I have nice things to say about McCain, honestly. Sadly, I am so disillusioned at how he has let his campaign be handled and the fact that is has resulted in some conservatives turning into gleefully willful ignoramuses and hate filled people that themselves can say nothing positive about anyone that does not agree with them that I no longer feel I want to say anything positive about McCain. I find myself quite saddened by that. I want to be a better person than that, and I am so filled with despair when I see the stories and the videos of the wild eyed "supporters" of McCain (really they would side with anyone that was running against whatever it is they think is going to destroy them today) that I don't think there is anything good to say about him at this moment. I hope that post-election is kinder to him than the election has been, and I hope he can become a kinder person in turn. Yet, I am unable to forgive him for fanning the flames of ignorance, racism and xenophobia simply to achieve a thing for himself instead of achieve that thing for the good of the country that he wants to represent.
I am reminded of something... ah, yes...
Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God. The argument goes something like this:
"I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."
"But," says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves that you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. Q.E.D."
"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
"Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.
Most leading theologians claim that this argument is a load of dingo's kidneys, but that didn't stop Oolon Colluphid from making a fortune with his book Well That About Wraps It Up For God.
I have always thought that the best argument against gods are the people that believe in them.
I remembered today one movie that makes me cry every time: Chasing Amy.
At the end of Chasing Amy when Holden just waves at Alyssa and she waves back when he is leaving the comic con. Damn, I mean, EVERY time. Did I mention I went to see that with my wife the day we got married, like right after the ceremony. :) In 2004 we went to Kevin Smith's Vulgarthon down in LA at the Cinerama and he showed it there and again, waterworks. Fuckin' Smith. It was nice, though, that at the end of that Q&A for it this guy asked his girlfriend to marry him. It was very sweet. (And what was so funny was how misty eyed Ben Affleck look at that too. That guy is a sucker for romantic shit apparently, and we saw him later hugging and chatting with the couple.)
Personally, I wish they would just buck up and do it the right way for a remake: reverse all the gender roles. Make Frank a girl in butch drag. Make Janet the sort of uptight nerd and Brad the sexually repressed one that discovers he likes strong women. Make Rocky a female. Just reverse EVERY gender in the movie and let it fly. If you're going to fuck with it, at least try to fuck with it in a way that would make it interesting to watch. I mean, otherwise, knowing their intentions at the moment, "interesting to watch" ain't gonna be the result.
Hm. I will have to think who I would cast in my reverse gender RHPS.
There's a scene in The Happiness Of The Katakuris when they are all walking back as a whole family burying yet another dead customer of their bed and breakfast that I almost always tear up at too. The whole idea about that's what makes up a family is just really a big tear jerker to me.
muteboy... you bastard! *sniff* The last episode of SPACED...
Don't forget, also... Monkey died, everybody cry. King Kong. :(
I also teared up at the last episode of MST3K when Mike, Crow and Tom sit down to watch TV and The Crawling Eye comes up.
The movie CQ kind of makes me tear up a bit too in various places.
Bubba Ho-Tep makes me tear up too. That's like one of the best fucking buddy movies ever made. If you haven't seen it, then you don't deserve the penis you have.
In the Doctor Who series 1 with Eccleston, when Captain Jack is telling the Doctor goodbye, well... you know, Doctor Who shouldn't bring me to tears, but it did.
One that I personally did not cry at, but which I have heard many a stories of grown men crying about, the episode of Futurama in which Fry's dog Seymour is shown at the end dutifully waiting for Fry to return... and he never returns.
I'm A Cyborg, But That's Ok brought me to tears numerous times. That is an amazingly precious film.
During a recent massive fuck up on the server side of things, several of our individual email addresses were redirected to distribution list. Yep.
So, Joe Bagodonuts sends our an email to someone he has sent out email to before a jillion times in the past and BAM! The email is sent to an almost campus-wide distribution list. Thousands of people. Did I mention it had patient data in it? Ow. That email went out on Friday afternoon around 4 PM. I promptly ignored it and deleted it.
