I think at this point in our internet relationship, it's safe to say that you all know me for the uber-mega dork that I am.  It's a sad fact of life that I love all things lame and uncool, and while I may never embrace it I can surely learn to live with it.  That said, here is the sad and tragic tale of one of the dorkiest things I have ever done.

An unhealthily large portion of my college life was centered around a video game called Half-Life.  I discovered it at the beginning of spring semester in 1999 and was still having daily deathmatch games against my LAN-connected roommates and neighbors well into 2002.  It's one of those games that brings me back to the "good old days" of sitting around drinking beers at my desk at two o'clock on a Wednesday morning, straining my ears in an effort to hear the agonizing frustrated death cries of my downstairs roommate every time I capped him in the head with a crossbow at long range.  Looking back on it now, when I think of much time I spend playing Half-Life in college I die a little inside.  However, my connection to this game did not merely end at my obsessive-compulsive desire to play it on a regular basis.  No, the rabbit hole of my limitless dorkdom goes far, far deeper than that.

I'll spare you the rest of the jibber-jabber and just say that one Friday in 2002 I discovered a program that unpacked all the sound files in the entire game into their original WAV formats.  Being that I was drunk and alone at some obscene hour of the night, in my deluded state of mind I thought it would be cool to throw all the sounds into a program called Fruity Loops and see if I could mix something together that sounded cool.  So I did.  In the span of about ten hours I put together four songs, dumped them into the music folder on my desktop under the band name "Neurotoxin" and the album title "Lambda Core", went to sleep and completely forgot about it.

About two weeks later I was in Sergeant Darkfucker's car, driving towards what would end up being my first real date with Hot Andrea.  We're listening to a CD he put together when all of a sudden I hear a very familiar sounding song.

"What is this?" I ask.

"Oh dude, you gotta hear this", responds Morloc.  "It's like a techno-style song made entirely out of sounds from Half-Life.  It's simultaneously one of the dorkiest and awesomest things ever.  I pulled it off one of the network music drives."

At this point I remembered that the music folder on my desktop was linked to the local area network as a shared folder (in the townhouse I lived in all eight of us had our entire music and porn collections set up in shared folders that anyone could browse), and came to the sad realization that Morloc had found my horrible Frankenstein Monster of a creation.  With the ghastly visage of my massive, unrivaled loserness staring me dead in the face, my first reaction was immediately to go on the defensive and tell everyone how drunk I was when I put that stuff together.  This unfortunately only served to let the cat out of the bag that I was the evil mastermind behind this auditory equivalent of a twenty-sided die.  Morloc encouraged my inner geek and suggested that I mix this crap as a full CD and try to sell it, but I suggested that there might be copyright issues involved there and expressed my hesitation in attaching my good unsullied name to something so incredibly ultra-nerdy.  However, since I'm on a roll when it comes to sharing dorky shit with you through the medium of the Internerd, and since I have little to no time at work this week in which to put together a half-decent update, I'm instead going to post the songs I put together.  Yes, it's lame.  I know.  The entire concept of this is lame.  But that's just how I roll sometimes.