Recently in Misc Category

Ha! You suckers feverishly clicked on this link thinking it was going to be about the infamous 15th-century witch-hunting manual, but in reality this is just another one of those "life update" type posts that, ubiquitous as they are, threaten to drag the entirety of the interweb down into the abyss of self-absorbed tedium. So here we go:

• As my wife and fellow Rosicrucian agent Michele has noted already, the two of us are planning a trip to Germany this autumn. Of you who have been there, I ask: what should we do with our two weeks in the Holy Roman Empire?

  Also, Michele is really smart.

• If you've got room on your prayer list, here's something to keep in your prayers.

• Congratulations, Peter and Vanessa!

• I'm using the Opera web browser again, after years of adulterous flirting with other, less worthy programs.

• Michele and I have continued our Warhammer RPG campaign, and continue to enjoy it. For a while now, I've been gearing up to run a summer campaign of the Castles and Crusades RPG, but scheduling and other difficulties are making it tough to get that started.

• I saw Batman Begins and liked it a lot. In other film-related news, I keep meaning to post some thoughts about Revenge of the Sith, but cannot shake the dread certainty that the world doesn't really need Another Blogger's Thoughts About Revenge of the Sith.

• My sister is coming out from California this week to visit!

• My workplace has a fully-functional Pacman arcade cabinet. Who would've guessed that a successful, high-scoring Pacman game required so much strategy and practice?

I'm tired and rapidly approaching total incoherence. Time to sign off.

A quick roundup of some links and thoughts you may find interesting.

• Extended RotK: I was all set to blog about my thoughts on the extended Return of the King, and then realized that Polytropos seems to share my exact opinions and has already posted an insightful essay detailing them. (Short summary of my views: Drinking game = bad, Aragorn's behavior at the Morannon = bad, and everything else = good to excellent.)

  More importantly, from the aforelinked post I've now learned that there are other people in the world who can sing from memory the Orcs' timeless marching tune. True story: while slaving away sorting pottery on an archaeology dig in Jordan, I overheard somebody else in the pottery room humming this tune. When I worked up the courage to confront them, they were as amazed as I that somebody else out there had the song memorized. Instant friendship!

  Jonathan has some good thoughts on the extended RotK too.

• OK, one more Tolkien link: Why Lord of the Rings Will - and Must - Be Remade. Very interesting little essay.
  
• Environmental catastrophe: Mark has an interesting post talking about his reasons for not putting much stock in "we're killing the planet!"-type environmental arguments.

  I've not read The Skeptical Environmentalist or the other books he mentions, so I can't comment on their quality. But there is a glaring need for somebody--preferably somebody within the environmental movement--to step forward and honestly discuss why the worst-case scenarios we've been hearing about for decades have not come to pass. Some of these the-world-is-ending predictions are made by fringe extremists and can be discounted as such, but an awful lot of these ominous predictions originate from--or at least are not publically countered by--more reputable sources. Certainly, not a year has gone by in my memory that I have not heard from very earnest, scientific-study-citing individuals that our oil/forests/clean air/living space is on the verge of vanishing forever... but I can still fill up my car for $1.80 at the local gas station, same as ever.

  In my opinion, the reason for much of the disconnect between apocalyptic predictions and the reality is not a malicious desire to deceive, but simply the human penchant for hyperbole. In a world of ten billion distractions, the only way you can make yourself heard or drive home your point is by voicing more and more extreme warnings. This is perhaps understandable, but it also has the effect of making it hard to take seriously the latest "our ____ is about to vanish!" reports.

  Ahem. So much for quick links and brief commentary, eh? Forward, then, to the next stop on our journey, the much-anticipated...

• Political link: One of the most thought-provoking pundits from the Right that I've come across is Stephen DenBeste, who has unfortunately retired his blog. However, I note with great joy that he has put together a page linking to his best essays. His synopsis of the war against terror is an excellent, logical ordering of the conservative vision for the current war. Even if you don't agree with it, I think you'll find it an enlightening summary of the conservative position.
  

OK, I think that's it for now. I must be off to finish up some last-minute Christmas shopping. Merry Christmas to all!

