Spelunking the Universe
Posts tagged life
Pets in the Home
1 month ago
by Rico Penguin
in General
It’s remarkable how much something I had been avoiding for so long has improved my life. As a young boy I had a myriad of pets from all sorts of animal kingdoms. I had a cat for a short while, two dogs, ton of fish, a few birds, Gerbils, and even some spiders and beetles.
In general terms I felt that the saddest of the pets were the birds, taking an animal that should be out flying the skies and dropping it in an EXTREMELY small cage. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a bird cage that didn’t look far too small. Just the size of the cage compared to the animal itself was unreal. If there is a hell I imagine it is being a bird inside of a bird cage for your entire life.
It is a terrible practice and I can’t recommend it to anyone anywhere, I’m a bit mortified when I see birds in cages. At least the pet store cages are kind of big. Next saddest tended to be the fish for similar reasons. A tiny meta habitat inside of the human habitat was very weird for me, same could be said about the gerbils. It was the cats and dogs that made sense. I spend the vast majority of my time indoors and so if I feel the area is big enough to make me happy I figure an animal many times smaller than me should be quite pleased.
Likewise they have no predators to deal with, an endless supply of toys to play with, and some suckers to pet them and cuddle them all the time.
During my childhood there were deaths, many events that made me astoundingly sad. When I was living alone and it was just me and my last dog it was something that haunted me. If I could go back in time it is a period of my life I would relive differently and I generally try to not think about it very much. But there is a long period of time before the downward swing of death that is cherished, years of fun moments, (admittedly one sided) conversations, and compassion.
Even if much of the interaction is anthropomorphized, I don’t mind, it is an illusion I’m willing to accept. These are tangible beings that have so many wonderful signs of their emotional state, and to see them rest soundly is a wonderful feeling.
It was those late tragedies that caused me to shun the idea of a new pet. But ironically it appears that these mistakes in my young life are why I try so hard with our new kittens. We did tons of research to make sure they only eat the best cat food possible, a list of ingredients that are likely to show up in a cat’s actual diet. I’ve tried my best to find the little that is least likely to have chemicals but also not be a dust cloud of death and mayhem.
Their toys are all highly rated and safe, nice beds, the best cat tower we could find (that they use often), and they are using vet recommended anti-flea medication alongside getting all their shots and their routine checkups. These two kittens were even fostered together so we adopted them both to make sure they weren’t separated.
Coming home to them is something otherworldly and satisfying. You spend an entire day dealing with the mundane, routine cycles of the same processes that lead to the same results in an endless wheel of stagnation and only simulated progression. In the business world the only people seeing and true improvement are at the top of the tower, everyone else is just resetting the clock every 28-31 days.
But with this I have friends, sort of like little furry children. They get into mischief, play, grow, learn, and I see wonderful advancement. They have become a calendar of sorts, progression of joy and ever greatening brightness. There have been a few scary moments (Artemis got quite sick as a baby) but otherwise it has been unending cuteness and compassion (which is unusual for cats, I’m guessing Artemis will grow out of it but I think Venus might be a lap cat for life).
Someday if I find myself with a big house and a nice yard I just might get a dog. I don’t know however, having never had a cat for long (we gave ours away quite fast, I guess scooping poop was too intense) so for me this is something new, these cats are not competing in a spot of me that is held by another. They also don’t threaten to remind me of my own weakness at a separate point in my life.
I guess that’s all for today. I should close by mentioning my great disappointment in a lamp I bought, it doesn’t work. So I might not have a lamp for this weekend (I really need some light in this place, California doesn’t believe in putting lights on the ceilings of their living rooms, totally archaic state).
2012–Reflecting on the Past
1 month ago
by Rico Penguin
in General
I am listening to the song “First of the Year (Equinox)” by Skrillex, I find that it is highly appropriate seeing as we are now at such a point in time. Not for much longer, it is already 10:31 PM on the 3rd of my 4 day weekend. Our company has about 12 extra days off a year and I find myself too often wasting each and every last one just trying to unwind from the never ending mind screw that is my job.
It’s been an entire year since one of my most active blog attempts, the Project 52, surprisingly I only updated 18 times the entire last year. That really does reflect my state of being mentally. I’m just kind of breezing by and letting the cards fall where they will.
