Grikdog's Blog

Browncoats

2012-02-02T11:06:00.001-06:00

The novel cover shown is pure fiction, but a lot of us would sure like to read it! (It's at deviant art somewhere. Personally, I think the tv series was tons lighter than the heavy-handed movie, Serenity. I'd be happy with pulp fiction, or well written fan fic if naught else.

Star Ocean Second Evolution (PSP)

2012-01-23T22:42:00.004-06:00

Wouldn't you know it? I forgot how to recruit Precis! She's in Linga, and Bowman is there to send you (usually to your death) in the caverns for some weed or other. But not Precis, after the initial foofarah with Robbie! Hmmmm...

Hospitalized by NASH!

2012-01-16T18:51:00.004-06:00

Hepatic encelphalopathy, i.e., confusion, apparently mild. My mind jitterbugging on the altars of entropy -- I forgot I was going cold turkey from pain patches (Duralgesic.) It's been five days now, and I can sleep without waking up in a space ship.

Nash is not a get out of a jail free card. It's still liver disease, and bacterial ammonia in your gut will do nasty things to your illusions of Selfhood.

Pithy Comments

2011-11-28T08:36:00.002-06:00

Was gonna. Pithed out.

Past dashing

2011-11-17T10:12:00.002-06:00

I thought I'd mention Aucassin and Nicolette, which like Goethe's Faust, I've never read. Another example of the disenfranchised brain simmering in modern genres. That old stuff makes peculiarly loverly trajjeddies, compared to Penn State locker rooms. Ye shall know them by their fruits.

Quasi War, 1798-1800

2011-11-16T14:27:00.001-06:00

U.S. Frigate Constellation

Ok, there we are back in history. We fought the Revolutionary War against the British. We fought the War of 1812 against the British. And.....

We fought an obscure marine conflict called the Quasi War in 1798 to1800 against the ... uh ... French. Our ally, where Benjamin Franklin was our ambassador. I just found out about it last week. I'll be 67 years old next Sunday.

Just found out about it! What a great school system we've got. Americans are nuts.

Big Bang Theory tie-in

2011-10-30T12:05:00.015-05:00

A poster similar to this can be seen on Wolowitz's bedroom wall in the übernerd comedy series Big Bang Theory.

Oddly enough, if you never knew or can't remember the extreme parkour based Mirror's Edge, the name of the game, there's no way to find the image on the Cortex. I had to browse used ps3 dioramas at our local videogame stores.

Mirror's Edge is attractive to look at, but at first blush only teenagers have the reflexes to play it. The game is also fast-paced, and needs many iterations and some patience to get through tetchy difficult passages. Running on walls, e.g., is not natural even for real life parkour nuts.

Halloween Costume

2011-10-27T10:49:00.001-05:00

Maybe I'll go as clone 17 of my 66th annual clone. That would explain the anomalies I've been wondering about lately...

Professor Layton and the Last Specter

2011-10-19T10:47:00.007-05:00

London Life

Fans of the first three Professor Layton games may be disappointed by the fourth.

The new game is a prequel.

The voice acting is "off" -- Layton is not the original.

The story is linear.

The artwork varies from clever to amateurish.

There is a "London Life" mini game embedded on the same chip as the game proper, which suggests not enough space to develop either game fully.

So... At first blush, "Last Specter" earns a B- for tedium and lack of effort. Buy the new Terry Pratchett book instead.

Mac "gestures"

2011-10-14T09:53:00.004-05:00

One thing I despise about the new Lion Mac is the way the screen suddenly slides out of sight to left or right, or else evaporates up or down. I think they call this behavior "gestures".

I hope so. I have a gesture to add to the Lion repertoire. Middle finger. Straight up.

Fortunately, the Mouse settings under System Preferences can turn the most obnoxious bits of this "feature" off. Which I blame on Steve Jobs.

Another Pratchett book??!

2011-10-10T10:00:00.002-05:00

My wish list just got longer...

Pratchett has an interview with Neil Gaiman you might like to get into.

The last gorgeous day of Fall

2011-10-09T16:23:00.002-05:00

We played bocci with friends in Bever Park under a sapphire sky, a gentle breeze flurrying leaves of a topaz maple. I sat in a cloth foldaway chair in the warm sunlight, basking in the inexplicable regard of actual friends and family. (I'm the philosopher with the doofus sunglasses on me fore 'ead.)

Full fathom five, thy father lies

2011-10-06T11:17:00.009-05:00

Apple Lisa

As I recall, the Apple Lisa we sold out of Beacon Microcenter in Ames, Iowa shipped with SCO Xenix and our sales staff had to make a big deal about "Yes, Xenix really is Unix." I knew as much when I first heard those SCO daemons chuckling softly to themselves. A new experience for me, but if Linus Torvalds did not exist, it would have been necessary to invent him.

This was back in the Eighties, after the death of SOS /// (which couldn't support Corvus networks without picking up aviation radio signals and crashing in financial ruin), before the 1984 girl hit our screens with the revolutionary Mac. All Steve Jobs, whose vested interest in forgetting about Lisa is a bit murky, at best.

Unlike the real Apple innovators (Steve "Woz" Wozniak, Andy Herzfeld, at al.), who could be optioned into obscurity, SCO's claims to bits of the Apple venture were owned by the California Board of Regents. Jobs dissociated himself from failure faster than a speeding bullet.

Sanctions against American citizens

2011-10-03T11:19:00.013-05:00

So, we wiped out the fugitive Anwar al-Awlaki, a United States citizen who advocated terrorism and was no fan of his own country.

There's precedent. We did the same to John Wilkes Booth.

What a mess!

2011-10-01T10:23:00.000-05:00

I poured a 12 oz glass of orange juice on my Dell Inspiron laptop's keyboard the other day. The keys are stuck, the motherboard is fried, and I am both livid and depressed by own ineptitude.

We bought an iMac to replace the laptop, and I am cudgeling my brains to remember various logins and passwords which were, courtesy of Mr. Murphy, not backed up.

I have to say, I am no fan of Safari, the new dock, or "Spotlight". Years of Ubuntu have trained me to a particular Look & Feel, and this ain't it.

Browncoats Anonymous

2011-09-19T09:29:00.013-05:00

"Animated series"...?? I don't know what that is, but I'm for it.

Firefly the TV series is way over the top, the best space opera since Indiana Jones Meets Star Wars.

Serenity, the direct-to-dvd movie remake, is the perfect example of ignorant exploitation, Reaver Rape & Pillage at the hands of Fox producers. River, Reaver... Get it?

To be specific, in the TV series the bad guys came two by two (with hands of nitrile lab gloves blue). The Alliance was just a foil, the thing the Browncoats lost to during the recent insurrection. The Reavers are one boat, one insane survivor, one bit of eldritch plot twitch. River Tam is the magic child, a standard role in Japanese anime, and Firefly gently teases out her gradual reveal, the same way other characters are slowly brought to light, such as He's No Shepherd Book. The TV series is, on occasion, screamingly funny. River fixing the Bible, for example, to the consternation of Shepherd.

The move is River Tam, Warrior Girl, who battles Reaver packs, Blue Zone assassins and Alliance squads which are just following orders. Beautiful, yes. And yes, Firefly fans do buy Serenity — and loathe themselves for it.

Like the lovebot quoting Mr. Universe marvelled in disbelief, "He killed me Mal, he killed me with a sword. How weird is that?"

Firefly, five stars.

Serenity, two.

Whoa, check THIS out!

2011-09-15T11:25:00.005-05:00

Release date is October 17, and it's on my wish list!

Aliens Amongous

2011-09-12T10:23:00.005-05:00

It must be fun to be from somewhere else. Alas, I am from right here.

I need more Firefly (no aliens, just cowboys.)

Department of Glib Quotations, and so forth...

2011-09-02T15:23:00.006-05:00

It must be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to plan, more
doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage, than the creation of a
new system. For the initiator has the enmity of all who would profit by
the preservation of the old institutions and merely lukewarm defenders in
those who would gain by the new ones.
— Machiavelli

In Fallout 3, looking for Wehrner's hiding place in the Steelyard, ho hum. Very difficult to care about these denizens. The good guys are bad, the bad guys are badder, the "find an ingot" game is boring and unrealistic. There's not actually any interaction in these games. You can't ask question, make choices, enlist help or decline to perform every kabuki-like step of a "mission (if you chose to accept it). In fact, the games get tiresome, especially Fallout New Vegas, where you can obviously obtain schematics for homebrew firepower, somehow, but the wherewithal does not present itself easily.

First day of September two thousand and eleven

2011-09-01T09:49:00.013-05:00

I have been much bemused of late in noticing that Boing Boing dot net has become so seldom relevant to anything these days. A nursery of new ideas has burgeoned, leaving them firstborn in the dust.

Moreover, I learned on Nova last night that human mothers abandon or kill their infants more often than any other primate on the planet. Mary Poppins, anyone?

Babies, it turns out, have advanced facial recognition software keenly attuned to Mom and personal survival.

Ummm, yes. "It takes an entire village to raise a child..." [Subtext — it's not my problem!] does seem a bit self-serving, does it not? This begs the question, are dumb blondes cannily advertising their fitness to be caring, loving mothers?

Allahu Aqbar

2011-08-29T17:07:00.004-05:00

A cable documentary about Al-Qaeda last night remarked that "Allahu Aqbar" means "Allah is greater." Spock-like, my eyebrow arched over this low-voltage disinformation, as I recalled that this particular cable channel is far more widely recognized as a world authority on UFOs, crop circles, bigfeet and alien sea monsters from other worlds.

Allahu Aqbar is not a "jihadi warcry." That is like saying the rosary is a "Catholic prayer for fortitude, mercy and strength of character."

Allahu Aqbar is sung from the minuets during every call to Muslim prayer, five times a day. The phrase means "God is great" or "God is greatest" but never "God is greater." The latter mistranslation is heretical and borders on blasphemy, if uttered in full consciousness of its meaning. God is incomparable.

The heretical version (comparative rather than superlative) is put about to push buttons, create cannon fodder, and fan the flames of Crusade, God knows why.

