I do the same thing, though I'll admit to not knowing the long, sordid tale of methylthatthingy that you tell above. I learned the elements' symbols and names from this little quiz program that came in the games/ directory of my dad's old SCO server in his office. (I can't sing the Tom Lehrer song, though)
I end up apologizing for slipping "big words" into conversation, though they're not really big, and I couldn't "give you a big word" off the top of my head, I only notice when people get on my case about it. But saying "after seeing so much gore, you become inured to it" isn't the same as saying "after seeing so much gore, you become used to it". If you asked me where I picked up the word, I couldn't tell you, but English is a great language partly because we have so many near-synonyms and weird words, like eldritch or cthonic. Gives the language flavor.
I do tend to retain stuff, but it's seldom useful. Thanks to Cerebus, I have a fine understanding of the difference between inferring and implying (inference and implication), and some day I'm going to get to use the word "imbrue! to taint... to stain... imbrue!".
I don't think I ever really picked up a jumble of totally uninteresting data, but I do pick up little bits of things here and there. (For example.)
Teenaged. Not tennaged. Tennaging probably isn't legal in Australia. They probably have Anti-Tennagement Squads around every corner, ready to leap out and detain any deviant tennagers.
This is the same country where the age of consent for being in porn is sixteen, leading to an admonition I've seen in various places not to trust the United States-legality of anything you download from Australia?
Man, that's weird. And it'd be something of a bother, too, if porn came from porn stores and not too-trusting tennaged girls on the internet.
Really? Well-written Wikipedia articles captivate my attention, because there's a lot of interesting stuff out there.
Did You Know that Robert Heinlein invented the waterbed? He never built or patented it, but because of the descriptions he wrote in his books, an attempted patent on the design was turned down due to the existence of prior art.
Did You Know of the Boston Molasses Disaster? A tank of molasses exploded, sending a Crushing Molasses Wave traveling at about thirty-five miles an hour, and peaking at over eight feet in height, outwards through the north end of the city. This may be the weirdest disaster I ever read about.
Did You Know that, until the early 1980s, it was not known that peptic ulcers were mostly caused by the bacterium Heliobacter pylori? It was thought that ulcers were caused by stress and spicy food, and theories to the contrary were ridiculed. The Australian scientist Barry Marshall, to make a point, ingested a test tube of the bacteria, developed a rather nasty case of peptic ulcers, and cured himself with antibiotics.
Did You Know that Fritz Haber, the inventor of Zyklon B, was a German Jew who was actually forced to emigrate in 1934. (To be fair, it was intended for use as an insecticide, not as a weapon.) He had earlier been involved in the production and delivery of chlorine gas on the Western Front during World War I, at the Second Battle of Ypres. His wife committed suicide with his service revolver upon learning of the use of poison gas. (The Canadian forces fought through the gas using urine-soaked handkerchiefs as primitive gas masks. No joke. The ammonia neutralized the chlorine.)
Reading the encyclopedia is one of life's pleasures, I think. Bit by bit.
Seconded, most definitely. Girls who hate porn tend to be the type that would even consider having sex to humor someone. Yech. I collect pornography from the vasty wastelands of TGPs (mainly from sources like AskJolene and Tiava, which include a great deal of crap that I wade through) and send it forth to my beloved, who shows her appreciation via a hacked Dakota that I sent her. (There, I have dork credibility. Nyah.)
I went through a lot of my first girlfriend telling me I was "sick, disgusting and wrong" (that's a direct quote) before I found out that not all girls do that, and that I'm not, in fact, sick, disgusting and wrong. A lesson well learned---I shall never date another non-perv, ever again.
By the way, what's the 'ACT'? What country are you posting from, and what do you mean by 'real porn'?
That's impressive. Space programs need people like him. You get the feeling that if there had been a Boris Smeds around before the Challenger incident, things would have gone a bit differently.
However, the laws also allow for retribution, which generally means you turn over any profits to the copyright holder...
Hey, since those profits are in the form of media (you know, that part where they say that you've profited to the tune of $3 hojillion bucks because you've scored 300 mp3s), does this mean you just need to share your collection of Britney Spears and goat porn with them?
Seconded: Darin Morgan rocks my frickin' socks. A short, yet brilliant career. If you haven't, I'd recommend looking up the Millennium eps he wrote from season two: "Jose Chung's 'Doomsday Defense'" and "Somehow, Satan Got Behind Me".
