Complete with snackbar!

Tip of the halo to PZ.

Alright, already...

So, I'm playing in a game of Scion, (a tabletop RPG in which the players portray the children of various gods from various mythologies) and for laughs, I ripped off Rich Berlew's brilliant webcomic, the Order of the Stick. (Click images to enlarge).

It started with the need to illustrate the mysterious cause of an explosion:



After that, a title page ensued:

From left to right, they are: Toni, daughter of Ptah; Sabina, daughter of Ares; Violet, daughter of Baron Samedi; Ray, son of Raijin and Mick, son of Poseidon. Oh, and Mick's faithful companion Daxter.

Most recently, and perhaps best of all, was the explanation of Poseidon's potency:

St00pd Numb3rs and other random things.

So, here I am watching Numb3rs, and frickin' Larry busts out with Pascal's Wager. If you're not familiar with it, here's a nice example:

Really? That's your argument? *facepalm*

I shoulda expected it from him, metaphysical monk-loving wackjob that he is.

It's just annoying:

1) P's W assumes a single deity, and ignores the fact that there are a multitude of often opposing religions.

2) P's W assumes that god (or whatever) is too retarded to detect cynical insincerity.

3) P's W forgets that you do loose things, albeit to varying degrees, in any given religion. Time, logic, rationality, self determination, free will, a sense of personal freedom... and much, much more.

Damn it, if you're gonna make an argument, at least make a new one. Fail.

Yes... expecting originality from the t.v... I know. Silly me.

No, but really...

The boss is on vacation this week, so I'm super tired. Finally have a day off tomorrow, which I will use to rest and shoot things, maybe actually explore Liberty City.

Also, coming up next month, the bestest birthday outing evar: a great new exhibit is opening at the Exploratorium on my birthday! Win.

Iron Underwear and Inoperable Shrapnel

Disclaimer: I have not read any of the Iron Man comics. I just saw the movie. Once. I'm bound to get some things wrong.

Well, I saw the movie Iron Man, and all in all, it was good. I saw it with friends and I liked it.

So:

Start with one immensely spoiled, emotionally undeveloped man-child. Torture him for a couple of months and make him rely on his own know-how to escape. Cook at 450 degrees for fourty-five minutes... oh, wait, that last bit is for my frozen pizza. Anyhow, presto-chango, insta-super-hero.

Oh, and there's shrapnel in his heart, or near his heart. Or something. The fellow who explains it isn't very clear. Something about the itsy-bitsy bits of metal worming their way into in important organs i.e. Tony Stark's heart. So, instead of removing said pieces of metal, some guy, we'll call him Bob-o, constructs an elaborate electro-magnet hooked up to a car battery to keep the killer metal shards from going further into his chest. Now, I may be wrong, but it seems to be that if you just, I dunno, used a stronger magnet, you could just suck all that nasty killer junk right out. And yeah, that would have some problems too, but I doubt it would be more invasive than, oh, I don't know... a giant metal-lined cylindrical cavity carved into the man's chest.

So, now having been on the receiving end of his own weapons, Stark decides to reconsider the whole Merchant of Death job. He runs up against some trouble selling the new peace-sort-of-liking image to the rest of Stark Industries. While being pushed out of the company's daily business, Stark goes to make an unexpected appearance at a Disney-Benefit-for-Orphaned-Firefighting-Puppies (or something) and finally notices that his assistant, Pepper Potts is female... Finally paying attention to her, because she has her hair down and is wearing a backless dress. Obviously, a female can't be an interesting person unless she is also scantily clad.

Despite these things, I really enjoied the movie. It was visually interesting, the CG integrating (to my untrained eye at least) almost seamlessly with the real-life acting. The timing, comedic and otherwise was so good as to seem almost lyrical and it wasn't cut short, which is often a problem with good movies... they end to soon. I enjoyed every minute of it, really, (save for the bits I missed due to my tiny bladder). And I recommend staying through the credits. Really.

I mean it.

Book meme of doom...

So it's going around: "the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users." So what I've read is in bold, what I've started, but never finished is in italics:

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi: a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran: a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury tales
The Historian: a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New world
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible: a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes: a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States: 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake: a novel
Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics: a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

--

In other news, I've got some new things up on Zazzle! Go look.

And while we're on the subject of cats...

An interesting thing happened last week, as our new six month old kitty began to aclimate herself to our home.

