Disclaimer: I was raised on a 2600. I was hooked from there on out.
I spend about a half an hour (...or an hour...) each night gaming with my four year old.
"Dad...Dad? Dad? Halo is a scary game, right? I can't play that game."
"No, Dad. I want to be Kit Fisto. The green one. Let's do the lava one. Where he turns into Vader. No..no..I'll be Anakin. You be Obi-Wan. Why doesn't Anakin like Obi-Wan anymore, Dad?" (And no...I didn't let him watch Sith. He got that from Lego Star Wars and "Star Wars H". "Star Wars H"? The History Channel Star Wars special, silly.)
"Dad..Dad? Don't use the Circle / Triangle with the bug anymore, Dad. I don't like that worm. Its scary."
"Its not 'Monster War', Mom. Its 'War of the Monsters.' "
"Dad...Dad! DAD! No, let me throw you. Okay, now let me throw this truck at you..."
"Let's fight Dooku, Dad. On the spaceship."
"When are we going to get enough points for the dragon monster, Dad?"
And he can only play after dark. Or if its raining. And he takes karate and is no couch potato. The time I spend with my son each evening is usually one of the best parts of my day. Especially when my two year old daughter sits down between us, grabs the extra (unplugged) controller and shouts: "I need my controwwer!" and proceeds to mash buttons enthusiastically.
"Again, if you were ever a Marine, you'd understand and agree with that. So unless you can post some proof of your service, I'll just keep thinking of you as a lying troll like that Josh guy in Missouri."
You miserable little swift-boater.
You've been to the sandbox. What a hardass.
MCRD San Diego, Recruit Class 2025, graduated August 20, 1993. Infantry School and Marine Combat Training October - December 1993. Rifle Security Company - Leeward, Guantanamo Bay, 1994. Alpha Company 1st Bn 2nd Marines Camp Lejeune, January 1995 - December 1997. Extended with unit to complete Mediterranean deployment.
Stationing at Guantanamo included maintenance of order when we took on thousands of Cuban and Haitian asylum seekers. We prepared for (and sat on the tarmac for three nights in a row, you smug prick) the invasion of Haiti and assistance with securing the American embassy. The Haitians wisely decided to invite the Army in instead.
Deployments with 1/2 to Panama, Korea, Okinawa, CAX at Twentynine Palms.
Mediterranean deployment included sitting off the coast of West Africa evacuating people from Congo / Zaire. My day on the beach was in the summer of 1997. We had received word that we were to storm a hotel in Freeport, Sierra Leone, and kill all the rebels holding it. The word changed. The rebels sat quietly while we took a Freeport beach and moved everyone out. They had torn up some Nigerians a day or so prior. They wisely thought it best not to attempt that with us.
To hell with you, swift-boater. Nice interpretation of the band of brothers and sticking up for the Naval service. It doesn't mean anything to you, you little fascist toad.
"Again, if you were ever a Marine, you'd understand and agree with that. So unless you can post some proof of your service, I'll just keep thinking of you as a lying troll like that Josh guy in Missouri."
You miserable little swift-boater.
You've been to the sandbox. What a hardass.
MCRD San Diego, Recruit Class 2025, graduated August 20, 1993. Infantry School and Marine Combat Training October - December 1993. Rifle Security Company - Leeward, Guantanamo Bay, 1994. Alpha Company 1st Bn 2nd Marines Camp Lejeune, January 1995 - December 1997. Extended with unit to complete Mediterranean deployment.
Stationing at Guantanamo included maintenance of order when we took on thousands of Cuban and Haitian asylum seekers. We prepared for (and sat on the tarmac for three nights in a row, you smug prick) the invasion of Haiti and assistance with securing the American embassy. The Haitians wisely decided to invite the Army in instead.
Deployments with 1/2 to Panama, Korea, Okinawa, CAX at Twentynine Palms.
Mediterranean deployment included sitting off the coast of West Africa evacuating people from Congo / Zaire. My day on the beach was in the summer of 1997. We had received word that we were to storm a hotel in Freeport, Sierra Leone, and kill all the rebels holding it. The word changed. The rebels sat quietly while we took a Freeport beach and moved everyone out. They had torn up some Nigerians a day or so prior. They wisely thought it best not to attempt that with us.
To hell with you, swift-boater. Nice interpretation of the band of brothers and sticking up for the Naval service. It doesn't mean anything to you, you little fascist toad.
You go ahead and say it you squid punk. I'd knock you on your ass. Your goddamn cheerleading for this idiotic war serves nothing but your own twisted excuse for a conscience. The closest you've ever been to the enemy was shining your brass in the engine room. And I'll tell that to your face.
There is no plan. Are you going to join the mass wave of conscription (see: Patton see: Second World War) to annihilate every Muslim who might possibly want to do us harm?
