Apparently I'm a Coward

I Was Not Hit By a Goddamned Bus

Josh "Lie Stock" Boruff decided it would be a great idea to tell everyone on the front page that I was dying from bad beef, and while it may have seemed that I was on death's door last night I have in fact made a full recovery. Yes, I "be illin" last night, although bad beef had nothing to do with it since I generally don't eat any meat. More likely it was stomach cramps brought on by the deceit of Josh himself, whose blatant lies have catapulted him to the status of "biggest liar currently writing for Something Awful", above Scotty D and his "I just won a Pulitzer Prize" article and Fragmaster and his "I just kissed a girl" article. His petty deceits are as deplorable as the tyrannical actions he will no doubt take as the new "lie king" of Something Awful.

Apparently I'm a Coward

Proving that being fat doubles the amount of humor you contain, my Limbaugh tolerability rating has decreased at a speed directly corresponding to the speed at which his waistline was shrinking.Lowtax took over my updating for me Monday morning because I was in Ohio visiting friends and family. I'm not going to bore you with the details of my trip but one aspect of it ties into something that has been bothering me for a couple weeks. My car does not have a working CD or tape player. I had one of those shitty car Discman players with the stupid cassette you put into your tape deck that always magically breaks your tape player, and low and behold it magically broke my tape player. My tape player continued to play regular tapes for roughly a day afterwards, but then it too broke. Then I tried to jam stuff into it to fix it and not surprisingly broke it even worse so that now there is part of a pen and two pieces of cardboard shoved deep in the guts of the tape player. In my frustration I also punched the tape player a whole lot making buttons fall off, thus making the pre-programmed radio station function unusable. But, the radio still works, and on extended car trips like I took this weekend I spend hours listening to AM talk radio.

I tend to avoid FM stations because they have entertaining things like "music" and "a shitload less static" which get in the way of enjoying a long car ride. No, I much prefer the grating voice of Laura Schlesinger or Rush Limbaugh filtered through a bucket full of crackles and hisses. I thrill to their angry conservative view points that rake across my brain like an acid coated medieval flail weapon.

On this particular trip the airwaves were full of discussion about "corporate corruption" in which nearly every one of these hosts discussed the concept that most corporate executives are not corrupt and are not taking advantage of their employees. Then they went on to yell about how political "middle roaders" are cowards who refuse to pick a side, how the democrats and republicans are so completely different, and how big business is better than big government unless you're talking about the office of homeland security, because goddamn that needs to be as big as possible because nothing is more important than locking us down under gladhand martial law!

Bilious harpy Dr. Laura has always been an aural vision of hell, as evidenced by my comical inclusion of a Hieronymous Bosch painting in the background.

I get pleasantly worked up listening to all this crap, chewing my lower lip at each idiotic word that spews out of Limbaugh's gaping pie hole. I grin with delight every time Dr. Laura tells a caller to not buy their college-bound daughter birth control because it will detract from her spiritual relationship with Christ. I gleefully imagine her drunkenly screwing two guys at the same time and then shuffling to an abortion clinic with a tear-streaked face eight weeks later. I would make fun of liberal radio show hosts too, but the fact is most liberal radio show hosts are comedians who aren't interested in arguing about politics, what few exist just don't make it all the way to my radio.

I consider myself a pretty middle of the road person who happens to side more frequently with less-liberal Democrats than he does with more-liberal Republicans. For those of you who read that sentence and just got slightly annoyed with me; you are fucking retarded. The same goes out to anyone on any side of the political spectrum who thinks one party is pretty much always right and the other is pretty much always wrong. To me the "middle of the road" represents reason and rationality, and the farther you go in any direction away from that road the closer you get to having a doctor put a helmet on you because you're so stupid you keep trying to stab your brain with a fork. What's even better is that the farther you get from that political middle and the closer you get to that fringe the closer you also get to the polar opposite fringe.

