Becalmed
In a perfect world, I would have an e-book or three loaded on the Newton right now, or have an iPhone with web access. Instead, I am sitting on Rt. 664, as I have for the last hour, waiting for them to clear a major accident from the Monitor-Merrimac tunnel. The good news is that I’ve got a nice calming trance podcast on the iPod.
I tried first to write some notes for fiction projects, but while a thought or two leaked through, I’m generally blocked; so I am journaling on this Apple notepad instead. I need to scrawl less sloppily; the handwriting recognition on the final OS rev was pretty good, but there’s only so much of my bad penmanship it can take. Lowercase ‘f’s keep coming out capital, for some reason. I’m adding more curve to the tops.
Car behind me just stalled out, guy asked for a jump start. No problem. Asked three times which terminals he had the jumper clamps on… after impressive display of sparks from my battery terminal, went and checked myself. Reversed them. Thank goodness that didn’t kill the Hyundai.
Just remembered I could send email from my work Blackberry; updated everyone there on my status. It seems I’m not the only NASA employee trapped here. I wonder if the accident was mechanical failure, or one or more people being idiots? I’ve been cut off twice in the last 24 hours by rude drivers trying for a single-car position advantage; Hampton Roads drivers can be brutal. On the other hand, I certainly hope no one was seriously hurt… as the cliche goes, “been there, done that”.
Whoops. We’re moving. Will post this from work.
Taikonauts
Assuming that I have converted my time zones correctly, and that nothing went awry with the countdown, the third Chinese manned space mission is heading for orbit right about now. There should be three crew aboard, one of which will perform a spacewalk during the mission, using a spacesuit based on Russian designs.
This mission is to lay the groundwork (spacework?) for a Chinese space station, to be constructed in orbit from emptied fuel tanks before 2020. This idea was proposed by American scientists decades ago, but eventually rejected.
Meanwhile, we are still trying to decide whether to throw tons of money at the Shuttle to keep it flying, buy Soyuz spacecraft, or beg for rides from the Russians (who we’re currently mad at because they’re invading people again). Who knows, maybe the SpaceX manned program will work out.
At the Movies
I am turning Starr into a Hayao Miyazaki fan, getting her attention with “The Castle of Cagliostro”, cheering her on a bleh evening with “Kiki’s Delivery Service”, and charming her last night with “My Neighbor Totoro”. After “Nausicaa” and “Spirited Away”, though, I’ll be all out and have to pick up some more sometime.
Oddly enough, by coincidence she’d been reading up on Shinto traditions yesterday afternoon, and recognized much of them in the movie – more than I! I foresee a Catbus plush in our future.
Also, over the weekend I finally saw the “Lost Skeleton of Cadavra” (Rowr.) An intentionally bad 50s-style SF movie, this flick is awesome if the viewer’s got the right sense of humor. The associated drinking game required drinks on the words “science”, “meteor”, “atmospherium”, “alien”, “mutant”, and “skeleton”. I didn’t participate, mainly because I don’t drink, but also because I’d have ended up blasted out of my mind. Why do people need to pretend to be forced to drink alcohol?
The other weekend movie was “Dorkness Rising“. I really loved it, and am tempted to buy a copy; good script, nice production values for a low-budget film, and an utterly believable – if silly – look at the GM-player dynamic in tabletop RPGs. Additionally, much of the scenes ‘within the game’ are absolutely hilarious. Really, if you game and you happen to see this on the video schedule at a con, make time to see it.
I will be 40 years old on November 15th. I’m not sure what it says about me that I’m still reminding myself multiple times per day to act like a grownup. I’ve taken responsibility for a lot of things in life, and willingly so; I want the perks of adulthood. But it means there’s a long list these days of stuff that I can’t wait for someone else to take care of for me, and after all these years I’m still learning many of the tricks of handling a grownup’s duties.
