The Super Bowl halftime show reminded me of why I loved the ’80s.

First, there was Madonna. I don’t know whether she and Lady Gaga actually have that much in common besides both being attention whores, since I prefer to live in the past regarding my musical tastes, but the show encapsulated the ’80s: tacky, over-the-top costumes full of blinding bling and a seizure-inducing mishmash of themes and songs.

I went to a Super Bowl party, and one comment I overheard pretty much said it all: “What the fuck is happening?”

The whole thing could have gone horribly wrong considering Madonna is 53 years old. Age might be just a number, but there’s a number at which you look ridiculous in a thong, and Madonna seems to have grasped that her time for thongs is behind her. Lo and behold, she’s still sexy fully clothed, despite the camera’s many attempts to get cooch shots. Plus, I can totally relate to her missing that step and nearly falling. The last time I wore heels that high, I couldn’t even walk on my own.

Rock on, Madonna. Never stop wearing leopard-print capes.

Summary: His stance is that Star Wars the Old Republic is sexist because it allows you to administer electro shocks to a Twi’lek slave-companion named Vette.

That’s about as fair as saying SWTOR is racist because it allows you to shock an alien with long tails on her head.

Kain says: “So the inclusion of a shock-collar-wearing slave in BioWare’s Star Wars: The Old Republic, a new Star Wars MMORPG that released this past December, is not so much surprising as it is disappointing. And really creepy.”

Of course it’s creepy. It’s supposed to be creepy. If you shock her, you are a creep. The Sith are creepy. That’s why they follow the Creepy side of the force, and the Jedi follow the Asshole side of the force.

The game is full of morally questionable choices, so it’s weird that anyone would fixate on this as evidence that BioWare is morally broken. In one Sith quest. you have to pour poison into some slaves’ water supply. You can give them just enough poison to cause unspeakable torment, or you can give them enough to slaughter them all. And slaughtering them is the Light Side option.

While you have the option of torturing Vette with a shock collar, it’s clear from the beginning that this is the douche-bag path to galactic domination. And female Sith can inflict just as much pain as male Sith, which is exactly what’s happening with me and Devon. He’s being super sweet to her in hopes of getting into her pants, and I’m shocking her just about every chance I get to keep her in line. If BioWare would get around to allowing homosexual romances, I might be trying to get into her pants, too.

Maybe I’m a closet sociopath, but I doubt it. Roleplaying games are fun precisely because they let us be the kinds of people we will never be in real life. If I were shocking slave girls left and right in real life, I would be playing RPGs about underemployed crafters with a thing for steampunk.

I keep hearing how hard it is to be a female gamer. Maybe I grew up in an alternate universe, but I’ve never found it hard to be a gamer. We were pretty rare before the days of Team Unicorn, but I always found gamer dudes pretty welcoming. For some of them, I was one of the few girls who would talk to them, which probably helped. And we were all misfits with a love of looting the corpses of the imaginary fallen. The guys who were inclined to be assholes were assholes to everyone.

Which brings me to John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory.

To see this in action, check out every WoW PvP battleground chat log ever. There’s always at least one player bitching and moaning about how much you suck. He doesn’t care what you have between your legs. He’s just emo because he’s going to have to hold off on upgrading his armor a little longer than he’d hoped.

My use of “he” here is probably sexist. For all I know, battlegrounds are full of women roiding out because you insist on fighting midfield in Warsong Gulch.

"I will end Obama's war on religion. And make sure shitty coffee doesn't make it into your cup."

Here’s the story at Fox News: The only legitimate news source on the Internet.

Check this out, from Todd Starnes of Fox News: ”It was President Obama who declared in an e-mail to CBN News that ‘whatever we once were, we’re no longer just a Christian nation.’”

How dare Obama point out that people in this country are exercising their freedom of religion. That’s what we get for electing a Muslim president.

