Lame Computer Lab Boredom Tips

You too can be a computer prankster as cool as this man!I'll be honest, there are days when we here at SA have more on our minds than trying to be first class comedians entertaining dozens of people across the globe and angering thousands more. For example, right now I'm up against the wire fighting hand to hand with midterm project deadlines for classes I'll surely forget the second I get done with them. I'm not complaining about school being a waste of my time, because it’s a waste of my time that keeps me off the streets, or worse, the beaches. The last thing I want to do is fall back into my narcissistic pattern of roaming the various muscle beaches of Indiana kicking sand in the faces of pipsqueaks and flexing my sweet life away. I especially want to avoid this because I'm a ninety-pound weakling with immunity to the effects of sunlight. This lack of motivation would normally put me in some kind of handicap parking space of despair, but fuck it, I'm just going to go ahead and park on the curb with this update and leave it at that.

Seeing as how school is the scornful beast imprisoning me, I'm going to write about it. Specifically, I'm going to write about some of the lame tricks I occasionally enlist to bring myself minor amusement. I apologize profusely, as I'm some kind of newfangled graphics type guy, which means my schooling consists mostly of staring at a monitors all day and cursing about how annoying NURBs modeling is. Most college students consider "good fun" or "shenanigans" to be something more along the lines of excessive alcohol consumption and the subsequent rapes and accidental deaths that follow suit, but not me! Not old Livestock! As a certified straight arrow headed towards an impending psychotic breakdown, there is simply no time to rape and pillage in my bustling port city of a schedule. Well, at least not until summer vacation, but then I usually spend that time indoors working diligently on hypothetical survival plans should the unthinkable happen and communists invade our heartland in force.

So what do I do to amuse myself? Since I'm surrounded by other people's computers a lot, I tend to revert into what most people consider an "inconsiderate asshole." These are all relatively quick, simple, and slightly humorous ways to have a tiny bit of fun at other peoples temporary expense. At best you'll get five to ten minutes of entertainment, immediately followed by having other people look upon you as a total jackass, and rightly so. Oh, and you best be in a computer lab, since I'm too nerdy to do anything nerdy that excludes computers.

It won't be long, mark my words. The time has come for revenge of the nerds. Oh boy. Tip Number One: Evaluating Your Peers
In one class, the teacher dismissed us for a 15-minute break, and used this time to leave performance evaluations at our workstations. I returned early, as I'm simply too cool to hang out by the pop machine, and seized the moment. I noticed his evaluations were relatively simple and format, which cued the magic 60-watt light bulb of innovation that got lodged in my head on that fateful field trip so long ago. I quickly whipped up a batch of new evaluations for everybody in my row, and in an identical format. However, I pretty much don't know what tact is, so I just insulted the hell out of these people in a psychotic five minute rush. Since I was friends with the people I insulted, I figured it was all okay. When you return to class and find an evaluation calling you a "dumb bitch" and "the worst example of human life scarring the surface of this planet" there isn't much you can do but freak out. That's usually when you, the oh-so hilarious prankster, cut in and show off the real evaluation, because there is no sense bringing a higher power into this tangled tapestry of tomfoolery. The trick here is to control the situation, as you certainly don't want any painful repercussions to result from a little mischief. Boy am I hoot.

Tip Number Two: The Monitor Cable Switcheroo
Another fun way to mess with people is to stealthily switch monitor cables, in a crisscross fashion. This is not to be confused with Kris Kros fashion, which consists of wearing your clothes backwards and alternating between warming it up and pumping it up. This mostly just annoys people, since they aren't bright enough to figure out what the hell you did. It's also really obnoxious since most people just don't think to look for something so retarded, but it can occasionally be amusing. It also makes for a good team sport, since it sure looks weird if shit is happening on your screen while you remain motionless. I guess you should also be polite and switch them back when your hijinks are over with, since you'll likely piss the holy hell out of a lab tech when he has to try to figure out what's going on and doesn't think to check for something so retarded as switched monitor cables.

Tip Number Three: Keyboard Rearrangement
My favorite anti-boredom activity is carefully rearranging my keyboard. On the average keyboard, with a little work, you can pry pretty much any key loose and simply pop them back in. The wonderful catch is that you don't have to pop them back into their original location, which means all sorts of wonderful things can happen, including alphabetizing your keyboard and spelling out words. The latter might require some cooperation from others, as you'll often need to secure additional letters and/or numbers from other people. The results can be quite exciting, though. It's a great way to eat the time of a long lecture away like Pac-Man eats those hallucinogenic pellets that are probably actually the reason he thinks ghosts are chasing him. Spelling out things like "you will die at 12:00" and "help trapped in keyboard factory" are a lot of fun if you can get a hold of the letters. I guess you can always come in early and stay late if necessary. Seeing how it's totally unnecessary to begin with that's probably just a waste of time. But, at the end of a long day, there is a tremendous feeling of satisfaction that comes with having redesigned the keyboard for the next poor loser who has to use it.

Again, I won't hesitate to admit I'm a total nerd and loser, so don't think these are my awesome ideas for being a total renegade, even if they secretly are. More than anything, these are just simple suggestions of things to do that require relatively little effort and aggravate other people. Also note I didn't bother with any idiotic suggestions of "load the computer up with gay porn" or so on. That sort of stuff is just too easy and boring, and appeals to only the lowest common denominator of bored idiot. I'll end this scholastic odyssey with an ominous warning to Frolixo: meet me at the bike rack after school, pal.

Ohayo Gozaimasu, Fuckers!

Hey folks, it's Wednesday, and that means either a movie review by Ben "Greasnin" Platt or a game review by Taylor "Psychosis" Bell! And sorry to disappoint you all, but Ben's turn was last week, so this week we have a brand new review of the most Japanese game I've ever seen that isn't actually Japanese.

Scatological references aside, the plot in Tsunami 2265 should be immediately familiar to anyone who has heard of either anime or Japan. For example, the box says “Tsunami 2265: 1st Century After – A WAVE OF PURE ADRENALINE.” You can immediately guess that the civilized world has been destroyed in some kind of disaster (perhaps a tsunami of some sort) and that all over Japan different factions of a new Earth government are fighting it out against each other. Then when you learn that the main characters are a man and a woman who don’t seem to know each other, you can guess that the man will have spiky hair and a shady background, and the woman will be a strong warrior who had to fight extra hard to win respect because of her gender. And then at some point one of them will save the other’s life and they will fall in love. I wrote this paragraph after simply looking at the box - before even installing the game - and now that I’ve played it I can say that almost all of these guesses turned out to be correct. That’s kind of sad.

Read the review, foolish American!

– Josh "Livestock" Boruff (@Livestock)