Tag Archives: Humor

Bill

Business, Computer Games, Memoirs, ,
licensed from Adobe Stok

I’m starting to get old. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t mind getting old. What I do mind is the inevitable. And, honestly, I never thought I’d be ready for it.

Recently, I wrote an article about my roommate in college who passed away. Tom was a good friend of mine, and he was always my greatest advocate.

Bill was also a great friend of mine. But he and I had kind of simmered on our friendship for the only reason that I now lived in Texas, and he lived in California. However, whenever I got the opportunity to travel back to California, he and I returned to our friendship almost as if we had never parted. A short while ago, I received a message that he had passed away, too.

One of my recent plans had been to make it back to California so he and I could hang out again. Now, I don’t have a single reason why I would make the trip. Bill’s no longer there.

So, let me tell you about Bill. He used to work for a bunch of computer gaming companies. When I was working for Maxis (and then EA), he would be working for companies like LucasArts and Microprose. He was an actual pilot, so when those companies were designing flight sims (like Xwing, Tie Fighter and F-15 Eagle) he was always there testing out those types of games.

One of my favorite stories was when he was testing X-Wing, and the producer had told him that it was impossible to destroy the Imperial Star Destroyer that was producing all the enemies in the game, he spent days flying missions against it until he turned off the damage on his own vessel and finally destroyed the Imperial Star Destroyer. After a couple of days, the developers indicated that it was impossible to destroy the Imperial Star Destroyer.

Having felt like he had laid down the law, the developer thought nothing of it as Bill spent days flying endless sorties against the Star Destroyer, and then he destroyed it again. But this time on the hardest level.

The developers, after discussing it amongst themselves, decided to add a readme file on the main disk indicating that “if you destroy the Star Destroyer, you might not be able to finish the game.”

One of my other favorite stories of his exploits was the origin of his ecology degree from UC Berkeley where he had gone to college after his time in the Army as an Army pilot. He was on the original GI Bill, and the way it used to be structured was you could continue your education until you graduated, and then it was over. So, Bill being like Bill was, continued until he was about finished with one degree and then he would change his degree to something else. He did this for a very long time until the Department of the Army sat down with Berkeley, and an offer was made that he could choose several degrees (of his choosing), and they would confer it upon him. So, the ecology degree ended up being one of the ones he chose, just cause it sounded kind of cool.

My other favorite story was one that everyone wished they had done themselves, and it involved the pettiness of a ticket he received from the city that was for several hundred dollars. And add to it that they had sent him a threatening letter if he didn’t pay it immediately.

So Bill took the train to downtown and walked in to pay his bill. And he brought a handful of dollar bills to pay it.

So, the clerk took the money, counted it and determined there were several dollars missing. Bill swore there was an exact amount, so the clerk spent quite a while counting it again. This time, she came up with a different amount, but not the amount that was supposed to be there.

So, this went on for several more rounds until a supervisor came over, grabbed the money and counted it himself. He came up with a number far below the amount required. So he told Bill he’d have to get the proper amount and return.

Bill swore the amount was correct. He’d counted it a bunch of times before coming in.

The boss started counting again, got about a third of the way through and then just shoved the money into a drawer, saying: “Fine. He paid the right amount. Give him a receipt.”

So Bill walked out of their with a happy grin.

Now, these are all stories told to me by Bill over the years, and the one reason I believe him on each story is because he told me these stories over and over, thinking he was telling me them for the first time. So, if they didn’t really happen, at least he believed in them. And that was all I needed.

Bill was one of those people who had brilliant ideas that were completely out of left field. I remember when I had a theory about how gravity was a physical property, not just an action on something else. I thought it was completely original, but the second I told it to Bill, he started analyzing how my theory might actually exist and exactly how we could test it. Unfortunately, neither of us had an actual spacecraft needed to test it, but we discussed it late into the night, throwing theories back and forth.

The point being: A guy with his degree from Berkeley in various disciplines was capable of going toe to toe with a guy with a physics degree from West Point. And his analysis was good.

We’re a couple of months away from the actual release of Starfield, and as much as I long to play it, I really wish it would have come out earlier, because this is the type of game Bill would have loved. And he would have found a way to break it, too, cause that’s what he did.

And no one did it better.

About to Launch My New Streaming Service

Uncategorized, , , , ,
It’ll look a lot like this except make more sense

The other day, I was watching television and realized I had nothing to watch. There was nothing new on Hulu, Netflix, Disney Plus, Apple Itunes (or whatever it’s called), Amazon Prime, HBO Go (or is it Now?), CBS All Access and Telemundo. Okay, I don’t even know if I have Telemundo, but I bet if I did, there would be nothing new on it.

