| Do you wanna...? |
[Oct. 21st, 2009|02:49 pm] |
Ths one goes out to all my MMO-afflicted homies (MMO-mies?), and also anyone else who's been known to prefer spending their time in a virtual world of one sort or another. (Since the answer for almost all of you to the question as posed will be an easy 'nope!', you'll just have to imagine a video full of Horde or SL toons instead. Either that or go watch First of May again.) And yes, that's Dr. Horrible's girlfriend in the lead role.
( Embedded videos behind cut ) |
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| Tick Tock Take |
[Oct. 20th, 2009|04:47 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | mind-scraps, quotes | ] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  pensive | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | NaQoyQatsi - Primacy of Number | ] |
Western civilization began by smashing the faces of beasts with stones, determined to "conquer the wilderness," hammering at both matter and mind on the anvil of the millenniums until finally, we pulled down mountains and made atoms scream in tortured orbits. Now the day of deliverance comes, casting our shadows in merciless hydrogen light, illuminating not only our latest war crimes, but also crimes of trade and finance and greed during what has come to pass for peace, when our darkest commercial cannibalism feasts upon the naked wondrous bodies of the innocents. And now destruction dances in infinite rooms, singing in dark chords for the brute who smashed open the celestial clock, hungry to eat the ticking heart of god. --Joe Bageant, Redneck Liberation Theology |
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| Ba-WOOF |
[Oct. 20th, 2009|07:44 am] |
Here's to wishing a very happy birthday today to the biggest, buffest, bestest wolf I know, the ever-elusive ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) ccroft. Even though it should really be tomorrow (to most of us), he just had to go and muck everything up by living in the future, didn't he? So big he doesn't even fit in the present! (I knew I should've ordered a bigger one...)
Also a good one, only slightly belated, to that force of ottery blue nature, sugerhound, despite the fact I don't think he actually uses LJ at all anymore.
I'd sing ya both Happy Birthday myself, but it's in copyright until 2030 (and counting) and I can't afford the rights to it! |
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| A Breathtaking Work of Staggering Hubris |
[Oct. 6th, 2009|10:58 am] |
I was going to wait a bit before posting this, but drleo forced my hand! (I originally got it from the incomparable solarbird.) So, here we go:
The good folks over at that bastion of insanity and borderline treason, Conservapedia, have recognized a problem, a BIG problem, a problem lurking at the very core of everything that is currently wrong with USAmerican (and therefore human) society:
The Bible.
The problem?
It's too liberal.
And so they're going to write a Conservative Bible to make sure that no one else falls prey to such pernicious liberal messages as anti-materialism, peace, and forgiveness.
(If the link doesn't work, it's because their site has been getting hammered since this finally got noticed. In the meantime you can get other summaries of what they're on about from BeliefNet and SadlyNo and some Catholic guy, while RationalWiki has an in-depth history of the thing.)
The actual page itself really has to be seen to be believed though, so keep trying until it works. The layers of (apparently unintentional) irony* are just too thick, I don't know where to begin.
Does anyone remember that episode of Star Trek: TNG where they rescued a lone Borg who crash-landed on the planet, and someone floated the idea that they could basically show him a really fancy Escher picture so convoluted and self-contradictory that when he took it back to the Collective, the central computer would get bogged down in analyzing it and overheat/explode? Sometimes I think that's exactly what projects like Conservapedia are trying to do to the reality-based community.
Anyway, if they're really serious (and tragically I don't really doubt that they are), they probably could've saved themselves a whole lot of time and trouble by just handing out copies of this instead.
____
*Which in turn reminds me of Stephen Colbert's thriving conservative viewership who thoroughly enjoy him because they actually take him completely unironically, and will passionately argue that it's really all the liberals who are being fooled. |
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| "Rape Fantasies for Both" |
[Oct. 4th, 2009|06:24 am] |
Masters and Johnson published a list of the top five sexual fantasies of the gay and straight men and women. Forced Sexual Encounters was either No.1 or No.2 for all four groups. Both straight men and lesbians imagined themselves interchangeably in the role of rapist and "rapee." In the case of gang rape fantasies--I so love this--gay men occasionally "played an additional role of planner or organizer."