We Americans are ftupid, and have been ftupid fince the ratification of the Conftitution, so rabid hatred of Moslems is not unexpected. What is suprising is the same attitudes in intelligent heads, like Ann Coulter's. It makes you wonder if there's a Satan after all. Hell is easy, we make that ourselves.

The St. Francis Prayer for Peace comes naturally to mind at this point.

Backed into a corner...

2011-08-26T10:47:00.008-05:00

NCR's no-nonsense Col. Cassandra Moore

I'm beginning to think Team Bethesda didn't really think through all the possible endings for Fallout New Vegas.

I hated the Yes, Man endings. And I really dislike the Colonel Moore endings. What a bloodthirsty wench she is! She ordered me to assassinate the Great Khans, but I'm on good terms with the Khans. I've exterminated all the Fiends who were their drug buyers, including Vault 3's Motor Runner, and by applying slow pressure on myself to get my Speech stats high enough, managed to convince Jack and Diane to get into the Bathtub Stimpaks business instead. That was good.

Moore insists on Papa Khan's demise. So I quietly blew his head off, sadly, with regret, because Papa Khan has a really good point. If you forget history, you'll repeat it. Especially, e.g., the NCR massacre of the innocents at Bitter Springs. Ask around, not even NCR troops who were there agreed with that slaughter.

Apparently Moore now wants the rest of Red Canyon wiped out, or the game will not advance to conclusion. What if I blow her away instead?

I'm beginning to wonder if this is a game or a real-life CIA experiment in civilian mind control slash wartime ethics.

Not to change the subject, but after 250 hours of petty harassment by Legion flunkies, I decided to wipe out the Legion Fort and assassinate Caesar. This is apparently not easy, to read the crybaby posts at IGN and elsewhere. I did it after cleaning out Dead Wind Cavern. Piece of cake. Thanks, Brotherhood of Steel, for small mercies.

Now, my XP is maxed out at level 40. There's nowhere to go but back to mundane existence. The Fallout franchise always disappoints with their endings. Or lack thereof.

OMG!

2011-08-22T10:49:00.003-05:00

One of my daughter's friends is a kid who beat Fallout New Vegas in three days! It took her all of 20 hours. She liked the Legion costumes, so she won playing as one of the bad guys.

Cherry Bombs or Dynamite?

2011-08-20T13:30:00.010-05:00

Fallout 3 had lots of cherry bombs, which meant you could assemble one of the best weapons-in-a-lunchbox ever devised, the Bottlecap Mine. The joke was how awesomely effective it was for such little sister ingredients; you could take out a Deathclaw, providin' only you got the wee beastie steppin' on it.

By contrast, Fallout New Vegas majorly skimps on every kid's favorite toilet joke, and goes straight for the dynamite. Which is dirt cheap. Need some dynamite? No problem! Just go murder a few Powder Gangers, and right away you've got yourself a dozen or so sticks of Doctor Nobel's Patent Equalizer. The other ingredients listed in the Patriot's Cookbook (over here in unreality that's known as the Anarchist's Cookbook) are commonplace.

Lunchboxes were a bit rare in F3, but they're ubiquitous and virtually useless in FNV without five very rare cherry bombs. I'm sure the Bethesda Gods and Goddesses are laughing their collective backsides off over that one. So unfair, 'ey?

Time Bombs are a joke. Go to the trouble of building one of these babies, and you'll wonder why you bothered. It detonates in 15 seconds exactly. You can harvest better proximity hazards off the Legion assassination squads.

Dumb. Has anyone actually played Caravan?

Meanwhile, Back At The Wrong Branch

2011-08-15T11:31:00.002-05:00

I got fed up with Fallout New Vegas and decided to end it all with the Yes, Man variation. Right away, that cheerful visage should have told me something about the quality of my choices.

I've seen enough.

Bachman Bump, Yesterday's Nuze

2011-08-14T14:58:00.012-05:00

Yah, I live in Baja Minnesota, where the Republican "straw poll" is a media shibboleth of sorts. I have no idea why anyone would take a $30 a pop fundraiser seriously, or pseudomagically confound it with an actual Iowa caucus, not even an Iowa Republican caucus.

It's not illegal to buy straws, or polls, in Iowa. Anybody can do it, including Michele Bachman's flacks. This was a non-event, except for the media feeding frenzy. Can't begrudge that, of course. Stop by and spend money here anytime.

Iowa is to Republicans as flypaper is to greasy spoon diners, especially in August. Bachman was expected to win, given the low expectations all savvy punditry accords this non-event. She did. Check, please.

As far as Bachman herself goes, I subscribe to the White Queen Theory. That's the notion that the daughters of all powerful white uppercrust men have been bred from birth to believe six impossible things before breakfast at least since the Pelopennesian Wars. The more brilliant of them, such as Ann Coulter, are trained to utter scintillas of incendiary cadetry over dinner, to amuse their potential mates and partners. Hey, whatever works at the inbred end of the gene pool.

Beautiful Day

2011-08-10T00:53:00.000-05:00

Very equable, moderate temperature, low humidity, nice and breezy... All the windows wide open for the first time in weeks! Gorgeous.

Black Triangle

2011-08-08T11:33:00.001-05:00

It's been awhile, so I've forgotten exactly what year it was. There was still a gas station at the corner of 13th Street and Grand Avenue in Ames, Iowa. Maybe 1976 or 1984, or thereabouts.

I lived a couple of blocks from that corner, and walked up to the gas station in the calm of one starry summer's night to buy a pack of Winstons. I happened to look up. I saw something that baffled my eye.

It was a black triangle headed due north, blotting out the stars. It was utterly silent. My perception rearranged itself. Was that really much higher than it appeared, to make no noise? If so, it was huge, larger than a battleship. It was a flying machine, silently gliding north.

I've flown in two-seater small planes. The noise is deafening. I should have heard the roar of a jet, the growl of a small plane. There was nothing there, no noise at all. It wasn't a glider; there are none of any size that blot out the stars.

Just sayin'.

Boing Bonk

2011-08-04T14:52:00.005-05:00

Update: Figured out their mysterious update, so I'm following bb again.

I used to find BoingBoing.net, the webzine, sort of interesting. They changed how to leave a comment, though, in a mysterious sort of No Lusers Allowed tea-and-armpits sort of way that gave me at least the paranoid impression they were not seeking witty user repartee and riposte so much as data mining. (Who the blazes is disqus.com?)

So don't scrape my butterdish, Xeni Jardin. Boing who?

Quiet! Don't scare the fish!

2011-07-31T14:16:00.026-05:00

The biggest fish I ever caught was a largemouth bass out of my great uncle George Dana's farm pond near Olathe, Kansas, about 1960. I used a spinning reel with the first fishing lure I ever bought. Normally, I'd use a cork bobber and a night crawler, like the rest of the family, and we'd haul in a decent fishfry, mostly bluegills and a few small catfish. My grandmother refused to gut and clean the catch, but she fried a great dinner.

Fishermen raised in lesser traditions have sneered at my technique.

My dad, an AIQ veterinarian and microbiologist who worked for the USDA at the NADL lab in Ames, Iowa, remained a farm boy his entire life. I was a suburban kid in what I would now classify as the "poor intellectual" class, and that meant I didn't actually know squat about the Great Outdoors. I never shot nuthin' with my .22 LR single shot Savage, and other than what I caught on a bamboo pole in Kansas farm ponds, I knew nothing about fishing. Later in life, I bought a spinning reel on a good graphite rod, and caught more bluegills. I've had more fishing licenses than fish, though.

Enter the Playstation PSP videogame, Rapala Trophies. Rapala is a real company that sells real fishing tackle, started by an old geezer in Finland in 1936. Therein lies a contradiction.

Most fishermen during and since the Pleistocene have caught fish to feed themselves and their families. Rich fishermen catch fish because they're bored and seek entertainment. Fish for their tables comes frozen, or at the supermarket on ice if it's relatively fresh and flown in from the big catfish farms of the American south. Rich fishermen buy tilapia. Poor fishermen catch slimeheads. It's the same fish.

What canny old Lauri Rapala did with that first fishing lure of his was cast it into limpid pools of filthy rich ubanity and hook his first million, selling to fishermen. You've got it! Rapala Trophies is an old joke in new clown shoes: "Fancy lures catch fancy fishermen."

The PSP game marketed by Rapala is designed to barb fishing newbies in the cheek and get their bucks. It's pure Izaak Walton that one's bait should match the time of year, the weather and the catch, and never swear at the one that got away, for never having had it to hand, it cannot be lost. I came off relatively unscathed. I bought the game for ten bucks used, half the normal price.

I do have a gripe or two about the bait. First of all, the "guide" has a head-thumping nasal twang as obnoxious as a Billy Mays sales pitch. Secondly, real nature does not come with elevator music. Third, the profile characters all wear jeans that display a butt like two bocci balls. Scaled up on the women. Bowling balls, fore and aft. Country thugs and bullies, for the most part, who eat their fish raw, right off the hook. The women characters look like Dukes of Hazzard jailbait, except for broad-shouldered women who crack wise in the pineywoods. "Oh, yeah?" The fish win these contests because they have higher I.Q.s than the fisherpersons. Or the developers. Case in point, how do you "Save your profile" with no freaking SAVE option? Dumberer than dumb. (There is a save option in the Tournament section. Doesn't save a Free Fishing profile, though.)

But, to wax philosophical for a moment, everything good said of fishing can be said of golf. Which is the truer abstract of the human condition? Fishing, which destroys the fish? Or golf, which destroys the golfer — by inches?

I'll probably sell Rapala Trophies back to the store one of these days.^† Or, possibly, break that UMD disk apart and rub the round silvery bit on a sidewalk.

I think I liked Ocarina of Time's version of virtual fishing better.

^†Done, for a dollar.

How to pester a deathclaw

2011-07-29T17:13:00.006-05:00

Apparently, the powers that be have decided the deathclaws that infested Fallout 3 are too easy-going for Fallout New Vegas. There's only one sort in F3, but numerous varieties in FNV, each more aggravating than the last.

