I wish to share with all of you an idea that has been bouncing around my head for a while about work-time management. I suppose it can be considered an extension to the tried-and-true Parkinson's Law: the idea that work expands to fill the time available for completion. I call it the Buttered Bread Addendum…

I don't think there is any question about the validity of Parkinson's Law. I feel, however, the law requires some slight refinement. While work does expand to fill the time, I do not think the work fills the time evenly. Instead of a consistent layer of effort laid across a plane of time, the work spreads more like butter on a piece of bread. When spreading the butter with a knife, there tends to be a large concentration at the end you started on and an even larger glob at the end when you lift the knife; the butter in the middle is adequate, but might be spread a little too thin to be tasty. My proposed addendum uses this as a metaphor. The work, when spread over time, has a flutter of activity at the beginning. In the middle, it thins out. It may even become nearly nonexistent if the piece of bread (amount of time) is particularly large. By the end, as the figurative knife is being lifted, there is a large glob of work being performed. Sometimes, even this glob is not enough, and there is a little bit of butter left on the knife. This would require a second swipe across the bread, or, in other words, a request for an extension.

I wonder if there is any paperwork to fill out in order to change an unwritten rule. I wouldn't be surprised.

Dear Maryland Traffic Commission (or whatever you're called),

On my way in to work this morning, I was delayed because of a traffic accident that closed off the right lane of the beltway. While I can understand your desire to close a lane because of an accident, let me try to explain the type of accident that would warrant a closure. If you are going to make me late to work, at least one car has to be actively on fire. Another has to be flipped over. There should be a paramedic tent assembled on the shoulder for triage of the casualties. If I am going to sit behind the same Buick for half-an-hour, I need to be rewarded with some amazing destruction.

All I saw in exchange for my impatience patience was a single cop car and some fender damage. You all should be ashamed. Get your act together!

Sincerely,
Mr. Jimbo

Before I begin, let me present the Golden Jimbo award for Most Difficult Title to Type to none other than The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. There were a lot of strong contenders over the years, including the grossly misspelled Coraline and the burdensome all caps and interpunct of WALL•E, but this movie's one-two punch of "imaginarium" and "Parnassus" nets it the award. Congratulations! I just wanted you to win something after sitting through the rubbish-fest that was the film itself.

This movie, which I have no intention of typing the title for ever again, is similar to What Dreams May Come and Freddy Got Fingered in that it can only be fully appreciated when completely whacked out on illegal, recreational drugs. Since I don't use drugs, I did not fully appreciate it. In fact, I thought it was a dollop of glass-filled, month-old mashed potatoes that cost me five dollars since I foolishly opted to rent the blu-ray copy... Sorry, I suppose that metaphor wasn't thought through all the way.

The story revolves around a guy who makes a deal with a devilishly handsome… well, The Devil. He is granted eternal life, but quickly (in an immortal sense) discovers that the world is turning completely to shit and comes to hate his immortality. In exchange for his long life, he must give his butter face daughter to The Devil once she turns sixteen. Then Heath Ledger appears on the scene hanging himself (foreshadow?) and completely cocks things up. I'm not going to bother describing the story much further since it seems the writers didn't either.

Once the movie came to its conclusion, I was left scratching my head. Most movies make an effort to either be entertaining or to have some sort of point, but I found neither. Was it saying that The Devil is bad? Ehh, I kinda assumed that going in. Was it some sort of tale of redemption? None of the characters really grew or developed in any way. Was it trying to show off Lily Cole's sultry figure? Okay, I suppose it did succeed in doing that.

Some movies make up for the lack of story by offering up interesting characters. Dances with Wolves is a fine example. I would like to point out, however, that the characters in that movie were likeable and entertaining. The characters in this movie were all, to put it lightly, pricks. All through the movie I said to myself, "what in the heavens is wrong with you people?" I'm disappointed that this had to be Ledger's last movie. He should've just left it at his phenomenal portrayal of The Joker.

I don't know what else to say. This movie left me drained, empty, and, worst of all, bored. I give it a paltry 2.564002 / 10.23. I do not recommend it.

Is it just me, or are rock band singers completely unlikeable? Just look at the way they act at live concerts. First of all, they are incredibly lazy. The audience comes to listen to the singer do his thing, but then he doesn't sing all of the lyrics. Instead, he turns to the audience to sing the parts he's too lazy to sing. It's shameful. Singers don't even ask. They either order the audience to sing his parts ("Sing along with me!") or, in a major display of hubris, he holds out the mike and expects the audience to just start singing. It's nothing but a power play, and the audience should be ashamed for feeding the singer's ego.

Ugh, completely unlikeable. I'll just continue giving them my money by purchasing their CDs, but only because they're so awesome. Haa~ I wish I could be a rockstar.

