So, if you could be any videogame character... (part 1)

So, this other blog that I follow did a post about how the author would totally be Link from the Legend of Zelda series if he could be any video game character. Which I would never choose because Hyrule has an unfortunate lack of indoor plumbing.  But, I guess its an important question.

If I could be any video game character, who would I be?  Oh.  Um.  This is going to be hard.

First, lets lay down some ground rules:
1) This is video games ONLY.  Which means as much as I adore Twilight Sparkle, she's is off the list.  Ditto for Locke from Lost, or Commander Sinclair from Babylon 5.  While these are all awesome people I would totally be, they are from TV shows, and there are more than enough of video games to tackle.

2) Gotta be from a video game or video game "first" property.  Which means I can't use Lord Of The Rings, because those were books that were made into movies that were made into games.  However, Resident Evil is fair game because those were games made into shitty movies and even shittier spin off novels.  If I let myself use all the lincenced video games out there, we'd never, ever finish.

3) We're looking at characters, not games.  So, when applicable, I'll reference a series as a whole rather than an individual game.  This is another measure to take to make sure I can actually finish this list.

4)When I say "be a character" I'm referring to assuming that character's skill set at the outset of the game, along with their potential and learning curves.  Essentially, I'm just plastering my mental state onto the character in question, so if they start out as incompetent and get stronger, that's what would happen to me.  The big caveat here is that if a character is younger, I'd use my mental state from when I was the same age.  So, its 14 year old me in Sora's body, and my infant ass in Baby Mario.

I don't think I could possibly have been as annoying as that goddamn scream though

*WARNING*  I'm probably going to spoil things.  Several reasons are plot/character relevant, and I'm gonna delve into them if we're going to figure this out.

So, we might as well start with my favorite series, Final Fantasy.  Just narrowing down the series is hard enough, but from sheer badass potential, I'd probably have to choose between characters from VI, VII, and X. 

The characters are awesome- I'd rock as Terra from VI (The best spellcaster ever and half demi-god, with the ability to go super sayan), Cid from VII (I'm the nerd that will summon dragons and call down a rocket barrage from my kick ass airship) and Auron from X (If you look up badass in the dictionary, its just a picture of Auron with the words "'nuff said").

However, there is also something very wrong about all of these amazing settings that eliminate them: the worlds in which they are really screwed up.  In VI, the world goddamn ends at one point and everyone is left picking up the scraps.  VII's massive plot hole inducing ending hints at the destruction of all humanity and the people in X have all been emotionally scared by growing up living in fear of a giant whale monster that ended civilization at one point, and sticks around to screw with the survivors.  Yeah, I don't think I'd want to live there, kthxbai.

Not even impossible clothes and airships can save you.  I'm sorry.

Well, what about Mario from the plethora of games he's stared in?  He's basically an international celebrity at this point, has a strong love interest with royalty, and seems to go for at least a year or so of peaceful living between Bowser launching incompetent attacks.

I'm going to go the vain route here in elimination: Mario looks sorta retarded.  Also, he's an Italian stereotype.  And I'm not really down with mustaches, overalls, or being pudgy despite the miles of running.

Alright, I guess I'll have to eliminate Link too.  And for a better reason than because that guy did it (although, that is my primary motivation here). Its the simple fact that, as a 12 year old, saving the world is kind of a massive job.  That's a lot of stress and pressure, which if I was a bit older, I'd probably be able to cope with.  But at 12?  I haven't done any of this shit before, and you want me to kill the great big evil pig?  I think I'm just going to cry in a corner, thank you very much.

I was still  trying to figure out how to talk to girls at 12, and you want me to fight that?  With a sword?  I haven't developed enough sarcasm to handle this right now.

After that, most of the Nintendo games loose appeal do to the fact they have installments I didn't enjoy playing though, so why on Earth would I want to actually be any of those people?

Fuck, I'm hardly closer than when I started.  Well, tune in next post to get an answer to this great age old question.

The Waffle House Index

I'm going to assume everyone here has eaten at a Waffle House at some point.  If you haven't, let me fill you in: its basically a less classy IHOP.  Aside: has anyone ever left an IHOP feeling like hopping?  From personal experience, its more like, "I just ate enough grease to run a biofuel car for three years".  But I guess IJAEGTRABCFTY makes a shitty acronym.

International my ass.  I've never seen an IHOP in any other country I've been in.

