Archives, eh
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# A Euler Diagram for your pleasure and amusement
damn New Zealanders
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# Earth Hour
We turned off the lights during Earth Hour, but it was all right, I could still see what I was doing by the glow of the three laptops, the bling light on the file server and the glow of the television.
I wonder how much carbon those were worth :- )
Snarkiness aside, I more or less support Earth Hour. Not necessarily for environmental reasons [1] but more because it’d be nice to be able to see the stars. Earth Hour is never going to give me that, but it’s the thought that counts.
1 I turn off lights to save money more than the Earth; gorramit, I have to pay for that electricty!
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# Links for 2008-03-30
- DOSBox, a x86 emulator with DOS ✴
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# NASRTG
I downloaded an 8 gig torrent containing what appears to be scans of every Dungeons & Dragons manual, rulebook, expansion pack, module, &c from Chainmail all the way up to 3rd edition. There may well be 3.5 ed in there as well and I just didn’t notice. That’s including the game worlds, so Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk as well as the esotorica like Maztica and Spelljammer. It even has the Greyhawk Wars boardgame. Blackmoor. I haven’t checked for the Basic/Expert/Masters/Companions sets, but I bet they’re there too.
What the fuck? I mean really. What. The. Fuck?!? There is simply no way in the world I am going to peruse even a tenth of this let alone all of it. And I’m just talking idle scanning of it on screen. There’s buckley’s chance of me ever actually printing any of this, using it in a gaming experience, enjoying it. I have, in essence, just condemend myself to an eternity of having eight gigs less space than the file system is actually reporting. I can never get rid of this stuff; come on! It’s every D&D game book published! You do not just delete that kind of thing. You might as well officially give up and start trying to meet girls.
It’s not like I didn’t know what I was doing, either. When I found the torrent I stopped for a moment and flashed back to when Third Edition was published and I paid for it, one book every month on the day each was released in Australia, knowing full well that I was never ever going to use themi. I flashed back to buying the CD collection of Dragon magazine – and its forebear, The Strategic Review – despite knowing, as I lay down my credit card on the counter, that this was a collection of scans of a publication with a hit to miss ratio that makes the bad guys on any given A Team episode look like Carlos Hathcock.
Possibly it is an indication of how ludicrously cheap secondary storage is now. I have found my own personal Non-Accelerating Triviality Collection Rate of Storage – if actual storage space rises above the NASRTG the collection of pointless junk is likely to rise quickly. Tonight I kick off the torrents for a collection of MERP books and a horribly incomplete, but Malloryish collection of various Chaosium products. Not Runequest, more’s the pity, but Stormbringer, Elric! ii, Pendragon, Call of Cthulhu and Thieves Sanctuary.
Or maybe it just fills in the time while I pretend that I don’t really want to write, that all those little scenes that keep floating around in my brain have no legs.
And now for some small talk:
Cameron Reilly, a guy who went to my high school and started a podcasting business, advised in a blog post that people need to feed their brain with new material, that we should spend 10% of our income on books. If only; if I followed every “spend x% of my income on y” advice I encounter, even just the ones I agree with, I’d probably be spending twice the GDP of Tonga per year.
Duran Duran are in town. The pop band, that is, not the intergalactic villan. We are going. Or more precisely, D is going, I will be in the Entertainment Centre because D came to The Cure last year. She somehow managed to get tickets in the second row, despite only finding out about it last Friday. So there I will be, surrounded by women in their mid-to-late-thirties, close enough to count the wobbles in Simon le Bon’s jowls when he turns too quickly; I’ll turn and across the hall I will spot the only other man in attendance and we will nod in quiet ackowledgement. “Yes,” our eyes will say. “I too.”
i That I did in fact use them for some abortive attempts to find a gaming group doesn’t by any stretch of the imagination make me any less pathetic.
ii It is mandatory to pronounce the exclamation point when mentioning the game otherwise you are a liker-of-girls.
