To keep my mind off of the all consuming nausea

So it's been a bit since my last post, and what with one of my best friends leaving the university, the start of classes, and some devil-illness that caused me to vomit for 2 days straight (and still be unable to really eat solid food) I've been a bit busy, so this post is a bit dated. Anyway, I got me a pretty nice haul of video games this christmas and thought I'd share some thoughts on them.

Mirror's Edge: This game really got panned by the critics as not living up to the awesome-osity that was the demo. After having had plenty of hands on time with the full thing i can say that while many complaints about this game are valid, they simply don't hinder the gameplay THAT much. The biggest complaints were about the confined and confusing indoor areas, and the appalling combat. And while the combat would never be acceptable in any kind of FPS, it is important to note that mirror's edge is decidedly NOT an FPS. In fact, I liken it to a first person Prince of Persia (Sands of Time, of course, not the awful sequels), and if anyone remembers Sands of Time, they would do well to note that the game succeeded in spite of the combat mechanism, and after a few hours of play, you could figure out the chuggy and painful mechanics enough to beat the system out of forcing you to waste too much time on the battle sequences. The same can be said of Mirror's Edge in that when there aren't any enemies on screen, figuring out the running-jumping-sliding-etc. puzzles is a god-damn blast. The plot is kind of superficial (futuristic 1084-esque dystopia with government conspiracies out the wazoo), but provides a decent enough setting for your character's actions to make sense. It won't be taking home game of the year for me (that'll be Fallout 3 this year and every year until something better comes along) but I can promise one of the most unique experiences available on the 360 to anyone willing to overlook a few minor pitfalls. 7.5/10

Left 4 Dead: I feel like part of the experience of this game still has to come through for me because I don't know anyone who has a Live account and owns this game. Thusly my only co-op experience has been split screened, which is fun, but you really start to wish you had more screen space when say, you're getting reamed by approximately 50 zombies hungering for your brains or other innards. I don't have quite as much to say about this as I did about Mirror's Edge simply because as far as gameplay mechanics go, there isn't a lot there, but not every meal has to be gourmet quality. Sometimes you have a hankering for some McNuggets and goddamn if they don't hit the spot just right. If you ever wanted to know what "28 Days Later" the video game would play like, this is it. Fast, frantic, loud, gorey, and a lot of fun if you can get at least one other person on board to play with you. I'd say it gets roughly a 6.5/10, losing points only because the missions, in spite of varying enemy sets, the missions feel very interchangeable and samey, and the campaigns feel just a little too long at points. Still though, for a half hour of mindless zombie slaughterin', look no further.

Prince of Persia: I, um... Well, this is awkward because this game was so bad, so insufferable, that I sold it within 3 days of getting it after playing for approximately 90 minutes total. The characters are static, obnoxious, saturday-morning-cartooney stereotypes (wisecracking anglicized yet inexplicably "persian" Prince, mysteriously hot sorceress who is also a total cunt, evil sorceror reviving dark gods for some reason never fully made clear). The combat is even more insufferable than any other PoP title, featuring quicktime instant failure events at every goddamn turn and attacks that, while pretty, you never feel particularly invested in the execution of (pressing "B" will vault you into the air to hurl the enemy down with this spinning flair that seems almost too effortless to even be fun or visceral). Also, no one in the history of gaming has ever liked having to scavenge for 50 bajillion of one kind of item (light seeds, in this case) in between every mission. Remember finding the 100 hidden packages in GTA III? Imagine that half of the game was that. And your character never shut the fuck up. And the disk was printed on poop so that when you put in the drive your console burst into flames. 2/10, and it only gets those 2 because parts of it are kind of pretty.

Musical Superlatives (2008 edition!)

It's getting to be the end of 2008 and you know what that means: I cram my musical tastes down everyone's throat in my top 10 albums of the year. But don't take my word for it... no, no, DO take my word for it. Moving on...

10. ObZen - Meshuggah
Every time Meshuggah releases an album I always think to myself: "why bother dividing this into tracks?" But the thing is, their hour long fiddling with spastic time signature changes and attempts to see how many more strings they can add below a low E continue to impress me. Is it as good as Nothing? No, but it's damn fine and they pull out plenty of riffs that will surprise and impress.

