the list goes on. Being an elected official was never a career choice our forefathers envisioned, you serve your time as a community leader and return to your life. No sweetheart deals, no pensions, no free health care, nothing off the backs of hard-working American people. I know nationalism and patriotism doesn’t mean much in this country, since the people who moved to this country to start new lives would rather embrace their home country and values rather than ours, but this country was formed by people who didn’t enjoy political and religious intolerance, and being ruled over by a monarchy half-a-world away. They fought and died for their freedom, and continued to fight and die to maintain it. We’ve had a rough history, some bad shit happened, but today we’re a symbol of freedom seen around the world, and mock us all you want, but people continue to move here every day seeking their own happiness and prosperity. Don’t let it be stomped out by two political parties vying to simply remain relevant and in power over your lives. Consider voting independent, because some day enough people will vote independent and take a chunk out of a politician’s poll numbers, and that will get the media talking, and Facebook, and Twitter. Politicians prey on people’s turn-on-a-dime mentality, no reason we can’t prey on that too.