Link to someone new

By Shamus Posted Saturday Aug 12, 2006

Filed under: Links 3 comments

Here is a good one: A Sweet, familiar dissonance links to some hilarious Star Trek inspirational posters. Brilliant. Bonus: I like the Wash quote she has at the top of the page. *Sniff* Wash. I miss Wash.

Czeltic Girl is very good at foraging on the internet for amusing or interesting links. That is just one example of many. Dig around and you’re sure to blow N+1 hours of time checking them all out, where N is the number of hours you have to spare at the moment.

Lots of people have cute pictures of their kids, but Nelsonblog has a really cute little guy who almost didn’t make it, but who’s doing fine now. Whew. Go for it kid, we’re rooting for you.

 


 

Profit Addiction

By Shamus Posted Friday Aug 11, 2006

Filed under: Rants 10 comments

As a follow up to my previous post about absurd uses of the word “addiction”, I present the latest in a very long parade of frauds and goofs: Computer Addiction Specialist Maressa Hecht Orzack, Ph.D. I would suggest that in this metaphorical parade, she is driving the biggest float.

Is there an alternate usage of the word addiction that means, “Something people do which annoys me and I wish they would do less”? Because that’s how the seems to be employed now. A computer is a tool, one of the most versatile ever conceived. To suggest that its ubiquity is due to some sort of weakness or disorder and not because of the utility of the thing is madness. Did nineteenth century people worry about “horse addiction”? Did people in the last century talk about “car addiction”? This wouldn’t be so silly if this woman were just some researcher who’d drifted off the path of science, but this person is selling a cure, which makes the whole thing particularly risible.

Note also on this page that this woman has three entries in her BIBLIOGRAPHY, and one two of them is a letter she wrote to the editor.

Hat Tip: The Rampant One.

 


 

Picture a day for three years

By Shamus Posted Friday Aug 11, 2006

Filed under: Movies 5 comments

A woman took a picture of herself, every day, for three years. It forms a strange sort of animation, watching her weeks and months fly by at 24 frames a second. (Or whatever.)

The fact that a woman did this makes it more interesting. Her day-to-day variations are significant enough to keep her ever-changing. If a man did this it would be more or less the exact same picture, over and over, and the only thing likely to change is his shirt. (Although doing this while growing a long beard could prove interesting.) But this woman changed her hairstyle, makeup, and other things every once in a while, and of course women wear much more varied clothing as compared to men.

She also did an admirable job of getting the picture taken from about the same angle / distance each time. She did this for three years, starting in November 2001. I wonder if she’s still at it?

UPDATE: Yup – She is still doing it.

 


 

New Paint Job

By Shamus Posted Friday Aug 11, 2006

Filed under: Notices 1 comments

I’ve had this new site theme sitting around for ages but never put it into place. Finally the guilt of the wasted effort got to me and drove me to upload the thing. I’ve checked it in IE and Fireox. No obvious, glaring flaws or shortcomings so far. Let me know if you spot anything amiss.

 


 

Book Meme

By Shamus Posted Thursday Aug 10, 2006

Filed under: Nerd Culture 12 comments

Too busy to be creative today. Let’s do one of those memes, of which I was making fun yesterday. Let’s see… Don has a good one: A Book Meme.

To keep this interesting, let us append the qualifier “besides the Bible” to all of the following. Otherwise, my list would be rather homogenous.

  1. One book that changed your life
    A Wrinkle in Time was the first book I ever loved. I was in fourth grade. As an adult, Screwtape Letters actually had a large effect on me. The book is quite small and simple, but it gave me some very handy tools for thinking about the Christian life in different ways.

  2. One book that you've read more than once
    Fellowship of the Ring. I read the other two books only rarely, but I’ve taken in Fellowship many, many times.

  3. One book you'd want on a desert island
    Laying aside the fact that I’d mostly likely die within a week if deprived of my medicine: Some sort of survivalist book. For beginners. With pictures. Maybe even some sort of survivalist pop-up book, which contained various tools and devices within its pages.

  4. One book that made you laugh
    Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. In my youth I read it a couple of dozen times. I’m sort of afraid to revisit it after all this time. Will it still be funny?

  5. One book that made you cry
    Never happened. I don’t go in for sad books, I guess.

  6. One book that you wish had been written
    “Why Shamus Young is Totally the Greatest Guy Ever, Volume X” But wishing for that book is silly. I’d settle for just a Wiki.

  7. One book that you wish had never been written
    I don’t know. Are we trying to alter history or just avoid reading something that sucked? If the former, then I guess Mein Kampf or the various things Marx put to paper could be a good choice, although I’m always wary of messing with the timesteam. Haven’t we learned anything from Star Trek?

