We finished Chapter One of my Terak D&D campaign last night. Took 8 sessions.
We had internet service blackouts from Shaw last night and this morning – and customer service tried to tell us that everything was fine. Anyone else have similar disruptions?
James? (wink wink)
The Pixies
Commodore Ballroom
April 22-23, 2004
DRS 8:00
$35 + s/c ($41.25 total at outlets, about $2 more over phone or website)
On sale Saturday Feb 22 at 9:30AM
Thanks to Phil.
Admissible in Court?
Brain Fingerprinting, developed by Dr Larry Farwell, chief scientist and founder of Brain Fingerprinting Laboratories, is a method of reading the brain’s involuntary electrical activity in response to a subject being shown certain images relating to a crime.
Unlike the polygraph or lie detector to which it is often compared, the accuracy of this technology lies in its ability to pick up the electrical signal, known as a p300 wave, before the suspect has time to affect the output.
“It is highly scientific, brain fingerprinting doesn’t have anything to do with the emotions, whether a person is sweating or not; it simply detects scientifically if that information is stored in the brain,” says Dr Farwell.
Hmmm…I’m not convinced.
Yesterday I helped Sheri & Stephane move. Ahhhhh invigorating.
Photography fans…
I learned about camera obscura in school. Here’s a neat application of it:
http://www.abelardomorell.net/camera_obscura1.html
Abelardo Morell blackens out all but a half-inch circle of a rooms window. As
light rays are forced through the small opening, they criss-cross and turn
the image of the outside world upside-down as the rays pass into the room.
He then records this optical phenomenon in an eight-hour exposure with a
large-format camera, and the resulting image shows the outside world
upside-down over the rooms interior. (thanks to Palle)
Neat.
They gave us too much and not enough.
Last week’s episode of Enterprise was one of the worst episodes I’ve seen, if not the worst. For those of you who didn’t see it, T’Pol (the Vulcan) got jealous of Trip (the first officer) and they ended up having sex. They seem to be redefining Vulcans with this series, and be redefining, I mean taking away everything that makes them different from humans.
They’ve also introduced creatures from another dimension. I had hoped Enterprise would be about the roots of the Federation and starfleet. I wanted to see what life was like before the transporter and universal translator. Instead they gave us everything tired and overused in TNG, DS9 and Voyager – time travel and extradimensional threats. Bring back the Andorians. I wanted to see them make first contact with the races that will eventually form the Federation. I didn’t want a temporal cold war or a whole season devoted to hunting down a threat to Earth. Show me how the Prime Directive was created. Show me how miscommunications between species have sparked wars and starfleet technology left on pre-warp worlds have twisted civilizations. Show me smallpox in space. Show me what the worlds of the Classic Trek aliens (orions, romulans, klingons, andorians, gorn, tellarites, tholians) were like before Kirk’s time.
Anghold says “it seems completely *unbelievable* that you were the ‘type’ of kid that would shove people around,” but it’s true. I used to push kids off bikes, and worse. I’ve kicked girls in the groin. I spent a great deal of my elementary education standing in the hall or in the principal’s office. I’m sure my mother could elucidate with stories. Then, in junior high and senior high, I went from dishing out the bullying to taking it. In fact as I recall Chris Woods was sticking up for me once in a while, because I sure as hell didn’t do it myself. I generally just soaked up the shoving, and the pebbles being thrown at me, and the being hit in the head with a half eaten orange (yes, some of the lyrics to “Big Robot Dinosaur” come from real life experience), and continued staring at the ground.
I really have no idea what I would be like today in that kind of a situation – it’s been a while since I’ve been “picked on.” If somebody was beating up a friend of mine – would I jump in with my art-fag fists flailing uselessly about like half-full bags of coloured marshmallows? Or would I curl up into a ball repeating “this is not happening” over and over? I have been a pacifist for so long that I can’t think of bringing myself to violence, even for my own protection. But I imagine adrenaline might take over and then I’d come to my senses on the witness stand being asked “and isn’t it true that on the 13th day of February you willingly and with malice aforethought throttled this poor little old lady to within an inch of her life using this very bike chain?”
And I certainly don’t bully anyone around. Well, except for the VGG volunteers, but only because I know they love it. But it makes me think about how different people can become over time. When I was a teen and in my twenties my mantra was “I hate kids.” People would say to me “but you used to be a kid once” and of course the proper response was “yeah, and I was awful so I know what I’m talking about.” Ha! They didn’t expect that one!
Maybe I’m in the minority and most people don’t change as an individual as markedly as I have. I would say that I’m quite different now than I was even in my early twenties. I’m still an atheist, I’m still pretty cynical, but I’m not quite the nihilist and misanthrope that I was in my college days. I’d like to think that I’m more mellow, tolerant, open-minded, confident, yaddayadda. I look back on things I’ve done – lyrics I’ve written, relationships I’ve taken for granted – and I realize how I would not do things the same today. And maybe that’s the benefit of wisdom or maybe it’s just because I am inherently a different person than I used to be courtesy of Father Time.
