Words for the wise from the mouth of a fool.
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The weblog of Seth Johnson -------------- INKSLINGER.ORG -------------- OD ARCHIVES -------------- FEEDS Posts:  Shared Items:
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Saturday, January 19, 2002
I stumbled across this archive of Superhero ICQ Logs while searching the net for something completely SA-unrelated. Enjoy.
When I was in seventh grade, I was one of the Good Kids. You know, the ones who got good grades and behaved themselves. As such, teachers occasionally asked me to help them out with this and that.
One afternoon, a teacher grabbed me before an assembly and asked for a favor. A guy was coming to speak to the whole school, and he needed somebody to run the slide projector. Could I do it? Sure, I said.
Flash forward an hour to the school gymnasim. One of the long sides is lined with bleachers, packed with the school population. Out in the half-court circle, a portable screen is set up. On the half-court line, about halfway between the screen and the bleachers, is a small wooden table with a slide projector sitting on it. In a chair, next to the table, is me.
The program begins, and it turns out, our speaker is an ex-convict, here to do a Scared Straight kind of program. He tells us a bit of his personal history, the robbery he committed that got him sent to prison...and then he begins telling us about prison.
Now the kids up in the bleachers, they could fidget all they liked. Solong as they didn't get caught, they could whisper among themselves, do what they wanted. Not me. I had to be listening for the occasional "Next slide, please." And I was all by myself. All I could do was look at that screen and listen as he described prisoners' assaults on each other with homemade weapons, the....unpleasant....social networks that form, the foreign materials that disgruntled prisoner kitchen-workers drop into the food (metal shavings off cans, parts of rats...), sadistic guards...
Years later I would see A Clockwork Orange for the first time. When Alex is strapped into the chair and forcibly "reeducated", my friends snickered. Not me. I remembered that day in seventh grade, as I listened to an ex-con descibe the horrific details of his experiences. I remebered getting sick to my stomach, so sick that it was hard to breathe. I wanted to run, to leave, but all I could do was stay and hope that the next slide would be the last.
I don't know about any of my classmates, but I was certainly scared straight that day.
On Friday night, I saw Black Hawk Down. It's an interesting time for the movie to come out; in a time when the public would seem to respond more readily to fluffy jingoistic flag-waving films like Pearl Harbor, Black Hawk Down is the story of an American military operation gone horribly wrong in a place it's not clear we should have been in the first place. (Or if we should have, should we have been more decisive? Or less? Even the book, which goes into much greater detail and which I highly reccommend, doesn't so much answer these questions as give you more cud to chew on.)
Halfway through the movie I again thought back to that day in seventh grade, when I was forced to endure something that I'd rather not be watching--not because it was of bad quality, but because it was a heavy dose of the unpleasant, uncomfortable truth. People die in combat--suddenly, unexpectedly, and with a terrible finality. It doesn't matter if they're better trained, better armed, and have a better plan. All it takes in a combination of a few monkeywrenches in the gears and an unending stream of enemies and it's even odds every second whether you'll live or die. Black Hawk Down depicts all of it unflinchingly, and in doing so evoked that same sick-to-the-stomach feeling I remembered from junior high.
Go see it. Then I dare anyone to try and argue why 'realism' is more important than 'fun' in games.
I think I'll go play MAME for a while. But I don't think I'll forget the movie--or the truth behind it--for a long time.
Friday, January 18, 2002
I'd like to share a link with you, though I haven't read all of it yet. The Edge Question is a collection of answers to a question put forth to wide variety of thinkers and intellectuals. An annual activity , this year's question is especially intriguing: "What is your question, and why?" I think just about any of the answers could spark an entire evening's worth of discussion.
Now I just need to think about what my own answer to the question (or is that question to the question?) would be...
It's amazing what you can get done when you procrastinating really hard on something else. F'rinstance, last night I cleaned all my closets! Along the way, I found a number of things I've been meaning to get to people for a while. So if you get something in the mail from me, it's probably not a bomb.
In other news, this page went blank for an hour or so today until I realized I was pushing the edge of my storage quota. Time for a spring cleaning of the old webspace, I guess...
Thursday, January 17, 2002
FUN TIME: BEGIN!
A timeline of the life of Emporer Norton, self-declared Emporer of the United States! Read it!
Exploding laptops and cel phones? Say it isn't so!
The Kooky Kat Catnip Company! They're certified!!
FUN TIME: END NOW!
