Gamer Girls

First, a bonus video. I forgot to post anything yesterday. It was midnight when I remembered. I wasn’t going to stay up to write something about Erin or whatever. It can wait.

So Newt is ripping off ReportOfTheWeek now. He just has to start wearing thrift store suits and being gay. Well, I think that he has that last part down already. So just the suits then.

0:00 – “I was sitting line at the local pharmacy waiting for my Zoloft prescription.”

We don’t need to know what medications you’re taking. We’re not your dentist. But Newt wants to advertise how depressed he is.

So to cheer himself up, he bought a sugary beverage. When did I stop drinking soda? I don’t know. I only drank it regularly when I was living at home. My mother would buy cases of it. Terrible parenting. And she drank soda regularly so it was just part of her addiction, I guess.

But as an adult, I never bought much soda. I’d get it if I was going to a restaurant or a fast food place but I never bought any from the grocery store. Then a few years ago when I started being more concerned about dental hygeine, I cut it down even less. And then when I went on a diet, I cut it down to basically zero. I drink it once in a great while if I’m in Subway or something but we’re talking maybe two or three times a month.

I don’t miss it. I don’t get these people who talk about food and drink. It’s just food. Do other things. Get other interests.

0:45 – Newt complains about a customer who was using coupons. He goes on to say that the cashier, “Looked like she died three years ago but somebody forgot to tell her. That’s how old she was.”

You’d think that a depressed person wouldn’t try to tear other people down. People have problems. This is a woman who’s perhaps working past retirement age because she doesn’t have enough money to live on. The US doesn’t have anything approaching an adequate retirement system. You have to have a private retirement fund and if you weren’t consistently contributing to such a plan and if you weren’t working consistently since you were in your early 20s, you’re just fucked. You have to get a job in retail and work until you die. Serving asshole customers like The Ideas Man. Newt is not remotely sympathetic. Newt only cares about Newt.

Newt gets this beverage and he talks about how conflicted he was when purchasing it. He tries to justify drinking soda. Who cares? Drink it or don’t.

1:15 – He’s reading from the label. “‘Dew with a blast of Americana.’ Given our track record over the past few years, I’m assuming that taste means mass shooting.”

What an odd comment. Of all the things that go on in the US, positive and negative, why are mass shootings what he identifies the US with? He just focuses on whatever the Chosen People in the media tell him to focus on, I guess. Today it’s mass shootings, tomorrow it will be abortion, the day after it will be Mickey Mouse being gay. Get outraged over stuff that affects very few people in the country, and totally ignore the stuff that affects virtually everybody like the standard of healthcare, the health insurance situation, the cost of college tuition, non-dischargeable student loans, toilets that don’t flush, the obesity epidemic, massive inequality, and so on.

The odds of you getting shot in a mass shooting are virtually nil. But the odds of you requiring medical treatment at some point in your life and having to pay a fortune because you don’t have insurance and possibly having to declare bankruptcy and losing your life’s savings are extremely high. Newt himself has had numerous ocassions to get hospital treatment. So he should know this. But he’s concerned about mass shootings.

1:30 – Newt reads the calories. 270 calories. He says, “The other night, when I got home from work, I was like, dude, I got to fucking get back into shape because I feel disgusting.”

Well, good for you. We can all look forward to penis picture of The Ideas Man where he’s all buff and muscly.

Then he drinks some of it. And…eh…it’s alright. Three out of five stars, I guess? A 5 out of 10? Good stuff.

Wow. I wrote more than I planned to on that one. But here’s what I actually meant to talk about:

Hey guys! Remember Star Wars: The Phantom Menance?

Well, I guess. I never saw it but I remember the hype. When did it come out? 1999. I would have been in college.

I remember as far back as like 1994 an English teaching talking about the planned prequels. He was hyped for them. He was probably in his mid 30s so he could have been around our age when at least some of the original trilogy came out.

Then the more you learned about the movie, the less interested you became. And it turned out to be a piece of shit.

1:00 – Newt says that he started working in movie theatres in 1999. Really? I think that Newt is 40. So he would have been 16 in 1999. Well, I guess.

I never did any part-time work in high school. Why would I? I’m in high school.

Well, I guess if you want to make money for your hobbies or doing stuff or wooing the ladies. But I didn’t do any of that stuff.