"Once upon a time, two East Indian immigrants gave birth to a baby boy, whom they loved very dearly, yet nevertheless named 'Juggernaut Onan Goopta'..."
Well, you can read the scripts here and here, though reading them is a far cry from seeing the actual episodes.
Say what you will about Utilikilts, they make the ladies all hot 'n' bothered. I was unaware of this until I took my ladyfriend to the "Fetish Fair Fleamarket" in Boston, and she started gesturing and salivating at the men in kilts.
Also, they're remarkably comfy. I tried one on. Too bad they're like three hundred bucks.
'Course, the size of the deficit shrunk by an order of magnitude during his tenure in office. I'd call that at least noticeable---especially since if the debt grows slower than inflation, the debt is in effect decreasing. Assuming that inflation was greater than 0.36% for that last year, the nation ran an actual surplus.
That's 'Wesley'. 'Westley' was the Man in Black from 'The Princess Bride'.
I forget---is 'The Princess Bride' considered a dork thing? Chicks dig it, but so do geeks, and renfaire nerds are all over the fencing bits like white on, well, nerds.
I'll second that. With automation, we shouldn't have to work so many hours to produce the same value. So what gives? I'd like to be able to work three and a half days a week, taking long weekends and reading, writing on Wikipedia or watching porn. Maybe all at once.
Indeed; I have the "Best of Both Worlds" soundtrack for that reason. Strength is irrelevant. Resistance is futile. We wish to improve ourselves. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service ours. It ended up being a let-down, but man, was it ever fun while it lasted.
If you can't take a little bloody nose, maybe you had better go back home and crawl under your bed. It's not safe out here. It's wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross. But it's not for the timid.
And yet they do the technology so badly that they have to ignore the possibilities of what they've done in the past so that they can make the plot a challenge for the crew. (For example, no beaming a tasty blend of matter and antimatter into the middle of the Borg vessel, even though they can clearly contain antimatter for fuel, and beam people onto the ship.)
Somehow, Babylon 5 managed to have both shiny, shiny technology (PPGs! Jumpgates! Organic ships!) and yet do plenty of characterization and cultural stories.
The problem isn't an overemphasis on technology. The problem is laziness and a vision that extends no further than next week, and its (verterons|tetryons|nadions|omicrons|trekkions). This works fine for a soap opera; it's no way to build a universe.
The diversity-stifling corporate control of the media has formularised Star Trek into a soap-opera using scifi special effects; a genre in its own right, supplanting SF in the minds of the viewers and in the ecosystem of big-budget TV productions.
Exactly right. Trek isn't SF, and the sooner we can get rid of it, the sooner we'll be able to replace it with real SF.
Why would you tie the hands of a genius like Straczynski with the weight of too damn much shitty, contradictory continuity?
Justin Rye's commentary is a good place to start on it. At the bottom of most pages where it says "Star Trek does x wrong", it says "Babylon 5 did x right, and here's how".
For example, when the crew can beam onto the Borg ship, they can blast a few things with phasers, but don't think to bring, say, a five hundred megaton nuke into the center of the ship and set it to detonate as soon as they clear out. Babylon 5? (Spoilers for the end of season three here.) When Sheridan goes to Z'Ha'Dum, he brings nukes with him. Not "quantum torpedoes" or some treknobabble crap that doesn't sound ooh-we're-hippies-nuclear-scary, he brings a fucking nuke. (Well, two, for good measure.)
It suffers from the same problem that Xander's muscles did in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. How strong is Xander---does he get beat up by one regular vamp, or can he hold his own against an invading army of Turok-Han---"they are to the vampire what the Neanderthal is to humans"? It depends on how convenient it is to the plot.
The problem, in both cases, is giving someone way, way too much power, and having to nerf tham with stupidity because otherwise they'd be unstoppable. Which, incidentally, is why Batman rocks, and why Superman is a fucking tool. (For a list of Trek-tech which has to be ignored in subsequent episodes because they're overpowered, see here.)
Look, if you want brilliant SF, give JMS or Joss Whedon a fat check and a full season to prove themselves. Trek has become synonymous with SF. (I at least hope that 'Star Wars' has more of an association with fantasy than SF.) That needs to change. Netcraft Confirms---Trek Is Dying.