On the other hand, I am surrounded every day by people who aren’t giving that half the effort I am, so I suppose there’s hope. 🙂
Sun, sea, and soreness
Someday I will learn to keep a stash of ibuprofen at my desk.
Saturday I wanted to do anything but sit on the couch and stare at the DVR. Handily, there was plenty going on in the area, and we ended up catching a free blues festival at the 17th Street oceanfront. Less handily, we ended up parking at the 23rd Street oceanfront and I got my exercise for the weekend in 95-degree weather. I can’t believe I’m not sunburned. But, the music was excellent.
Add in that walking to yesterday’s five-hour cleaning spree in the apartment (2.5 rooms done, yay!) and I am an achy Borg today. Still, I’m pleased with the reasons I got that way, so I’m calling it a win.
Saturday night we ended up as guests of Starr’s parents at a mildly pricey Italian restaurant. The kitchen messed up my order once, and delayed the second attempt; the manager finally comped me the dinner and I think overdid my dessert as apology. With two large cannoli on a plate before me that evening, I’m pretty thankful for all the unplanned exercise.
Today is my mom’s birthday, At first, I was fretting over whether she’d even want to talk to me, but that’s not the right attitude. I want to talk to her, and I’m still commmitted to getting this whole situation worked out in a way that gets her as much of what she wants as is sane.
Good news for today? I just found a bottle of ibuprofen in my glove compartment; and these 90-minute OS X Leopard installs give me lots of time to tap away at the Newton.
My Life for Aiur
If you can understand this guy’s comedy routine, without speaking his language or checking out the title of the video…
then you might be a fan of Blizzard’s computer games.
(I had the Battlecruiser captain stuck in my head the other day. It was a strain not to start conversations in his accent.)
Stand back, I’m doing… stuff.
Most weeks I wait impatiently for my Kingdom of Loathing turns to build up to a useful level. This week, I’ve been sitting at the max of 200 turns for days, but I don’t have time to mess with it. I guess it’s a sign I’m using my time well… KoL isn’t exactly productive… but on the other hand, you can’t be productive all the time. Makes Jack a dull boy, you know.
On that note, I am going to watch a movie this weekend. Either in the theater, or from my list of DVDs to watch or re-watch. I don’t remember sitting through an entire movie since we watched “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” together.
One of the two 400MHz CRT iMacs that have been sitting in my office gathering dust since I left Decipher has found a good home – it’s in the possession of Starr’s youngest sister. She’ll probably want to give it an external FireWire HD and/or a memory upgrade before long, it’s only got a 10GB drive and 256MB of memory. But it’ll do Word and Photoshop and play DVDs, and she seems thrilled with it, so happiness all around. I need to find some old games to pass along that don’t involve serious mayhem.
Speaking of productivity, I am attempting to do something personally productive at least once a day. Either spend at least an hour on a personal project, or sit and write something with some thought in it (thus the recent outbreak of philosophising every week or so in my LJ). It doesn’t come easy: I am a slacker and procrastinator. But time moves with or without me, and I’m not going to be left behind.
Fantasy Battles
After watching Yahtzee take apart the XBox 360 game “Too Human”, I saw a trailer for the new Warhammer Online game starting up, so I stuck around. Now, I won’t be playing “WAR”, as it’s called, if for no other reasons than a) I’m still enjoying WoW just fine, thank you, and b) as is so often the case, I’m using the wrong OS. One WAR developer’s mentioned with a wink that he’s working on something important involving his non-Windows computer, but I take that with a Massively Multiplayer Grain Of Salt (MMGOS).
Okay, but I do read the blogs from the beta testers, and it looks like while WAR won’t be a revolution in online role-playing, they have a few nifty ideas, and kudos to them if they make it all work. As I’ve said before, I’ve long grown out of the idea that my fandoms and other people’s fandoms must engage in steel cage matches until only one can stagger out. But the point of this whole entry is the reaction I had to the trailer, a reaction that surprised me. While I might have been interested in the game under other circumstances, I hated the trailer. I had an intense negative reaction to it. Why?