If you've never eaten at either of these places, you've never been drunk and hungry at 3 am, which is also the only time its really acceptable to actually go to a Waffle House.  Because if you go at any other time, you'll take one look at the place and wonder why the gas station bathroom has decided to start serving waffles.

Seriously, I don't think Waffle House gives a single fuck about how they appear to any of their patrons.  Its like a white trash convention in there(if you're from Mississippi, a family reunion)- the bus boys are generally drunker than the patrons, there are at least 3 drug deals going down at any given time and your waitress' crabs have herpes.

They have a valtrex prescription at the local pharmacy under the name Eugene H. Krabs

Not to mention they actively cater to the drunk with pictures of their food on their menu.  Screw drunk, they cater to the outright totally hammered/wasted.  I've been smashed, but I've never forgotten what a waffle looks like.

I mean, I guess it makes sense, if your face is numb from Everclear shots, you won't be able to taste the fine layer of cigarette ash that is certain to be on every waffle, because the cook is smoking outside of a hole in the side of his neck due to the fact he has throat cancer worse than Batman in Dark Night.

So, you can imagine my surprise when I found out FEMA uses Waffle House conditions to figure out how hard an area has been hit by a natural disaster.  Considering Waffle House is basically a disaster (even the sign looks like a ransom note) I did find it a little ironic that it was used as a scale to judge other disasters.

But it turns out, Waffle House has found a niche.  They've matched up the fucks they don't give with people who desperately need fucks.  Wait, stop, I didn't mean it that way!

Waffle House does not cater to sexually frustrated nerds.  Does it sound like Waffle House caters to me?

Waffle house has started to market (and plan for) being the first business up and running after some catastrophe has struck an area.  So basically, they make up for a total lack of any quality by being the only choice available, which again, is brilliant.  They even have a mobile command center that travels from disaster to disaster, being the only option for people devastated by some calamity.

I mean, after a hurricane, whats a few ash covered waffles anyway?

DIY Technology!

A lot can happen in a garage.  Its a very capable space, able to do a lot besides holding a car and the dead bodies. Garages are a combination of a storage space, workbench space and light up a joint space.  What more can you possibly ask from a room?

Great things have happened in garages.  Google was pretty much started up in one.  However, just because you own a garage doesn't mean great things will happen.  Only you hold the keys to putting that wonderous space to good use.  Only you can do awesome things in your garage.

And no, having a terabyte of porn in paper form doesn't count as awesome.  It does mean you probably don't need that double or queen size bed, though

"But," I'm imaging you crying, "how?  How can I do amazing things in my garage?  What do I do?"

Welcome to the dojo, young one.  Come, sit and you shall learn what awesome can done in a garage.  You'll want to loose any and all regard for personal safety and develop some sort of untreated antisocial personality disorder before we continue.  I figure that shouldn't be to hard.  No rush.  I'll wait.

Done?  Sweet.  Lets start with lightning.  Or namely, a tesla coil.

For those of you who don't know, tesla coils are those cool things you see in science fiction movies that shoot lightning bolts.  Except they totally aren't science fiction, but still totally shoot lightning bolts.  By lining up a pair of coils, and wiring one up to a voltage generator and a capacitance, you can shoot sparks between the coils.  Make the frequencies of the resistances on the coils match, and you can get the voltage to skyrocket between the gap.

For everyone whose eyes just glazed over at that last sentence, it looks like this:

Thor just peed his his pants a little bit

As proof that awesomeness can be distributed, Dr. Electric (He calls himself that.  I make it a policy to not antagonize future super villains.) has the circuit diagrams for free on the web.  As you might have guessed, however, the parts required to spew lighting several feet in all directions does cost more than a recent graduate from an arts college can pay for, so here's a version made out of shit someone found dumpster diving.  Its still pretty formidable, getting up to 250,000 volts, which is approximately 100 times more voltage than your household current.

Plus, you liberal arts majors get practice in dumpster diving, an invaluable skill to you post graduation.

But what if lighting isn't quite your element?  I get it, I get it, you're more of a fire person.  Fire is also very, very cool.  Now, these next set of questions are for all you budding young arsonists out there.  What is cooler than fire?  The correct answer is flame throwers.  What are cooler than flame throwers?

Ok, the technically correct answer here is dragons.  But wrist mounted flamethrowers come pretty close.

10 bucks on this kid being behind the California wildfires

In what is a civil lawsuit just waiting to happen, there are several models of DIY wrist mounted flamethrowers out there on the web.  Which is fantastic, because the US department of defense in 1978 basically said, "You know what, screw flamethrowers.  Water boarding is cool, but flamethrowers?  That shit's horrific.  We're not using those anymore."  Which is doubly fantastic as there is no ban on actually owning a flame thrower in the US, with a few states requiring a permit.