I, for one, am glad Perry will end Obama’s War on Religion when our Lord and Savior makes him president. Then all our brave men and women overseas fighting religion can return home to their families, and we can redirect all those tax dollars to something important, like making sure people can’t get married unless their pee pees interlock.

Fine, I’ll stop. I can’t keep a straight face anymore anyway.

Starnes goes on to say: “It was during the Obama administration that Christian school children were ordered to stop praying outside the Supreme Court building because they were violating the law. Instead, those American boys and girls were forced to pray for the elected officials while standing in a gutter.”

This is technically true. But the Supreme Court does not have a policy prohibiting prayer. This happened because one police officer misunderstood the Court’s policy on group demonstrations. I’d also like to note that I got a crappy cup of coffee from my local coffee shop today. I’m waiting for an explanation from Obama, as this tragedy happened on his watch.

The rest of his column is equally asinine, but you can read if for yourself.

To avoid making myself bug nuts, I’ve decided to kick back and enjoy the War on Religion (officially known as the War on Religion, Christmas, Children and Sometimes Yo Momma). Republicans trot it out every December, and it has become warm, comfortable and hairy, a lot like yo momma.

There are three things I love about the War on Religion.

Oh, fuck it. Never mind.

The Food and Drug Administration is telling Trent Arsenault of California to stop giving his sperm away like it’s a keg party at Delta Tau Chi.

The best part about this whole story is HuffPo’s headline: “Trent Arsenault, Sperm Donor, Gets Cease Order From FDA.”

Like, it wasn’t enough that this story is made of awesome. HuffPo needs to make sure we remember his name, too. It’s like if I said, “David White, Public Masturbator, Does It All For The Kicks.” I picked that name randomly. If your name is David White, my apologies. Unless you masturbate in public. Then I’m totally right about you. And you’re gonna go blind.

Arsenault is giving the sperm to low-income and gay couples, who he says have a harder time getting donations from sperm banks. I gotta side with Trent on this one. He’s not selling it, and if he were, shall we say, making home deliveries, this wouldn’t be a problem at all.

By “making home deliveries,” I mean “sticking his penis into her vagina.” I worried that wasn’t clear.

I have to agree with George Carlin: “Selling is legal. Fucking is legal. Why isn’t selling fucking legal?” Taking it one step further, why isn’t giving away the byproduct of fucking legal?

C’mon, FDA. Give Trent a chance.

What bothers me the most is not that this guy is a douche rag. Lots of people, rich and poor, are douche rags. It’s that I found a bunch of exceptional Americans in the 99 percent with some 5-minute Wikipedia-fu. It seems our educational system is failing the filthy rich.

Peter Cooper: An American industrialist, inventor, philanthropist, and candidate for President of the United States. He designed and built the first steam locomotive in the U.S., and founded the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in Manhattan, New York City.

Aaron Copland: an American composer, composition teacher, writer, and later in his career a conductor of his own and other American music. He was instrumental in forging a distinctly American style of composition, and is often referred to as “the Dean of American Composers.”

Gertrude B. Elion: An American biochemist and pharmacologist, and a 1988 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Working alone as well as with George H. Hitchings, Elion developed a multitude of new drugs, using innovative research methods that would later lead to the development of the AIDS drug AZT.

Millard Fillmore: Not remembered as our greatest president, but still a pretty impressive achievement.

John D. Rockefeller: Yeah, that guy. He wasn’t always stupid rich.

And these are just a handful of 99 percenters from New York state alone. I didn’t even mention any of the raft of actors, athletes, poets and other entertainers that have come out of New York’s working, middle and upper-middle classes. Or the people doing awesome things who will never get Wikipedia articles about them.

Also, and this is a cheap shot, but dude, if you’re that rich, you can afford a suit that fits properly. Damn.

On one hand, people who like to pretend they’re vampires and gnomes don’t have to pay for sex anymore. Now we have hot chicks rolling a d6 and guys bragging about the Gandalf quarterstaff replica they scored at Ren Faire.

