We're talking about a VIRUS. Antibiotics are not effective against viruses. (In fact, one of the reasons that common antibiotics are becoming less effective is the phenomena of dumb-cluck mommas who insist Junior get penicillin every time he gets the sniffles.)
Tony Millionaire is a brilliant artist with a very dark streak. His weekly strip "Maakies" is about a suicidal, alcoholic crow and Uncle Gabby, his monkey buddy.
Yeah, yeah, fusion drives will open up the solar system and mining asteroids will all make us rich.
I've heard it all before, twenty five years ago when SF fans waddled around conventions wearing "L-5 in '95!" and "Lunar Mine in '89!" shirts and buttons reading "The meek will inherit the Earth, I'm going to live in space!"
Actually getting into space turned out to be harder than making better concept drawings of space colonies and coming up with triumphalist slogans for buttons.
You want our civilization to go to the stars? Raise your kids to be engineers! Let them read SF for inspiration, but not so much that they think that ranting about the Statists and Flatlanders and the Moon Treaty will do the trick. Make sure they learn calc and get good study skills and how to work with real-world materials and how to walk on dirt.
A contest that requires real-life rocket science! They have a different goal each year. E.g., this year they had to build a rocket that would safely launch and recover a fresh egg in a flight that lasted as close to sixty seconds as possible.
Teams of high school kids from all over the country participate. The best go to a national meet to compete with each other.
Clement's Ice World was set on a unthinkably frigid world where sulfur was a solid and liquified steam covered the surface!
It was Earth, of course. The protagonist was an alien scientist kidnapped by drug smugglers and forced to analyze a horrific drug they'd been buying from the natives. It's a juvenile, really, but enjoyable by adults as well.
It may not help in the end, but at least you'll feel like you did something while Homeland Security is dragging you away to have a NeuroDongle(tm) installed in your parietal lobe to keep your brain from processing non-DRM equipped media.
The useful idiots who repeat the spin and F.U.D. from the Global Climate Coalition, Club for Growth, Cato Institute and other tools of the fossil fuel industry have a huge variety of talking points at their disposal.
Many of these have been disproven, but they keep coming up. New ones occasionally replace them. But they all amount to the same basic concepts:
It's not happening!
It's happening, but it is not our fault!
It's happening, and it's our fault, but it's a good thing!
OK, It's happening, we're to blame, we're royally screwed, but the invisible hand of the market wanted it to be this way and just think of the investment opportunities!
Add final bits of realism to Nintendog experience
on
Review: Nintendogs
·
· Score: 1
Occasionally dump a mixture of vinegar, oatmeal, and bean sprouts on carpet, to simulate puke. My dog would never consider peeing or pooping indoors, but she thinks nothing of heave-hoing when the need strikes.
Whenever you head out the door, back a couple of small plastic bags. If you see a pile a dog crap, pick it up and dispose of it responsibly, all the while imagining that your Nintendog dropped the pile.
Several times a year, pretend your Nintendog is stick. Take your game unit to a local vet. Take a seat in the lobby, wait a half hour while looking at bags of overpriced boutique-brand dog chow, then give the receptionist a $50 check with instructions it be given to the local shelter or rescue group.
At the bottom: "People who write erotic versions of Star Trek, Where all the characters are furries, like Kirk is an ocelot or something, and they put in a Furry version of themselves as the star of the story."
Really! Early "Green Box" D&D sets came with little blocks of wood, a whittlin' knife, and a fountain pen to write the numbers.
It was really satisfying coming up with a perfectly shaped tetrahedron all on your own, and many old-timers rue the day that bastard Zocchi introduced his perfectly formed, gleaming jewel-dice.
True, carving dice had its drawbacks. It was really easy to end up with a d13, or a d20 that came up 19 half the time, so it was a good idea to bring that knife to gaming sessions to settle disputes.
Also, the staples that held the books together were put there by Arneson and Gygax themselves.
I can't bring myself to visit the SF & F section of bookstores often these days.
When I do, I'm struck by the large amount of "comfort food" fiction: Either outright fantasy, or fiction nominally set in the future but whose society and technology essentially duplicate that of a familiar and understandable past.
I've quoted this before, but it fits:
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous, and it is amoung the benefits of science that it equips the future for its duties."