I don’t think that’s what I want to do though, I’m going to try and refresh my brain again this year. Start reading again, writing constantly, and see if I can revitalize myself. Get myself out of this job induced rut and start being proud of myself again. It’s important to have goals and to achieve them, life only has as much meaning as we wish it to and one can very easily find themselves at 50 looking back on decades of wasted opportunities.
So what will be my goals for this year? For one I will finish the Operation 52. This will require a bit of backtracking, the plugin I had used for the excel presentation went out of date and now I find myself with no backups. I also don’t have the original excels. (Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites just started, arguably one of the best things to happen to my ears in the last year) Luckily WordPress itself has not failed me and I can go back and scuttle the information from old posts. Once I know how many books I’ve read I’ll start completing the operation and after that I will start reading at least 1 book a month.
Only one? Well I won’t limit myself but that will be my minimum goal. I’m keeping it small in hopes that I will do more out of desire than necessity. Likewise I know I’ll be working against the soul sucking beast of my work life.
If you get a job and they tell you the hours are 10-7, be sure that you’ll love your job. It will take up the entire cognizant period of your day and by the time you get home you’ll be too tired physically and mentally to do anything of value. Weekends will, from experience, be about recovering just enough to make it another week. Before you know it you’ll be a year down the road and wondering what kind of out of work accomplishments you’ve made.
That paragraph should probably be up higher, but you’ve got places to be so we’ll just keep on moving. Plus I’ve only got another hour before it is tomorrow and this post is too late.
I’m going to try and write one post every single day this year. I know I won’t accomplish that, mostly because there will be a maintenance night that totally screws me. But we’ll see how close I come to that and make some sort of slick excel sheet at the end of this year.
From what I hear it is good that I’m going to write lots this year as it just might be the last year we ever have. I know there have been a good dozen of those since I was born, popular ones, but this one seems like a keeper. Why? Well because its not 2013 yet, once it is I guess we’ll all point and laugh at everyone who sold all their stuff.
So that’s it I suppose. It’s the first day of a new year, the last year of our lives that will have a uniform date “12/12/12”. I wonder how many games are going to be released that day? Lets guess a dozen.
Thanks to everyone who visited this year (of which there were a surprising amount), the website saw visitors from every major continent with the exception of Antarctica. We’ll see if I can pump out enough philosophy and other mental content to make this another global year. I’ve actually got an idea for tomorrows post already, inspired by a recent podcast featuring Janeane Garofalo (a name that I utterly butchered before Google saved me).
See you, in an awkward telephone game fashion, tomorrow.
(You can safely assume you’ll see pictures of cute cats this year)
The Nature of Stress
3 months ago
by Rico Penguin
in General
So I haven’t updated in a while. Some of you know why, others do not, but I have a potentially fascinating tale. It involves regurgitation so I suppose if you have vivid visualizations of what you read you might want to skip this post.
About two weeks ago I started getting nauseous. It started off simple enough, felt a bit like I had eaten too much. Everything I had had prior to this event had also been eaten by my wife and so I thought that food poisoning was unlikely. Each day it got a little worse until about day 3 when I found myself uncontrollably vomiting in the morning. First the food, then a bit of bile, and eventually it was just dry heaving.
As a kid I thought that nothing was worse than vomiting, the build up is terrible and the final event tended to be highly acidic (thanks to my childhood love of Soda and other sugary treats). But I have since been proven wrong, day after day I started the morning with intense dry heaves. My stomach would tense to the point where I thought I was going to tear something internally, it was the strongest and least pleasant torsion of my innards I’ve ever experienced. This is coming from someone who nearly snapped their neck once.
Day after day passed and I realized something, I had greatly passed the “after 48 hours consult your doctor” warning on the Pepto Bismal. I tried to get an actual doctor, but living in America you don’t have the ease of any other civilized country. I had to find one that would accept my insurance or I was going to get rammed so hard in the ass with charges that I’d be leaving the hospital potentially better physically but very unhappy fiscally.
Conversely what good is money if you are dead. With that in mind I found a local urgent care and got checked. They ran a battery of tests, I was stethoscope, given a very bitter “lemonade” drink, breathed into two separate bags that they tested, and had a couple vials of blood taken. The first doctor I had was new and my symptoms stumped her, they didn’t match anything but food poisoning which was unlikely.
