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| Sunday, October 12th, 2008 | | 1:13 am |
Blizzcon!
Blizzcon, Wheee! Just finished, didn't take a camera because I forgot (idiot!) so all I have is a bunch of blurry god-awful cellphone pics. Most notable is Will, but suffice to say I was there and it was a crazy-awesome blast. It had more than twice as much to do as last year, all three Blizzard games were playable there, and had about three times as much free swag as last year. Everyone's favorite were the light-up yo-yos from the Vasco authenticator booth, everyone was playing with them everywhere. There were three huuuge halls this year and they were chock-full of cool, high-intensity things to do and see. We watched a 3-D Figureprint being printed, checked out all the new games, watched tons of competitive pvp matches in action (surprisingly awesome - the knowledgable commentators really help you follow the action). Of course they had all sorts of art and figure kiosks to check out containing tons of concept art and actual production art used in the games. Last year's con was a little dry on stuff to do and see, but this one was an overload. They really pulled out all the stops, and there was way too much to see in just two days. The closing ceremonies were in Hall C this time - they had to be, all 15,000 people were there. We watched Patton Oswalt, the guy who voiced Remy the Rat in Ratatouille - who, it turns out, is an extremely talented comedian with tons and tons of nerdish jokes. He was really really funny, and about a third of his jokes were pure improv, such as the blue giggling elf girl who will haunt his nightmares from now on, and the disapproving minnesotan who will be in his mind's eye at every audition forever after. Then Level 80 Elite Tauren Chieftain took the stage, and they rocked hardcore, introducing a really good Death Knight song and a really silly song based on Diablo III's Diablo. Then Video Games Live took the stage, and we got to see a full live orchestra perform choice music from Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo, including the theme from Wrath of the Lich King performed live for the first time anywhere. ( Pics inside ) | | Thursday, September 25th, 2008 | | 9:55 am |
40
The big four zero. Me. Today. The graphics guy says I look 20. I was born on 9/25/1968 I'm either one of the last boomers or one of the very first X'ers. Even people my age seem old to me though, their mental processes mired down in conventions and preconceptions of another age. So few of them even fully realize what's going on right now, let alone what's coming soon. Meh, clean living and good genes I guess. My family is generally very long-lived. | | Wednesday, August 27th, 2008 | | 10:44 pm |
Blizzcon Tickies!
Well, we were pretty disappointed earlier this month when the Blizzcon tickets sold out before we could buy them despite taking shifts on the computers to watch for the site opening up. Unfortunately we completely missed the random eight minute window in which Blizzard sold all 12,000 tickets... in eight minutes. Sometime between 12:40 and 12:48, so I understand. So we were REALLY bummed out and seriously sad and angry, but then Blizzard announced that they were so upset about screwing up so bad that they would purposefully make space for 1,500 more Blizzcon attendees to be given away to people who already had an account on their store before the ticket debacle. Well it just so happens that we had an account there ahead of time, so we opted into the contest just in case. You have to realize that these tickets have a street value of over $1500 each (or at least that's what scalpers are trying to sell them for despite Blizzard's efforts to squash them). So probably between 20,000 to 30,000 other disappointed people also opted into the contest for the chance to get Blizzcon tickets. Well, WE WON! So we're going to Blizzcon after all! I checked it over carefully, we absolutely have a perfectly legit email from blizzard.com announcing that we now have the right to buy two (2) Blizzcon tickets. We're one of 1,500 people selected to be allowed to buy Blizzcon tickets out of the tens of thousands that applied. I have to think that they looked at our registered accounts and noticed that we've both been playing the game since launch. We're going to Blizz-con! We're going to Blizz-con! Nyah nyah nyah! Hehe, lol. We're happy as clams now. I heard a rumor that Mike Morhaime will be handing out these tickets himself to ensure they can't be scalped, so that would be pretty cool. We'll see :) It's obvious that he felt awful about the ticket selling debacle and all the people who couldn't get in. Current Mood:  jubilant | | Monday, August 25th, 2008 | | 9:49 am |