It's like a fucking circle, and if the middle of the road is one place where the less retarded "liberals" and "conservatives" can meet then on the opposite side of the circle is where the screaming idiot fruitballs find a common ground of absolute ruinous insanity. Anybody remember Hitler? Yeah, he was great, and fascism is about as far "conservative" as you can go. Anybody remember Stalin? Well guess what, Soviet Russia was about as "liberal" as you can go. Hitler and Stalin both killed millions of people, ordered tens of thousands of executions in the name of their regime, the effect they had on the people of their respective nations were both absolutely horrible. They were in that little liberal/conservative common ground on the political circle directly opposite of "middle of the road". Since David Duke isn't really pulling a lot of political weight these days I'm not comparing anyone's politics to Hitler or Stalin, I'm simply using both as a means of demonstrating how similar the effects of supposedly opposite political extremes can really be. I have created a visual representation for those of you having difficulty grasping this concept.

After listening to hours of radio commentary on my journey I came to the conclusion that someone needed to develop a piece of software that would demonstrate the similarities between the far right and the far left. Since we here at Something Awful take a lot of pride in offering fair and balanced news coverage much like Fox News does not, I knew it would fall to us to fill this gap. More importantly I wanted to be the person who might finally get the flapping heads of the radio commentators to shut up so that I could enjoy that remix of "Mambo Number Five" they were playing on the HITS FM station. After laboring for minutes in my workshop I have produced AnswerBot, the ultimate political opinion simulator. I put five issues before AnswerBot and asked for him to comment on them and then project the results of his solution, in the mean time I offered my own "cowardly middle road" solution. I tried to get AnswerBot to project the results of my solutions but it threatened to have me strangled with piano wire because "all of [my] ideas are treason".

Health Care
AnswerBot Crazy Conservative Mode: Healthcare is the responsibility of the individual. Everyone sells bandages, go buy bandages if you get cancer you dummy. You don't deserve any of my money, it's not my fault you're having babies, I hope you get tetanus you stupid welfare Mexican!
AnswerBot Projected Results: Millions die from lack of adequate healthcare, particularly victimized are the homeless, destitute, elderly, and children.
AnswerBot Crazy Liberal Mode: The government has to take care of every single person. It is the responsibility of businesses to ensure that anyone who wants to come into their place of business can despite disability. Every building must be padded in case retarded people run into walls and hurt themselves, running tracks must have mechanical legs available for the wheelchair handicapped, and all public businesses and areas must be equipped with flame-retardant foam pools into which someone suffering from spontaneous combustion can jump.
AnswerBot Projected Results: Businesses collapse under the weight of government regulation until the economy is completely reliant on the government, resulting in millions of deaths particularly amongst the homeless, destitute, elderly, and children.
Zack's Middle-Road Cowardly Answer: Businesses should be reasonably prepared to deal with the handicapped if there is a reasonable demand in a given region. A ski-store on top of a mountain should not be required to build a wheelchair ramp. Healthcare should be provided for American citizens who cannot provide for their own healthcare in a manner that penalizes those who seek to unfairly take advantage of the system.

The Military
AnswerBot Crazy Conservative Mode: We need a gigantic military that can destroy any nation that opposes us in roughly a week. China is about to invade Florida any second now so let's build a giant laser cannon in the Florida Keys to shoot at Cuba. All of the Middle East needs to be occupied by robotic soldiers.
AnswerBot Projected Results: Millions die under the heel of our oppressive military throughout the world before the rest of the free world unites in opposition against our tyranny.
AnswerBot Crazy Liberal Mode: Our armed forces are not necessary in this day and age. All of our tanks and jets should be melted down into Dance Dance Revolution machines for the Japanese and our Navy should be turned into pleasure boats for the wealthy. The soldiers can keep working as long as they plan on working for free.
AnswerBot Projected Results: Canada air-drops three squads of infantry in Washington DC and negotiates our surrender. Millions die in the Canadian salt mines working to further the goals of the Canadian Supreme Emperor.
Zack's Middle-Road Cowardly Answer: Continue to expend large sums of money on weapon's development. Avoid idiotic pork-barrel projects like that stupid ass stealth ship and continue to invest in high-tech battle superiority projects like the F-22. Scale back the size in number of enlisted men but increase the amount paid to our soldiers and continue to maintain superior training and readiness.

