LockeTalke 041 - Now with feelings!
Episode 41 of LockeTalke! Haru and Kyo have a chat about polygamy, children, men becoming wolves, zombies, and love.
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Our Outro song for this episode:
What Is Love (single Mix) | Haddaway
LockeTalke iTunes Link
LockeTalke Episode 041 (MP3)
LockeTalke Episode 041 (M4A)
LOLA LOCKE – The Joys of Cat Ownership
I love my cat. Since getting her 9 months ago, some of my friends have even called me a crazy cat lady because of how much I care for her. Living alone can be pretty lonely without a pet and my cat ZZ has filled that void for me. Let me tell you about the wonders of cat ownership.
My cat and I have a special bond. I got her when she was about 3 months old. She was still so tiny that I could fit her in the palm of my hand. Being with her every day since then has created the special bond that only cat and cat owner can have.
ZZ at 3 months old
My cat wants to be everywhere I want to be. Sometimes this can get annoying, especially when I am in the bathroom and she is meowing at the door, but most of the time it is nice to have your cat sitting next to you or on your lap while you are relaxing or watching TV. Cats are also much warmer than humans so when they lay on you they become an extra blanket which warms you through those winter nights.
Cats are low maintenance. All I have to do for my cat is feed her and pet her. No walks (although this has been a fantasy of mine to take my cat out on a leash), no real training, no excessive grooming- none of these things. Cats are just the right amount of cute and just the right amount of independent for my busy life.
I think she knows I'm taking a picture
Cats are unique. This is the thing I love about my cat the most- she has her own personality. She likes to play fetch which makes play time so much easier on me. She greets me at the door when I come home from work. If I snooze my alarm too many times, she’ll paw softly at my face to wake me up. She loves to roll around on her back, exposing her belly. And sometimes, she’s just so fucking cute! I liken it to a kid. You never know exactly how much you’ll feel for something until you have it.
KYO LOCKE – I’m allergic to your fucking cat
Cats make me sick. I mean that quite literally. My eyes swell, I feel a lump in my throat, my nose runs – quite a number of symptoms that would want me to keep away from the fuckers. There is nothing else on the planet that makes my body react like this. My entire body attempts to kill itself in their presence, so I contend that cats are not animals, but rather demons from hell. I won’t digress into a discussion comparing them to dogs, but dogs do not kill me by being in the same room as them.
I hadn’t realized this about cats until I was in the 8th grade, where I was forced to volunteer in order to graduate. I did my time in a retirement home, where they had pet cats, and I actually had to go home on at least one occasion because of how sick the cats made me. Not the smell of urine and/or feces, not the disgusting hygiene of the elderly, not the feeling of death surrounding me. Cats. It’s been 11 years, and I’m sure all of the old folks have since died, which I’m going to attribute to the cats.
Salem was the cat from Sabrina the Teenage Witch. No one's seen the show's star Melissa Joan Hart since, so he must have killed her.
Lola has a cat named ZZ. ZZ also gives my body violent reactions. Because of this, I’ll keep my distance from her cat. Because ZZ, like most of her species, is a motherfucker, she likes to come near me for attention. Now, I’m friends with Lola, so I would never uppercut her cat, but it has crossed my mind a few times. The biggest deterrent to this, however, is that if I were to actually touch her cat, I’d probably get bowel cancer, because that’s what cats do.
Why would something that kills me want top get near me unless it was pure evil? I’m not the only one, either. Lola’s own boyfriend is allergic to ZZ, prompting him to go outside to smoke periodically. I’m not sure that smoking is any worse for his health than the cat is, given my experience with them evil little shits. Lola’s not the only friend I have that owns a cat, but all of them put a damper on my hanging out with friends. That’s bullshit.
The health ramifications of watching Halle Berry's Catwoman are actually pretty similar.
Nothing good has ever come from a cat. Forgive me if I sound a bit harsh, but fuck ‘em. Quite frankly, I’m a little miffed that they make my body not want top be alive around them. Just think of the most annoying person you know, the one who you try to actively avoid, and imagine that they made you physically ill. That’s my relationship with cats. They suck. We make a lot of concessions for people that are allergic to peanuts or some other shit, we should put a ban on cats. It’s only fair.
LockeTalke 040 - Now with Mortality!
Episode 40 of LockeTalke! The title pretty much sums it up.
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Our Outro song for this episode:
Threshold – Sex Bob-Omb | Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
LockeTalke iTunes Link
LockeTalke Episode 040 (MP3)
LockeTalke Episode 040 (M4A)
I am a huge, HUGE, Tim Schafer fan. Without going too deep about his games and Double Fine Studios, I wanted to say that if you’ve never played any of his titles, you are most certainly missing out. On the eve of our Point/Counterpoint, I saw a number of gaming sites promoting a Kickstarter page from the man himself promoting a new Double Fine game, that you get to fund.
