I don't think I've mentioned this to a lot of people, but I've started making games. But in a hilarious twist of irony, I get anxious whenever I play video games because I feel like I should be working on my own game. Long after inspiration has faded, Space Delinquent lies incomplete. It yearns to be loved and nurtured. Longs to be a complete game.

Now do not get me wrong. Space Delinquent will be finished. But it's hard not to think about the next game, and the game after that, and what platform you are going to develop for, in what language.

Ultimately, I wish to satisfy my lust for telling stories. I can never draw comics on the level I want to. I have come to terms with that. I could't possibly write a novel. But games are a huge part of my life, and they are something I am immersed in. None of my real life friends read comics, and most don't even read books. But we all play games. And eventually, everyone in the world will.

I turned twenty-three recently and my thoughts have centered around moving out. It's not that I even really want to move out, but more that I don't want to be one of those guys that lives with his parents forever. I look at how much money I make versus how much an apartment is and it just does not seem reasonable. I can honestly say that I have no idea how people are meant to survive around here. What am I doing wrong?

I'm hoping to be good enough at making games that I can do it full time. I know it sounds crazy. As about as crazy as doing comics full time, I guess. But I'm going to school for computer science so it's a much more realistic dream, I think. I don't want to give up on comics forever though. I could probably find a way to combine the two thoughtfully given enough time. And no I don't mean using comics for cutscenes. It would have to take the traits that make them so good and somehow fit into a game. Something to think about.

Shell

I don't know if I'm remembering this correctly because my memory is pretty shit, but there was this Marylin Manson interview where he described music as an escape. He could put on a record and recede into this musical shell where your parents, your teachers, or your friends couldn't bother you. If I recall correctly, I could not relate at all.

When I was younger, I consumed music. You have to understand that this is around the time Napster became this huge deal. If you wanted to hear a song, you could just download it for free. How wild! It seems silly now, obviously, but it was almost like a race back then to see how much music you could accumulate from lesser known bands.

Oh you haven't heard of them? They're the best, but there stuff isn't sold in stores.

Well of course it fucking isn't. But I just ate that shit. Who are these guys? Okay this one song is good. Oh yeah, they're my new favorite band. I bought all their shirts.

To this day I don't think my friend Austin has ever listened to a song all the way through. I would come over, and we'd go through his library of newly accquired music and listen to about thirty seconds of one song before moving on to the next. One time while we were listening to "Smells Like Teen Spirit", he started up the next song to show me how much bass it had. I put him on the spot.

Hey man have you ever even heard the last verse of that song?

He tells me no and then asks why. Well fuck him then.

It wasn't until I was maybe 19 that I got it. After landing a job at Wal-Mart -- every boy's dream -- I managed to save up enough to snag some sweet headphones. Now I had no idea why I needed such sweet ass headphones. I just knew that I needed them because there is a right way to listen to music, and it involved them.

After that it hit me pretty fucking hard. I don't know if it's because I got turned down for a third date by I girl I really felt I had a connection with, or if it was because I hated my awful fucking job, or if those headphones were actually as super fucking sweet as everyone told me they were. But on a lonely day like any other, I put on "Since I've Been Loving You" by Led Zeppelin and vanished. Just poof.

I imagine if anybody else was in the room with me they would have freaked out. I was nowhere to be seen!

Wherever I was was very comfortable. I remember just seeing blue and yellow lines freaking out like some sort of musical muscle spasm. It was like being heartbroken but in love. My eyes were shut and I rolled around like a cat with some serious nip. The good stuff from oh you know that place in south america.

Yeah I "got" it. My house could have burned down and I would have died there, just listening to that song. As a matter of fact, I would have loved that. I can't think of a better way of dying.

So there you have it world. If you ever see my immersed in sound I want you to murder me. You would be doing me a favor.

Anti-Hospitality

If you had to stand in front of a door and talk to everyone you see without prejudice, could you do it? Or would your mind put together an idea of a person before you could even greet them?

So lately I've been standing at the center of the store and helping customers as they walk by. It has its ups and downs.

The ups are I talk to much more people in a day. Most of the time they don't need anything from my department, so I end up just walking them someplace but that's not a big deal. It makes the day go by faster when you're just shooting the shit with a customer.

The downs are that I talk to much more people in a day. You can't really have a ton of good customers without a few bad ones. Oh well.

Our first culprit was interesting looking. Now I find I don't want to talk to people based on their appearance. Call me prejudiced, I don't know. I can't stand people that are odd looking on purpose. Like it's not your fault if your face is weird, but it is your fault if your pants are pulled up to your chest.

This guy was abnormally tall with a very distinctive drug-user face. You know the one I'm talking about. Like he's constantly worried and is sweating despite the building being really cool. I can tell this guy is an enemy to the world but I have to talk to him. Its my job. So he tells me this--

"If I need help, I'll ask."

I say cool. I really didn't want to help him so it works out great. The odd thing is that he continually curses at his son, and its really almost terrifying in a way. Iduno if he was mad at the kid or what. Our mobile manager Adam said he was cursing to the little boy about our store, which is just super fucking weird and I feel sorry for the little guy. Oh well. You can't pick and choose your parents. I know that all too well.

