Category: general

The Silmarillion in 1000 Words

MEN OF MIDDLE-EARTH: Shiny tall wonderful wise sea-king dudes! Yay!

NUMENOREANS: Here, have some stuff and wisdom.

MEN OF MIDDLE-EARTH: <3 <3 <3

Shade passed me this must-read. A couple excerpts:

ringwraiths@Mordor.net

Found ’em, Boss. Or at least we thought we found them. Busted up their hiding place real good, but they escaped into Old Forest, which is very scary. We would have gone in after them, but locals sounded incredible fire alarm. Took a vote and decided to head to Bree, wait for hobbits.

Sauron@Mordor.net

You took a vote?! (Sigh). Fine, whatever.

ringwraiths@Mordor.net

Now in Bree, but rest of Black Riders not here. Barkeep wants us to pay their tab. Pal Bill Ferny said homeys are retracing their steps to see if No.5’s ring fell off on way from Isengard. Rented great room with view. Expense request enclosed.

Sauron@Mordor.net

2,000 farthings for ‘Dwarf massage’?

and

ringwraiths@Mordor.net

Right you are, Boss. We five are plenty for the job. I guess we’ll get the others’ bonuses, ha ha. Anyway, turns out the hobbits have joined forces with a Ranger, named Strider. Job suddenly got harder. They also bought Ferny’s pony; Bill got hit with apple from one of the hobbits, but lived. He said they went cross-country, which means we’ll just have to hope they rejoin the road up ahead. Thoughts?

Sauron@Mordor.net

Thoughts? Yes, try following them.

:D

Rich people, feel free to buy this for me. [I’ve heard rumors that this isn’t quite legit…oh well. -4/4/23 6:53am]

Here is a really doofy article. Yes, that is a tabloid.

It’s an interesting claim, but although I think that unconscious knowledge does help fuel our decision-making, I’m not exactly sure how we would be able to “tell by looking” that Kerry has more royal blood than Bush, or why that would make us choose Kerry. I would be interested to see if the claim that the Presidential victor always has the most blue blood could be backed up by fact, but of course you’ll never see that sort of devotion to balanced reporting in the National Enquirer.

So, apparently I took so many pictures in Savannah that I can’t fit them all in one Gallery album. What I’m going to do is break them up into two groups, then go through later to add captions/descriptions and remove pictures that aren’t so great. Hopefully that will cut the number down to 290 or below, which seems to be the limit. (At some point I need to update the Gallery software, but I haven’t had the time.)

Of course, I’m not going to leave the pictures up forever, because the sheer number means they take up a lot of space on the family website, but I’ll at least leave them there long enough for my travel companions to see them :)

Link to album one coming soon.

When I got home from work today, I had barely settled in when I decided to lie down for a minute to cool down (it was really hot again today, although the heat was mercifully offset by the occasional breeze this time). A little later, I noticed that I had been sleeping for awhile. I shrugged, got undressed, and went back to sleep.

I think I woke up one other time and went to the bathroom, but after that I didn’t awaken until…

11:30 p.m.!!!!

So yeah…I guess I was tired. :>

The thought struck me that I still didn’t know whether or not toilets flush in a counterclockwise direction in the Southern Hemisphere, so I looked it up on Snopes. (Yeah, I know, this is extraordinarily important.) I’m glad to have the mystery solved, but what really got me was this quote:

The Coriolis effect produces a measurable effect over huge distances and long periods of time, neither of which applies to your bathroom.

:D I love that.

When I started my car this morning, the headlights, dash lights, and radio all came on. I didn’t check the interior light. I was too busy feeling shocked and annoyed.

I guess the headlight switch is “on the fritz”…well on the road to going out, but willing to work intermittently. I’m not going to trust it on a road trip, the little tease.

Random tangent: I used to call my car Walton, after my grandfather, the car’s previous owner, but the name never really fit. Recently I came up with the perfect name…but now I can’t remember what it is.

I’ve been curbing my addiction to caffeine–haven’t had a caffeinated soda in a couple weeks now, and I’ve even avoided my beloved Southern sweet tea and green tea–but this makes me wonder if I’m neglecting a more important problem.

Leanne Ely’s Saving Dinner has helped me to make more nutritious (and delicious) meals this year, but I’m still falling into the trap of fast food and ordering in. And hell, I work every day for a restaurant marketing company, so I deal with images and descriptions of food all the time. Could this be as harmful to my figure as thinking about babies (specifically, multiples) all the time seems to be to my emotions?

(I’m exaggerating, of course. I love my jobs, and it would be ridiculous to blame them for my own issues.)

In other annoying news, my car is acting up, so I won’t be able to go to DC this weekend as planned. A few weeks ago a car electronics service technician diagnosed the problem as being an old/faulty headlight switch–without actually looking at the car. I was a little skeptical, and I had Reid look at it for me before I left for Kentucky. He replaced some fuses, and everything worked fine again, so I was able to make my trip with no problems.

