Je suis brilliante.

My friend Melissa moved to Korea fucking ages ago, and I found her via her website during my last year in Taiwan. She had a baby and a Korean husband, but other than that she was exactly as I remembered her. Suffice to say that her website is impeccably-written, fascinating and funny. Suffice to say she has fantastic taste in her reading habits. Which brings us to the point.

A winner is me. Melissa gifted me with this lovely award, in all its pink, sparkly, compression-artifacted clipart glory. My website is apparently now "brilliante." Not sure what the "premio" means, though. And all I had to do was cry like a little baby.

Right. So, the award comes with this set of instructions, which basically amount to "send this to at least seven other blogs." Which is silly. First off, I don't think I even know of seven other blogs which are updated regularly and are well-written. (I mean, my god, have you read Kotaku recently? Fuck me, they need a copyeditor.) Secondly, I don't want to just float around somebody else's crappy jpeg when I could just as easily make my own crappy jpeg.

So that's what I did.
I give to you, the Official adamfirefist.com Award for Total Excellence, representing over an hour of Photoshop practice. (A staggeringly informative learning experience it made, as well, after bumbling my way through that McToken poster from the last post.) Well, I don't give it to you, not necessarily, but maybe.

If your name is Melissa, and you live in Korea. In a total shocker, Melissa is the sole recipient of the very first OaAfTE. Congratulations! Your official notification is on the way!

The award may also be presented to people, things or events which I recognize as having innate self-worth, such as Mega Man (who happens to be the first honorary recipient, btw).

Of course, every rose has its thorn, every night has its dawn, and every cowboy sings a sad, sad, song. Light and dark co-exist. The Force is constantly balanced by the Dark Side. Buffy and the Scooby-Gang are always faced with the machinations of the First. And to balance the zenith of accomplishment that the Official adamfirefist.com Award for Total Excellence represents, there is also the nadir of those websites (dis)graced with the Official adamfirefist.com "Dead to Me" Condemnation.
The Oa"DtM"C is presented to those individuals who can't be bothered to update their websites at all, having set off for the more 'productive' glades of MySpace or the Book of Faces. Well, screw that. J'accuse! J'accuse!

It is with a heavy heart that I present the inaugural Official adamfirefist.com "Dead to Me" Condemnation to both Katherine and Jonathan. Your websites are fail. (Allison, you're on notice.)

The condmenation may also be presented to individuals, things or events which evoke my ire, such as the Beijing Olympics and the sitting president of the United States of America.

Thanks for coming out to my impromptu awards ceremony. We had a few laughs, shed a few tears, and made the world a slightly better place.

On to matters of import.

This past week, the kids over at CERN fired up the Large Hadron Collider for the first time. It's a great jesus atom smasher, 27 kilometres in circumference, that's going to bash the shit out of a bunch of atoms to try and find the Higgs boson. It's fascinating and awesome. Of course, there are those who have no idea what a particle accelerator is or does, and they manage to conjure up all kinds of doomsday scenarios, wherein the collider creates a black hole, or some strangelets, or some antimatter, which will destroy the Earth. Some of them even went so far as sending death threats to some of the scientists on the project. Oh, heavens.

Speaking of CERN, Wired recently collected 10 videos showing off the flashier side of science. The water bubbles in space, Taiwanese demonstration of superconductors, and (of course) the Large Hadron Collider Rap are the standouts.

This guy has a deathwish, but for one brief, shining moment at the end there, he's almost badass.


IT'S PIKACHU!
GODDAMMIT!

This impeccably-photoshopped hamster (or gerbil) was found for sale on the Japanese Yahoo Auction site for the quite-reasonable price of ¥99,000,002,805,760 (over $900 million Murkan dollaz).

I'd buy one.

(Here's the auction watch website that Kotaku posted. Y'know, if you feel like being dazzled with kanji and kana.)

I found a new game called Aether. I played it for a while, but I wasn't able to accomplish anything. I went to another planet and ran around, but the fifteen minutes I devoted to it at lunchtime the other day were insufficient to unlock its secrets. If you can figure it out, let me know.

Well, it's Friday night, and I'm still here slaving away at my keyboard when I should be spending time with Katie. I'll leave you with this cartoon. Apparently, Seth McFarlane (the Family Guy guy) has turned his hand to youtube cartoons. He's released five (well, four and an intro), but this is the only one that's about video games. They're basically the Family Guy without the Family bits.

Now fuck off.

Love, Adam
Asps. Very dangerous. You go first.