I'm getting caught up on my blog reading. Here are a few noteworthy items I've come across lately, for your perusal:

• Bill has written an excellent essay on prayer and miracles.
• Fun article on how D&D changed the world. (Side note: have you seen the new 30th anniversary coffee table book? It looks pretty neat-o.)
• As many of you know, Firefox 1.0 was officially released recently. If you are currently using Internet Explorer and don't know what all the Firefox fuss is about, give it a try--it's free and easy to download/install. And don't forget its hot, email-reading cousin Thunderbird. Wait, that didn't sound quite right...
• I've been really enjoying the Game Matters blog, by one of the Duke Nukem developers. Lots of good discussion about games, from marketing to gameplay to what-have-you.

Enjoy.

Wow, it seems that everybody has been feeling the need to shake things up lately, blog-design-wise. Kim, Jon, Bill, me and now Michele. And I'm probably forgetting to mention somebody else.

I'm sitting in my hotel room now, where somehow the wireless network is reaching six floors up and providing me with internet* access. Tomorrow is the final day of our annual internet-ministry conference, which has been a good experience thus far. Michele will be joining me here tomorrow after she puts some research time in at the University of Chicago library.

Then, Sunday morning is when Michele and I are being officially welcomed as members at our church. So it's been a somewhat busy week and weekend for us--at least, compared to our usual weekly schedule.

(* Wired magazine recently declared that it was time to stop capitalizing the words "Internet" and "Web", and I say it's about time. So from now on, I'll try to incorporate that into my online writing.)

Instead of a longer post today, I'll fire off a few miscellaneous items for your reading enjoyment.

I really enjoy Penny Arcade's occasional "Cardboard Tube Samurai" comic strips. I think the most recent two part strip is especially good. Great stuff. (And as an unrelated side note, "occasional" is one of those words that I spell incorrectly every single time I use it.)

Michele and I saw The Village last night. I won't spoil anything, except to say that I was mildly disappointed. It had some wonderful characters, interesting ideas, and a few moments of brilliance, but overall it just didn't seem to come together quite as well as it should've. I left the theater thinking it would've made a really good short story, but not such a great movie. That said, I did enjoy it, and I'd recommend going to see it--it's just not as good as it could've been. I have some more specific comments about it, but I'll wait a bit until a few more of you have seen it before doing so, as it's difficult to discuss the movie's merits and flaws without spoiling some of the surprises.

Speaking of movies--every now and then, against my better judgment, I get excited about movies that I know are going to be horrible. Such is the case with Alien vs. Predator, which I've been reading about this morning. The odds of this being a good, or even halfway-decent, movie are astronomically low (Alien Resurrection, anyone?). But there's just something about those aliens that keeps me coming back for more, despite the fact that the franchise is quite thoroughly past its prime. Go figure.

On to another, semi-related topic: Doom 3 is coming out soon, and I'm quite excited about it. I was even more excited this week to learn that it might even run on my computer. Genuinely scary computer games are few and far between (System Shock 2 and Undying being the two most frightening games I've played); it looks like Doom 3 might be a contender. We shall see.

I'll close this post with a question: is there any pagan deity in the ancient world that even comes close to the coolness of Horus? I didn't think so.

We all know that ninjas are pretty awesome. But have you ever wondered exactly how awesome your ninja actually is? If you yourself are a ninja, this is much more than an academic question. Use this handy guide to calculate the awesomeness of any ninja. You begin with zero points and add relevant points as indicated by the chart.

Ninja:

is male: +1

is female: +6

has black, white, blue, or red ninja costume: +2

has ninja costume of other color: -1

is also a cyborg: +5

has more than 75 shuriken concealed in costume: +1

wields a katana: +1    --katana cries out for the blood of foes: +1    --katana cannot be sheathed until blood is drawn: +1    --katana can cut people in half, but they don't know they're dead until the ninja stomps on the ground and their torso slides away from the rest of their body: +3    --katana can slice through gun barrels and tank armor: +2    --wields more than one katana: +1 per additional katana