The new deathclaws form family groups. There are huge Mother deathclaws, quite large Alpha Male deathclaws, basic deathclaws, and baby deathclaws. These canny marauders infest rocky locations, and all types share a propensity to leap, maul and mangle before you're aware they're near by with excellent stealth skills. (There are also Blind and Legendary variations.)

There are only two survival strategies. First, stay far away. And second, take high ground and snipe them with the best long range weapon you've got. These are two: The YCS/186 unique variant of the Gauss rifle, and the .50 caliber Anti Material Rifle. Both are scoped, and both are deadly enough against deathclaws, if you're patient.

Beware. Fully-grown deathclaws can disappear from view. Think raptor pack tactics in Jurassic Park.

Occasionally, you may encounter solitary deathclaws, or a pair of them. In this case a light machine gun can be effective, provided the beasties are distracted by your companions, such as Veronica, who prefers Pushy to any other melee weapon, and ED-E with ranged laser.

By the way, don't overload Veronica with extra inventory. She has a tendency to hang back if her agility is impaired by superfluous weight.

I see dead people

2011-07-25T13:49:00.012-05:00

Deathly Hallows Part 2 clearly wasn't the last bit of Pottery J. K. Rowling wrote. There were too many unexplained deaths, for one thing — including every horcrux^† in the books, one by one. Truth? I didn't even care enough to pillory this dreck.

I suspect the books are much different than the movies, especially considering that Rowling seems well able to keep a sense of continuity in the few examples of her writing I actually slogged through, books I and II. The actors were brilliant, and when allowed could save any disconnected, underwritten Kloves and Yates scene in the finales (there were two.)

Luna had a terrific line, then disappeared for so long she might as well have been killed off like half the Weasley twins.

Voldemort flaking away in the breeze? Unintentionally comic Malfoy body language? Sorry, I need to bang my head on the wall at platform 9 ³/₄...

^†Unwilling persistence of bee leaf forces us to admit the snake is a... (caff) ... "horcrux." Sweet literary bat of belfries!

The Philosopher's Gallstone

2011-07-20T12:39:00.006-05:00

British author J. K. Rowling's god-given gifts, besides more head shots than a platoon of Navy Seals, apparently include a nearly-infinite power to conjure up that which Alfred Hitchcock affectionately dismissed as The McGuffin, the lowly Plot de Weiss. Must we enumerate?

To begin then, the Philosopher's Stone (or Sorceror's Stone for the benefit of benighted Americans unfamiliar with either alchemy or the love of knowledge.) The Magic Wand. The Core of same. The Time Turner! The Sword of Griffindor. The Gourd of Swiffendor (just kidding.) The Cup of Hufflepuff said ten times fast ... Ah, truly magical! Prediction Globes! The Portkey, an entire class of dissimilarities, that. The Horcruxes, or possibly Horcruces. And of course, the Deathly Hallows, so called because such a plot device is deadlier than Hamlet's last act.

I skipped a few of the teen angst movies. Will rejoin the fam to observe Deathly Hallows 2 on Sunday. Hopefully, J. K. will become filthy rich enough to bail out Greece.

Fallout New Vegas' missing goals

2011-07-19T13:02:00.007-05:00

After two weeks of manic, obsessive play, I've burned out on Fallout New Vegas. All the humor and grace notes that marked Fallout 3 are missing, so dang if I can figure out what FNV is all about. I'm on level 23 28, and maybe the only burning issue left for me is how to survive an attack by three or four (or more) deathclaws and put Quarry Junction on the map. I've got the anti-material rifle, so maybe that's the clue.

Can't say I care enough to find out. In Fallout 3, the more familar you got with super mutants, the more whimsical they became. Super mutant conversations heard in passing eventually became hilarious, but they were still murderously inconvenient. Except Fawkes. And Uncle Leo, the super mutant with a Socratic turn of mind.

In FNV, the only similar turn of events is the blind deathclaw wandering in a cave, and Jas' hint about shooting them in the eye. Red herring? An inferior game, anyway, compared to Fallout 3.

[Update] Since posting this, I found the gauss rifle. May keep playing a bit more.

Idiot Me

2011-07-18T11:19:00.005-05:00

I watched an eternity of FIFA Women's World Cup soccer yesterday afternoon, rooting for Japan but pretty certain the US would win it. Well into the second half, the first US point finally sailed into the back corner of Japan's net. Well, thought I, that's that, and changed the channel.

This morning I read that Japan won the match on penalty kicks. Hit me in the head with a hammer. I'm stunned.

Absurd quest...

2011-07-15T11:07:00.006-05:00

I stumbled on this book (which gives a permanent +3 boost to Survival) whilst staggering about the hills looking for a way around the gate on the south end of Mojave Outpost. I like the CliffsNotes™ styling and b&w vanity press production values. So like Moira......!

There's a "Prepare to Stop" arch on your way NE, back up I-15 to Mojave Outpost. The surreal rolling hills and unnatural mirage-like textures on the southwest side of the gecko hills are worth finding, but they contribute nothing to the game except to fill in a corner of the map.

The book is in the Lone Wolf Radio trailer.

A Rose Among The Thorns

2011-07-12T11:07:00.001-05:00

Fallout New Vegas is still too raw to be fun (level 12 is too low), but it has its ridiculous moments. Like making it to Jacobstown, or finding the unmarked entrance to The Thorn just outside Miguel's Pawn Shop.

Casey Anthony lynch mob roundly rebuked

2011-07-07T00:20:00.000-05:00

It seems obvious to me that Casey Anthony's jury was having none of the lynch mob atmosphere which had already branded her face with LIAR on both cheeks and GUILTY on her forehead, without benefit of trial. Presumed innocent?

The officers of the court who brought this flawed case were slapped down hard, in record time. Let's hope they remember the lesson.

Casey Anthony, at least, got the justice denied her in months of media frenzy.

Fallout New Vegas update 1.06 released today!

2011-07-06T23:24:00.005-05:00

Fig. 1 - Ghost (Mojave Outpost)

Well... Best Buy had the PS3 version of Fallout New Vegas on sale for $9.99, thirty bucks off (!), so I at that price I bought it anyway. That was Monday. Today, I had to download update version 1.06, which is about 3 Gb of data and takes about three solid hours at Verizon hotspot speeds.

That was odd, all told. I don't see any difference in the game but I suppose there's something critical in there. I'm not that far in, still tracking down the neophyte locations — Mojave Outpost, and such — and Levelling Up to where the game is playable.

I'll pass on New Vegas

2011-07-03T12:45:00.010-05:00

[Update] Hmmm... Apparently these folks have a patch for the PS 3 version which you can download. I may change my mind.

The thing about Fallout 3 that really drove me up a tree was the sheer, accumulating mass of petty programming horrors — the lockups, glitches, stitches, switches and event-killers which turned level 30 play into a plague of hardware migraines that destroyed my game, left no way forward in the scene (let alone the plot!), and earned Bethsoft its permanently picayune place in my disaffection. Ghoulishly corrupt data saves turn Fallout 3 into self-parody.

It took about 10 seconds of Googling to turn up the not-very-surprising news that New Vegas is even worse. Thanks, but no thanks. When it's been done right (Final Fantasy XIII), it's hard to tolerate spaghetti-coded algae rhythms that drift so far from merely bad technical demerits.

To quote The Three Little Bops, "You gotta get hot to play real cool."

I hate Westerns anyway. I laughed during Silverado when they shot the needles off the prickly pear. God.

Fallout 3 ghoul

2011-07-02T11:57:00.011-05:00

Fig. 1 - Doctor Barrows, chief resident at the Underworld Chop Shop

Yes, it's true. Too much Fallout 3 and your skin will dry out and flake off, you'll lose your hair and begin absorbing radiation. Especially flat-screen tv radiation. You'll turn uncanny, and your condition will irreversibly bring you to the glow-in-the-dark stage. Your brains will dry out and leak out like sand down your nose and out your ears and eyes.

Scary stuff. Two days ago, I found Argyle and the unarmed bobblehead and knew I had to quit. So I sold the disc back, for a 1950's song, to the game store. Yesterday was my first full day of withdrawal. I felt like my brain was bleeding.

A pity, though. I never explored many of the places I found, like the National Guard Depot or Mama Dolce's Food Processors. But those hopeful treks back to the alien mothership to collect power modules would lock up hard. Maybe a glitch? The same thing happened at Fort Independence, and the plague of tiny annoyances was near-biblical in Operation: Anchorage. It could happen anywhere, but the bug mostly seemed to infiltrate the add-on stuff. Bethesda can't debug their product?

It was enough. I needed relief. Been there. Done that. Nicest grace note in the game? Have you found the last decorated grave in Arlington Cemetery? Look for a flash of brilliant color.

How to find Georgetown West

2011-07-01T01:38:00.014-05:00

Fig. 1 - Rocksalt, male version

This conundrum is part of Fallout 3, viz., where to discover Georgetown West. By "discover" is meant to actually go there and receive the official "You have discovered Georgetown West" message in green letters, top left of your screen.

The answer is, enter the Tepid Sewers once again†, and fight your way through any remaining mole rats and incidental raiders, heading due North until you come out in Georgetown West. You may be attacked by Talon mercenaries, Super Mutants or both as you emerge.

You'll know you're near the exit when you run across a sandbag barricade and nasty piece of work called Rocksalt, who is the only named Raider in the game so far as I know. Random gender and appearance, s/he drops Rocksalt's Key. Instant hostility.

In real life, Georgetown West is a nice boutique-infested neighborhood on the C&O Canal — or it was, I haven't been there since 1975 — but in the game it's an isolated cul-de-sac surrounded by impassable heaps of postapocalyptic rubble. By foot, only one way in or out. Once it's named on your map, you can fast travel in and out as usual. There's a grocer, a trader, a stealth boy, and a Nuka-Cola Quantum.

That just leaves Vault 87 (yes, yes, of course I've met Fawkes) and maybe Rockopolis "undiscovered," then I think I'll call it quits on this game.

