A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

I watched Patriot Games with classicaljunkie last night. I enjoyed it in theaters when I saw it with my dad ~15 years ago, but now it's just ridiculous, basically a slasher/monster movie painted to look like political intrigue.

The scenes I remembered most remain poignant anyway, and I discovered some new ones. My new hobby is to bellow I WILL FUCKING DESTROY YOU! I WILL MAKE IT MY MISSION IN LIFE to someone different once per week. Maybe I'll start with the neighbor's dog and work my way up.

And now I am going to go drink until I can say "Microsoft Windows Internet Explorer" without shouting FUCKING in between each word.

Wednesday classicaljunkie and I went to Six Flags. It was weird and nobody had any fun. Basically, her approach to amusement parks is to ride the 500-foot coasters over and over until she can't walk anymore. Mine is to go on the baby rides with my eyes squeezed shut while I go FUCKFUCKSHITCOCKNONOAAAAAAAAAAA, and then sit for a while to recover. A basic incompatibility was thus discovered.

But then we went shopping and had coffee and felt better.

As a pedestrian, I've lately started flipping off traffic a lot. I even flip off drivers that aren't interacting with me, but being rude to other motorists. I hypothesize that I am more comfortable about this the closer I am to my home neighborhood.

I enjoy it a great deal, though it doesn't make me any less angry, for that brief period after an incident when I am teeth-grindingly ragey.

Someone made a Gamut page at Softpedia. (Not that I had heard of this website before, but tsall good.) They went through the trouble of taking their own screenshots instead of ripping off the perfectly good ones I made for Gamut's page on volity.org. Whoever it was just sat alone at various game tables and shouted the name of their website in all caps. Whatever pleases you, my friend. I went ahead and submitted some information about the most recent version.

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There's now a small and slowly growing crowd of regulars in the Volity devchat, every day. Most of them I didn't know before this month. I thought the developer beta would start mostly with some local folks I know who've been wanting to get involved, and while that is happening, the first real outside game development is coming from heretofore strangers.

This is quite excellent and I am very pleased, even if they are all Python hackers, ho ho. (Actually I love to see the devchat awash in Python code snippets as they give each other programming advice for soon-to-be Volity games. Really very good.)

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I spent maybe six hours writing three business letters today, all in the partnership-seeking vein. Not a complaint; I write slowly simply because I write carefully, and with letters whose ultimate message is gold plz, I really don't mind my own pokiness. It's not so good when I'm trying to write a book, that's all.

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Saw Thank You for Smoking last night with friends and it was pretty good I guess but my mood was pre-ruined by my subway ride to the theater where some kids were spitting at me. I think. I'm not sure, because for some reason (maybe from having very little social contact this week) I dropped into this stupid third-grade bully-survival mentality and became determined not simply not acknowledge their existence, so I didn't look at them or listen to them (had iPod). This really bothered me; sitting there just taking it, I ended up feeling pretty emasculated, to be honest. I realized a split second too late that I would have felt a lot better if, after disembarking, I flipped off the car they were in as it went by.

Come to think of it, I enjoy flipping things off a lot. I flip off the neighbor's dog every chance I get. Maybe I'll just make a personal habit of flipping off everyone in the T after it starts to pull out, from now on. I mean: easy points. Fish in a barrel!

Anyway had fancy-pants drinks after the thing and all told spent like $30 on the evening and holy crap. I'm not doing that anymore, not until I have a salary again.

For whatever reason, the ~10-year-old Cross/Odenkirk launch vehicle Mr. Show seems to have risen in visibility lately. As I didn't have any HBO in the 1990's, I didn't even hear of the show until a couple of years ago, when its release on DVD generated some trickle-down buzz. After Netflixing one of these DVDs, I understood why: it's a sketch comedy show, but its sense of humor and timing is bang-on perfect for, erm, people sharing that sense of humor, and its everything-segueing-into-everything-else format was brilliant.

I watched the show on HBO after that, with my TiVo faithfully recording the rare times they aired it, usually as late-night filler. But last year TBS started showing it, and soon afterwards Comedy Central scooped it from them. (I mean that the instant CC started airing it, TBS stopped. Funny how one can sometimes track apparent contract disputes via TiVo.) And this made me kind of sad because even though the shows aired regularly, the insertion of ads broke up their rhythm. Furthermore, they bleeped out all the swearning.

But an interesting note about that: At first, CC bleeped nothing but the F-bomb and variants. Then it bleeped almost every blue word. And now it's shrugged, switched the show's rating to TV-MA (unless it was that way before, but I dern't think so) and bleeps nothing at all. I was actually pleasantly surprised to see that... it seems to be against the trend of TV management in the shadow of the current baby-jesus-led FCC. Good for them!

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I think my favorite swear word right now is "cockgobbler" because it sounds like it should be a McDonaldland character. At first it would be villainous but soon would come the relevation that its intentions were merely misunderstood, and soon it would be accepted as openly friendly. I am not sure which particular fast-food item it should be associated with though. I guess chicken sandwiches.

Do they still make McDonaldland commercials though? My memory is fuzzy. The concept might have died when I was still a kid for all I can remember. Oh well. I'm sure otherwise I could have sold my idea to them for big bucks.

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Has anyone seen that dreadfully creepy ad for Disney World featuring CG Mickey and Goofy talking about new park attractions? It's awful... the animation director apparently didn't know the difference between "elastic" and "liquid" and so the character's faces and even eyes constantly wobble and ripple like sacks of gelatin while they speak and gesture. I actually stop and watch this ad every time I start to TiVo past it, because it's such a car wreck.

How did Disney approve of this? I really have to imagine that this is an exception to the any-publicity-is-good mantra. Mickey really shouldn't make children cry just by smiling and causing his mousy facial-flesh to ripple back and forth.