Spelunking the Universe
Rico Penguin
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Posts by Rico Penguin
Empty Supermarket Sunday
018 hours ago
by Rico Penguin
in General
Post Writing Note: This post takes some unusual turns…I’m pleased overall.
So there is, or was, a big football game going on. I’m being mostly vague because I haven’t the slightest clue when it began or how long it is going to take. My main interest in football died around the time I stopped playing NFL Blitz with my friends as a kid. That game was quite good on the N64.
Liz and I decided that the best time to go to the store would be when everyone is at home watching the game. So we left at 4PM (Pacific) and made our way to the local Safeway and Sprouts. Sure enough both were mostly barren, but Safeway was certainly the more empty of the two. Perhaps a matter of demographics? The average person who shops at a supermarket might be more likely to watch something like the super bowl. I haven’t a clue however.
Seeing empty aisles at a store in California is no less shocking than seeing an actual UFO landing in front of you. There are so many people in this state. I’m often wondering if California pays people to have kids, its like every square inch of this area is covered in people. It’s made even more noticeable by the fact that many people will run you over with their cart without so much as an apology.
I bought my first two packs of Dark Ascensions yesterday (fantastic segue), I managed to get 2 Mythic Rares out of a single pack and the Zombie Apocalypse I had planned to buy as a single. It’s a great start to a new set and I’m thinking I should get back to buying the MTG books to finish my collection.
I’m currently drinking some black tea with considerably too much honey in it, its sweet to a fault and I can feel the kick building up in the back of my brain. Once I finish this post I’m going to dive back into storybook and see how much more I can add to it. That is some fantastic software and I’m very glad that a friend directed me to it.
Totally unrelated to the topic (which is what?) but Twista and Busta Rhymes are amazing rappers. I can’t for the life of me replicate their speed or accuracy. I’m not sure which I like best, slow rap or fast rap, but for sure the fast stuff tends to amaze me more functionally. Slow rap does however tend to be much more informative, more thick themes.
So I’ve been thinking about writing poetry again. It’s been a long time, I realized that it has become incredibly hard for me to do it anymore. Why? Well mostly because I used to write about hope, about a better life I might someday have. Not necessarily emotional poetry but it was about a life I thought highly unlikely.
Now I’ve kind of got it, I’m married, have some sweet pets, a fairly nice place, enough money to keep up with my hobbies. It’s like when someone with millions complains about bills on television, it just seems weird. So while listening to music in the shower (Iphone+Ziplock for the win) I realized I could start writing poetry about my story world. Take topics from the view of my characters. Would be kind of fun, plus it can add to my not-so-hidden tactic of putting backstory all over the internet (most specifically this website).
I didn’t mention it 5 days ago but I’ve made it a full month! 1 Post per Day. I haven’t finished the Michael Pollan book I’m working on but I’ve been having some poor sleeping habits. Baby steps.
We had our company reviews this last week, the way it works at my job is each employee writes about themselves and every other employee in the building. We say what we think are each employees strong points and each employees weak points. I had thought I was the most critical employee in the building, and then I started talking to others about what they had written and realized something startling.
I’m a really nice guy.
When did this happen?! I remember in high school people called me an asshole, not everyone, but enough folks. How many of your high school friends still talk to you? For me of about 40-50 people I had actively talked with at my high school I think 3 actively have tried to talk to me since graduation.
That’s some damn poor turnover. I remember during a particularly cumbersome relationship period one girl who knew me had told another that “He is like fire. You get mesmerized by him, then you get too close and get burned.” I’m not getting all the words right, but the gist is there. A big part of it was that I absolutely hated myself, it wasn’t a matter of self esteem necessarily, I just couldn’t stop certain habits. Mostly being abrasive, I wanted to not be but it was a tough habit to kick. Junior high had murdered my innocence and I wanted to ruin everyone around me.
I grew out of it, remarkably fast actually. My parents had enrolled me into Tae Kwon Do and I was sparring every week. The training was therapeutic, stronger than any drug I’d ever taken, and fighting with people who wanted to fight felt great. I was placed into a situation where I was trading blows with someone who wanted them, not just uncontrollably harming people around me.
Sometime during this I had my heart utterly crushed. It was the only time I can recall crying for an entire night. It was certainly not my most proud memory. I remember that feeling of emptiness, just seeing this hollow universe that had once been full of so many things. Every little thing that had made up who I was had been crushed into a tiny diamond, an impenetrable fragment.
I decided that next morning that I truly didn’t give a damn anymore. That I wasn’t going to let people take me down anymore. There was no turnover period, no withdrawals, nothing, I simply crushed that past me and moved on. It was a remarkable feeling, when people say they felt liberated I’m not sure if they went as far as I did. I truly felt weightless, each step was like I was forcing myself back down to Earth. Without proper concentration I might have floated off into space.
Tae Kwon Do became even more important for me because it was consistent. I went, I had friends, and we all connected. I was surrounded by immensely talented people, smart people, funny people, truly wonderful people, and we all shared that Dojang in common. Training and fighting were the links that connected our otherwise greatly different worlds.
I never did do real well at tournaments, I’m very good at getting second place. I’m not sure that’s a talent that anyone really wants but I’ve got it down like a science. A big part of that was the environment, I was no longer fighting with people I liked nor people I knew. I was fighting with a stranger and that was not fun for me. In many cases it wasn’t even a matter of them being better, I was just utterly disinterested. Every tournament I ever went to was basically me fighting someone who wasn’t as good as the people at the Dojang, and most certainly people who were not as enthusiastic as the people at the Dojang.