Weekend
Spent all weekend working on the sailboat, repainting the keel, working on the outboard motor, washing the underside to get rid of all the grit and dirt down there. I wanted to go sailing, but there was just no way I was going to make it this weekend :( The toughest part was washing the underside of the boat, since I had to prop myself on the bars of the trailer and scrub with acid just inches from my face. The bottom of the boat has to be squeaky-clean and smooth to the touch so that it will pass inspection to get into local lakes. They're really careful about getting infected with Quagga Mussels and such, so you have to have a nice smooth-hulled boat to get on the water. The good news is the outboard motor is running now. The impeller was bad where it pumps the water up to cool the motor. I couldn't find the exact right part, but I found something "good enough" and I'll just see about ordering the original part later. It definitely works for now though, so the outboard motor is all good. The only thing left to do is re-mount the keel on the boat and wait for next weekend to go sailing again. Hopefully there will be some wind at Lake Piru next weekend. | | Sunday, August 10th, 2008 | | 10:00 pm |
Sailing
Went sailing today, but by the time we finished fixing the last-minute stuff it was pretty late after all. BUT we got in at least 2 hours of nice sailing, mostly floundering around trying to avoid sharp rocks and marina buoys, lol. We didn't have an outboard because there's apparently a problem with the one my Dad was going to lend me, so it's a project to get fixed pretty soon so it will make getting out of dock a lot easier. Sailing a sailboat under sail directly from the dock and into open water when the wind is blowing directly into your face is NOT an easy task, hehe, but we managed it with the help of a helpful onlooker who shouted instructions about what to do, lol. Instructions that turned out to be pretty smart in the end, since we successfully tacked like 20 times in the tiny marina dock area without crashing and sinking and finally got out into the just-slightly larger marina area. The wind was a big problem too, since the breakwater blocked it out of our sails whenever we got too close to the right side of the channel. The left side was sharp rocks, so we only moved really well when we were close to danger, hehe. So, things to fix, the keel bushings need to be checked because the rudder kept clunking from side to side in the waves, so it must be a bit worn out. Also, we discovered that the handle to crank down the keel that we'd gotten with the boat was actually the wrong handle and we finally had to use a screwdriver to slowly unwind the keel... which failed and the keel fell, lol, but other than the THUD there were no ill effects. We only sailed with one sail, so we were a bit underpowered, for sure, so next time we'll have the jib and a better mainsail and I'll fix a billion smaller things on the boat that I'd missed the first time around. And next time we'll float it in a lake (probably Lake Piru) so we'll have more room to yacht around in. When it caught the wind, the little boat moved very nicely, and everyone had fun. | | Saturday, August 9th, 2008 | | 12:38 am |
Distractions
I am distracting myself with my newfound sailing obsession. Last week my Dad donated an ancient (1962 or so) Vagabond 17 to me, he bought it for $300 when it was going to be junked and it's been sitting in his yard for the last two years. Fiberglass apparently lasts forever, unlike love, lol. Here it is!   So it needs sails and some minor fixit work, but fortunately my Dad also has some sails that we can cut down to size and sew up. I wangled a sewing machine, so tomorrow is sailmaking day, hehe. Everything else is perfect on the boat except most of the wood panels are gone/rotted away, so I'll also replace those eventually. There's a good chance it will be ready for the water tomorrow or sunday! In other news, I'm not really feeling better yet. I think it's going to take a while. I'm hoping that some new experiences will help bury it a little, so I'm aggressively moving forward with this project. I've never sailed a day in my life, so it will definitely be a new experience. | | Friday, August 1st, 2008 | | 3:23 pm |
To beta or not to beta
Bunny has invoked his beta key from Blizzcon to get into the Wrath of the Lich king Beta test. I haven't been too interested in World of Warcraft (WoW) lately because I've been trying to work on my art. But still, it's very tempting to invoke my own beta key and try it out. I probably will at some point. Current Mood:  listless | | Monday, November 12th, 2007 | | 1:39 pm |
| | Friday, November 2nd, 2007 | | 5:33 pm |
WANT TO CHANGE THE WORLD?
