Have You Considered Screaming?

So I’ve been thinking. I’ve been thinking for a while, and I know that my life is entering a new chapter, as are the lives of so many other people, and I’m afraid of that. I’m not too proud to say that, I am afraid, and I only have an okay idea of what my next step is. That’s enough to frighten anyone, I think, and I’m undeniably stressed about it. The good thing is that I am working to be open to new opportunities, and I am looking for steps to take to put myself in the best position for me.

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This is not me, but I am happy that this man has found peace in his screaming as well. I would like to perhaps speak with him one day.

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So I Watched the MLS All Star Game

Alright, this is the last time that I will post about sports until the far-too-long KU Football preview that I have already started writing, which will come out presumably before the season starts.

The Major League Soccer All Star Game was about as entertaining as I expected it to be. This was a fun-enough game of soccer played between two teams that, at a glance, did not really care to be there. Neither team played badly, but this wasn’t a great display of soccer. That’s to be expected by two teams very clearly in an exhibition. The trouble that plagued this game was actually different from the trouble that plagues most other major all star games, because there was no shortage of offense at Soldier Field on Wednesday, just a shortage of scoring.

mls asg 2017

 

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Please Save the MLS All-Star Game

Apparently, with two posts in two days, I’ve lain the seeds for a soccer week here on joebush.net, but I’ve only got like four soccer topics in me before I crytype out a 3000 word rant about how we, as a country, should appreciate Jozy Altidore more.

I watched the MLS All-Star Game last year on a YouTube stream, and I do not remember a single thing about it other than the fact that I would’ve bought one of those jerseys if I could’ve put Ignacio Piatti’s name and number on the back (I couldn’t). The same goes for this year, except it’d be Dax McCarty’s name, because as an everyman with a bad haircut, I identify with him.

I’ve gone down this year’s roster, and I don’t agree with a lot of the guys picked. Obviously, I have a bias towards my preferred club in Kansas City, but they’ve been very good this year, and the guy that we got in was not the guy I would’ve picked for the honor were I given the decision. (and as someone with the influence that I have, I should’ve been given the decision).

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And, yes, I printed out and annotated a Wikipedia article. I did this because I am eighty years old.

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I went to a Soccer Match on Saturday

July 29th marked my third Sporting Kansas City match of the year. I’m undefeated so far, having seen one draw and two wins (granted, Sporting themselves are undefeated at home regardless of my presence). I’d love to see more matches in person, but it’s a long drive from Lawrence and I don’t get to make it that often, and tickets aren’t cheap. Every time that I go down that way has a purpose. I’ve set foot in either side of Kansas City only about five times this year, and three of them were for Sporting matches.


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Which Wish-Granting Being should Skee-Lo Consider?

One thing that I always forget about Skee-Lo’s 1995 summer smash I Wish is that it actually has a framing narrative, not unlike Wuthering Heights or Rebecca. At the beginning of his song, Skee-Lo calls a radio station for their “Wish Hotline”, during which, I guess that people just sort of call in and vent to a drive-time radio DJ about their problems. We now have a whole group of replacement apparatuses for yelling about my issues, like Tumblr, or Facebook, or Kansas Senator Jerry Moran’s office phone, and the wish-hearing radio program is now obsolete.

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The Compendium of All of Joe’s Other Bad Opinions

This week has come to a merciful end, and I am now about to spout potentially the dumbest things that I think, period. This is going to be like a Jerry Seinfeld routine, except in text, done in a list format, without a charming slap bass riff, and none of you – and I mean none of you – will know what the deal is with whatever I’m about to put down here. I don’t even know yet

American money should take the initiative that Canada and the UK took and make the switch to colorful, waterproof money

Well… mostly just Canada actually took that initiative, but my point stands, compare this:

bill

Also, it’s flying in front of a virtual sky in this image that I stole from a real news source’s website

to this:

ol george

Now, I love ol’ Georgie, and the dollar bill is iconic, but why do they all have to be green? Why can’t they be cool and plasticky and waterproof and have the little clear bit that the Canadian bills have? I don’t know much about counterfeiting stuff, but it’d probably be harder to fake a Canadian dollar than an American dollar. Even barring that, it just looks so cool, and you know, looking down at your wallet, immediately which bill is which depending upon the color. In the United States, you’ve gotta fan the money out and figure out what’s what. This isn’t that much of a hassle, but still, the Canadian money looks cool, feels cool, and it’s very, very slightly more convenient! All three of those reasons should justify the complete overhaul of our paper money system, in my opinion. Continue reading

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The Compendium of Joe’s Bad Opinions on Film

NOTE: Film, in this case, can mean anything that was ever put on a video camera. This can mean anything from the biggest budget Hollywood blockbuster to the Youtube video filmed on a cell phone camera of the guy imitating sound effects from Oblivion. This is a cop-out, as I don’t have that many opinions on movies, or television, or whatever we call the stuff under television, but I feel like I can piece all of them together and make something out of it. Not something good, per se, but something, nonetheless.