--from "Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex", by Mary Roach
I find myself imagining someone standing there with a clipboard and a stopwatch... "Alright, numbers 4 through 6, you're up!" (Yes, I'm *such* a romantic...)
PS. If you're confused about today's location entry... |
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| Of cores! |
[Sep. 26th, 2009|07:01 am] |
| [ | Tags | | | apples, politics | ] |
| [ | Current Location |
| | downtown core | ] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  contemplative | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | Stone Temple Pilots - Core - Wicked Garden | ] |
When an organization (say, a police force or a government or Wall St.) goes awry and becomes (or at least reveals itself as) hopelessly corrupt, we might say it is "rotten to the core." Being an inquisitive sort, I started wondering about the physical basis of the metaphor.
I spent some time thinking about it, and I could only come up with a few relatively-common non-abstract uses of "core": specifically apple cores, planetary/stellar cores (which probably work on the apple metaphor themselves), and nuclear reactor cores. Because GIMF, I did a quick search and didn't find any other applicable uses, except a note that "the single seed in the center of a cherry, peach, plum, olive, avocado or other fruit" also counts as a core. Personally, I don't think I've ever heard them referred to as such. I always call it the pit or the stone. Does your mileage vary?
So, setting aside the stone-fruits, the only common "core" I know of that actually rots is the apple core. But I have an apple tree in my back yard which I do not apply pesticides to, and as a result 99% of the apples that come off that tree tend to have things living in them when I pick them up: mostly grubs, the occasional small beetle or earwig. (This is actually not as big a problem as it might seem. Split the apple in half, spend 30 seconds with a paring knife, and you can usually salvage at least 3/4 of a perfectly delicious uncontaminated apple, and consign the rest to the compost.)
When things start living inside apples, I've had enough apple-dissection experience to know that it's the bits all directly around the living space that rot first (I'd presume due to the wastes that have nowhere else to go). I also have enough apple-dissection experience to know that when things want to move into a pristine apple, they ALWAYS go directly for the core and set up shop in there first, expanding outward once established. It makes sense, of course (of cores!), since the core has those little hollow fibrous spaces for the seeds, which might as well be billed as a ready-to-own bug-condominium that they don't even have to bother excavating, and where all the walls are made of food. Paradise! The point is though, in all my experience with partly-rotten apples, the rot virtually always spreads outward FROM the core, not inward TO it, and it's not even subtle.
The only possible exception I can think of is the bruised apple... if you give an otherwise-good apple a good hard drop and then let it sit around for awhile, when it finally starts to go bad, it'll start at the bruise and radiate outward (and inward) from there. Which I guess begs (to ask) the question: what causes more rotten apples, stuff living inside them or bruises? More to the point, what caused more rotten apples when they coined the phrase "rotten to the core"? It would seem to me that, especially historically (pre-pesticides), bugs would probably get far more apples than bruises would, and if so shouldn't the phrase be "rotten FROM the core" instead? Which is often just how it works anyway when an organization really goes bad. Would that be telling too much truth? |
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| He did what?? |
[Sep. 24th, 2009|09:57 am] |
Hey LJland, I was just wondering, is there any truth to the rumors that http://glennbeckrapedandmurderedayounggirlin1990.com/ ? I've been seeing this cropping up more and more lately, and while some of them claim to be jokes, after a while you just you start to wonder.
I hesitate to ask, cuz even I have to admit that he PROBABLY didn't... but if he didn't, where's his official denial? Has anyone asked him about it publicly yet? And if he hasn't denied it yet, why not? Why wouldn't he just take 5 minutes to clear the air and reassure us that he didn't in fact rape and kill any girls in 1990 like all these rumors are saying? |
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| Kitten! Part II: The Namening |
[Sep. 24th, 2009|06:10 am] |
The timing of this post may be deceptive, as I had actually settled on the name before I even got her home.
Lovelace.
As to why I picked it... if I was enough of a nerd to have named my first cat Schrodinger, who might Lovelace be a reference to? (Pre-emptive note: NOT Linda. I mean really, come on.) I also like the ambiguity in pronunciation between "love-lace" and "loveless" depending on how British I want to get about it.
So far her favorite toy is still a crumpled-up ball of paper. Hooray for the easily-amused! |
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| Kitten! |
[Sep. 21st, 2009|01:09 pm] |
Mew! |
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