Alfred North Whitehead, 1925
" . . . lack of imagination, failure of vision, ignorance of history . . . "
Damn straight.
American politics and culture seem dead set on crawling into the past where everything was swell and things made sense*, and when faced with something scary that might require sacrifice, imagination, and change, a class of professional blowhards, F.U.D. artists, and useful idiots rise to their feet screaming that there is no problem.
We're even losing our nerve when it comes to dealing with opportunities.
Stefan
* Assuming you were middle class, white, and didn't have a goddamn clue or did but didn't care.
* Can't stimulate estrus with hormones, as you can with other animals. (Doggy estrus is weird. I read about it while reading up on dogs prior to adopting one. Very complex process, and messy. Glad my pup is spayed.)
* Difficult to detect ovulation.
* Eggs are not ripe when they leave the ovary. They have to be nabbed as they travel through the fallopian tube, modified, and reinserted within a few hours.
If you ignore the glowing red eyes, caustic drool, and an unearthly howl that makes babies cry and causes normal dogs who hear it to lose bowel control, chew through their leads, and leap in front of FedEx trucks.
I live down the street from a giant Intel plant in Hillsboro, Oregon. When the weather is cool and I feel like I need the extra exercise, I walk the dog around the perimeter. It is a touch under four miles round trip and has its own wetlands area where beaver, ospreys, and coyotes live.
Immediately across the street is some more Intel land. It has Intel no trespassing signs, but is . . . well, not vacant. It is a clover field. Sometimes you can see tractors plowing it up or harvesting the stuff. I guess Intel leases the land to a farmer.
Around two of the sides are great big walls of blackberry bushes. These are considered weeds out there, but produce great whopping crops of blackberries. I picked about three gallons last year, enough to make three pies and twelve jars of jam. Technically, one of the white SUV security vans could bust me for picking the berries, but it seems a shame just to leave them for the birds.
Sorry, dude. You ARE a game designer. Live with it. You may not be a paid professional, but you are still a designer and the fact that people write and thank you for your work is a really good sign.
I don't play Neverwinter Nights, but:
One of my college professors had a cartoon taped to her file cabinet. It showed a badly drawn Charlie Brown sitting on a curb, chin resting on crossed arms, with a sour expression on his face.
In a thought balloon above Charlie's head:
"Getting a paper published is like pissing yourself when you are wearing a dark suit. You get a nice warm feeling but no one else notices."
I'm engaged in the game design version of this. I am writing INFORM text adventures.
I have one practice adventure finished; a haunted house adventure:
"Compiled" file for playing with Frotz or other Infocommish play engines:
I'm working on a much larger summer camp adventure. Actally had most of the text written, but put the files in a folder I didn't back up prior to getting this laptop serviced. Duh.
The kids writing Allen most likely have no real interest in game design. They're writing him because they had an assignment (e.g., "What is your dream career?"), spent a week playing video games instead of doing any research, and then the night before the paper's due-date did a Google search and pestered the first guy on the hit page with questions.
It's true. Those letters your aunt, grandmother, and that complete stranger who thinks you are their college friend because you have the same initials are the most reliable source of scientific, health, and political information:
Aspartame causes MS. Andy Rooney has definitive proof that the founding fathers wanted prayer in the classroom. Microwaving food in plastic causes cancer. George Carlin lays out why librals are dumb. Bill Gates wants to buy you a car for forwarding this email.
Slashdot Mirror
Aye, the horror
How soon will it be before SF conventions are overrun with people in knitted superhero and supervillain costumes?
Stefan "Not that there's anything wrong with that" Jones
I call bull on this damn fool.
We're talking about a VIRUS. Antibiotics are not effective against viruses. (In fact, one of the reasons that common antibiotics are becoming less effective is the phenomena of dumb-cluck mommas who insist Junior get penicillin every time he gets the sniffles.)
(I submitted this to McSweeney's Internet Tendency. It got rejected, so you'all get to suffer:)
Suggested Names for Bills Requiring Intelligent Design in Schools:
Trofim's Law
Global Laughingstock Initiative
No Child Left Secular
Equal Time for Unbelievable Bullshit Measure
Last Nail in the Coffin for Public Education Act
Irreducible Complexity Sophistry Initiative
Created for Excellence and Metric Elimination Bill
National Irrelevance Act
What . . . The . . . F***?