WAR has two ‘factions’ one can play: Order and Destruction. In the trailer, we see Destruction assault a capital city of Order. Death is everywhere, people dying of (bloodless) sword wounds, spear wounds, arrow wounds, magical fire, magical ice, and crushing mass. The trailer shows us the Dwarves, Humans, High Elves, Dark Elves, Greenskin, and Chaos forces slaughtering each other as the city is knocked apart around them. (I am somehow unsurprised that both Elven ‘hero’ avatars are females who manage to make it through the trailer unscathed, and in the case of the Dark Elf, scantily dressed.)
So, of course there’s war. It’s called Warhammer! But the video made something abundantly clear: in the world of Warhammer, Destruction wins.
It may not look like it. The last scene of the trailer shows the three Order races facing some huge monster, and we are led to believe that the resolution is up in the air. But look around the heroes. There are bodies everywhere. The city is smashed. Even should the monster be defeated, Destruction can just come back tomorrow, to a city that’s still smashed and carpeted with the dead.
(Oh, I know that in the game, the city will reset overnight, buildings will spring back into existence, and the citizens will respawn. I’m not talking about the game, I’m talking about the fictional world.)
It takes years to build a city, weeks to construct a building, and decades to produce an adult warrior. It only takes hours, minutes, or seconds to end that existence. Destruction is easy. The years of food and housing and training and socializing that went into that warrior are countered with a single arrow. If all one cares to produce is wreckage, the world is quite willing to help.
(This, by the way, is why I had to give up on Battletech fiction after a while. Excellent games, and the individual novels ranged from okay to excellent, but they painted a reality where a star-faring humanity nearly pounded itself back to coal and steam, called a truce, recovered long enough to rebuild some technology, and then immediately resumed smashing everything within the reach of a Jump Drive. And they did this cycle repeatedly.)
Now, the game isn’t exactly its fiction. Once online, Order and Destruction have nigh-infinite resources in the long run, and new weapons, warriors, and metropolises with the click of a mouse button. But the fictional background shown in that trailer is far too bleak and pointless for my tastes, and unless the WAR loremasters have something up their sleeves, this is a world that offers me little appeal.
Curiously, the last thing the squirrel thought was, “Oh no, not again.”
Ready for more LHC humor? (Beats the uninformed paranoia, right?)
Evolutionary Acceleration Research Institute Ready to Start “Squirrel Smasher”
Dallas, TX – Scientists from the Evolutionary Acceleration Research Institute (EARI) announced that the first test of the Giant Animal Smasher (GAS) will begin on December 19, 2008, the 41st anniversary of the premiere of Dr. Dolittle.
Dr. Thomas Malwin, head of the research project, said, “The first test runs will only accelerate microscopic life-forms like bacteria and viruses to high speeds, but theoretically the GAS can handle animals as large as squirrels, hence the ‘squirrel smasher’ moniker.”
Biologists from around the globe hope the GAS will unlock the secrets of the so-called “Darwin particle” that could unlock the secrets to life.
“If we discover the Darwin particle we could possibly create new life-forms, or accelerate evolution to unimaginable levels,” said Malwin.
The GAS is a 25 mile tube buried ten feet below the surface, and accelerates the animals at rates up to 6,000 meters per second using a series of pulleys, levers and fusion reactors.
Think of the possible discoveries, not only in the field of evolutionary biology, but also those of children’s book illustration, furry fandom, and perplexing Far Eastern toy manufacture!
Yes, this is humor. No, no one is actually advocating doing this. Oy.
Brief updates
- 12:15 Retweet @Ihnatko: Good: LHC went live and did not destroy ALL reality. Bad: I’m the only one who remembers President Gore’s 2 terms. #
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Brief updates
- 09:09 Getting two more high-velocity pebbles in the windshield in the last 24 hours. One left a nice star in the glass. #
- 09:40 Re-registering to vote because I didn’t last year and my address changed last April. #
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