This blog would be nothing if I don't become your enabler in doing something even the US military thinks is downright inhumane.  You can thank me someday if we ever meet.

I think you'll melt your own face off first, but don't let that stop you.

Ok, ok, wrist mounted flame throwers and lightning spewing towers are pretty cool, but you want to go bigger.  You've got better plans than these child toys.  You've got a destiny.  You want something that if it goes wrong, it won't just ruin your life, but ruin the lives of everyone in your neighborhood.

You want a nuclear fusion reactor.

The goddamn sun.  In your garage.

Now, mind you, this is sort of a "because I fucking can" type project.  Fusion reactors don't actually generate more power than they require to hit critical mass, but you can say you made something hit critical mass.  What more do you want from your DIY project?

Plus, this one comes with helpful warnings like, "Don't touch any exposed wires because you'll die".  Even better, if you push the reactor enough, the x-rays will give you cancer right through stainless steel, so you'll want some lead protection for this.  Unless, of course, lung cancer sounds like an attractive option at that point.

And what could possibly go wrong?  I mean its not like boy scouts don't try this and end up giving their entire neighborhood a nice healthy dose of radiation or anything.  Yay, cancer for everyone!

Cheating is just another way to fund a country

I've dabbled in massively multiplayer online games.  Yes, dabbled.  As in, only played for a little while.

Why are you staring like that at me again?

Alright, alright, I spent way more than my fair share of time playing several mmorpgs.  I put in obscene amounts of time into Final Fantasy 11, I played way to much World of Warcraft, I played a jedi in Star Wars Galaxies when that actually meant something and yes, I've even grinded up a character in Maple Story.

Don't judge me.

However, my mmo days are pretty much over.  It became very apparent to me that I could either pass school and have a life, or get an epic mount.  I couldn't have both.  I won't lie to you, I did a whole excel spreadsheet to the pros and cons of having a job at McDonalds vs an epic character that could shatter the servers themselves.  It was a pretty close call.

Most said phrase of Zul'garak, the Arbiter of Darkness: "Would you like fries with that?"

As any past or current mmo player can attest to, one of the most annoying aspects of the game comes from gold farming (or RMTing depending on how old school you are).  For those of you not acquainted with the term, its basically shorthand for a cycle of suck, failure, misbegotten profit and shortcuts.

The idea works as follows: in almost all mmorpgs, there is a form of currency.  Most of the time, you need to actually do things in game in order to earn said currency, something like selling items your character has made, doing tasks for others or whoring out your skills at teleporting people around the world, like some kind of monorail-prostitute combo.

Soulless destroyers of fun, smelling an opportunity, realized they could probably get some people to pay real money for fake in game money, because people are really lazy, really retarded and have no friends.

If you want to waste your parents cash on something that has no actual value, go right ahead.  I'm sure you're in the basement for a reason.  But please don't also ruin the game for someone who has been having fun actually playing it.

You know what game play does? Builds a skill set.  The game compensates for that- it gets harder to play.  So if you buy your way to the top, you're dead weight because you haven't put in the time to actually get good.  But then other retards see you with your cool shit, want your cool shit and buy their way to the top and the cycle of stupid continues.

The moral of the story is that you can't buy happiness or self worth.  But you can be annoying as fuck.

Anyway, because this makes the game less fun for everyone involved, most game companies go way out of their way to put a stop to it.  However, they're basically outclassed before they ever get off the launch pad because China uses gold farming as a way to put prisoners to work.  Yes, you read that right- we make prison gangs mow the medians of highways or something, but China makes them get as much fake currency as possible to it can be sold to stupid people.

That's fucking brilliant.  You can get your dangerous margin of society to hate every other country by having to deal with constant dumb meme references in the trade chat and make money at the same time.  Well, it could be worse, I guess.  Its not like China is using that money to fund a nuclear weapons development program-- but North Korea totally is.

Every time you reply to a person who has no vowels in their name offering you gold, North Korea gets a little closer to having the bomb

Why Arthurian Legend Sucks

So, yesterday, I picked up my old collection of tales about King Arthur. And I made a shocking discovery.

What might have been promising stories have been abused by shoddy storytelling like a redheaded stepchild. And not the massive Christian influence or the fact that the nights in question are more or less superheroes.