^†This trot through the Tepid Sewers was part of Moira Brown's "mole rat repellent stick" Wasteland Survival Guide quest, and if you were doggedly persistent or maybe lucky, you might have discovered Georgetown West before you ever knew how hard it is to locate. Thanks, and a tip of the Hatlo Hat to all the snarky fanboys who deliberately posted incomplete, wrong or misleading information.

Fun stuffed

2011-06-25T11:41:00.003-05:00

Who knew? Teddy bears are lethal. (So far as I know, only in Fallout 3.) You fire them out of the Rock-It Launcher.

There's a Sewer Waystation near Grayditch with a pair of conveyor belts filled with teddy bears — by my count 21 of them, but I may have missed a couple (or other stuff.)

I took them up to Mothership Zeta and dropped all 21 bears in the bridge nook for Sally, but they all merged into one or two bears for some reason. There's a clean, secluded space in front of the Captain's chair, down a short flight of stairs on port or starboard.

I Ching versing Fallout 3

2011-06-21T10:47:00.009-05:00

Fig. 1- Toy angles and hard edges, just like Troy.

Ok, a hypothetical. In the heat of battle, you've just taken out your own follower with friendly fire. Dismayed, downcast and distraught by the surprise, pain and accusations of betrayal in your companion's eyes, you find a pre-war copy of the I Ching (Wilhelm translation). Seeking solace you read, "Dense clouds, no rain from our western region. No praise, no blame."

Neutral karma? Hey, great! Off the hook. One tenth scale damnation is so cool...

Anchorage, you say?

2011-06-18T00:59:00.005-05:00

Fig. 1 - Ubiquitous hula girls

Ummm... ok. I convinced General Jingwei to commit seppuku (are Chinese Communist generals allowed to do that? I thought they got "re-educated." Seems to be a bit of cultural mashup there.) So that was easier than I thought. If that scenery is "Anchorage, Alaska," though, then Sarah Palin is a mutant space alien exiled to Earth for crimes against thing-kind.

What else? When "Operation Anchorage," which is unexplained, by and large, concludes, there is a bit of mutiny among the disaffected. It's hard to keep the two good guys alive if the firefight gets too heated. Put yourself between the combatants before it starts, and shoot first. Use the Lincoln Repeater. If your other skills and perks support it, that thing makes you a murder machine. Look to your armor first, right? You're still wearing the Neural Interface suit.

If you revisit the Outcast Outpost, you may find yourself stuck in the elevator, which will not respond to up or down button, and the steel doors won't open. However, it's not a freeze or normal glitch, because you can turn yourself around, look up and down, and zoom on the locked door. What is going on? It's probably a glitch, yes. But you may have just gotten yourself in an inconvenient place during a super mutant attack on the outpost. If my conjecture is correct, the doors should open when the A.I.'s finish their battle outside.

Also, finally disarmed that big bomb in the middle of Megaton, and got my own house (and a few interior decoration options) from Moira Brown, the naive shopgirl at Craterside Supply.

Yes, I'm aware there's a real world out there. The only one that counts is my family. Politics, economics, elections.... Eh. I vote. I'm retired, I'm 67, and I much prefer the obvious acerbic fantasies of Fallout 3, bugs and all.

Two Weeks Later?!

2011-06-11T12:43:00.010-05:00


Button Gwinett, NPC (note the white powdered wig!)

Considering all the extant glitches, lockups, temporary freezes, tone deaf "nice" dialogues with children and the "freedom" to play Fallout 3 any grotesque way you feel like (and apparently some of you FEV failjobs feel like Jack the Ripper or Jeffrey Daumer) — considering all that — it should not have surprised me when the sophomoric ending came and everybody died except the narrator and his or her sophistries. The game can be amateurish, at times.

It ends. Like that. Pitched battle, impending disaster in the water purifier, rushing in where angels LOL at the stupid storyline, saving the world. But deader than Spock from radiation. Flash to white. Interminable sepia-toned testimonial to follow.

So there you are, dead, without so much as a so-what left in this game. Shouldn't we have ignored the main quest for another hundred hours or so?

Not to worry, children. If you bought the Game of the Year edition, you have four or five ways to continue the action. In fact, one of the them is automatic. After the sepia junknotes, before the credits roll, you regain consciousness "two weeks later."

My sarcasm level topped out at 110 (off the scale) on this level, but then I found the hilarious Button Gwinett, so it won't be awhile before I reenter the simulator...! The one NPC, absurdly, in the whole game who can understand and relive American history from memory. Unlike Abraham Washington, who's got it all ludricrously wrong, a bit like Sarah Palin.

Framed. On my wall.

2011-06-05T13:05:00.003-05:00

Fallout 3 Game of the Year edition contains a number of additional quests intended, I presume, for players who have played through the mainline game, gotten the bends and require time in a decompression chamber. I took a run through the Lookout Point, discovered quickly that our Chinese espionage agent is in the Turtledove Detention Facility, and that Desmond's tribal enemies are way too tough for a lowly level 9.5 player like Y.T. Later, then.

There's a good yeoman jewelry repair and cleaning guy with 30 years' experience here in Cedar Rapids (Iowa). His name is Randall Patterson, phone (319) 366-6611. His work is guaranteed and modestly priced. He fixed a broken clasp on my wife's fine gold chain; brought in on Memorial Day, picked up this morning. Randall's old shop downtown was sunk during the great Cedar River flood of 2008, so he works at home. Call ahead.

I'd add him to Craigslist, but frankly the details of that hypermundane task are more time than I'm willing to invest.

You know you've done it...

2011-06-01T09:12:00.011-05:00

These are some Fallout 3 sure things. You know you've done them.

In Megaton, you paid the princely sum of 120 bottle caps for "that" room in Moriarty's, you slept in the big bed, and 48 hours later you looked for the "How was it for you?" button. The "action" on screen was awfully mundane. Like it didn't even happen.... Maybe it was all in your mind?

You got the Hamilton's Hideaway weapons cache key from Three Dog and went there expecting cake. You got radscorpions up the wazoo instead, but by dint of many saves and a lot of strategizing around the problems, you discover the raiders are dead and one of them has a combat shotgun she won't be using any more. Works just fine on radscorpions if you keep your head (and catch a bit of luck). When you finally find the weapons cache, it seems kind of paltry, but you get a mini-nuke! So you take the goodies to Flak and Shrapnel's down in Rivet City, where you sell enough stuff to buy a Fat Man. You travel fast to Anacostia Crossing, where you notice with deep satisfaction the group of three young Talon Mercs standing too close together. With a heart of ice, you launch the Mini-Nuke and wonder where you can find another one for free?

Later, travelling West from Megaton, you notice the same four (or is it five?) Raiders camping in the gully just beyond the billboard. You sneak up and launch a missile into the group, taking them all out again. With a fine tactical regard for the possible, it occurs to you to wonder if a single missile would have taken out the Talon Mercs at Anacostia Crossing. Too late....

You found Vault 112, but your Science and Lockpick skills are too low to save Dad. You wonder how to raise your Intelligence. Maybe read a book?

By the time you've cleaned out the Evergreen Mills Bazaar, found Madame's Key and finally met Smiling Jack, you want to use your combat shotgun on his head. The guy is rude, but he sells stuff. I'm not sure offing him is bad karma, but his label is green, not red.

Last Day of May

2011-05-31T18:27:00.000-05:00

Slow beginning to this cooler than normal year...

I've stalled out

2011-05-28T10:41:00.004-05:00

My time, focus, attention (my wife would chisel in the much chillier word, "obsession") has stalled out on Fallout 3. As usual, I can't figure this version out either. It is filled with improbable mayhem in an post-apocalyptic Westworld sort of thing, where nothing can possibly go worng (sic, sic, sic). In a world where everything has already gone about as wrong as it can get, maybe the one last thing to exclude from humanity's future is humanity. The game is unrelentingly sarcastic on this point.

But it's fun. You play with karma. For example, too much thievery and nobody trusts you anymore. Does the game include forgiveness?^† Obsessive fun.

^†It does! Give purified water to the dying beggars (well, they say they're dying) who squat outside settlements like Megaton or Rivet City. Alternatively, you can donate to the sanctimonius clerical errors who preach to postacalyptic, but tiny, congregations. The going rate is 100 caps to redeem your own soul from pawn.

Gary Snyder

2011-05-26T00:41:00.002-05:00

Despite what Snyder expatiates upon here, I have always felt that the universe and all creatures in it are intrinsically in a state of imperfect wisdom, flawed love and improper license vis-a-vis compassion; acting in abusively criminal response and private isolation. Personal realization of one's own imperfections is impossible, hateful and unlikely; and in fact wisdom is nowhere cherished and a pariah only, because we universally prefer satire to comprehension.

Such, however, is not Snyder's view. He says:

Buddhism holds that the universe and all creatures in it are intrinsically in a state of complete wisdom, love and compassion; acting in natural response and mutual interdependence. The personal realization of this from-the-beginning state cannot be had for and by one-“self” — because it is not fully realized unless one has given the self up; and away.

In the Buddhist view, that which obstructs the effortless manifestation of this is Ignorance, which projects into fear and needless craving. Historically, Buddhist philosophers have failed to analyze out the degree to which ignorance and suffering are caused or encouraged by social factors, considering fear-and-desire to be given facts of the human condition. Consequently the major concern of Buddhist philosophy is epistemology and “psychology” with no attention paid to historical or sociological problems. Although Mahayana Buddhism has a grand vision of universal salvation, the actual achievement of Buddhism has been the development of practical systems of meditation toward the end of liberating a few dedicated individuals from psychological hangups and cultural conditionings. Institutional Buddhism has been conspicuously ready to accept or ignore the inequalities and tyrannies of whatever political system it found itself under. This can be death to Buddhism, because it is death to any meaningful function of compassion. Wisdom without compassion feels no pain.