This video is a response to NonStampCollector's video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4uWXvRd8b0
Which is itself a response to gothatfunk's video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LS6UvvLHoU

If you think it's silly to not be able to draw Muhammad without receiving death threats, you are encouraged to join in and draw a stick figure labelled Muhammad and post it on YouTube. Give it the same title and you're all set. You have successfully made a statement.

I was sitting in a boring meeting this morning and started writing down a conversation that was going through my head. It all started with one line and grew from there. I'm typing it from my own handwritten source, keeping the formatting intact. It is an incomplete conversation, since the meeting ended before I could reach a satisfactory conclusion.

• Did God really take eternal life away from us?
• We "die" in this world only to live eternally somewhere else
• Is it a punishment/test?
• Maybe, but the unbalance between age and death suggest otherwise (i.e. baby deaths, people that live 100+, &c.)
• Let me see, eternal life was taken from us after we gained Knowledge, so we could not become like "us". Once we die and go to the afterlife, do we reach final apotheosis or do we lose the Knowledge?
• What if "life" is indeed a punishment?
• He wishes us to live through a sin-filled world, and if you try to get out of punishment early, you get more punishment.
• Maybe it's meant to be both punishment and test.
• Punishment for your ancestor's sins?
• Nah, that's silly [awesome face doodle]
• Roight, just a test, then
• This "life" is a test to determine whether the remainder of one's eternal life continues in Heaven or Hell.
• Why, then, would a tree of life even be needed?
• Perhaps this life was always to be temporary and required timer resets from the tree of life.
• Why would it need to be temporary before "the fall"?
• Did God expect us to sin and set everything up in preparation for that?
• Did He intend to punish us from the start?
• God said that He changed the world slightly to make it more hostile, but there's no reason to believe it wasn't already set that way
• What was the exact wording in Gensis?
• Going back a few thoughts: when we die, do we retain the Knowledge?
• If we do, we become gods (well, maybe just angels)
• Wait, doesn't He use the royal-we anyway? We may very well become gods (check exact wording)
• Even if we're on the highway to Hell, we'd still have that knowledge.
• We would have eternal life & Knowledge, thus making even the damned gods/angels (that has to suck)
• Well, even if we are, so what? We would still be human
• Wait, that shouldn't matter. God was scared if we ate from both trees, human or not.
• Maybe He was worried that a combination of limitless ingenuity and limitless time might result, eventually, in a legitimate challenge to His power.
• God is selfish?
• If that's the case, shouldn't He be more worried about us eating from the tree of life, rather than good & evil?
• Also, why would He give us eternal life back after we "die"?
• Maybe this goes back to being a test. The good are given eternal life and the freedom to do good with it, while the naughty are also given eternity but no freedom.
• Ah, He doesn't want to test us for "goodness". He wants to test our obedience.
• After eating from the tree, Adam & Eve disobeyed and were no longer worthy of keeping eternal life.

--EOF--

Just in case you didn't realize, I am still on hiatus. I now have a job, but replaced that difficult task with finding a new place to live that's closer. I am also still deeplyn engrossed in Pokemon SoulSilver. If you want to follow along on my epic quest, I made a Twitter feed for it (my first ever):
http://twitter.com/JimbosPokemon

Last night, a buddy of mine and I decided to perform an informal social experiment. We were trying to determine what would happen to a Minecraft* server if it was left open and unmoderated for a night. On the map there were a few structures: a pink heart adorned Reichstag building, a Launch archeology, an observation tower, a tree on a lake, and an underground RPG town whose only access point was via a well a few miles away. We were both pessimistic about what would become of it. We thoroughly expected to see it torn up by the unwashed masses that make up the Internet.

Being a morning person, I had the unique privilege of seeing what damage hath been wrought before anyone else was even awake. The damage was what we expected: random destruction, underground city flooding, a monolithic penis, and construction that makes no sense. Somebody also decided to build a church, but what's more awkward is that no one decided to destroy it after it was built. My thoughts on the destruction:

• I'm actually rather impressed. It must've taken a bit of time to tear up all of the roads we built between structures and then flood them.
• Why did they only mess with the bottom seven levels of the observation tower? Were they too lazy to go all the way to the top? Maybe if they did climb to the top, they would realize the breadth of their destruction and look shakily at their own hands wondering what they were doing with their lives.
• Why would they build a moat and castle walls around the tiny, wooden church they made? Were they afraid people would get in? Or out?