At any rate, I’m getting off onto a ridiculous tangent. The point is that for a long time I was the most critical person I knew. But over the course of the last 8 years (8? Dear god…) I have changed more than even I realized. I’m so utterly uncharged about people, I see the faults of others far less aggressively than I once did.
The harshest things I said on my review paled in comparison to the things other people said. When I mention this I should clarify that I’m talking about the nice folks in the office. The nice people said meaner things than I did.
I’m apparently a teddy bear now. Maybe it is a matter of perspective? I used to have repeating nightmares of all the worst moments of my life, I consistently relived the events for months at a time. These days though, its just so pointless. It’s very similar to apathy, I could mistakenly identify it as such. But it isn’t that I don’t care anymore, its just that I care as much as I should given the weight of the event. Does the random jerk online upset my cats? No. Do they alter the water quality in my county? No. Did their commentary impact the tax rate for my income level? Probably not.
No that random jerk is a nobody, a spec of dust that will be lost to time in the very near future. They’ll die and basically nobody will remember. So if the world can’t be bothered to remember them why should I?
I’m reminded of how I feel when I see pictures of myself from High School, or earlier, and just wondering about the intermediary steps between that moment and now. The physical and mental transformation I’ve taken from then to now. In basically every sense I am a completely different person than I was then. It’s like hundreds of different people are living out short periods of time in the timeline that my name is slapped on.
I’m the collection of many other Mes, each leaving a few marks on the future Mes, some good marks, some bad marks, but each a cliff note that helps guide the next version along its path.
Yes, I think that fits. I feel a bit like computer software. With inconsistent updates. Sometimes a month, sometimes a year or years, till the next revision sets in and cannot recognize the prior. Online you’ll see 
jokes about people like George Lucas who once said that altering films is an evil act, and seeing them now butchering every work they’ve made. I might have before thought George a hypocrite, but now I see it as the current version of GL acting as he is designed to.
The prior GL that had made those statements no longer exists basically in the most literal sense. They died off and another GL took that real estate. The body changed visibly and invisibly, the changes are subtle enough over time to create an illusion of a single person, but each body contains dozens, hundreds, thousands, or perhaps incalculable persons over the course of its lifetime.
I’m beginning to wonder if that was Honey I put in my tea or PCP. Sure tasted like honey.
“Pro-Life” is not a legitimate position.
01 day ago
by Rico Penguin
in General
I like to give my posts controversial headlines sometimes, mostly because I like to see who just replies on Facebook to the titles. I doubt by the end of this this will be quite as controversial as it seems like it might be.
The first thing about taking a position on something is that you are making the statement that there is an opposing view being held by some number of other people. For instance if I said I was “Anti-Baby Rape” I’m making the statement that somewhere out there there is a reasonably large group of people who are “for it. That’s a stupid thing to say, I highly doubt of the 7 billion people alive that there is a significant number of people taking the opposing view.
In the case of Pro-Life, or “Anti-Abortion”, you have to ask the question is there really a big group of people who are Anti-life, or “Pro-Abortion”? The obvious answer is no. This is a group of people who were entirely fabricated, a straw man army, if you will.
The amount of people who gleefully have abortions is small enough that there is no data for them, they only exist in the anecdotal commentary of ‘Pro-Life’ organizations. Whenever I see a group that is presenting an obvious façade as their belief I wonder what the actual central goal is.
For Pro-Life it isn’t all that difficult to find. The central supporters for defunding Planned Parenthood, are by-and-large also the same people who are against proper sexual education in school, against contraceptive distribution amongst sexually active populations. This results in a group of people who are ignorant of their chances of getting pregnant, removes their ability to lower their chances, and then makes it impossible to do anything but carry the child to term once they act out of ignorance.
It’s a remarkable scheme, the central theme to the entire game is control. Think I’m just talking out my butt? I wouldn’t blame you if you did. So allow the CDC to help me out here: One-Third Of Teen Mothers Didn’t Use Birth Control Because They Didn’t Think They Could Get Pregnant. The good news is that the internet exists, though there has been intense work done since its inception to hide information about sex from teens, anyone with half a functioning brain (read: basically everyone) can find anything they desire.
What delights me the most from this movement is that in states where abstinence only education is pushed you find a positive correlation with teen pregnancies. So either coincidentally these states have the most fertile youth, or the system doesn’t work. In interviews teens who believe in abstinence do not use contraceptives once they finally do decide to have sex. Why? They think contraceptives don’t work.
If Pro-Life was a legitimate movement it would be concerned with proper sexual education. Why? Because the US Ranks #1 in the world’s developed nations for teen pregnancy. We are one of the only places in the world teaching abstinence only, when you don’t create a disconnect between reality and education you don’t get left with the messy cleanup after. If a person truly wanted to stop abortions they would go to the source. Be proactive, not reactive, but being proactive would mean breaking down the system of control.
It’s perhaps not so much a pro-life movement as much as a fetish for life. An infatuation with birth and perhaps secondarily punishment in those deemed heretical. Having sex out of wedlock? You should be punished. It’s sort of a creepy retelling of Eve and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, with every single teenage female they can find. They say don’t touch the fruit, and set up the environment in such a way to leave Eve (the girl) enticed.