I’ve reached that era of humanity in which I’ve watched everything I can possibly imagine, leaving me staring at my television screen with nothing to do. Yes, a real first-world problem, eh?

So, rather than try to find another source of television, I’ve decided it’s time for me to just launch my own streaming service, something that caters specifically to Duane. I know the whole world has been waiting for this, as I’ve queried my various stuffed animals, and they nodded emphatically (or they just stared back at me with blank faces, but I’m pretty sure they were enthusiastic).

So, I’ve decided that in order to launch my new service, I need to feature premiere Duane-programming, which means 24/7 Star Trek (but only the shows I haven’t seen yet, which limits it to, um, none of them cause I’ve seen them all, twice, plus that one where Kirk fights the lizard guy probably at least five times; I mean, quality is quality, right?).

But the shows are going to have to be really cool, so as I’m a huge fan of twists and mysteries, we’ll have to focus on a lot of those, except every now and then they’ll have to not have a twist or mystery (being the twist and mystery itself). There should also be absolutely no sports whatsoever, because I don’t like watching shows where people can do all sorts of athletic things I can’t do, like breathe normally, or anything more strenuous than that.

I also don’t want romances because they’re not believable. Never once in my life has a woman knocked on my door and then wanted to make mad passionate love to me. Nor go on a second date. Perhaps there’s more than just a coincidence there.

I don’t like reality programming because I refuse to believe that 37 teenagers can live in the same house without an adult and somehow still manage to end up with beer in the refrigerator. And people laugh at me for liking science fiction?

So, the kinds of shows we’ll have to have will be the very high-tech science fiction shows with laser battles and really cool cars that talk to the actors, saying really funny things that people don’t actually say in real life, because that would be too scripted. But they still have to sound all natural, like it’s the right thing to happen at the most inopportune times.

And ninjas. You kind of need ninjas in most shows. Which now that I think about it, perhaps romances would be okay, as long as it was a romance between two ninjas (who throw laser ninja stars at teenagers who live in apartments with no beer). I’m not really sure where I’m going with this one, but something tells me I’m on a roll.

Of course, there’s no way to really talk about this without mentioning price. I figure $3.00 a month is appropriate as long as the entire world seems interested in subscribing. Considering there’s about 340 million people in the US alone (on any Tuesday, although Wednesdays and Fridays our numbers dwindle horribly), that would be (gets out calculator…at least three dollars times 340 million, which my two years of second grade math instruction comes out to about at least a million dollars). So, yeah, this would be really profitable.

I was going to say that my streaming service should have hot cheerleaders and Scarlet Johanssen but that was much more relevant when I was a teenager, so let’s just say that as long as we’re meeting the ninja demographic, we’re probably okay.

I haven’t figured out exactly when I’m going to be launching this new streaming service, but it may have to wait until after I’m finished watching the latest season of The Expanse, on Amazon Prime. Or was it on Starz? One of these days I’m going to have to figure out where my stuffed animals have hidden the remote.

Stickman

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Just a quick update, but Stickman has been seriously updated. And there have been a few reasons behind why exactly that happened. So, it back and let me tell you a story.

A Stickman fan contacted me the other day and told me that she found questionable content linked from the Stickman page and wanted to make sure I was aware of this. At first, I thought someone had hacked me, but as I started to investigate this, I discovered a couple of things. First, my word press site (the main one that most of you know) has been housing my Stickman content for some time now, even though not much of it has been updated much). However, during investigation, I began to realize that a whole other segment of the Stickman page was still out there on one of my sub accounts.

You see, back in 2009, I created Stickman on a sub domain of sarbonn.com, and I had actually tied it to my old web site, littlesarbonn.com. At some point, I consolidated and got rid of littlesarbonn.com, but hadn’t realized someone bought it and decided to house Japanese porn, or something of that nature. As I had no intentions of trying to gain back littlesarbonn.com, I didn’t realize care. That was until I found out that a number of my links on the subdomain were linking to that address. So, in essence, I was sending a lot of people out to some Japanese porn site without their permission. And I also know that kids read my comics site, so that obviously didn’t make things any better.

So, I decided to revamp my Stickman site and make things better. That was when I discovered the old web site providers I was using had sold all of their IT services to India and at the moment, it was practically impossible to do any updates on their page (as it had a ton problems that made it impossible to stay logged in longer than five seconds (not an exaggeration). So, after days of dealing with this and support that only uses chat and speaks little to no English, and basically couldn’t understand anything I was saying before responding with stuff like “Have you tried turning off and then on the computer?” So, I left them and decided to set up shop with Hostgator.com.