No one today can afford to be innocent, or indulge himself in ignorance of the nature of contemporary governments, politics and social orders. The national polities of the modern world maintain their existence by deliberately fostered craving and fear: monstrous protection rackets. The “free world” has become economically dependent on a fantastic system of stimulation of greed which cannot be fulfilled, sexual desire which cannot be satiated and hatred which has no outlet except against oneself, the persons one is supposed to love, or the revolutionary aspirations of pitiful, poverty-stricken marginal societies like Cuba or Vietnam. The conditions of the Cold War have turned all modern societies — Communist included — into vicious distorters of man’s true potential. They create populations of “preta” — hungry ghosts, with giant appetites and throats no bigger than needles. The soil, the forests and all animal life are being consumed by these cancerous collectivities; the air and water of the planet is being fouled by them.

There is nothing in human nature or the requirements of human social organization which intrinsically requires that a culture be contradictory, repressive and productive of violent and frustrated personalities. Recent findings in anthropology and psychology make this more and more evident. One can prove it for himself by taking a good look at his own nature through meditation. Once a person has this much faith and insight, he must be led to a deep concern with the need for radical social change through a variety of hopefully non-violent means.

The joyous and voluntary poverty of Buddhism becomes a positive force. The traditional harmlessness and refusal to take life in any form has nation-shaking implications. The practice of meditation, for which one needs only “the ground beneath one’s feet,” wipes out mountains of junk being pumped into the mind by the mass media and supermarket universities. The belief in a serene and generous fulfillment of natural loving desires destroys ideologies which blind, maim and repress — and points the way to a kind of community which would amaze “moralists” and transform armies of men who are fighters because they cannot be lovers.

Avatamsaka (Kegon) Buddhist philosophy sees the world as a vast interrelated network in which all objects and creatures are necessary and illuminated. From one standpoint, governments, wars, or all that we consider “evil” are uncompromisingly contained in this totalistic realm. The hawk, the swoop and the hare are one. From the “human” standpoint we cannot live in those terms unless all beings see with the same enlightened eye. The Bodhisattva lives by the sufferer’s standard, and he must be effective in aiding those who suffer.

The mercy of the West has been social revolution; the mercy of the East has been individual insight into the basic self/void. We need both. They are both contained in the traditional three aspects of the Dharma path: wisdom (prajna), meditation (dhyana), and morality (sila). Wisdom is intuitive knowledge of the mind of love and clarity that lies beneath one’s ego-driven anxieties and aggressions. Meditation is going into the mind to see this for yourself — over and over again, until it becomes the mind you live in. Morality is bringing it back out in the way you live, through personal example and responsible action, ultimately toward the true community (sangha) of “all beings.”

This last aspect means, for me, supporting any cultural and economic revolution that moves clearly toward a free, international, classless world. It means using such means as civil disobedience, outspoken criticism, protest, pacifism, voluntary poverty and even gentle violence if it comes to a matter of restraining some impetuous redneck. It means affirming the widest possible spectrum of non-harmful individual behavior — defending the right of individuals to smoke hemp, eat peyote, be polygynous, polyandrous or homosexual. Worlds of behavior and custom long banned by the Judaeo-Capitalist-Christian-Marxist West. It means respecting intelligence and learning, but not as greed or means to personal power. Working on one’s own responsibility, but willing to work with a group. “Forming the new society within the shell of the old” — the IWW slogan of fifty years ago.

The traditional cultures are in any case doomed, and rather than cling to their good aspects hopelessly it should be remembered that whatever is or ever was in any other culture can be reconstructed from the unconscious, through meditation. In fact, it is my own view that the coming revolution will close the circle and link us in many ways with the most creative aspects of our archaic past. If we are lucky we may eventually arrive at a totally integrated world culture with matrilineal descent, free-form marriage, natural-credit communist economy, less industry, far less population and lots more national parks.

GARY SNYDER
1961

Monday

2011-05-23T01:45:00.000-05:00

I gather The Rapture was supposed to happen on Sunday, but apparently the whole world missed it. I had a touch of rapture for my part: I found Rivet City (in Fallout 3). Dogmeat died in the Super Duper Mart, though. There are fantasies, and fantasies. The trick is telling them apart.

Stewed Snoodge

2011-05-19T13:01:00.012-05:00

This is the kind of advice you typically get about kludgy videogames from the nerdboys who hang out on game forums. The advice can be summarized like this:

Noob:  My R2 button doesn't work when the second wave of sludgeworms attack.  Any suggestions?

Forumboy:  What do you mean, your R2 button doesn't work.  Your R2 always works!

Noob:  Yes it works when I play [lists 20 other games in which R2 works perfectly].  When the sludgeworms attack in the second wave, R2 doesn't work.  I die every single time.

Forumboy2:  Your controller is broken.  Sludgeworms are the dumbest, slowest, easiest-to-kill monster in the entire game.  If R2 isn't working, maybe your reflexes are too slow.

Noob:  I can kill the frogbats ok, they're twice as fast.  I use slash/slash/L2 and it always works.  R2 combos don't work against anything.

Kidsister:  You might have jam in your buttons?

Admin:  If you think you've discovered a bug, report it to the developers at SquareSqueez through normal channels.  This forum is for game discussion ONLY.

Noob:  Doesn't anybody know a workaround for the R2 bug?

Wiz: Prs A alwys wrks 4 m.

DevGirl:  You've discovered the notorious R2 "rad feature."  The second wave of sludgeworms glows in the dark, so it is radioactive.  R2 lowers your rad level, if you have RadGloop.  You need to back off for R2 to have its usual damaging effect on radioactive sludgeworms.  If you don't retreat, they will eventually die of radiation poisoning anyway.

Noob: TY, DevGirl.

Forumboy9:  This is soooo boring.  You are obviously a troll.

[Thread Locked.]

Words have their place...

2011-05-14T11:41:00.004-05:00

Chatoyancy, e.g., is a buzz word used by rockhounds and other high-class geomantics to imbue certain kinds of worthless dirt with expensiveness. Google it if you don't believe me.

Light Drizzle 2

2011-05-13T15:33:00.012-05:00

Rub out all the "game" elements, like four or five simultaneous buttons pressed to walk through stupid electric arcs in an abandoned power substation (who has money enough to stage that?), and watch the remaining movie, and you might have something worth seeing — once.

The "mature" story (i.e., Ethan Mars or Madison Paige naked in the shower, whichever trips your trigger) sucks though. Reminds me of a young Quentin Tarantino, say age 11, gluing the wings back onto flies. I sold this luser back to the shop and bought a used Gong Li UMD Video with the proceeds.

Parable of the Bad Samaritan

2011-05-11T02:20:00.003-05:00

As Jesus said, "Be as passers-by." — Robert Crumb

Crumb is quoting from the gnostic Gospel of Thomas, of course, and no part of the New Testament. Mentioned this evening in Boing Boing, but fuggedabowdit. I hate it when libertines get their sticky hands on the Bible.

The Gospel of Thomas advances the trite (and sophomoric) canard that we are spirits trapped in flesh, and not really part of the general muck around us.

Even Buddhists take a pass on that one. The Dharma makes no distinction whatever between mind and matter, and teaches that such a viewpoint is heretical — in other words, anyone who teaches non-involvement with the world, instead of compassion for it, will be reborn as a nest of foxes.

Disunity

2011-05-10T15:31:00.008-05:00

Ubuntu's "Natty Narwhale" release (11.04) foisted a new look-and-feel called, laughingly, "Unity" on users last April 28th. Ubuntu users are writhing and fainting in coils.

To be sure, the screwball Ubuntu nerds profess to like it ginormously, but those of us who need to explain to our families why they need to spend a couple of hours retraining... Ah, yes. You see the problem.

No, I will NOT sideslide to Natty Narwhal, or any other whale carried on a gnome's back. I'm turning off my Abbie Normal update setting, and sticking with Ubuntu 10.10 for the nonce. To infinity. And beyond.

My next "update" will probably be a Macintosh, if Oneiric Ocelot fails as obliviously as 11.04.

Scorpiotistic's Resonant Chamber

2011-05-09T23:37:00.001-05:00

10 Resonant Chamber by Scorpiotistic

Unpopular Memes

2011-05-09T11:39:00.005-05:00

No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
well as a manor of thy friends or of thine
own were; any man's death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
— John Donne, from "Meditation 17"

Aquarium Blunders

2011-05-08T15:13:00.024-05:00

That is some serious fish-fu, dude!

I tried to keep tropical fish for more than five years, and failed. Here are some lessons I learned the hard way:

All home aquaria are too small. Mine was 20 gallons and should have been 55, long and narrow to give active fish like Buenos Aires tetras room to scoot and zoom in.
Use a bottom filtration system with a curtain of bubbles. Filters that hang on the side of the tank are a noisy joke. THINK AHEAD. You will regret your choices far less.
Your heater will do its job far too well, in a home that is not air conditioned. When it's 95° F. outside, it's over 100° in a south facing room. Your water warms well past the 86° your tropicals are comfortable with.
Be prepared to deal with nitrate buildup. This natural result of living stuff in a closed tank not connected to anything natural kills fish slowly by blinding them and eating away their sides and fins. The usual thing to do is change water frequently, and suction out the mulm on the bottom.
Algae are a worse problem than you can imagine, especially in tanks placed near bright sunlight. Don't trust "algae eaters." They don't eat algae. Little algae eating fish become huge, aggressive tank bullies.
Snails do eat algae, and anything else they can catch, but they make a nasty mess. They also smear egg patches on glass walls which have to be peeled off with razor blades, but the glass is never clean again, or not as clean as it was.
All plants die, except for unattractive junk like Elodea (aka Anacharis), which turns long-jointed and ghastly yellow in incandescent room light, then dies anyway. Duckweed may take over koi ponds outdoors, but it dies from bad pH balances in indoor tanks. Amazon swords become algae infested. Etc.
Speaking of pH, a little baking soda may improve your water, if needed. But anything sour, like vinegar, will kill your fish — all your fish, within minutes. Don't do that!
You must love this hobby passionately, or the problems will make you hate it passionately. You are not Herbert R. Axelrod. You must learn nurture the hard way.
It hurts when your aquarium dies. It will haunt you like Banquo's ghost. There's a period of mourning. You'll want to start over, try again, but at that point, the voices start up: "No, Dad! It's my turn! I want a kitten. In a bubble!" And my favorite, the 17 degrees colder in here, "Oh, really...?"
Getting rid of a problem tank and stand is easy. Just clean it up and put it on the curb with a sign that says FREE — ours was gone inside two hours.