What truly makes me angry, what makes me dizzy with rage when I hear folks pushing this idea is that they trivialize the impact of abortion on a person. An abortion is an intense procedure, it leaves the woman biologically confused and emotionally torn for a long time. In my own youth I had a friend who was sexually active (not with me, mind you), she ended up having an abortion and I watched it change her.
She still smiled but not nearly as much, occasionally we’d talk and she’d ask me how I think the child would be now. What would the kid be doing today if it was still alive, and how her life would be different. I had over my teen years counseled a lot of people for various things, abuse, trauma, accidents, relationship troubles, but of all of them hers was the one that hit me the most.
It wasn’t like dropping a DVD off at Blockbuster, she had been separated from a part of her. Life has been chugging along for hundreds of millions of years, the desire to keep our young alive and to protect them has been ingrained for more generations and for more types of animals than any person can fathom. To think that suddenly in the last 100 years we have somehow overcome this extreme parental coding and can merrily dispense of a fetus is moronic.
Completely and totally moronic.
This sort of event should not be trivialized, it is a serious moment in a persons life and it does impact them deeply. Acting like its no harder than paper or plastic immediately sequesters a person into being illegitimate, totally unworthy of being heard.
I would love to see a world where this is not something that happens. However I do think for the foreseeable future we will have people getting abortions. The macro level reason is simple, cognitive dissonance in the culture. You have 17 million kids already alive in the US who are either going hungry or are not provided enough food to be healthy. While it isn’t necessarily intuitive, starvation tends to lead to death, death is the antithesis of pro-life.
So first I would suggest these groups gather some legitimacy by fighting as hard to feed these children as they do to defund planned parenthood. Once that mind-blowing hypocrisy is over, admit that there is no real movement for pro-abortions and that Planned Parenthood is about reducing unplanned pregnancy to its lowest possible level but ultimately having options for when the event occurs. The hardest step would be accepting that the morning-after pill is not abortion nor murder. Unfortunately this recalls a leap of logic that directly conflicts with the interpretation some folks have made about their own faiths.
Even if that cannot be accepted, you then move onto what any person legitimately concerned with life would do. You would maximize the likelihood that all pregnancies are planned and wanted. Fund for the most extensive sexual education teens can get, provide them with contraceptives and make sure the proper use for that is taught as well. It is important to also get over the whole “teens are having sex” thing. Most people reading this probably were, and judging by the amount of people on my Facebook who are parents of multiple kids already I’d be willing to bet my high school had quite a bit of boot knocking going on. (Perhaps just getting all kids into Magic Cards would keep pregnancies down, apparently all the mating went over my head while I was untapping my lands).
Once you have established a strong network of education for sex and how to do it as safely as possible you move onto support for the pregnancies that do arise. Assuming the most likely scenario for a couple you have about 5 in 100 couples looking at potential pregnancy (assuming no pill but using spermicide+condoms). If we can assume people put a legitimate effort into feeding those previously mentioned 17 million people (who are alive already, I might add), we should have a safety net now for supporting the pregnant women.
Get them the proper nutrition they need, then discuss support plans or adoption with them. We can hope that with a good education system that this sort of event is no longer stigmatized, so she’ll be able to finish school if she’s still in school without being looked at as some sort of categorical failure.
Now ideally you want her to remain the parent of the child. Children of adoption do not have the best track record for life. Which is why I generally tend to assume that people who say “just give them up for adoption” are probably suffering from elective retardation.
But we are assuming that the massive pro-life movement has also put in to get the children already up for Adoption into loving families. This would mean that newly born children would be quickly nabbed up and raised in a loving family. It costs about 13,000 dollars a year to take care of a child on the west coast. So once you have the total number of sexually active people, you can then take 5% of that number and multiply it by 13,000 to get the cost for a year of raising those kids.
Now in theory if you provided teens with outlets, such as adult entertainment you could reduce the amount of people having sex. Likewise if you remove the mysticism behind it it is likely to become less pervasive. Again we are rocking the teen pregnancy championship not because we are more fertile but because we aggressively try to make people ignorant in the matter while simultaneously making it difficult and embarrassing for them to protect themselves.
Why in heaven’s name would we do that?
Oh.
You can look at it from another angle also. It is utterly moronic to think that making abortions illegal would stop them, look at the drug war, or prohibition, or absolutely anything else. Making things illegal doesn’t make them go away. It just makes them slightly harder to see, and out of sight certainly does not mean gone.
If you take someone in a state of panic and don’t give them safe outlets for their issue you will leave them in a position to not only endanger the life they are creating but also the one they currently possess.
A big part of the problem is adults never growing up. I don’t mean in the conventional sense, keeping your childhood curiosities and desire to learn is a good thing, but the fetishizing of fantasy into adulthood does a considerable amount of harm. When looking at an issue like Abortion it should be approached sensibly and with a very broad mind.
I don’t think anybody wants abortions happening, it isn’t something that causes people to high five and breakdance to dubstep to. But if someone truly wanted to protect life, they would respect it at all stages. Part of respecting life is letting people make informed decisions. The keyword is informed. So the choice becomes somewhat binary, which is more important, forcing a view upon others or respecting their life?
Shame I just do these as a one off…I bet I could restructure these posts much nicer on a second or third draft.
Such is the nature of daily posts!
22 in a (300) Million
02 days ago
by Rico Penguin
in General
I was originally going to talk about intelligence versus wisdom. I think I’ll save those for later just because of how alarming I found this piece of data.
