Wizards of Winter. A music video, done with stop-motion animation of the Christmas decorations of…a house.
Wow. Just…wow. One of the most creative things I’ve seen in a long time.
Sound, work-safe.
Cool link o’ the day
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Tag Archives: too cool for words
WARNING! DANGER! MAJOR GEEKINESS AHEAD!
So Shelly’s been trying to think of ways to study chemistry that aren’t mind-crushingly tedious, and we’ve started working on a chemistry game similar in some ways to trading-card games like Magic: the Gathering. Here’s what we’ve come up with so far:
The game is played with decks of cards, each of which represents an element. For example, there are oxygen cards, hydrogen cards, sodium cards, chlorine cards, and so on. Each player has one deck of cards.
Each player begins the game with twenty hit points.
Each player has a field in front of him, consisting of eight spaces where hydrogen and oxygen cards can be placed, and consisting of three slots in front of him where defensive molecules may be placed. All these fields are empty at the beginning of play.
Game play takes place in turns. On each player’s turn, that player does each of the following, in order:
1. The player may place up to three Hydrogen or Oxygen cards from his hand into the field in front of him. At no point may the field contain more than a total of eight cards.
2. The player may then create molecules by combining atoms which are not hydrogen or oxygen from his hand and combining them with hydrogen and oxygen atoms from his field to form molecules. These molecules may be used to neutralize any molecules which his opponent has previously played against him which continue to cause damage until neutralized (see below). The molecule thus formed and the molecule played against him are then discarded.
3. The player then builds defensive molecules by taking atoms which are not hydrogen or oxygen from his hand and combining them with hydrogen and oxygen atoms from his field to form molecules. For example, if a player has a Sodium atom in his hand, he may combine it with a Hydrogen and an Oxygen card from his field to form sodium hydroxide, NaOH, which is an alkali of Rank 3. This means that if it is in his defensive field, it neutralizes acids of up to Rank 3. A player may place no more than 2 defensive molecules per turn.
4. The player then builds molecules with which to attack his opponent by combining atoms from his hand which are not Hydrogen or Oxygen atoms with Hydrogen or Oxygen atoms from his field to form molecules. For example, if a player has a Sodium atom in his hand, he may combine it with a Hydrogen and an Oxygen card from his field to form sodium hydroxide, NaOH, which is an alkali of Rank 3. This means that if the player plays this molecule to attack his opponent, the molecule will do 3 points of damage immediately to the opponent, plus one additional point of damage per turn until it is neutralized. If the opponent has an acid of Rank 3 or higher in the defensive position, it is neutralized and both the NaOH and defensive molecules are discarded from the table, the defending player receiving no damage.
5. As soon as a molecule is played on a defending player, that player may immediately combine atoms from his hand with Hydrogen and Oxygen molecules from his field to counter the attacking molecule. For example, if the attacking player plays HCl, hydrochloric acid, an acid of Rank 3, the defending player takes 3 points of damage if he has no defensive molecules on the table which can neutralize acids. However, if he has a sodium atom in his hand and a hydrogen and oxygen in his field, he may immediately play NaOH to neutralize the HCl. In this case, he takes 3 points of damage, but the HCl and the NaOH are immediately removed from the table and he does not continue to take damage on subsequent rounds.
6. Some molecules are special; for example, fluorsulfonic acid (HSO3F), is a superacid of rank 4 which will inflict 4 points of damage on the defender, 2 points of damage on the attacker, and an additional 1 point of damage on each player on each turn thereafter until it is neutralized.
7. When the player no longer has enough atoms in his hand to form molecules, he then takes any damage from any remaining cards played against him that do periodic damage, and both players draw cards (if necessary) until they each have 7 cards in their hand. That player’s turn is then over and the next player’s turn begins this same sequence.
For the purposes of simplicity, organic compounds are not part of the game. Atoms in the decks include all the halogens, all the alkali metals, sulfur, nitrogen, and so on.
So…whaddya think? Too geeky?
Links: Zombies, Philosophical canoodling, transhumanism, and more!
First, we have the world’s simplest role-playing game, with zombies
Genre: cinematic modern horror. Playing time: 2-4 hours tops.
1. GM supplies general setting of the game, e.g. Teenage Slasher or Suburban Zombie Apocalypse. Everyone creates a character accordingly.
