I was checking the comments on my post I made last week and I noticed the following Google ad on the page.

Meet Homosexual Army Men
Find Army Homosexual Men Near You View Profiles 100% Free. Join Now!
http://www.GayMilitaryDating.com

Google is amazing. I’m not convinced they truly understand the audience, but they are amazing.

They took the fact that my post was about a gay pride parade, (and ignored it was in an MMO), and the references to the military that were also found on the Skippy’s List website, and said, “Hey, we have an advertiser with a service you might be interested in!”.

Although I was not personally interested in this service, I am an open minded individual. So, if any of you guys out there meets the man of their dreams because you saw this ad in my post, I would love to hear about it and maybe even be invited to the wedding.

I also considered this ad to be a sign from the universe that I need to post the following bit that I do in my regular stand-up routine.

This was a bit that Skippy was going to post a month or so back, but he knows that the cardinal sin of comedy is stealing someones jokes. He was going to ask me if he could post it. At the time, he was already considering getting guest writers, so, this is the bit that made him approach me about writing here. So here it is.

The bit is about a subject that has been bugging me, basically, how homophobic this country has gotten in the last several years. It seems everyone is worried about gay marriage or they are afraid that some homosexual is going to recruit them.

Seriously? Did anyone ever receive a call after high school from a gay recruiter?

Just me?

Fine, let me tell you what happened. The guy called me up and explained the benefits of homosexuality to me.

I told him that, as a heterosexual, I don’t want to make a full-time commitment to homosexuality. So he talked me into joining the reserves.

All I had to do was be gay for one weekend a month and two weeks out of the year, and I really needed the college money.

It was a sweet deal until they decided to “activate my unit”.

I really don’t talk about what happened much, but I will say this…I saw a lot of good men go down.

Fair warning, this is gonna be geeky.

Seriously, there is a big time world class nerdening happening below. You have been warned.

A few weeks ago me and some friends were discussing settings for MMOs. While weighing the pros and cons of science fiction vs fantasy vs other more unusual settings I was struck by a bolt of inspiration.

Gamma World.

If you are unfamiliar with this property (Likely because you dated in high school, or are under 30) here is a quick primer, courtesy of Io9.

Basically you have the perfect formula for an online game.

First of all, you have a back story that can be explained in seconds.

“WW3 destroyed the entire world. The planet is now a wasteland were survivors and mutants battle over the crumbled remains of civilization.” Done. Now everything the players do will make sense.

Next up, players like to customize their avatars. Many free-MMOs make their profit off of this fact. Most players in Gamma World are mutants. This is an excuse for the kind of player customization that is seen in City of Heroes. Want to play a bunny with a sniper rifle? Done. A turtle with a penchant for oriental weaponry? Not a problem. An offshoot of a flying squirrel that has the ability to generate electrical energy? Why the heck not. Pretty much anything the a player can come up with fits into the game.

All you need to do is come up with a balancing mechanism for the player that, for some reason, choose to make a regular human. Possibly by giving them better technology.

Which brings us to tech. If you are playing in a post-apocalyptic world, where high tech used to be common, you have pretty much the everything that you can think of available. Low level characters would start with primitive weapons, like hatchets, crossbows, and machetes. As they level up they could acquire ceramic body armor, automatic weapons, and explosives. High level players could get science fiction devices such as laser rifles, and force fields. Pretty much everything is fair game.

Low level player could have horses, or even some sort of mutant riding animals. As the players advanced they could get better pet/mounts or trade them in for a dirt bikes, a dune buggy, or even the last of the V-8 interceptors. You could even allow the players to strip the vehicles of defeated enemies for parts to tweak their own rides.

And thanks to the whole “psionics” angle you don’t even have to give up spellcasters, you just have to rename it. Heck if you start the players off privative enough, you don’t even have to rename it. After all one man’s pyrokinetic mutant is another’s fire-spec mage.

I really think this could be developed into something great. Now all I need is an investor with 5 million laying around, my own game development studio, and my trusty razor boomerang and I’m set.

Any of my gaming readers have any comments on this idea? (The game idea, not the ‘Skippy ruins amok with a razor-rang part)

One of those things that just kind of happens when you put something online is that when someone else likes it, they will usually not think anything of taking it, and then putting it on their own site. Or in their message boards. Or all over Live Journal. Or in their (shudder) fanfic.

Now I prefer that people come here to look at my material, for a few reasons. First, it avoids problems like the one I had with the journalist last year, who didn’t believe that I really wrote it. Also because I have advertising on here and I sell things. By putting more eyes on the site, I help bring in the small bucks that I do, which in turn help me keep the site up. And so, every once in a while I have to send out an email asking that people not copy my stuff on their site.

I try not to be an ass over it and people are generally pretty decent about abiding by my wishes. With the possible exception of some charter member of the tin-foil yarmulke club who said, “I guess Skippy has become a real asshole ever since the Army clipped his wings”. So last week it got brought to my attention that someone had a similar list of things that they couldn’t do. This young lady, Katie, had a similar list up on her site.

And when I say, similar, I mean some of it looked cut and pasted from mine. She then went on to say how she and her friends wrote her list while she was in basic, and if any items on her list are similar to hers, well they originated with her list.

Needless to say, I enter “not amused” mode. But before getting into too much of a fuss over it, I decided to write her to check to see if there was some sort of misunderstanding. And it turns out that there was.

