I’ve been collecting crappy photographs for a few weeks, and I’ve just culled a few from the steaming heap of photo crap for your viewing pleasure.

There’s also a photo in here that I didn’t take. To be honest, it isn’t even a photo - it’s actually an ad. I’m including it because it’s… well, it’s a unique kind of ad.

I hope that you appreciate what I’ve found with my artistic eye.

Ninja Assault

When I was growing up, video game arcades were very important. They were where you went when you wanted to try out the latest hardware and spread your communicable diseases to other like-minded people. Arcade games were always superior to anything you could purchase for your home (unless you were like Ricky Schroder on Silver Spoons and had a rich but estranged father who bought you your own arcade games, but you weren’t, and your family could barely afford frozen fish sticks, to say nothing about buying you the full-size Pac-Man cabinet you asked for VERY NICELY at Christmas time, but oh, noooooo, your family was more interested in feeding and clothing you than in getting you an awesome video game, and, no, I’m not bitter, god damn it, because I’d much rather have Gorton’s god damned frozen god damned fish sticks any day than the world’s awesomest video game and I HATE MY LIFE CRAP CRAP CRAP CRAP CRAP).

Nowadays, it’s a completely different affair. If you want to play games that take advantage of the latest technology, you sit down at your desk and fire up your $4,000.00 liquid-cooled gaming system to enjoy the three games that currently take advantage of your bleeding edge graphics card, and dream about the three games coming out next week that will make it obsolete. On the bright side, the only communicable diseases you’re going to catch are the ones you give to yourself (and, given the hygiene of your average hardcore PC gamer, it isn’t doubtful that this will happen). This takes away many of the social aspects of going to an arcade, including the time honored human tradition of passing invasive microbes to each other while talking smack about how much better Blanka is than Ryu (and losing the argument, by the way, since Blanka sucked).

This huge shift in video game culture is something I encounter on a regular basis because of the MSDN Events I do. Most of our events are held at movie theaters, and movie theaters seem to be one of the last bastions of arcade games left in the world. I usually spend about eight to nine hours at a theater on presentation days, with about four of those hours spent behind the registration desk, usually right across from the arcade games.

One thing I can tell you is this: nobody plays ‘em. Except really, really young kids who don’t know any better. Sometimes parents push their kids into playing them, presumably because the fifty cents spent on the game is a cheaper way to expose children to disease at an early age than paying for vaccinations. Most of the time, though, kids walk right past the games in search of more entertaining distractions, and usually wind up playing “Let’s clean the movie theater ourselves by picking stray pieces of popcorn off the ground and then eating them and then probably throwing up on the carpet when we get home later with food poisoning while our parents give us that ‘How did you get so many hairballs caught in your throat during one outing to the movie theater?’ look.”

During my last event, up in Redmond, Washington, I sat and stared for several hours at a game called “Ninja Assault.” I didn’t get to see a whole lot on account of its being out of order, but something about the cabinet itself told quite a story.

Maybe it was the guns.

If you look closely, there’s a red gun on the left and a blue gun on the right - they’re holstered

I might be behind the times, but when I used to play ninja themed video games, they were usually a little more balanced than this. There were a couple possible scenarios:

1) You played the ninja, and your job was to kill other ninjas using things like throwing stars and roundhouse kicks and fireballs and spikes and magic spells and potions and aerodynamic pointy orcs and angry cats and broken hypodermic needles and other similar things

2) You played some piece of poor white trash in the wrong part of town where there’s been a recent ninja invasion, and you beat off the ninjas using things like chains, cars, fists, Michelob, and your machismo

It was kind of sporting. The ninjas had swords, the white trash had broken beer bottles, and they had their honor to defend (well, except for the white trash – the white trash just got mad because all those ninjas hopping around on their trailer rooftops interfered with TV reception and pro wrestling didn’t come in as well – if honor were several thousand dollars of credit card debt for the projection TV that takes up half of your trailer, then these hicks would have it in spades, but they didn’t because honor just happens to be something else entirely).

It looks like this game is totally different. Like I said, I didn’t get a chance to see the game in operation, but I can only imagine that the meat of the game is lining up a ninja in your sites and then blowing his head off with your pistol. Then, once you’ve done that, you blow the head off another ninja. What the hell kind of a game is that?

The “out of order” sign was good, too:

“Sorry for the inconvenience.”

The Merriam-Webster dictionary describes “inconvenience” thusly:

not convenient especially in giving trouble or annoyance

Given the scene at the cinema that day, I’m not sure that “inconvenience” is really an issue:

Where's the yellow police tape when you need it?

This photo shows the throngs of angry “Ninja Assault” fans who felt that they had been given “trouble or annoyance” by the “inconvenience.”

It’s a good thing that sign was there to explain what was going on to save the theater manager the hassle of having to answer the phone which would have been, no doubt, ringing off the hook with one call after another complaining about the inactive vector for disease.

The Bathroom Girl

At various times throughout any given day, I have to visit the restroom. My reasons for this are personal, and I don’t want to discuss them here, but let’s just say they have something to do with urine.

I was a little disturbed when I walked into the restroom at this theater and commenced my personal business - looking up, I saw this poster directly over the urinal:

Peek-a-boo!

Maybe I’m a bit of a prude, but I found that my urinatorational performance faltered a little when I found myself looking eye-to-eye with what appeared to be a cute college girl in her jammies peering out at me from behind a book. This just doesn’t belong in the men’s room above the facilities. What you usually find above the urinals in the men’s room is a section of the sporting pages from today’s paper, covered in large images of men in very tight spandex trousers tackling each other to grab a ball or something. Sometimes, if the ball is grabbed well and deposited in the appropriate hole or goal or whatever, then some lucky bastard gets a photo of the spandexed men smacking each other on the ass to say, “Hey – good job handling that ball like a pro! Here – let me slap you on the ass in front of millions of people to show my gratitude!” For some reason – probably a primal instinct to mark one’s territory – this makes urination very easy. The girl just makes you nervous.

The poster brought an interesting question to mind, though: Why are they only showing half of her face?

There are models out there who are hand models, leg models, chest models, arm models, neck models, ankle models, and hair models. Are there also “top of the face” and “bottom of the face” models? I mean, people who are beautiful from the nose up, but like the elephant man from the upper lip down to the chin?

She might not even have a mouth and that’s why she likes reading so much.

Makes you wonder.

The Creepy Ad

I found this sucker online today:

In addition to being a prude, I might also be hypersensitive to certain things in life, like ads which try to get you to purchase a product based on the guilt you should feel when leaving loved ones behind at the time of your death.

Think about that slogan – “If you die… Love continues.” It’s like saying, “You thought death was going to be your escape from this world of torment and hell, but it’s only the beginning. You’re almost certainly going to leave behind a young girl who’s going to sit on the steps and cry and cry and cry and cry about your death, which you probably did on purpose just to teach her a lesson… unless you leave her $500,000.00 when you go, which is something we just happen to be able to help you with. Wouldn’t she look sporting driving away from your funeral in a new Porsche? Don’t be an asshole. Leave some dough for your next of kin, you selfish, dying bastard.”

Anyway, that’s all. I’m going to go cry now.