Internet perils
elfie.org has been off the web since Sunday morning… no e-mail for me… no way to feel the love. 🙁
On the other hand, I got a chuckle from this month’s Sabrina Online strips… only here can you have a porn star trying to explain sex to a 9″ tall Transformers robot.
I feel that I should post something a lot more deep and meaningful here, since I haven’t posted in days and days… but nothing’s coming to me just now.
Thoughts on a Tuesday morn
My head killeth me. I’ve had a cough for days, and though all the other symptoms of my New Year’s cold are gone, the nagging cough burns in my chest and sets my skull pounding. Concentration today is an interesting challenge.
I think vond and kittenchan should come back to the USA, but that has nothing to do with what’s good for them; I just like having them around 🙂
I’m beginning to understand the attachment Amiga users have to their unsupported, out-of-date machines. I was given an old unused Apple Newton for Xmas, and I’ve become quite fond of it. Not only do I finally have a digital address and date book, but the other day I passed an afternoon with it reading Jules Verne’s “From the Earth to the Moon”, writing a journal entry or two, and playing a version of the old mainframe Star Trek game. Sure, it doesn’t slide invisibly into my hip pocket, but I don’t lose it at the bottom of a bookbag either 🙂
raininva has done an incredible job with the apartment this last week, the living room is unrecognizably nice. We’ve already got two discrete gaming areas worked out. Looks like we’ll be up and running this Friday night – MechWarrior for sure, possibly Settlers of Catan, Chez Geek, Illuminati, or selected PlayStation 2 games as well. If you’d like to come by, we’d love to see you – drop us a note so we’ll be able to estimate a number of warm bodies.
And a special thank you to healerkou – this week, you did something that made me a little happier about a personal project. Too bad I can’t ask you to sign up, but it’s a bit of a drive from your digs to southwest Virginia. BTW, is the last syllable of your screenname pronounced “coo” or “kau”?
Battle Fury
Every time I see a hostage situation in the movies, the angry, violent part of me wishes I was watching the Klingon version, where the good guys sorrowfully declare the hostages martyrs, sing songs of their brave sacrifice, and blow up the building.
One of the worst times was actually during a Star Trek episode, where some culture had gotten hold of a space probe of ours, reverse-engineered the matter-antimatter technology (wrongly), and wrecked their planet. They then had the gall to blame us, and kill off a hostage to show that despite their idiocy, they still had really big sex organs. And to make it worse, our captain starts feeling guilty about the whole thing!
On the other tentacle, the Klingon version:
Terrorist: “Despite the fact that you were agreeing to our demands, we’ve killed one of the hostages. I bet you regret your mistake now, huh?”
Klingon captain: “I sure do. Good-bye, honorable landing party.”
Klingon landing party: “Bye! You’ll find some death song ideas in our personal logs – we’ve been working on them just in case!”
Terrorist: “What? Hey! Wait! Wait a minute!”
The landing party’s communicators, being really sturdy, register the first half-second of incoming photon torpedo fire.
Klingon captain: “Too bad. Let’s go find a planet with some real warriors!”
Now, I want to make it clear that I’m not suggesting this as a solution to any real-world situation. Whatever the flaws in the idea, though, I bet it would cut down on hostage crises.
Declaring a vent order
Just read an article yubbie posted elsewhere on the impending return of Battlestar Galactica… it’s a somewhat annoying article, full of smug talk like “we’re taking the opera out of space opera”, and “our spaceships won’t go woosh”, and “we’ll never do a time-travel story”, and “no bumpy-headed aliens”.
It makes me want to grab them by the throat and say, “Look – you morons!” Since the days when our hide-clad ancestors squatted around a fire and told stories of the gods to avoid thinking about how cold and hungry they were, storytelling has only needed two elements: engaging characters, and a stong plot (in fact, if you’ve done one of those elements extremely well, you can often skimp on the other).