It turns out that Katie went to basic a few months after I got out. And at that time she had never heard of my website. While she was in boot she and her friends started their own list. And some of her friends quoted my material. Katie believed that they had made it up. Years later, she came across my list. She had assumed that at some point I had met the people she went to basic with and incorporated their material into my list. When I pointed out that around half of the list took place while she was in high school, she immediately apologized, and updated her blog so that there wouldn’t be any misunderstanding. She then went on to ask if I was going to keep reading her blog. She said she hopes so, because then two celebrities will be reading it. Skippy, and Wil Weaton.

Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

See, many people do read my website. And I have made jokes about being a c-list Internet celebrity. But this comparison? It’s either really awesome for me, or really, really sad for Wil.

Probably a little of both.

I was discussing this with David Rodriguez the other day. He pointed out that if people were comparing us, maybe that means that my site is getting a serious increase in circulation and now people are starting to know me. I pointed out that Wil used to actually be on television, and actually gets paid to go to conventions. Hell, he probably gets Trek groupies flinging themselves at him all the time. (”Take me Ensign Crusher! Warp engines to sexy! Engage!”) Dave pointed out that I occasionally get hit on by female fans, via email. To which I responded, “Sure I may get bitches, but I don’t get Wil Wheaton bitches.”

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

Seriously, I have no idea in what context this originated. I am just amused, and a little disturbed.

Several years ago, I started playing my first MMORPG. I was unemployed, living alone, and had no girlfriend, and thought I would find a game to occupy my time. I got a copy of Ultima Online. For the time it was an amazing game, and I enjoyed the interaction with thousands of other dorks from around the US and the world.

But, like any other MMO out there, there comes a point where you are not always out grinding for XP, you just socialize or find weird ways to have fun. In Ultima Online, when you just sat around and talked to other players, the activity was called “bank sitting” as the bank was where all players came and went at one point or another. It was the place to virtual people watch. You could see all sorts of interesting things at the bank. City guards killing a thief, people buying and selling crafted items, people arguing about who is more uber, … the usual.

I’m not sure what possessed me this one night, but I wanted to do something really interesting and have fun. I had a large audience and plenty of spare time.

I thought it would be funny to march around the bank and protest for gay rights.

I’m not gay. I’m not anti-gay. I’m just a straight guy who thought, “How funny will this be to have a gay pride parade in a medieval/fantasy game?”

So, I rolled a new character, “Gay Blade” and dressed him in the foofiest, pink shirt the game offered, along with a nice Van Dyke for the facial hair and an awesome receding hairline. He looked like half the gay men I have known in my life already. Finally if there was any question about his sexuality, I made him a fencer. Let’s face it fencing is the gayest form of swordplay, so he had to be a fencer.

Since I didn’t really have any friends in the game, and certainly not any I was going to convince to take part in a gay pride parade, I decided to get a horse and name it Gay Pride. The cool thing about having a pet, like a horse was that they would follow you where ever you went and their name showed up on screen as well as your name.

So, when I started, people at the bank saw a guy dressed in pink named Gay Blade, followed by a horse named Gay Pride. We walked in a circle around the bank, while Gay Blade yelled, “We’re here! We’re queer! Get used to it!”

Plenty of people thought it was funny.

“We’re here! We’re queer! Get used to it!”

A few just wanted me to shut up.

“We’re here! We’re queer! Get used to it!”

I even had one guy come up to me and tell me that he was gay and that I was his new hero.

But then I ran into intolerance and bigotry.

There were a couple of guys that were none too happy with me expressing my virtual homosexuality to the world. They tried to give me crap and called me names. Basically they were not thrilled that my horse and I were here or queer and they certainly were not going to get used to it anytime soon.

Finally one of them told me to go to the cemetery just outside of town.

The cemetery was where people often went to duel, as it was outside of town and fighting in the town limits was illegal and the guards would come and kill you. I knew he wanted to fight me. I knew he would beat the crap out of me as my character was about thirty minutes old and had no “skillz” to speak of. But I went anyway because I had a plan that I knew would be funny.

We get to the graveyard, and this guy almost immediately starts to attack me. As he does, I begin to yell, “HATE CRIME! HATE CRIME!”

He kills me and starts to ride back to town, after taking my belongings, including the foofy pink shirt, which just adds to the theory that most homophobes are actually a bit gay themselves.

I’m left standing there as a ghost. But I noticed that my faithful horse, Gay Pride was still alive and following me. That’s when I realize that since I am a ghost I can have my horse follow this guy where ever he goes. It drove him nuts to have this horse just stuck to him in town where everyone can see. No matter where he went, there was Gay Pride following him.

You should have seen him run in circles trying to shake us. I think he was afraid he might “catch the gay” from a virtual queer ghost and his virtual horse.

I made the mistake of following him to the graveyard again, where he killed my horse. So I had no choice but to resurrect and come back. As soon as he saw me, he attacked me. Again I screamed “HATE CRIME! HATE CRIME!” Dead.

Resurrect.

“HATE CRIME! HATE CRIME!” Dead.

Resurrect.

We did this over and over, and I may have even questioned his sexuality based on the intensity of his reaction to me and my horse. He finally ran off or logged out or something. I guess gay bashing becomes tiring when your victim keeps resurrecting and spreading gayness all around you.

It was one of the most fun times I have ever had in any MMO. I would like to think I struck a blow for tolerance that night, but I think all I accomplished was cracking myself up and annoying some homophobic jackass. If that isn’t fun, I don’t know what is.