“I’m a free spirit. I don’t like to be tied down. What? You mean literally? Oh no… totally into that.” ~ Goblin Female, WOW

“Wanna see something really scary?” ~ Dan Aykroyd (character unnamed) in Twilight Zone: The Movie (via John Landis)

Just in time for Halloween, a horror ad that makes the best case for birth control I can imagine.

“Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.” ~ Ayn Rand

Anyone who’s clocked time playing Civ will enjoy this:

I haven’t yet been able to get and play Civ 5 although some of the changes look cool. I have mixed feelings about it, mostly stemming from the fact that Civ was the game JTL and I played most.

One of my favorite playing with JTL memories involves Civ 4. I was always chugging for cultural victory while he was bombing everything that dared look twice at his border. Although we generally played as a team, we had a sort of competition to see if I could win with culture faster than he could win by military means. Once, I convinced him to play a game based on culture wins only (no war) and was explaining all the little tricks I employed to edge up culture gains. As anyone knows, this involves lots and lots of spreading religions. He became exasperated with the fail rate on missionaries and began to growl about how if RL missionaries had been so incompetent the world would be a much better place. Then he began loudly berating his computer with exclamations like: “Damn you, Christianity, how can you not spread in Atlanta!” and “I’m telling Buddha on you” and “Get your Hindu ass over there and convert already!” By the time it was all over, I was in giggling fits.

The next day, I got this email, with an attachment:

1. go to http://www.2kgames.com/civ4/downloads.htm and download the v1.61 patch
2. install the patch.
3. start civ, fix all your options (for me at least, it reset my sound and graphics options). you may also want to turn on the new (?) “show city radius” graphics option. it makes it easier to tell what tiles are already used by cities, when you have a settler selected. If you get a flash of a screen which says something like “Your mods are not correctly installed”, don’t panic — I think that’s complaining about the files we modified by replacing rather than using this new override mechanism. we can and should fix that sometime, but it seems to work just fine as-is
4. exit civ
5. go to your “My Documents” folder and make sure you have a “My Games” directory, and inside of that a “Sid Meier’s Civilizcation 4″ directory, and inside of that a “CustomAssets” directory. If not, stop here and call me
6. save the attached file CvGameCoreDLL.dll in that CustomAssets directory
7. optional, but I think you’ll like the small changes: save the attached file CvReligionScreen.py in the CustomAssets\python\screens directory
8. restart civ; marvel at your hopefully all-powerful missionaries and the only slightly-different but oh-so-much-better f7 screen
9. marvel at my awesomeness

After that, missionaries had a 100% conversion rate — a change which I squeed over, but which he said made him feel “dirty in the bad way.” This is a frequent saying that started between he and I and has been part of my personal vernacular ever since.

The f7 screen shows all your civilization’s cities and which religions are at play in each. It mostly lines up so you can peg what a city might be missing at a glance, except that when a city founds a religion, it puts that religion out of order. This was unacceptable. Things have to laid out properly or OCD brains go haywire, as anyone who reads XKCD knows. If I told you the number of things he coded around just to make margins line up…

He never did get around to the Flying Spaghetti Monster patch.

I miss you, still, dear friend.

“Poisons and medicine are oftentimes the same substance given with different intents” ~ Peter Mere Latham

For the last week or so, I’ve been struggling against a late-Summer bug. It started as a minor cold, but then picked up steam and has been knocking me out with fevers and chills for the last few days. One of the odd things about running fevers for me is the fever dreams I get grow wickedly intense. Sometimes they are even so vivid that I have trouble distinguishing if they are memories or simply the work of my dreamspace masquerading as memory. A couple days ago, I had a fever dream snippet that was so clear it felt like it just had to be a memory. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and it sparked the following conversation:

Salome: I need to ask you about something, just to make sure my dreaming mind isn’t faking a memory.
SFSHS: k
Salome: Do you remember when we used to stay up to all hours at your house playing MULE?
SFSHS: yeah
Salome: Do you remember another game, sort of like operating?
SFSHS: like where you have to remove the funny bone without touching the bzzz
Salome: No. This was like a screen and tools to click on and you had to apply anesthetic and make an incision and remove an appendix.
SFSHS: not ringing any bells…was I baked
Salome: I don’t think so.
SFSHS: there’s your first indication it may have been just a dream
Salome: This was back in high school
SFSHS: oh…so we weren’t baked…but it’s not familiar
Salome: This was very vivid and felt totally nostalgic. It was you and me and Jon, and we were pissed because we couldn’t find the manual and the patient kept dying. One of the first times Jon cut without applying anesthetic and the computer let out this blood-curdling scream becase we tried to cut into the patient while he was still awake. The scream woke up your Dad who came out to yell at us to keep it down.
SFSHS: oh shit
Salome: What?
SFSHS: I totally remember that
Salome: SEE!
SFSHS: yeah, I remember that now
Salome: WHAT was the name of the game?
SFSHS: you’ve got to be fucking kidding…I didn’t even remember any of this until twenty seconds ago…and I’m baked
Salome: This is going to make me nuts. I can’t find it. How many late 80s operating games could there have been?
SFSHS: man, I loved mule…did they ever update that? why isn’t there like mule 2010?
Salome: Don’t get me started, I can’t even find a halfway decent emulator for it. I barely remember how to play it, I just remember loving it.
SFSHS: now I REALLY want to play mule…I so hate you
Salome: I REALLY want to know the name of the operation game
SFSHS: hold on
Salome: You can’t Google it — operation and game returns so much crap it’s unbearable, you might as well try and Google the lyrics to Free songs.
SFSHS: fuck that…Jon remembers everything
SFSHS: he says try life and leath
Salome: You called him?
SFSHS: yeah
Salome: WENCH! It’s like 2am!
SFSHS: whatever… google life n death
Salome: Holy hell
SFSHS: find it?
Salome: YES!
SFSHS: he totally remembers us waking up my Dad with the computer screaming too…also he says your crazy and hi
Salome: Tell him I’m sorry you woke him up but now my brain is happy
SFSHS: he is happy your brain is happy
Salome: That dream was so real but I couldn’t find the game and it was making me crazy
SFSHS: fuck that, go find me a way to kick your ass at mule…I WANT IT
Salome: You’re baked, you’ll forget this conversation in half an hour
SFSHS: mule and doritos…I need them…go fetch
Salome: Logging out now and crawling back to bed
SFSHS: noooooooooooooooooooooooo get me mule!!!!
Salome: lurves you

If anyone cares:
SFSHS = Salome’s Friend Since High School
Jon = her cousin (who often played video games and AD&D with us)
MULE’s Wiki Page
Life and Death’s Wiki Page

“You can’t always write a chord ugly enough to say what you want to say, so sometimes you have to rely on a giraffe filled with whipped cream.” ~ Frank Zappa

I have a commercial fetish. There is something genuinely enthralling for me when marketing is done well. It is rare that an over-hyped product can put a spin on something that jumps out at me, but Direct TV nailed it with their “Opulence, I Haz It” spot:

Okay, let’s move off the fact that having a pillow-trained teacup-sized giraffe that pouts like a Pomeranian and then relents to offer a peck is just plain cheating. It borders on too adorable to remember what the product is. What’s brilliant about it aside from the cuteness, however, is that it’s absurdist enough to make you sit up and pay attention, and go seek out the commercial again to take a second glance at what might otherwise just be dismissed as a cookie-cutter gimmick spot.

Upstaging the guy with the cheesy Eurotrash accent and the pretty ornamental girls dripping off him in their painted on (and, it should be said, yummy) slink, the giraffe (which had better be in stores by the holidays — if anything ever needed to be taken from CGI into some form of marketable toy, it’s this thing) makes you go back and see what else you missed.

Like the dog holding an ace in his paw under the table during the live-action “Dogs Playing Poker” set up. It does demonstrate something about how the bar is set these days that live dogs actually set up looking to be playing poker is NOT absurd enough to make the grade — they actually faded into the background on my first viewing.

Maybe it’s true that the devil is in the details, but of that’s so, then the devil does good work. And if the devil has teacup giraffes, he can have my credit card number.