If you’ve got those elements, you can do anything else you want. Technobabble? Fine, the fen will compose dictionaries for their own amusement. Bumpy-headed aliens? Makes it easier to tell ’em apart. Time travel? I’ll just point out that time travel is at the core of much of the favorite science-fiction and fantasy of the last 40 years.
Stop telling us what you won’t do, and show us some damn good writing. Do that, and all else will be forgiven.
While I’m in the mood to rant… yesterday, I was once again informed by a younger fan how lame classic Star Trek was, which is something I’m so sick of hearing. Kid, maybe the show isn’t to your taste, which is your right as a language-using primate. But I challenge you to find me a better science-fiction show with a continuing set of characters on late 1960’s American network television. Can’t think of one? Fine, then don’t blame a Ford Model T because it couldn’t break 100 miles per hour and didn’t have a CD player.
Aaaaahhhhh… that felt good.
Why one should keep an extra outfit at work
I am now condemned to wearing a big meatball sub stain on my shirt for the next 8 hours.
I think I’m going to look into adult-sized bibs.
Continuing my thoughts from yesterday…
An unscientific poll seems to indicate that, not only are geeks having more sex, it’s often pretty kinky. I guess that’s not a great surprise when you combine the sterotypical geek willingness to embrace new ideas and desire to avoid conformity. (Or sometimes beat conformity over the head with a baseball bat.)
Kinky is, of course, a relative term, but since the only part of sex necessary for the species’ survival is the act itself, I find it interesting that our brains are wired in such a way as to make all these variations so enticing. I gues that, in the long run, it encourages even more sex, which is what our DNA wants from us. I can just hear the Great Designers now…
“We’ve come up with this great advantage, better even than claws or wings. We call it ‘intelligence’, and with it, this species should be running the planet soon.”
“What’s the downside?”
“Well, now they’ll have things to do besides eating, sleeping, and making copies of themselves; it might slow the program down a bit.”
“All right… you can try this ‘intelligence’ thing… but make sure you tweak their circuitry so they’re still fixated on food, sleep, and sex. Otherwise we’ll never get this project done.”
Recent exchanges in nius‘ LiveJournal got me thinking… healerkou recently told her mom that “Geeks don’t have sex.” This isn’t really true – it is the popular stereotype, and it may be true that geeks find sex less readily available, but that’s changing. And, like so much else at the beginning of the 21st century, we can connect it right to that dang Internet.
Short history of the geek-sex evolution of the Internet:
1) Government-sponsored geeks build a network to talk about nuclear explosions. 2) Those geeks, while talking about nuclear reactions, digress into astronomy.
3) Those geeks, while talking about astronomy, digress into Star Trek.
4) Those geeks, while talking about Star Trek, digress into things they’d like to do with the half-naked aliens on the show.
5) … which leads to Internet porn archives.
6) … which leads to the discovery that the geeks can make money selling porn site subscriptions to non-geeks.
7) … which leads to horny geeks meeting each other on porn sites and *doing* something about it.
Of course, this wouldn’t work were it not for the fact that intelligent women everywhere are discovering this subculture in which they can make as much money as the males, and simply by agreeing to roll a few d20s once a week, they can have intelligent men with paying jobs lined up at their doors.
It’s a rosy future, with hope for us all… assuming the non-geeks don’t catch on that we are finally having sex without them, and blow up the planet in spite.
B plus 34 years and counting…
Forgot my lunch this morning, so since it’s my birthday, my boss ordered me a sub from the deli nearby.
So far, this has been one of the more pleasant Fridays 🙂 I’ll have to share my good mood with my sweetie later today *wink*
For the webcomic fans
Checked out a new online comic this morning – Freefall, at http://freefall.purrsia.com/ . It’s the story of a rougish “captain” never seen out of his space suit, a rather addled robot, and their newly-hired anthopomorphic engineer, as they try to make an old salvaged spaceship space-worthy. Another bit of online fun that had me snickering frequently.
