A Pixelated Mind

Dear Editor-lady,

Gabe the Deontological Beaver here with my jam-packed submission for your peanut butter-packed newspaper. Do with it what you will, though hopefully you will print it. Also, I assume you shall contact me if I do end up ‘winning’ this mysterious and death-defying contest.

In any case, there’s a slight problem with the time-space continuum. See, I happen to be in North Ryde, New South Wales, Australia on a three month exchange at this particular moment and I cannot stop by Corbett Center and pose for your splendid photographers.

There is, however, a second option (I call it Option B). I have a predrawn head-shot and full body shot that you could gladly publish. I have attached my favorite picture of myself in both .jpg and .tif file formats, which I assume are appropriate for your needs. Let me know if these are not correct or if you would like for me to send my head-shot instead.

I also have a designated artist in New Mexico whom I could get to contact you if so desired. Alternatively, you could take a picture of a potato, a large piece of living room furniture, or some random mammal and claim that it is me. I’d bet my own mother would have difficulty telling the difference.

In any case, I look forward to my competitor’s article and wish you a grandiose year.

Love,
Gabe D. Beaver
Advice Columnist sans the Advice
Pix Capacitor

[obviously, the text proceeding the word 'obviously' is not to be printed]

Tao of Gabe

Gabe the Illustrious Beaver here with the results of his year-long odyssey into the college student psyche. It turns out they spend most of their time playing Spider Solitaire and poking people on Facebook.

College is where people find themselves… face down in a pool of their own vomit. Actually, that’s an exaggeration based on a stereotype that is perpetuated by the media. I shouldn’t perpetuate that image, but as I’m now part of the media, I find myself compelled to do so. I also feel compelled to cast a biased look at whatever politician you happen to prefer and promote whichever political idealogy you happen to detest.

I digress. The point was to explain what college students think (in case you, as a college student, didn’t know).

Not all college students are the same. While some could entertain you for minutes on end with stories of their drunken escapades against the parking department, many college students are content muttering ominous death threats while hovering around for parking (the adult version of musical chairs).
Similarly, while some students bed dozens of partners, others remain virgins until their postgraduate days. If you think that’s sad, I bought a 12-pack of condoms in March and I still have 11-and-a-half of them left.

Then there is the other part of college that nobody mentions: classes. College would be so great if it weren’t for the classes. Then, as if it weren’t enough to be made to pay to do extra work, they make you buy books that you’ll open once before each test and then never again. Don’t lie; you know you complain more about how heavy your books are than how hard.

That’s the reason that every semester I look in my wallet and I say to myself, “Gabe, this money isn’t going to last very long, so you’re going to have to spend it really fast!”

Luckily, college isn’t just surfing the web, drinking, and complaining about parking, sex, and classes. No, if you truly want the college experience, you can do so much more.

You could live in the dorms, for instance. Everyone that’s lived in one would recommend it, I know I do. Of course, we only recommend it because we don’t think it’s fair that nobody warned us beforehand. It turns out that it? not very fun to overpay to live with the dirtiest people this side of Mississippi and eat the same tired food day-in and day-out.

Then, if you still feel you’re not getting the college experience, you could join a sport, become a Greek, or join a club like SANA: Students Against New Acronyms. It is definitely advisable to do at least one of those– or so we hear from the testimonials on the brochures.

College is a little of everything, really. Sometimes, while trying to make sense of it, I feel as if I’m the only sane person in the world and that makes me feel crazy.

Love,
Gabe D. Beaver

“Remember Kids: The college experience is a hoax perpetuated by the media!”

I’m having a thought and it goes a little something like this:

Good vision was once a genetically selectable trait. In other words, if you had bad vision, you died or had a greater chance of dying.
People that had good vision thus had a greater chance of living and humanity was culled.
Then some myopic jerk decided to invent glasses.
And suddenly vision wasn’t so important. Perhaps it mattered to the person who had the vision, but it didn’t decide his or her life expectancy.
So instead of each generation getting better and better vision, the general vision of the populace stayed the same.

A similar line of reasoning could go for body hair and clothing.
The conclusion, which should follow from these logical inferrences, is that inventions create a crutch for which humanity doesn’t bother leaving. In other words, once you invent something that does something we hadn’t done before but wanted to do, all of a sudden that trait isn’t selected for and humanity gradually evolves away from it.

Some people would conclude from this that we would start selecting for intelligence and for inventive minds.
That’s very optimistic, but wrong.
With all of modern technology and convenience, people that would have been too weak or stupid to fend for themselves in the wilderness are now able to eat, drink, live, and be educated for relatively no effort on their part. In other words, by making education easier and the learning curve more gradual and less deadly, the human race will steadily grow stupider and stupider.

(as to how we developed intelligence in the first place, that’s a matter for anthropologists. My hypothesis is that the intelligence curve was so steep for early man– what with not having any other natural defenses– that we became much more intelligent than we knew what to do with. Basically, for the weakest one of us to be smart enough to kill mastodons, he had to have an ungodly amount of intelligence at his disposal… seeing as there was no education to help them at the task)

Proof that I am truly in Australia is below the fold.. (more…)

It turns out Roommate #4 objects to her name. Ha ha. It’s funny, really, because she’s the reason I started numbering them. She would never be around and I would be like, “hey, where’s the fourth roommate?”

But she doesn’t like it, so I’m going to stop. From now on, it’s Jess, T-Rob, and Liza (I can only remember people’s names if they happen to be four letters long). I’ll keep this link handy if you ever need a refresher (assuming I talk about them, I so hate those stories on various blogs that refer to people who may or may not be imaginary).

Oh, and just so you know. I have the most beautiful hands in existence. They’re so perfect that if they weren’t my hands already, I wouldn’t be able to keep my hands off them.

As a Level Six Philosopher in a Level Ten Philosophy class (Immanuel Kant was a real pissant..)
I realized how much like a Role Playing Game my life was.

So much so, in fact, that I decided to make an RPG about it. For those of you keeping track at home, that’s 7 poems, 2 plays, 1 screenplay, 1 sitcom, about 92 viewspapers, and soon an RPG under my belt. Let me give you the outline:

You start off with a choice of three characters. They all have different skills (reason, physical, creativity) and so are all adept to various majors. You choose your character and begin playing. This choice determines the plot of the game and not the playing, as the other two immediately join your team as ‘friends.’

The object of the game can be to overthrow the evil dean (the physical player), to find a purpose to your life and create something truly original (the creative character), or to save the world.

As you go through the game, you can change your major as many times as you want. Different majors have different skills attributed to them, obviously, so you can become the type of character you want to become.

It’s a strategy game, so as you make more and more friends (there’ll be a Fraternity minigame where you gain 30 friends and 3000 enemies in one fell pledge), you’ll have to fight bigger and worse enemies.

The enemies, by the way, can be term papers, presentations, parking nazi, or the Freshmen Fifteen. There are various ways to beat the enemies that only some majors can do. For instance, if you develop your Bullshitting skill with your English major, you can breeze through a term paper, but you may be caught up with presentations if you didn’t develop your Method Acting or Improving skills with your Drama major.

The truly tough bad guys (Deans, Final Exams, and Police Captains) would require a combination of different assaults to take down (Rhetoric, Strength, Charisma, etc.).

At the end, you can get degrees in any amount of subjects (including Master’s and Doctorates, for the die-hard players), and use the various skills to overcome the enemies.

I’m still working out the kinks, but this promises to be an awesome game.

My roommate thinks I’m nuts for this and that this is all an offshoot of my finishing Shining Force and not having anything to devote my time to anymore. I think he’s just jealous that I’m going to do for so many people what Shining Force did to me.