2. List FOUR things that the character is especially GOOD at, such as running, driving, climbing, picking locks, survival in the outdoors, fast talking or decapitating zombies using only a vintage 1940s tea set. The GM must ratify these.
3. List TWO things that the character is especially BAD at, such as swimming, finding their way in the wild, avoiding alcohol, keeping their cool in a fight, or not flipping out in confined spaces. GM ratifies as before.
4. Everyone writes their name on a piece of paper and gives it to the GM.
5. The GM picks out one name at random. This person is the Survivor. No matter WHAT happens (except see below), this person will survive, so long as he is trying to. Everyone else will die. Without exception. Everyone. The players are not told who the Survivor is.
It goes on from there. Looks like a lot of fun. Hey datan0de, think you could turn it into a strip game?
Next up, a couple of links from nihilus:
Turing’s cathedral, an exploration of the question “What makes you so sure that mathematical logic corresponds to the way we think?”
The Ship of Theseus: Identity is not so static nor so clear-cut as you might think. You can never step in the same river twice, but what does it mean to take the same boat across the river twice? (Shelly and I have discussions about this as it relates to transhumanist ideas on an ongoing basis–is a copy of me, perfect down to the limits imposed by Heisenberg uncertainty, still ‘me’?)
I really, really like this photograph (may not be work-safe for some work environments).
BDSM themes are becoming more and more prevalent in everyday media, and beer ads are no exception…this Heineken ad plays with that to very amusing effect.
Work-safe, kinda (it is a network TV ad, after all), and very funny.
What happens when a pro-life protester needs an abortion? It happens more often than you think.
“I’ve had several cases over the years in which the anti-abortion patient had rationalized in one way or another that her case was the only exception, but the one that really made an impression was the college senior who was the president of her campus Right-to-Life organization, meaning that she had worked very hard in that organization for several years. As I was completing her procedure, I asked what she planned to do about her high office in the RTL organization. Her response was a wide-eyed, ‘You’re not going to tell them, are you!?’ When assured that I was not, she breathed a sigh of relief, explaining how important that position was to her and how she wouldn’t want this to interfere with it.”
Andrea: Chaos, Politics, and Urban Decay
feorlen spent the last few days with us, braving Florida’s humidity and a cat with an unfortunately-timed UTI to hang with Shelly and I.
Wednesday we wandered around downtown Tampa and Ybor City, talking about relationships and urban decay and taking pictures of the grafitti. Tampa has recently seen an explosion in political “treet art,” most of it preprinted and slapped up on abandoned buildings all over the place. Some of it is really quite sophisticated, and it’s everywhere.
We didn’t have to look too far to start seeing commentary; someone had made his views on the recent rate increases on downtown parking meters quite clear:
A few blocks from where we parked the car, we found an abandoned building totally plastered in political agitprop:
The image on the left is well-known in billboard hacking circles; it’s the face of Andre the Giant, and the icon was designed by activist Shepard Fairley as part of an anti-authoritarian and anti-consumerist propaganda campaign. (There’s an interview with Fairley here.)
Some of the other imagery, though, is even more interesting. Bandwidth-crushing photos lie beneath!
I have such sights to show you…
…and many weeks to catch up on. It’s been a busy, exhausting, overwhelming, and fun few weeks.
I have not read LiveJournal in over two weeks now, so if I’ve missed anything anyone finds particularly compelling, now’s the time to say so. 🙂
So on to the past few weeks!
Shortcut to Nirvana
Two weeks ago last Saturday, smoocherie came into town and we went to the movies. Sound like an ordinary evening? Wait; it gets weirder.
An old friend from many years ago was in town from Seattle, and rang me up to see if we could get together. We invited her to go see the movie with us; Shelly and smoocherie and I were meeting another old friend, Charlie, to see a documentary on an Indian religious festival, Kumbh Mela, called Shortcut to Nirvana. The film’s director, Nick Day, is a friend of Charlie’s, and was on hand for the movie.
If you’ve never heard of the movie, I strongly recommend it. You can find it on DVD on the film’s Web site. The Kumbh Mela is thew largest gathering of people anywhere for any reason in the entire history of mankind, yet very few people outside of India have ever heard of it.
Got a photo op of the group of us at the theater:
After the movie, we all kidnapped Nick and decided to show him around Ybor. First stop: sushi! We talked about religion and God and the role of science and philosophy and HBO’s awful series Sex and the City…Nick is intelligent, articulate, and very well educated, and a fascinating speaker.