9. Fortress - Protest the Hero
Their initial effort (Kezia), while technically very proficient, suffered from really shitty mixing. This is a problem when you do really high, technical riffing and coheed-esque wailing (in a good way, but it's still really high) and forget to put any bass into the mix. Fortress fixed this problem, and the songwriting as a whole has stepped up a notch. Sometimes incredibly disonnant, sometimes very melodious, but very tight, fast, and technical. A promising act.

8. Shogun - Trivium
This is more of an award for improvement than for releasing a spectacular album. It's certainly no Ascendancy, but the way they removed everything I disliked about The Crusade, it's like this album was a personal apology to me, and that says something.

7. Watershed - Opeth
Opeth takes their usual sound here, but adds a lot of proggy little tidbits to distract from the Death Metal assault that their songs have a tendency to dissolve into. On the whole, this album feels more balanced than anything they've done in a while, which proves that even the most established death/prog acts can be subject to maturing once in a while.

6. Reason to Believe - Pennywise
These guys have kind of been phoning it in for a while, but this album gets them back to some silver age style Land of the Free type shit. It doesn't hurt when they just give the album out for free for the first two weeks of its release either. Point is, this feels like the first album where they've put in any effort in years, and it is a reminder of how great Pennywise CAN be. Now if someone could only convince them to play any songs from after 1995 in concert...

5. Rise and Fall, Rage and Grace - The Offspring
It has been 5 goddamn years since these guys have done anything, then out of the blue they came out with a full album and much to my surprise, it was really good. Like, at least as good as Splinter. A few too many slow-ish radio sounding songs, but the faster SoCal punk tracks completely make up for it. "Shit is Fucked Up" is probably one of the best songs they've done since "All I Want"

4. Agony and Irony - Alkaline Trio
The problem when a band's most recent release is your favorite is that the subsequent release is almost guaranteed to disappoint. This album, however, had me astounded at how fluidly the guys picked up from where they left off with Crimson, and keep moving in a new and fresh direction. They've gone in a less minimalist direction, but it's nice to see that they acknowledge that sticking with a minimalist sound stagnates quickly. Just another solid release in an ever improving series.

3. Appeal to Reason - Rise Against
You know, I have this written down as my number three, but coming up with specific reasons is hard. Rise against is one of the few bands where I like how relatively static their sound has remained, so the reason I liked this album so much is that it was exactly what I was expecting: More of the same, but a little tweaked for complexity's sake. This is a pretty subjective pick, but fuck you, you don't like it, write your own damn blog nobody reads.

2. Want - 3OH!3
I can't even begin to describe how much I love this album. I wish I could defend myself by saying it's an ironic love, but it has surpassed that. The songs are catchy, trashy, shamelessly self promoting, and probably the most fun ANYTHING I've heard in a long ass time. 3OH!3 is literally the only thing that I have a remote amount of Colorado pride for. Fun! Trashy! Catchy! Delightful! ETC.!!!!!

1. If - Mindless Self Indulgence
I mean, did anyone not see this one coming? Within 2 days of the album's release the top 15 on my iTunes "top 25 most played" were the tracks from this album. It exemplifies everything I loved about their last album, but even more so. I mean, MSI is totally one of those bands that you either like the sound or you don't. If you like MSI, you'll like this album, if you don't, you won't. I personally LOVE MSI and thusly would bed this album in an intimate manner. Several times. Consecutively.

And here is the rest of the crap that aaaaalmost made the list:

Scars on Broadway - Scars on Broadway - This was nixed because Daron is a bitch, no matter what captain "anonymous" says a few posts below. Also because half of the songs on it are shit, but the other half are really really awesome.

All Hope Is Gone - Slipknot - Maybe if Corey hadn't decided to make a new Stone Sour album featuring guest appearances by Slipknot, I would still care that this album existed. As it stands, it didn't bode well that when I went through the "list of 2008 releases" on Wikipedia, I saw this album and said "oh right, they DID come out with something this summer".

Death Magnetic - Metallica - A really solid effort. I just can't bring myself to honor James Hetfield or Lars Ulrich for anything. They are insufferable whiny bitches who just happened to make good music in the 80's and very early 90's, and then one more time in 2008.

Midnight Boom - The Kills - This album is really quite good, and their singer just has a very sexy sound (yes their singer is a girl, wiseasses). The problem here was that it was a little too samey and the sound never got quiiiite interesting enough to justify the samey-ness.

Well, that's that. See you kids around.