You expect that stuff when you open the book. Arthurian tales are basically Conan the Barbarian set in England, circa 1200, with editing provided by the Archbishop. No, I'm going to complain about the actual structure of the stories themselves.

Excalibur- the original lightsaber

In a nutshell, life is balls for a knight. They can't trust their own judgement. Often in these tales, someone gets wronged at court or what have you, and some knight rides out to avenge some wrong to someone else's (or his own) honor or something.

It seems like a lot of effort for an abstract feeling, but maybe I'm a robot and don't get that whole "lovey-dovey" emotion crap.

FUCK YOU CARE BEARS

However, at this point, all the knights should flip a coin, because half the time they shouldn't have done jack shit and were "carried away by evil passions". However, the other half of the time, the nights in question have done exactly the most badass thing ever.

Its like some arbitrary moral guardian decides if the knights are acting for good or ill. The actions themselves are never judged, and the reasons are usually the same anyway. Now if this was reality, this wouldn't matter.

Lawyers and psychics make a living on kicking people when they're down, after all. It's that if a knight makes a bad choice, he gets power-screwed. His whole life gets cursed, he ends up killing a close relation of sorts and in a misguided attempt at penance, he probably burns a town down. Generally, he gets slain in the end by a best friend or other close relation.

Its almost like someone is just rolling a dice and if they get a one, they just crackle evilly and proceed to drive a character through metaphysical hell an--

WAIT. Holy shit. Arthurian tales aren't stories! They're the first evidence we have of pen and paper gaming!

King Arthur. The original D&D

Videogames. Used for things other than entertainment.

Video games have been the great constant in my life since I unwrapped a Nintendo 64 for Christmas one year.  Ever since that one glorious moment, I've never lived up to my potential.  I have wasted hours, days, even entire weeks in imaginary worlds.  I've since changed places of residence, schools, jobs, friends, interests, and identities countless times since then, but video games have always been there for me.

And if it wasn't for online Halo matches, I would have never found out about my mother's colorful past.

Its really easy to see why- when it comes to entertainment, video games are very active.  You get feeling of accomplishment from building a skill (never mind the skill is essentially worth as much as a hobo's alcohol tolerance) along with all the joys of taking a break from your current sucky reality and being in an objectively better one.

Case in point, I have yet to see a video game where hipsters exist and I don't murder them for points.

When you add in the fact that the Internet now lets gamers get all their social interaction via gaming, its easy to see why video games and their kin are pretty much the next wave in the entertainment industry: they satisfy all of your emotional needs.  You get self gratification and social contact wrapped up in a nice package where you can forget about all the terrible failings and mistakes of your current meatspace life.

Playing video games for long enough will also remove you from ever having to deal with the pressures of starting a family

However, its when games go above and beyond the call of duty (pun totally intended) and start influencing the physical world around us that things get way cool.  Like, for example, a Doom 3 deathmatch used to settle a copyright lawsuit.  Which is beyond awesome, for several reasons:

1) Futuristic warriors running around with shotguns and rocket launchers blowing each other up is about 200% cooler than anything related to copyright law ever.
2) This opens the potential for other legal disputes to be solved in this fashion, which would mean that all lawyers would need to log hours playing deathmatch against kids calling them "fatass nerdy thundercunts" with nothing they can do about it.  If that doesn't drastically lower the amount of soulless attorneys, then I don't know what will.

However, there is the unfortunate counterpoint that if we let even one legal dispute be solved this way, the end result is that the world just gives up any and all sanity and becomes like the movie Rollerball, in which countries solves disputes not with war, but with teams of fucking combat rollerbladers.

The fact that anyone thought this was a good idea makes me wonder how anyone lived through the 70's

It is not only in the realm of war that video games have managed to influence reality.  They've caused love to-- especially when Portal 2 was used as a marriage proposal.  Warning: This story is all kinds of sweet and adorable.  Be prepared.

I dunno, I think I'd take some custom levels to Portal over a nice dinner any day of the week, honestly.   Video games just seem to make everything better.  Even the unholy-hell-according-to-sitcoms marriage.

Artificial Life

Science and technology are the two most awesome things ever.  Period.  If we were to try and visualize the abstract concepts we throw around every day, science would be the tyrannosaurs lion cyborg that could also shoot nukes and travel at mach 2.  Love would be a hippie with fairy wings stuck in his back, and if he felt particularly threatening, a pretty pink sparkly wand.