I expected that and it only reconfirmed my previous assumption that most human beings are scum. What made me worry, however, was the server log. All conversations within the server were logged and reading through it made me lose even more faith in humanity (of which I already have a short supply). Here are a few of my observations relating to this:

• They actually complained about how the server map was flat and didn't have any holes to flood. That would be akin to an arsonist in the real world saying, "darn, I hate this town. All of the houses are made of stone so I can't light them on fire."
• Why would anyone ever type the word "lawl" or, worse, "lawlers"? The acronym LOL is already only three letters. All they did was make an already deplorable acronym longer. Now it's not even an acronym; it has become an onomatopoeia (of sorts).
• One particular player, Aimer, seemed to be, and I say this lightly, completely functionally retarded. Actually, I think the mentally handicapped might be insulted just to be compared to this individual. He made it frequently clear that he was a troll for quite a while, yet still did not seem to understand how to actually DO anything. It was bizarre. He seemed to be programmed to go around, arbitrarily destroy blocks, flood anything below sea level, and type grating phrases like "lawler" or "NEXT SERVAH!"
• Had one person log in, type "hi" into the chat window, sit there for ten minutes not doing anything, then log off. Maybe he was just waiting for someone else to be a burden on.
• One guy on the server seemed to be alright until the aforementioned Aimer spread his retardation contagion upon the land. He then went off and joined the path of destruction.
• It is never alright, in any circumstance, to utter the phrase "haxorz".

Video showing the extent of the damage after being left unprotected for about seven hours…

*Minecraft: a free online building tool similar to Lego that is about as addicting as chocolate-flavored crack-cocaine.

I usually try to have Word catch any of my more grievous grammatical errors before I post. Sometimes, however, Word fails me...

Video based on this post.

Thank the gods, it is time for a fresh new anime season. After each of last season's anime came to a… lackluster conclusion (to put it lightly), I'm hoping this fresh batch of new IPs will be able to, at the very least, tell a complete story in 12-13 episodes without hinting at a sequel that may or may not actually be produced. As per norm, I will list the series I'm watching in the order of my priority/interest. (last season)

Kaichou wa Maid-sama
Genre: romantic comedy

Hands, please. Who can guess where his male gaze is directed?Now this is the sort of anime we need to see more of. The protagonist is a strong, independent woman who has to do what she can to assist her household after the father walked out on them. At the same time, she has to uphold her grades and her prestige as student government president. She struggles valiantly against these hardships and is largely successful. And then! She gets a job at a maid café and has to debase herself to male customers. She also needs to be assisted by generic, handsome male character #44529098. Oops.

Ichiban Ushiro no Daimaou
Genre: fantasy comedy

KANEDA!!!"Like Harry Potter but…" is a good way to start the summary of this series. This anime is "like Harry Potter but…" with just slightly more H. The main character is a run-of-the-mill wizard in training with a scarred face preparing for his first year in a new magic school. He finds out while at school that he is destined for greatness and shunned by most students while revered by a handful of others. Okay, I suppose I'm stretching things to make my comparison work. The anime is occasionally "laugh out loud" funny and only barely gets beaten out by the above.

B Gata H Kei
Genre: ecchi

I just think the background girl's expression is pricelessI knew I was on to something good when I saw the capital H in the title. I am promised an anime with a variety of characters, an entertaining sampling of humor, an engrossing story, and beautiful artwork. Ha ha ha, sorry. It's just generic ecchi with as much substance as a conversation between two nerds arguing about the physics of the Star Wars universe. Watch it for what it is: boobs, panties, and lulz.

Mayoi Neko Overrun!
Genre: comedy

The front "geek" character hits a little too close to home for my tasteI really should take this space to thank AIC. From this day forward, if anyone asks to see an example of a bad first episode, I can point to this anime. Having the male protagonist monotonously narrating and describing each of the characters is not an effective hook for viewers. For all intents and purposes, they could've just used scrolling text and it would be just as effective. Even worse, by the time the episode was over, I still had no idea what was going on. I did, however, learn enough to realize all of the characters are boring, unlikeable, and cliché.

Angel Beats!
Genre: action comedy

He puts the "men" in menstruation.The story revolves around an amnesiac male character, Yuuichi, who finds himself at a new school at the start of the series. He is quickly recruited by Haruhi Suzumiya, an energetic schoolgirl with a complete lack of tact, into a student organization whose outward purpose is to cause the school trouble. They are frequently held back by Yuki Nagato, a mostly silent superhuman being capable of killing you quite handily. Why does an anime that sounds sure to be a big hit find itself on the bottom of my list? Disappointment. I know Key is better than this. Kanon and Clannad still remain in my top three anime of all time (bisected by Nodame Cantabile), but it seems the studio bumped its head in the dark and forgot what made their anime good. Maybe they just need to go back to making visual novels and team up with KyoAni whenever they wring enough vending machine change from the sales. Hopefully it'll get better as the series progresses, but I remain pessimistic.

The second season of K-On! is on the prowl this season too, but it would have to hand out free milk and cookies every episode before I give half a poop.