Or do you just like killing foreigners for the sheer sport of it? Do you like being used as a tool of a huge multinational corporation and consulting group making billions off this fiasco?
There's a difference between saving the free world and making sure Halliburton has enough contracts to make it shareholders happy.
I understand the requirements of warfare a hell of a lot better than you do. Thanks, but I'll take my guidance from sources other than a frat-boy draft-weasel flyboy and and an oil executive with "other priorities". I invite you to join the combat patrols as well. If getting those Halliburton profits up is worth dying for, you step right up, dixie-cup.
Have you actually ever been in the military? Have you ever been a police officer, firefighter or first responder?
This blithe "This is how war really is. People die." just stuns me.
I am a Marine enlisted infantry veteran. I never saw combat. Very close: armed men standing on the other side of a beach counts as close. But no combat. I apologize for the attack: you haven't the faintest idea what you are talking about.
This war was a lie. A huge, war-profiteering political scare-grab lie.
Here's a plan: you go on patrol.
You go on the death march knowing its just random chance you are going to live or die. You talk to your mom about your upcoming third tour and how you want your funeral. You leave your sister or mom in some foreign country because, since you are dead, you can no longer sponsor their citizenship request. You hold the hands of your children to explain why your husband was shredded by an IED. You hold the flayed corpse of your child after the passage of an American bomber. You do it. Quit talking. Do it.
I survived by the consequences of politics and chance. But I was up for it. You do it.
This makes me sick. You execute your plan. You sign up ten of your buddies and bite all you want. Show your backbone.
"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." James D. Nicoll
"There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation many never come again. But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?
We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."
It is a far better use of our energy than immolating each other while arguing about god.
Sign me up. I'll dig ditches for the launch pad if that's what it takes for me to be involved.
If I see anything other than that rubber suit with irridescent eyes that terrified me when I was eight, I swear I will burn my Starfleet Academy underpants.
I don't want to see any crap like that goofy thing wrestling with mirror-Archer.
And nobody crack wise about me burning the underpants with me in them.
"(I have an actual gaming router, linux based, that does prioritize xbox live, xbconnect, etc, and works great even when I'm bittorrenting the hell out of the connection)"
I'd be interested in seeing the specs or a guide on the configuration of such a device.
It would make a great ask-slashdot. How did you put the router together?
We seem -- in my observation -- to be devolving. Ignorance is rampant. Netspeak can be clever or self-parodying. However, I see it as a symptom. No regard for education or rational compositional writing. Consolidated mass media doles out drivel. The chief executive cannot by any rational standard be conceived of as an intelligible orator.
I know I am older and less tolerant of the young. There are approximately 73000 years between 20 and 35. I still contest that a larger portion of the population is losing its ability for rational and concise thought. Netspeak is merely a canary in our cultural coalmine.
sczimme: "Here is a hint: no one dies from lack of Internet access."
And yet...its a slippery slope. Hate to drop that cold war buzzphrase.
They hassle net cafes in China. Here ("USA!"tm) the Friendly Brothers of Inquiry can get a list of the books you check out from a library. Because you MIGHT be up to something...
Soviets used to hand-make books and burn copies of copies of copies of audiotapes to pass dissident information or --- music --- to one another.
I understand the non-equivalence of passing copies of Pasternak and getting the new episode of Galactica.
Domination of the flow of information is the key to political power. I know I'm ripping someone off and subconsciously paraphrasing that --- but who?
Or at least that's what my telescreen told me. I hate that traitor Goldstein!
Slashdot Mirror
Disclaimer: I was raised on a 2600. I was hooked from there on out.
I spend about a half an hour (...or an hour...) each night gaming with my four year old.
"Dad...Dad? Dad? Halo is a scary game, right? I can't play that game."
"No, Dad. I want to be Kit Fisto. The green one. Let's do the lava one. Where he turns into Vader. No..no..I'll be Anakin. You be Obi-Wan. Why doesn't Anakin like Obi-Wan anymore, Dad?" (And no...I didn't let him watch Sith. He got that from Lego Star Wars and "Star Wars H". "Star Wars H"? The History Channel Star Wars special, silly.)
"Dad..Dad? Don't use the Circle / Triangle with the bug anymore, Dad. I don't like that worm. Its scary."
"Its not 'Monster War', Mom. Its 'War of the Monsters.' "
"Dad...Dad! DAD! No, let me throw you. Okay, now let me throw this truck at you..."
"Let's fight Dooku, Dad. On the spaceship."
"When are we going to get enough points for the dragon monster, Dad?"
And he can only play after dark. Or if its raining. And he takes karate and is no couch potato. The time I spend with my son each evening is usually one of the best parts of my day. Especially when my two year old daughter sits down between us, grabs the extra (unplugged) controller and shouts: "I need my controwwer!" and proceeds to mash buttons enthusiastically.