Of all her toys, her favorite is a poofy bunch of feathers on a line and stick; she loves chasing it and when she does finally catch is, she likes to carry it around the house before returning it to you for more play. On one such occation, she happened to walk by the window while holding the feather-toy. Lo and behold, a scrub jay appeared in our yard! Amazing! Enthralled, she crouched in the window, toy still dangling from her mouth, while the jay hopped about our yard. Finally he left and Tara aparently lost interest. Or so it seemed. We went back to playing, but the next time she caught the toy, she made a b-line to the window and stared intently out. She repeated this behavior several times, twitching her tail and holding herself as if at any moment, that jay would appear, called once again by her talismen of Bird Summoning. That's right! Within a matter of moments, my cat had developed a superstition!

Now, I know this sort of thing has been observed in pigeons, but it's interesting to see it yourself.

She kept up this ritual for several days. Now, though, she has given up on her talismin, either forgetting it, or realizing in her little kitty brain that the birds will come whether or not she prompts them with her lucky charm. This, then, demonstrated two things:

1) Cats can develop unfounded superstitions.

2) My cat is smarter than 83.1 % of Americans, because upon failure of her unfounded belief, she promptly gave it up.

No Evidence

And while we're on the subject of Lolcats:


moar humorous pics

Felis silvestris catus

Too braindead to say clever things now. Maybe because...

My new cat ate my brains!



Meet Tara (pronounced 'Terra'). This classy kitty enjoys carrying her feather toys around the house, riding on shoulders, and trying to nurse on fuzzy blankets. Also, cruizin' in her sandcrawler.



Actual posts will occur soon...

It's Still Alive...

(Cloverfield spoilers)

So, I saw Cloverfield the other day, and I am pleased to announce that it was really damn cool. I was worried that the hand-cam style would be jarring, but instead I found it an intersting technique to put the viewer right there with the characters, not really knowing what's going on, not quite being able to see certain things. One thing that's left unanswered is what, exactly, the monster is. Don't get me wrong, they show the whole thing, but the origin is an unknown. Despite the "thing falling in the ocean" that can be seen, I'm of the opinion that it's not an alien. Looking at the viral stuff, it looks like the falling thing was probably the Tagruato satelite.

My theroy is that the Cloverfield monster is actually a giant mutant fish, of all things. Some sort of deep sea dragonfish, like a viperfish, to be more exact. It's mostly the face that makes me think of that: the air-sacks on the side of the thing's head seem to resemble modified gills. Plus, the beady forward-facing eyes along with it's massive teeth.... yeah. That could also be the origin of it having six limbs rather than four.

In any case, the movie was cool. The viral marketing is fun, and J.J. Abrams is still really creative. Plus, in movie form, his ideas don't have time to peter out like his T.V. series seem to do.

So, yes, please do see it. Much with the cool.

WWWWOOOAAAAHHHHMMM!!

That was the sound that woke me up at around 5 in the morning, accompanied by an astonishingly bright red-magenta light shining through my window, despite the fact that my blinds were closed. The sound repeated itself twice more, the light white the second time and back to magenta-red the third. Alien? Ball lightening? The Invisible Pink Unicorn's Holy visitation?

Okay, it was just a power breaker or transformer of some sort arcing as a storm-blown tree fell into it. Lightening? I wondered. But what would make that noise? Fireworks, asked Aaron. It was the roommate that pegged it... he'd seen it before.

I reflected how this sort of thing could easily spark a more vivid and uneducated imagination, though. If it had coupled with, say, sleep paralysis, (something I experience in the warmer months) I can easily see it being a truly terrifying experience.

The thing is I'm certain that, once conscious, I'd never jump to the conclusion that it was aliens, or any other pseudo-scientific weird-ass phenomenon. Why? Well, something like that is just as likely in my mind as, say, leprechauns.

Which leads me to wonder why? How is it I am able to make a rational guess until I can learn the answer, while other people are immediately inclined to interpret things in extraordinarily unrealistic ways?

I don't know.

And maybe there's my answer. I'm okay with 'I don't know.' Admitting a lack of knowledge is more honest than any half-brained assertion, no matter how hopeful.

Alright, enough with my rainy-day musings. Good night.

Belated Happy New Year

So, I haven't posted for some time, because... *drumroll*

...I moved! I love, love, love my new place. It's huge, two stories and has a DISHWASHER! W00t!

So that's why I haven't posted. Sorry. I resolve to to better this year, Honest!