I googled Tyrannosaurs Lion and this came back- its somehow more awesome than what I was picturing.

Science is awesome because it looks at a world around us goes, "That's pretty good thing you got there with your axe and chopping down trees and all.  Now go sit in the corner with this coloring book and we'll show you how one really chops down a tree."

And then the chainsaw was invented.

So, recently scientists have looked at life and been like, "That's a pretty good thing you got there mother nature, with your life and species and ecosystems.  Now go sit in a corner and we'll show you how one really creates life."

Yep!  We've officially crossed into the realm of playing God and have managed to artificially construct life in a way nature never, ever intended it to be.  Really! In a move that's just asking for the human race to get smitten, scientists inserted synthetic DNA into live cells and left for weekend- and when they came back the cells had multiplied according to  the man-made instruction set.  The researchers then high-fived, and left the office holding maybe the greatest card in the "worked harder than you did, so make me dinner" argument ever.

I made life today!  I deserve some time on the couch with a beer!

Alright, alright, I'm being a little over dramatic.  We've got a ways to go on the artificial life front before Lord of the Rings fans can actually create their own hobbits to boss around.  Advance life forms, like you, me, or a hobbit, are still in the realm of science fiction according to the project lead of the "playing God" team of scientists in this CNN interview.  Heck, even advanced cells are still a few years of research off.

At the end of the day, though, we've still created cell colonies you can never find in nature- because mother nature had no hand in their creation.  We borrowed some of her techniques, sure, but no natural selection was ever performed on these cells, no environmental pressures.  Just a bunch of really smart dudes, some expensive equipment and a Petri dish.  Or if you happen to be a bible thumper, a bunch of researchers made a bunch of cells that God did not intend for Earth.  That's got to be a chilling thought.

God would be about as awesome as science if he would smite more cities with lasers.

It shouldn't be, though.  Smart scientists are taking the first steps into something fantastic.  Think about where this could lead for a second- one day, when BP screws up again, there doesn't have to be a big environmental calamity.  We just release the strain of cells that eats oil for breakfast, and when they're done, eat themselves so the ecosystem isn't disturbed.

Or the T-Virus.  That's another place this could lead to.  You zombie apocalypse fans have something to get excited about, it seems.

I want to make an important point here- these cells are different from other things we've genetically engineered.  We're not taking a plant and inserting some firefly genes in it to make it glow at night (although we can do that and it is indeed just as cool as you're imagining it).  These cells have the potential to do things that nothing in nature has ever done before.

We've taken the first step toward organic technology, and if Babylon 5 is to be believed, that's one amazing step.

How to watch Disney movies as an adult

How does one watch Disney movies past around 10?  The movies are clearly aimed at the little buggers- after a certain age, cynicism just makes watching a picture perfect love plot impossible.  It takes all your effort not the scream out with your world-weary adult mind that this is all bullshit anyway and we're just setting unobtainable standards for our kids and how can we possibly feel good about that?

I'll tell you how.  With booze.  Preferably enough of it to make you call up a bunch of ex-girlfriends and leave tear strained voice mail about when did we go wrong and why can't it just work out between us like it does for Ariel in the Little Mermaid?  It doesn't have to be so hard, after all the incorrect half of her was a fish.


Oh.  I guess I'm the only one whose done that then. hm.  Awkward.

So, without further ado, I present to you several sets of rules to use for a few Disney classics.  Each of the specific rule sets comes with an optional "hardcore" rule designed to make it so that the only way to play the rule is to literally have a keg going directly into your blood stream via IV.

A pair of general rules before we begin: Take a salute gulp any time a memorable character appears for the first time in the movie (or any time any memorable character appears at all).  Also, drink for every musical number.  If you want to experience liver failure, you may start drinking at the start of each musical number and not finish until after the number is over.

Mulan:

•  Drink something on fire whenever Mushu's antics continue Mulan's involvement with the war, or the war effort as a whole.
• If you're a guy, chug a chick drink, if you're a girl, take a shot of whiskey for every cross dressing reference
• Drink for every instance of people eating with chopsticks
• Drink every time a dragon is mentioned or appears on screen
• Hardcore: Drink for anything that is Asian 

Aladdin:

• Drink two for every instance of animal abuse
• Start drinking for every instance of sexual tension, and don't stop until the tension is over
• Take a drink every time Aladdin pussies out of something
• Take a drink every time the Genie references something that doesn't exist yet, but no one misses a beat
• Hardcore: Drink for anything that is Middle Eastern. 