Indeed. I was unaware of the true degree of wankery on LiveJournal until I discovered the 'otherotherkin' community, which exists solely to mock the 'otherkin' community. You know, people who "identify" as dragons, pixies, humans who will some day actually get laid, elves or magical goats.
And though I don't like kids, it's sobering to see the level of discussion on the 'childfree' community, where it's frequently "I saw a child today, and did not tear off its face and eat it. Why am I so tolerant? They don't deserve my grace."
Or, you can read six thousand copies of the following message on 'sextips': "OMG I WAS PLAYIN WIT MY BF AN HE CAME IN MY B-BUTTON AM I PREGGERZZ?"
Ah, good times. At least there are the porn communities.
I just think it's ironic (this is irony, right? I remember that all the things in that Alanis song were in fact not irony) that Wikipedia has been experiencing some rather major server issues, recently resolved but not really explained to anyone outside of the server maintenance IRC channel.
While it was down, the OpenFacts status page was the place for immediate info, but the log of activity was kept on the 'wikitech' account on, you guessed it, LiveJournal.
Did you actually see what I linked to? It was a discussion on a talk page, much like this one, in which the issue of Larry Wachowski's alleged intersexuality is debated, and pretty solidly dismissed as unconfirmable rumor.
Would it have been more credible if I'd just pasted it in?
You could have learned more in school, because you were a dork with the capacity for it. I'm still a bit tweaked that I didn't learn more math in high school, because I gobbled up everything they taught me and there was nothing left.
You can learn same as you ever could, you just don't have someone imprisoning you in a McGulag for eight hours a day. (Well, depending on where you work...) It's a cheap excuse.
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I do the same thing, though I'll admit to not knowing the long, sordid tale of methylthatthingy that you tell above. I learned the elements' symbols and names from this little quiz program that came in the games/ directory of my dad's old SCO server in his office. (I can't sing the Tom Lehrer song, though)
I end up apologizing for slipping "big words" into conversation, though they're not really big, and I couldn't "give you a big word" off the top of my head, I only notice when people get on my case about it. But saying "after seeing so much gore, you become inured to it" isn't the same as saying "after seeing so much gore, you become used to it". If you asked me where I picked up the word, I couldn't tell you, but English is a great language partly because we have so many near-synonyms and weird words, like eldritch or cthonic. Gives the language flavor.
I do tend to retain stuff, but it's seldom useful. Thanks to Cerebus, I have a fine understanding of the difference between inferring and implying (inference and implication), and some day I'm going to get to use the word "imbrue! to taint... to stain... imbrue!".
I don't think I ever really picked up a jumble of totally uninteresting data, but I do pick up little bits of things here and there. (For example.)
--grendel drago
Teenaged. Not tennaged. Tennaging probably isn't legal in Australia. They probably have Anti-Tennagement Squads around every corner, ready to leap out and detain any deviant tennagers.
Once upon a time, I could spell...
--grendel drago
This is the same country where the age of consent for being in porn is sixteen, leading to an admonition I've seen in various places not to trust the United States-legality of anything you download from Australia?
Man, that's weird. And it'd be something of a bother, too, if porn came from porn stores and not too-trusting tennaged girls on the internet.
--grendel drago
Really? Well-written Wikipedia articles captivate my attention, because there's a lot of interesting stuff out there.
Did You Know that Robert Heinlein invented the waterbed? He never built or patented it, but because of the descriptions he wrote in his books, an attempted patent on the design was turned down due to the existence of prior art.
Did You Know of the Boston Molasses Disaster? A tank of molasses exploded, sending a Crushing Molasses Wave traveling at about thirty-five miles an hour, and peaking at over eight feet in height, outwards through the north end of the city. This may be the weirdest disaster I ever read about.
Did You Know that, until the early 1980s, it was not known that peptic ulcers were mostly caused by the bacterium Heliobacter pylori? It was thought that ulcers were caused by stress and spicy food, and theories to the contrary were ridiculed. The Australian scientist Barry Marshall, to make a point, ingested a test tube of the bacteria, developed a rather nasty case of peptic ulcers, and cured himself with antibiotics.
Did You Know that Fritz Haber, the inventor of Zyklon B, was a German Jew who was actually forced to emigrate in 1934. (To be fair, it was intended for use as an insecticide, not as a weapon.) He had earlier been involved in the production and delivery of chlorine gas on the Western Front during World War I, at the Second Battle of Ypres. His wife committed suicide with his service revolver upon learning of the use of poison gas. (The Canadian forces fought through the gas using urine-soaked handkerchiefs as primitive gas masks. No joke. The ammonia neutralized the chlorine.)