Monday morning around 9 AM he sent a recall. Uh. Yeah, I admit it. I laughed. I mean, poor guy, it wasn't his fault and all, but come on. 9 AM Monday morning recall of Friday 4 PM email that went to thousands of people? You really should have called the service desk first thing after you found out what happened. They would not have suggested sending a recall for one thing, they would have just turned your call over to the security group and you would have dealt with it like any other breach. The upside is that is was one person's information in the email sent to thousands of employees who know how much trouble they can get in when shit like that happens, so most of them deleted it immediately.
I freak out the neighbourhood kids by drinking out of the garden hose. I'm super-educated, I'm smarter than Spock.
LOGIC DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY! [/Morobo]
-----
Tap water here. San Francisco's tap water is much better than anything out of any bottle. I do buy club soda, though, since I enjoy fizzy water every now and again.
jb - I think the expose you might be thinking of is an episode of Penn & Teller's Bullshit! in which they send off tap water for analysis and find that it has much higher levels of arsenic and other things than the tap water. They also do some man-on-the-street tap water taste test in NYC and nearly everyone picks the tap water as tasting better.
A lot of this falls under the "If you pay for it, then it really is better to you." psychological rule. This post at Mind Hacks links to two studies, one showing that simply describing a wine as more expensive results in people saying it taste better and the other one showing that people value advice they pay for over free advice even when they know the sources are providing identical advice.
That's my theory on bottled water, really. If you pay for then it MUST be better? Right? RIGHT?!
I have probably one of the last mass manufactured clicky keyboards that Dell made, and it has been rarely used (it was never put out in the field) so I have that as part of my personal collection. Sooooo.... clicky.
BlueHorse - I am right handed and left hand mouse, but I don't switch the keys. :) You'd hate mine more than even anyone else's. The hardest computers for me to use are left-handed configured mice setups because I use my own left hand and leave the mouse in standard configuration. My job involves often sitting down to other people's computer's though, so I roll with the punches.
This article does enlighten me on the reality of why people don't like certain keyboards as opposed to the psychological perceptions people have about why they don't like them. Keyboards are one of those things that people have zero vocabulary about (myself included) so when they complain they only can focus on what they see with their eyes that is obvious. Thus width of keys becomes the biggest issue that people complain about. The result is that people complain about laptop keyboards as being "too small" while in reality those keys are often a slightly big larger than regular keyboard keys.
I was always bemused by everyone's reaction to the old iMac keyboards as well, due to this same reaction. "It's too small!" Of course, it turns out that the keyboard was identical in size to any standard keyboard when it came to the vast majority of the keys on the keyboard. Yes, the function keys were smaller and the arrow keys we smaller, but it was entirely a full size keyboard when it otherwise came to the keys. But psychologically, it didn't matter. People just have an idea in their head about "size" for keyboards that they really aren't cognizant about. I always liked my old Grape iMac's small keyboard. I appreciated it for exactly what it set out to do: give you more space on your desk.
As it stands, right now I still use a G5 tower, so I still use the keyboard that came with it (and I have a backup).
I mean, seriously... wow and double fucking wow. Imagine being the photographer. It's probably the single most memorable thing in his life.
"What about when I was born, daddy?"
"Not even close."
Well, you know, as innocuous as drunken college boys passing out and drowning can seem. I think "accidental" was work I really wanted to use there. It's early. *sips coffee* Better vocabulary later.
I inhabit the city by the bay, not the one by the lake. Although, I am a frequent visitor to the city by the lake (and have plans to move there at some point) and keep up with Chicago news, thus my finding the whole mess a bit head scratching. All of those things separate DO seem incredibly innocuous, but when you pull them all together it does have a pattern that seems suspicious.
Because nothing says "I love you!" like a piece of jewelry that used to say "I love you!" and now says "I loved you? Hoo boy! What was I thinking? What were YOU thinking?"
You could push the content of that page to another site called "CURSED TOKENS OF AFFECTION".
Wow, so many great ones.
Here are some of mine that as far I can tell don't duplicate what has already been posted.
Slow Wave - C comic generated by a guy taking suggestions from readers about the dreams they had.
VG Cats - Video Game Cats - cartoon carts with many references to new video games, old video games, and a few movie references.
Bob The Angry Flower - Our favorite apostrophe fascist in his own strip.