has sworn blood vengeance against someone: +2

is an anthropomorphic animal: -2

is only visible as a blur of motion when leaping around: +2

wields nunchaku: +2 per nunchaku

knows nothing of good or evil--only the Way of the Warrior: +2

can battle multiple enemy henchmen at the same time: +1 per 15 henchmen

can kill people just by touching them: +4

can kill people without touching them: +4

leads a life of non-violence: -12

can be convinced to emerge from retirement to cut one last swath of bloody vengeance through the ranks of foes: +3

trained under the same mystical martial-arts master that his/her nemesis did: +3

is seeking revenge for murder of his/her master: +2

can run around on walls and/or ceilings: +1

can shoot fireballs: +2

dialogue:    --no dialogue; ninja never speaks: +3    --consists of poorly-translated subtitles: +2    --is dubbed by lackluster English voiceover: +2    --is spoken in fractured "Engrish": +4

has total control over body systems and reflexes: +1    --can feign death for long periods of time: +1    --can breathe underwater for long periods of time: +1    --feels no pain: +3

can catch arrows in midair: +2

is the last surviving member of his/her ninja clan: +2

What other items should be added to the list? And most importantly... how does your ninja rank in terms of awesomeness?

Beautiful rainy spring morning today--I'm working at home today, and I much enjoyed tapping away this morning at the computer to the pleasant background noise of a nice rain. We bumped into many patches of rain on our cross-country trip last week--just enough rain to really bring out the bright greens and that unique rainy-spring smell, but never so much that it interfered with our plans. In other words, just about perfect.

I don't have any epic essays written today. Instead, we have a random assortment of interesting (to me, at least) links and other miscellanea for you to peruse.

Random thing #1. I was excited to see the release of Fedora Core 2, the latest iteration of my Linux distribution of choice. Unfortunately, I may sit this one out and wait for Fedora Core 3, unless they can do something about the "minor" glitch that prevents you from booting into Windows XP on a dual-boot machine. That would be a pretty major problem for some of us. Hmmmm.

#2. Taking long road trips, especially road trips that involve going near Chicago (travel tip: if your road trip will take you within two states of Chicago, add about 10 hours of traffic to your estimated travel time), has cemented in my mind the idea that most people with drivers licenses are horrible people who shouldn't be allowed near a bicycle, let alone behind the wheel of a 1+ ton block of metal traveling at 80 mph. So after several days' worth of driving uber-cautiously and ranting about the horrible driving habits of other people, what's the first thing I do upon my return to Grand Rapids? I swerve into another lane without looking first and force another car to brake madly to avoid hitting me. I guess I'm just another one of those terrible people you always hear about.

#3. Joel passed me this link to an interesting series of essays discussing the basic concepts behind the Japanese language. Very fun read.

#4. I've really been enjoying GetReligion.org, a blog on the topic of religion and the media. Pretty sharp commentary, and politic-y without being too pundit-y. If you know what I mean.

#5. It turns out my wife has pretty good taste in music. Ever since she introduced me to Tom Waits, I've been listening to him whenever I get the chance. How can you not like a musician who writes lyrics like these? Unfortunately, Michele's taste isn't perfect--she has not yet acknowledged that Extreme's III Sides to Every Story is the album than which none greater can be conceived. Ah well, she'll figure it out eventually.

I think I'll stop with five random observations for now. Wouldn't want to go overboard.

It's been a slow week for blogging for me. I don't have the energy to tackle anything too epic, so I'll fire off a few updates from the past week or so.

• Rumors are a-flying that Mark and his lovely wife Rachel are now the proud parents of a new baby. This has caused me to ponder what exactly would make a cool name for a baby these days. Assuming you want your child to have a supervillain-style name, you're in luck, because we've seen some pretty cool bad guy names emerge over the last decade or so.