The Simpsons Season 9 is Still Very Good

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This is my copy of the DVDs, which I did buy myself

I know there’s a general rule surrounding The Simpsons that the viewer should really stop watching the series after a certain point. It’s one of the only shows with a rule like that, where you’re only supposed to enjoy a certain amount of it and then accept that the rest of it just isn’t good at all. I have generally followed this rule, partially out of listening to other people who told me to do this, and partially because my dad’s DVDs, which I have effectively burgled from him over the course of like five years and he hasn’t said anything yet so I’m not sure if he ever noticed, stopped at the seventh season or so. Continue reading

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The Compendium of Joe’s Bad Opinions on Video Games

This site actually started out as a video game-centric haven for my opinions on all sorts of interactive entertainments. I used to guarantee myself one post per week where I’d describe, in detail, every game that I played that week. I eventually had to stop this for two reasons:

  1. It became so difficult to say something new about a game after weeks and weeks of still playing it. Sometimes, things don’t get any better, and things don’t get any worse, and sometimes, I don’t have enough to say in order to convey a serious opinion, and those filler statements often took up more space than necessary compared to the actually insightful commentary that I had on others.
  2. I played NBA 2K15 to an embarrassing extent

The Monday Update eventually split into several different spheres – More targeted video game-related written posts kept being put on the site (though I don’t do that nearly enough), the sort of yearbook/weekly play through recounts became the sort of pseudo let’s-play stuff I put on my main YouTube channel, and the actual criticism evolved into whatever But on Batteries is now.

But I don’t write about video games that often anymore, but that doesn’t mean that I have stopped thinking about them, and that certainly doesn’t mean that the things that I think about them have become correct. So let’s start with a softball that everyone who knows me will see coming:

The Switch won’t be worth it until Animal Crossing is announced

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Nintendo has done the impossible task of creating a console that could be completely perfect for Animal Crossing. If you told me that the Switch was created for an Animal Crossing game the same way that the N64 controller was made for Super Mario 64, I would believe you, and then I would ask why they haven’t made an Animal Crossing game for the Switch yet. Continue reading

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The Compendium of Joe’s Bad Opinions on Sports

Bad Opinions Week continues…

It is time for the Sports Opinions. I’ve always supported the oeuvre of Sports Opinions as a concept, because they’re relatively quantifiable but also completely quantitative in argument, so there will almost never be a correct answer to anything that anyone says about their Sports Opinions. However, I am entirely certain that mine are quite wrong.

The 2017 Gold Cup will be some weird shit

Canada

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The Compendium of Joe’s Bad Opinions on Music

My daughters and sons – Welcome to Bad Opinion Week.

I think about a lot of things a lot. Probably all of the time, to be honest. I can’t think of a time when I wasn’t thinking about something.
Now, despite all of the time that I spend thinking about things, I know just about nothing about anything. In fact, here’s a list of things I think I know a lot about:
Early ‘90s British Old-Skool Rave Music
Olathe, Kansas
The Sega 32X Library
Where the Carl’s Jr/Hardee’s line is generally drawn
Medal winners at the 2002 Summer X Games
The lyrics to “Possibly Maybe” by Bjork
Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book that I read one time, and in that book, he said you had to spend like a million hours doing something to consider yourself an expert in the subject. I don’t have like a million hours, as I’m a busy man who writes jokes. Most of these conclusions are drawn after like twelve minutes of solid thought and a good, thorough scan of a wikipedia article, but they will still be presented here, as there is no editor or middle-man or woman between whom I need to pass my writing before it is published.
Each weekday in this here week in mid-July will have one post dedicated to a subject upon which I have very wrong opinions. The subjects are these:
MONDAY – MUSIC
TUESDAY – SPORT
WEDNESDAY – VIDEO GAME
THURSDAY – FILM, THINGS FILMED
FRIDAY – LIFE, WHATNOT
Today is dedicated to music. I consider my musical criticism ability to be the lowest of any of my criticism abilities. Were this a game of The Sims, and my musical criticism skill level were to be applied to my cooking skill, my house would burn down in minutes and I’d scream unintelligibly while waving one hand in the air to an uncaring god. But that’s why I’ve quarantined this sort of thing to this week. You, the reader, are only going to have to read about this once, and never again. So let’s start with an easy one that only I care about:

Cathy Dennis should have been more popular as a solo artist

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