Natalie Dee - Surreal one panel strips.
PvP Online - a sort of old school brethren to Penny Arcade (a friendly rivalry exist between the two strips).
Overcompensating - Jeffery Rowland's true to life honest to god real things happening to him five days a week. I love this comic. Probably my favorite in my rotation at the moment.
Wulffmorgenthaler - I think these guys are Dutch, but not sure, but they do a great surreal and bloody violent strip yet also funny.
Octopus Pie - If you have the aforementioned Questionable Content in your rotation already, this is a good sister comic to it. It is a little more "serious" in the stories, but nothing really deep. It's largely about a chick who is sort of a misanthropic pessimist living among a lot of hipsters in Brooklyn and trying to figure out exactly why she's doing that. Great artwork.
Beaver and Steve The surreal adventures of ass hole dinosaur lizard thing Steve and poor, misguided Beaver. Sometimes funny, sometimes NOT.
Too Much Coffee Man - The venerable classic TMCM online.
Subnormality - Great, detailed colored art. The comic itself overlaps a lot of weird things, but I have found it largely worthwhile.
Kawai Not - Cute, anime-esque inanimate objects making comments about how they aren't that cute.
MSBC's photo round up of 2008 celebs that died: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28113372/displaymode/1107/s/2/
posted by smallerdemon 15 years ago
In "If you can't say something nice"
I have nice things to say about McCain, honestly. Sadly, I am so disillusioned at how he has let his campaign be handled and the fact that is has resulted in some conservatives turning into gleefully willful ignoramuses and hate filled people that themselves can say nothing positive about anyone that does not agree with them that I no longer feel I want to say anything positive about McCain. I find myself quite saddened by that. I want to be a better person than that, and I am so filled with despair when I see the stories and the videos of the wild eyed "supporters" of McCain (really they would side with anyone that was running against whatever it is they think is going to destroy them today) that I don't think there is anything good to say about him at this moment. I hope that post-election is kinder to him than the election has been, and I hope he can become a kinder person in turn. Yet, I am unable to forgive him for fanning the flames of ignorance, racism and xenophobia simply to achieve a thing for himself instead of achieve that thing for the good of the country that he wants to represent.
posted by smallerdemon 15 years ago
In "Creationists declare war over the brain."
I am reminded of something... ah, yes... Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God. The argument goes something like this: "I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing." "But," says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves that you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. Q.E.D." "Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic. "Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing. Most leading theologians claim that this argument is a load of dingo's kidneys, but that didn't stop Oolon Colluphid from making a fortune with his book Well That About Wraps It Up For God. I have always thought that the best argument against gods are the people that believe in them.
posted by smallerdemon 15 years ago
In "Curious George softly weeps."
I remembered today one movie that makes me cry every time: Chasing Amy. At the end of Chasing Amy when Holden just waves at Alyssa and she waves back when he is leaving the comic con. Damn, I mean, EVERY time. Did I mention I went to see that with my wife the day we got married, like right after the ceremony. :) In 2004 we went to Kevin Smith's Vulgarthon down in LA at the Cinerama and he showed it there and again, waterworks. Fuckin' Smith. It was nice, though, that at the end of that Q&A for it this guy asked his girlfriend to marry him. It was very sweet. (And what was so funny was how misty eyed Ben Affleck look at that too. That guy is a sucker for romantic shit apparently, and we saw him later hugging and chatting with the couple.)
posted by smallerdemon 15 years ago
In "Rocky Horror Picture Show remake imminent."
Personally, I wish they would just buck up and do it the right way for a remake: reverse all the gender roles. Make Frank a girl in butch drag. Make Janet the sort of uptight nerd and Brad the sexually repressed one that discovers he likes strong women. Make Rocky a female. Just reverse EVERY gender in the movie and let it fly. If you're going to fuck with it, at least try to fuck with it in a way that would make it interesting to watch. I mean, otherwise, knowing their intentions at the moment, "interesting to watch" ain't gonna be the result. Hm. I will have to think who I would cast in my reverse gender RHPS.
posted by smallerdemon 15 years ago
In "Curious George softly weeps."
