Spelunking the Universe
Posts tagged life
Empty Supermarket Sunday
3 months 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.
Minecraft – Housing and Exploring
3 months 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
3 months 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.
Kids–Particularly Furry Ones
4 months ago
by Rico Penguin
in General
I had plans to write more today but I got attacked by the Children. Namely our Calico Cat, Artemis. She decided that all night long was the perfect time for me to play with her. When I decided I’d prefer to sleep she promptly pimp slapped me.
Alternatively walking on me, or trying to eat me feet, or exhaling stinky kitty breath in my face at least once. She managed to escape punishment by being painfully adorable.
So my brain is basically slush, my entire work day was just one long drag of exhaustion and now I think I will pack up my brain today. This weekend anytime I see her sleeping I’m going to poke her, or play with her, or meow in her ear.
Vengeance will be mine!
Why SOPA/PIPA are Bad.
4 months ago
by Rico Penguin
in General
So I’m writing this from upstairs which means I’ll be warmer which I hope means I won’t have the “cold hands / short post” problem. The only downside to writing up here is I have to magnify the screen by 2x to see anything that I’m writing. However beggars can’t be choosers and I’ll take the steadily rising 63 degrees of our bedroom over the 57 degrees downstairs.
So lets see, why is SOPA bad? Well there aren’t all that many reasons really. There are probably tons of smaller reasons, different pieces of it you could pick apart that make it truly diabolical but it is the macro level that I am concerned with and it’s a failure of politics in general. The first thing is the name, you can generally tell what a bill won’t do or won’t be by the name. The Patriot Act was not Patriotic, Quite a few Clean Air bills actually made regulations lighter, and in this particular case this would not (in any way) stop or even hinder Piracy.
Crime is an interesting thing, it exists solely to answer a niche that is not properly addressed by the legal world. If you want to see what happens when something mundane is made illegal look at Prohibition. It didn’t stop anything and ended up being the foundation for modern organized crime. The next time you hear about a kid getting shot by a gang keep in mind that that stems from conservative laws passed in the early 1900’s (hope I’m getting my history correct, forgive me I can’t double check easily on this PC at this time). In the modern world we have the war on drugs which has single handedly cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of people (speaking conservatively) and incarcerated thousands of Americans for little more than carrying and using drugs. You might think this is fair but imagine if Alcohol or Tobacco was a federal offense starting tomorrow.
How would you feel about that? I know personally I wouldn’t care but for TONS of (unknowing) hypocrites this would be an extreme inconvenience and likely a one way ticket to jail or criminal activity. So we’ll keep that in mind. Piracy itself exists because a market is not being met, Valve came along with steam and has made millions by (to a point) answering this market. Others are digging deeper graves and only worsening it.
Here is the second problem: Regulation of illegal activities doesn’t really work, regulation works best when it is dealing with something obvious and easily quantifiable. Clean Air, Clean Water, Factory Conditions, all these things that you could easily and safely examine are regulatory concerns. But when you are stuck with something that is shady and dangerous you will find no success in regulating it. What you must do is find the root cause and eliminate that (and I always suggest by satisfying it in a positive and legal way).
Then there is the biggest problem and the thing that so many people overlook. This law is not by itself ultimately evil it is what this law will open the doors to. Think legally speaking of precedence. This is where judges look at previous rulings and use that to help them decide on modern cases. This is used a LOT in politics. Politicians create a small law, then enhance it a little bit each year or even in under a year. Have you been to an airport lately? That whole charade went from profiling, to x-rays of all your stuff (including shoes), to full body pat downs or full body x-rays. It’s these progressive increases in restrictions that are so nefarious and often overlooked. But they must not be. This is extremely important, you must not ever let a law be judged on its own merits. You must always look at a law for what doors it opens towards the future.
I don’t care what country you are in this is incredibly important. Tell a friend, I know this is some small website on the edge of the internet universe but this is something that should never be understated. This is why SOPA is extremely dangerous. IT would start with some minor oppression of information and as soon as it is politically safe to expand upon it they would. Before you know it there would without a doubt be steps taken to make lawmakers immune from reference on the internet.
