Luftmensch

Went to a gay party last night. Everyone assumed I was gay by default, until I opened a beer bottle on a propane grill, and everyone turned to me and said, "oh! You're straight!"

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Dude I know, I'm stealing that idea fo sho.

When I think of Jeff Goldblum, I mostly think of this: http://blip.tv/7minutesinheaven/jeff-goldblum-6194136

I meant to finish No More Heroes 2. I really liked it. I wanted to see the end. But my sister had been watching me play, and she said she didn't want to miss the ending. So two months later, I still haven't gotten around to it.

You missed one (panel #7) I'm assuming they're saying something about how small his penis is.

Half the folks I know love it. I think it's a larger minority than you may think.

I will start watching sports on TV the day they launch eESPN. I'll call my uncle over and tell HIM a thing or two about how it's played.

Holy crap Sean I was literally just coming here to post that. You know your audience.

I drew a thing. It occurred to me that as far as illustrating and drawing comics and all that, my notebooks are full of that shit but I've never really tried to make anything to publish, so I'm trying to go ahead and make all the mistakes. Anyway this is a little comic I drew. Dunno where I was going with it. Wasn't trying to be profound. Just had and idea and drew it.

The associated image I mistakenly attached to Circus Galop actually belongs to a piece called Faerie's Aire and Death Waltz. In the spirit of the thread, here's a video of a performance of this piece https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCgT94A7WgI

I'm on the lowering weapons side of the fence. It's kind of a contextual thing, but it doesn't bother me if I can't do something that literally cannot possibly help me and can give me a game over. It's conventional enough that even if it's not the most elegant or appropriate approach, it's still pretty acceptable.

I went to an early Halloween party recently. I had a shirt when I was at the party, but all my photos there were blurry.

Reader mail's back? I approve. I think it's nifty how you just happened to have a cast about Dota 2 the day after TMA had a cast about LoL. I'm not sure what to make of it, but I think it's cool how you're all playing the same style game but you're playing different games and getting something different out of it. Also: I totally expected the shotgun cocking sound to turn into the Battletoads pause music.

I just heard this and this is horrifying. Circus Galop

I may be wrong, but I believe that as long as she stays inside an embassy without extradition to Jordan, she's temporarily safe. Temporarily being most key, of course, but that's the best I know. Criminy, what a mess.

My mum was invited to give a talk about Catholicism at small local conference about the role of religion in voting. She spent the next several days following the event telling everyone about how bizarre the other speakers were. One highlight was that, after she gave the talk, she was approached by a woman who told her that she thinks "the liberals" had "infiltrated" the Catholic church. When my mother asked why she figured, she was told because the Catechism, which she read, contained the expression "social justice", which is liberal propaganda code. That, and many other anecdotes, settled in my mind that there is a deep institutional lack of rationality where I live, and I want no more part of it.

Howdy thumbers, I'm young and talented and attractive, so I'm thinking I should move out of the deep south and off to somewhere where I can expand into a full career. My top choices are San Francisco and Los Angles; LA because that's where most animation studios in the US are based, SF because that seems like a place I'd actually like to live. I'm not in a rush to move, but I'm slowly doing some research and trying to make the right moves, because I've never lived in a city with a population much greater than 100,000. I don't have any support network out west, so I'm curious if any of you, many of whom live in San Francisco especially, have any suggestions for where to look and what to avoid. Cheers.

