Frank Miller’s Charlie Brown: A Charlie Brown comic strip as it might be drawn by Frank Miller, the comic book artist responsible for Sin City and The Dark Night Returns.
“That’s right, thumbsucker. I see you…”
Words fail.
Once again my Web browser is devouring half of my system’s available RAM and more swap space than you can shake a stick at, so it’s time once again for a long list of links.
Including naturally enough, some Watchmen-related links.
I’ve got several real posts brewing, none of which I’ve actually had time to write (just got home from the office, if that’s any indication), so without further ado, here we go!
Science
Obama to lift restrictions on stem-cell research
Obama Science Memo Goes Beyond Stem Cells
If Obama accomplishes absolutely nothing else in his entire term in office, if he does nothing to stop the pointless and expensive war in Iraq or right the capsizing economy, then his presidency will still be an epic win. Abandoning religious ideology in favor of actual, genuine science is one of the most important things this nation can do. First World superpowers keep their position only by dint of their technological and scientific basis, yet in the past eight years under anti-intellectual Republican rule, the US slipped to #22 in the world in terms of financial support for basic scientific research.
Rewiring the Brain: Inside the New Science of Neuroengineering
This is an incredibly exciting time to live in. We’re closing in on being able to understand and manipulate the stuff of the universe on the smallest scale possible, and we’re also closing in on the ability to understand in ways never before possible the most fundamental things that make us who we are. These areas of exploration bring incredible promise.
New Scientist: Humans may be primed to believe in creation
I’ve written before about how the brain is not an organ of thought so much as an organ for generating beliefs–a “belief engine,” if you will–and this research shows that a predisposition belief in purpose is a very strong component of that belief engine.
Missing Link Between Fructose, Insulin Resistance Found
For the first time, a concrete, documented mechanism between fructose and fructose-containing sweeteners and diabetes is uncovered.
Sociology
The Vatican uses the line “life must always be protected” to justify the excommunication, in apparent ignorance of the irony that without the abortion, the young rape victim, and the babies, would have died.
Bush: ‘Sanctity of Human Life Day’
In the last days of his Administration, former President Bush declared Jan. 18 to be “National Sanctity of Human Life Day.” Apparently, the sanctity of human life doesn’t apply to the citizens of Middle Eastern nations that happen to be geographically close to other nations that were responsible for terrorist attacks on us.
Steve Pavlina: 2009 Focus – Intimate Relationships
So there’s this guy who is…well, I’m not exactly sure what he is. He seems to be a motivational coach (or “personal development” coach, whatever that is). Anyway, he writes a blog, and in his blog he says that 2009 is the year he’s going to explore polyamory. And he linked to my site on his list of resources.
Bizarre
Photos of abandoned Russian ships frozen in ice
I really, really, really, really want to visit this place. The Russians have always been amazing at taking urban decay to the next level, and this place is just beautiful.
The Most Amazing Star Trek Collectible of All Time
If by “amazing” you mean “horrifying beyond all human reason.” The commentary is priceless.
Watchmen condoms: We’re society’s only protection
If you want your schlong to look just like Dr. Manhattan’s, now’s your chance! These blue condoms come in a flip-top case with the smiley face on the front, and …yeah. I have nothing else to add.
In the past, I’ve never quite grokked the whole deal about Twitter. Now that I’m using it, I still don’t quite grok what other folks use it for, nor why it’s as popular as it is. It strikes me as a fun toy (that’s losing six figure quantities of money every month), but not really a useful tool most of the time.
However, I will say this: I’m a wordy bastard, and I appreciate that Twitter enforces a very strict limit on brevity. Learning to say what I want to say in 140 characters or less has been…interesting. I find that if I have an idea I want to Twitter about, I usually have to edit it multiple times to bring it down to 140 characters. It’s good writing discipline.
A recent example: “Between having a brain optimized for finding patterns (even if they don’t exist) and confirmation bias, it’s amazing we understand anything.” Number of characters: exactly 140. Number of edits to fit it in that space: 3. Brevity is hard, but sometimes squeezing out the extraeneous stuff makes the idea more accessible.
So this evening, my roommate David and I went shopping after work.
We had to make it fast, because we both had raid tonight. In fact, he talked to his raid leader on the way to the store, so that we’d have an idea of how much time we could spend shopping.
Which got us to thinking how to tell if you’re completely addicted1 to World of Warcraft. The warning signs are pretty subtle, so it can sometimes be a difficult call to make. Still, there are a few little signs and signals that might tip you off. To wit:
1. Your boss asks you if you can work overtime, and you say “Sorry, no can do. We’re raiding tonight. Sartharion, booyeah!”
2. Your new sweetie asks you out on a romantic date, and you say “Sorry, no can do. We’re raiding tonight. Sartharion 25-man, booyeah!”
3. You’re scheduling a funeral for a family member and you realize it can’t be on Saturday, because you’re raiding that night. Sartharion 10-man with three drakes up, booyeah!
4. Your fiancée wants to go out shopping for wedding rings, and you have a fleeting moment when you think “Shopping? We don’t need to do that! I can craft a [Titanium Spellshock Ring]!
5. You have your real-life wedding in-game.
6. …and ALL of your friends show up.
7. …and think it’s cool.
8. And your family shows up, too.
9. You install an add-on that lets you play another game inside the game while you’re idle or traveling somewhere.
10. Your character’s cooking skill is higher than yours.
11. You schedule vacations around the release dates for game expansions.
12. You schedule vacations around patch day.
13. Two words: Soloing Onyxia, booyeah!
14. The porn folder on your computer contains screen shots of that time you soloed a Fel Reaver at level 69.
15. …and you weren’t playing a warlock.
