Author: Heather Meadows

Today in #amrn, Kevin was talking about a hybrid supercar that he liked. (His exact words were, “the hybrid supercar makes my pants tight too”.) My response:

[23:16:03] <COSLeia> Kevin: this one? http://www.toyota.com/vehicles/future/volta.html

[23:16:20] <COSLeia> that looks like something Orochimaru would drive

[23:16:28] <COSLeia> ahem, I mean, that car looks like a snake

[23:16:34] * COSLeia notes that her Narutard is showing

Elizabeth Leah Sauls, 21, was hosting her niece’s second birthday party at the time of Friday evening’s raid. She was allegedly smoking marijuana in the master bedroom and continuing to sell pot out of the house as the police moved in. Friend said she received 35 calls requesting the drug in the short time that police were there.

[…]

She appealed to the police that she was just selling the marijuana to pay for diapers and food for her 1-year-old, but police said they had been gathering evidence for weeks, making undercover purchases from the home, arresting buyers leaving the home and finding $860 and a pair of scales in the house.

I’m not going to get into a debate about whether or not marijuana is as dangerous as other drugs. That’s not even the issue here. This woman was ploying illegal trade out of her home and in the presence of children. Her activities endangered children. She is scum, the end.

It is not. According to Yahoo! News – Oddly Enough, American Jill Wettstein won a “trans-Atlantic pancake race”, beating out the British winner, Andrea Rawlings.

Rawlings was the fastest in a field of 26 apron-clad contestants between ages 20 and 73, who ran from the Olney market place to the local church while carrying a pancake in a frying pan.

The women are required to flip their pancakes before the start of the race and at the end to prove they haven’t dropped the pancakes.

[…]

Legend has it that the Olney race started in 1445 when a harassed housewife, rushing to be on time for church, arrived at the service still clutching her frying pan with a pancake in it.

A beautiful, honorable sport.

From Yahoo! News – Oddly Enough:

Jurors and others in Judge Donald Thompson’s courtroom kept hearing a strange whooshing noise, like a bicycle pump or maybe a blood pressure cuff. During one trial, Thompson seemed so distracted that some jurors thought he was playing a hand-held video game or tying fly-fishing lures behind the bench.

The explanation, investigators say, is even stranger than some imagined: The judge had a habit of masturbating with a penis pump under his robe during trials.

Ahahahahahahaha!

This story sounds really familiar to me. WKYT doesn’t date their articles (why?!) but Google says this item was updated 13 hours ago, so maybe it’s new. Who knows.

I haven’t been getting enough sleep this week, and today I started to feel sick–a little cough, sore throat, sinus pressure, haziness. So I took a nap.

As I slept, I dreamed.

In the first dream, I got Chris Dotson to help me build an awesome computer on the cheap for Ben. Chris is the son of an old friend of my dad’s. He’s several years older than me, and I always thought he was cool for that reason. Plus, he knows his stuff when it comes to computers–he used to call companies like IBM when he was troubleshooting a problem, and they knew him by name. I don’t know if he still does that, or if they still know him, but I always thought that was awesome.

I don’t know why I didn’t just get Sean to help me make a computer for Ben, but that thought apparently never occurred to me in the dream.

The computer we built was neat, and weird. It had five flat panel monitors, and they were arrayed in a half-circle–two of them lined up next to each other, then one right between them at a 90° angle, and the other two coming out at the 45° angles. The monitors were connected to each other by plastic spokes, and the monitors coming out towards the user were double-sided, so their picture could be seen from the left or the right.

There were these small round things with blue and green lights–not LEDs, but almost opaque plastic–on top of each monitor, and I remember thinking they looked like USB hubs. There was also a bag with five webcam and microphone sets on it. I remember trying to explain to AJ why exactly this computer was cool, and I said, “Now we can call anyone we want to anywhere from Ben’s computer for free!” (This part of my dream obviously came from A9.com, which I had been messing with right before I took my nap. Check out their new Yellow Pages, and you’ll see what I mean.)

