http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fl20080329td.html
from the studs at improbable research, natch. (fun fact: improbable seems to be one of those words that, once you take a second to look at it, will never look like it’s spelled correctly again.)
i’m not gonna go into any detail; if you don’t know about it (and you shouldn’t), or care about it (lord, get help) then you don’t need yet another propogator of links to the same story you’ve seen all over the damn place anyway.
all i want to say is: violet blue vs xeni or the rest of her pseudo-nerd posse at that site. you know the one, is the highest if high-sterical situations. in a best case scenario all of those people will soon see their self-importance reach critical mass and spontaneously detonate into a lovely cloud of atomized constituent parts: hack “journalism,” crypto-yuppie-nee-hipster brand name obsessiveness, and a debilitating infatuation with one’s own place in the heirarchy of cool.
although when i was on the well way back in the day, cory seemed a nice enough guy. just to be fair.
anyway. hi. lar. i. ous.
i read this a couple of times. i’m still not really in total agreement here, but it’s close enough to what feels to me while i’m making it like an extremely weird argument that i have to give some propage. especially since i still can’t stand most things microsoft, and feel like that outfit is specifically responsible for the artificial retardation injected into the system by greedy know-nothings following yesterday’s news like it was handed down by the oracle at delphi.
that being said… you find me another billionaire who has decided it is his personal responsibilty to use his nigh-mythical wealth and prestige to cure diseases. all of them. starting with the ones that shouldn’t even exist anymore, in the poorest, most hardest-hit places in the world. not getting a check for it. not creating lots of photo-ops or whatever so he can pull a ross-perot on us in a few years. if anything, gates is smart enough to realize how much more efective he can be by NOT being president, which is good, because he’s dead right.
my personal fantasy is gates one day challenges rupert murdoch and roger ailes to a cage death match, although i’m about 95% sure that even decrepit old murdoch would use his satan-given gifts to literally eat gates’ head right off his body, but hey. maybe bill could wear the bear suit or something. i’m pretty sure he could afford a pretty nice one.
skimmed from mefi. pretty darn funny, in a sad, sad kind of way.
on the plus side, i managed to get html::mason working on apache2/modperl2 on my mac laptop. now, i have to figure out why, exactly. of course the first code sample i cut and pasted from the mason docs didn’t work, because of course it references a method that has been renamed in apache2. so that’s fun. mason docs: as screwed up as i remember them. and i have an interview at 3pm tomorrow (yes, sunday) and i just remembered that god damn daylight savings crap kicks in tomorrow again. dear time-fuckers: we have electricity now. we can make lights go on and off when we need to. stop playing with the damn time. if you’re going to get cute with the clocks, let’s move to a 30 hour day and stop fucking around. 20 hours to get stuff done, and then 10 whole hours of sleep. what’s not to like? sure, we lose a day and a half from a week, but on the plus side we could start the week on tuesday afternoon. again: what’s not to like there?
i need some new music.
I think I spend too much time yelling at invisible people.
I don’t really have anything to add to that. Although maybe it would be wiser to wait until someone actually hires me before advertising that particular, uh… non-clinically-crazy-type, harmless and quirky in an amusing kind of way, thing… that I kind of, you know, got goin’… there.
Anyway, I just checked, any my wisdom is 8, so I might as well run with it.
Which reminds me, of course, of how surprisingly sad I am that it took his dying to make me realize how much I really owe to Gary Gygax. That Tycho kid at Penny-Arcade said it better (naturally, although I comfort myself with the knowledge that he has been practicing a bit more regularly than I have for a good long while now. That, and whiskey, is what I comfort myself with, technically), although he’s all young and stuff. I was 12 or 13, already a compulsive reader of sci-fi and Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories and most anything in the middle, having recently read TLTR for the first time - man, I was ripe for the plucking. My brother brought home the original rules set booklets (pretty sure there were three of them) from the hobby shop at the mall, Eldritch Wizardy (Baba Yaga’s Hut!) and the like, and some dice and some character sheets… and plucked I was, like a god damn E-string on Les Claypool’s bass. Or, more accurately for the time, Geddy Lee’s bass. I’d use some of the hardware from my first drum kit to help set up the play area, using the snare stand to hold the DM’s Guide for instance. That was really part of the awesomeness, setting up to play the game, building the perfect play area that 3 or 4 friends could sit around until 5 am, eating Ding Dongs and Cheetos and listening to Moving Pictures, and rocking the fire giant king’s face, getting all Vorpal on some dark elf’s ass.
By the time we were 16 or 17 and driving and stuff, we’d started making our own games, combining the overall depth and feel of AD&D with the combat system from DragonQuest and some stuff stolen from Champions, plus whatever comic book stuff we were reading then. But, you know, at a certain point when you’re 17 and have a license and, even better, another license with a somewhat different, more advantageous birthday on it (*cough*) there’s only so many nights you can devote to that. Plus we realized we were having more fun designing the rule sets and campaigns and characters than we were actually playing the game, which had already delivered a grievous injury to our enthusiasm by the time college, and everyone splitting up all over the place, killed it altogether. And, you know, since I’m ancient and stuff, I probably don’t need to mention that this was about a millenia before anything like Baldur’s Gate or NWN or any of that stuff was available (although conan on the apple ][ ruled so hard).
I still have my dice, and a few figurines, although I think I left my original set of the AD&D books at jorm’s place when we tried (with a remarkable lack of success, although the fried chicken was tasty) to play a module a few years ago. I can see the newer set of books on the shelf from here though; I picked them up when they came out a few years ago, even though I haven’t played since (outside of pc games, I mean). I guess it means that much to me, it was that important to me. How thoroughly goofy. Anyway, thanks, Mr. Gygax. Thanks for all of it.
I’ll deal with you invisible bitches later.
Roger Angell of the New Yorker wrote this a while ago. It explains something that I’ve given a lot of thought to, especially since, in my group of nerd friends in particular, I’m very well acquainted with the “amused superiority and icy scorn” phenomena and just how exceedingly fucking annoying it is to be condescended to about this.
Anyway.
“It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitive as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look — I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring — caring deeply and passionately, really caring — which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naivete — the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball — seems a small price to pay for such a gift.”
Of course, my nerd friends do care, as ardently as the most lunatic sports fan… about computer games. Which, apparently, aren’t “sports,” which I think is “bullshit.”
This doesn’t explain the phenomena of why most Raiders fans are unbearable assholes, or why most Boston fans period, of any sport, should have thier faces sewn to the underside of an elephant for a week or two.
(btw, I got that quote from the sports guy on espn.com.)
It’s always the little things. Although i’ve learned more about the way ruby handles path, and some of the FILE methods, than I really wanted to at the moment. Something odd is going on with the way a namespace for a method is getting referenced in a require, and I still haven’t figured it out. Dammit.
upgrade wordpress, all your settings get overwritten. and you get to wade through a .old directory trying to find the css files, or re-edit them. because why wouldn’t you want that?
Apparently I let my boneconductor domains lapse, and some scummy domain sales outfit just grabbed it last week. man, that’s irritating. I can still (and, in fact, just did) get the .net domain, but: annoying. And they want $650 for it! I guess it’s a better business model than actually working for a living. Still trying to mine that 1996 domain name bonanza, I guess. Ride that wave of the future, guys, I’m sure you’re all getting rich off of it.
Again, I say: losers.