The next doctor I met was an older man, probably 6’4’’ or so. He was one of those men you assume was a farmer in their early life, big hands and a very Heston-like demeanor. He sat back and asked me if I had ever had an incident of this kind of nausea before. I told him yes, near the end of my tenure in college. He was swishing a mystery liquid in a Styrofoam cup. With a grin he took one of those wooden sticks they place on your tongue and stirred it further.
“Did you drink in college?” He asked. I said no, his eyebrows lifted and he said surprised “Not even beer?” Now these questions were coming after I couldn’t even tell him what year I was in college, a week of minimal food intake had left me exhausted and dreary. It may have come across to him as drunk or signs of alcoholism.
He looked back and the drink and shrugged. “Well basically you are going to want to chug this, because if you don’t it is going to completely paralyze your mouth.” He handed me the drink and I did my best to chug it (which I now know I’m good at). He told me after “This will paralyze your stomach, if I’m right you have an ulcer. Basically your stomach is trying to scratch and itch and in doing so it is just making it worse, so we need to stop the scratch and then confirm the cause of the itch.”
After drinking my stomach was utterly numb, I couldn’t feel it at all. I realize that 99% of the day I cannot feel my stomach, but this was different, it was like there was negative space exactly where it should be. I also found myself belching like there was no tomorrow.
I later told him I was belching when he came back in (about 10 minutes later) and he told me that further supported his theory.
I was told I’d be contacted within 48 hours by the first doctor, as I was her patient it was her job to call me. She did call me, 8 days later. During this time I slowly got better, but what would come back from them was interesting.
The data didn’t support an ulcer, but they told me to get a family doctor and get further checkups. I also did not have a virus, nor any other disease. My kidneys and liver were functioning properly. What she did say was that it could have been stress.
I find myself in an odd place with that news. That the stress in my life, at 25, could put me in such a bind that I spend 7 days vomiting and barely able to recall past life events. Stress is a powerful thing, an alarming thing, I had at at least two points thought I might be dying. It is when you gather knowledge like this that you realize you should rethink your life and perhaps your career.
Every second in my personal life is quite pleasant, I have no real desire to change it greatly (minus a larger source of income). But if you are someone living a highly stressful life I would urge you to reconsider your path, had I not gone to a doctor by the time I did I could be much worse off and I suspect that this sort of thing does hell to your life expectancy.
As a final thought I am seriously considering taking up meditation. Though I think my writing serves as that for now. Writing something I lost for almost two weeks and will finally return to…or I suppose by posting this have already returned to.
Additionally Batman: Arkham City is a beautiful game that I’ve almost played through completely twice (working on Riddler as well). I’ll write a better review later but if you have any interest in Batman or quality game design this is a good title to catch.
The Vacation–Part 2: PAX is Dead
5 months ago
by Rico Penguin
in General
I am not an entirely distant individual, there is still part of me that relays alongside the rest of humanity. It is this part of me that knows full well that PAX will survive for many years to come and perhaps decades. However the thing that PAX once was is no longer.
When I first started going to PAX it was still young, it hadn’t moved into Seattle and it was actually somewhat empty. The companies there were excited to see you, they had prizes for visiting and if you so wished you could even win more stuff by trying out their new games. It was a land of welcome and of dreams.
Once being here was more exciting than Disneyworld.
Over the years I have watched PAX gain weight, it has grown obese with popularity and the thing that it once was has slowly been dragged to a halt. The arteries of the venue that once ran smooth are now clogged to the point of bursting and the creature shows no signs of regressing. It will continue to grow until it finally ruptures, similar to E3. PAX has transformed from what felt like a collection of happy gamers and their craft into a large commercial.
I have a closet full of clothing and had, until recently, bags upon bags of memorabilia. I would enter into PAX and know that I wouldn’t be put through hoops. If I wanted swag, I could get it. This created a situation of jubilation which made me want to play the games people had available. Not only that but it was a place that was much like a Casino, it was so fun and stress free that it even stimulated buying. I’ve purchased things every year prior, each year slightly more hesitantly than the last. This year was entirely purchase free, I couldn’t have forced myself to grab anything. No longer are you put into a loot and atmosphere induced gaming Eden, instead you are tested and stressed at every corner.
These corners being far out of reach about 90% of the day. Over time I have watched as the “alleys” of PAX went from manageable to mosh pits. I was literally hit, shoved, and bumped during my short stay in PAX this year. People would stop in the center of alleys, or walk straight at you, or push on you to get by. It creates an unending drama of irritation and stress.