SupePACS are a recent phenomenon that came about with the Citizens United Supreme Court Ruling. One of those rules that has, for cynics unsurprisingly, lead to the obvious conclusion. The numbers are out and about 150 million dollars was raised. A large chunk of this money has been used aggressively to shape the opinions of the general public in (thus far) 4 states.
What really caught my attention was something said by Colbert on the topic. That of this money raised almost half of it was raised by 22 Individual People or Businesses. With 300 Million people in the united states we find a mere 22 voicing as much an opinion as the other 299,999,978 of them. This is the ultimate direction that every report I ever read said citizens united would take us and it has now become the case.
A ridiculously small group of extremely wealthy people are manipulating the passing of information in order to create a political climate where they are most likely to be in control. It’s a cyclical process that just leads to more corruption. This ties in beautifully with all this remarkably synchronous legislation aimed at regulating the internet. The only thing legitimately standing between these organizations and complete information control is the internet. Destroy that nuisance and you are left with a lovely landscape for manipulation.
What bothers me about it is how cliché this all is. Seriously what on earth is going on? Since when did the reality become far more than the conspiracies folks banter on about? How exactly has this data not resulted in a panic attack across the country?
It is impossibly easy to satire this kind of data. How ridiculous everything has become in the last 12 years. It’s like one jackass sends a dozen other fools into a couple of buildings and the resulting event renders an entire country invalid.
This is just silly and this kind of news is becoming way too common. I might need to restrict myself to only talking about it twice a week. SuperPACS have broken the election system, amounts of money are getting spent that no average citizen could hope to contend with. You’d have to have a pretty steep investment from every single US Voter to keep up with just a few dozen people and that’s only if they don’t step up themselves.
Corporations are immortal beasts that need not breath, eat, sleep, and cannot bleed. They are relentlessly investing to destroy the educational system, in other words…they are coming for your brains.
Perception of Time
03 days ago
by Rico Penguin
in General
It’s remarkable how pliable time perception is. Today was the first day in quite a long time that I’ve gotten to work in a quiet environment. There was a period of two hours where nobody was there besides Liz, which meant the vast majority of the time was silent blissful relaxation.
I finished more work in the course of two hours than I tend to manage over half a workday. I can barely recall what order I did things in, I just knew by the time hit 10 AM I had a completed inbox, and all my planned tasks for the day completed.
It reminded me of casinos, no clocks, no windows, just you and your activity. Time flies and before you know it you are drained of every last cent you brought with you. It didn’t even seem obscure to me, I effectively teleported into the future and it was not only acceptable but a joyous occasion.
Even now while I’m trying to write this I’m suffering from the reverse issue. Time is crawling. In part it is because I’m trying to write it while watching my shows. I suspect it is that extra distraction that is making it more obvious that I’m working on something.
How much of our life is lost in a the flash of an uncontrollable daze.
An interesting thought, just don’t get stuck on it too long, might wake up the next day alarmed and confused. Which for my friends who drink will not be far off from the norm.
Disappointing Graduates
04 days ago
by Rico Penguin
in General
When I was graduating from college, and indeed when Liz was Graduating, there was something that I noticed that was highly disappointing. Roughly half one time, and about two thirds the other of these graduating classes were business majors.
I thought to myself at the time “If everyone going to college is a business major why are we having economic troubles in the US?” I thought, naively, that maybe this was a good sign that we would see a bunch of bright new faces in the business field. That the future of business would be one of the new world, young people acting human.
But then the truth becomes revealed over the years. People aren’t entering the business field because they want to make the world better, this field is so popular because of the ridiculous amount of money it makes them. Bain Capital is a fantastic example, but you can look just about anywhere. Corporations, Wall Street, The Private Sector, these are all things that live a creepy double life.
It’s like following a set of guidelines that says “Kill anyone who thinks your juice is not the greatest juice.” and saying that these guidelines are petitions for peace and love and harmony with all juices. The reality us much bleaker, business does not harmonize with humanity. To maximize profits you must minimalize humanity. Apple knows this, as do many other companies. Sweat shops, terrible work conditions, borderline slave trades. Environmental Pollution and Tax Evasion. All these things are at the center of creating the biggest return.
In business the only concern is the return.
It is that singular view that causes me to feel my stomach curl when I look back on those graduating classes. Where were the scientists? The teachers? The engineers. These groups were tiny. A few rows. The art majors? Even fewer. These are the things that make us human, that actually better our world, and they are all in the stark minority.
The capitalist system is not unlike a video game. It is designed by people who think it is fool proof. But anyone who has ever gamed can tell you that everything has its bugs. Where a gamer might have gone to the gameshark people in the past to get infinite lives in Goldeneye, we in the business world see people going to firms.
They are gaming the system because it is so amazingly easy to game. The trick is just having the resources to game it. Unfortunately this usually means money. Any equation that isn’t linear tends to have a tipping point. Sort of an asymptote for loss, you get to the point where it is not quite 0 but close enough to be negligible.
The tax code is similar, tax rates go up and up until they cap out at a point. After that its all profits, your loss in taxes is not relative to your total earnings anymore. Then you start throwing in the cheat codes, off shore bank accounts, donations to your own businesses, or other questionably legal tactics and you lower it further. Before you know it you have people who make 100,000 times more than you paying as much or less in taxes by %.
