URL : http://www.flashgame-girl.com/Action/GrossOut-Battle-for-Sludge-Valley.html

Game description :

Fight against other opponents in this turn based styled fighting game. Can you beat them all?

Game controls :

Use Mouse to interact.

A mad scientist does what he shouldn’t in this grossout classic.

Most sizeable social movements utilize technology in the form of webpages and forums, which aren’t necessarily “new” technology, but they are more than what has been available to activists in the past.  Almost every activist-y, political online community based around a social movement that I’ve been a part of has utilized forums to allow members to communicate.  I thought I would highlight a more negative (at least in my mind, feel free to disagree if you’d like) social movement that has apparently achieved most of their success and numbers by utilizing the web and its many features (specifically forums and message boards) for many years in order to reach out and spread their cause: the White Power movement.

These groups came up in my Homeland Security class two weeks ago while talking about domestic terrorism.  Apparently a large amount of people in this movement are what many would call “armchair activists”, and pose no real physical threat to anyone.  However, due to the multitude of topics and posts on their forums, they often attract young, impressionable people to their websites.  On these websites are reams of propaganda articles centered around racist ideology, and forum posts that relate the ideas in these articles to everyday life.

When doing some digging on the topic, I found one website (whose name I will not give and link I will not post here, because I don’t think they deserve to gain any more traffic or ad revenue) with a massive forum section, with multiple smaller message boards.  Sections included politics, everyday life, regional discussions, tactics, and special interest topics.  Among one of the special interest boards was a board specifically for people under the age of 18 who wished to discuss racist ideology in this setting.  This helps young people find this board in search engines, and thus, exposes them to these ideas and the movement at a young age and helps the movement gain new members.

Me performing one of my old comic odes, “Uncle Disgusting”. Be warned: it is as tasteless and gross as I could make it, so don’t view if you’re offended by that sort of thing. Apologies for the poor audio quality – dunno what’s up with my webcam mic, but I’ll sort it out as soon as I can and post a higher-quality version.

Incidentally, the poem is licensed under a Creative Commons non-commercial/attribution/sharealike licence. If anyone wants to do something funky like animate/illustrate it, let me know and I’ll make you a high-quality mp3 of the audio to work with.

Next up, I’ll be posting a more recent (and better) ode of mine, “Donna McGonagall” – a dark, grotesque, comic fable on the perils of plastic surgery (again CC-licensed).

So, Finslippy was talking about stinky Gingko fruits, the other day, and I was thinking, wow, I’m glad we don’t have Gingko trees here in Kansas City, because wow, that would suck to ride my bike through a pile of dead leaves and rotten puke-fruit and then have that shit stuck in my tires.

Ahem.

So, my route home takes me under a couple of railway bridges, both of which are dank and smelly places often redolent of pee and rotting garbage. I just hold my breath and pedal fast. Last Friday night, coming home from the First Friday Art Crawl, I passed through the second bridge and smelt something just plain horrible, and thought that some Friday-night reveler had tossed his cookies somewhere just outside of the pedestrian tunnel of the bridge.

Then on Monday, I rode beneath the bridge, and smelled that horrible stench again. Good grief, that’s some barf with some staying power.

Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, I pass through the same place, every night, thinking “bleargh, ohmygodeeeeewww!“

On Thursday I read Finslippy.

On Friday, I notice that the yellow leaves strewn all around the street on Van Brunt, just North of the railway bridge are fan-shaped.

On Friday that little lightbulb above my head switched on. Gingko. Gingko! Stink-o! No freakin’ wonder. Also, Finslippy wasn’t exaggerating. Holy whew, those are some stinkin’-assed fruits. Also–I was riding my mountain bike. With the semi-slicks. Which were now packed full of stink-fruit residue. An emergency session with a bottle of Simple Green and the garden hose rendered my bike fit to bring inside.

Tonight, I’m taking a different route home.

Get home, take off your helmet, go into the bathroom and discover not one, not two, but three dead, dried-sweat-encrusted gnats* lodged in your eyebrows.**

I’m having a hard time deciding what is worse, the fact that there were gnats stuck in my eyebrows, or the fact that my eyebrows can foster so many gnats.

*I rode through a gnat swarm on Cliff Drive on my way home tonight. I didn’t wreck in that spot where I wrecked the week before last–I knew to slow down and hit it straight on. I did fishtail a little bit, however. Clay mud–SUCKS.

**I also had gnats stuck in my hair and sweat-glued to my arms and neck. Yuck, double yuck, and triple yuck. Also, ew.