After dinner, my Seattle friend, who had already seen the movie and skipped the film to go out partying, invited us to a lesbian bar.
But not just any lesbian bar…rather:
The most dreadful lesbian bar in the world
I say that with complete confidence, even though I have not, in fact, been to every lesbian bar in the world. I can state with absolute certainty that even in the blackest heart of Calcutta in the days leading up to the Great War, you would not have found a more dreadful lesbian bar.
It’s not just the place. The bar itself wasn’t particularly dreadful; a tiny, almost unnoticeable hole in the wall, reached by a steep flight of narrow stairs leading into darkness…uncomfortable certainly, but not especially dreadful.
A truly dreadful experience has to be a well-rounded experience, and indeed this bar fit the bill.
Imagine a cramped, narrow bar that’s mostly a dance floor, with a tiny stage on one end and a distinct lack of usable facilities. Now, cover every square inch of the place in dreadful Halloween decorations from the local Wal-Mart. Still not especially dreadful overall, but moving in that direction.
Now stage a completely over-the-top drag king show in this place. Still not dreadful; drag king shows are supposed to be over-the-top, right? Ah, but here it comes, the piece de resistance: Imagine that this show is being overseen by a huge, and very loud, MC who sincerely believes that the height of wit is insulting the patrons at the top of her voice, while jumping up and down and sweating profusely, and then cause the sound system to fail intermittently. The sound system is an important element because when it failed during a performance, it made it just that much easier to hear the MC singing along to the song.
These words can’t really convey the dread of the place, in much the same way that calling Great Cthulhu a smelly squid can’t adequately communicate the horror of the Great Old Ones. The combined experience was the stuff of which Lovecraft novels are made.
But I digress.
Nick and Charlie were good sports about it all, and eventually the group of us fled with at least seventy percent of our sanity points intact. smoocherie even managed to get in some wiggling with my friend, which was great fun to watch, despite the multitude of horrors around us.
Downtown Ybor is currently home to some of the most fascinating grafitti I’ve ever seen, and seems to be a sort of Mecca of grafitti these days; I took pictures of many interesting specimens, which I had planned to share with all of you. Unfortunately, I pressed a wrong button and inadvertently deleted all of the images from my camera. Perhaps later.
The rest of the weekend was much more placid–shopping for fetish clothes with smoocherie and generally ignoring the impending threat of the hurricane, which passed us by with nary a problem. We heard a techno cover of the Clash’s Rock the Casbah in one of the fetish stores, which just goes to show you.
Life imitates computer games
So unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past year or so, you’ve at least heard of “World of Warcraft,” the Blizzard game where players create characters on a Blizzard server and play simultaneously with other people–LOTS of other people–in real-time. At any given moment in time, thee are over 200,000 people logged on to the World of Warcraft servers playing the game; Blizzard has over two million subscribers total, making WoW the most popular computergame…well, ever.
I play myself; I have five characters, including a level 60 warrior named Ragnarokkr on the Medivh server.
Recently, Blizzard released a new WoW patch. They do this from time to time, often to add new content–new quests, new areas to explore, new dungeons for groups of characters to adventure in. The last patch, which was released about a week ago, introduced a new elite dungeon designed to be played by groups of 20 high-level, powerful characters.
The main adversary in this new high-level dungeon has an ability to infect a player with a disease called “Corruption of Blood.” It kills the payer rather quickly and it can be spread to other, nearby players. Blizzard didn’t think a player infected with this disease would have the opportunity to leave the dungeon before dying of it. (Death in the game is a minor nuisance; if your character dies, you become a ghost, and you can reincarnate by returning to the place where you died or by having a priest or shaman player ressurect you.)
They were wrong.
Last Thursday, someone infected with this disease and playing on the Eonar server, where two of my characters live, managed to make it to one of the capital cities in the game world, a place called Ironforge. At any given time of the day or night, you can reasonably expect to see about a thousand players running around in Ironforge, meaning that this virtual non-existant city has a larger population than almost every real city in the world through three-quarters of human history.
Anyway, the capital cities have a very high population density, and the disease can be transmitted from character to character. You can tell where this is going, right?
My character died almost immediately when I entered the city. The entire place was littered with corpses. People would die, resurrect their characters, and then promptly die again–or worse yet, become infected just as they were leaving the city. It took hours before it was safe to move in Ironforge.