There's a scene in The Happiness Of The Katakuris when they are all walking back as a whole family burying yet another dead customer of their bed and breakfast that I almost always tear up at too. The whole idea about that's what makes up a family is just really a big tear jerker to me. muteboy... you bastard! *sniff* The last episode of SPACED... Don't forget, also... Monkey died, everybody cry. King Kong. :( I also teared up at the last episode of MST3K when Mike, Crow and Tom sit down to watch TV and The Crawling Eye comes up. The movie CQ kind of makes me tear up a bit too in various places. Bubba Ho-Tep makes me tear up too. That's like one of the best fucking buddy movies ever made. If you haven't seen it, then you don't deserve the penis you have.
posted by smallerdemon 15 years ago
In the Doctor Who series 1 with Eccleston, when Captain Jack is telling the Doctor goodbye, well... you know, Doctor Who shouldn't bring me to tears, but it did. One that I personally did not cry at, but which I have heard many a stories of grown men crying about, the episode of Futurama in which Fry's dog Seymour is shown at the end dutifully waiting for Fry to return... and he never returns. I'm A Cyborg, But That's Ok brought me to tears numerous times. That is an amazingly precious film.
posted by smallerdemon 15 years ago
In "Curious George: What the hey?"
Of course they wouldn't sign a piece of paper. They were wiping their tushes with paper.
posted by smallerdemon 15 years ago
In "email recall"
During a recent massive fuck up on the server side of things, several of our individual email addresses were redirected to distribution list. Yep. So, Joe Bagodonuts sends our an email to someone he has sent out email to before a jillion times in the past and BAM! The email is sent to an almost campus-wide distribution list. Thousands of people. Did I mention it had patient data in it? Ow. That email went out on Friday afternoon around 4 PM. I promptly ignored it and deleted it. Monday morning around 9 AM he sent a recall. Uh. Yeah, I admit it. I laughed. I mean, poor guy, it wasn't his fault and all, but come on. 9 AM Monday morning recall of Friday 4 PM email that went to thousands of people? You really should have called the service desk first thing after you found out what happened. They would not have suggested sending a recall for one thing, they would have just turned your call over to the security group and you would have dealt with it like any other breach. The upside is that is was one person's information in the email sent to thousands of employees who know how much trouble they can get in when shit like that happens, so most of them deleted it immediately.
posted by smallerdemon 15 years ago
In "Bottle or tap?"
I freak out the neighbourhood kids by drinking out of the garden hose. I'm super-educated, I'm smarter than Spock. LOGIC DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY! [/Morobo] ----- Tap water here. San Francisco's tap water is much better than anything out of any bottle. I do buy club soda, though, since I enjoy fizzy water every now and again. jb - I think the expose you might be thinking of is an episode of Penn & Teller's Bullshit! in which they send off tap water for analysis and find that it has much higher levels of arsenic and other things than the tap water. They also do some man-on-the-street tap water taste test in NYC and nearly everyone picks the tap water as tasting better. A lot of this falls under the "If you pay for it, then it really is better to you." psychological rule. This post at Mind Hacks links to two studies, one showing that simply describing a wine as more expensive results in people saying it taste better and the other one showing that people value advice they pay for over free advice even when they know the sources are providing identical advice. That's my theory on bottled water, really. If you pay for then it MUST be better? Right? RIGHT?!
posted by smallerdemon 15 years ago
In "The science of keyboard design. "
I have probably one of the last mass manufactured clicky keyboards that Dell made, and it has been rarely used (it was never put out in the field) so I have that as part of my personal collection. Sooooo.... clicky. BlueHorse - I am right handed and left hand mouse, but I don't switch the keys. :) You'd hate mine more than even anyone else's. The hardest computers for me to use are left-handed configured mice setups because I use my own left hand and leave the mouse in standard configuration. My job involves often sitting down to other people's computer's though, so I roll with the punches. This article does enlighten me on the reality of why people don't like certain keyboards as opposed to the psychological perceptions people have about why they don't like them. Keyboards are one of those things that people have zero vocabulary about (myself included) so when they complain they only can focus on what they see with their eyes that is obvious. Thus width of keys becomes the biggest issue that people complain about. The result is that people complain about laptop keyboards as being "too small" while in reality those keys are often a slightly big larger than regular keyboard keys. I was always bemused by everyone's reaction to the old iMac keyboards as well, due to this same reaction. "It's too small!" Of course, it turns out that the keyboard was identical in size to any standard keyboard when it came to the vast majority of the keys on the keyboard. Yes, the function keys were smaller and the arrow keys we smaller, but it was entirely a full size keyboard when it otherwise came to the keys. But psychologically, it didn't matter. People just have an idea in their head about "size" for keyboards that they really aren't cognizant about. I always liked my old Grape iMac's small keyboard. I appreciated it for exactly what it set out to do: give you more space on your desk. As it stands, right now I still use a G5 tower, so I still use the keyboard that came with it (and I have a backup).