For the passive observer it seems fair. “Wow he paid out 250,000 dollars in taxes.” But you take a minute and realize that this person, or company, makes that much over the course of 5 days or less. Imagine if you were only taxed for 5 days worth of income across the entire year?
I noted earlier that part of the lost humanity is tax evasion. It sounds silly and misplaced but one must realize where these taxes (are supposed) to go. Better roads, better housing, better infrastructure in general, paying for parks, for environmental protections, for education, for healthcare. Taxes are the means by which the entirety helps support itself. Each person becomes connected by way of taxes to every other person.
We all donate to the same pool with the end goal being that we all benefit. I would be truly shocked if the failures in our tax system, the misappropriation of the taxes, and our own disgust at taxes was not caused in majority by business majors or businesses.
I am not saying that you must be a terrible person to be a business major. But it does seem like you can’t maximize profits in the ultimate sense without losing what it means to be human. When you can destroy the life of another person and happily drink wine that same night over a fantastic meal, that takes a truly glorious kind of evil.
I was never really scared by the over the top villains in my youth. It was the ones that believed what they did was the right thing, those ones worried me the most. The Ozymandiases of the world. People that do truly terrible things under the psychotic belief that they are bettering the world.
Killing tens or hundreds of thousands of people to avenge a thousand. Herding and executing a group of people. Forcing people to leave their home and travel for thousands of miles in terrible conditions only to live on a terrible piece of land. Fire bombing a quarter of a million civilians. Crushing people financially and saying “It’s just business.” Or selling food or medicine that you know is dangerous. Rushing your animals to the slaughter house because their living conditions are so poor that they’d bleed out if you waited any longer (and yes all of these things have or do still happen).
These people by and large are smiling, they felt or feel noble, they sleep well and many (if not all) took home nice paychecks to make this all happen.
It’s all about the bottom line. So truly disappointing.
Stubborn Change
05 days ago
by Rico Penguin
in General
There is a phenomenon is psychology, perhaps that’s too strong of a word, there is a part of our psychology that adapts as we grow older. The brain starts specializing all the tasks that it does throughout the day and will shave off the unnecessary information. We are left over time with a machine perfectly made for our mundane routine but not very efficient at accepting new data or changes to the paradigm.
This leads to conservatism, humans generally become more conservative as they become older. You can get around this by being aware of the specialization of your brain and training it, thinking outside of the box often and about different things will at least slow the rate of decay. I do consider it a matter of decay, perhaps hyperbolic, but the desire to keep things exactly as they are is something that should be looked upon as a disability, a dysfunction,, something altogether negative.
Change for the sake of change is not naturally good, but no good thing could not be improved in some fashion. Water itself is effectively perfect for our body, but generating systems to generate tons of it as cleanly and as safely as possible is something we should be striving for. Capitalism is nice but we should be constantly looking for new systems to better reflect our modern world.
The universe is endlessly changing, each moment is the connector of the last frame of time to the next. There is no permanent state, outside of the likely end of the universe, and that’s so long from now that I would consider it a non issue.
I say most of this because of the nature of business, and of shareholders, the desire to never take chances or to evolve. Video games, automobiles, television,, marketing, teaching, these things all have areas where they are being poked at by a minority of people but the majority find themselves lost to stagnation. Complacent in standing still amidst a rushing river of change.
In a way it is pure ignorance, apathy is really just ignorance of a better reality, accepting what we have as…well…”acceptable.”
My own job does not allow us to work routinely from home. Why? Is it because of any concerns of trust, efficiency, or costs? Probably, in their eyes, what I was told was the reason (by the President of the company) was “We just do things as we always have. It’s tradition.”
Really? Our job is entirely digital, there is no benefit to us being in office. The only thing that the VP and President do better in person is scolding because English is not their strong suite. But for that matter if the company is turning profits and our weak point is development then what is the issue? We obviously can do our job, and we would be much more comfortable doing it in an environment that isn’t so sterile and claustrophobic. None of the windows open at this business.
It’s a shame, to see such talent wasted on conservative thinking. We have smart people, but I don’t see us keeping them. Quite a few have left since I’ve joined, and I suspect the ones I see now will be gone with time. Because ours is not a business of progress, not a business of change, its about tradition.
Tradition is nice, in the quant setting of a home, dressing up in ridiculous sweaters and singing terrible songs around a tree we mounted in the living room. Watching explosives fired into the sky just off shore. These things are cute, they are our nostalgic ties to some past we wish existed.
But they have no place in public, I don’t mean visually, I love old buildings or clothing as much as anyone. But in our policies, in how we conduct ourselves for the future. Precedence is lazy, it is lazy in law, and it is lazy in life.
Because when we subscribe to precedence we subscribe to stagnation. Entropy doesn’t stop for us, so if we remain neutral then the net change is always negative.
It’s tragic, I find it utterly pathetic, truly, and I do hope that I will live long enough to see a country of people wise enough to overcome it. Sweden looks promising.
Sherlock Holmes–BBC
06 days ago
by Rico Penguin
in General
Since I have more to watch I suppose I’ll keep this short. If you haven’t seen the new BBC Sherlock Holmes you should. It’s 2 seasons ,6 episodes, and 1.5 hours a piece. It’s, quite easily, some of the best television to be made in my lifetime.
I just finished the first episode of Season 2 and it was every bit as good as the first three, which I thought was going to be an impossible task.
So that’s it, tomorrow I have maintenance. This week will be very busy. I’ll try to check into current events and discuss some science or politics of some nature.
