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From the virtual Cecil B. DeMille’s of Bennelong.

Yes, we’re early. But we did let a month go by after Myer put out their decorations.

Some parents of kids in Mr 5’s class have expressed concern that the school-hours scripture classes are a little too “Fire And Brimstone!” Some kids have been coming home from school talking about death and pretty upset about their parents’ prospects for admission into heaven.

We hadn’t noticed anything particularly odd. A Moses colouring activity came home with a light saber once. At age 5 everything looks better with a light saber.

I decided to check out what Mr 5 thought about his scripture classes.

I don’t have this captured perfectly, but you’ll get the gist:

They’re always talking about God and Jesus. Mostly Jesus. They really like Jesus.

Jesus is really powerful. She has some big dogs who can cure blindness by licking people.

Really big dogs.

He hasn’t heard the joke about the dyslexic insomniac agnostic.

Blade Runner, in any of its forms, is clearly one of the finest science fiction films ever made. While enjoying our new Apple TV last week, I succumbed to the temptation to buy the high definition Definitive Cut version and watch it.

I’ve seen pretty much all of the versions of Blade Runner multiple times — even the versions with reluctant Harrison Ford voice-overs. I didn’t expect much more than to be washed over by very leisurely-paced science fiction film noir nostalgia and marvel at how Admiral William Adama has grown.

I was struck by just how much nostalgia there was to be had.

Ridley Scott was prescient in his ability to select 1982-contemporary brands for prominent display that would encounter some serious trouble by the time history caught up with the movie. Each of the brands I recognised seems to have experienced a pre-2019 hiccup or two:

• RCA: Purchased by GE in 1986 and gutted.
• TDK: Not dead, but owned by Imation since 2007.
• Atari: A brand being revived post-1980s as the adopted name of Hasbro Interactive and Infogrames.
• Pan Am: Does not require explanation.

Apart from Atari, these brands don’t look terribly likely to method act their way to a triumphant resurgence in 2019.

Worth reading just for the introduction.

From the outset, they adopted the philosophy espoused by esoteric novels The Illuminatus! Trilogy, gaining notoriety for various anarchic situationist manifestations, including the defacement of billboard adverts, the posting of prominent cryptic advertisements in NME magazine and the mainstream press, and highly distinctive and unusual performances on Top of the Pops. Their most notorious performance was at the February 1992 BRIT Awards, where they fired machine gun blanks into the audience and dumped a dead sheep at the aftershow party. This performance announced The KLF’s departure from the music business, and in May 1992 the duo deleted their entire back catalogue.

Esoteric novels? They were the finest of their indescribable genre.

I blame sleep-deprivation for a lack of even sporadic blogging.

Rather than kick off a del.icio.us linkspam bot, I’ll just refer you over to the rightleft. My Google Reader shared items change far more frequently than this blog.

That widget is powered by the wake of my leveraged synergy drive.

Fafblog is stirring.

If I go back to using Bloglines from Reader and pretend Billmon is still around I’ll be blog-partying on teh Internets like it’s 2004.

…but almost that boring.

I Am A: True Neutral Human Sorcerer (5th Level)

Ability Scores:
Strength-12
Dexterity-15
Constitution-12
Intelligence-14
Wisdom-14
Charisma-15

Alignment:
True Neutral A true neutral character does what seems to be a good idea. He doesn’t feel strongly one way or the other when it comes to good vs. evil or law vs. chaos. Most true neutral characters exhibit a lack of conviction or bias rather than a commitment to neutrality. Such a character thinks of good as better than evil after all, he would rather have good neighbors and rulers than evil ones. Still, he’s not personally committed to upholding good in any abstract or universal way. Some true neutral characters, on the other hand, commit themselves philosophically to neutrality. They see good, evil, law, and chaos as prejudices and dangerous extremes. They advocate the middle way of neutrality as the best, most balanced road in the long run. True neutral is the best alignment you can be because it means you act naturally, without prejudice or compulsion. However, true neutral can be a dangerous alignment because it represents apathy, indifference, and a lack of conviction.

Race:
Humans are the most adaptable of the common races. Short generations and a penchant for migration and conquest have made them physically diverse as well. Humans are often unorthodox in their dress, sporting unusual hairstyles, fanciful clothes, tattoos, and the like.

Class:
Sorcerers are arcane spellcasters who manipulate magic energy with imagination and talent rather than studious discipline. They have no books, no mentors, no theories just raw power that they direct at will. Sorcerers know fewer spells than wizards do and acquire them more slowly, but they can cast individual spells more often and have no need to prepare their incantations ahead of time. Also unlike wizards, sorcerers cannot specialize in a school of magic. Since sorcerers gain their powers without undergoing the years of rigorous study that wizards go through, they have more time to learn fighting skills and are proficient with simple weapons. Charisma is very important for sorcerers; the higher their value in this ability, the higher the spell level they can cast.

Find out What Kind of Dungeons and Dragons Character Would You Be?, courtesy of Easydamus

I wonder what D&D life would be like if I had agreed to assassinate the president in the survey? Oh wait. The back button is my friend.

Obviously I would be among the most odious of chaotic, sonofabitches…

I Am A: Neutral Good Human Sorcerer (5th Level)

Lee-Harvey Oswald was true neutral before he shot JFK and neutral good after? Tell that to Jack Ruby.