This might sound silly but consider what the internet represents. This is the first and possibly last free information trade global network. This represents the absolute only chance that humanity has to potentially better itself and escape the archaic systems of its past. Much like postal mail is dying to the Email, the internet will someday make many old world systems obsolete.
In the US look at what this has done for presidential and congressional voting races? Information on the shady dealings of these people are exposed in weeks or days, not months or years. The façade they put forth is quickly crushed beneath the incredible combined researching power of the citizenry.
Wars will never be the same, politics will never be the same, and truly no other facet of dominance will be. Acts like SOPA are important to people who enjoy the privileges of a closed information market. These acts will continue to be proposed for as long as is needed and they will continue pushing to get them through in sneakier and sneakier ways (perhaps hiding it in the NDAA the next time that comes around).
If the internet is not censored, quickly, there will be a considerable problem for bad people. This is something other countries (Iran, China, etc) have realized. This is something people outside of those countries should never laugh at. It’s a serious possibility and one very important reason to always fight these kind of bills. The moment one gets through it will be abused.
I’m hopeful however, unlike the airports the internet is something that the vast majority of Americans use to some degree. Some once it starts getting broken people will likely stand up. As a final note, ANYTIME a bill says it exists to “save American jobs” it will most certainly kill them. It’s not about saving them in the grand scheme, but saving the specific ones that paid for the bill.
California can be a cold place.
4 months ago
by Rico Penguin
in General
It’s a bit too cold for me to do an authentic update. It turns out that gas prices are obscene so we’ve forgone using our gas heater for an electric one. It does the job (for a lot less) but we can’t have it on while we aren’t home (wasteful) this means that coming home after work is quite a cold time. I can’t really feel my fingers. I might start doing weekday updates from the upstairs computer.
But for now take solace in the fact that I’ve updated my Myr, Sliver, and Elf decks. Should be fun to see how they do tomorrow. Rarely, I’ll admit, as well as they do in my mind.
See you all tomorrow in a much warmer upstairs room.
Lethargy
4 months ago
by Rico Penguin
in General
Merriam-Webster’s lists Lethargy as:
1 : abnormal drowsiness
2: the quality or state of being lazy, sluggish, or indifferent
And I must admit that I’m suffering from this hard today. I’ve been cleaning up slowly around the house for no better reason than I can’t get the energy to do much of anything. It’s an odd state of being, I mostly blame my poor choice of staying up late last night. It ruined my drive for the entire day.
It’s a different kind of bad day, not quite depression, I know that feeling all too well. No, this is something much more interesting. It’s like my body is telling me to just slate everything for now, that’s quite an unfortunate scenario since tomorrow begins another work week. Working 70% of the waking year, not very nice to be down in the dumps the other 30.
I have some things to look forward to this week: New Magic Cards, No Buzz Killer, and the general expectation that it’ll be a quiet office week. The house >is< coming together slowly, extremely slowly, but progress is being made. If I start laundry right after this post I just might make the floor look like something quazi-respectable.
Part of this might be my story situation, I >know< I had a binder sitting around with notes but I can’t find it for the life of me and it is infuriating. I’ll be reprinting today but that’s still notes that I won’t be seeing again till I tear this place apart and that’s never fun.
How do you lose something as big as a binder? Really? How many places would I have put that stupid thing, I only ever read in the bedroom before sleeping and so it should be right next to the blasted bed. But no…it’s not. I swear things sprout legs sometimes.
On a bit of a closing and random note, serving sizes are amazing. I’ll take a picture soon but I got a “sampler size” of Coffee from Starbucks and its about the size of a human fist. I remember when sampler sizes of just about anything could be confused with singer serving hand wipes. The US has changed so fast, not always for the best (certainly on the business end) and I often find myself surprised by the changes.
I wonder how many people actually get upset when they order something size “small” and get back a 
keg. I feel like it is probably just me. I have some odd expectations that I really dislike seeing ignored or challenged. Not because I’m against change, I just understand that not all change is progress.