To the tens of people visiting each day, thanks.
Minecraft – Housing and Exploring
01 week ago
by Rico Penguin
in General
I’ve started using Storybook in Earnest and realized something that I need to do. I’m going to draw the blueprint for every house or location used in the story. I need more visuals to help me with my writing. When I was younger I wrote some fairly silly stories for the Ragnarok Online Universe (well my story with the lore of Ragnarok) and I found that seeing the locations made it so much easier to keep up with continuity.
Plus I like drawing, I’m absolutely terrible at it but it is something I really enjoy. If I get the inspiration I might look into a cheapish tablet and start drawing straight onto the computer. The only danger there is my evil kittens trying to march across the tablet as I draw. The delight they’d get from the lines moving in tow with their paws would probably be real fun for them though.
On that train of thought, someone should make a DDR pad for kittens. You place it in front of the television and as they step on the buttons different things happen on screen. I know mine love to step on the keyboard keys and watch text fly across the screen.
What else…well obviously Mitt Romney has become the poster child for unwarranted wealth in the united states. A man who made millions upon millions of dollars by firing people, that’s remarkably evil. He stands as the purest essence of capitalism. This man has made nothing and in doing so makes as much in 12 hours as I make in a year (probably even faster now). It’s remarkable, I’ll admit that at some level I’m disgusted in his wealth. I don’t know what I’d do with that kind of money, I do know that sitting on it would drive me utterly insane.
Tens of millions? Good lord, once you have a house and a couple cars what else is there to buy? You could go on a cruise once a year for the rest of your life in the nicest suite they have without putting a dent in it. I could buy a hundred copies of every magic card every printed and not see a dent in my bank account.
I could pay people to play magic for me. But they’d have to look really intense or they didn’t get their paycheck.
Seriously, at what point does anyone just look at their bank total and say “Alright. I’ve beaten the game, what else to do?” Because I know when I play city builders it is about the time I have so much wealth I could renovate the entire map without flinching that I completely lose interest.
Is it even fun anymore? He’s effectively got the money cheat on spam and just resting. Worse he has kept much of his wealth because of painfully low taxes that his own firm (alongside other extremely wealthy firms) viciously lobby to protect. Immense balls, that’s what it takes to say “I only pay what I’m told I owe.” without mentioning that his own fierce fighting is what has kept him paying basically what I do.
Which is extra upsetting when you realize that he makes almost double what I do in a year, in a day. Not much of a surprise that the US is having funding problems when that kind of money is being removed from the market without it getting pumped back in (unless we count campaigning).
Plus its upsetting because he’s one of two major choices in the Republican party at this time. You have a twice cheating, thrice married, family values candidate and a tax manipulating multi millionaire who earned his fortune crushing the lives of thousands of people.
I’m not huge on Obama, while I don’t feel Presidents have an immense amount of power I do think he could have made a pretty big stand in government had he just been serious about it. But look at that competition? (Again Ron Paul is an Independent who runs under the Republican Banner, Democrats have a few Independents who run with them). These are terrible human beings, legitimately terrible people, few things do I dislike more than habitual hypocrites. We all act against our words from time to time, mostly because we are all evolving.
But when every second sentence out of your mouth is blatant hypocrisy it becomes overwhelming. These men aren’t fit to run an Applebee’s, much less a nation.
This is beautiful, in terms of timing. We are witnessing some of the worst examples of humanity, ignorance, greed, hypocrisy, and we are seeing them at their purest essences. This is all happening at a time when the government is trying hard here and abroad to cripple the only possible avenue for escaping the cycle (the internet).
The timing could not be anymore perfect, the candidates couldn’t be anymore perfect, if this were a book I’d call it cliché and unbelievable.
Now you might be saying to yourself, I thought the title of this was about Minecraft? You’d be correct and the title is about Minecraft. It just so happens that when I stepped into lava in the game and watched all my progress consumed in front of me that it immediately reminded me about Romney. When lava reminds you of somebody it is probably time to banter about it for a bit.
Here are the images I’ve got for today, unfortunately the snow did not let up through most of the images.
My little house on the frozen lake.
Smelting, Crafting, and Cooking. That’s a cauldron beneath the torch.
My rooftop farm, provides my guy with most of his nutrition. Oddly you can find quite a few chickens living in the forests around my house.
The top floor, Bed, and storage for my food, crafts, and other non mining materials.
The view from outside the bedroom floor. Not too shabby. Off on the left is some lava, you don’t want to play around there more than you need to. Skeletons have a tendency of ambushing you and knocking you into it.
So now that you made the journey through a long tired rant, some story news, and minecraft shots you are still reading? Probably not, but for the few of you that have made the great journey and are looking for something extra. But what?
I’m thinking a magic card. But lets step it up for today only. I’m going to show you one of my favorite current magic setups. I should put out the list for this sometime for folks who want to build it. This is the ideal hand, but there are dozens of combinations that work just as well. The only essential piece is 1 of the 7-8 mana generating elves, some elves, and Genesis wave. Here is my personal favorite hand. I’m going to use Magic Workstation to run how it goes.
Turn 1:
Turn 2:
Draw Elvish Harbinger. Tap Forest + Arbor Elf for GG.
Turn 3:
Draw Spawnsire of Ulamog (Darn). Tap Forest + Arbor Elf for GG.
Lightning Greaves on Priest of Titania.