The idea seemed like it was wishful and grandious to try and cut out publishers for the sake of making an old-timey point and click adventure game. Well, that was their plan and the Kickstarter goal was to reach $400,000 by March 13, 2012. When I heard about the news, I quickly threw money at them (when I reassed my finances for the month, of course), and I was a proud supporter along with pool of a thousand others that had their project at $190,000.00 (at the time I had pledged). This morning as I am publishing this post this on LockePick, the project has not only been funded, but is over $600,000.00 (February 9, 2012 – 9:30am Central time).
All I wanted to say was fuck yeah, internet.
FUCK YEAH!
Working Alone is Clearly Better
I have never counted myself among the people who prefer working in groups or working alone. That is, until I really thought about it. Working in groups or teams sucks to an ultimate degree.
In school, there was always a group assignment at some point during the year. I remember this particularly bad experience during college. It was a project for my Israeli/ Palestinian Conflict class and the group had to pick an aspect of the concept and report upon it. Our group chose The Arab Lobby- a subject that should have been a piece of cake. Instead, our group could not decide upon what aspects of the Arab Lobby each of us were going to report upon until a couple days before our presentation was scheduled. In addition to this stupidity, a couple of minutes before our scheduled presentation, half of my group members were still putting together their PowerPoint slides.
When one thinks about working in a team or with a group of people, one assumes that these team members will not only be on a similar level of intelligence, but capable. Capable of handling things that normal people in that class/ job are able to handle. Sadly, and I know this from personal experience, this is not always the case. Sometimes you’ll get that team member who expects you to critically think out all their decisions for them because they can not do it for themselves. Other times you will get that team member who is lazy and pushes all the work onto you- which is more annoying than if you were just assigned to the project all by yourself. Sometimes you’ll get the person who just asks all the stupid questions like “What is communism? I know it’s bad, but why?” or “Why would anyone want to be President?” Keep in mind, these are quotes from team members my age or older. I have had to teach people how to save Word documents and even that I can logically excuse and chalk up to unfamiliarity with computers, but which still baffles my mind.
So, I have come to the conclusion that working alone causes less stress and less anger which leads to an overall happier life. Isn’t this what we are all striving towards? Why must we drag ourselves down with groups? I can work fine in groups. Just give me a group of me.
We are Legion
Teamwork… If I honestly believed in my heart of hearts that true teamwork was completely possible to cultivate, I’d have no problem just writing up a few sentences and calling it a day. Truth is, I don’t entirely believe in teamwork. In fact, I did not even go through the effort to read through all of Lola’s post as I am quite certain she made a good argument based on personal experience (probably involving that one jag-off in school that doesn’t know his head from his ass… you know the one).
Yeah! That shithead!
The issue here is that we judge teamwork based on a very foolhardy perspective… our youth. The worst time to expect anything from anyone is when we are dealing with people barely know what they want to go to college for, let alone the initiative that you do (its especially worse when we have no say over who gets to be in our team, and most of the people in it couldn’t care less). Teamwork by its very nature will always fail. There will undoubtedly be fools, lazy people, and pricks that you deal with in a team setting, simply due to the fact that you have no control over the situation. But I don’t believe in the “teamwork” that you believe in. I believe in manipulation. A real team is hand picked, and should always be a collection of people who share a common goal and a strong responsibility to see things through to the very end. Real teamwork is less about a team. Instead, it’s about management.
I have had the opportunity to work in a field that had its fair share of incompetence (and in certain situations, I was the incompetent one in the pack), but the ability to distinguish someones strength and weaknesses and shifting their responsibilities accordingly was the pinnacle of success. This was an essential for a field where someone could not be fired, but it was always understood that the end goal would never succeed on self reliance alone -even more so in my field where you had to literally rely on the people next to you to stay alive. You need a team to achieve success… but even more so, you need a team that has a strong tolerance for your bullshit to fine-tune the perfect group of super-stars.
My point is simple, if you own the project, the “team” that you work with can achieve the unthinkable, but it requires you to be proactive. It’s that same feeling you get when you know you’re the smartest one in the pack but instead of being fussy, you decide to manipulate them to churn out work. Granted, not all of us have the luxury to lead, reorganize, and remove people at will, but a team is a broad enough term where I can go so far as specify that a team you build from the ground up, is yours to control. But to truly create something amazing, you need to trust in others and in their skillset, which means you need to harness their potential by being a gigantic douchbag.
I want to run something by you. I want you to look at the images below and tell me which of these people have been successful in their careers, and which of them did so by not being a prick…
My point isn’t necessarily to belittle the people that work for/with you to achieve success, but in order to compose a worthwhile team that will deliver on the things you cant do (and trust me, there are a myriad of things YOU CANNOT ACCOMPLISH ON YOUR OWN), you breed impossible expectations out of your group that they hate you for at the time, but respect you for when all is said and done (kinda like that one professor that you hated but you came to understand that they wanted you to go above and beyond your own expectations and you have been grateful for that ever since).
If we take the teamwork argument at face value, Lola wins this long before I even start to write. However, the core function and end result of a real team crafted by blood, sweat, tears, yelling, and sheer talent is a force to be reckoned with.
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