This was just part of my joy today. All 14,000+ spammy blog comments have been purged and I’ve enlisted the help of Akismet & ReCaptcha to help from here on out. I know it’s a pain in the ass if you want to chime in, but so is delving through the myriad of shit that’s ended up on here.

I’m likely to drop in Disqus in the coming weeks as soon as I upgrade WordPress to the latest build and throw a new theme on.

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I’m really looking forward to these, and they’re probably not going to be all that plentiful, or cheap. The other bummer is some of the exclusivity clauses make Wal-Mart the sole providers for several of the action figures, along with “specialty stores” which pretty much means big gaming conglomerates like GameStop and EB Games. For some reason they’re also not coming out until 2008. God only knows why it takes that long to mold that much plastic.

You can find more shots of the figures at Spawn.com’s Halo 3 page.

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I am a big fan of this summerboard theme called PlainJane. It’s so simple and beautiful. It may be cutting my battery life down by like an hour a day, but it’s totally worth it just for its contrastacular style.

If you have an iPhone and haven’t hacked it yet you’re totally missing out. It’s a ton of fun to play with, at least until the SDK comes out in February.

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Photos by Donald Bell.

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Yesterday was an interesting day. I helped my buddy Rob move from one end of town to the other, and after a long, hard day of nearly losing fingers, pulling muscles, and finding out I’m really out of shape, I figured it was time to reward myself with a snack while re-fueling the U-HAUL. Amidst the wonderland of overpriced snacks that make up the gas station convenience store, lies a foul, stalwart of a treat known as Doritos’ marketing trick de jour…

It’s called X-13D, and is supposedly a “flavor experiment.” I’ll kill the suspense right now, it’s supposed to taste like a cheeseburger. For lack of a better way to describe the new flavor, it’s absolutely disgusting. What might be the worst part (besides the fact you can’t get your money back without spending 15 minutes on the phone with customer service–hardly worth the $.99), is the flavor, which in my opinion is not something I want in a tortilla chip snack. What makes a cheeseburger, or any burger for that matter, delicious is its texture and balance of flavors. The soft bun, the crisp lettuce and pickles, mixed in with drippy sauces and gooey cheese. Not to mention the meat, which if you’ve spent more than $4 should taste like humankind’s glorious victory over agriculture (and vegetarians).

None of these things are in X-13D, except the god awful aftertaste you get in your mouth a) from eating Doritos, and b) a cheeseburger. It’s somewhere between the artificial flavor they’ve put in there for pickles, and the other for mayo. Either way it’s nasty and sticks with you for at least an hour. I’d recommend steering away from these things at all costs.

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The only downside I’ve discovered thus far is that I think every beverage I’m drinking is Kool-Aid–an unfortunate side effect of the coloring I suppose. That and I only have one of them.

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Junkmail. It’s one of the many wonders of the modern age. If there’s one thing I hate more than spam, it’s junk mail. Rewind about a year and a half ago. I had just purchased www.TheBigFootChallenge.com from GoDaddy under the name of “JL productions,” with my home address and mobile phone number. I didn’t feel like spending the extra $8 for WHOIS anonymity because I thought “hey, if somebody needs to contact me, it’s probably important.”

In less than 24 hours, I began getting phone calls about every 2 hours or so from various companies offering me services from hosting to traffic monitoring. You name it, I got a call about it. I quickly called up GoDaddy, explained the situation and was met with a “Yeah, this happens all the time. Sorry about that” from the agent. 15 minutes and $8 later, I was completely anonymous again…to everyone except Chase who had apparently gotten a hold of it rather quickly.

Since then about three times a week I get a credit card offer from Chase that’s addressed to JL Productions. It’s the same exact offer, and they just keep sending it to me. I can only imagine how much it’s cost them just in postage JUST to send it to me. Needless to say, I hate having to shred these things. They come in this envelope that’s nearly impossible to tear open, and just thick enough so you can’t just pop it in the shredder. When you do open it, sometimes they’ll come with a fake credit card, which makes me have to pull it apart from the paper just to shred separately.

I began collecting these things in a big pile for mass shredding about two months ago. Today I was cleaning my apartment, so I thought I’d take the liberty of having a shred fest. What you see below is made up entirely of Chase credit card offers.

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