Been spending the last few days doing just that. And thought I’d rebuild my Stickman site from scratch using javascript and Dreamweaver. I’m pretty happy with the results right now, although I probably need to continue updating it as I discover new things that need to be fixed.

But the site is now located at https://www.sarbonn.com/Stickman/Stickman.htm.

Come visit and enjoy the site. It’s going to be part of a much bigger project I’m starting in the next few weeks, so it’s nice having it up and fresh, especially when it no longer looks like it was built in 1990.

Bob Jenkins, middle manager at a Wyoming Applebee’s, is being closely watched as last male executive not accused of sexual harassment

Business, Relationships, , ,

Today, according to inside sources, Bob Jenkins, a tenured, two-year manager at an Applebee’s in Wyoming, is being closely monitored to make sure that no sexual harassment claims are made against him. As he is the last semi-senior executive of any corporation in America who has not yet been implicated on charges of lewd and inappropriate behavior towards any female member of his staff, Mr. Jenkins is being closely watched to make sure that he does not succumb to natural male tendencies.

Server Rebecca Dallison of the Applebee’s stated: “Not once has Bob attempted to fondle me, corner me in the back room alone, or stick his tongue down my throat while handling every day normal assignments. He hasn’t ever followed me to my car and made me feel completely uncomfortable in any way, shape or form.”

This newspaper was going to continue following this story, but our executives have all been implicated and fired for sexual harassment situations, leaving Dorothy, a junior reporter who has never covered a story on her own, left to man the store until appropriate personnel can be located in the future.

 

Sorry, but it’s not all about the bass; it’s all about the story

Computer Games, Writing, , , , , ,

Recently, I found myself back in the world of Azeroth, or to those who need more information: World of Warcraft. I’ve been playing that game off and on for years, and recently I ran out of stuff to play, deciding I’d fire up the game again and see what I’ve missed.

Now, to catch up our story, when we last left our characters in the sword and fantasy world, I was level 85, and the last expansion was Cataclysm. Since then, there have been two expansions: Mist of Panderia and Warriors of Draenor. Well, Draenor is brand new (weeks old) and Panderia has been out for a while. But to get from 85 to 90, I had to go through Panderia, at least until I could go to Draenor, where the game lets me level up to 100.

What I wanted to talk about was Mists of Panderia, which from what I’ve been reading didn’t get the most stellar of reviews. And I can understand why. As I played it, it felt very much like an attempt to parody the world of China, and to do that it introduced a new race of Kung Fu Pandas. Yeah, I’m not kidding about this.

But after all of that, I found a couple of really interesting tidbits to keep me going. And those tidbits were specifically story related. To give you an example, I was playing through the story and at one point you have to relive the incidents that a Dwarf engineer went through. Now, the voice over is a Scottish dwarf who has probably one of the funniest voices in the game, and just listening to him narrate made the game fun alone. But then there comes a time where he’s spotting for a sniper and then befriends a raccoon, which the sniper then kills. Now, this may sound kind of harsh or violent, but it was probably one of the funniest scenes in the game by far, because this poor dwarf took the whole cartoon violence very seriously and for the continuation of those missions NEVER forgave his partner for killing his pet raccoon. The whole banter was quite inspired and well worth the play through.

And that’s the point. I think a lot of games are missing the sense of fun that Blizzard tends to invoke in its games. At one point during the beginning of Draenor, you meet a new soldier on the frontier, and his name is something like Newbie Greenguy, or something like that. It reminded me of the one noob character they had running through Cataclysm who the undead npcs were always trying to kill off, just to get him out of the game and out of their hair.

Those kinds of funny moments are truly inspired, and I wish there were more of them in other games.

But for now, I’m happy finding them whenever I can. And sometimes you find them in the strangest of places. One of my favorites for the longest time was when I found a Dwarf Fishing Rod, which was actually a shotgun. It’s one of those jokes that takes you a second to get, but it so cool when you finally do.

Shocking Photo Reveals Nixon Wasn’t Only Dishonest; He Existed in Black and White While the Rest of the World Was in Color!

News, , , , ,

John Dean, Timothy Naftali

A photograph was published today for an article on Salon.com, in which John Dean is shown in the picture with President Richard M. Nixon. Until this time, photographs of Nixon were often shown in either color or in black and white. However, when this photograph was published, an interesting dichotomy was shown: Dean was in color, and Nixon was in black and white. Yes, long has it been suspected that President Nixon was in reality a black and white individual, someone without any color whatsoever. This picture may have proved just that.

Fortunately for us, the person who published this photo didn’t realize the mistake he or she was making in accidentally forgetting to photoshop either of the two people in this photo. But now, we finally know the truth. Richard Nixon was, in fact, a black and white person.