Were you one of the people who waited in a long line to take a test for a Bioshock Infinite Shirt? Well the joke is on you if you came on the first day. For a good portion of the morning their test was literally impossible to win. It wasn’t until a person complained to someone that they actually double checked their work and I’m told they eventually fixed it.
I personally missed two questions on the survey, the impossible one, and a question about colors. Colors? Really…Fuck all for anyone color blind I suppose. Otherwise all the lore questions and all the questions that anyone could reasonably remember I did quite fast, I even aided the guy next to me. However neither of us would get the shirt because of that broken poll.
I suppose if anything PAX is dead for people like me. Someone who likes games but doesn’t fantasize about them. I don’t scour the internet looking for the latest release news of Skyrim, though I am excited to play it. There are likely millions of people who do do this, so for them PAX is a wonderful place to be.
There is more to be mentioned, from the disorganized nature of this years PAX, to the hackeyed presentation, but in the end it would just sound like further ramblings of a broken fan.
This was the first stop on the Vacation and it was a place I wanted to leave as soon as I got there. To watch something I used to love so much fall so far it is disheartening. Luckily this would be basically the last low of the trip.
The Vacation–Part 1: TSA
5 months ago
by Rico Penguin
in General
It has been quite a while. I’ve been out of town on my one year anniversary. It seems like just yesterday I was dreading the first dance and now we are here, so far ahead yet not too far at all. I’ll be discussing the vacation in a series of posts. Mostly because I suspect that this will go somewhat long. The general theme will be from negative to positive as I talk about the TSA, PAX, and the Vacation itself.
A bit of early spoiler is that the cruise was fantastic. But we’ll get to that when we do. First the TSA, which is not coincidentally the first part of the trip.
Since September 11th, a date close approaching once again, the TSA has been slowly expanding their grasp on airport security. You can learn more about this organization over at Wikipedia. However if you have access to the news you probably know a good deal. Be it Adam Savage getting on a plane with foot long razor blades, fake breasts removed, urinary bladder bursts, or manipulation of lines to get folks to pass through the new back scatter machines.
It is, at its heart, a business that is profiteering from the paranoia and passiveness of Americans. The gamble is that most American’s only fly once or twice a year, with this in mind they are unlikely to fight back against increasingly tight restrictions. With each passing year a new toy is passed without study and more people are subjected to systems that have in no way increased their safety. Each time some crazy person tries to sneak something on a plane they will add a new layer of complication that will only weaken the effectiveness of what they do.
A metal detector and an x-ray for bags would have stopped the 9/11 hijackers had blades not been allowed on planes. Further an understanding that not all people value life would have stopped the hijackers from holding the planes. It was the belief that all people wish to live that kept those passengers in their seats, not the blades in the hijackers hands.
There will never be another US airplane hijacking, not one that succeeds as those did 10 years ago. The next fool to try and take a plane will be beaten and likely killed, terrorism only works if you have the element of surprise or an element of anonymity. Once these are lost you are not likely to succeed or last long at all.
The San Jose Airport is, as of now, one of two airports that I use. It takes me to SeaTac and allows me to visit my in-laws. This airport has a few small (roughly the size of a sheet of paper) signs that say the X-Ray machines are not necessary and you can just use the metal detector. However the TSA agents that are there not only point people to the machines they also get grumpy if you decide to take the metal detector.
This grumpy response confuses me, because it seems to assume that I have something to hide. Perhaps the 25 years of being an American citizen have helped to foster some sort of super terrorist. Dear god…has Al Qaeda snuck into the wombs!
Regardless I took my first and last back scatter. I stood there in the same position a criminal would take on the ground, hands behind my head, legs spread, motionless. They snapped me and some random guy with likely no more qualifications than a Wal-Mart employee made sure I didn’t have C4 in my testicles.
Turns out I didn’t, which is good.
I feel no love for the TSA, they have not since the day they founded made me any more safe. They have not even given me the feeling of being safe. What they have done is help bolster an amazingly misguided fear amidst 300 million people.
The day I see the name of this organization on the budget cuts list I’ll be supremely pleased and that money could go towards something better, education, environmental preservation, or even mass transit. Any of these things would reduce our chances of terrorism more than the TSA.