...It's easy! Invent something new that makes people money. There! You've changed the world. Basically, someone will be doing that thing to make money forever until it becomes obsolete and stops making money. But you've made your mark! Economics guarantees that as long as your product or process or service makes money against the tide of competition, someone will be exercising your invention to produce cash. It's economic immortality (or at least a greatly extended lifespan). | | 12:06 pm |
Symbiosis of critic and artist
The critic and the artist, the observer and the quantum particle. I'm a lot like a critic. I know I have powerful creative potential, but I often ignore it because I know that it would take a lot of work to bring it to life and I'm a lazy person. I tell myself with some justification that creation and observation are two necessary halves of the same whole, that I enjoy the appreciation of other people's creative work and this is a necessary and worthy contribution to the ecology of art. This is all true of course, or I wouldn't believe it. But the critic is fooling himself, aided and abetted by his laziness. The critic judges art based on an internal vision of perfection in the concept being observed. He sees how it differs from his internal vision of perfection and marks it on the scale accordingly. But if the critic brought his vision to life, he would no longer be a critic, but a creator. Well, the thing is, the conclusion here, is that he should. He should bring his vision to life. The critic is a creator that hasn't bothered to blossom, who throws his energies into the objectification of other work rather than the instantiation of his own. No wonder artists prefer the company of other artists! Artists crave the criticism of those who are subject to their own in return because they know that the critic is coming from a foundation of personal vision which can be seen and manifest in the critic's own art. One may well outlaw criticism except by peers. I need to develop my art more. I have just realized that I haven't the right to feel that I truly appreciate the work of others unless I can contribute on an equal footing. | | Thursday, October 18th, 2007 | | 10:41 am |
Insights about the Semantic Web
Some insights about the Semantic Web: As I understand it, the Semantic web is basically an internet where for every page on the web, there's also a crapload of additional data layered on top of it that provides context and relevance. In fact, there could be waaaay more context and relevance data in a webpage than actual data on the page. This is a lot like memories in your head: Every memory, no matter how insignificant, is connected in some way with a family of concepts, which is what you use to find the memory when you want to use it. Say you're thinking about summer days, and contained in summer days are a bunch of memories of actual summer days, as well as stuff like "hot" and "dry" and "muggy" and "nice smells" and whatever else you associate with your experience of "summer days". Each of these concepts leads to their OWN raft of memories and after a few seconds of thinking about "Summer days" you might find yourself drifting off to memories of apple orchards or water slides or whatever else you're interested about in connection with the original memory. Building the web like this would make it a lot easier to find stuff you're looking for, because the concepts would chain together in logical structures according to relevance. The thing is, this contextual info can actually be way more information than the actual objects it carries, so efficiency really matters. Consolidating memories happens all the time, and the context web is super-efficient. But basically your brain has to be more than twice as active than it would normally take to process the actual data held in it. It has a huge informational overhead for every actual memory you've got stuck inside your cranium. This is probably why attempts at building artificial intelligence have failed, because the context web has been too thin for each one. A computer contemplates a block, but it doesn't get the flood of contextual info that would inform a baby contemplating the same block. Hell, it even has trouble identifying the block, so we know we've got a ways to go here. If it DID get a context flood, you would see the computer playing with the block in the same way a baby might, because the computer would have so much contextual info associated with the block that it wouldn't know what to do with it all, so it might just fiddle around with it until something interesting happened. This is why babies play with toys: they are looking for interesting permutations of their contextual web by putting the object into new relationships. If a computer started spontaneously playing with the toy in the same way, you'd know that you were close to something that could think, if you could only scale that introductory context web up until the computer had advanced context webs for extreme concepts like words and stock options. Artificial intelligence fails because the context web density and efficiency for any system that's ever been made has fallen far short of true intelligence. The context web needs to be geometically more dense than the concepts embedded in it, and computers just aren't up to the task yet. Your brain makes it look easy, but it has all sorts of cool tricks that we know nothing about. But I digress. The semantic web is an attempt to bring the same kind of thing to the internet, so that companies like Google will eventually be obsolete, or mostly obsolete. An internet where you put in a concept like "rubber" and you get back a torrent of other concepts from tires to latex fetishism, then you pick the one you want to follow and off you go until you find what you're looking for. Google tries to do this, but if fails miserably because it tries to shortcut the task to one inference and an instant result. And, frighteningly, the web is just too damn big. Google could choke itself trying to provide contextual info on every page inside it. The semantic web is an attempt to offload the whole task onto the web itself so that each page knows what it's about and what it relates to and can provide that info without Google trying to do everything in one location. So basically we're trying to turn the internet into a big brain so that we can find stuff easier. When it gets done, creativity and productivity will explode because you'll be able to put in something like "asian fighting kite designs" and miraculously discover that there's a little old lady six blocks over from your house who is ALSO interested in asian fighting kite designs and would be happy to show you her collection and talk about it with you. So everybody becomes more productive at everything. I think it's a pretty cool vision. | | Tuesday, October 16th, 2007 | | 11:33 am |
Upgrading the World
