So last night I was taking a smoke break in between looking at porn when I spotted the Google ad you see above. It features an Asian woman being a caressed by a white dude who I'll only describe as "interesting". His embrace sends off creepy vibes to me. I'm not sure why.

Now, in the over ten years of surfing the Internet, I think I've clicked on maybe five ads in total. The ad above though, was too tempting to resist. Once clicked, I was taken to a special, special place called chnlove.com. I know for a fact there are a ton of mail-order bride web sites out there but this was the first one that I'd perused in detail.

The most compelling thing I found first was the "success stories" page. It's filled with testimonials from happy couples who were formed using the site. It's here where the whole thing takes on the nature of a slo-mo car wreck. You kinda don't want to look but you have to. The first thing you see is that many couples have decided to post pics of themselves. Now maybe I shouldn't be surprised but the majority of the couples are older, white, and at times, weird looking dudes paired up with Chinese ladies about 10+ years their junior. Some of the couples are just uncomfortable to look at. It's like if I started to date say... Danica McKellar. What an odd choice for me to pick. I actually thought I'd choose Megan... ah... Danica McKellar... she's so smart... I wonder if we'd do integrals together... what?

So yeah, just read what some of these dudes have written:

"If you want to find love, Chinese woman first are beautiful and they want to please the man that love them. It's very important that you be honest as they are and they will love you forever. I couldn't have done this without them. Thank you again."

That comes from a dude who looks like Wilfred Brimley. Now granted, I'm of an open mind, meaning that I am quite sure that at least a few of these relationships aren't motivated by citizenship desires. In fact, a few of the pictures show couples where the male is very close in age to the lady and he's not hideous looking either.

Go have a look for yourself, it's quite an eye-opening experience.

3 Comments

I've decided I'm going to hang both my skateboard decks I own on the big column next to my desk at work. So far, all the column has done for me is block all the natural lighting coming from the windows. At least this way, it'll be doing me some good.

If you're like me, you are probably wondering how you mount a deck on a wall. According to Google, this is the best way.

0 Comments

Image courtesy of myconfinedspace.com

Though the "official" start to summer is still about 16 days away, unofficially in years past the weather should be quite nice around this time of year. The problem is that the weather has been pretty much crap since about November.

In Vancouver this year, we didn't really have a spring. "Spring" as it were, was just a continuation of winter, except just two or three degrees warmer and lots more rain. Granted, it doesn't dip below freezing any more but it's just as gray, wet, and dreary as your average fall day. Just this evening, it was pouring rain and not your nice summer rain either. It was a soul-stealing cold rain. While walking home, I even briefly thought about bringing my wool coat back into rotation since it would not look or feel out of place.

The one good thing about this poor weather is that once a nice string of sunny days comes along, everyone quickly forgets how bad the days were. The question is, when are the sunny days finally going to arrive?

0 Comments

A common practice in the video game industry is to award each member of the development team a plaque once the game ships. Usually, the plaque contains the cover art for the title, the disc of the title, and a small metal plate with the member's name and the name of the title. Some people have their plaques at home but a lot keep them at work.

Though I helped ship Sonic Rivals, I never received anything for being on that team. Maybe it had something to do with me leaving the company at alpha. For skate. they decided to do something different. Since it was a skateboarding game, they decided to forgo the usual plaque and instead, had custom decks done up for all the dev team members. We had a choice of two pieces of artwork: a single skeleton reaching up towards the skate. logo or the skate. army which you see above. You also had a choice of getting your name printed on the deck. After all that hard work on the game, I decided I deserved at least that little bit of recognition.

Sorry about the flash removing some detail. The characters you see on the deck are all the pros we signed for the first game. I left the protective plastic wrap on it because I need to bring it back to work since that's where I want to leave it long term. Click on the pic above for a much larger picture.

1 Comments

UPDATE: After some tinkering I've been able to safely republish my entire blog. If you're curious, it amounted to 2175 individual files and about 24 Mb worth of data.

All old references to the previous commenting system has been removed, making archive page loading much faster now. As a consequence to the republishing, the current commenting system has been backported to all my old pages, so if you want, you can go back to pre-2007 pages and leave comments there. Also, you might see one or two new things in the formatting. Thanks for you patience.

---

As some of you long time readers know, this blog has not always used Blogger's built-in and awesome commenting system. Actually, Blogger's own commenting system didn't exist until about a year and half ago. Previous to that, I used a free and external commenting system that I was never happy about.

It now appears that external commenting system has now gone down for good. Sadly, this means that any comments from about 2002 to about 2007 are now lost into the digital ether. I sincerely apologize to each and every one of you who took the time out to comment on this little dog and pony show. There were some classic comments made on this blog over the years.

The bad news continues in the form of longer load times on pages where it still references the old commenting system. Because of technical details I won't go into, I can automatically strip out those references but it'll invalidate the archive links you see to your right.

I'm still working out a solution. In the meantime, I'm sorry for the inconvenience.

0 Comments