August 5, 2006
Greetings, fellow netizens. I return from meatspace bearing lots of news.
My parents generously invited me to move back in with them, and I accepted. Living away is really fun, but I can't afford to now that I'm done with my civilian service, which paid for my apartment. I'm not really a fan of burning bridges nor of invocations to the Devil, but I suspect Satan played a role in putting me there. Drafts are idiotic in the first place. If a nation can't muster the patriotism among its citizenry necessary to defend it, it doesn't deserve a standing army, and an alternative to military service is really no alternative at all.
Religion bashing time again! This time it's the creationists' turn. A meme I've only recently seen (but one which I suspect has been in circulation for some time) got my attention and it goes like this: Evolution is a dangerous philosophy (philosophy?) because Adolf Hitler and Pol Pot used it to justify their atrocities. It's completely irrelevant! It's like blaming the theory of gravity for murders committed by pushing people off high places. In other words, totally nonsensical. Watching creationists debate biologists is somewhat akin to watching a paraplegic compete in the Olympics. Ken Miller is my new hero.
Moving home involved the end of the trial period, if you will, of 1080i 360 gaming, so I bought my own 360. Here's a cool thing: When you retrieve your gamertag you also get to download everything you've paid for again. This is the way it should be, but it's neat that it's actually implemented. The only regression is SD, and SD sucks.
I bought and framed three prints from deviantART: Apollo, Pepper by the window, and Scythe Dancer. I love 'em.
I pulled myself together and fixed the sorry state of my music's metadata. Every file now has shiny ID3v2.4 metadata attached to it, and I used foobar2000 to do it.
My Links page has had enough stuff added to it to make a neutron star envious. The most noteworthy updates are in the Gaming section: 3D Logic (thanks Joakim Næss Lea), TrackMania Nations (thanks again Joakim Næss Lea), Gridlock, Tiltilation, Neverball, Hamsterball, and Narbacular Drop. There's a link to foobar2000 too, naturally. In the Reference material section there's Unwords (a dictionary of invented words) and The Phrontistery (at which you can learn what rhochrematics and grammatolatry are). The Online comics section has seen two updates: xkcd and Dungeons and Denizens (thanks Alexander).
Books have been read. The Satanic Bible, Accelerando, Around the World in Eighty Days, The Alchemist, and the Rama series, to be exact.
I also played and finished Prey, a game that makes you feel like you're walking through an Escher painting. It's very good, but it contains almost zero puzzles! Oh, the potential.
Yes, my updates will be more timely from now on.