Our country was spared horrible circumstances when he resigned early because there’s no telling what might have happened if his black and white ways were allowed to continue in a world that needed color.

My Thesis Proposal I Never Turned In

Education, ,

My thesis was on the 1991 August Coup in the Soviet Union. Here’s the thesis proposal I wanted to go with, but am certainly glad I didn’t choose:

Abstract

Okay, there was this big revolt in the Soviet Union. You know that place that became Russia? Well, it used to be the Soviet Union. And they were kind of communist. Well, they claimed they were communist, but they were more of a socialist republic without the socialism part (well, and the republic part, too, for that matter). So, I guess they were kind of like an aristocracy, except no one had any money, so they were like a poor aristocracy, and they had no real power either, so they were probably more like a bunch of thugs who would beat you up if you didn’t give them your milk money. We all remember those guys. Those were the same guys that stuffed you in the trash cans during your freshman year in high school, and they’d laugh as you tried to pull yourself out of the can, but some kid before you had thrown his tuna fish sandwich into the trash bin because he was sick, and now you’re covered in bad tuna, and well…wait, I was talking about the Soviet Union.

 

Definitions:

“the” – This word seems to show up a lot before other words. No one in history has ever figured out what it means.

“fashizzle” – doesn’t really mean anything, but uncool, white guys often use it to pretend they’re not uncool, white guys.

Research Questions

  1. So, what’s with that?
  2. What the hell is that?
  3. Does this make me look fat?
  4. Do you think it bites?

Hypotheses

  1. If I throw a rock at that really big guy who is working out in the gym with really heavy weights, I believe that my top speed at running will increase twenty percent higher than normal by the time he catches me.
  2. Che chingu sogehagesimnida. Ore-kanman-imnida. Anyung haseyo.
  3. Life is like a river.
  4. If you add one kilajoule of potential energy to a discharged atomic isotope that currently has negative momentum caused by electromagnetic displacement, an equal force of distraction progression (caused by chaotic disbursement) will equal 1/10th of the fragmentation of disabled housing processing.

Methodology

Start with a base of flour, add in a batch of uncooked rice, approximately 13 ounces, and then stir while frying at a medium boil. After 15 minutes, add paprika and then baste in a turkey baster. Let it sit for an hour and then serve with white wine.

Discussion

So, like, this chick and I are totally digging each other, and then she suddenly reveals that she’s been seeing this other guy, so I says to her: “Yo, babe, I don’t think this is going anywhere,” and she gets all haughty on me, talking about the whole “commitment thing, and I just know she’s going to bring up that I was dating Suzie that one time we broke up for fifteen days, and then she’s gonna….

Conclusions

  1. Never poke a one eyed man with a stick. It’s just not a good idea no matter how much you think it might be.
  2. Never start with number one if you don’t have a number two to follow it up with.

Amazon’s Business Practices Discriminate Against the “Out of Money” Class

Business, Economics, , , , ,

Often, us poor people have to live in places like this, such as my Summer resort, where cable isn't fee!
Often, us poor people have to live in places like this, such as my Summer retreat, where cable isn’t fee!

Today, I was thinking of buying a book that I don’t really need, but for some reason felt I had to have it right then and there. So, I went onto Amazon’s site, put in the information for the book and found out that I could purchase it used for $7.54. I went through the full process of buying, but when it came to the last stage (well, the stage before I give my address to send it to), I was halted by a statement indicating that my credit card could not process the transaction. So I immediately checked my checking account and discovered that my balance was 32 cents. So I then went back to Amazon, realizing that my bank had no more funds in my account and tried to figure out how they could accommodate me.

It turns out that Amazon has no contingency plan for those who do not have enough money to afford their products. In other words, I was proverbially screwed.

This immediately inflamed me because all companies should have resources in place to assist those of us who are “financially challenged”, which, according to an Internet search I just did that brought up lots of lesbian pornography, I discovered that the financially challenged are quite often the most overlooked disenfranchised class of people in American society. It’s almost as if businesses think that people need to “work” for the things they wish to buy and aren’t too proud to not say so.

So, I contacted several loser friends of mine to inquire whether or not they have ever been discriminated like this before, and four of those five friends indicated they had (the fifth could not answer as he was suffering from a severe case of “Cheetos-overimbibing”). I was shocked to discover this was not just an isolated incident.

This has inflamed me to no end, and I decided that I would send out the word to everyone that these practices must be stopped immediately, or we would use our financial clout in massive protest and show them that without our inability to pay for goods backing up their company, they’d…um…um, you know maybe I haven’t thought this through enough.

Let me get back to you, and when I do, boy am I going to have something for you to rally behind!