It’s a mere 3 more days before I have written as much this year as I did all of last year. Remarkable…I don’t think I want another year to vanish like that.
PS. Hey Adobe, how about joining the last decade and adding auto save to Photoshop. It’s a feature that everyone else in the entire world has embraced but you, it doesn’t make your program edgy or cool it just adds another bullet point to the list of reasons its not worth a tenth the asking price. The last thing I had that didn’t include Auto Save was Sim City 4, and guess what? It crashed quite a lot also. Something about arrogance that doesn’t mesh well with sloppy coding.
Random Ramblings – The Food Business
4 months ago
by Rico Penguin
in General
I actually don’t know what to talk about today so I’m just going to go with whatever the first thing to pop into my mind is. I’ll make a minor note that Artemis (our Calico) is climbing all over my monitor, very cute. But regardless I think I’ve thought of something.
The commercialization of Food is absolutely perplexing to me. There are a few things that I don’t think Business should ever be involved in, I call these things “Essentials.” They are intrinsic to a functional society and in many ways they are pivotal to life. Food, Shelter, Education, and Healthcare. I’ll talk about others on different days probably but lets just look at food.
There should be only one goal for food, food should always be safe and as plentiful as necessary to support the local population. It shouldn’t be about marketing, bright colors, added sugar, or profits. This is just a truly devious state of being.
I can understand, for instance, someone loving cooking and making a business out of making people food. You are bringing to the people who live in your area a place to socialize, nourish, and perhaps enjoy new sensations. However mass production fast food joints are extremely creepy. Maximizing the output of a steer, masking the Ammonia used to clean poorly process meat with additives, patenting living organisms, and all the other dark practices involved with globalizing any foodstuff.
This is all so surreal, taking something absolutely essential to existing at all and saying “Yeah this should follow the profit or death model.” What group of psychopaths gathered and thought that was reasonable? I can understand that the world isn’t full of altruistic utopic people, but to think that enough people were cool with it is almost disheartening.
I’m optimistic however because I understand the nature of biases. I just-How? Imagine if air was monetized? How outlandish would this seem to people? Is it the immediacy of air compared to food? Will we reach a day where air is sold in cans? Even Water being remarkably difficult to acquire in some areas of the united states is obscure to me, these sort of things should be science fiction, not fact.
So this is a bit of a thought experiment. Imagine the air in a can, think to yourself if that’s a fair example of a similar situation, and ask yourself how reasonable it is that food is a commodity with cost and corner cutting. Something so completely vital to a healthy and frankly (ultimately) any life.
Microwaves
4 months ago
by Rico Penguin
in General
Have you ever sat there and wondered how something works? I think most of us do, sitting at a stoplight wondering how it knows we are there. Pressure plates? Magnetism? Vibrations? Sitting there in momentary wonder before going on with the rest of our day.
I don’t function this way, usually when something is a curiosity to me I end up looking it up as soon as I can. Lately I’ve been thinking about just how cool Microwave Ovens are, an innocuous little device that is in basically every home in the US (I imagine).
Bill Maher is someone I enjoy listening to, as with any two people we don’t agree on everything but he has a presentation style and outlook on life that I find very entertaining and he’s often spot on with data points. One thing he said many episodes ago caught me by the brain and hurt a little. He said “I don’t like Microwaves, the idea of them making food jiggle and then it jiggling inside me, just unsettling.” This I found was odd.
Microwaves do jiggle food, they are warming the food through friction. But that’s not inherently unique, all heat is caused by friction. Molecules rub up against one another when they are excited and release energy that we call heat. So if he finds microwaves unsettling, he would be mortified by a conventional oven, a fireplace, or even the sun (which I’ll admit I find unsettling, I burn easy).
These are incredibly neat inventions that in modern day get an unfair wrap because of the standard food cooked in them. A hodgepodge of highly preserved quazi-food that usually has to use buzz words just to get around being sued into oblivion. This wonderful little heating device gets slapped hard by frozen burritos and Pizza pockets.