Corporate Corruption
AnswerBot Crazy Conservative Mode: Corporations are wonderful and have never done anything wrong, ever, no way. Those scandals are the fault of the Democrats who are taking kick-backs from liberal lobbyists and selling political favors. In fact let's just replace the office of president with the CEO of Lockheed-Martin, the board of directors at Lockheed is pretty much the same as the Electoral College anyway.
AnswerBot Projected Results: Corporate interests grow in strength within government until our entire government is nothing but a plutocrat elite ruling over the oppressed workers, barely more than slave labor.
AnswerBot Crazy Liberal Mode: Corporations are evil and are responsible for every single problem in America today. Those scandals are the fault of the Republicans who are taking kick-backs from corporate lobbyists and selling political favors. In fact let's just replace the office of president with Supreme American and the AmeriIntern office for society's betterment. We'll have a committee and it will be nice and there will be cake.
AnswerBot Projected Results: Government grows to control every aspect of the economy until there is no free trade whatsoever. All workers are employed by the government and are barely more than slave labor.
Zack's Middle-Road Cowardly Answer: Hey, here's an idea, why don't we send those responsible for corporate corruption to jail for a long time? While we're at it why don't we institute legislation that makes taking corporate kickbacks immediate grounds for termination as a government employee? Well shucks there goes almost every major politician out there, I'm thinking it's no big fucking loss.

Religion and Government
AnswerBot Crazy Conservative Answer: Every school should have a cross above it and a chapel right next to the library, hell, demolish the library and just turn it into a really big chapel because shit who needs books (aside from The Bible of course) when we have The Lord to educate us? Erect a huge statue of Jesus outside every Federal building and make employees kiss its feet whenever they go into work. Evolution is for crazy liberals, everyone knows Moses rode a dinosaur to the Promised Land.
AnswerBot Projected Results: Religious tolerance levels are consistently decreased until only Christians are allowed within our borders. Scientists and those of others faiths are persecuted with violence and driven out. Christians also become really retarded when they stop believing in evolution and start thinking the world is like 5,000 years old.
AnswerBot Crazy Liberal Answer: Christianity is the ultimate evil! Destroy it all, burn down all of the churches, replace any reference to God or Jesus in government literature with a reference to a random type of dessert, if people have to see a Bible in school and they aren't Christian their eyes might explode on a fountain of blood out of their heads. Apple Fritter bless America!
AnswerBot Projected Results: Christianity is completely removed from government, but it doesn't stop there, expressing any religious belief outside of your home becomes a crime akin to smoking in a hospital's oxygen storage room.
Zack's Middle-Road Cowardly Answer: Avoid inserting references to God or Jesus into any new government literature, avoid removing it from any existing government literature. That evil shit Eisenhower may have stuck God into the pledge, but did we really have to ban it? I don't think a kid saying "God" is going to turn them into a religious nut.

Probably the most amusing indictment I heard offered against "middle-roaders" this last weekend was that those who are in the middle of the political spectrum are never the ones who institute massive positive change. I've got bad news for Limbaugh and company, but those who oppose the status quo are those who institute massive positive change. Since the status quo is a tug of war between political extremes rather than an actual rational government I've got a lot of money riding on the Upright Citizens Brigade turning this country into something better, not a George W. Bush or a Dick Gephardt. I love the United States I just hate almost all of our politicians, I guess that makes me a political extremist.

Soothing Truth

In an effort to getting to the bottom of the barrel of truth can be difficult when it comes to entertainment because of all of the promotion and buzz. Something Awful takes pride in cutting to the truth at the bottom of this barrel of lies and giving you only the distilled version of what we assume might be facts. That's right, it's a brand new Truth Media review!! This installment is a review of the recently released roleplaying game "Neverwinter Nights".

It’s no secret that, unlike Diablo II, the main focus of Neverwinter Nights is the single player. But still, as an afterthought, Atari included a multiplayer mode. There were quite a few servers online when I tried this, but the single player world doesn’t lend itself to multiplayer very well and Atari didn’t bother to make a multiplayer-only world ala Dungeon Siege. It’s too bad the concept of modding a game is restricted to the FPS genre, as Neverwinter Nights is sorely in need of something like this. Patches and expansion packs will probably ensue, but nothing can make up for this shortsightedness on Atari’s part, and quite frankly, I'm not interested in paying EXTRA money for a product or service I was originally promised in the first place!

This excellent Truthmedia Review of "Neverwinter Nights" should have the flame e-mails rolling in to Something Awful in no time! Head on over and see if this one makes you angry even though you already know that its intention is to enrage you.

– Zack "Geist Editor" Parsons (@sexyfacts4u)