You're arousing suspicion!

2011-05-06T12:02:00.011-05:00

The PSP console controls for this really, really aggravating puzzle are worse than normal. You can tell by the unusually large number of snarky fanboys who'll gleefully tell you they beat it the first time they tried. Yeah, right.

I'm ready to give it a rest. Found all the dealers, all the security cameras, all the blue swirls, and made my second million euros, but I can't beat this grumble. Maybe I'll be back around Christmas...

The Geronimo Post-mortem

2011-05-05T11:08:00.027-05:00

Considering how "we" (heh) got bin Laden, isn't it just conceivable that when Dubya said he wasn't too concerned about finding UBL anymore, that the Al Qaeda mastermind had become marginalized and uninvolved with day to day ops, that he was speaking STRA-TE-GI-CALLY (ten years ago!) as part of a developing black op that nailed UBL over the weekend in an utterly different administration?

We Americans are dumb; we think miniature thoughts crafted for us by Barbie Dolls and Transformers, and we are utterly unfamiliar with the long term. We don't play chess (let alone go). Precious few of us play golf, "the thinking man's game." And almost none of us play with the tools of indirection, patience and foresight except J.R.R. Tolkien, Ian Fleming, Agatha Christie, Homer...

Obama worries me, frankly. Didn't he read the sequel? Ulysses is not famous for stuffing a Greek Trojan into a horse. He's famous for a cheap trick that, against all expectations, destroyed a world power — and then, not too clever by half, going through Hell to get home again.

Petulance

2011-05-04T09:13:00.000-05:00

Al Qaeda is pledging nuclear retaliation if UBL is really dead. Guess he must be really dead, huh?

Osama bin Laden is Dead

2011-05-02T10:01:00.017-05:00

Funny thing.... Like Sun Tzu, it turns out we knew what we were doing after all.

Nobody assassinated David Letterman (we pretended to be incompetent stumblebums who couldn't find a barn from the inside).
We flooded Waziristan and rural countrysides with killer drones (we regretted killing civilians and avoided cities).
We cowered meekly when Pakistan told us to keep U.S. troops out of their country (engendering that uncanny sixth sense of invulnerability bin Laden so enjoyed).

Flipped, faked or photoshopped photo
alleged to be Osama bin Laden
dead after Abbottabad Raid is NSW;
"China Military" appears here instead
of the photo Reuters says is fake.

In other words, for four years we played Osama bin Laden like Herbert Hoover fly fishing in the Rapidan River. We forced his every move, we backed him into a corner, we took him out. And the time invested in this game of cat and mouse, from the beginning to the final silent pounce seemed almost to balance out 9-11.

Me, a culprit?

2011-05-01T12:09:00.010-05:00

Fig. 1 - Hyphessobrycon anisitsi

Sadly, yes. I set up a 20 gallon fish tank in 2006, and watched in tiny wavelets of mounting horror as I slowly recognized my inability to keep tropical fish. They died in tiny droves, abetted, I dare say, by my nearly infinite capacity for procrastination. I can ignore a pressing duty with the dash and aplomb of a travelling boulder of glacial granite. Even self-deprecating wit will not let me off that hook.

My last corydoras died yesterday. My last tattered Buenos Aires tetra made a few feeble darts and attempts to avoid the green net of doom, then gave up and accepted its fate among the daffodils by the back door.

The drudgery of tearing down a fish tank flogs my recriminations. I much prefer cats. Tropical fish are difficult to keep alive.

Kate Brings the Entmoot to Westminster Abbey

2011-04-30T01:18:00.023-05:00

It seemed odd to see 20-foot-tall English Field Maples and a few Hornbeams lining the nave in Westminster Abbey Friday morning. It was as though Wills and Kate had invited the Knights Who Say "Ni!!" to their nuptials in the old royal peculiar.

Maybe they did. According to BBC et al., the shrubbery was Kate Middleton's idea. Seems a little Tolkien-esque (or at least pagan) to me, but a nice bit of dottily eccentric British tradition if it catches on.

One wonders whether J. K. Rowling was among the behatted duchesses of MOE, AINWN. (Apparently not. And yes, I've heard the nonsense about Harry Potter showing up to cleanse the event of Slytherins. The Slurm-meisters will say nothing nice about a franchise that signed with Universal Orlando instead of Disneyland, evidently.)

Portal 2

2011-04-29T01:55:00.028-05:00

Portal 2 for the PS3 rawks! Like, actually, dude. I may not get my tv back for the duration, at least during non-homework hours.

Lots of shooting. No one gets killed (except by accident, frustration or intolerance for sarcasm). Unless GLaDOS is serious about that "android hell" thing....

Did I mention droll? Lots of games start out this way. I'm upbeat to believe Portal 2 ends as well as it started, considering the original Portal's track record and that viral video about being still alive.

Favorite Portal 2 quotes so far

[Aperture Science Sentry Turrets] have all been given a copy of The Three Laws of Robotics to share. (N.b., gotta love it! Any game that can devote a few precious nanoseconds to set phasers on KRILL and twig off the biggest horse's ass in last century science fiction has my gratitude.)

You seem to have packed on a few pounds ... Waddle over to the elevator and we'll continue the self test.

Just remember what I said just now [speeded wa-a-a-a-y up] in slow motion.

Aftershocks diminishing?

2011-04-28T01:53:00.001-05:00

The Japanese megaquake seems to be simmering down, to my untrained eye. There has only been one Mag. 5 aftershock per day off the coast of Honshu for the last few days. A week or so ago, that number ranged from about 4 to about 9 a day, with some quakes at Mag. 6 or a bit higher.

USGS M 5+ Earthquakes

Hanna

2011-04-24T10:31:00.038-05:00

Roger Ebert has his own take on this film, "a first-rate thriller about the drawbacks of home schooling," which is somewhat bunk and somewhat tongue-in-cheek. We both like it, but maybe Ebert likes it just that little bit more.

One consistent theme throughout the entire film (and from now on, I presume you've seen it) is the way all the beautiful people are evil. That includes Hanna, whose murders can justifiably be considered innocent self-defense, because the child, a Wunderkind product of extreme genetic engineering, is not responsible for her own uncanny reflexes, superior endurance, inhuman strength, quick uptake or underdeveloped sense of empathy.

By contrast, the plain to ugly to broken normal people she meets on her journeys are beautiful only by culture and inclination; they rise above their disappointingly weed-like DNA. They are musicians like a Spanish flamenco troupe, plain, fat and accomplished, who sing with flamboyant bravura, loud, trained and traditional. Or they are mezzuins calling the faithful of Morocco to evening prayer, or simple hotel owners whose only demonstrable talents are kindness and safe haven.

Hanna loves music, hates noise — because she has hypersensitive hearing, she recoils from the cacaphony of random noises produced by simultaneous teakettles, ceiling fans, plinking fluorescent lights and Moroccan television game shows.

Everyone challenged in the comeliness department in Hanna's world is trustworthy, friendly and helpful, especially the unlikely Berlin magician, a good man as hairy, unshaven and perverse-looking as 40 years of American trope, meme and formula can lead one to expect. It's a subtle message — commonplace people are a young girl's safe companions and the salt of the earth.

Anyone nice to look at in this flick is ready to kill, and will soon make the attempt. Hanna, played by the gorgeous young Saoirse Ronan, is the sweetly deadliest of them all. She wants out of the life she was born to, either intensely aware of its limitations or stupidly comic about failing to get a grip on tritely ordinary situations — like a first kiss with a first, expendable, boy.

Her adversary, while beautiful, is a pitiless harridan whose gums bleed from obsessive dental (or is that mental?) hygiene, and whose death, when it comes, is mourned by no one. Only Hanna feels regret. She is sorry she spoiled the heart shot yet again, and now must waste a bullet on the head.

One peculiar aspect of this flick was the audience, which seemed to be composed almost exclusively of middle aged men who laughed at odd moments and seemed to miss the show's best points entirely, assuming the story is not just "as we are."

The Prometheus Plague

2011-04-22T16:34:00.021-05:00

I'm not extremely familiar with the origin and spread of savannahs, except that they are vast expanses of grasslands and were once found in a contiguous belt from Africa to Southeast Asia. The theory goes that climatic cooling causes them. The great savannah most relevant to humans appeared 2.5 million years ago, as did, perhaps not coincidentally, Homo erectus, the hominid famous for lack of ancestor or antecedents, the unimaginative conservative who used the same Acheulean-style hand axe for two million years... and fire.

Is this story correct? Modern humans deforested Europe in 2000 years, and northern India in approximately the same time, mostly for firewood.

Once Europeans reached the "new world" they denuded the great forests of North American from the Atlantic to the Mississippi in about 500 years. (True! Every tree in Missouri was RE-forested, or descended from reforestation. To this day, many of them Baja Iowegians hate trees with a passion difficult to understand.)

The human species arrives in established, stable ecosystems like a plague, lacking any native check or balance on our population.

Nor was that plague in North America exclusively Eurocentric. Modern humans came here 20,000 years ago over the Bering Land Bridge, too. We all practice slash-and-burn, not always for agriculture, but also to make hunting easier and just to plain stay warm on a cold Dakota night.

My question is, are the Great Plains of North America (or the Pampas of South America) more than just sort of similar to the great Afro-Asian savannah of the Pleistocene? Are these grasslands the scar left in established ecologies by the arrival of a plague, a plague of humans? Look at the damage we can do in 2,000 years; then multiply that a thousand times over...

How do humans make a grassland? With, I submit, ordinary arson. Fire has been a bolt in the promethean quiver for two million years across at least four subspecies of the human plague (H. erectus, habilus, neanderthalensis and sapiens, and possibly other, older, species as well.)

I grew up in Kansas. It's like Original Sin. We moved to New York, where trees line rural roads up to the shoulders. Thought I'd gone to Heaven.