I’d be interested to hear how others perceive how time has changed their personality.
Did you hear? Did you hear? Don’t tell Paul Revere!
APRIL 18 Red’s, Edmonton, AB CANADA
19 MacEwan Hall, Calgary, AB CANADA
21 Victoria Curling Club, Victoria, BC CANADA
22-23 Commodore Ballroom, Vancouver, BC CANADA
24 Big Easy, Spokane, WA
25 The Big Easy, Boise, ID
27 MacDonald Theatre, Eugene, OR
29 Freeborn Hall, Davis, CA
MAY 1 Coachella Festival, Indio, CA
I could have played tennis today. I would have played tennis today. I should have played tennis today. I’m declaring tennis officially playable. Who wants to be on my tennis spam list for arranging impromptu games?
Today I went down to Radical Entertainment (video games) for a voiceover audition. I think it went well. Wish me the luck. The good kind of the luck. While I was there Dennis made sure that I got to show off my artwork to the art director there, Yayoi. They have cool super secret projects going on there that I can’t talk about. I mean that in both senses of the word “can’t” – I am not allowed and I’m not able. My bus transfer ran out while I was there so I went to the McDonald’s in the bus depot there on Terminal Ave. I bought a chicken fajita. It wasn’t even worth $2.13, but it gave me change for another bus ticket. I decided to try my old transfer on the bus just in case (I wasn’t sure what time it was, and also I wanted to see what he would do if I tried to get on with an expired transfer). To my delight and surprise he said “don’t worry about it” without even looking at the transfer, which he didn’t take. Sometimes, if you get on with an expired transfer, the driver will look at it to see “how expired” it is, and may let you on. I wonder if that is something the drivers do personally – break the “rules” – or if they’ve been instructed officially that they are allowed to do that.
There’s no D&D tonight because we don’t have quorum. It would be a good chance for me to catch up on my work, but for some reason I just don’t feel like it tonight. Or at least, not right now. Maybe it’s because I just got off my feet.
I’m getting a little disheartened by “contests” in which your entry consists of submitting creative work. This happens a lot in the gaming industry. For example, a contest to design an entry or create a writeup for a book. The prize? A copy of the book (sometimes more). This is a cheap way to get content for a book. This is also going on with a “Necronomicon” contest at http://www.cthulhulives.org/necronomicontest/contest.html You “submit your spell, drawing,
chapter, or passage of mad Mythos rambling. Your entry could be included in the
finished volume, and you could win a complete, handmade, leather-bound, super
authentic copy of the finished work, done up in full 17th-century style at the
insane level of detail the HPLHS is known for! There are lots of other prizes
too, so submit several entries and increase your chances.”
Now this particular example is not bad, and in fact it is kind of in the spirit of Lovecraft’s contemporaries (Lovecraft had writing buddies who used one another’s ideas for a collective “mythos”). Furthermore, submitting one drawing or passage may not be a lot of work to some. But there are other similar contests in which entrants must submit, for example, a fully statted monster entry for an upcoming D&D book. This is a good idea if you’re a publisher, because instead of paying a professional (usually freelance) author three cents a word for one piece of work, you can instead receive scores or hundreds of submissions and pick your favourite, and reward the contest entrant with a complimentary copy of the finished book (of which an author would normally get at least one in a standard contract) and whatever else you happen to have laying around the office. It’s clever, and it’s cheap.
H.B. Janet
It’s the anniversary of Janet’s birth on this very day! Janet, may you be lavished with gifts and wonderment and joy. Lavished, I say! Are you going to work today? You shouldn’t. If you do, I will not do any work in your honour.
On another note – I hope everyone will read Mike’s blog entry today. Truly outrageous, and not in the Jem & the Holograms way. Also – if you play the penguin game (as linked on Janet’s blog) – you get 10 tries only before you post your high score. Sorry, it’s decreed by the Council of Yeti.
Sometimes things make me laugh.
You don’t have to follow politics to get a chortle out of Donald Rumsfeld’s Kung Fu moves
Sorry for all the crappy boring links lately. Some day I’ll write a real blog entry. But right now, I draw a muck tojanida. Score 10 nerd points if you know what a tojanida is.
Well, there it is: spankings all ’round.
The Placebo Sofa Cinema is closing down at the end of this month. Sad news. I recommend you check it out before it’s gone. I offered them all my money to stay open but was told “Most of the problems stemmed from neighbours and noise.” There’s Dr. Strangelove on the 18th, an Invader Zim marathon on the 21st and The Shining on the 26th.