I don’t think it is fair, these are so freaking cool. How the hell do I have something so awesome in my house? It fires freaking microwaves at things. I put something in there and I get to act like a super villain from DC comics.
I actually went and read the Wikipedia entry for a Microwave, that’s a bit inaccurate, I’m reading it as I write this very post. How many times have you wiki’d a household appliance? I suggest you do it more often, your house is full of the craziest crap. How the heck can we not be overwhelmed by the amazing world surrounding us on any given day.
Good heavens the devices connecting me to you right now are something utterly unbelievable. Trying to explain them to someone a hundred or two hundred years ago would have been a complete disaster. We are the Science Fiction novel of a century ago, and I am sure that there will be a generation to come that says the same about their world compared to ours.
But I am digressing in my food powered hyperrant about Microwaves (which ironically were not used for my dinner, I used another delightfully neat invention, the Toaster).
So it turns out that Microwaves work by heating through a system known as “Dielectric Heating.” Now this was another page I ended up on, and I’ll admit I’ve skimmed this one a little less deeply (but will be reading it fully later). High-Frequency waves excite the molecules of whatever is in their path and cause them to move at high speeds which causes friction and then heat to be generated, in the case of a Microwave this is done to cook food (or occasionally melt stove top pot handles for kids who didn’t know the rules of Microwaves).
The depth that the microwave travels into the material is determined by the density, the more dense the object the quicker the microwaves are absorbed and the more shallow the heat is distributed. In these situations you get a food item with a warm outside but a frigid inside. It’s interesting to note that according to Wikipedia if you stand close to a high-power microwave antenna that it can cause severe burns and actually start cooking you.
Now back to Microwaves themselves. A Microwave is most efficient on Water and fat. I believe Sugar is also included in this world. It has been in my experience that the better something microwaves, generally, the worse for you it is. Now I doubt this is a hard fast rule, I am sure it is full of more holes than Swiss cheese. But if you slap a Cinnabon in there it’ll be molten hot in 15 seconds, put some carrot slices in there for 15 seconds and they’ll be warm at best. (This probably also has to do with densities, but there is a metric ton of fat and sugar in a Cinnabon).
So the next time you cook up a hot pocket and the inside of it burns through your lower jaw and goes into critical meltdown on the carpet, you’ll have good knowledge as to why 
.
These are truly incredible devices with a fascinating history. The next time you see something in your house, or in your life, that you think is interesting or are curious about I implore you to read up on it. Even a rudimentary understanding of everything you meet will certainly enrich your life, if not yours it will enrich the potential children in your future.
I sure hope someday when I have Kids one of them asks me “Daddy, how does a Microwave work?” I’m going to look at them, clap my hands and say “Oh you just opened Pandora’s Box! Do I have a story for you! There was this guy after WWII who…”
Special Extra: Did you know that the reason your Microwave has a grate on the front door is to stop the Microwaves from cooking your face as you impatiently gawk at your cooking meal 
. The circles are just the right size to not allow the waves of light to pass through the door! A secondary cool note is that visible light is a shorter wavelength and >can< pass through the holes, which is why you can see inside in the first place.
Simple Advice–Problem Solving
4 months ago
by Rico Penguin
in General
I could see myself setting this up for failure by saying “Sundays will be Simple Advice Sundays!” But after this particular one I fear we might run out of advice. We’ll see, if an idea pops into my head or if I see a problem that could be solved seemingly easy I’ll give it a go. Today I want to talk about the overall concept of problem solving and the source of most of my life philosophy.
Try your best to not treat the symptoms exclusively, being retroactive is a poor choice in life and means the problem will be more destructive than it needs to be. Each problem should be dissected down to its component parts. Which part of the action or incident do you find negative? Once you have established this you will then look at the source of the issue (to the best of your abilities).
The source is the trickiest part of problem solving. There is the what you want the problem to be caused by and then there is what is the cause. If a problem lasts for any extended period of time the likely reason is that you have incorrectly diagnosed the cause. This is usually a fundamental issue, people place their own personal beliefs on how people act or how the world works ahead of actual data. If you find yourself making this error it is imperative that you reshape your view, at the very least for the process of problem solving.