On the other hand, I want children to suffer as I suffered. Because I’m an asshole.

I was born in the wrong decade. When I was a kid, the rules for popularity were clear: You had to stuff your bra and wear tight clothes.** I chose to ignore these rules, but God, the text-adventure games I wrote were awesome.

I didn’t even realize I needed a bra until I was 12 and a friend suggested I think long and hard about it. Probably because my brand new boobs, which showed up out of nowhere while I was eating Cheerios one morning, were distracting in those paper-thin white t-shirts they made us wear for gym. These shirts were like boob alarms for preteen girls.

You’d think that would have gotten me past the “wear tight clothes” rule, but in high school, I was convinced that wearing clothes three sizes too big made me look thinner. I also believed this haircut was a good idea at the time.

High school, 1992. I'm the goober on the right. No, I don't know what I was thinking.

I don’t even know what constitutes a social misfit anymore. How weird do you have to be before the jocks stuff you into a locker? And what makes a kid weird? When geeks go mainstream, does it come down to a turf war between vampire LARPers and Civil War re-enactors?

** Stuffing your bra and wearing tight clothes is still a pretty solid path to popularity, from what I’ve heard.

Our friend mentioned she took her daughter to see something called “Freckleface Strawberry,” which is apparently about a girl whose raging insecurity leads her to believe her classmates hate her. After groveling for their acceptance in a vortex of codependent need, she snaps and kills them all with a chainsaw before settling down for some quality time with her XBOX and that kid from “Freckle Juice,” who thinks she’s pretty effing hot.

At least, that’s how it would end if I wrote children’s books. Which is why I’ve been chased out of all the best playgrounds.

We went out for dinner with our friends Amy and Ellen over the weekend, and Devon accidentally strolled into the women’s bathroom.

It ain’t no thang. I remember the time I accidentally walked into the men’s bathroom, and I had to camp out in the stall while a seemingly endless stream of men used the urinal. Somehow, the fact that there was a urinal didn’t strike me as odd when I walked in.

But anyway, I promised the old ladies he wasn’t a pervert, which is where I lied. But it all ended happily and no one went to jail.

Later, we went to the M&M’s store in Times Square, where Devon spent $50 on M&Ms because he missed the sign that said the candy was $12.99 a pound, and he filled that bag like a starving Somalian at an all-you-can-eat buffet.

What $50 in M&M's might look like

Then he felt bad, because no one wants to spend 50 bucks on M&M’s, but it was too late to turn back, so I told him to just enjoy the chocolate and think fondly of that time he was a total sucker.

WTF happened to Christina Aguilera? She looks like someone’s divorced, middle-aged alcoholic mom stripping at amateur night to prove she’s still got it.

I was floored when I found out she’s 30 years old. I keep putting her in the Justin Bieber teeny bopper camp, and learning she’s only three years younger than I am made me feel old.

Oh, who am I kidding? It made me feel pretty damn good about myself after seeing those pics.

Before anyone gets on my case, it’s not just the weight gain. I’ve lost and gained the same 20 pounds twice in the last four years. But if you’re going to dress like a dominatrix, you need to look like the kind of woman who would look sexy wielding a paddle, not Elvis circa 1977.

She’d probably be pretty cute here if she brushed her hair, learned how to wear makeup appropriately and didn’t dress like she was filming a 1980s skanky aerobics video with Jane Fonda.

God, I AM getting old.

A lot has already been said about this, and I don’t have any wisdom to offer. But it’s pretty exciting to see so many people exercising their right to freedom of speech in such a big way, even if it’s still a work in progress.

The complaints are mostly financial:

Some are about education, implicitly and explicitly:

Good sign. 

                            Bad sign.

Some people go for the long shot:

Some people relax:

Some people work:

And some go off the deep end:

I can’t help but wonder how many will stick it out through the first frost.