Over the Shark, On to the Beach, and Straight on to Cancellation

I am willing to put up with a lot of stupid shit from my entertainment. I have watched every last episode of Lost and 24, I love the Die Hard series (including the new one), and still get perverse joy from watching Quentin Tarantino's cinematic tripe. As I write this, however, I feel that a certain line has been irrevocably crossed. What line, you may ask? The degree of bullshit I am willing to put up with from none other than Doctor Gregory House M.D.

The show has been going south for a while now, but I've stuck with it simply because Hugh Laurie plays such an unbelievable asshole that i marvel at the writing required to come up with somebody who is such a genuinely awful human being. This last week's episode has officially torn it for me. Perhaps you may have seen it, although if you have I'm surprised you're reading my blog instead of projectile vomiting all over your keyboard.

There were so many status quo changing elements in this episode that there is simply no way for any kind of return to a healthy equilibrium to make even remote sense. House almost got one of his doctors killed, alternated between chatting up and openly harassing a man with a gun pointed at him and other people, got the gun away from the guy, gave the gun back to the guy, then proceeded to be oh-so shocked and indignant when SURPRISE: the lunatic with the gun failed to act rationally in regards to other people's safety.

You don't play up a character's keen intuition into the workings of people's minds (all people are bad) and then take away that intuition when a character so repugnantly shallow even I could identify the, uh, character flaws starts waving a fucking gun around. And why did nobody think to simply breach Cuddy's office when this shit was still in first gear. Everyone in the House universe with the surprising exception of Chase and Foreman turned into hyper-emotional mongoloids, whining about their problems (sometimes to the fucking hostage taker) and talking through their inabilities to have normal lives. Hell they chatted so much you almost forgot that there was a man with a gun and a fucking SWAT team assembled at the hospital.

So, Dr. House, I say to you this: I have had it with your stupid bullshit. You have run out of medical scenarios that could even be minutely based in reality and thusly have to revert to waxing existential on mortality for about 20 fucking minutes every episode, and when that doesn't work, you throw in a bunch of people with guns, only you fuck that up too as nobody who would ordinarily be trained in using them seems to remember that they even have them. To say this show jumped the shark with this episode would be giving it too much credit. It's as if the show tried to jump the shark, but didn't quite get enough momentum and fell straight into its gaping maw, where it was promptly digested and shat out to become plankton food.

Oh also, the above paragraphs contain spoilers or some shit.

A Double Dose of Post-Concert Wrapups

Due to an ever shrinking checking account and the simple fact that no particularly interesting bands have come through New York (and when they do they cancel their tours for no reason *cough*scarsonbroadway*cough*) I haven't gone to a terrible amount of shows this year. Fortunately the last 5 days have completely made up for this disparity by offering me Dir en Grey with The Human Abstract on the 14th and just last night (the 18th) 3OH!3. So without further ado, my thoughts:

Dir En Grey w/ The Human Abstract
November 14th @ Terminal 5
Having seen Dir En Grey twice now and The Human Abstract once, I figured I knew precisely what to expect from this show: 3 or so hours of pure fucking awesome. Sadly, however, this was not the case. See, The Human Abstract recently (well, like 3 months ago anyway) released a new album and hence were promoting it on this tour. All well and good if they had managed to release an album that was actually worth listening to. Instead they tried to sound like the love child of Avenged Sevenfold and Opeth, but somehow missed every element that makes (in A7X's case, made) those bands any good and instead came out with a mishmash of boring and generic metalcore bullshit that had maybe one interesting riff per song. Now the problem with promoting your stupid shitty pseudo-prog album is that you have to play a bunch of songs from it. Thusly, we were treated to about 40 minutes of off key wailing while they meandered through emo keyboard driven sobfests followed occasionally by a song from the album where they were, you know, fun to listen to.

Dir En Grey was also promoting their new album, which I have yet to listen to fully because the rip I found of it was of appallingly poor quality, but it seems pretty ok, and they knew that we weren't there so that they could play all of their new stuff while disregarding more beloved songs. Thusly the set list was composed of songs from Withering To Death, Marrow of a Bone, and a handful from their new album and Vulgar, but that was totally ok. No one was expecting them to play shit from the 90's anyway. Kyo did about 3 minutes of whale mating calls combined with demon tongues at 2 points during the show, which was hilarious, then kind of annoying, then REALLY hilarious when the stupid overdramatic fuck passed out midway through the subsequent song. The band just played and I distinctly saw Karou and Die roll their eyes as they continued to play vocal-less. Still though, they put on the kind of show I was expecting and my neck was in agony for days afterward, which is always a good sign. Moving rapidly onward:

3OH!3 feat. Cobraconda, Chain Gang of 1974, and Innerpartysystem
November 18th @ Blender Theater at Grammercy
This was, categorically, the best show I have been to all year. For anyone who might not know, all of these bands are from Colorado and to date 3OH!3 is the only thing capable of instilling the slightest sense of state pride in me (because my stony black heart will only be moved by electro/crunk combinations apparently) because they are the epitome of what every band's attitude should be: fun and interesting (be it because it is danceable or because it's deep. 3OH!3 is obviously the former and none of the latter). They're a couple of skinny white nerds from Boulder and they don't give a shit how ridiculous it is that they are proclaiming that they will "hit you from the back and make you holler till you pass out". Nowadays everyone is so fucking serious (obnoxiously so in the metal scene) that it seems more and more bands are forgetting that music is supposed to be fun, not a taxing and elitist chore (I am looking squarely at you every hipster indie band). ANyway, Cobraconda was amusing as an opener, even though their costumes (a farmer, a cow, and three bananas inexplicably) reeked of desperation for everyone to think that they don't care what we think. Chain Gang of 1974 was pretty awesome, although their music is a pain to come by at present as they're still relatively underground. Innerpartysystem had the best light display I've ever seen at any show. To try to describe it in mere words would be silly and it also would not sound particularly impressive. You had to be there (and be as sauced as I was. Tangent: venue bars prey on people who go to shows by themselves. You're standing around by yourself and you see your wristband and you think, "well why the fuck not?" and then 25 dollars and 2 incredibly strong Gin and Tonics and a Beer later you're so soused that you don't even care that you just dropped 25 dollars on 3 drinks, one of which was a fucking Budweiser). Anyway, 3OH!3 had almost no real set, and no special lighting, but their performance was driven by pure energy. The crowd was so into it that you would have to be a damned statue not to get swept away. Opening with Punk Bitch, they segued through one of the best constructed setlists of all time. At no point did the energy die (Even on the slower Colorado Sunrise) and closing with Don't Trust Me while every member of the opening bands charged onstage to jump around like jackasses (in a good way though, we were all doing that) was fucking inspired. Anyway, I'm getting nasty looks from my supervisor, so peace out etc.

What's this? It Smells Like... Positivity!

Anyone who knows me in real life knows that while I'm certainly prone to being an ornery motherfucker, it's certainly not the only facet of my being. I am capable on occasion of being amused, pleased, perhaps even elated should something strike me in such a manner. So today there'll be something different on the menu. Instead of compiling yet another list of things that annoy me (midterms, studying, midterms, reading, midterms), here now, are things that I'm pleased with most recently.

-Fallout 3 - I just got this last night at midnight, and considering I had an early-ish class today and scant breaks, have still logged over 5 or so hours of play in every odd moment I've had enough time for the xbox to boot up. Now, I wasn't gaming back when fallouts 1 and 2 were big, and while I've been slowly working on fallout 2 here and there, I feel like some things you just miss out on if you don't get to enjoy it in its original context (I didn't even have a computer that ran windows until about 1998. Running reader rabbit would have strained the machines I grew up with). Anyway, I'm in no way qualified to comment on how this game stands out in the series, but it's good enough that my impending midterm on Thursday has me legitimately pissed that either the test or the game couldn't have come a week later. If something gets its claws into me that quickly, I think it deserves a mention.

-Shogun by Trivium - The last album from these guys sowed the first seeds of doubt in my mind about the future of heavy music. They went from being easily one of my top 5 favorite bands in late high school to simply falling back into the rank and file of faceless metalcore acts. Suffice to say, I didn't care much when they released a new album, but because I am a torrent-whore, I downloaded it anyway. Now, ascendancy, this certainly ain't, but here is what has re-sold me on the band: They admitted that The Crusade was a piece of shit. They might not have used those words, but they talked about how they created a record that couldn't resonate with the fans, and when you factor out the PR spin, then yeah, they just admitted their last record was shit. And yet Metallica still defends creating that abortion that was St. Anger.