BTW, the White Rabbit is late for Easter. Just the kind of dumb movable feast joke Charles Lutwidge Dodgson would tell a kid.

Who is this Mrs. Sippy Twain is talking about?

2011-04-21T12:58:00.006-05:00

In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. Therefore ... in the Old Silurian Period the Mississippi River was upward of one million three hundred thousand miles long ... seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long. ... There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesome returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
— Mark Twain

("Mrs. Sippy" is a trite wordbird entitlement for any number of coffee dripperies and beangrinders in Middle Girth, as it turns out. Google on your own dime.)

A Clever Bit of Self-reverential Ragtime

2011-04-20T11:25:00.006-05:00

"We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are."
            — Anaïs Nin

Sure, you can have a universe filled with clever authoresses. You can also have a universe moderately jam-packed with kittehs. I prefer kittehs.

Backwards Beekeepers

2011-04-19T02:10:00.014-05:00

Check out the CNN video on their website! Good karma!

Almost forgot: Skynet went live at 8:11pm this evening.

Dragon Haul ZzzzZZZAP!

2011-04-18T12:23:00.005-05:00

The Nintendo DS version of this mission was enough to tie your dodger dog in knots but the PSP edition shall we say...(caff caff)...suffers from excessively mediocre knurly button clotpoll glombongle raving stickleback saxifrage garglebark, or, iow, goes north when you shoulda gone south fuming loon buckle... AAAAAAARRRGGGGHHH!

梅沢由香里のやさしい囲碁 (PSP)

2011-04-17T02:18:00.011-05:00

Playasia.com, in Hong Kong, was apparently running a closeout sale last month. I was able to buy Yukari Umezawa's Easy Go (for PSP) for $34.90, including shipping. The box is labelled ¥2,940, or about $35.36 not including the currency exchange rate. In other words, I bought it at less than Japanese retail. A couple of years ago, the same game was selling for about $64, plus shipping.

The game is entirely in (middle school level) Japanese. No English, but no region encoding either. There's a Nintendo DS version of this same game, but the graphics are much smaller. The PSP edition is nice to look at. This is the MyCom BEST edition of 2011. An earlier version, also by Mainichi Communications, came out in 2008.

There's an iApp version, too, apparently. (9-13-19 refers to available board sizes.)

Mrs. Murphy's Ovaltine

2011-04-15T18:01:00.006-05:00

These are probably NSFW if productivity matters in your cube, Ickle.

Boop-oop-adoop fer shure, man :-)

Yeah, I know ... I know ... but Dorothy Dandridge was something else, man — although maybe Betty Hutton was a spark off the same ball of fire.

The Saharan Pump

2011-04-14T09:22:00.013-05:00

Somewhere along the line I learned that early hominins (this word used to be hominids) lived in "Savannahstan," grasslands in other words, of vast extent across Africa and southern Asia, more or less. Using little more than fire, hand axes and (presumably) some kind of "primitive language"^† which allowed them to live in groups of up to 100 individuals, these ill-equipped pre-modern humans survived the big cats of the savannah.

How big? Pleistocene lions stood five feet tall at the shoulder. Really big.

There's also something called the "Saharan Pump," which is alternating wet (savannah) and dry (extremely arid deserts) periods in what is now (temporarily) the Saharan Desert. The idea is, wet periods are inviting and allow humans to expand out of Africa, while dry periods turn huge rivers into wadis, slam the door shut on the way out and force people south and west in Africa, or into Europe and Asia. Vast time scales. About two million years ago, humans appeared in Africa, and got pumped out into the wider world. Actual modern humans appeared about 100,000 years ago, and got pumped out of Africa the same way.

The Saharan Pump is still active.

What happened to the big cats during this same period? Are tigers a kind of lion? What about leopards, which seem pretty much the same everywhere? How in the world did humans "adapt" to big cats? They're not wolves. You can't adopt lion puppies... I'm puzzled. Actually, there's a story (I think told by natural historian Raymond L. Ditmars, or possibly Gerald Durrell) that men stink, so far as lions are concerned; they find us disgusting and unpalatable, like human females. Thank gosh for Old Spice.

^†"Primitive"...? This supposition is based on comparison between a modern 2-year-old's larynx, and that of Homo erectus. The argument may be specious. Mothers can understand their 2-year-olds quite well, thank you, and everyone can understand R2D2.

Say what...?

2011-04-13T11:26:00.002-05:00

Two words: Ruffalo Cody.

Several more: "Developing, installing and supporting software products with integrity and value for nonprofit organizations nationwide, is a promise we keep, every day."

I am not a member of that alternate universe. Excuse me while I rush out and buy a noesis upchuck receptacle.

Masters

2011-04-11T09:23:00.008-05:00

What a mixed bag. On one hand, the guy who came in fifth could find no fault with himself or his game decrepitating on the back nine. On the other, some kid from South Africa won the green jacket this year. On the third hand, the young turk so calm and Ferris Buehler-like those first three days got paired with the strictly business grownup Angel Cabrera and started playing like Long Duk Dong. Only the Aussies (Jason Day and Adam Scott, T2; and Geoff Ogilvy, T5 with He Who Must Not Be Named) got through the day with their aplomb intact, if not their leads. It was fun watching the naddering nabobs paging frantically back and forth through the blankest pages of their talking points notebooks.

Maybe not what Bobby Jones had in mind.

Congersman Frog Does The Math

2011-04-10T01:32:00.008-05:00


Congersman Frog (sic)

The guvmint dint shut down after all; Congers chickened out. I don't know how big the budget is, but it's probably three or four trillion dollars. The big giant enormous compromise that allowed the damfoolidjit Republicans to save face, pass the (ahem) "compromise" budget and avoid shutting down the guvmint was a ginormous $38.2 million bucks.

Got that? $38.2 million bucks were cut out of the $4 trillion budget. Gosh. If we divide $38,200,000 by $4,000,000,000,000 dollars, that's a gigantic whopping 0.000955% saved! No egg on those bowties!

"A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking about real money." — U. S. Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen (Republican, Illinois, 1951-1969)

Note: Walt Kelly's Congersman Frog (sic) is from Okeefeenokee Swamp, courtesy Pogo.

Mel Bytes The Fuss

2011-04-09T10:46:00.019-05:00

GTA CW on the PSP gives you two extra Chan Jaoming missions, bookends for three extra Melanie Mallard missions. The final cutscene is a bit moody, as though it weren't all sound and fury, nothing signifying, after all. Nice touch, R*. A bit like class, almost.

Melanie, Marcy and Cherie could be sisters. Hmmm... Same voice actress playing three different roles? My guess is either Meg Ryan or Theda Bara.

I found a curious glitch in the second Wade Heston mission. If you fail to stay on the tail of the Korean car, and take your time restarting the mission, Wade demands his "2 bags of coke" ... which you've got, and brought with you twice now. The game founders, Titanic-like, on a floating impasse. A message comes up saying you still need 64491 bags of coke. (Bear in mind, 50 is your carry limit!) O-kaaay....

You get two more bags from the usual sources, to no avail. Wade still thinks you're stiffing him, the game remains stymied, and the message rather snidely comments that you still need 0 more bags of coke. Yes, zero more bags! Wow, simultaneous Tea and No Tea, anyone? I guess the lesson is, always use more than one Save slot, so you have a way to Restore.

Damn All Republicans and Their Ferenghi Ilk

2011-04-08T01:08:00.006-05:00

Rabid dogs, all of 'em. What the hell happened to my Grandfather's Republicans? The ones like Dwight Eisenhower and Nelson Rockefeller, or even Barry Goldwater who was at least civil. These days, all we get are diseased spawn of Satan, masquerading behind Mephistophelean good looks, the pussbuckets.

When they take away your VA benefits and Social Security checks today, fellow geezers, just remember all you need to know is, REPUBLICANS DID THIS TO YOU! The gorge will rise, the ire will rancor, but no matter the provocation WE will NEVER throw widowed Liberty on the same bonfire which burns away the last vestige of Republican decency.

Ok, that's reaching, but I was going for Republicans in the hands of an angry God. Futile, of course. They'll never get the allusion.

Toning it down then, let us give up Republicans for Lent, devil take the sorry lot of 'em.

What's that old Boss Tweedy word nobody remembers anymore...?

2011-04-05T23:30:00.003-05:00

Incest? Necrophilia? Nepo... Nepo something... Nepotism? No, that's if you hire your own kin. Walker hired the college dropout offspring of a top donor. Cronyism?

Yeah, that's it! CRONYISM!! Neither ethical nor legal in most states, even in Wisconsin. To the victor belong the spoils; the kid gets $85.5 thousand a year.

GoPanda

2011-04-05T11:40:00.022-05:00

Update — IGS has been working on a quick-loading Java Webstart client called GoPanda which will replace gGo and glGo. It seems to be still in beta, might have a few community- and tournament-related features.

A few years ago, IGS, the Internet Go Server (PANDA-IGS) in Japan, published Peter Strempel's glGo program. This works fine on Windows or Macintosh, put needs to be finetuned for Ubuntu.

The issue is, glGo on Ubuntu requires Python, and while Ubuntu is up to version 2.6, glGo doesn't recognize the update. You'll have to fake it:

cd /usr/lib/ ; sudo ln -s libpython2.6.so.1.0 libpython2.5.so.1.0

Then run glGo as normal; the fix generates a lot of warnings, put the program seems to run as it should. No guarantees.

Note, there is also a Java Web Start version called gGo, which takes forever to load. I no longer use it.

It's 2012 already?

2011-04-04T10:55:00.009-05:00

It's crepuscular dawn in America, and the horde of Tee Potty numbats is crawling back to their holes to snooze through another day. Avoid thought, gentlevermin. Avoid thought...

And my god, America, isn't anyone going to realize that finding missing pages from the crassest Wah Between Thah States propaganda novel since Birth of a Nation is, unlike Sherman's march to the sea, NOT a good thing?

Antebellum zombies, now. Yes, that would be good. "Ankly, eye near, Ah ohn'd ivva ganzschjj."