Well, it turns out that the problem has totally run away from Blizzard. On some servers, it’s impossible to go to ANY city without becoming “infected.” It’s bad enough that there’s an article about it on The Register:
It’s said that attempts have been made to quarantine the infected, but the efforts of what might be called the World of Warcraft Health Organisation (WWHO) appear to be ineffective. Plague-carrying players escape the curfew to lug the lurgey out into the wider WoW world.
The Corrupted Blood disease is, in short, out of control and rapidly taking on epidemic status.
Of some interest is the fact that when I read the article, Google Ads paced an ad for a site which sells online game currency for genuine real-world currency. There are many such sites, and they have become big business. How big? People make six figures a year doing nothing but generating online currency and then selling it for real money. That big.
It really is a World of Warcraft world.
Weekend stuff, computer peripherals as a metaphor for relationships, and an olive branch
Saturday evening, Shelly and I went out to the Castle to do some danng,a nd hooked up with S, her other boyfriend, nekidsteve, nihilus, phyrra, and their friend and housemate. (Tried to shoot you an IM, johnnymoon, but you weren’t online and it was a really spur-of-the-moment, last-minute thing…)
The main DJ sucked. The alternate DJ ruled. There’s a life lesson in there somewhere, that I’m too lazy to dig out. Anyway, the alternate DJ played the Second Best Song to Dance To Ever Written1, which I’ve heard before but didn’t know the name of. Shelly talked to him after. Turns out the song is by a band called Wumpscut, and the song is called Wreath of Barbs. (Note: direct MP3 download; 6.3 megabytes.)
datan0de, if you aren’t familiar with this song, you should be. 🙂
In old-school computer hackerspeak, a situation can arise between a computer and a peripheral which is called “deadlock” (or, for those of you who hail from MIT, “deadly embrace”). Modern computer protocols have largely done away with it, but generally speaking it’s a situation where a computer and a peripheral stop talking to one another because each is waiting for some sort of response from the other.
There are two basic varieties of deadlock: “starvation,” in which the computer and the peripheral are each waiting for data from the other, and “constipation,” where the computer’s buffer is full and it’s waiting for a signal from the peripheral to receive the data, and the peripheral’s buffer is full and it’s waiting for a signal from the computer to receive ITS data.
It seems the same sort of thing can happen between two people, especially if some kind of problem has existed between them. ach ends up feeling marginalized by the other, and each ends up feeling that the other wants nothing to do with him–so each ends up not reaching out to the other.
Computers can be rebooted, and there’s no hard feelings. With people, it’s a bit more tricky.
So. We had a blast at the club, except for tension etween phyrra and I. I can tell she doesn’t feel comfortable around me, so I don’t try to impose on her, so she feels like I’m avoiding her, so she feels uncomfortable around me, so… starvation deadlock.
And there’s no reason it should be this way. phyrra is a warm and wonderful person who I like very much. Just so y’all know. 🙂
And, just as a bonus, I bring you, courtesy of felisdemens, English As She Is Spoke, the worse English dictionary and phrasebook ever written. From the site:
This 1883 book is without question the worst phrasebook ever written. The writer, Pedro Carolino, who was Portuguese, did not particularly speak English, nor did he have a Portuguese-English dictionary available. Instead, he worked with a French-English phrasebook and a Portuguese-French dictionary. The results, I’m sure you’ll agree, are staggering.
This text is that of a book of excerpts compiled a few years after the book was first published. Anything that looks like an error is, in fact, the way it actually appears in the book. I’ve transcribed the complete text of that book; I do not, unfortunately, have a copy of the original. I’m sure you’ll notice bits that look like typos. They’re not; that’s all part of the fun.
The phrasebook contains such useful gems as a handy list of common English colours (White, Gridelin, Cray, Musk, and Red), popular English games (Foot-ball, Pile, Bar, Mall, Gleek, Even or non even, Carousal, and Keel), handy English phrases (“Give me some good milk newly get out,” “He burns one’s self the brains”), and English idiotisms and proverbs (“He has fond the knuckle of the business,” “So much go the jar to spring that at last it break there”). This stuff predates Engrish by a good century, and is, if anything, even more bizarre. Great stuff!
1All decent, God-fearing people know, of course, that in the great cosmology of Songs to Dance To, nothing can compare to the pinnacle of human achievement, Front 242’s Headhunter v1.0.