I'm just going to make a quick note about where I am at the moment and what I think is most open and ideal to me: I'm currently working on finishing my wooden boat, with is coming along nicely though not very quickly, and I promised my father that we'd finish it and take it sailing before I left. I don't expect the project to take too much longer, but I'm assuming a couple months before it's really quite done, all accounted for. In the mean time, I'm studying Spanish, mainly with Rosetta Stone, and supplementing with some good old-fashioned book learning. Wherever I go, I assume bilingualism gives me an edge. Also, as I mentioned before, I don't have a college degree. This is a little limiting: Intern programs require applicants to be college students or graduates. Most serious jobs will require experience or prior industry experience or both, which means I have to start at the bottom. Now, I've mentioned the idea of moving to Buenos Aires for a while to live and (illegally) work somewhere inexpensive and exciting. I've been dismissing it as just screwing around instead of actually making a career, but there is one detail about BA which I didn't mention but really put it on my short list in the first place: The University of Buenos Aires is free to everyone, including foreigners. The only requirement for entry is to pass a one-year introductory course called the common basic cycle, which is also free. As Chambraigne noted, going to a school automatically introduces a sort of social network around your classes. I know I can't afford school in the US (unless I were to be admitted to Cooper Union, perhaps, or I guess joined the military), but UBA is an internationally recognized school so I would actually be doing something with myself while I'm BA. Honestly, would it make more sense to try to go to school overseas and get myself a degree, or to go straight to California to make a career? I've still been kind of rejecting the Buenos Aires plan because it seems like a waste of time, but I still have that nagging feeling that I'm being too outright dismissive. Worth considering: A friend of mine who lives in BA and is going to UBA has been working on her degree for about 7 years to date and tells me that it's really hard to get a degree quickly there.

I was encouraged by Sean's little spiel about getting an inch and taking a mile taking him all the way to director on The Walking Dead, because that was pretty much my intention from the start, to a certain degree. Film, television, and Video games are such broad disciplines that I feel certain I can find a specialty I'll enjoy at a good company. There's a few people in particular I know I'd love to work under. Glen Keane is one, Terry Gilliam tops my lists for most interesting and least practical. Jake and Sean seem like they'd be cool to work under but not for the same reasons.

We've seen a lot of pretty clever tricks performed by individual robots. Unfortunately, now they've learned to cooperate: Got to 1:22 for a simulation of how it feels to be trapped by a swarm of sentient helicopter robots.

Wikipedia Article Purchase on Amazon I haven't had the chance to read this book yet, I had only heard about it yesterday, when I listened to the author's Seminar About Long-term Thinking while working on the boat, so at this point everything I have to say about the book is based on listening to the author's summary. I'm really fascinated by Pinker's findings. I've often heard claims that we live in the most violent period in history; I've always been a bit skeptical of this idea, but in practice I take it for granted. But according to his study, not only are nearly all forms of brutality in decline, but indeed overall violence worldwide itself is in decline, not only on a per capita basis, but in many cases the actual numbers of violent deaths are less today than at any point in history. The data itself is really fascinating, but I think the conclusions that Pinker draws are even more valuable. One, that as Thomas Hobbes wrote, “In the state of nature the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” It turns out that this is entirely true: Fossil records suggest that among prehistoric peoples about 15% suffered some form of brutality or violent death, compared with modern civilized peoples who have a less than half of a tenth of a percent chance of suffering brutality. This goes contrary to lofty notions that hunter-gatherer societies who live on the land are somehow more peaceful than civilization: Even in modern anarchic societies, the rate of war deaths is more than three times as high as it was in Germany during the 20th century. Two, that the trend towards peace appears to correlate best to advancements in literacy and media technology. The printing press saw the enlightenment and a sharp decline in violence throughout Europe following the 15th century. Furthermore, there's a positive correlation between literacy and peace. Three, and this I think is the most interesting, many of the worst atrocities in modern times are done for ideological reasons, and often with anti-urban sentiments. Hitler promised to return the German's to the countryside, as did Pol Pot and Mao Zedong. Lenin and Stalin's Communist ideology justified the mass slaughter of racial minorities and political dissidents for the promise of a stable state. Even the American Civil War was fought over ideology. According to Pinker, no major conflict between major powers has ever been over limited resources. I'm looking forward to reading this book. In the mean time, I'd like to hear your thoughts on this. I think the topic itself lends itself to discussion without necessarily needing to read the book, although I'm sure it helps.

I think that the distinction between improvisational puzzles from contemplative puzzles has a lot of merit, and there's been some interesting work on that topic in cog sci (famously Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow deals with that). None of that changes the fact that Puzzle is Game.

That's true, Pinker is certainly hesitant to pick any single cause of the trend, and he does emphasize that the trend hasn't been constant and is certainly subject to potentially reverse. I just paraphrased some of his more plausible theories and conclusions for the sake of discussion.

I took my friend to the DMV to take her driving test. While I waited for her, I drew this. She failed the test.