Turn 4 (I’m playing against Slivers if you were curious):
Draw ambush Commander. Tap Arbor Elf, Forest, and Priest of Titania for GGGG.
1 G floating. Attach Greaves to Archdruid and tap for GGG+G.
Her ability is used to put a Elvish Visionary on top.
Move Greaves to Visionary. Tap her for G+G (Floating 1).
Move Greaves to Eladamri, Lord of Leaves. He now has shroud, all other elves have shroud. At this point unless they have a mass removal you are one turn away from extreme pain.
Turn 5:
On my opponents turn they just hit me for 15 (and once before for 3), I’m now at 2 life. I lost Eladamri blocking their Sliver Legion. But this turn I draw the Visionary and play her. I drew a wirewood lodge. Which, with the loss of Eladamri is some beautiful luck!
I had to tap my Arbor elf, and my forest to play the Visionary. It was the draw from putting the Visionary into play that netted me my 2nd land (terrible land draw this game).
So now I’m going to tap the Priest of Titania for 5, Tap the Archdruid for 5, take 1 from the 10 in my pool to use the lodge to untap the druid for another 5. I’m now at 14. I’ll then Genesis Wave for X=11. (This is less than ideal, I prefer to generate 15 Mana so I can Genesis wave for X=10 and have 3 left over to pay for a Mana Leak).
I now draw the top 11 cards of my deck and put them into play if their casting cost is 11 or less. I drew a Nissa Revane, 2 Nissa’s Chosen, 1 Visionary, Drew an Extra Forest, Put 4 forests into play, 1 wirewood lodge, 1 Heedless One, and 1 Elvish Harbinger.
I use Nissa Revanes +1 to give me 2 life for every Elf in Play. I’m now at 24 Life. I play the Ambush commander from my hand. With the cards in play I can generate 27 mana (3 shy of my goal) but since I have a heedless one out I’ll just use it on her. She’s currently a 13/13 with Trample. My enemy has 1 Darkheart Sliver and 4 tapped slivers. This means they can generate 15 life. I’m going to take that 27 mana and summon the Spawnsire of Ulamog.
I’ll then take the remaining 17 and generate 8 Eldrazi Spawn with him (it?). I then equip the greaves to my Heedless One and swing for 13. My enemy takes it bringing them down to 4. I move the greaves over to the Spawnsire just to be safe.
Turn 6:
I tried to start my infinite draw chain on the slivers but ended up just getting a bunch of slivers that neither gave me haste nor did I draw an Intruder Alarm. So sadly my last chance for recovering with Slivers is over.
On Turn 6 I generate 20 mana (easily) and use the second ability of Spawnsire. Normally you want to do this right after the Genesis wave on the same turn Spawnsire comes into play. With it I summon the following 3 cards from my sideboard.
It That Betrays lands first, then All is Dust is cast causing all colored permanents (everything but lands and my Lightning Greaves at this time) are Sacrificed, all the slivers on my opponents side join my side alongside my Eldrazi. Emrakul then drops and gives me an Extra Turn. On this turn I swing with Emrakul wearing the Greaves for 15. My opponent Sacrifices his 4 lands leaving him with nothing in play and no life remaining.
I like this deck because the previous turns, even worst case scenario (1 land for 5 turns) turned out pretty good against slivers. Admittedly it came down to luck, had I drawn hearth sliver the match would have ended on Turn 5 for Slivers.
What makes it extra cool is we just relived the story. Nissa unleashed the Eldrazi and all was sundered in their wake. The only survivors were those that gave themselves body and soul to the Eldrazi lords.
This is not a deck I can really play in multiplayer 
. Because everyone starts eying me the second I put down so much as an Arbor Elf.
Thanks for your time…have an ice night. I’m off to read or draw for a few minutes then bed.
1 Cent Soda
01 week ago
by Rico Penguin
in General
Today we decided to venture out into the world, it’s a bit difficult to do after a long week of work. Our ventures took us to the local Target, a 2 story monstrosity (to be fair its only 1 floor, the parking garage is the other floor). We ordered some smoothies from Starbucks (something I would suggest you don’t do for now), and purchased a few “food items” from the market there. I use quotations because I’m quite sure my insides are debating whether or not what I ate qualified as actual food.
What I found most remarkable was the Soda pitch of the employee. “The cost without the Soda is 3.67, with the Soda it is 3.68.” Really? An 8-9 inch tall Soda cup is 1 cent more? I realize we are dealing with margins and packaged deals but I found this a bit remarkable.
Imagine if you went into a place and they said “Would you like an apple with that?” You momentarily protest because you can’t stand fruit (such an odd person the hypothetical you is) and they say “It’s only a penny more!” Oh my, an apple for a penny? Indeed I will have it.
I filled the cup with water, it helped wash down the incredibly rich Smoothie from Starbucks. Bless their hearts for trying but they need to get the mix down better for sure. It wasn’t bad Per se, but it was incredibly underwhelming. For the 4 dollar mark I would much prefer an all fruit drink, this tasted like an odd concoction of many things with a bit of fruit thrown in at the end.
Again, they are new to the field, so I’m going to give them some time to try and figure out how to make a smoothie. Perhaps their parents never owned a blender and they are lost in the venture.