Reading the encyclopedia is one of life's pleasures, I think. Bit by bit.
--grendel drago
Seconded, most definitely. Girls who hate porn tend to be the type that would even consider having sex to humor someone. Yech. I collect pornography from the vasty wastelands of TGPs (mainly from sources like AskJolene and Tiava, which include a great deal of crap that I wade through) and send it forth to my beloved, who shows her appreciation via a hacked Dakota that I sent her. (There, I have dork credibility. Nyah.)
I went through a lot of my first girlfriend telling me I was "sick, disgusting and wrong" (that's a direct quote) before I found out that not all girls do that, and that I'm not, in fact, sick, disgusting and wrong. A lesson well learned---I shall never date another non-perv, ever again.
By the way, what's the 'ACT'? What country are you posting from, and what do you mean by 'real porn'?
--grendel drago
That's impressive. Space programs need people like him. You get the feeling that if there had been a Boris Smeds around before the Challenger incident, things would have gone a bit differently.
Ah well.
--grendel drago
However, the laws also allow for retribution, which generally means you turn over any profits to the copyright holder...
Hey, since those profits are in the form of media (you know, that part where they say that you've profited to the tune of $3 hojillion bucks because you've scored 300 mp3s), does this mean you just need to share your collection of Britney Spears and goat porn with them?
--grendel drago
Seconded: Darin Morgan rocks my frickin' socks. A short, yet brilliant career. If you haven't, I'd recommend looking up the Millennium eps he wrote from season two: "Jose Chung's 'Doomsday Defense'" and "Somehow, Satan Got Behind Me".
"Once upon a time, two East Indian immigrants gave birth to a baby boy, whom they loved very dearly, yet nevertheless named 'Juggernaut Onan Goopta'..."
Well, you can read the scripts here and here, though reading them is a far cry from seeing the actual episodes.
--grendel drago
Say what you will about Utilikilts, they make the ladies all hot 'n' bothered. I was unaware of this until I took my ladyfriend to the "Fetish Fair Fleamarket" in Boston, and she started gesturing and salivating at the men in kilts.
Also, they're remarkably comfy. I tried one on. Too bad they're like three hundred bucks.
--grendel drago
I was referring to the single fiscal year of 1999-2000. But you make a good point; gridlock makes for better budgets.
--grendel drago
'Course, the size of the deficit shrunk by an order of magnitude during his tenure in office. I'd call that at least noticeable---especially since if the debt grows slower than inflation, the debt is in effect decreasing. Assuming that inflation was greater than 0.36% for that last year, the nation ran an actual surplus.
Neener.
--grendel drago
That's 'Wesley'. 'Westley' was the Man in Black from 'The Princess Bride'.
I forget---is 'The Princess Bride' considered a dork thing? Chicks dig it, but so do geeks, and renfaire nerds are all over the fencing bits like white on, well, nerds.
--grendel drago
I'll second that. With automation, we shouldn't have to work so many hours to produce the same value. So what gives? I'd like to be able to work three and a half days a week, taking long weekends and reading, writing on Wikipedia or watching porn. Maybe all at once.
--grendel drago
"I knew I'd hate COBOL the moment I saw they'd used perform instead of do." --Larry Wall
'Nuff said.
Indeed; I have the "Best of Both Worlds" soundtrack for that reason. Strength is irrelevant. Resistance is futile. We wish to improve ourselves. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service ours. It ended up being a let-down, but man, was it ever fun while it lasted.
If you can't take a little bloody nose, maybe you had better go back home and crawl under your bed. It's not safe out here. It's wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross. But it's not for the timid.
--grendel drago
About the only thing TNG did well was actuall scary Borg (before the movie and Voyager messed that up).
Agreed. The post-"Descent" Borg are a damned joke.
--grendel drago
And yet they do the technology so badly that they have to ignore the possibilities of what they've done in the past so that they can make the plot a challenge for the crew. (For example, no beaming a tasty blend of matter and antimatter into the middle of the Borg vessel, even though they can clearly contain antimatter for fuel, and beam people onto the ship.)