Lighten up, Francis.
Notice how the guy who was using the AK47 was a corpse.
Interesting...
Okay.
Bye squid.
I hope I meet you one day.
I've got some clever double entendres for you.
I presume your little ganglia bundles are capable of reading subtext.
Posting this now to the correct location:
"Again, if you were ever a Marine, you'd understand and agree with that. So unless you can post some proof of your service, I'll just keep thinking of you as a lying troll like that Josh guy in Missouri."
You miserable little swift-boater.
You've been to the sandbox. What a hardass.
MCRD San Diego, Recruit Class 2025, graduated August 20, 1993.
Infantry School and Marine Combat Training October - December 1993.
Rifle Security Company - Leeward, Guantanamo Bay, 1994.
Alpha Company 1st Bn 2nd Marines Camp Lejeune, January 1995 - December 1997.
Extended with unit to complete Mediterranean deployment.
Stationing at Guantanamo included maintenance of order when we took on thousands of Cuban and Haitian asylum seekers. We prepared for (and sat on the tarmac for three nights in a row, you smug prick) the invasion of Haiti and assistance with securing the American embassy. The Haitians wisely decided to invite the Army in instead.
Deployments with 1/2 to Panama, Korea, Okinawa, CAX at Twentynine Palms.
Mediterranean deployment included sitting off the coast of West Africa evacuating people from Congo / Zaire.
My day on the beach was in the summer of 1997. We had received word that we were to storm a hotel in Freeport, Sierra Leone, and kill all the rebels holding it. The word changed. The rebels sat quietly while we took a Freeport beach and moved everyone out. They had torn up some Nigerians a day or so prior. They wisely thought it best not to attempt that with us.
To hell with you, swift-boater. Nice interpretation of the band of brothers and sticking up for the Naval service. It doesn't mean anything to you, you little fascist toad.
"Again, if you were ever a Marine, you'd understand and agree with that. So unless you can post some proof of your service, I'll just keep thinking of you as a lying troll like that Josh guy in Missouri."
You miserable little swift-boater.
You've been to the sandbox. What a hardass.
MCRD San Diego, Recruit Class 2025, graduated August 20, 1993.
Infantry School and Marine Combat Training October - December 1993.
Rifle Security Company - Leeward, Guantanamo Bay, 1994.
Alpha Company 1st Bn 2nd Marines Camp Lejeune, January 1995 - December 1997.
Extended with unit to complete Mediterranean deployment.
Stationing at Guantanamo included maintenance of order when we took on thousands of Cuban and Haitian asylum seekers. We prepared for (and sat on the tarmac for three nights in a row, you smug prick) the invasion of Haiti and assistance with securing the American embassy. The Haitians wisely decided to invite the Army in instead.
Deployments with 1/2 to Panama, Korea, Okinawa, CAX at Twentynine Palms.
Mediterranean deployment included sitting off the coast of West Africa evacuating people from Congo / Zaire.
My day on the beach was in the summer of 1997. We had received word that we were to storm a hotel in Freeport, Sierra Leone, and kill all the rebels holding it. The word changed. The rebels sat quietly while we took a Freeport beach and moved everyone out. They had torn up some Nigerians a day or so prior. They wisely thought it best not to attempt that with us.
To hell with you, swift-boater. Nice interpretation of the band of brothers and sticking up for the Naval service. It doesn't mean anything to you, you little fascist toad.
Bravo. Well said.
You go ahead and say it you squid punk. I'd knock you on your ass. Your goddamn cheerleading for this idiotic war serves nothing but your own twisted excuse for a conscience. The closest you've ever been to the enemy was shining your brass in the engine room. And I'll tell that to your face.
There is no plan. Are you going to join the mass wave of conscription (see: Patton see: Second World War) to annihilate every Muslim who might possibly want to do us harm?
Or do you just like killing foreigners for the sheer sport of it? Do you like being used as a tool of a huge multinational corporation and consulting group making billions off this fiasco?
There's a difference between saving the free world and making sure Halliburton has enough contracts to make it shareholders happy.
I understand the requirements of warfare a hell of a lot better than you do. Thanks, but I'll take my guidance from sources other than a frat-boy draft-weasel flyboy and and an oil executive with "other priorities". I invite you to join the combat patrols as well. If getting those Halliburton profits up is worth dying for, you step right up, dixie-cup.
Have you actually ever been in the military? Have you ever been a police officer, firefighter or first responder?
This blithe "This is how war really is. People die." just stuns me.
I am a Marine enlisted infantry veteran. I never saw combat. Very close: armed men standing on the other side of a beach counts as close. But no combat. I apologize for the attack: you haven't the faintest idea what you are talking about.
This war was a lie. A huge, war-profiteering political scare-grab lie.
