People are morons
Did you know that the Moon is a spaceship where all of Tolkien’s elves (who are real, by the way) went at the conclusion of the Lord of the Rings?
Untitled (January 27, 2006)
Any of you gamers out there seen Fear of Girls?
It takes a Viking to raze a village.
Without meaningful content
Your 2005 Song Is
Boulevard of Broken Dreams by Green Day
“My shadow’s the only one that walks beside me
My shallow heart’s the only thing that’s beating”
In 2005, you bummed everyone out. Like you care.
What Hit Song of 2005 Are You?
Lazlo’s Chinese Relativity Axiom: No matter how great your triumphs or how tragic your defeats – approximately one billion Chinese couldn’t care less.
Untitled (January 13, 2006)
Deus
So much has happened in the last month, yet everything feels the same.
- I finished that web site for work, to very positive reviews, but no one reading this cares about the relatively obscure technologies upon which I labor.
- Fest happened. We played Dragon Quest VIII. It was the best fest game since Final Fantasy X, and I enjoyed it greatly, despite Akira Toriyama. (I wonder if Blue Dragon will feature a blue-haired character wearing a red bandana?)
- NOR moved in next door, but it’s too early to tell how different things will be. We have fairly incompatible schedules, so we may not end up doing too much joint DDR or other fun activities.
The one thing that has not happened for a month is Deus. Tonight’s the triumphant second half of the epic Monday/Wednesday joint adventure. I feel like I should be more excited, or like I should have prepared more, but nearly everything has been ready for over a month, so I’m feeling pretty mellow. Hopefully I’ll be more energetic once I’m in the same room with the fifteen other people.
Isolation
In the past three work days, I have accomplished less than 30 minutes’ worth of work on a web site I need to design. Part of the problem has been the new Deus Ultionis message board, and LiveJournal, but the most significant contributor is AIM. Despite my declaration that no talk regarding the gestalt game reach me over IM at work, at least three people have since discussed it with me at some length. I unfortunately do not have the willpower to rebuff these discourses—I enjoy talking with all of you too much.
As a result, I am cutting myself off from IMing at work starting now, indefinitely. I will try to be online more in the evenings and weekends when I am home, but I am pretty busy so no promises.
“It has been theorized that an infinite number of monkeys banging on an infinite number of typewriters would eventually reproduce the written works of Shakespeare. Thanks to the Internet, we now know this is not true.”
—Kurt Vonnegut
Solving problems, one by one
I am tackling the worries I complained about earlier!
Science as religion
I thought of a fun, hopefully-offensive-to-the-religious-right bumper sticker today:
Worries
This entry consists solely of me bitching about my life. However, enumerating my worries helps me to focus and defeat each one individually. If anyone is actually interested then that’s a bonus.
Anthropomorphizing mathematical concepts
(12:53:36) Paul: This program is offensive to the nature of natural numbers.
What makes good fantasy?
When Googling for information on epic fantasy (specifically, for a definition), I found an interesting article entitled Quality in Epic Fantasy that provides a thoughtful discussion of the current landscape of fantasy novel production, where many series go wrong, and how to avoid such problems. The author condemns the works of Jordan, Brooks, Goodkind and Eddings, while praising those of Tolkein, Martin, Ursula Le Guin, Sean Stewart, C. S. Lewis and Lloyd Alexander.
I also learned that “epic” fantasy means fantasy on a grand scale (Tolkein, Martin), while “high” fantasy means fantasy with high moral contrast (Tolkein and Lewis, but not Martin). (Everyone else probably knew that already, but it was enlightening for me.)
A litmus test
I saw the following license plate on the way to work this morning:
LV2FSH
What was the first thing you thought it might mean?
- “Love to fish”
- “Live to fish”
- “Leave to fish”
- “Leave two fish”
- “Level 2 fish”
Guess which one popped into my head first? Admit it—you thought the same thing, dork! (Apparently, I’m more of a dork than everyone else…) RPGs are the devil.
(Edited 2005 Nov 11 11:16)
Reconciling contradictory perspectives
I was discussing the topic of technological innovation with noonereally (regarding my previous post), and had a rather disturbing flash of insight.
Guns vs VCRs
Clay linked a great article illustrating the dichotomy between gun manufacturers, who are now completely protected from lawsuits by crime victims, versus media hardware and software creators, whose can be sued for “inducing” copyright violations, despite substantial noninfringing uses.
Next door
My next door neighbors, the ones living in the other half the duplex from me, have been going through very rough times this past year. The mother broke her hip and had to stop doing her daycare business. Worse, the father, who has diabetes, found out he had a rare form of leukemia that his doctor had been ignoring signs of since he mysteriously came down with flu-like symptoms weeks before. When it was finally caught, he was told he had to start chemo immediately, or be dead within two months. He did, and fortunately he is recovering really well. But he still can’t go back to work for a few more weeks. In the meantime, this family has five kids, at least three (I think four) of which are still living at home.
The Nintendo Revolution controller
I’m sure everyone’s already heard about the controller for the Nintendo Revolution. Personally, I think it will be awesome, as long as it can perform well. For those who haven’t seen the teaser video, I suggest watching it to get an idea of what Nintendo has in mind with this controller.
Penny Arcade linked an interesting article from Lost Garden a while back about Nintendo’s genre innovation. While the article does oversimplify some things, it makes a lot of insightful points about Nintendo’s strategy in the video game market.
More recently, David Sirlin, a bastion of reason in an insane world, posted his thoughts on the Revolution controller as well, and as usual I strongly agree with his sentiments.
“Nobody ever said people’s opinions have to have a footing in logic. That’d destroy the Internet as we know it.”
—Rhaka
The politics test
People like noonereally and withouttalent hit higher on the economic permissiveness than I did. It makes me wonder how much I really understand the consequences of corporate regulation. *shrug*
The Google alphabet
What do you get when you search Google for a single letter? Somewhere between 433 million and 8.12 billion results. Put ‘em all together, and you’ve got the Google alphabet! Sing along, everyone!
Required listening
Everyone should listen to this sound clip. It’s been around for quite some time, so my apologies if everyone’s heard it before.
After hearing it on Internet radio, it took me awhile to find the link (thanks to cirhosis for that).
I can't stop crying buckets of tears
The DDR machine at my house works again! It took the repair guy less than ten minutes to discover that it was a bad lamp ballast causing the fuse to blow (so fortunately the monitor was fine and didn’t need to be replaced). Bullseye Games has earned my respect and admiration. If you’re interested in playing DDR with me, give me a call.
I’m not tense, just terribly, terribly alert.