Somehow, Babylon 5 managed to have both shiny, shiny technology (PPGs! Jumpgates! Organic ships!) and yet do plenty of characterization and cultural stories.
The problem isn't an overemphasis on technology. The problem is laziness and a vision that extends no further than next week, and its (verterons|tetryons|nadions|omicrons|trekkions). This works fine for a soap opera; it's no way to build a universe.
Stick a fork in Trek; it's done.
--grendel drago
Oh, and the money quote from Justin Rye:
The diversity-stifling corporate control of the media has formularised Star Trek into a soap-opera using scifi special effects; a genre in its own right, supplanting SF in the minds of the viewers and in the ecosystem of big-budget TV productions.
Exactly right. Trek isn't SF, and the sooner we can get rid of it, the sooner we'll be able to replace it with real SF.
--grendel drago
Why would you tie the hands of a genius like Straczynski with the weight of too damn much shitty, contradictory continuity?
Justin Rye's commentary is a good place to start on it. At the bottom of most pages where it says "Star Trek does x wrong", it says "Babylon 5 did x right, and here's how".
For example, when the crew can beam onto the Borg ship, they can blast a few things with phasers, but don't think to bring, say, a five hundred megaton nuke into the center of the ship and set it to detonate as soon as they clear out. Babylon 5? (Spoilers for the end of season three here.) When Sheridan goes to Z'Ha'Dum, he brings nukes with him. Not "quantum torpedoes" or some treknobabble crap that doesn't sound ooh-we're-hippies-nuclear-scary, he brings a fucking nuke. (Well, two, for good measure.)
It suffers from the same problem that Xander's muscles did in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. How strong is Xander---does he get beat up by one regular vamp, or can he hold his own against an invading army of Turok-Han---"they are to the vampire what the Neanderthal is to humans"? It depends on how convenient it is to the plot.
The problem, in both cases, is giving someone way, way too much power, and having to nerf tham with stupidity because otherwise they'd be unstoppable. Which, incidentally, is why Batman rocks, and why Superman is a fucking tool. (For a list of Trek-tech which has to be ignored in subsequent episodes because they're overpowered, see here.)
Look, if you want brilliant SF, give JMS or Joss Whedon a fat check and a full season to prove themselves. Trek has become synonymous with SF. (I at least hope that 'Star Wars' has more of an association with fantasy than SF.) That needs to change. Netcraft Confirms---Trek Is Dying.
--grendel drago
Indeed. I was unaware of the true degree of wankery on LiveJournal until I discovered the 'otherotherkin' community, which exists solely to mock the 'otherkin' community. You know, people who "identify" as dragons, pixies, humans who will some day actually get laid, elves or magical goats.
And though I don't like kids, it's sobering to see the level of discussion on the 'childfree' community, where it's frequently "I saw a child today, and did not tear off its face and eat it. Why am I so tolerant? They don't deserve my grace."
Or, you can read six thousand copies of the following message on 'sextips': "OMG I WAS PLAYIN WIT MY BF AN HE CAME IN MY B-BUTTON AM I PREGGERZZ?"
Ah, good times. At least there are the porn communities.
--grendel drago
Wait, what new licensing scheme? I didn't even think they'd rolled out the new lawyer-friendly TOS yet.
--grendel drago
I just think it's ironic (this is irony, right? I remember that all the things in that Alanis song were in fact not irony) that Wikipedia has been experiencing some rather major server issues, recently resolved but not really explained to anyone outside of the server maintenance IRC channel.
While it was down, the OpenFacts status page was the place for immediate info, but the log of activity was kept on the 'wikitech' account on, you guessed it, LiveJournal.
Sweet, sweet irony.
--grendel drago
Did you actually see what I linked to? It was a discussion on a talk page, much like this one, in which the issue of Larry Wachowski's alleged intersexuality is debated, and pretty solidly dismissed as unconfirmable rumor.
Would it have been more credible if I'd just pasted it in?
--grendel drago
... I just think you're the first person who would own up to being dorky enough to know how to spell it right.
--grendel drago
You could have learned more in school, because you were a dork with the capacity for it. I'm still a bit tweaked that I didn't learn more math in high school, because I gobbled up everything they taught me and there was nothing left.
You can learn same as you ever could, you just don't have someone imprisoning you in a McGulag for eight hours a day. (Well, depending on where you work...) It's a cheap excuse.
--grendel drago