Here's a plan: you go on patrol.
You go on the death march knowing its just random chance you are going to live or die. You talk to your mom about your upcoming third tour and how you want your funeral. You leave your sister or mom in some foreign country because, since you are dead, you can no longer sponsor their citizenship request. You hold the hands of your children to explain why your husband was shredded by an IED. You hold the flayed corpse of your child after the passage of an American bomber. You do it. Quit talking. Do it.
I survived by the consequences of politics and chance. But I was up for it. You do it.
This makes me sick. You execute your plan. You sign up ten of your buddies and bite all you want. Show your backbone.
heh. good point.
"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." James D. Nicoll
I'd like to know the etymological history on this. How did it go from punishing a legion unit to a euphemism for near-annihilation.
Crazy language.
I wish I had mod points.
Opta ardua pennis astra sequi.
"There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation many never come again. But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?
We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."
It is a far better use of our energy than immolating each other while arguing about god.
Sign me up. I'll dig ditches for the launch pad if that's what it takes for me to be involved.
Speak the truth...
Do NOT fuck with the Gorn.
If I see anything other than that rubber suit with irridescent eyes that terrified me when I was eight, I swear I will burn my Starfleet Academy underpants.
I don't want to see any crap like that goofy thing wrestling with mirror-Archer.
And nobody crack wise about me burning the underpants with me in them.
"Can you fashion a rudimentary lathe?"
I've got two words for you, tough guy:
Fuckin' a.
I direct you to this this obligatory nerd link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Taste_of_Armageddo
We should feel that war is so awful that we should seek to avoid it at all costs.
Notice I said "seek to avoid" not commit to passivity.
Actually, Sawyer also wrote along this line in his Neanderthal series.
This is a fictional Neanderthal dominated Earth where they have evolved a technological society.
Every action they make - their entire lives - is recorded. The recordings can only be accessed during legal proceedings.
I've read the first 1 and a half of the 3 books in the series. Pretty cool.
That is one of the finest damn posts I have read.
I look forward to breaking you out of one of the re-education camps.
With humblest apologies to Mr. Adams, whom I am given to understand is spending the decade dead for tax purposes....
Kansas: The existence of life is PROOF of the existence of Go..er..Intelligent Design!
Oolon Colluphid: And yet, if you have proof of supernatural creation, that denies faith in the Supreme Being's existence.
Kansas: Er...yes...well...you see, trickle-down economics shows---
Oolon Colluphid: And without faith, the Supreme Being could not exist, and could not have been able to create the Universe...including Kansas!
Kansas: Oh dear, I hadn't though of that... ***vanishes in a puff of logic***
Luke: I don't believe it!
"Companies try to make as much money as possible. If you don't like that, fine, but that's the way that this part of the world works."
Yoda: That is why you fail.
"(I have an actual gaming router, linux based, that does prioritize xbox live, xbconnect, etc, and works great even when I'm bittorrenting the hell out of the connection)"
I'd be interested in seeing the specs or a guide on the configuration of such a device.
It would make a great ask-slashdot. How did you put the router together?
I have to jump in and reinforce the opinion of the good Doctor on this.
You are the exception that proves the rule. I am even older. I clock in at the practically pre-Cambrian age of 35.
People...ok...Americans...USians...United Statians...er crap...
We seem -- in my observation -- to be devolving. Ignorance is rampant. Netspeak can be clever or self-parodying. However, I see it as a symptom. No regard for education or rational compositional writing. Consolidated mass media doles out drivel.
The chief executive cannot by any rational standard be conceived of as an intelligible orator.
I know I am older and less tolerant of the young. There are approximately 73000 years between 20 and 35. I still contest that a larger portion of the population is losing its ability for rational and concise thought. Netspeak is merely a canary in our cultural coalmine.
That was cool.
I think their research is basically accurate.
Nice post.
sczimme: "Here is a hint: no one dies from lack of Internet access."
And yet...its a slippery slope. Hate to drop that cold war buzzphrase.
They hassle net cafes in China. Here ("USA!"tm) the Friendly Brothers of Inquiry can get a list of the books you check out from a library. Because you MIGHT be up to something...
Soviets used to hand-make books and burn copies of copies of copies of audiotapes to pass dissident information or --- music --- to one another.
I understand the non-equivalence of passing copies of Pasternak and getting the new episode of Galactica.
Domination of the flow of information is the key to political power. I know I'm ripping someone off and subconsciously paraphrasing that --- but who?
Or at least that's what my telescreen told me. I hate that traitor Goldstein!
AMERICA HAS ALWAYS BEEN AT WAR WITH IRAN.
I just can't imagine that the universe could evolve conscious life that was incapable of exploring the universe around it.
Its totally irrational but I will die believing there is some method to engineer FTL travel.