StefanJ
*** You see, 'kay?
Tony Millionaire is a brilliant artist with a very dark streak. His weekly strip "Maakies" is about a suicidal, alcoholic crow and Uncle Gabby, his monkey buddy.
Main site:
http://www.maakies.com/
Sometimes he goes far afield and does something strange and wonderful:
http://www.maakies.com/archive/m522.gif
Recent, typically morbid example:
http://www.maakies.com/archive/m553.gif
More:
http://www.maakies.com/frames/index.html
I now have a unignorable timer that keeps me from playing games too long:
My eighty pound Belgian Shepherd mix, who pummels me with her forepaws when she's decided I've been sitting around too long.
Stefan
Yeah, yeah, fusion drives will open up the solar system and mining asteroids will all make us rich.
I've heard it all before, twenty five years ago when SF fans waddled around conventions wearing "L-5 in '95!" and "Lunar Mine in '89!" shirts and buttons reading "The meek will inherit the Earth, I'm going to live in space!"
Actually getting into space turned out to be harder than making better concept drawings of space colonies and coming up with triumphalist slogans for buttons.
You want our civilization to go to the stars? Raise your kids to be engineers! Let them read SF for inspiration, but not so much that they think that ranting about the Statists and Flatlanders and the Moon Treaty will do the trick. Make sure they learn calc and get good study skills and how to work with real-world materials and how to walk on dirt.
Here's a cool place to start:
http://rocketcontest.com/
A contest that requires real-life rocket science! They have a different goal each year. E.g., this year they had to build a rocket that would safely launch and recover a fresh egg in a flight that lasted as close to sixty seconds as possible.
Teams of high school kids from all over the country participate. The best go to a national meet to compete with each other.
Stefan
Clement's Ice World was set on a unthinkably frigid world where sulfur was a solid and liquified steam covered the surface!
It was Earth, of course. The protagonist was an alien scientist kidnapped by drug smugglers and forced to analyze a horrific drug they'd been buying from the natives. It's a juvenile, really, but enjoyable by adults as well.
It may not help in the end, but at least you'll feel like you did something while Homeland Security is dragging you away to have a NeuroDongle(tm) installed in your parietal lobe to keep your brain from processing non-DRM equipped media.
Many of these have been disproven, but they keep coming up. New ones occasionally replace them. But they all amount to the same basic concepts:
Here's a nice analysis of the dubious claims made by Crichton in his speeches and in the footnotes of his novel State of Fear.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=74
Well, of course. Even geeks have a pecking order. Lore Sjoberg's "Geek Hierarchy" sums it up nicely:
http://www.brunching.com/geekhierarchy.html
At the top: "Published Science Fiction Authors"
At the bottom: "People who write erotic versions of Star Trek, Where all the characters are furries, like Kirk is an ocelot or something, and they put in a Furry version of themselves as the star of the story."
It isn't a matter of falling standards and laziness. It isn't the fault of too much TV or rap music.
There are forces in society who want science neutered and brought to heel.
"Intelligent Design," and the manufactured controversy over "junk science" . . . it's all part of a plan to:
You can find it all here, in a document called "The Wedge Strategy."
http://www.antievolution.org/features/wedge.html
Someone could make a drinking game out of this.
/. leads to someone posting a link to Michael Crichton ranting about junk science, take a drink.
For example: Everytime a discussion about science on
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous, and it is among the merits of science that it prepares the future for its duties."
- Alfred North Whitehead.
Really! Early "Green Box" D&D sets came with little blocks of wood, a whittlin' knife, and a fountain pen to write the numbers.
It was really satisfying coming up with a perfectly shaped tetrahedron all on your own, and many old-timers rue the day that bastard Zocchi introduced his perfectly formed, gleaming jewel-dice.
True, carving dice had its drawbacks. It was really easy to end up with a d13, or a d20 that came up 19 half the time, so it was a good idea to bring that knife to gaming sessions to settle disputes.
Also, the staples that held the books together were put there by Arneson and Gygax themselves.
I'd mod this up if I had the points.
I can't bring myself to visit the SF & F section of bookstores often these days.