I wrote this as a comment about a post on Digg about Ray Kurzweil and I think it went to a surprising place (for me) so I'm going to repost it here: Maybe Kurzweil really is brilliant, in fact, probably. But 90% of what you read about him (and the future) is hype. The stuff that he's saying is just a slightly better-informed version of the 50's utopia, the debunked "tomorrowland" of gleaming rocket ships and men with antennae on their head. The fact is, most of what he's saying is also being said by many other people, and in fact has been available in fiction and online for decades. Don't attribute it to Kurzweil or anyone else specifically - it's kind of a homegrown image of the future that everyone has come up with together. From Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash, Diamond Age) to Vernor Vinge (Peace War, Rainbows End), a lot of people have contributed to the vision of the future. Fortunately, I think it's pretty accurate. But the question is, when? Not decades, or at least, not less than 5-6 decades. Probably we'll have the easy stuff (wearable computers, interactive real-world VR, collaborative content economy) within ten years or so, maybe a little more or less. The harder stuff will take 20-40 years or more, such as basic medical nanotechnology and other nanotech applications. The thing is, the industrialized world is just a tiny tiny fraction of the possible intellectual output of the planet. We have more than SIX BILLION people on this Earth, but only about a billion of them are in a position to become educated enough to work in an advanced field (or do anything more than survive, really), and of those billions, only a few tens of millions actually DO interact on the high end of technology to contribute to building these miracles. These are the people like open-source software writers, people at Google, people contributing meaningfully to Wikipedia, and all the myriad materials scientists, mathematicians, physicists, engineers, doctors and informed laymen who contribute in little ways to the whole information ecology. Me writing this, that's interacting in a meaningful way with the information ecology, which is what 84% of the planet DOESN'T because they're too busy wondering where clean water or edible food is going to come from, or a house to keep the vermin out. We need to raise the level of the planet's information ecology if we want to see these miracles. We need to upgrade the third world into where we are today. | | Friday, October 12th, 2007 | | 4:37 pm |
A Hunter S. Thompson you never knew.
This is an interesting and revealing note about Hunter S. Thompson (the guy who wrote "Hell's Angels", "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" and other extremely influential stuff) Everyone always thought he was a drugged out drunkard, but his wife says he actually worked incredibly hard and did strong research for all of his books. Oh, and by they way, they apparently had a very happy relationship with an incredible age difference: he was 67 when he died, she was 32 then (that was about 2 years ago). http://www.cnn.com/2007/SHOWBIZ/books/10/12/the.gonzo.way.ap/index.html | | Wednesday, October 10th, 2007 | | 4:52 pm |
Huey Long & American Fascism?
I've been reading randomly about Huey Long in his wikipedia entry (I was looking for funny filibuster stories) and it's some pretty shocking stuff. Here's this ultimate democrat people's politician who wanted nothing more than to take from the rich and give to the poor... and yet he assembled an insanely scary political machine that gave him near-dictatorial powers in Louisiana. If he had made it to the presidency, he would have turned America into a Fascist nation... with the best of intentions. Scary stuff. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huey_Long | | Friday, September 28th, 2007 | | 6:35 pm |
Interesting lives of Nuns in the Renaissance
Who knew that Italian Nuns had such active and varied sex lives? Sex and the Renaissance NunOf course this was because of a certain social distortion which is laid out in the article as so: - In the 1400s, the skyrocketing cost of dowries meant that many of the city’s noblest families were obliged to place their teenage daughters, regardless of their wishes, in convents. Few of these developed a spiritual calling. It was openly accepted that the top convents were a “safety valve” for Venice’s surplus of well-born single women, who could go on to enjoy a level of sexual freedom unique for the time.
The western world has this stereotype of the nun as a staid spinster with little sexual prospects, but you have to remember, social convention is just that, convention which only means that's the way it's usually done. Doesn't mean it has to happen that way. Probably convents would be a more popular option for today's young girls if it didn't imply shutting off your sex life at the same time. Everybody wants to belong to a well-defined social group, but not one that restricts such a basic human need as sex. | | 10:04 am |
Links of interest 2007 09 28
This is terrifying stuff. For a long time I've had the idea that our medical care system is arbitrary and incompetent. We have a system with a lot of restrictions: If you're sick, you HAVE to go to a doctor before getting treatment. This means that any random illness has the potential to financially wipe you out if you live paycheck-to-paycheck like the vast majority of humans alive today. But my experiences with the medical establishment have completely destroyed my confidence in this style of "Mother may I" medical care. I'll say it in bold face font: DOCTORS DON'T CARE about you. Over and over again I have seen doctors brush off serious symptomatic evidence about health issues and withhold their knowledge under a veil of presumed omniscience. My distrust of the medical profession stems from an incident when my mother was feeling persistently ill for a matter of months with unspecified joint pain, body aches, fever and chills. We attempted several times to get help early because it was obvious to me that it was some kind of significant illness, but the doctors we saw persistently attributed it to simple physical trauma. "Oh, she must have just banged her knee on something." was the answer we heard more than once. A few weeks after the latest unsuccessful visit to the doctor, my mother nearly died of a staph infection. Only with a trip to the emergency room at the last minute was it finally stopped. Even the doctors in the emergency room had to be convinced, but the blood tests finally showed that her body was fighting a battle for survival. She was in the hospital on an I.V. antibiotic for weeks... when she could have been cured by a simple antibiotic months before, when it wasn't serious. So, as a result, I hate doctors. They just don't give a shit, except maybe 1 in 100. YOU have to be your own doctor. YOU have to diagnose yourself, using the best knowledge you can dig up on the net. You TELL your doctor what to do, what tests to administer, and you interpret your results yourself. If the doctors won't give us competent health care, we have to do it ourselves. EDIT: This pretty much sums it up: Clinic forgets patient in CT scanner | | Wednesday, June 6th, 2007 | | 3:08 pm |
Productivity enhancers
I was reading this article about productivity enhancers, and I felt compelled to leave the following comment: Whenever I see an article about "Productivity" enhancers, I wonder... what is "productivity", and why is it so important? Is it the essence of life or something? Does it make your life worth living?