I guess the survey is aware of who’s currently President of the US. Maybe it’s geo-located me and knows that my country doesn’t have a president. If I would assassinate some dictator who masquerades as president in Australia’s freedom-tolerating system of constitutional monarchy, then there is good in me!

Via Jeff Freeman

What Kind of Dungeons and Dragons Character Would You Be?

I know I’m not much of a marketing person. A marketing person recently told me that if developers were in charge of marketing, sashimi would be marketed as cold dead fish. I said developers were not that naive. We would actually market it as delicious cold dead fish.

But, you know, there must be a point where even marketing people run out of ideas with a product.

What more is left to do with, or say about, toilet rolls?

You can put puppies and ducklings in your advertising and talk about how soft it is. You can give it a name and a motto that speaks to how tough and unyielding it is like “Green bamboo Toilet paper: Very Tenacious!”[1] You can scent its “core” to make it remind you less of what you do with it. You can print your enemy’s image or poetry on it. You can cover it with pictures of shells and fish to remind you where it ends up. You can cover it in brown paper with happy flowers on it to distract consumers from the feeling of environmental purgatory that using it is going to give you.

You can also decide to make a roll of toilet paper longer and make something out of that.

This is what’s written on the outside of a packet of Kleenex Cottonelle toilet tissue.

“Change the roll less often. Double length. It’s twice as long. 1 double length roll = 2 regular Kleenex brand rolls.”

Finding that much to say about 1x = 2y is worthy of whatever the toilet tissue industry equivalent of an Oscar is.

[1] J & I were given this brand of toilet paper in Hong Kong before a month-long trek through China. It lived up to its motto.

A while back I learned something that I think is interesting for anyone who is interested in reliability. The reliability of solid state components in computers is related to the Arrhenius Equation. The Arrhenius Equation describes how the rate of chemical reactions is affected by temperature. A theory of reliability about solid state components of computers says that the reason they fail (after DOA and child mortality failures) is primarily due to chemical reactions, like oxidation.

In Wikipedia’s inimitable style:

The general rule of thumb, without solving the equation, is that for every 10°C increase in temperature the rate of reaction doubles. As with any rule of thumb, it does not always work.

Theoretically that means that for every 10°C you can cool your computer beyond its nominal operating temperature, you can (according to the unreliable rule of thumb) increase the mean time between failures of solid state components in your PC by a factor of 2. Another way of describing this is that it doubles the reliability of those components.

Now, a question: Should I freeze my backup DVDs?

www.omfg.com should have much funnier content.

This game looks like an end-run around WoW’s strengths: storyline depth, spelling, grammar, good localization quality and intentional humour.

From the Elf Online newbie quest database:

Quest name: Meng San’s worries
Quest level: 6~99
Rewarded goods: Fatal Wrath Kerchief 7J?21001?
Procedure: 1.Go to Uncle Lin in Sunset Prairie to buy a bottle of Injure Curer for Iron Arm Meng San in West Carefree Village.
[...]
Quest name: Beat elf
Quest level: 1~99
Procedure: 1.Go to HaiLiGe in North Wulong Village after killed 10 Snot Elf in Tranquil Seacoast 1.

And having agreed to join up, this is displayed after the “congratulations!” message:

Play Elf Online, Earn Cash.
Rare Items for Your Choose.
Cashes Points Rare Pets.

And, err, the download instructions look pretty frightening for Vista users:

1.Client latest version 2.0.2.496, about 890 M;
2.You can use either BT or HTTP to download. BT is recommended;
3.If you use the Vista O/S, please don’t install the game in disk C;
4. If you can’t login the game after downloaded and installed the client, please download manual update patch.

Even now I feel strangely drawn to play.

h/t Broken Toys

Update: Caution… you can’t delete or cancel your account details so be sure to use a pseudonym and a disposable email address during registration. And I can’t figure out how to… err… get an ID for this free game. Impenetrable grammar has its downsides too…

I work with a US-based manager called Jane with über-project-coordination skills.

One of Jane’s management super hero talents is a tireless ability to bring warring development groups together on the phone and gently negotiate agreement within minutes of observing email sniping or any of the other usual symptoms of project discord.

I watched too much of a TV show during my early childhood called Mr Squiggle. The show featured a puppet character called Mr Squiggle “the man from the moon” who…

…was a cheery, scatter-brained character who would often be distracted and would occasionally go for “space-walks”, and his assistant would need to calm him down to get him to focus on the task of drawing.

Mr Squiggle always had a female assistant to help him, and give the show some narrative consistency. There were several assistants during the show’s lifetime, but the assistant I remember most fondly is Miss Jane.

Even though he was easily distracted Mr Squiggle was a brilliant artist, as puppets go. He could change a piece of paper with some random-looking lines and curves into a complete picture by drawing with his pencil nose while talking about how nice the moon is this time of year.

Before starting to draw he would say “Hold my hand, Miss Jane.”

This seemed such a fitting parallel to our project (as the creative scatterbrain, Mr Squiggle) and our Ms Jane (as a stabilizing influence) that I thought I should share this parallel with her.

I was about to compose a Happy-New-Year-how’re-you-doing? email to Jane with background links to the Wikipedia article on the show when I noticed that there is also a short Wikipedia entry for Jane Fennell, the actor who was Miss Jane.

I read it and decided against drawing any parallels.

Now I think I need someone to hold my hand.