An extremely imaginative reader writes:
So, I have this new theory about your weblog:
Just like Doug Hofstadter did with the last couple chapters of GEB, you're slowly decreasing the signal/noise (until there's nothing but Sims screenshots and spam subject lines), so that nobody will actually be able to tell when it was exactly that you stopped blogging.
Ha ha! What a wild thought, eh? And then the chimpanzee says, "Whatever happened to that thing you used to have, with the electrodes?"
Another reader writes:
If this fails to horrify you, it's already too late.
Wa ha also! Very very nice. Actually I haven't played The Sims 2 for some time; I've been doing Work, and playing Alpha Centauri. (Remember Alpha Centauri?)
I'm playing as the U. N. Peacekeepers (which means that I always feel obliged to try to stop wars as quickly as possible, even if it looks like it'd be fun and/or advantageous to continue them), at level two. The Gaians dominated the world at first, but then the Believers came out of nowhere and conquered them. I just recently got satellites and went pretty much exponential (something the NPC factions never seem to do), so now I'm Top Faction, and unless someone gets really suicidal it's now just my racing with myself to see how fast I can get humanity to the next phase of evolution. And I just got gravships!
But I'm sure there are more Sims pictures in our future eventually.
Someone has posted a rather long and mostly correctly-spelled anti-porn screed in the talking place. I hope to eventually get around to responding to it, but feel free to read it in the meantime. Long-time readers will be able to predict most of my reply, I'm sure. *8) I expect it will be along the lines of "yeah, most porn is really lousy, but grownups don't try to outlaw everything they don't like." And then some degree of nitpicking over specific claims. And maybe a bit of philosophical musing about whether offering a reward really counts as coercion.
Speaking of Sims movies (does the chimpanzee have any hotdogs in that camera-bag, do you think?), I stumbled across this site, which seem to have like eleventy-million Sims movies on it. I watched a few more or less at random, but I'm not recommending any in particular. Maybe you'll have better luck!
There's a book based on the Post Secret guy that encourages people to mail him their deepest secrets anonymously as mail-art. Or something like that. Kinda neat and edgy and human and all.
Here's our Iris Chacon link o' the day. Found, astoundingly enough, on what clearly seems to be one of those vapid sites that troll for Google hits, but since I actually found something amusing on it (after finding the thing itself in my reflog), I will do it the honor of a link from a real live non-bogus site. May Google forgive me.
Memorable Fraud-Spam excerpt o' the day:
This is to officially notify you of the result of our Pee (Software) Sweepstake draw,which was conducted on the 30th day of September 2005.
Yes, well, hm. Pee Software. (And then two more chimpanzees and a squirrel began to recite the lyrics to "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald".)
Re: Of talk it posting calculating
Re: Is accept in quackery
Be cut be phosphorus
his comb to grime violence
octuple pushpin
Re: Be tell is millionths
Re: Are can or sixteen
so rain as swallow
Re: As listen or lint
Re: That travel the antelope sickness
Re: her learn as evanescent bosomy
RE: textile alberich
Re: To say my elephantiasis
(We must note, in particular, that that last one was the subject line on some spam trying to sell us Human Growth Hormone. Chillingly appropriate, eh?)
"Octuple pushpin" seems to be from an uncommon algorithm. I'm happy to see that they have "bosomy" in their database.
A more discriminating reader writes:
Just *one* more?
From Blanca Hood: "Re: the bring on dialectic"I imagined this as a scholarly discussion of Dubya's approach to foreign insurgencies.
*8)
And that's all we're gonna do right now. We're waiting to see if someone will send us some email so we can finish up a paper and send it off before dawn (or if alternately it'll slip even further past the deadline), and we're thinking about whether or not to put some more Sims pictures together into stories. We'd actually rather be asleep, but them's the breaks! Half a stick of butter, a cup of brown sugar, a teaspoon of baking powder, and a diplomat.
Yagunda.