I won’t get deep into detail (because I have before) but look at the drug war. This is a retroactive problem solving situation that has nothing but negative effects on the real world. Hundreds of Thousands of people imprisoned, hundreds of thousands (or millions more) living in subpar life environments for no reason beyond the war, and a condescending and improper education system in place failing to prevent people from taking up the hobby.
Then the dissonance of heavily marketing over the counter drugs and two recreational drugs with some of the worst withdrawal symptoms and longest addiction cycles (quitting alcoholism cold turkey can very likely kill you).
This whole system is built upon a foundation of what people want to be the problem (namely drugs being evil) and what is the problem: Illegalization of drugs makes them rare immediately increasing interest (we are all Sméagol), slanted and condescending education about drugs leaves people not trusting the advice of their elders (there are positives to drug use), and ironically the war itself.
If you want to see the only outcome of making a drug illegal, look at prohibition, if you want to see how someone would live with nearly any drug if it were legal look at Cigarettes. How many people do you see struggling to hold a job, robbing banks, or killing people in their homes to pay for Tobacco? Not very many I would imagine.
So once you have the source, to the best of your abilities, worked out you want to then try and find positive solutions to resolve the problem. This is critical, it must be positive. Negativity is met with resistance, positivity is met with acceptance. This isn’t a matter of being a hippie or some kind of pacifistic obnoxious soap box preacher. Almost no issue needs to be handed militarily. Because by the time you need to handle it violently it has already gotten too far.
Think minority report without the exaggeration, we want to find the source of the action. Why do people murder, why do people steal, why do they do nearly anything destructive? More often than not the answer is one of two things, poverty or mental illness. Are these always the case? Goodness no. But in terms of the most popular problems we attempt to solve it is often the case.
You can predict with remarkable accuracy how bad the crime in a certain area by just looking at the poverty levels there. Poverty is something with so many heads it is hard to truly comprehend. A lack of money means a lack of medical care, of food, of support, and of education. People look for an escape, we all want to feel good. What simpler way than drugs?
Drug dealers hang out in impoverished areas for the same reason military recruiters do. People in the depths will turn to any chance for salvation.
We look at this and we then try and find a fix. Access to a good (genuine) education, healthcare, and food become the immediate and obvious choice. In the end the cost of supplying these three is always cheaper than leaving people on their own. Once you work in debt, disease, destruction of property, and dozens of other unseen costs that the entire country (and invariably the species) suffer.
What about murder? This one is harder. You could very well fall on your head tomorrow and become a sociopath. The brain is a very fragile organ that can be irreparably broken leaving you a husk of your former self. You cannot stop all murder, in fact you can’t stop all of anything. The universe is evolving with every passing microsecond on both the macro and the micro level. This is a reality that people must accept and just try to do their best to resolve an issue.
In the case of murder you want to keep that initial poverty advice in step, keep all areas under your control in harmony as best you can. Supply them well and if you cannot then you shouldn’t be governing them. Next you should make it well aware that you provide counseling to anyone who is having trouble in their life. Stigmatizing this sort of thing is an extremely bad idea.
Once people see that having dark thoughts is not something to hide they can be more easily reached. At one point or another every single person thinks they are the lowest rung on the social totem pole. The US at the very least is a nation of people understating their lot in life. I’d be surprised if this was not true across most of the world. The people who achieve greatness likely either are born into it or don’t fall victim to self doubt.
Each nation, state, city, and even county likely has hundreds if not thousands of problems they wish to attend to. Destructive habits that they’d wish to end. The key is finding the ones that are truly destructive and creating a supportive (and genuine) environment to curb it. This requires the delegates in question open their minds to views separate from their own. While it would be nice to live in a world where everyone agreed, there is nothing positive to gain from thrusting ones own view of the world upon others.
Open your mouth, your arms, and your eyes. If what you have to say is genuine and people see you care then the likelihood of them supporting you and of your advice having power is greatest.