When I do, I'm struck by the large amount of "comfort food" fiction: Either outright fantasy, or fiction nominally set in the future but whose society and technology essentially duplicate that of a familiar and understandable past.
I've quoted this before, but it fits:
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous, and it is amoung the benefits of science that it equips the future for its duties."
Alfred North Whitehead, 1925
" . . . lack of imagination, failure of vision, ignorance of history . . . "
Damn straight.
American politics and culture seem dead set on crawling into the past where everything was swell and things made sense*, and when faced with something scary that might require sacrifice, imagination, and change, a class of professional blowhards, F.U.D. artists, and useful idiots rise to their feet screaming that there is no problem.
We're even losing our nerve when it comes to dealing with opportunities.
Stefan
* Assuming you were middle class, white, and didn't have a goddamn clue or did but didn't care.
I really enjoy the Harry Potter books, and dread the wait for the next and last book in the series.
But lets get real: We're not talking about great literature or ground-breaking fantasy.
That said, I thought book #6 was the best since The Prisoner of Azkaban. A great read, but still not what I'd consider Hugo material.
Stefan
From the NYTimes story:
* Can't stimulate estrus with hormones, as you can with other animals. (Doggy estrus is weird. I read about it while reading up on dogs prior to adopting one. Very complex process, and messy. Glad my pup is spayed.)
* Difficult to detect ovulation.
* Eggs are not ripe when they leave the ovary. They have to be nabbed as they travel through the fallopian tube, modified, and reinserted within a few hours.
"a frisky, healthy, normal, rambunctious puppy."
If you ignore the glowing red eyes, caustic drool, and an unearthly howl that makes babies cry and causes normal dogs who hear it to lose bowel control, chew through their leads, and leap in front of FedEx trucks.
I live down the street from a giant Intel plant in Hillsboro, Oregon. When the weather is cool and I feel like I need the extra exercise, I walk the dog around the perimeter. It is a touch under four miles round trip and has its own wetlands area where beaver, ospreys, and coyotes live.
Immediately across the street is some more Intel land. It has Intel no trespassing signs, but is . . . well, not vacant. It is a clover field. Sometimes you can see tractors plowing it up or harvesting the stuff. I guess Intel leases the land to a farmer.
Around two of the sides are great big walls of blackberry bushes. These are considered weeds out there, but produce great whopping crops of blackberries. I picked about three gallons last year, enough to make three pies and twelve jars of jam. Technically, one of the white SUV security vans could bust me for picking the berries, but it seems a shame just to leave them for the birds.
Sorry, dude. You ARE a game designer. Live with it. You may not be a paid professional, but you are still a designer and the fact that people write and thank you for your work is a really good sign.
I don't play Neverwinter Nights, but:
One of my college professors had a cartoon taped to her file cabinet. It showed a badly drawn Charlie Brown sitting on a curb, chin resting on crossed arms, with a sour expression on his face.
In a thought balloon above Charlie's head:
"Getting a paper published is like pissing yourself when you are wearing a dark suit. You get a nice warm feeling but no one else notices."
I'm engaged in the game design version of this. I am writing INFORM text adventures.
I have one practice adventure finished; a haunted house adventure:
"Compiled" file for playing with Frotz or other Infocommish play engines:
http://home.comcast.net/~stefan_jones/Radley.z5
Source:
http://home.comcast.net/~stefan_jones/Radley.inf
I'm working on a much larger summer camp adventure. Actally had most of the text written, but put the files in a folder I didn't back up prior to getting this laptop serviced. Duh.
Stefan
The kids writing Allen most likely have no real interest in game design. They're writing him because they had an assignment (e.g., "What is your dream career?"), spent a week playing video games instead of doing any research, and then the night before the paper's due-date did a Google search and pestered the first guy on the hit page with questions.
I was hoping this would be about cosmic engineering and turning large stars into Twelve Burst Firestorm with Loud Report supernova fireworks.
It's true. Those letters your aunt, grandmother, and that complete stranger who thinks you are their college friend because you have the same initials are the most reliable source of scientific, health, and political information:
Aspartame causes MS. Andy Rooney has definitive proof that the founding fathers wanted prayer in the classroom. Microwaving food in plastic causes cancer. George Carlin lays out why librals are dumb. Bill Gates wants to buy you a car for forwarding this email.
All true!
Stefan