Whoa!
Courtesy of purplespark: Scientists create mice able to regenerate lost limbs and regrow damaged organs.
The experimental animals are unique among mammals in their ability to regrow their heart, toes, joints and tail.
And when cells from the test mouse are injected into ordinary mice, they too acquire the ability to regenerate, the US-based researchers say.
Their discoveries raise the prospect that humans could one day be given the ability to regenerate lost or damaged organs, opening up a new era in medicine…
“We have experimented with amputating or damaging several different organs, such as the heart, toes, tail and ears, and just watched them regrow,” she said.
Now, this kind of stuff has always been within the laws of physics, but development of new techniques in genetic engineering and nanomedicine are both progressing faster than even the most optimistic of us transhumanists had expected. And speaking of biomedical nanotech, I bring you another article, Research scientists at Georgia Tech have built nano-scale detectors so sensitive that they will be capable of spotting individual cancer cells.
The detectors are based on a new kind of quasi-one dimensional nano material, dubbed nanobelts or nanoribbons, which can be made from a variety of materials, like zinc or tin oxides. They are typically between 30nm and 300nm wide, and can be a few millimetres long.
The semiconducting nanobelts, first synthesised in 2001, can be tuned to exhibit certain behaviours. Introducing oxygen vacancies can affect their conductivity, surface and optical properties…
These nanostructures are ideal objects for building sensors with biomedical applications, Professor Wang said, ahead of a presentation at the EMAG-Nano 2005 conference in Leeds yesterday, such as force sensors, blood flow sensors and cancer detectors.
I think a lot of people who aren’t really paying attention now are going to be very surprised when these things start hitting the market. I also suspect that people fifty or seventy-five years from now are going to look back on this as the Age of Barbarism: “Someone had a heart attack and you savages thought the best solution was to SLICE HIM OPEN??!!”
Bullshit! And other fun stuff
Spent most of the day yesterday with phyrra, nihilus, and nekidsteve, working on a role-playing game hat nihilus is putting together, and updating my Web site…props to sarahmichigan for her suggestions and proofreading.
Then, we watched a bunch of episodes of Showtime’s Penn & Teller: Bullshit! For anyone not fortunate enough to have seen this show…I can’t recommend it enough. It relentlessly skewers and debunks bullshit of all types, from the idea of the “traditional family” (a brilliant episode, which talked very positively about polyamory) to to ESP and “remote viewing” to feng shui.
And, after watching a large number of back-to-back episodes, I am pleased to announce:
The Unofficial
OFFICIAL PENN & TELLER: BULLSHIT! DRINKING GAME!
OFFICIAL PENN & TELLER: BULLSHIT! DRINKING GAME!
The rules, as with most drinking games, are very simple. The participants need their favorite libation of choice and a television set. Ready? Here we go!
As you watch an episode of Bullshit, be on the lookout for certain things. When you see your cues, drink up!
Things that are worth a sip
Take a sip of your beverage:
– Whenever Penn says “bullshit,” “asshole,” or “fuck”
– Whenever the show directly contradicts a statement made by a guest and provides evidence or a citation to back up the contradiction. (A citation provided by another guest counts.)
– Whenever the giant prop of the bull with the red horns makes an appearance (yes, the opening credits count)
Things that are worth a drink
Take a drink of your beverage:
– Whenever Penn says the exact phrase “And then there’s this asshole…”
– Whenever Penn insults God directly
– Whenever Penn insults a guest on that show before that guest has had a chance to introduce himself
– Whenever Penn insults a guest’s clothing
– Whenever a guest says something that makes Penn really, really angry
– Whenever Teller uses any kind of tool or implement to cut or pretend to cut any object
Things that are worth a chug
All players must chug their beverage:
– Whenever Penn compares any guest to a character in a movie, play, or television show
– Whenever Penn challenges God to strike him dead
– Whenever Teller removes any article of clothing, or anything approximating an article of clothing
– Whenever a naked person appears
– Whenever Penn says he never drinks. (The irony is just TOO delicious.)
For all the wannabe soldiers on your Christmas list…
…I bring you Shock Tanks. They’re radio-controlled toy tanks that come in sets of two. The objective is to shoot your opponent’s tank with your tank six times. Each time you score a direct hit, your opponent’s remote control gives him an electric shock. Great fun for the whole family…Mom, Dad, and little Junior War Crimes too!