  The trend I've noticed is that the coolest Bad Guys don't seem to have personal names so much as cool-sounding titles. The days of being an evil overlord with a name like Grondar or Brutarus are over. Consider these cool bad-guy names:

  • the various Darths of Star Wars
    
  • the Merovingian, Trainman, Architect, etc. from the Matrix films
    
  • the Last European (from a Clive Barker novel... maybe my fave bad-guy name of all time)
    
  • the Undying King (cool bad-guy name from the computer game Undying)
    
  • Vigo the Carpathian (from, uh, Ghostbusters 2)
    
  • the Mouth of Sauron, the Witch-King of Angmar, the King Under the Mountain* (Tolkien, of course)
    
  • the Gunslinger*, the Man in Black, and the Crimson King (Stephen King's Dark Tower series)

    (* technically not bad guys)

  You get the idea. So Mark and Rachel, I hope you haven't already named your child something else. If you have given him/her a normal name, you will need to rename your child something with an ominous-sounding title.

• Lately I've been feeling the call of the old NES, perhaps from listening to so many Nintendo-game-remixes at Overclocked Remix. Last night I played Ninja Gaiden 3 for a few minutes, long enough to remember how impossibly difficult it is--even in comparison to the early games in the series, which themselves set new standards for video-game difficulty. In NG3 they maintained more or less the same gameplay difficulty level as the previous two games, but decided to limit the number of continues you get. That singlehandedly turns what would be a really-cool game into a merely pretty-cool game. Bad move, Tecmo. That said, the Ninja Gaiden series still remains a personal favorite of mine.

• Last night, Michele and I watched Rashomon with Alan and Junko (and Toshi). It was excellent and prompted some good discussion, both at Alan's place and on the car ride home. I still haven't decided entirely what I think of it; I do suspect I'd need to watch it again, more carefully this time, to come to a conclusion about What It All Means. At any rate, a highly recommended film should you be so unfortunate as to have not yet seen it.

• I got a new roleplaying game this week, after hearing rave reviews of it from Jon--Hero Fifth Edition. So far I've only skimmed through it, but it looks absolutely superb. It seemed to give off a major Rolemaster vibe (which is good, since I love RM) with its focus on flexibility in character creation and consistency in game mechanics. I may offer more comments on it as I read through (which may be a while, given its bulk).

• I'm still plodding steadily through Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver. Thus far it is a fairly interesting read--and there's no denying Stephenson's linguistic mastery--but it hasn't grabbed me like Cryptonomicon did. That said, I'm only about one-third of the way through it, and the novel itself is only one-third of a trilogy, so it'd be a bit premature to make any sort of judgment at this point.

I now return you to your regularly scheduled Friday, as I return to mine.

Our apartment is being invaded by ladybugs! Perhaps prompted by the Indian Summer weather we've had this week, ladybugs by the truckload are swarming around our apartment trying to get in. The clever little guys have figured out how to get in through the window screens (next thing you know they'll be learning to use doorknobs or something) and as I type this, several are crawling about on the ceiling of the room... watching me. They're watching me!

If this were a cheesy movie, this would mean that a monstrous Queen Ladybug had taken up residence in our basement and is directing its hellish little minions to overwhelm the apartment. But my life is no cheesy movie--we don't have a basement; the only place a Queen Ladybug could really hide would be in the walk-in closet, and I just checked in there, and it's clear. But they've got to be coming from somewhere... hmmm...

update 7:15 pm: Michele is gone, off to buy something at the pet store. More ladybugs. I've sealed myself in the computer room. That should hold 'em for a while.

update 7:22 pm: They're pounding on the door, but they can't get in! Ha! I should be safe here, but if you're reading this out in Internet land, send help soon.

update 7:24 pm: They've gone completely silent. Are they gone? No, I don't think so. They're up to something... but what?

update 7:25 pm: The lights--the power! How did they cut the power? They're just animals! Coming through the air ducts--

[sound of a loud crash, followed by gunshots and a loud explosion]

That... should've showed 'em... I've got five bullets left, not counting the one I'm saving for myself... if it comes to that. Quiet again... maybe... maybe they're giving up?

Oh no. Here they--come get some, you chitinous freaks! Yeah, you!

[sounds of more gunshots and crashing noises]

They're everywhere! Everywhere! But they won't take me alivlkasj;a ae9 )O83

update 7:29 pm: Disregard the above comments. The situation is completely normal. The one known as "Andy" is in excellent health and appreciates your concern. Kindly withdraw any law enforcement units dispatched to this location.

[sound of chittering]