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# Links for 2008-03-18
- Distant Suns at Larvatus Prodeo ✴
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# Links for 2008-03-14
- Chris’s Invincible Super-Blog » Blog Archive » Archie In… A Different Class!
brilliant ✴
- Chris’s Invincible Super-Blog » Blog Archive » Archie In… A Different Class!
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# Mandatory Sportsblogging for the Month of March
My prediction for how the teams will be lined up on the NRL ladder at the end of the regular season i:
- Easts
- North Queensland
- Brisbane
- Wests
- Melbourne
- Gold Coast
- New Zealand
- Newcastle
- Canberra
- Penrith
- Cronulla
- Canterbury
- Manly
- St George
- Souths
Parramatta? Dropped from the competition in May after the NRL decided comedic effect was no longer required. Farewell Finch and Smith; you dipshittery will be missed.
i May or may not require careful application of Many Worlds theorems to come true. -
# Links for 2008-03-09
- Futurama timeline@Everything2.com ✴
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# I just like to see them lose
Today, we are all Scot.
I particularly like to see any achievement by Wilkinson ∗spit∗ over-shadowed by them losing.
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# No, apparently you *can* make this shit up
According to the statement released by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith Feb. 29, a baptism administered “in the name of the Creator, and of the Redeemer and of the Sanctifier” or formulas that do not say “in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” is not a baptism at all. If the baptism is invalid, so are the other sacraments the person may have received, such as matrimony.
“If you are not validly baptized,” and thus not validly married, “a person needs to get rebaptized and remarried,” explained Father Weinandy.
However, unless a witness at the baptism knows that an incorrect formula was used, “it is assumed they used the right formula,” he said. “The presumption is the obvious truth that the baptism is valid.”
∗snigger∗
∗snigger∗
The implication here is clear, I believe. God – allegedly omniscient, by the way – cares very much about the exact noises the priest emitted – as opposed to sentiment – and if they aren’t right, even if they are analogous of the right noises, well you’re destined for Limbo.
What? Oh right, God changed His mind a few years ago, didn’t He? Despite a centuries old policy of three Afterlives, Limbo wasn’t really working out on a PR level i so he dropped it; there were unconfirmed reports that it was re-zoned to provide space for the rapid and massive expansion of the Seventy Virgins Estates since so many Muslims were taking Him up on His Die and Get a Brothel offer.
Ah, no. Further research reveals that Limbo has not in fact been retconned; merely that the Infants section has been marked with a great big Citation Needed. You can continue to send your stillborns here but we may yet be giving them an automatic upgrade to Saved at some point in the future. At your expense. You have been warned.
Anyway, so allegedly He cares about the sound waves formed by the particular arrangements of mouth, lips and tongue formed by the priest at the baptismal ceremony, and He is already established as caring whether or not you are baptised, because you can’t be Saved unless you are ii but apparantly not enough to actually check out the baptisms. No no, for that He outsources the responsibility to Uncle Fred. If Uncle Fred says it was all right, you too can get in to play quoits and learn the harp and watch in envy as the Zeusists have lots of very weird sex involving transformations into sundry livestock and coloured liquids.
Welcome to the Holy Roman Catholic Church Of Making This Shit Up As We Go vi.
i All those babies who die before they get a chance to be baptised was a nightmare for the Heavenly Spokesman, Metatron.
ii Unless you are a itty bitty dead baby, and said policy still being debated by the Salvation Department, in consultation with Legals and Marketing iii.
iii Or, I understand, married to a Catholic. I gather Jesus called on the ol’ burning bushiv one day early in Operation Sell Out v and let them know that if Roman husbands would get into heaven if they wife was a Christian, thus facilitating the conversion of the women in an early example of customer segmentation and a member-make-member direct marketing program.
iv i.e. copius amounts of mind-altering drugs. mmm, a legal system based on an ancient Israelite acid trip.
v When the early Christians retconned the whole thing and Greekified it to facilitate whoring their cult to the Greater Inter-Mediterranean Polity (GIMP), particularly the Romans who were getting bored with the old shit and needed some new bullshit because this was the days before the internet and The Biggest Loser and Britney Spears.
vi A subdivision of Bad Robot Productions.