After that, I was hanging out for lunch at a university. It might have been UK; I’m not sure. There was something like a jungle gym there, and people in their twenties and thirties were casually lounging around on it. Chris Dotson came there to hang out. There was a guy who he obviously knew who was in a bad mood, so Chris took it upon himself to cheer the guy up enough to smile–mostly by teasing the hell out of him. I don’t know if Chris acts like that in real life or not.

After he’d finished helping his friend’s mood, Chris revealed that he was actually in need of some cheering up himself. “Meal time has been replaced by pagan time,” he said bitterly, and went into a rant about his father’s new wife, and how she uses every opportunity to preach her pagan/occult beliefs. (I don’t know that his father actually has a new wife. I think this was just a dream thing.) From his impassioned speech, I got the impression that Chris’ Christian beliefs were affronted daily, but that he could do nothing about it out of respect for his father. (I don’t even know if Chris is Christian in real life.) I recognized how tormenting this must be, and I gave him a big hug.

At this point, something happened to where I was on a quest. (I had been reading The Illearth War immediately before I napped–almost to the end.) There is more to this, but I can’t remember the details. Ghosts of what I dreamt keep playing at the edges of my mind, but I can’t seem to grasp them.

Somehow I ended up at a gate at an airport. It was a secluded area, accessible by a bank of escalators that led back down to the main airport. Chris was there, as well as various other people. As we waited for whatever we were waiting for, suddenly terrorists started coming up the escalators.

They weren’t turban-wearing, robed, bearded Middle Easterners. They were, for lack of a better term, “white people”. Some of them might have had some “foreign” features, but nothing that really made them stand out.

I don’t really remember what they started doing. I think they were threatening us with something. But we fought back. I remember vividly kicking one of them back down the escalator.

After that encounter, I was loath to move out of a fighting stance. Duncan Fraser showed up, and at first some of the others at the gate were suspicious of him. They engaged in an extraordinarily brief fight that left Duncan in a low stance, with someone’s ridgehands (hands held flat in the “karate chop” position) dangerously trapping his groin.

“Okay, can I get up now?” he said humorously, looking up at everyone. I think the guy with the ridgehands was Eric Thigpen, another old kung fu classmate. They let Duncan get up and he joined us in the watch for terrorists.

Shortly thereafter I saw a line of men wearing airport uniforms, with large gold medallions that said “United” on them. I knew immediately that they were terrorists, even though they too were “white”. Watching them ride stiffly up the escalator, I shifted into an inapparent stance, trying not to tip them off, but I was already moving to intercept them.

One of them said, “James,” and raised his white umbrella.

I instinctively knew that those umbrellas contained some kind of lethal chemical gas or powder. I took a breath and held it as I moved forward to try to attack.

I must have really held my breath, though, because this woke me up.

As I awoke I remember thinking that it had been too long since I was in kung fu, that I was rusty, and that though I had been able to kick that one terrorist down the stairs, that was more luck than anything else. I remember thinking that I needed to train.

Game companies want animation. They want a fucking guy to parachute down from the top of your screen and land on the article you’re trying to read. They want you to have to interact with their advertisement just so you can see the content you came for. Everyone who uses the internet knows that this kind of shit is just frustrating. Look at sites like IGN, Gamespot, or Gamespy. You can’t read an article there without an animated bug crawling across your screen or some flash ad blaring shitty music. When we decided to do advertising we decided that we wouldn’t ever run any kind of animated add. Some companies won’t advertise with us because of it. Others, it’s like pulling teeth to get a non animated ad out of them. They have this idea in their head that the only way their ads will be effective is if they are annoying as fuck.