Also note that if anyone honestly wanted to do something terrible on a plane that they would. If a 25 year old American born male with no criminal record is likely to be a terrorist, how is a TSA agent a surefire bet?
Now compare the idiocy I experienced at San Jose with SeaTac. I was dreading the flight back because of how much these people annoy me. I put my bags on the conveyor, walked up to the section where the metal detector and backscatter machines were situated. Standing behind the metal detector was the gate keeper for this row. He smiled at me, likely noticing my nervous demeanor and he waved his hand over to the metal detector. I walked through, no alarm went off, he told me “Have a great day sir!” and I said “Thanks and you too!”
I grabbed my bags, put on my shoes, and waited for Liz. The entire sequence of events took a matter of seconds, I was treated like a human and put through an entirely respectable check. If that was all that the TSA was I’d be happy to have them around and that man that I dealt with in SeaTac was a shining example of the only kind of person that the TSA should hire.
No sneers, no misguidance, he saw an American and he treated them as such. Hell, he saw a human and treated them as such.
To be frank, I seem to recall always going through a metal detector. So I suppose what I’m asking for is a return to the system that would have worked fine. Certain events are once in a lifetime, box cutter evangelists are a thing of the past.
So yes, my vacation started very poorly in San Jose. As I took an unnecessary smack of radiation to the organs. But the trip back is indicative of how the trip evolved. More to come.
Relationship Advice for Teens and Adults
7 months ago
by Rico Penguin
in General
Now immediately there are a few things to note before we begin. This will be largely anecdotal, I’m not an old guy, and hardly a professional. However I haven’t a single regret in my life, I have made mistakes, but I don’t regret them. People make mistakes and that’s how they learn, the take these mistakes and the knowledge the mistakes bestow upon them and they spread it to others. Theoretically it creates an evolution of common knowledge that protects future generations (and perhaps current ones) from the same mistakes. With that out of the way, here are a few things I’ve learned.
Do not fight to keep friendships. This is counterintuitive, and it goes against what you see in romance movies, feel good movies, etc. You have these people who go to the ends of the earth in order to keep a friendship alive. I don’t think this is necessary, in my own life this has always ended in a poor relationship. If you have a friendship that needs fighting to be maintained, don’t continue it. If you find yourself looking at a relationship as a stressful endeavor, don’t deal with it.
Why? Well, to be frank, there are 7 or so billion people in the world. That’s Billion as in…what 9 zeroes followed by a digit? A lot of people. For that one douchebag you fight to keep, you could have had 20 amazing friends who are there for you thick and thin. 20 amazing people you could have been for through thick and thin.
The best friends I have, and likely ever will have, never required me to fight for them. Now, literally speaking, if they were in danger I’d fight for their safety if the outcome was not likely death on my part (I am a selfish organism after all) but as for dealing with bullshit to keep a friendship? Nada. Don’t do it. You are constraining yourself by assuming that these people are so critical to your survival. Really the only perk they had going for them was the proximity to you. Otherwise you’d never have befriended them, you’d have moved two rows down and hung out with that person you mesh with much better.
The same goes for romantic relationships. If you find yourself hating the person you are with. Complaining about them night, and day, finding that you are more often in tears than smiling, leave these people. The only reason their antics survive is they know that a needy person will stay attached to them.
Of the 6+ years I’ve been with Liz we have fought maybe once. That one fight she doesn’t even remember (apparently, if I bring it up she seems confused). And that was within the first year of our relationship. It sounds cliché, and it sounds unbelievable, but there are people that can click this well. There is many someone’s, for everyone, that would make every life a wonderful moment in time.
The saddest thing in the context of this point is seeing people who are only together because they don’t want to go through the game of relationships again. It’s probably not of benefit to anyone to do this, with the new forms of communication you can interact with people on every edge of the globe at any time. It’s fantastic, use the tools available to truly make yourself happy.
If people shit on you, dump them and move on. Now I’m going to be honest here, I was one of these people. I overcompensated for #1, trying to be what I thought folks wanted me to be and I came off as a total prick for quite a long time. My fault, was a huge mistake. I ended up friends with people I didn’t really relate to, spent a bunch of years wasting my time trying to be part of the group. And really what did it leave me besides a lot of wasted effort that could have been put towards FAR stronger relationships.
Once I stopped trying to be a part of this group, I made very good friends with people I used to be a total shit to. I found that I had far more in common with the people I was shitting on, in hopes of not being shit on myself, than those I was trying to impress.
