BYOND Life

Down here in the wang state, we have a new law that began this morning. The law is commonly called the 'Bring Your Guns to Work' law by its detractors. Thats pretty descriptive so you get the basic idea. For those of you thicker than the fog of Silent Hill, and to expand, I'll explain.

The law gives people in Florida, with concealed carry permits, to keep a gun in their locked car at their workplace.

Now, I'm for it on second amendment grounds. But I'm against it because it forces businesses to allow it. That'd be yet another government regulation on privately owned businesses. It assumes control over how a business is run, but it affirms someones right to protect themselves.

This issue is making my skull throb.

As you can likely guess, there is more than a little uproar about it. But they're all pissed off because they hate guns in the first place, so they are against it for the wrong reasons. I hate guns too, but thats because I like archery.

The argument they use is: 'It could send the wrong message to disgruntled employees.' Oh, it could? I always thought that you had to prove your mental capacity to get a concealed carry permit, showing that you aren't going to walk around pretending to be Billy the Kid.

Now, back to my moral dilemma. A business is like a home, the owner sets the rules. If one of my friends tells me they don't want me bringing a gun on their property, I wouldn't. So, I guess the best way for this law to work would be if it was rewritten to allow businesses to choose whether or not to allow guns onto the property. But in that case the law might as well be thrown out. If someone wants to keep their gun in their car, they can park somewhere else.

Alright, so I guess I'm against it for the sake of keeping the government out of telliong people how to run their businesses. Hope you enjoyed taking this little trip with me.

(Guns will always be in the hands of criminals, so don't bother arguing about gun laws. Criminals don't follow laws, thats why they are criminals. Besides, this is about law abiding citizens. Besides, the second amendment is mostly there so we can revolt if the government does... well what it is doing now... well damn, did I miss the revolution?)

Today is my six year anniversary on BYOND. So, how better to celebrate than by showing a badly conceptualised comic from BYOND Life?



I would make a joke about Tom oweing me an anniversary present, but the sixth year is the wood anniversary, and I wouldn't feel comfortable asking a man for wood.

There, I decided to use phpbb to make a forum for the BYOND Life main site.

http://byondlife.com/forum/

Alright, so I'm watching Family Guy on TBS (I don't remember why, likely nothing else was on.) and halfway through the show I see Bill Engvall walk out. I begin to roll my eyes at yet another popup ad on television. Then the most curious thing happens, the show is paused so he can promote his show.

Thats right, they paused in the middle of a scene to plug another show.

The worst part is while reading up on the phenomenon, I found they've been doing this for a while. They wonder why we turn to internet viewing and then they pull this. It was bad enough when it was just covering up the bottom of the screen and making a little noise, hell it was bad enough when they were silent. We have commercial breaks and product placement for a reason.

When you alienate your audience, that is the complete opposite of the point of advertising. What's next? Is the Hulk going to punch through my screen during a local news story about a murderer who kills geeks with brown hair while they watch TV?

Right now I'm watching Castaway on TNT, in the lower right hand corner is their stations watermark, and in the lower left is the phrase "MORE MOVIE... LESS COMMERCIALS". So far I've seen 4 commercials for the closer while the movie is playing, so much for that and oh god he knocked his tooth out, I hate that part.

Here are some ideas I have:

1: Don't constantly show your stations watermark, maybe show them once as a bumper at the beginning of the show.

2: With digital TV as the norm, allow viewers to decide if they want to display the rating. Personally, as a grown adult I don't care what the rating of a show may be.

3: Stop with the animated voiced popup ads, they drive viewers away from the shows. Just like on the internet. Why do you think popup blockers became prevalent as automatically installed?

4: Never, ever, under any circumstance pause in the middle of a show to advertise another show. This is beyond wrong. Besides, most of the time we are *PAYING TO HAVE YOUR STATION*. You already make hundreds of millions off of just the regular advertisements, just how fucking greedy are you?

Ahem, anyways, since I know no television execs are going to read this, I'll just stop listing ideas.

Ahh, yet another day of work out of the way. I arrive home today and enter through the back door as per usual. I water my cantaloupes (that's not innuendo), and check my mail. But as I go outside, I see a large box on the front porch. It was my new computer case.

http://www.xoxide.com/moneual-lab-m550f25-case.html

The best part? It has that giant 250mm fan built right into the side, yet I still got an extra 120mm fan for the back. I plan on getting another 120mm fan for the front, then my computer will struggle to get above 20C. After that, all I need to do is get this beast:

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/ item-details.asp?EdpNo=2700093&CatId=2535