Oh . . . Mass Effect 3 . . . how I love and hate you . . .

Never Pre-order from Kmart or for an EA/Bioware game AGAIN!

***UPDATE*** A heaven-sent friend who won't be able to get his copy from Gamestop this week is letting me get his pre-order. He figures (rightly so) that Gamestop won't honor his pre-order for more than a day and will give it to someone else, so it might as well be me, his friend who got screwed by Kmart. I owe you one man! BIG TIME!!!
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This past February 7th I managed to pre-order a copy of Mass Effect 3 N7 Collector's Edition at Kmart.com. The process was easy, straightforward and trustworthy . . . or so I thought.

I decided to check my order status today, since the game was to ship out tomorrow, when to my surprise, I find this:

Not only did the ethically challenged moribund megacorp cancel my pre-order, it did so on February 28, mere days before the game comes out and thus leaving me with no possible way of getting the Collector's Edition.

Could it get any worse? Well, yes it could, thank you for asking: the bastards DID NOT even send me an e-mail to inform me that my pre-order had been cancelled. I only found out because I decided to check its status a few hours ago. Had I not done that, I would have been sitting on my porch like a fucking douchebag waiting for the mailman until 7:00 p.m. before crying myself to sleep really pissed when I found out what happened.

In any case, as a gamer, I am rightfully angry at this situation. As an attorney, I'm fucking pissed now!!!

Gibbs, our General from "Cat's Eye"

17 years ago, when I was barely 13, and my baby sister was only 5, Gibbs the cat came to protect us from lizards and cockroaches, much like General from Stephen King's "Cat's Eye" came to protect a 10-year-old Drew Barrymore from a nasty looking evil troll, whose physical appearance would still haunt me today if not for the fact that I knew Gibbs would always be there for my sister and I.


Gibbs appeared to be a mean cat, seeing as he would bite anyone just for fun and then look at them with beady, shifty eyes, as if saying, "what you gon' do about it?", right before proceeding to lick his nut-sack while sitting lazily in the couch. He wasn't mean though, he was simply playful yet full of conviction, and he was training for the day when the troll would come.

Linsanity and its Effects on Lintellectual Stereotypes

I am really enjoying the Linsanity (all Jeremy Lin all the time), but am also deeply troubled by the way he is portrayed in most media articles: as a nerd, and as the smartest player on the court at all times.

Not only do I believe that perception to be a classic example of the continued use and abuse of asian stereotypes, but I also think it unwittingly belittles the other 9 players on the court, many of them from Stanford, UCLA, Washington, Georgetown and other very fine institutions of higher education, and yes, many of them, African Americans and non-americans …

Is Jeremy Lin smarter than Dikembe Mutombo (African)? Dikembe has two degrees from Georgetown, one in linguistics and the other in diplomacy, speaks 9 languages, and has multiple honorary doctorates … and yet, he was never called the smartest player on the court.

Pau Gasol (Spanish) went to medical school in Barcelona before joining the NBA; the Collins (african americans) and the Lopez (hispanic descent) twins graduated from Stanford; Shane Battier (half african american) had a 3.8 GPA at Duke and was an Academic All-American twice.

I am not trying to stir up anything; I am simply stating the obvious. American media, and especially sports media, has a long way to go regarding stereotypes in sports. At the risk of sounding like I agree with Floyd Mayweather’s take, the fact remains that race plays a large part in Jeremy Lin’s meteoric rise. Not in regards to his physical abilities, like Floyd thought, but rather his intellectual ones …