"Marriage is a great institution, but I'm not ready for an institution yet." - Mae West

Random Playlist Song: Kumi Sasaki - JIKU ~ Mirai Sentai Timeranger

Go over time and space...

Beyond the future, ride on the future
Live on my dream, live on my soul

(Full lyrics)

This is the only Sentai theme I've heard so far that I've liked. Well, the DaiRanger one is okay, but doesn't really have that oomph.

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KOTOR 2 (PC) Shipped to Stores

"Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords for the PC has officially shipped and will slash its way into stores on February 10, 2005. The highly anticipated next chapter successfully launched December 6, 2004 on Xbox.

The Sith Lords picks up five years after the events of the original KOTOR and features an all-new perilous storyline, as well as new characters, classes, locations and force powers.

The PC version features high-resolution textures, optimized screen resolutions and a variety of other graphic card enhancements."

Woo hoo!

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When I was younger I hated going to weddings... it seemed that all of my aunts and the grandmotherly types used to come up to me, poking me in the ribs and cackling, telling me, 'You're next.'

They stopped that crap after I started doing the same thing to them at funerals.

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Yes! I finally got 10/10 correct playing the game Fake Or Not.com.

And Blogger's upgraded its comments and post editing infrastructures. Maybe I'll finally get down to restoring my army stories from Dec 2001 - Dec 2002.

Meanwhile, you can download Fabled Lands 1, 3, 4 and 6 from the fabled_lands Yahoo Group!

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Me: are they screwed up girls?

Someone: aiyoh you have to define screwed up
to me it sounds like prostitutes


wth?!


Someone: tell them i'm 16. i look the part.
seriously. it's a terrible curse.

Me: heh it's good to be young

Someone: only if you want to date underaged girls

***

What style of online writing annoys you most?

a) It gt 2 b dis typ: cuz it showz dat dey is fik
b) ThIs TyPe: It JuSt LoOkS sTuPiD..
c) ALL CAPITALS: THE STYLE OF THE ATTENTION SEEKER!
d) Consistent proper English: We are not at school!


It's a toss-up between a) and b)

***

Salon has a very interesting interview with "Ruben Bolling", the mystery man behind the comic strip "Tom the Dancing Bug" (which sometimes is too wacky and weird even for me, and that's saying something).

"Interviewer: Personally, I love the God-Man strips. They're silly and subversive.

Interviewee: While that is also quite popular, God-Man gets very negative reactions -- more than any other character, in fact. People seem to take offense to any comments about religion. It's sort of ironic because these same people wonder why there is very little discussion of religion in American culture, but when I introduce the subject, their tendency is to want to shut it down. They seem to miss the point: God-Man isn't actually God. He is a straw man that I'm using to make fun of some people's very simplistic views about religion and philosophy. They literally forget that and think that I'm offending God Himself with these strips."

I agree with the interviewer about the best strip, though: The Humane Foie Gras Farm, of which a transcript follows:

FOIE GRAS! That quintessential gourment treat has only one drawback -- the nasty ethical aftertaste of knowing it's made from the distended livers of ducks and geese that have had pneumatic tubes repeatedly rammed down their esophagus, mechanically pumping them full of corn paste.

At the Humane Foie Gras Farm, we induce obesity in our ducks not through brute force, but by simply giving them the lifestyle and privileges we all enjoy as Americans!

Every Sunday, our ducks are seated in LA-Z-Boy chairs to watch hours of TV, surrounded by a dizzying array of cheese products, starch products, and cheese-filled starch products!

Five days a week, our ducks are rendered sedentary in small cubicles, where the only food available in the short breaks allowed them are from snack machines and fast food outlets!

Meals are presented to our ducks in obscenely huge portions, squeezed in next to densely caloric side dishes, super-sized, value-packed and all-you-can-eat gluttonized!

Finally, our ducks are subjected to work and family stress so severe, they find themselves alone in the kitchen at 4 A.M., stuffing peanut butter sandwiches down their throats!

The FOIE GRAS IS SUBLIME, AND YOU CAN ENJOY IT KNOWING IT WAS CULTIVATES IN THE MOST HUMANE -- INDEED, HUMAN -- WAY POSSIBLE!

Duck: Uh... Actually, we'd prefer the pneumatic tube.

***

New Scientist Senses special: The art of seeing without sight

"The painter is Esref Armagan. And he is here in Boston to see if a peek inside his brain can explain how a man who has never seen can paint pictures that the sighted easily recognise - and even admire. He paints houses and mountains and lakes and faces and butterflies, but he's never seen any of these things. He depicts colour, shadow and perspective, but it is not clear how he could have witnessed these things either. How does he do it?

Because if Armagan can represent images in the same way a sighted person can, it raises big questions not only about how our brains construct mental images, but also about the role those images play in seeing. Do we build up mental images using just our eyes or do other senses contribute too? How much can congenitally blind people really understand about space and the layout of objects within it? How much "seeing" does a blind person actually do?"

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Secular vs. Sacred, Universal vs. Multicultural

"A tolerant society is an open and vigorous one, not a closed and stifled society; not one in which you tolerate absurdities, violence and injustices because they are being perpetrated by a religion. In a tolerant society criticism and opposing views are allowed. Is a society tolerant in which in the name of respecting religion and culture, it is not allowed to say or write things which, followers of this or that religion, do not want to hear or to read? And when it is vital to question and to criticise any kind of religion and religious ideas and practices, there are attempts to silence you?

... If the government really wants to create religious harmony and a tolerant society, it should abolish all religious schools, and de-religionise the legal and educational system and the public life. But what they are striving for is to place religion in a realm beyond ordinary argument, and give it an upper hand, and it is happening now."

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The Naturalistic Fallacy and Sophie’s Choice - "Genetically modified food, cloning, sustainable development, and pollution are some of the issues that today demand expedited answers and entail making difficult choices. Should we preserve nature or procure human development? Should we increase our control or reduce it? Do we have the right to change nature? However, some of these questions and their possible answers are driven by the naturalistic fallacy, the belief that nature is essentially good. Many of the fears and misconceptions shaping our options and influencing our choices are by-products of this fallacy. From our distrust of artificial things to the fear of tampering with the natural order, the following are some of the most common distortions behind the human vs. nature debate."

Discovery Phase - "The Discovery Institute made a key tactical error. Somehow, a document that seems to bare the true soul of the institute leaked onto the Web. You can read it here, with Discovery's gloss on it. Unfortunately, not even the most consummate rhetorician could explain away lines like, "Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions." Once it lets its guard down, anti-evolutionism hasn't changed a bit."

How to play the French service game ... and win - - "What I've learnt in 11 years of living in France is that getting good service here is anything but a divine right. It's like learning to play a computer game. You've got to press the right buttons or it will be game over before you have had a chance to buy a single croissant."

Retro Find 1.0 - "Using the diff provided in this thread on MozillaZine's forums, I was able to construct a rudimentary extension that reverts the find bar in Firefox to its original find dialog."
In the words of idbehold: "HOLY SH!T I LOVE YOU, I LOVE YOU, I LOVE YOU, I LOVE YOU, I LOVE YOU, I LOVE YOU, I LOVE YOU, You put all mozilla devs to shame with your extension alone. This has to be the best thing since sliced bread, I LOVE YOU!"

Ilios - The Iliad, Manga style. Noooooo...