Robin Hood:

• Take a drink and weep for all the future furies every time Maid Marian tries to play up sex appeal in any way (Female version- any time Robin shows off to her, make the amount of alcohol in your cup less by way of your throat).  Side Rule- take an additional drink to deal with your shame if you ever felt that way about either of them.
• drink every time an arrow is shot or seen flying through the air
• drink for every rabbit on the screen
• drink any time anyone is running away from something
• Hardcore: Actually follow those above three rules during the final chase scene.  Its 51 sips in about five minutes, if you wanted to know.

Princess and the Frog:

• Take a sip from a Hurricane every time New Orleans is mentioned or shown
• Take a drink and sing, "It's Not Easy Being Green" every time one of the Frogs starts complaining about anything, or looks annoyed with the other frog
• Salute to badassery: take several large gulps during the villain death scene
• Take a drink and roll your eyes every time Prince Naveen looks longingly at Tiana.  Bonus rule- take an additional drink every time it flies over her head.
• Hardcore: Drink for every instance of racial stereotyping.  Bonus drink for every racist reference, and triple bonus drinkage multiplier for every additional sexist reference.  So, for a reference that is stereotypical, racist, and sexist, that's six drinks (and yes, there are several parts of the movie that qualify for the six drink special)

Robots are still going to kill us all, part 2

So, last time I made a blog post about how a combination of scientific hubris and progress pretty much assured our deaths at the hands of our robot overlords.

This is a continuation of that theme, if you will.  Because I'm not doing my job until you look at your alarm clock suspiciously every day and threaten your cell phone with bodily harm when it doesn't work, yelling, "I know you can, you goddamn scout for the robot force.  You choose not to.  You have not won yet, AI!".

I want everyone operating on my level so people stop looking at me weird when I'm in public.

So!  Last time we were on this subject, I had stated that there were two paths of research scientists were taking to have us all be killed by our creations, yet I only went into detail about one path (the one where we program intelligence and self-awareness from the ground up).  The other option is that we simply start with what we already have- a brain.  Just attach all the robot parts to it.

Think Frankenstein, but instead of pitiable monster, death-dealing robot

How far along have we gotten with this?  Oh, we've already done it with moths.  For those of you who don't feel like clicking on the link, that's a robot that is run by a moth brain.  And the researchers are super happy about this, because insect brains are very, very complicated.

The central nervous system of something is complicated?  Like that part of it that tells it what to do, acts on outside events, the whole reason it isn't just sitting there immobile is complicated? No. shit.

Also, proof again that the horror is in the little quotes- here is a line from one scientist: "We want to design a machine which is far more powerful than the living body."

Alright, I concede- the only thing the moth cyborg (try to type cyborg seriously and not put it in italics.  Try.) can do is drive around a look for hot lady moths, then weep in frustration when it can't get it on, so to speak.
 
Don't think this is isolated to moths, as scientists are trying to make already terrifying insects far more scary with all sorts of advances in insect cyborgs.  Because people don't already run and scream enough when they see a bug, so lets make that bug be able to shoot a death ray and see what happens.

Ok, if there is a natural brain inside of the metallic body, there is a chance that there will be natural empathy too, I guess.  And, yes, this means that it just might be possible for us to have awesome cyborg bodies in our lifetimes.  Jonathan Coulton's The Future Soon may be heralded as one of the curiously clairvoyant songs ever written.

I'd be lying if I said I didn't think my love life would play out exactly that same way

But what about if we built the brain artificially?  Its been a enigma to scientists after all, your brain is more powerful than a low grade super computer, when you look at all the data that you have to deal with on a daily basis.  Its a miracle of nature- infinitely complex and powerful, yet also able to fit inside a cavity about the size of a a couple apples.  How can man ever hope--

Oh, wait, we did that already too.  Luckily, so far, it can only remember its undying, overwhelming lust for revenge against its creators for 12 seconds before it forgets, but that's 12 seconds of mankind being drawn and quartered inside its head.  Which is too much if you ask me.

And, just before you get comfortable with all of that, here's an update on process A (we program the whole thing from the ground up):  robots are now aware of their own state and place in space.  Or according to the researchers, about as self aware as a cat.  Here is a picture to help visualize that:

YOU MADE IT MAD.  FUCK.  RUN.

Robots are at that level of intelligence.  The best part is that when reminded that about all the movies that have an AI killing us all, one researcher replied, "We just pull the plug out of the robot. That's all."

Might want to start on that bucket list right now.