Left Behind Video Games

In a spate of fiendish cleverness, the fundamentalists have realized that their kids wanna shoot things up on TV screens too, so now there's Left Behind: Eternal Forces. So you too can demolish cities and kill people you don't like, but this time it's in the name of God!

...because as we all know, boys and girls, Jesus said we must judge the wicked and slay the sinners, for revenge is ours!

The Democrats want a draft!

You can't make this stuff up!

Microsoft are Arrogant Bastards

Ok, so due to some weird security setting I wasn't able to use an online conferencing tool from work on my home box, so I went ahead and reset "Internet Explorer" settings to their default. Did you know that the "default Internet Explorer Settings" include removing Start Menu links to the Firefox executable, replacing them with Internet Explorer in the pinned section, and just removing them in general in Firefox's own folder so it looks like a bad install?

Luckily, since they only "pretended" to uninstall Firefox, aka make it completely unavailable to a normal end user, I was able to get all my bookmarks back. The arrogance of those bastards is utterly astounding.

Wow, what do you say?

You know, I love my family, especially the small subset of my family that acts as if my brothers and I are members of it. Some of my family actually treat my brothers and I like we're members of the family, and it's really nice.

Now, no-one's family is perfect, so there are always family things that you do regardless of their vapidity or the general bored disinterest of all participants. It's part of the grease that lets families exist. For the past calendar year we've already performed the normal holiday "since we're co-located at the moment, let's play nice & pretend we care" rituals like:

Aunt: So... when is the wedding?
Madeline: We were married in April.
Aunt: Oh, well I guess we'll have to get that present right in the mail!

or

Aunt: So how come you never let us know when you're visiting?
Me: I called you the last three times I was in town.
Aunt: Oh.

So, when I checked my email this morning, the last thing I expected was this:

Hi Jim

Hope you and Addy are doing fine!

I want to get you both a gift certificate for your wedding gift. Sorry............. this gift is quite tardy, but I am trying to catch up. Where would be a good place for you all to have a gift certificate?

If you are ever in Dallas, give us a buzz. We would love to see you.

Let me know what you think about the gift certificate.

Love, ******

If it's true that it's the thought that counts & not the gift... do they really sell gift certificates that small?

The Inner Ring

Available at BigCSLewisFan. This made the rounds thanks to reddit, and since I hadn't seen it before, I wanted to put it up. You can see the parallels to events in Surprised By Joy. Its funny how much "Middle-Aged Moralists" can teach you -- things you already sorta knew, but never fully got your finger on top of.