16. The first thing you ask that new hottie who just moved in across the street is “Horde or Alliance?”
17. And if the answer is “Alliance,” you know a relationship will never work. Fuckin’ pansy-ass Alliance, anyway.
18. The three things you look for in a vacation spot are power, broadband Internet access, and… Come to think of it, there’s really only two things you need in a vacation spot.
19. Actually, you don’t really need to go anywhere on vacation. Travel takes away time you could spend playing!
20. And so does sex, for that matter.
21. You may drive a [1977 Chevy Vega] in real life, but who cares? Your character rides a [Mechano-hog]! Booyeah, baby! Put that in your [Dark Iron Smoking Pipe] and smoke it!
22. Your [Tigule and Foror’s Strawberry Ice Cream] brings all the boys to the yard.
23. Those “World of Whorecraft” porn videos bug you because they keep getting the lore wrong.
24. When you go to lunch, you tell your boss “AFK for 30”.
25. “LF 1 GF. Will be checking gear.”
26. You know your way around Alterac Valley better than you know your way around your own neighborhood.
27. …and Alterac Valley is safer than your own neighborhood.
28. You see “LFM OT + DPS UBRS Rend run” in general chat and it makes you all misty-eyed with nostalgia.
29. You’ve watched the World of Warcraft “Switch” ad 167 times, and it keeps getting funnier every single time you see it. “Or hell, why don’t I just self-res, and bam! Cast Frost Shock!!!”
And finally:
30. If you had a dollar for every time Blizzard nerfed your class, you could…you could…play for two months for FREE!
1 Not that that’s, you know, a bad thing.
…in Internet Explorer 7!
But perhaps that’s redundant. “Dumb bugs” and “Internet Explorer” have long gone together like chocolate and peanut butter.
Anyway, one of my coworkers wanted to know why attempts to install Firefox always bombed out on her system. She was going to the Download page and clicking the “Run” button, which in reality actually means “download and then run.”
The Firefox executable has spaces in its name (it’s called something like “Install Firefox 3.0.6”). Now, as we all know, the Web turns spaces into %20, which is the hex ASCII code for a space.
So Explorer downloads the file as “Install%20%Firefox%20%3.0.6” but saves it as “Install Firefox 3.0.6”. Here’s where things go all hinkey:
It then runs the file “Install Firefox 3.0.6” but sets the path to the file as “Install%20Firefox%203.0.6”–which doesn’t work. When the installer attempts to run, it can’t locate its own built-in libraries because the Windows file path parsing APIs do not change “Install%20%Firefox%203.0.6” back into “Install Firefox 3.0.6”.
*rolls eyes*
Anyone who has a Web site and wants to make a little extra money is invited to give it a try:
http://www.symtoys.com/affiliate.html
There are banners available, and more will be coming. The affiliate program pays out 20% of Onyx and poster sales, a number I cleverly arrived at through intensive research and complex mathematics (I took the normal commission from other Web sites’ affiliate programs and doubled it).
Also, the poster pre-orders are at about half what they need to be for a print run, but they seem to have stalled. So if anyone wants to help me get the word out, you can copy-paste the HTML below into your blog–it’ll put the graphic and a link to the pre-order page. If you link to the graphic on my server, it will automatically update when more pre-orders come in.
Here’s what it will look like:
Last night, I spent about a half an hour fixing some minor bugs in the interactive version of the Human Sex Map. Cleaned up the way the toolbar works when you scroll (so it doesn’t jump all over the place in some browsers) and fixed a minor issue in Firefox where it sometimes moves the pins three pixels down from where they should be.
And then I tested it in Internet Explorer.
And it was totally, utterly, completely broken.
Goddamn festering, pustulant heap of rotting garbage pretending to be a Web browser anyway. I will never, for the life of me, understand why people use that decaying mound of rubbish when there are Web browsers that actually work correctly that you can download for free. Everything the Internet Explorer development team knows about Web standards would fit in the white space of a postage stamp. If these guys had any decency or self-respect, they’d all ritualistically disembowel themselves on Google’s front lawn.
Words can not express my loathing, hatred, and contempt for that tottering mass of bugs and misfeatures that the folks in Redmond laughingly call a Web browser. It’s a mad sick joke at the entire Internet’s expense. So, I turn to a more visual communication medium:
It took me until six o’clock in the morning to code around all of Explorer’s bizarre bugs and rendering issues. Longer, by nearly an order of magnitude, than it took to make that picture. So if you tried to use the Map at all yesterday, sorry ’bout that.
Bless me, Internets, for I have sinned. It has been ten days since my last confession of kinky sex.
I…have a Twitter account now. At “franklinveaux”. And strangely, I already have two followers, even though I haven’t told anybody.
What…what is happening to me?
…and I’ve got just two words for that. Code signing.
Seriously. Code signing.
Viruses work because our cells contain machinery which will read, accept, and translate any RNA strands they see into proteins. Any RNA strands they see. Including RNA strands injected into our cells from viruses, or RNA strands transcribed from DNA injected into our cells from viruses.
Which is, from a security standpoint, pretty fracking stupid.
Code signing, I’m telling you. If our genetic material were signed with some sort of unique code that means “yes, this really does come from us, it’s safe to translate this RNA and build this protein,” and the transcribing and translating machinery would refuse to process RNA that wasn’t signed, then viruses could inject their bits into our cells from now ’til Doomsday and it wouldn’t mean diddly.
Code signing. Just one more reason why if we were designed by some Grand Creator, he wasn’t very good at his job.