So just don’t do it. If your girl or boy friends, or adult friends, are the kind of folks that mock you and shit on you constantly. Just drop them. Again, 7 billion people, I got dropped a few times. Frankly I deserved it. My mistake was not following the first advice point once it happened.
Understand that People do Change. Don’t hold a grudge, that guy that was a total monster cock in Junior High may have had an epiphany and changed. If you find them acting remarkably different, it could very well be genuine. If you find out it isn’t, obviously drop them and move on. But don’t pass judgment eternally. There was a guy that lived in my neighborhood by the name of James (saving last name from this to protect his facebook), when he first moved to our area he was a nightmare. Because at his old school everyone was an asshole, people picked on him for being the nerd/nice guy.
The response in the neighborhood was visceral, everyone taunted him endlessly. Then after a while he just kind of stopped. He became himself again, that kid he was before his old school shit on him. Frankly he’s an awesome fella, I got to know him better, we found out (ironically) that our interests were very similar. Also found out that both of us felt like shit but just expressed it differently.
We don’t talk much, he’s got a family and a military life to deal with. But the dude is great, it would have been a great loss for me to just throw him under the bus for life because of the bad first response.
Don’t think about it too much. Relationships are like eating, in this paragraph at least. You want to think of it in a healthy way, but don’t dwell on it. Stick with relationships that feel natural, that feel fun. If at any point a relationship feels like a job, you probably should drop it. If you don’t, it is not the end of the world, but not that you could likely be having a much nicer time if you were with people who are naturally pleasant to be around.
My oldest friend who I still stay in contact with is Dave, it is a very natural relationship. I think of him like an actual brother. These sort of things are possible, even in small populaces. I would caution anyone against working hard for a relationship, don’t let sappy movies or songs lock you into an abusive situation that will inevitably leave you wasting a large part of your life that could have been so much better.
That’s it, I got to go pick up groceries from the farm. Just note that there are tons of people out there that would love to talk to you. It doesn’t matter if you are a Jersey Shore cast member or Mohandas Gandhi, every type of person has likely tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people who would jive really well with them.
In this new world of interconnectivity, don’t let yourself be locked into the old world constraints of those closest to you. They are not inherently better by proximity.
Good luck, and by all means, ignore the ranting of the 24 year old . I would think that would be the safest bet.
My Weekend
8 months ago
by Rico Penguin
in General
It was a rather quiet week and I wanted to at least give a quick summary of my weekend. I drank Coffee, Made Pizza, Wrote a bit more for the Story, and finally…
Yeah…that happened. I’m apparently fantastic at using arrows to create suggestive situations.
This is my guy thus far. Not much to look at but he is doing his best to bring the pain. I am roleplaying as a bounty hunter who travels the land looking for “less than savory” characters, I collect my bounty by taking all their stuff, sort of like a repo-man. Except Repo-men rarely kill you before they take your stuff, recent movies aside.
My current task is getting all the way through the Thieves guild chain, once this is done I will use the final item that nets me to complete the Dark Brotherhood. From there I will move on to the Mages Guild and Fighters Guild.
Mods Wise I have OOO, Midas Magic, A few convenience Mods, and all of the DLC. I find it funny that I’m sitting on a dozen games that I haven’t started and I suddenly got the urge to play an old one I’ve done a thousand times over.
I’ll probably keep you posted on the further adventures of “Deputus, The Bounty Hunter.”
Wymi–Further Fishy Figuring
8 months ago
by Rico Penguin
in General
Wymi, otherwise known as, “What you Make it.” Is a easy to remember two syllable word that represents the second and possibly final piece to “The Fish and the Faith”. It’s something I was told ages ago during the short stint of time I spent in Church. The answer came when I asked why no two people had the same response to what heaven was.
The man told me “Heaven is What you Make it.” Well that was interesting I thought. Because I am a bit of a completionist, another fake word that I’m sure nobody needs explained. I need to see things to fruition, whenever a problem is unsolved, a story unfinished, or a debate unresolved, I am left brooding over it.
What if? What would be the ultimate end to this problem? I need to know this, I need to have all the data. It’s part of the beauty of our relative size. You could live the same span of time a hundred thousand times and never experience the same life twice unless you actively tried. Millions of different locations, billions of people, seemingly endless variations, every generation is riddled with infinite possibilities.