posted by smallerdemon 15 years ago
In "I Has A Sweet Potato!"
I could barely read it at the end because my eyes were full of tears.
posted by smallerdemon 15 years ago
In "The Chaitén volcano in Chile"
I mean, seriously... wow and double fucking wow. Imagine being the photographer. It's probably the single most memorable thing in his life. "What about when I was born, daddy?" "Not even close."
posted by smallerdemon 15 years ago
In ""A college student was last seen having a night on the town. "
Well, you know, as innocuous as drunken college boys passing out and drowning can seem. I think "accidental" was work I really wanted to use there. It's early. *sips coffee* Better vocabulary later.
posted by smallerdemon 15 years ago
I inhabit the city by the bay, not the one by the lake. Although, I am a frequent visitor to the city by the lake (and have plans to move there at some point) and keep up with Chicago news, thus my finding the whole mess a bit head scratching. All of those things separate DO seem incredibly innocuous, but when you pull them all together it does have a pattern that seems suspicious.
posted by smallerdemon 15 years ago
In "You don't want it,"
*heh* That poor woman looks awfully... uh... masculine.
posted by smallerdemon 15 years ago
Because nothing says "I love you!" like a piece of jewelry that used to say "I love you!" and now says "I loved you? Hoo boy! What was I thinking? What were YOU thinking?" You could push the content of that page to another site called "CURSED TOKENS OF AFFECTION".
posted by smallerdemon 15 years ago
In "monkey want comix"
Wow, so many great ones. Here are some of mine that as far I can tell don't duplicate what has already been posted. Slow Wave - C comic generated by a guy taking suggestions from readers about the dreams they had. VG Cats - Video Game Cats - cartoon carts with many references to new video games, old video games, and a few movie references. Bob The Angry Flower - Our favorite apostrophe fascist in his own strip. Natalie Dee - Surreal one panel strips. PvP Online - a sort of old school brethren to Penny Arcade (a friendly rivalry exist between the two strips). Overcompensating - Jeffery Rowland's true to life honest to god real things happening to him five days a week. I love this comic. Probably my favorite in my rotation at the moment. Wulffmorgenthaler - I think these guys are Dutch, but not sure, but they do a great surreal and bloody violent strip yet also funny. Octopus Pie - If you have the aforementioned Questionable Content in your rotation already, this is a good sister comic to it. It is a little more "serious" in the stories, but nothing really deep. It's largely about a chick who is sort of a misanthropic pessimist living among a lot of hipsters in Brooklyn and trying to figure out exactly why she's doing that. Great artwork. Beaver and Steve The surreal adventures of ass hole dinosaur lizard thing Steve and poor, misguided Beaver. Sometimes funny, sometimes NOT. Too Much Coffee Man - The venerable classic TMCM online. Subnormality - Great, detailed colored art. The comic itself overlaps a lot of weird things, but I have found it largely worthwhile. Kawai Not - Cute, anime-esque inanimate objects making comments about how they aren't that cute.
posted by smallerdemon 15 years ago
In "The Lesson: Don't Eat the Feet"
Noting to not eat anything that can possibly slice through my throat and then cause me to bleed to death. My razor souffle is sadly out.
posted by smallerdemon 15 years ago
In "An Editorial in Biological Psychiatry "
"I would like to present a few well reasoned objections against your emotional responses to my work. Because that always works."
posted by smallerdemon 16 years ago
(limited to the most recent 20 comments)