While he was leaving he told our door guy that he got helped too much and he wasn't coming back. Haha.

So the next guy I just really did not want to talk to. He was doing the pants to chest thing, which looked even worse on him because he was what I can only describe as rotund. He had his hair slicked back but it was too long so he donned what I typically call a stinky mullet. This and he was wearing shorts. Jesus christ. Shorts?

I walk up to the guy and ask him how his day is going. He just looks at me, puts his lips to his lips, and goes, "Shhhhh."

What a dick. So I say yeah sometimes I get hung over too.

I'm okay with somebody not wanting to talk to me, but that is no way to go about it. To make sure he gets plenty of attention, I point him out to the rest of the store over microphone and tell everyone to get this man everything he needs. He isn't going to get out of the store without at least 5 people talking to him.

This is something we usually do to thieves. Why? Thieves and socially inept people are ones that hate being talked to. And I would say the majority of the time it is very hard to distinguish between the two.

What you'll do is have a whole bunch of people just start asking the thief if he needs help and they usually break down and leave after a while.

Am I saying this guy was stealing? Nah. I'm sure he was just a doucherag. What I'm saying its that by not presenting yourself as a human being in a respectful manner only shows the world that you are a chicken basket with extra cunt or that you just have not worked a day in your life, and you appear no better than the subhuman trash that comes in on a daily basis to steal xbox live cards even though you can't use them without activating them at a register.

So I urge you, get a job in retail if even for a short time. Do not become this. If somebody walks up to you and asks you how your day goes, have a conversation with them. If for whatever reason you believe you are above this person, go kill yourself. It is win-win for everyone.

Teamwork

There are this father and son I've seen at Best Buy a couple of times who I swear communicate telepathically.

I got to actually talk to them for the first time after seeing them so often because they needed a tv. The father just had this really weird smile on all the time, even when it wasn't approriate to smile. His son did too, but his was more of a toothy grin. It is also worth noting that they looked nothing alike.

I just recall several times during my time with them that the son seemed to pre-emptively do things that his father wanted to be done. While I was loading out their TV, I told the father to bring his car around and he told me he sent his son to do it.

When? I was standing with both of you the whole time.

I also saw both Victor and Tim again.

If you remember Victor, he was the one who had to research every little thing he would buy. Well it paid off for me because after doing some research, he decided to come back and get a blu-ray player. I thought it was cool that he was telling the truth about his weird research fetish and wasn't just a really cheap person.

Tim seemed worse this time around though. Things were still going pretty bad for him and he talked a lot about his health issues and his crushed dream of becoming a pro football player.

When I start writing a story I hope I can create characters like these people. It seems so easy and tempting to stick with archetypes and idealistic entities, but wacky too careful Victor and I feel my life was wasted Tim are two of the most fascinating dudes I have ever met.

If you haven't already, check out a website called textfiles.com. It sounds pretty nondescript, but it's full of rich history from the 89's BBS days. I am currently obsessed with it.

Can't get 500 words out this time. Sorry.

House Rule

One of my pet peeves is when a person gets punished for doing something wrong or illegal and then get angry over it.

What were you expecting exactly?

I remember the first and only time my friends and I went to Applebee's. We drove 45 minutes to the next town over just to eat there. This is, of course, because we had pretty much exhausted Baytown in terms of food. Every restaurant seemed dull and routine, so we actively seeked out new places to eat at.

I didn't like my meal, but that is not the point of this story. The point is that Nick and Jason decided they would pull a fast one on Applebee's by having Nick buy a meal that comes with free soup and giving the soup to Jason. The thing is, if Nick doesn't eat the soup then they have to charge Jason for the soup. This is so nobody gets a freebie soup. In my opinion it is a completely reasonable rule. Its the same reason you can't have one family share a plate in a buffet diner.

When they charge Jason for the soup he and Nick get angry. They tell me not to tip her. I tell them to shut the fuck up and basically have to explain to them what they did was against the rules and that they have no reason to be angry.

If you get pulled over for speeding and your first reaction is to roll your eyes and get pissed because the man is keeping you down, go fucking swallow a cactus. You were breaking the law!

"Oh but James I don't agree with all the laws blah blah."

I don't agree that I shouldn't be able to fly and never have to poop but that's just not how it works, b. Laws, whether you agree with them or not, are meant to be followed. If you disagree, there are actual legal things you can do. Breaking the law is not one of those things, obviously. Do you think you are a rebel? If anything, law abiding citizens are the rebels. In a world where everyone pirates music, and drives through corner store parking lots to get places faster the ones that do play by the rules are a minority. How does that make you feel?

Now this is a rant for sure. But I bet I can stretch it to five hundred words.

If you're a gamer you might know that people like to make house rules. I hate house rules and I will give reasons in the following sentences. House rules tend to imply that you know better than the designers of the game. While in rare cases this may prove to be the case, you must consider that before a game hits the market it is typically tested over and over to try and create a fair, balanced product.

