How I Waste My Precious Time

Whew, a big flutter of chatter in the news last week about some recent scientific findings: the gases let off by shower curtains are bad! That’s right folks: those foul, chemical-smelling, plastic-manufactory odors that you smell when you open the package of a new plastic shower curtain are actually noxious gases. No shit! Thank you again science, I couldn’t have figured it out for myself. 

I do think the way news is reported these days is ridiculous in all its forms, and one of those is definitely the portrayal of really obvious things that have now become verified by science. I admit that there could be some use to it if it helps establish some legal boundaries or something to assist the greater good, but can’t science work on something more important?

I just discovered the best feature of the Virtual Console on the Nintendo Wii: you can leave games paused infinitely just by returning to the Wii Menu. Not such a big deal for the Super Nintendo and later games with Save functionality built-in, but this is huge for NES and other games where you have to play from start to finish in one sitting. It’s like turning the TV off and leaving the NES running all day while you’re at school.

I’ve just started playing through Super Mario Bros. 3, and because of this feature I think I’ll play through the entire game. Should be fun to beat every level instead of just grabbing those Warp Whistles all the time. I’ll let you know how it goes when I finish next year sometime.

The new iPhone SDK comes with an iPhone simulator named Aspen Simulator, which is a full iPhone emulator and includes a few built in Apps including the iPhone Safari (Mobile Safari, Safari Touch?). Using this simulator is a sweet way to test how webpages look on an iPhone without using a scrunched up Safari window or an actual iPhone.

This appears to require a webserver though, as I haven’t figured out a way yet to just specify a path to an html file. Maybe it’s in the manual.

Every feel like saying this?

“Don’t say another Goddamn word. Up until now, I’ve been polite. If you say anything else - word one - I will kill myself. And when my tainted spirit finds its destination, I will topple the master of that dark place. From my black throne, I will lash together a machine of bone and blood, and fueled by my hatred for you this fear engine will bore a hole between this world and that one.

When it begins, you will hear the sound of children screaming - as though from a great distance. A smoking orb of nothing will grow above your bed, and from it will emerge a thousand starving crows. As I slip through the widening maw in my new form, you will catch only a glimpse of my radiance before you are incinerated. Then, as tears of bubbling pitch stream down my face, my dark work will begin.

I will open one of my six mouths, and I will sing the song that ends the Earth. “

I know, hilarious right? Stolen from Penny-Arcade!

Read this today, it’s connected to the way my point of view has been evolving lately. There’s also a nice bridge here between “the nature of things” part of it all and the “why are we in this predicament” view of society at large.

I’d been thinking mostly about the first half recently: it’s in our nature and an expression of life itself to do unlikely things, to pursue something bound to fail, to create something for no reason, to be (willfully or ignorantly) defiant of the odds. That was starting to be a hopeful point of view too, but as Wil points out it could be responsible for humanity’s stupid pursuit of extinction and catastrophe as if we can’t tell what’s coming.

Well that’s a bummer! Something positive to take from it: at least the remnants of civilization will have the will to push on after the rest of us die off. Of course, it’d be nice to think we could moderate things just a tad so as not to hit the finish line quite so fast.

That last video I linked too said that we were spending over half of all tax revenues on the Military!?! Is that right? Holy fuck! Can’t we just switch most of that money into space travel? The same Military Industrial Complex can build everything with the same wasteful amount of Government money, so we don’t even need to get rid of corruption to do this. At least there’d be a chance that as a side effect human Lunar and Martian Colonies would make it after Earth becomes a little less comfortable to people. Maybe they could teach us how to live in bubble cities?

Found this awesome video on Digg: Story of Stuff. It’s a 10 or 20 minute video about production, the supply chain, and consumption suitable for children’s education but with the truth instead of abstractions and suspiciously missing value judgements that I fear most educational material features.

I didn’t think I needed to sit through it, but it was really charming and unfortunately the topics covered probably aren’t as obvious to most as they should be. Check it out.

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I just moved a number of posts here to “private” status, just to make sure I don’t cause any stupid issues for myself. Pretty lame, but I’m shy anyhow so I hardly needed the excuse.

Common’s new album: Finding Forever is firstly awesome, but also has this cool detail of the Chicago skyline on the cover art that reminds me of the header image up above. Cool!

Recent comments about “the hacker” character in modern movies and TV has lead me to a potentially uncomfortable realization. Penny Arcade posted a comic strip Monday on the matter. A couple weeks before goldenfiddle posted a chat transcript on the same idea. I think they were both inspired by Die Hard 4, which I haven’t seen, but you don’t have to look far to find other examples. I’ve only seen a quarter or fewer of 24 episodes, but they must be amongst the worst. That show would collapse if it’s weren’t for the constant usage of all-powerful hackers as a plot device. So lame.

And then I realized one of my most favorite and lovable and heroic characters of all time may be the original inspiration for all of these lame followers. I’m afraid R2D2 is the original hacker. He mostly opened doors and fixed space ships in a pretty “hands on” manner, but shutting down all the trash compactors on the detention level is on the edge.