log (2009/02/13 to 2009/02/19)

A reader who was kidding writes:

I was kidding about the eagles! Come back already!

What, morning already?

I am typing this somewhere in the northward wilds, in a place where the internet access, or at least the wireless internet access in the area of this cozy little rucksack on the floor, is spotty at best. But at least I am typing it!

Rather than doing other things that don't result in eventual weblog postings.

So what has been going on? I've been playing somewhat less Second Life, although still posting the occasional amusing adventure in the secret SL weblog.

I've been playing quite alot of World of Warcraft ("WoW"), somewhat contrary to expectations: even though Spennix has her flying machine and her special goggles, I didn't lose interest at all in the game; Northrend (the new area opened up in the latest expansion) turned out to interest me enough that I kept on playing; Spennix now has a couple more of the "Explored [area]" achievements, and also the "ten mounts" acheivement (she looks very amusing on her huge elek; pictures to follow on Flickr or somewhere before long I imagine). Only Spennix, though, pretty much; I don't seem interested in any of the other, lower-level characters. The Alliance ones would all just be doing stuff that Spennix mostly already did a long time ago, and so far none of the Horde ones have really caught me.

It's odd, or at least notable: even when (as really is always the case) there are lots of creative and interesting and enriching stuffs I could be doing, whenever I walk by the WoW computer the thought of sitting down and Spennixing around for a while (or a few hours) is generally very very tempting.

Mostly because it's so easy, I think. I'm lazy.

I blame the Winter. *8)

And speaking of addictive computer pursuits, this Penny Arcade item led us to this extremely lovely and fun small thing, and a bunch of related ones, of which the micro-RPG one is perhaps particularly noteworthy.

Whether because the spam filters have gotten better at blocking them, or the spammers have moved on to other techniques (or, likely, both), the amount and quality of Bayesian Spam Poetry we've been getting has decreased. Still, the occasional noteworthy one shows up; here's one:

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A bit of proto-Gaelic or something in there. Cloudless commonin summer months reach degrees. Because last, week spent.

Someone notes in the Talking Place that:

hullo. Teucer has revived your curvature of the earth nomic:

http://einos-nomic.blogspot.com/

which is pretty cool. I hope they have more time for it than I did. *8) I don't know if I'll even have time to play in it, although I really should.

Speaking of things seen on Penny Arcade, this is very funny. A beautifully consistent idiom. (Taken to the limit and beyond!)

This is pretty funny too. Of course the Onion usually is.

Less funny is the politicians spending more money than exists in the world in a more or less random manner, in hopes it will do some good, or at least make them look powerful and decisive.

"We're going to invest three hundred and fifty billion dollars in our nation's transporation infrastructure!"

"But we state governors say that it will take at least one trillion dollars to actually fix the problem!"

"Oh, yeah? Well, we're asking for a zillion dollars to save the nation's manufacturing sector!"

"That's nothing! We're going to spend two hundred million jillion dollars to rescue the economy!"

"Well, unless we spend eleventy zillion jillion fillion dollars before next Tuesday, civilization will come to an immediate end!"

"We're going to spend infinity dollars!!!"

"We're going to spend a million infinity!!!!"

"There's no such thing as a million infinity, stupid!!!!"

"Who are you calling stupid, stupid???"

"You, stupid!!!"

"Ah, you're a poop-head!!!!!"

Which is to say that, while I'm still very happy with the fact that President Obama (a phrase that still sometimes amazes me) is intelligent and well-spoken and humorous and so far doing some pretty good things, I'm quite disappointed to see that he seems to have bought wholeheartedly into the whole "it's so important that we instantly spend unthinkably large amounts of money to prevent the collapse of civilization, that we can't really stop to figure out whether or not it will actually help any" meme.

Obama and the Democrats also (as more than one libertarian type has pointed out) seem just as prone to using the economic crisis as an excuse to push through lots of their favorite legislative ideas as Bush and the Republicans were to use terrorism as an excuse to push through lots of theirs.

The fact that the Democrats just want to take my money, whereas the Republicans wanted to both take my money and tell me who I could sleep with, imprison me indefinitely on Presidential whim, invade random foreign countries, and so on, is something of an improvement, but still...

I'm sure there was other stuff I was intending to talk about next time I got the time and energy to write here, but it's not springing to mind at the moment. That's okay, though; maybe that will increase the chances of my posting again in the next week or two. *8)