Imagine, if you will, playing Street Fighter as Ryu but not being able to shoryuken because of a house rule. Somebody might say it has too much priority and is unfair to the game. This is all hypothetical of course, because most people would rather ban throws because they don't want to learn how to tech. But do you see how you have fundamentally changed the game (for the worse) by removing an important part of it because you lack the knowledge and experience with the game to see why the original rule, or in this case the dragon punch, affected it for better or worse? Run on sentence.

Now there are other options. If you consider yourself an authority on the game you can try and contact the creator. You could ask why they created a specific rule, or possibly suggest changes. I recall in Battle for Edahd somebody proposed a variant that made the combat much better and now it is accepted by pretty much everyone as the way to play. You could also create a game exactly like it seeing as how you cannot claim ownership to game mechanics. Most people usually hate this sort of thing but sometimes you get good results.

Blah.

Agendas

"James, when you get older you'll realize that some people have 'agendas' and sometimes truth gets in the way of them."

Victor was a customer of mine with a very unique issue, and also the one who said that. Victor told me that he would research a purchase for months. Even years. He didn't make any moves without knowing every detail. The fact that I sold him a surge protector was an incredible feat. He was intent on getting the tv and getting out, but that's now how it works with James Harrison.

This was during finals week, and I didn't really want to be working when I still had things I needed to work on. I actually mentioned as much as we were getting him signed up for a credit card, and he asked me what I was studying. I mentioned history and he mentioned that he didn't like how people were constantly revising and changing history. I told him about a few decisions the board of education were making and he gave me the line that opened this text.

I've started to like the term "agenda" because it just sounds so rad.

"What's your agenda, douchebag?"

You know I may call in tomorrow. I'm feeling kind of sick.

Retail has the oddest way of dealing with that sort of things. Typically you will get a guilt trip.

"There is only one other person working today. Are you sure you can't come in?"

And then the sarcastic, half-truthed wish of health.

"Okay, well I hope you feel better tomorrow."

And then you sit at home feeling like shit even though you already felt like shit because you were fucking sick. Typically they'd rather you come in and just spread your sickness to all of the customers. It's the perfect way to run a business because people with weakened immune systems are more acceptant of attachments. I made that up but it is still pretty ridiculous.

Hopefully one day I can get a job where being sick doesn't affect me much. Who knows how that will turn out.

Tim

After I became a salesman my ability to talk to people improved tremendously. Small talk was no longer an obstacle, and I could always find something to talk about that interested the other party. Most people would give obvious signs.

If they have an mp3 player they obviously listen to music. Ask them how they feel about lil weezy. They either love or hate that guy. Just play to the crowd.

Sometimes they wear a shirt with a band name or something on it. I bumped into this dude the other day that was wearing a spider-man shirt and I asked him where he bought his comics. We talked for like five minutes. We could have gone on longer, but he was kind of socially retarded but that is okay.

But this one time I sat outside of target I got jumped by kindness. It was such a hot day and I didn't feel like talking to anybody. I was sitting outside of the store just waiting for my ride when this big dude sits next to me.

"Man it's hot out here."

I was like haha yeah. He said, "I'd take off my shirt but people would go blind."

This guy was kind of chunky but so am I so I laughed. I was wearing my best buy uniform at the time so of course I get the usual question.

"How long have you worked at best buy?"

Dude just kicked through my fence. That's how you initiate a conversation. It's not like I could douche out of that one. "Oh you know a year or so," blah blah turn away to stare at the concrete. Happens every time. Inevitably, the work discussion started.

Long story short, we talked about our jobs and I found out in a really dickheaded way that I got paid more than him while doing much less work. When he asked me how much I got paid, I couldn't even give him an answer because I honestly didn't remember. 8 or 9 dollars? Something like that?

I didn't realize how douchey my response was because I didn't know that Tim was making less than seven dollars doing the most tedious sounding job known to man. And he mentioned it so sincerely. I just asked, "Do they pay you enough?"

So I always tell my friends and co-workers that I get paid too much. They all laugh, but I never know if I'm joking or not. But Tim (that's his name by the way) has to organize mountains of documents and then scan them one by one into a database for eight hours a day. I get anxious when I have to scan a single piece of art. This dude is literally doing something that will be performed by super robots in the near future. And he gets paid as such. Fuck, Tim, I didn't realize things were so bad.

He actually works for the unemployment office. Like, he started by getting jobs from them but eventually moved up the ladder and is an actual employee of theirs. That gives me hope that a hardworking dude like him can get somewhere. And it fills me with rage that a lazy low-life like me gets paid more than a guy like him.

Since then I started to avoid talking about money when the work discussion came up. And it came up a lot. People love to use it as an opening line. I don't even have to be wearing the uniform. I always get the, "Hey don't you work at best buy? I promise I'm not a stalker."

To say I'm a distinctive looking dude would be an understatement, but I look bizarrely different in my uniform. At least to me. So when people spot me outside of work and know who I am, I feel like they've discovered my secret identity. Sometimes it makes sense, like the girl from target. She talks to me whenever she sees me but that's because I go to target all the fucking time. But sometimes it's terrifying, like when I'm just sitting at school reading. But I guess that's the price you pay for working where everybody shops.

Man what was I even talking about.