Some of them are actually shocked when ads at PA out perform animated versions at other sites like IGN. Here we are just a little comic site and we kick their fucking ass. We tell them that if you don’t insult people with shitty flash ads, they are much more likely to actually check out your game. I have never once clicked on a flash ad except to mute it or close it and I have a feeling you guys are pretty much the same. They just can’t get it through their heads that people don’t like to be annoyed by advertising.

So, like, whatever happened to that resolve?

They don’t have sound on their ads, which is a good thing, but they definitely have animation. At least it isn’t horrible flashing that distracts you from what you’re reading, but it’s still movement in your peripheral vision, and that’s distracting enough. I wonder what changed their minds.

No new comic/rant yet, but hey, I’m just glad to see the site restored.

[Edit 1:25p: I can’t get to it from home. Not sure if it’s a DNS issue between here and work, or if it went down again after I checked it. Alas!]

Have a lovely Fat Tuesday :>

Happy Chinese New Year!

(Well, starting sometime later today, when it’s the 9th in Asia.)

There’s a piece up on BoingBoing about a cultural Internet phenomenon in east Asia called “orz”. If you look at those letters next to each other, you can imagine what the writer describes:

It illustrates a guy facing left and kneeling on the ground, the “o” means the head, the “r” means the hands and the body while the “z” means the legs. People use this pictograph to show they failed and they are despair or in a sad mood (“??” in Chinese or japanese Kanji) in the Internet.

(Unfortunately, that Chinese character didn’t come out.)

You can see the sheer defeat in that pictograph. The speaker has been beaten to his hands and knees. And yet I feel that there is a dark sort of humor to it, a grim commiseration that allows men going through orz to identify with each other, and maybe even laugh about it.

I found it interesting that they pronounce Internet pictographs, e.g. “greater underline less” and “XD”. (I also thought it was cute that he explained what the emoticons meant.)

Thanks for hosting the translation, BoingBoing!

Mathias Dopfner, CEO of German publishing firm Axel Springer, has written an editorial about Europe’s role in the war on terror. Snopes has a translation up. Here’s a snippet:

Only two recent American Presidents had the courage needed for anti-appeasement: Reagan and Bush.

His American critics may quibble over the details, but we Europeans know the truth. We saw it first hand: Ronald Reagan ended the Cold War, freeing half of the German people from nearly 50 years of terror and virtual slavery. And Bush, supported only by the Social Democrat Blair, acting on moral conviction, recognized the danger in the Islamic War against democracy.

I was pleased to see that Snopes managed to present this piece without comment.

For what it’s worth, I share Mr. Dopfner’s concern. More to the point, I’m worried whether America’s efforts will be enough. The terrorist threat is insidious, subtle. And there’s no clear front–except, now, Iraq.

We cannot lose Iraq. But if more nations don’t realize the danger and come to our aid, I fear that we will.

I mean it, she is a beautiful person. This interview made me so happy she was nominated.

I probably ought to see the film!

Three buildings in downtown Nicholasville burned down last Thursday. (Topix.net is great, but its RSS news isn’t exactly timely, is it?)

The fire began in a thrift shop at about 1:30 p.m. on South Main Street between West Chestnut Street and East Maple Street. The fire spread to a pool hall next door and quickly escalated from a two-alarm to a four alarm fire. In all, at least three buildings are damaged, two that are a total loss. The fire continued to burn into the evening.

My family could get to that area in like, three minutes. (Nicholasville’s kind of small, and they all essentially live “downtown” anyway.) I’m glad the fire didn’t spread (it would take a lot to spread to my family’s homes, but you know), and I hope no one was hurt.

[Edit 13:44: AJ sez,

Eh. Don’t know what’s up with that fire you mentioned. Downtown got the shit burned out of it a few months ago, though. Didn’t hear about it happening again.

Perhaps this article is not simply a week old…but months and months old!!]

“Please forget about that whole terrorist thing, that wasn’t us! Here, try this Singin’ in the Rain remix ad instead.”

I like it, actually :D It’s cute! (And I love that movie.)