At the end of your life, when you're lying down in your grave, do you want your kids to look down at your face and stroke your cheek and say in a shaky voice, "He was... so productive..."?
If not, it seems like a lot of hoo-rah for something that isn't particularly important.
| | Monday, March 19th, 2007 | | 9:38 am |
Sex Muse and the value of hard-fought skills
Well, as we might imply from my last entry, I've been feeling unusually horny for the last few weeks. Which is why I've created a sex blog, of course! But what we might not realize is that sex is my muse. Oh yes, absolutely! Unusual? Not really! You'd be surprised at how much creative effort is expended in the service of lust. Oh, sure, you wouldn't know it because it's hidden well away from the judgmental eyes of mundane folk. You have to look for it! Here are two hints, if I've made you curious: FurAffinity and VCL ArtCosmic amounts of fine art and creative juices are expended there directly in the service of sexual desire. Who knew that lust had an inspirational side? But these furries work their fingers to the bone to gain incredible creative skills because it's the only way for them to properly express their unique sexuality. Which is why I love furries despite their flaws. So yes, Sex is my Muse. Being horny lately has caused me to start writing a series of stories on my sex blog, which we knew. But it's also caused me to remember my too-long neglected drawing skills. I've begun drawing again, and despite neglect of several months, my skills are surprisingly intact. However... I'm STILL having trouble with eyes! It makes me laugh, it really does. I have attacked this problem over and over again. Apparently it needs more pounding before it will submit. I AM better though! Every time I attack the issue I become marginally more adept, oh so very marginally better at drawing eyes for my characters. But I still suck. I console myself with the thought that this will be a hard-fought skill. When it comes, if it ever does, I will have explored the subject so thoroughly that I will have a FAR better intellectual and precise knowledge of it than if I had simply been able to turn out perfect eyes on my first attempts. When a skill comes easily, you fall into predictable patterns, the path of least resistance. When you have to really fight for a skill to come to you and it finally does, you have little more to learn when you finally acquire proficiency. So anyway... more eye practice. | | Friday, March 16th, 2007 | | 10:31 am |
I have a blog?
Who knew? Yeah, yeah, I never post in this one. The problem is, my friends on livejournal really have very little in common with me. It's my own fault, I know. Anyway, I started a sex blog a few weeks ago to fit some of my many sexual deviances. It's doing quite well! At least Yahoo 360 has a pageview counter so that you can tell if peeps have peeked at your page lately. I'm writing a story for my sex blog. It's about a young man who begins a sexual journey. It's not bad! I've always had a touch for words. I should mirror it here ^_^ I'll bet it would trim my friends list a bit. It's very explicit. But just the fact that I'm updating it frequently (at least twice a week) will earn me more viewers as time goes on. I've never written sex stories before. I should have done it ages ago. It is art, even if you're supposed to read it one-handed. I hate to say it, but even sex can be art. How so? Because it has a message! It's telling you something! It wants to tell you about the person who wrote the story, it wants to tell you about yourself. Some people have very little to say about the subject of sex, it's true. Vanilla people just say the same thing over and over again. But others, like me, have SO much to say, so much to tell you. And of course my sex blog is a part of that, an expression of an emotion, an interest, a sensation. And that's art, right there. Just because it's in the service of pleasure doesn't make it any less. | | Tuesday, February 6th, 2007 | | 4:10 pm |
I saw a cool sig!
John Constantine, "Chaos versus Order indeed. I thought everyone had heard of fractals these days. There's no chaos, no order; just patterns of different levels of complexity." -Neil Gaiman |
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