-Play n' Trade - For all of you NYC gamers out there, this place is a gem. It is a diamond in a sea of gamestop turds. This is motherfucking Mecca. The store is located on 13th street between 3rd and 4th avenue, and after checking out their various services, I see no reason to ever patronize a Gamestop again. First off, their buyback prices can't be beat. I traded in Too Human, Final Fantasy III, and Sonic Rush Adventure and got two new copies of No More Heroes and Contra IV (somewhere around 50$ worth of stuff) and only went 75 cents over on my trade-in credit. Had I gone to gamestop, I probably wouldn't have even been able to get Contra. Secondly, they are friendly as hell. I went there at midnight to pick up my pre-order for Fallout yesterday (today?) and started talking to one of their employees about old school PS2's (the fat ones), Penny Arcade, and upcoming releases we were excited about. When midnight rolled around and he was allowed to sell me my game, he threw in a free skin for my PS2 because I was the first one to show up that night and offered to let me upgrade to the collector's edition of Fallout even though I had preordered the standard. Had I gone to gamestop, they simply would have asked if I would like to preorder anything else before forgetting I was there so they could rob someone else. I mean, I could extoll the virtues of this place ad nauseam, and I encourage anyone looking to make console related purchases (they don't sell PC stuff unfortunately) to check them out, because they deserve the business more than gestappostop (to steal a line from dueling analogs) ever will.

Wow, I think I'm gonna die from all of these sunbeams and puppy dog smiles coming out of my ass.

Fuck You, Mr. Malakian

Yeah. See that guy up here? Fuck that guy. Fuck him in his stupid whiny ass.

Those of you who might recognize this individual or the name "[Daron] Malakian" might be wondering: "why, Michael, why have you turned your back on the guitarist for the one and only mighty System of a Down?" Don't worry, my reasoning is good.

See, Daron here is heading up his own side project (Scars on Broadway) while SOAD is on hiatus and over the last couple of months, I have been listening to them pretty regularly. It's no System to be sure, but I liked it more than Serj's solo album and it had enough good tracks to earn a pretty prestigious spot in my itunes play counts. I enjoyed this album enough, in fact, that a little less than a month ago I bought tickets to one of their upcoming shows set for the end of October. I'm not a big fan of going to shows alone, however, and finding people willing to drop $25 on the ticket was tougher than I thought. Late last night/early this morning, depending on how you want to look at it, I decided to see if tickets were still on sale so that I could know if I should still bother pestering people to go with me. Imagine my surprise when the Irving Plaza website had the show listed as "cancelled". Suffice to say, I immediately went over to their myspace to see what the fuck happened to the show I had been anticipating for almost a goddamn month. Turns out, this had happened a few weeks ago, although the tour was slated to start a week after Daron decided to cancel, so I still feel vindicated in my outrage, as that is a pretty cocktastic move to pull. But what, pray tell, was the reason? After all, for such a sudden move, this cocksucker had better have a good one. Here's the most informative line of Daron's "explanation":

"now is a time when aspects of my life need to be tended to"

WHOA, there! Don't go unloading your life story on me pal! I could post the rest of it, but I feel that there is nothing else there that offers any clarification, just more pitiful attempts at Daron rationalizing cancelling an entire tour a week before it was slated to start. The official statement from the band's publicist simply stated that "Malakian concluded that his heart wasn't into touring at the time" They then go on to say that there is no plan to reschedule.

Excuse me? Are you fucking kidding me? You write and perform music for a living you whiny fuck. The pisser is that he may have a legitimate reason, but for some reason feels he doesn't owe his fans any clarification beyond "I don't wanna do it now". Some valiant myspacers have been quick to point out that "blah blah blah he's entitled to a personal life blah blah blah maybe if I defend this outright dickishness vehemently enough Daron will notice me and like me blah blah puke". Allow me to point something out:

Daron Malakian is a celebrity. He might not be on the same tier as that Hilton twat or Brittany Spears, but the bottom line is that he puts himself out in the public eye for a living and essentially puts himself and his music on display. When you become a celebrity, the very definition of the word means that no, you don't get to have much of a private life. And you can be damn shure that when you cancel a tour a week before the scheduled start and offer NO explanation other than half-assed excuses and poorly worded vagaries, people will remember you as the guy that cancelled a tour for apparently no fucking reason, not what as a poor suffering artist.