    If we just want to blot something from history to avoid reading it, then I nominate Day of the Delphi as an example of something that was published to the detriment of human culture. Utter sophomoric tripe. As proof: How many fiction books have a webpage dedicated to detailing all the ways in which it sucks? (And in fact, the author of that page is unduly kind in my view. There are many additional flaws that he does not bother to enumerate. He read it in order to familiarize himself with the Technothriller genre. That’s like watching Plan 9 From Outer Space as an introduction to sci-fi.) Take the Tom Clancy technothriller formula, hand it to an author who knows nothing about firearms, goverment, or military equipment, replace the main characters with stale b-movie hero archetypes and various Weathermen-style 60’s radical leftovers (as good guys), and then run the whole plot through some sort of John Woo stupidifier. Some books aren’t worth the paper on which they are printed, but Day of the Delphi isn’t worth the cubic volume of air that the book displaces.

  8. One book you're currently reading
    (Blush) Fellowship again.

  9. One book you've been meaning to read
    The System of the World books. I read the first in the series – Baroque Cycle – but got bogged down because the whole cast was a bunch of miserable cusses. I know there’s gold in the later books, I just need to suck it up and get through the plague, torture, slavery, frighteningly bad medicine, war, gross food, bad hygene, crushing opression, and the general prevailing theme that life in the seventeenth century was horrible, violent, and short.

  10. Tag 5 people
    Five? Stinking extroverts. Hmmmm. I can’t “tag” Steven, as he hasn’t upgraded his site from Stone Tablets and Chisel version 1.0. I could tag Don, who I got the meme from in the first place, but that would cause the meme to collapse in on itself and form a singularity. So let’s not do that. Lots of other people I read deal with a subject in particular (such as Anime) so tagging them would be an implicit request for them to break the theme of their site. What happens if I tag someone and they simply don’t feel like answering the questions? Doen’t this seem sort of pushy? Hey! Blog about books because I linked you!

    Anyway, if these questions interest you then by all means: Knock yourself out. But in the interest of fulfilling the request for an arbitrary five tags…

    My wife.
    Let’s also ask Fuzzy.
    And Augury.
    Let’s see if Mark will give up talking about movies long enough to talk about books.
    How about Beware the %Kawaii no wait… that just leads back to Don again.
    Tunes for Tancos? Nope. Don again. Come on, man! You’re hogging the internet. Save some room for the rest of us.

I picked this meme because I thought it would be a good way to bang out a ten-minute post, and I just blew a half hour on it. Whoops. Back to work.

FURTHER REFLECTION: Doesn’t this “tagging” business go counter to the idea of a meme? A meme is supposed to spread on its own, because people find the idea attractive or interesting. The “tag” thing seems to be a way to artificially spread a meme that wouldn’t otherwise cut it.

 


 

Crunch Time

By Shamus Posted Thursday Aug 10, 2006

Filed under: Personal 1 comments

Wow. For the first time in almost seven years I’m in full-on crunch mode at work. Last time I did this I was 28 years old, and I’m finding that as the birthday signpost labeled “35” looms ever closer that I am no longer able to get away with this as I once did. The spirit is willing (although the spirit is also a little bitter and grouchy) but the body is not quite able.

This is not to suggest that my body is failing. It’s just that it is failing to keep my brain energized for the 17 or so hours each day that I’m asking from it. As bedtime draws near I can feel my concentration slipping. Instances of a personal stack overflow – those times where you are working with more than two ideas, forget one of them, get confused and lose all of them – become increasingly frequent. I find myself wishing that programming was like less cerebral endevors, such as ditch-digging, so that I continue to work on sheer force of will alone.

 


 

Prey Demo

By Shamus Posted Wednesday Aug 9, 2006

Filed under: Game Reviews 2 comments

Many cultures have their own superheroes / beings / champions which serve as an endless font from which new lore may be drawn: The Japanese have Ninja. The Scots have Highlanders. The Chinese have Shaolin Monks. The Brits have a large collection of dry-wit detectives with super powers of observation and deduction of the Holmesean variety. I’ve enjoyed them and their many stories, but I’ve never been able to get into the Native American “Sprit Warrior” stuff. It just never worked for me.

The Prey Demo has changed this in short order. Like all of the other stuff I mentioned, I’m sure the story and characters as they are presented bear little or no resemblance to the source material. I’m sure the powers you employ in the game have nothing to do with any legends passed down among the Native American tribes. The legends did, I’m sure, contain lots of Eagles, Wolves, and stuff about spirits. Like a lot of stuff borrowed from different cutures, the writers crib from it to get new ideas and symbols, but the rest is simply recycled superman. The culture is used as an excuse to imbue the champion with superhuman power, and from there we’re off to save the world…

Which is a good thing in my book.

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