The Unseen Hand of Ling Shan

2011-04-03T11:43:00.050-05:00

In GTA: Chinatown Wars, Ling Shan is the short-lived weapons master who trains the newbie (you) on a few killer moves. It's a bit of a bummer that she gets rubbed out so soon.^‡

Even so, the entire game feels her overfluttering presence. Ling has stashed weapons in the red dumpsters scattered all over Liberty City, so everything you need in the manslaughter department comes, free like beer, out of Ling Shan's playfully filial foreviolence.

There's lots of dumpsters. It's a chore to find all the red ones^&dagger — some GTA players consider dumpster diving a fun mini-game, but the unbalanced few who tumble early to the fact that dumpsters, if and only if they're red, always spawn the same kind of weapon make it a full-scale mission to classify the diversity of available mayhem in each location.

Green dumpsters by contrast have interesting or allegedly comic contents, no telling which; otherwise no connection to plot or Ling Shan. The green ones do sometimes contain small neatly-wrapped packages of incidental pharmacopoeia dumped there by panicked dealers on the lam, one supposes.

^‡R* cell-shaded Ling Shan on tons of promotional advertising before CW was finally released to the North American market IRL...then, ungratefully, killed her off in Act One, Scene Two. She was, in other words, a virtual objectification of a purely fictional character in an alternate universe that exists only in the minds of fourteen-year-olds boys playing a game rated M. Magritte a un mal de tête...

^†GTA scholarship being what it is, the exact locations of all those red dumpsters is a matter of closely guarded handwaving — "Dude, they're in alleys everywhere!" — but so far, I've only found enough of them to fill my Favorites list with red stars (cf. the 110% perfectly accurate IGN map here).

Why Am I Not Surprised?!

2011-04-01T01:58:00.012-05:00

I didn't know the Aristocrats' Gilbert Gottfried used to be the voice of the Aflac duck. I gather he was "let go" (imagine King Kong butterfingering Fay Wray on top of the Empire State Building — "Oopsie!") because he tweeted something brunesque about tsunamis and offended everyone in Japan...or something?

What about Earl Billings, the deadpan second banana in every Aflac duckvert who is the only one who can see and hear the duck? Is he still around? And if not, why not? Billings' bugeyed role is a classic reference to Old Hollywood's blackest screen stereotypes, especially those by Topper's Eddie "Rochester" Anderson — "Feets, don't fail me now!"

Speaking of not laughing all the way to the bank, tiny toy giraffes are the most in-demand unavailable product on The Cloud right now. For awhile there was even an Etsy toygiraffeshop (I kid u not!) Blame it on the nouveau riche Russian mafia.

Plutonium at Fukushima?

2011-03-29T15:05:00.019-05:00

Oh gee, let's leap to an unspeakable conclusion, shall we?

Bearing in mind Japan's militaristic past and blazing hot technological economy, plus the Macarthur constitution and Old Nippon's extraordinary willingness to adopt nuclear power despite being A-bombed into submission at Hiroshima (the U.S. version of history is very self-flattering), doesn't it make sense to speculate that Japan (or more likely Mitsubishi) has conducted a few science experiments over the years with its own self-preservation in mind, rhetorical question mark?

See, plutonium doesn't naturally occur in Nature. (The nastiest isotopes of the stuff in the air come from nuclear weapons testing in the 1960's; or possibly, in Japan, a special case, from Pu-239 weapons use in 1945, Nagasaki.) You need a breeder reactor and the will to go where no one should go, not to mention the tenacity to learn how to make the stuff.

I'd give dimes to doughnuts that one or more of the zaibatsus either have The Bomb or the wherewithal to make one quickly. Japan, as a sovereign independent nation, almost certainly “does not.” But the zaibatsus are the Seven Jewels of the Imperial throne, and will remain demurely out of sight until and unless they're needed.

Plutonium at Fukushima? I dunno. "Intent" depends on which isotopes were found in Fukushima's soil. Plutonium has "industrial" uses, but only Pu-239 is weapons-grade; still, the Seven Sisters Hypothesis might make a good world holocaust prevention flick. (Not starring Angelina Jolie this time, please. How about Dakota Fanning instead?)

Future Loomings

2011-03-28T12:45:00.000-05:00

What's the word? Prescient foresight? Obvious stupidity?

So. Obama speechifies about LIB-yah tonight. Meanwhile UN and UK psyops are warning GUH-daffy's frenzied hangers-on to drop off and scuttle away, because Something Is Going To Happen. Did I mention, Obama the World Community Organizer will be speechifyin' 'bout LIB-yah tonight?

We're filling in the big blank screen with Mythbuster's-style C4 and gasoline hellstrom, but that's only speculation at this point, and not the main point. The main point is this:

A billion world Muslims, most of them peaceful as apple fandowdy, are going to be watching this, wondering whatever might be any difference between tomorrow's history and yesterday's Crusades.

Neat things about being a Taoist

2011-03-26T12:51:00.001-05:00

I get to live, sometimes, in a real world I imagine.

Yyrrrchhh!

2011-03-26T12:15:00.001-05:00

Projectile vomiting, intestinal cramps, diarrhea... Ugh. It only lasts a day or two, but lawks. Yes, I'd wish it on my worst enemy. All thinks in mudderation, y'know.

Purple Ice

2011-03-24T10:25:00.014-05:00

She delivered all her lines with the finality and panache of a second year high school Spanish student — "siempre como culebra" — like Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2. Her most embarassing role was not Cleopatra, but Catherine Holly in Suddenly, Last Summer. She was every Hollywood film maker's icon of steamy female libido, the Freudess who drove every cocktail conversation of the Fifties; she was Lolita, fifteen years too late, and Tennessee Williams' soulmate, forever uncast (her role lost to Ava Gardner) in Night of the Iguana,^† had either of them only known. As she confessed, frequently and at length, her passions were "too intense" — and amazingly inarticulate. She deliberately associated herself with brilliant writers — Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee — to deliver their prose in agonies, in paroxysms of frump maternity. She never outlived National Velvet, nor would rise above her level, nor could. She thought she was at the prom, and gave herself to her audiences like an aging porno queen, softly sarcastic, used and forgotten by morning.^‡

^†In real life, probably just a gecko.
^‡Always bearing in mind she was 15 minutes late to her own funeral ;-)

Secret of Kells

2011-03-21T09:48:00.002-05:00

We watched the DVD last night, on the first evening of Spring. Ten stars.

Vernal Equinox: etym.Steam Punk, substantive — A green, low-octane horse.

Boron Glass as a Nuclear Quencher?

2011-03-17T09:49:00.011-05:00

So, neighbors being as neighbors does (especially the family feud types with long memories and not a forgiving bone in their obstinate skulls), Korea is dragging its heels about supplying Japan with enough boric acid to shut down those four nuclear reactors damaged by the Sendai temblor.

Makes sense, in a strictly technical way. It takes millions of dollars to refine uranium to the point it can be used in a reactor. So if the reactor core gets out of control, what you do is unrefine it.

I don't know what they used at Chernoble, but in Japan they'd like to use ⁵B, boron, a neutron quencher one spot left of ⁶C, carbon, which was Fermi's control rod in the first sustained nuclear pile ever (Stagg Stadium, University of Chicago, 1942).

How do you deliver something like that to a hot nuclear core in Japan? I'd recommend 20-Mule Team Borax, tons of the stuff, maybe melted into a couple hundred tons of potmetal, tin and pewter. Once the reaction is diluted to the cooling point, what you got left is a chunk of high-quality uranium ore.

And, as any potter with experience mixing glazes can tell you, you don't want pure elements in your glaze anyway, you want the pre-mixed kind, the fully-adulterated mixtures provided by aeons of geological weathering.

Just a thought....

Japan

2011-03-14T13:28:00.000-05:00

Please, no more history! Been there. Done that.

Lady GaGa is urging her Little Monsters to buy Pray for Japan bracelets, that's one good thing I guess. All proceeds go to Japan earthquake relief.

Sony PSP 3000 file structure for movies, system software version 3.67

2011-03-10T01:26:00.007-06:00

Videos are revealed in USB Connect mode.

Each movie in VIDEO is matched by an almost identically-named decryption bundle in MLN_ROOT/LICENSE.

Thus /VIDEO/UV0010-NPVA09789_CN-29192.MNV is an encrypted MP4 movie; its matching decryption bundle is /MLN_ROOT/LICENSE/UV0010-NPVA09789_CN-29192.MNL — this happens to be an official Playstation Store download for the film Zardoz, produced and directed by John Boorman (1974).

Most information about copying DVDs to PSP elsewhere on the net is seriously out of date or misleading, and is probably not even remotely possible in the current version, at least not without carnal knowledge of the encryption codecs employed.

Decryption bundles appear to be simple XML textfiles, but their internals are arcane. They appear to contain all the information needed to decrypt an MP4 movie without "calling home" on the 'net. This is speculation, or as they say in French Kiss, "boolsheet, it is like breathing."

Moving On

2011-03-08T12:20:00.006-06:00

Finished Final Fantasy IX just in time for Lent. Does that count as "giving something up?"

Seems likely. This was my second time through a very long game, and there are still features I haven't found, or haven't explored.

Zidane was Level 75 this time, which makes the endgame less aggravating, although I still couldn't open the store in Quina's ocean, not to mention no Blue Chocobo and no Dead Peppers yet. And I had undelivered Mognet mail for Atla, the shopmoogle in Burmecia's Vault, who was the game's only source for Needle Forks.

I was playing this version on the PSP, and the sound quality held up pretty well until the last few cutscenes after Necron. That memory stick I mentioned a few days ago really did keep this game playable.

Japanese exchange students at Washington HS

2011-03-07T11:07:00.008-06:00

Nana and Minori, exchange students from Okinawa, spent a couple of weekends with us this month. Kireii nee...

Ipsen's Castle

2011-03-02T12:06:00.001-06:00

It's fun to see Cerberus again when your respective levels are finally rising near 50. Final Fantasy IX's version of this recurring beastie has three mouths, stacked vertically, instead of three heads.