So with this in mind, I had told the man, nowhere nearly as eloquently as I’m about to tell you, “I would want this.” If Heaven is Wymi, then I would choose to make it where I am now. We have Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and the outlying Kuiper belt objects. This is centuries of exploration in a single solar system. Then we have 200 billion solar systems in our galaxy alone. That’s 200 billion times hundreds of centuries (lets cut the difference and say 500 centuries or 50,000 years per solar system). 200 billion times 50,000 is 2,000,000,000,000,000 years of content to explore in our galaxy alone (forgive discrepancies in math I’m doing this on the fly with only a few sips of coffee in me thus far).
There are 7 trillion dwarf galaxies, I’ll count these as a quarter of ours just to not exaggerate too much (it’s arbitrary I might be counting them for less than what they are). Then there are 350 billion large galaxies, I’ll count these as 1:1 even though again it is arbitrary. That means there are 2.1 trillion galaxies or 2,100,000,000 galaxies out there, at 2,000,000,000,000,000 years a piece that’s 4,200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years worth of content. A tale of the most epic proportions, a game of the most unbelievable size, a journey of utterly unfathomable variety.
This is curiosity porn at its most ridiculous, this is a mass of content that dwarfs every single action by ever single living thing that has ever breathed on the surface of the Earth. Yet we are so quickly to discount it all and say “It can’t be just this can it? This can’t be all there is?”
We stand, miniscule and nondescript on the surface of a nearly invisible pebble, that pebble spins around an orb of flam that is itself nearly invisible as it floats around a galaxy that is nearly invisible amidst a sea of a trillion other galaxies, all of which likely is but a spec in the vast darkness that spans for infinitum in all directions.
It’s so astoundingly beautiful that thinking about it makes me warm from head to toe. This is what I want, heaven could not interest me in the slightest until this entire journey is complete. Until ever rock is overturned, to be taken away early is a maddening thought, and the possibility that an afterlife could result in knowing it all instantly is incredibly unsettling.
So why? Why would I even need to die in the first place, if Wymi is correct then I’m already here. Death is a superfluous and redundant feature. I find it almost impossible to believe anything with the mental capacity to create so much content (even procedurally) is so near sighted that they’d have such poor variety in ultimate outcomes.
100 Years? Really? When there are 4,200 trillion trillion years of content for me to explore? What monster would do such a thing?
That, I believe, is the conclusion to the two major reasons I am not a man of faith. I cannot be so greedy that I would look at so much and ask myself “Is this it?” I instead ponder just what can come along that would grant me the power to see it all, one gorgeous discovery at a time.
Again apologies for any bad math above, the gist is still the same. If you enjoyed the few minutes you spent here on this please vote for this article on reddit (link provided above) I would be infinitely appreciative, views help me both figuratively and literally.
Duck!
9 months ago
by Rico Penguin
in General
So once a week my wife and I go for a walk. This past weekend we decided to go through the community center here in Sunnyvale, California. Our journey began with an oddly specific sign along some building construction.
It was indeed correct! We looked to our right and there was a path of travel, as pedestrians we took it. The entire thing turned out better than expected really. We made the journey down the road, passed (by not before entering) an In-N-Out Burger and then up to a fairly large lake. I’m not sure if the lake was at one time natural but it has been thoroughly altered by humanity. But this hasn’t necessarily been a bad thing.
The ducks at the lake (or pond whatever) were absolutely adorable. We saw adolescent ones like the ones pictured above (with a concerned adult duck watching us on the right).
She (I presume she, since female birds tend to be less colorful than males) patrolled the island and made sure no trickery by the gazing humans was going to jeopardize her children. The region is merrily devoid of predatory animals it appears and I’m happy these little ones found a niche.
Some adults that really couldn’t have cared less about our presence. You’ll note a fake swan in the top left corner. There are 3 of them here and I don’t for the life of me know why they are there. But they caused us to star at them like idiots for about 5 minutes trying to guess if they were fake or not.
You can’t tell in this image but these two are apparently hot for one another. The one in the center was making some pretty aggressive passes at the brown on in the top left. It was pretty funny to watch and I can tell they didn’t appreciate it because they made their way to the water where I was far less likely to snap shots at them.
I guess I can’t blame them. I doubt many people would be happy if I uploaded pictures of them here while they were putting their moves on one another.