Even in college…my horrible mother would regularly complain that I wasn’t working. Of course I’m not working. I’m a full-time student. And she hadn’t had a job since she was like 25. Who is she to criticise anyone for not working?

But I got a job when I was…20? I delivered pizzas. That was alright. I did it once a week for three months. Seems like it was longer. Then when I was 21, I got a job in a casino. I did that for three months too. Then that was it. That my college work experience.

None of it had any bearing on my future employment prospects. Whether I worked or didn’t work, it’s irrelevant. I still ended up getting a job. I’ve had loads of jobs. But in college, I was going to college. That was the job. My mother and her eighth grade education couldn’t seem to understand this.

1:15 – “They’d say, ‘Wow. 24 years and you’re still doing this. What a fucking loser.’ To which I’d say, ‘Mom, stop leaving comments on my Youtube page.'”

Newt’s mother seems to be about the same calibre as mine.

1:30 – “I haven’t always been in movie theatres. Remember, I failed at a media company.”

It’s an interesting perspective. You look at Newt getting fired from Screenwave and you think, “Big deal. It was just some shitty office job.” But for Newt, this was something different. If you’re working in movie theatres for 20 years, you might welcome the opportunity to work in an office. Even if it’s with a shitty company like Screenwave which apparently doesn’t have a pleasant work environment.

“And I ran hotels and comic shops and shit like that. I bounced around.”

Oh, that’s right. So he hasn’t worked in movie theatres for 24 years. He can get another job if he wants. Presumably, the movie theatre job pays the best.

“I keep getting brought into these situations because I’m pretty fucking good at it, man. Assholes are like, ‘Oh, he probably just makes popcorn.’ Yeah, I make popcorn sometimes. But I also book the films, I do the inventory, I’m putting the ticketing system together so the buildings communicate with each other.”

I’m surprised that a manager makes popcorn. Surely, they have employees for this. He made a short recently of the popcorn popping. It wasn’t nearly as interesting as I had hoped.

I haven’t had popcorn since I was a kid. No, my girlfriend at the time gave me some “gourmet” flavoured popcorn a few years ago. That was bad. Her idea of “gourmet” varies greatly from mine. If it says “gourmet” on the bag, she just takes it as fact. No. It has to be a quality product. An actual gourmet product probably isn’t going to have the word “gourmet” on the packaging.

3:00 – Newt is telling a story about how he worked in a gas station and somebody robbed him at gunpoint. Newt says that he urinated himself. He was 16 at the time. When the manager returned, the manager laughed at Newt having urinated himself. This robber put a gun in Newt’s mouth, by the way. Then a manager of a movie theatre came into the gas station, as Newt was waiting for his mother to pick him up, and offered Newt and his friend a job at the theatre. So this is the origin of Newt working in cinemas.

Then Newt gives a cryptic response about what happened to the manager of that gas station. Newt says that his grandfather was in the police department and…something happened. I don’t know what.

But back to the urinating. I don’t blame Newt for that and the manager was obviously an asshole for making fun of him.

I urinated myself once before. This was in the 7th or 8th grade. I was in the school band. The teacher was prone to fits of outrage. Totally irrational. Totally out of proportion to anything that was going on.

We were on stage practicing for some school concert. Nothing remotely important. The parents come to see the concert. There are a few concerts a year. Nobody wants to attend these things. But it’s for the children. Take an interest in your children’s activities.

Earlier in the day, some kid playing the clarinet hit the wrong note so he started screaming at him, told him to move further down into the band line up, and picked up his chair and threw it like twenty rows into the audience area. Nobody was in the audience at the time, of course.

Then we’re playing a new song. I’m on the bass drum. It’s the first time that we’re playing this song. So I’m looking at the sheet music and following along. Doing my drumming.

The song finishes and I look at the teacher. He’s staring at me and looking like he’s going to kill me. He says, “That’s the first time you’ve looked at me.” Then he starts screaming about how maybe if that was the first time we played that song he might understand it. It was the first time. But he just keeps screaming about this. And it’s over absolutely nothing. At some point during this, I urinated myself.

We’re talking about a school band. The guy was a lunatic. He died last year. He had been teaching for 50 years. Nobody left a comment on his obituary page. Nobody gives a shit about this guy. Born a scumbag, lived a scumbag’s life, died a scumbag.

12:30 – After talking about the movie, briefly, and his career history, Newt says that he never should have took the job at Screenwave. Then he blames everyone else for him plagiarising.

That’s the video.