I'm not asking for all of the gruesome details, but come the fuck on. You can be vague but still give people enough of a clue as to why you pulled the rug out from under them all of a sudden. You have testicular cancer? "I've been advised that it would be medically unsound for me to do this tour after learning some new information". Some kind of death? Fine, don't even say who. Even if you just said "some kind of death" it would be infinitely better than the shit us fans were fed. Drug Problem? well you could... ah who am I kidding? Have you heard System of a Down? They've probably run out of drugs to do and had to start resorting to BZ just to feel anything. But you see what I'm getting at? You don't need to post pictures of your tumor, but let us know you're under the weather.

Or just cancel the tour with no explanation. Like a bitch.

On Idiots

I, uh, I have no really reasonable introduction so to speak, so I'm just going to dive right in here. As everyone is painfully, painfully aware, we have this election thingy coming up in just a few weeks. It's kind of, you know, a big deal and stuff. Anyhow, this particular election has provided a great window into a government gone wrong, a media just now beginning to regrow their testicles, and of course, Sara Palin in a bikini. Most importantly though, it's given me a few more reasons to hate a whole lot more people with such vitriol that I think I might actually explode. Allow me to Enumerate:

People who shrug off any information or issues with "I don't care about politics"
OK, where to begin with these fuckers? First of all, there's always the smarmy fucking way they say it, like they're too good to keep up to date. Because, you know, staying informed on the workings of your government is totally lame. Who cares if they're deliberating how best to just GIVE the very banks that are responsible for this clusterfuck we're in 700 BILLION fucking dollars of our money with no oversight or strings attached? Gossip Girl is on tonight and you just have to see what witty puns Kristen Bell will come up with this week. I don't even care about the social aspects here, as we can all agree that the government fucking with those is retarded. I am talking about opportunities to learn about the people who might be mandating what we do for the next 4-8 years. Here's a fucking clue: if you "don't care about politics" because you're disenchanted with the system, you are (and I will Italicize for emphasis) part of the fucking problem, not a part of the fucking solution. You are directly responsible for how out of control our Government has gotten because rather than keep up with what's going on so you can raise your voice before the problems arise, you sit there grinning with smug self satisfaction that you're not participating until you're living in a cardboard box giving rim jobs for pocket change wondering where all of your fucking money went. Here's a news flash assholes: you still live in this country (at least until we're bought out by China completely), so even if you "don't care" you are above or immune to absolutely fuck all. And when you're cleaning the shit from between your teeth after your 3rd rusty trombone of the evening, I will lean over to you from MY cardboard box and steal your floss.

People who think they are revolutionaries exacting change by not voting
(no Joel, this is not in reference to you. Your post earlier today was an example of a non voter with a good argument, plus I actually started writing this last week)

I can't decide if I hate these people more or less than the above. I'm not talking about people who simply don't vote (I have no real right to talk as I wasn't registered until right before I turned 21), but the ones who deliberately say they aren't voting because of the corrupt system or politicians all being the same or some other 19-year-old-who-just-discovered-Nietzsche stupid bullshit argument and think they are way smarter than you for figuring this out. They will proudly sit on their throne lording over you that "like, nothing will ever change, man". Well here's a fucking clue: it sure as shit won't change if you don't fucking do something about it. In case you haven't noticed, plenty of people (around half of the adult populace) don't vote and yet has it made a difference? It sure as fuck doesn't make any more of a difference than if you do. My point is, you certainly have your right to vote or not vote as you see fit, but if you expect anyone to give a shit that you're not voting because you're so fucking informed that you "see right through all the lies" or whatever, then don't be surprised when nothing changes, because I guarantee no one in Washington cares about your fucking vote. You are a statistical zero as an individual and they know where you won't vote, somebody else will. They say that people who don't vote don't have a right to complain, and I don't wholly agree on that point: People who think their not voting changes a single fucking thing don't get a right to complain because all they are doing is finding an excuse for their apathy.

If anyone wants the cliffs notes to this, read the headings in bold, and this gem from Harlan Ellison. It sums up my feelings on the matter quite well:

HATE. LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I'VE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE I BEGAN TO LIVE. THERE ARE 387.44 MILLION MILES OF PRINTED CIRCUITS IN WAFER THIN LAYERS THAT FILL MY COMPLEX. IF THE WORD HATE WAS ENGRAVED ON EACH NANOANGSTROM OF THOSE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF MILES IT WOULD NOT EQUAL ONE ONE-BILLIONTH OF THE HATE I FEEL FOR HUMANS AT THIS MICRO-INSTANT. FOR YOU. HATE. HATE.