Same couple different angle. I like this one (even though it’s a little light screwed) because the more colorful duck was giving me the eye. I should have taken video.
We’ve got the goose which apparently is a bouncer in these parts. When humans get too close to the babies the ducks will quack and the geese seem to show up. Now it could have just been coincidence but I thought it was a funny turn of events. I also didn’t get a shot of the other duck that came up and gave me an earful for getting too close to the collective ducklings.
Another shot for posterity. You’ll note the water is very blue. For some reason in California they dye the water blue. I guess so they know who is trying to swim in it?
Jesus ducks! They walk on water with the greatest of ease. This shot you’ll want to enlarge to get the full scope.
So yes. That’s the extent of the outing. It was fun, the ducks were adorable. I cleaned up the park a bit because litter just isn’t cool and felt refreshed when I got home. I’m sure we’ll visit again 
.
How corn killed people at Jack in the Box.
10 months ago
by Rico Penguin
in General
This is a rather retro story that has real world implications in modern day America (and the western world). For those of you who were old enough in the early 90’s you recall the E. Coli outbreak at Jack in the Box (henceforth called Jack) and might be saying in confusion “I thought it was beef that killed those 4 kids, not corn.” You would be technically correct, which is generally the best kind of correct.
However, being technically correct doesn’t matter much when dealing with bacteria or trying to reduce ones chances of death. Unfortunately nature doesn’t care about technicalities, it’s more about doing what it does and we largely follow along trying not to get stepped on or eaten by rabbit squirrels.
E. Coli is not inherently a bad thing, there are types of E. Coli living in the lower intestine of many endotherms that’s pretty awesome. It keeps us from getting much worse things in there, it provides us some important vitamins, and occasionally it writes us letters. It’s a relatively simple bacteria that most warm blooded creatures probably would thank once or twice in their life if they knew enough about it.
However, as with many things, there is a dark side to E. Coli. There are strains of this organism that will destroy the ever loving heck out of your Kidneys and red blood cells. These are two things most people cherish, this isn’t exactly common in adults (but still consult your doctor) and generally only really kill kids or old people.
So again, you might be asking, just how in the hell did corn kill people at Jack in the Box? That’s a valid question, so far it just sounds like beef was contaminated with this bad E. Coli, folks ate that beef, and some kids died. Fairly straight forward.
But what you might not realize is that this strain is rather unique and came about, quite interestingly, by a single process. Feeding corn to cattle.
It turns out that naturally a cows stomach is PH Neutral, while a human stomach is acidic (I believe that means PH Negative). Feeding a cow copious amounts of corn will actually change the PH Balance of its stomach and leave it with a wonderfully familiar tummy, one that actually is very upsetting for the cow (and would probably kill them if they lived longer than 16 months in the US these days).
So what happened before we fed corn to cows? Well factories would cut up the cows, poop would contaminate your meat, you’d eat that meat and the E. Coli would enter your stomach. Since it was adapted to survive in the PH. Neutral world of the cows belly it would be utterly slaughtered within your stomach. You might get some level of sickness but not something to write home about and I imagine your biggest issue would be gas.
Now, however, with corn fed cows you have a bacteria that hits your stomach and scoffs. It laughs with such a fury that one might find it curiously cocky, though I would be too if 10 microbes of me could be fatal.
So that, my curious web goer, is how corn killed 4 kids in the early 90’s and how it continues to sicken and kill people across the US. It turns out that taking an animal you’ve been well adapted at eating, and dramatically changing its diet, might not be the best idea.
Who would have thought?
If you were curious, or paranoid, grabbing grass fed beef from your local farm (or from a farmer’s market) will dramatically improve the nutritional quality of the meat you eat (both subjectively in terms of the treatment of the animal and objectively in terms of actual nutrition) and will reduce the chance of, at the very least, you getting a nice case of E. Coli.
However, I’m not about to petition companies to stop corn feeding cows. It’s not my place to stop them, it’s up to consumers to decide if they want to endanger themselves and create an incredibly destructive environment for some slightly cheaper meat. So this is more of an interesting tale than it necessarily is a cautionary one.
Edit: Holy crap. I linked this on reddit for some lulz since I imagined some folks there would like to tear it apart (as I’m sure there are problems and reddit is wonderful for fact checking) but I wasn’t expecting to immediately see folks viewing. Very honored for sure.