I’m currently diving into a game known as Darksiders, much like the smoothie it isn’t bad, but the designers certainly could learn a thing or two about streamlining. Backtracking for no better reason than “Well its that way” is something that I thought died a console generation ago. A short cutscene of my guy walking back to the main room would have been far better, similarly when you complete the minigames it sprinkles throughout it would be nice if it would just cut to your guy approaching the beginning of the room again.
I’d show you some screenshots but I can’t for the life of me figure out where the game was saving them. The game is a bit old now and indeed a sequel is hitting this year, I’m not sure if I’ll buy it. I got this for 7.50 on Steam and it certainly hits that mark. The 60 dollar (or as I call it “crazy price point”) ticket is a bit too much for entry.
It’s a lovely effort and I think the team that made it is talented, but it has a few too many problems to justify the original asking price. On a related note I watched the “Most Anticipated” list of games for 2012 and it cleared up something for me.
I am easily going to finish my book this year.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a less exciting lineup of games. Diablo III maybe but even that is probably going to smell of the new Activision branch. With each passing year I wish Blizzard would have not joined up with Activision, but perhaps its just me, I am getting older after all.
So tomorrow I’ll be playing around with story ideas. I’ve actually been building a mental locker of tweaks for the story. The best part of having it done now is that I can add in some very nice foreshadowing and 
other hints to the end as well as connect dots better. The original write through was something of a mad dash for the end. I was building the skeleton for a new beast and had not the best direction on where to put organs, with it now done I can move things around before I breath life into it.
This post came in mighty late today. I’m playing around with Goblins now for deck building, my current deck is missing something. I’ve finished the revamp of Monoblack Zombies, Slivers is in the mail, as is Infection, and an absolutely delightful Discard Deck.
Time flies when you are building, it’s a good feeling and actually gives me time to think more about the story. I truly hope I can finish this year with a printed copy in my lap, even if its personally published.
Brain Fatigue
01 week ago
by Rico Penguin
in General
Brains are an unusual thing, even now I’m talking about my brain with my brain. More accurately my brain is talking about itself but using a pseudonym. Or would it be talking in the third person? Similar to “Chad thinks we should go to the mall. Chad really likes what Chad has to say.” “Alright…Chad.”
Well regardless this odd cyclical system of self referential commentary is getting us nowhere! I want you to know that I am so incredibly tired right now. This exhaustion leads to a series of wonderful things. The first being that I am not fully aware of just how slow I am completing tasks or just how well I am completing them. A tired person does not (perhaps cannot) accurately tell how tired they are, similar to a person who is drinking trying to figure out how drunk they are.
The answer is always given as N, but the answer is always N+1 or worse. It gets better because this doesn’t just stretch into my ability to work heavy machinery, juggle chainsaws, or hold a kitten it also goes into just how much sense the things I say make. My ability to rationalize and contemplate topics is completely hindered. Right now I presume I’m saying profound things but I bet by tomorrow morning this will look like the drunken ramblings of the neighborhood urchin.
This ended up giving me a mighty big problem. What was I going to talk about today when my brain has gone full retard? If Minecraft is too brain intensive, what hope do I have to finish a post on here.
Well I realized then that talking about how the brain acts when it is tired as the best option! Attack the problem at its source!
Charge!
![I574B[1]](http://theios.net/content//2012/01/I574B1.png "I574B[1]")
If you are ever trying to decide if you should study all night or wake up early and study then the answer should always be to sleep and study in the morning. All that studying you do overnight is basically wasted time. Much of the progress you’ll make on that test in the morning will be from the studying or class time of the weeks prior, and not that brain stoned stupor of an all night study marathon.
It’s doubly bad if you do it, you waste all that time reading a book but now when you take the test you will be totally hammered by fatigue. The circles will start to warble, you’ll start daydreaming, questions will become a sea of meaningless characters smacked together in an utterly random fashion.
If you are tired enough to wobble, don’t drive. An exhausted person is as dangerous as a drunk person or a person texting while driving. All three of these things are a fantastic recipe for vehicular manslaughter.
I’ve got this.
![lz3OS[1]](http://theios.net/content//2012/01/lz3OS1.jpg "lz3OS[1]")
Brains are pretty much assholes, that’s something that nobody should ever forget. Your brain will never tell you (it?) when there is a major cognitive failure, and for a very good reason: “It doesn’t know what it doesn’t know”. When your computer has registry errors that wipe the records of a disk drive from the system it doesn’t know that they are gone, it doesn’t even know they existed to be gone.
When your brain is in full blown stupid it has no idea it is. Just like a totally inebriated person tends to think they are running on all cylinders. How better to explain this…given my own mental disability at the moment. The brain can’t register that there are problems in the system if the system itself is broken. Yeah…that’s it. I like that.
You know what is crazy? Just a random closing thought, with the passing of ACTA this sort of post could cause this whole website to get taken down. The amount of free time that would open up to me would allow me to play a video game for an extra hour a day.
Oh…my…god.
They passed ACTA so I’d start buying more games.
Jokes on them. Steam already sold me all the games. At this point if the entire spectrum of “free” content out there was nuked from orbit I’d not have a single extra game I’d want to buy. When did this happen? I remember the days when I was clamoring for video games. Now I don’t even look up previews for upcoming titles.
It’s not that all games have turned into complete piles of crap (not all of them have) but I already own the ones that haven’t…unfortunately I own some that have as well.
But wait! Digression alert! Brain cannot handle original train of thought. Time to pack up this stuff and ship it out. Which I’m serious about, I have some Amazon returns I really need to get out tomorrow.