Yesterday, though, as I was heading out of work, and just as a pretty piano piece came on, suddenly the radio just stopped functioning. I clicked the buttons and fiddled with the volume for awhile, but it was just dead.

“Oh, shit,” I said, because I had a premonition. I flipped on the headlights.

Nothing. No headlights, no dash lights.

This was pretty damning evidence already, but I checked the interior lights just in case…and they didn’t come on either.

Looks like I need a new headlight switch after all.

I guess I will be calling the car electronics guy today. He knows how to order the part, and install it of course. I doubt very seriously that this work will be done by the weekend, though, so I’ve gone ahead and cancelled with Noelle and the Sushicam people.

This is rather disappointing…I was looking forward to seeing Noelle again, and DC, and meeting Jeff from Sushicam (and, of course, taking pictures). But bleh. What can you do?

I was frustrated yesterday, and thinking that we should go ahead and buy a new car…but we really can’t afford it. Some stuff has come up at Sean’s work that may mean he’ll have to change jobs, taking a pay cut in the process. He was hoping that he’d be able to stick it out until his security clearance came through, but it’s sort of out of his hands now…which sucks. So…no new vehicle for awhile.

Does anyone out there have job security? Lately everything feels so impermanent. While I love being flexible, ultimately it’s also nice to know that I can afford it.

The sooner I get my raise, the better. And the sooner I can get going on my own business venture, the better. There is a lot of work I’ll need to do just to get started, but I need this. We need this.

ecological footprint quiz 2004:

CATEGORY: ACRES

FOOD: 5.4

MOBILITY: 0.2

SHELTER: 5.7

GOODS/SERVICES: 5.4

TOTAL FOOTPRINT: 17

IN COMPARISON, THE AVERAGE ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT IN YOUR COUNTRY IS 24 ACRES PER PERSON.

WORLDWIDE, THERE EXIST 4.5 BIOLOGICALLY PRODUCTIVE ACRES PER PERSON.

IF EVERYONE LIVED LIKE YOU, WE WOULD NEED 3.8 PLANETS.

Hmm. Isn’t that nice?

Or something.

I wish Augusta had its own Batman and Robin.

I’m hesitant to link this, simply because Den Beste seems to be inundated with emails as it is, but I think it’s a really cool article about the history of ship/fleet warfare. This sort of thing does not interest me at all…or at least, I never thought it did. Den Beste’s overview was really informative, though, and I read it beginning to end.

He originally started out planning to write about the plausibility of and possibilities for future/space fleet warfare. To do this he had to begin with descriptions of the history of fleet warfare, and it got so long that he decided to put off writing the space part! I’m looking forward to seeing what he comes up with on that front.

There’s your introduction…remember that he does not want emails, so if you just want to shoot the breeze about this article, post your comment here! ;D If you have some sort of life-altering, fascinating, amazing insight, then you can probably go ahead and email Den Beste. Disclaimer stated…here’s the link!

Some of my last posts on the AMRN (I haven’t posted recently, and I’m thinking yet again of quitting) were for Milla Frank, currently the XO of the UNS Etrakis. Mr. Justice hadn’t been posting much for Captain Youngman, so I was pretty much the active senior officer during a rather interesting crisis: first contact. (For our fleet, anyway; it came out that our government already knew about the aliens. Also, since it’s Macross, you could argue that it’s not really first contact since we’ve already met so many other aliens…but I’m not here to discuss semantics!) I had to make executive decisions about deployment, get our people out of harm’s way and, later, negotiate a truce with the new aliens while trying not to look like a sissy.

This was really the only time in my almost five years of playing on the AMRN that I felt that I both had a decent grasp of what I was doing and that my actions had a direct impact on the game universe. In short, I was actually playing the game and having a hell of a lot of fun at it.

Virtually all of my fun in the past came from non-combat, relationship-motivated character interaction. There is a disparity between “combat” and “down time” that many players and GMs have remarked upon. “Combat” is meaningless flying out to attack the enemy of the week (or month, or year), typically never quite finishing the mission, and having a neat resolution packaged up by the GM that essentially nullifies any actual impact you had on the game. This can happen under a single GM–perhaps s/he simply doesn’t have the time to rewrite his/her plot, or something–but it’s most noticeable when one GM leaves and another takes over. The successor typically has no idea what occurred in game or what it might have meant for the characters, so s/he simply washes the slate clean. Convenient for him/her, annoying for the players.

Down time, on the other hand, is not so closely monitored by the GMs, so the continuity is maintained directly by the players. If my character starts flirting with another character, that character will be affected, and so will anyone observing. Flashbacks to this occurrence could happen months later (real-time). It was in those times that I really felt that I was building story.

At the same time, though, I always had the niggling feeling that I wasn’t building a complete story. Yes, characters are the most important thing (at least, to me), but the setting and the events of the universe are part of what shapes the characters. Much of what I have done in the game could be done anywhere. There is nothing that makes my characters’ relationships and motivations particularly bound to the world of Macross. A few little changes, and we could plunk them right into, say, the United States Civil War. When I started realizing this, I started losing my interest in the game, and it’s been declining ever since.

My experience with Milla has shown me what a real game can feel like. In fact, I strongly believe that that experience is the only reason I read Den Beste’s article all the way through. I had been thinking about similar principles in order to create a favorable outcome in my game…and because I was having a direct impact on what happened (to an entire fleet!), the learning was actually interesting.

I don’t gain anything by knowing mecha statistics. The GMs don’t know them, either, so they tend to resolve rounds in general ways that don’t depend on the combination of mecha type and actions. The GMs who do “know” mecha stats often disagree with one another, meaning that there is no general consensus and therefore no point in trying to learn. Why bother, if there’s no guarantee that my knowledge will be useful? If I get the same result by simply understanding the basic principles and maybe adding a few mecha-specific details, why bother taking it to the next level? What is there to be gained?

This is most likely why I find mecha stats so boring. I have no time for knowledge I don’t have a use for.

I would like it if there were some way to give all players the feeling I had during the first contact (or whatever) scenario. I’m not going to say it was perfect–at times I felt as if I was being “guided”–but it was a hell of a lot better than pretty much all of the rest of my AMRN experience. There is no perfect game, because people are all different…but I think that having a direct impact on larger-than-life events would add a long-missing excitement for every single player.

Savannah was awesome, and I’ll be posting up some pictures and a blurb or two as soon as possible. Until then, though, here are a few fun things:

• Reminiscent of my discussion of the “well said” phenomenon in Japan, here are some advertising quotes (I love the longer ones).
• An exciting new technology, whereby plants are used to cleanse the soil of deadly chemicals that remain after an area is mined for gold, is being implemented in South America. The plants not only absorb the mining chemicals, but the gold remaining in the ground. This gold is then used to pay the costs of the cleansing and of training the locals to farm the land once it’s cleansed. This is what technology is all about!
• This cracked me up. Just go look. (I especially love that “unique WWW address”…no wonder people needed code books back then!)
• I link this because it’s the first time I’ve laughed at Mac Hall in quite some time. The last panel just totally gets me.
• Penny Arcade, on the other hand, pretty much invariably makes me laugh. This looks like it would be fun. Sean and I are going to some sort of Asheron’s Call 2 convention in August, so I don’t know if we would be able to swing PAX, but it’s something to think about.

Speaking of trips, I’m going to Washington, DC to meet some of the folks from Sushicam this coming Friday. I’ll be lodging at the home of my very good friend from middle school, Noelle. She and her husband John are being very gracious, considering the short notice! ^^; I hope to spend some time with the two of them on Saturday, doing…something or other. Cary (my cousin, who I saw yesterday in Savannah) suggested that I try to go to Georgetown instead of looking at the monuments. She said there are lots of interesting things to see and do, and some great cafes and shops. So I’m kicking that idea around. However, since it will apparently take eight hours to get there, I will really only have Saturday in which to do stuff. It may be that I’m unable to do much sightseeing at all. But relaxing with Noelle and catching up (we last saw each other last summer, at Myrtle Beach) would be just fine with me.

That’s it for now. More on Savannah later. For now, let me just reiterate that I had a blast. :)

This time I’m on a day trip to Savannah. Mapquest claims it will take three hours to get to the resort where Aunt Bev and Cary are staying, so I’m leaving now to hopefully arrive at noon. Since Mapquest also said it would take three hours to get to Myrtle Beach, and it actually took more like an hour and a half, I’m hopeful that I’ll arrive early. Then again, it is Saturday, so I may have to deal with other travelers…

I finally downloaded the pictures from Kentucky onto my computer last night, but I haven’t had a chance to put them up anywhere. Most of them are normal family things, but a few are noteworthy, and I’ll find a place for them later.

Well, here I go. I’ll be back much later tonight…whether or not I’ll post again is another thing entirely.

Of course, not every burning issue was cleared up Thursday. For instance, how can 15 people be fired when they were never hired in the first place? That question may never be resolved.

Hahahah. MSN is teh funnay.

This is amazing. I’ll post actual thoughts on it later, when I’m not supposed to be working. ;>

AJ linked me tonight to what may be the greatest video currently on the Internet. I’ve seen it before…but it never gets old! I think part of the reason I enjoy it so much is that she seems, based solely on her looks, her voice, and that self-indulgent little giggle right before she gets whacked upside the head, to be a total fucking ditzy bitch.

It’s shallow, I know. But I can’t stop enjoying it. :>