You may return to what you were doing.
"Hang on a second--I'm gonna go check out David's package."--JP
Hey, he said I could quote him.
Went to the dentist this morning to get a filling, and I was shocked how quick, easy, and relatively painless the whole experience turned out to be. I had to wait for about five minutes in the chair while the Novocaine kicked in, but once the dentist sat down and got to work, it was less than four minutes from beginning to end. I suppose that comes from the proper balance of a great dentist and advances in dental technology.
I've had a lot of dental work done over the years, and when I was a kid I remember the Novocaine injector being this enormous staple gun-sized thing that the dentist jammed into your mouth sideways. Now they use this tiny little piston tool whose size is dictated only by the fact that the dentist has to be able to reach it into the back of your mouth and still manipulate it. (Actually, they may or may not be using Novocaine these days. Whatever it is, they have the dosage down to a science--less than two hours ago I was in the chair, and I already have most of the feeling back in my jaw.) I also have a bunch of old, metallic fillings; now they use this cool tooth-colored polymer that they pack into place, shape, and cure into solidity with ultraviolet radiation.
All in all, though there's still some discomfort (mainly from nervousness, probably), going to the dentist is rapidly becoming more of an inconvience than a trial. Makes me wonder what it'll be like for our kids and grandkids. They'll probably sit down in the sentient DentalChair, which will scan their head with a mini MRI, then release nanobots that will go in and reconstruct any tooth decay. 'Course, I hope insurance covers that bill.
On the way back to my car I swung by the offices of my old haunt, WisPolitics.com. When I left WisPolitics to come work at Humanhead, I had two hopes: that either I was so vital to the operation that it would crumble within 48 hours, or that it would thrive and survive long into the distant future. Happily, the latter seems to be happening. In a time of dissolving dot-coms, WisPolitics is doing quite well and have added features I'm not sure I would have thought of if I had stuck around. Incredibly, they even appear to be financially solvent ahead of schedule. Helping start up the site was a happy chapter of my life, and I'm glad to see them doing well.
My love of comics demands I provide with with a link to the first installment of Marvel Comics honcho Bill Jemas' new column on Aint-It-Cool-News and my observations: first, what is a comics column doing on a movie website? Second, Bill Jemas is an asshole.
That is all.
Wednesday, January 16, 2002
I have now collected my Minimum Life's Requirement of Pizzicato Five, Link Wray, and Screamin' Jay Hawkins, added to the ever-growing Monkeyfan Archives. Thanks to everyone (and to the slightly-retarded but well-meaning All Music Guide) for constantly pointing me in the right direction. Keep up the good work.
"The researchers say performing oral sex is twice as risky as receiving oral sex. When compared to receiving oral sex, insertive vaginal sex is 10 times more risky, insertive anal sex 13 times more dangerous, receptive vaginal sex 20 times more hazardous, and receptive anal sex 100 times more perilous. "
Why do I provide that quote from this news story? Pick your own reason:
1) A burning concern obcession with public health issues;
2) Not enough hits on Ober Dicta by Google-using pornsurfers;
3) I like to showcase occurances of thesaurus usage by reporters.
Yeah, I'd probably pick that last one too.
Okay, story time:
A few mights ago, my friend Chris and I went out for dinner. We were told it would be about twenty minutes before we could get a table, so we went to wait in the nearby bar. I was sitting there conversing and drinking my Diet Coke when a complete stranger walks up to me and asks, "Hey--don't I know you?"
The clever reader will have noticed that I labelled him "a complete stranger" in the previous sentence and already know my answer: "I don't think so..." I said. To be honest, he looked a little drunk. Maybe he thought I was his long-lost roommate Skippy or something.
He squints at me for a second longer, then grinned and said, "I know! You were in The Onion!"
So I was. Some of you know this already. For those who don't, here's the photo he remembered:
(Those who want to read the full story and can handle a 400K page load will find it here.)
This was six years ago. (And it's a bad picture, I might add.) The story was reprinted once, deep inside another issue, but to the best of my knowledge it hasn't been in any of the Onion's books (though they must be running out of reprint material--I expect it should show up soon.)
We chatted for a few minutes about comics and the late, lamented Pic-a-Book, and then he wandered off to hit on "The TEAM Girls", who were mascots for a local radio station or something.
Afterward, I turned to Chris and said, "No offense, but I'll be lucky to remember you in six years, let alone somebody I saw in a newspaper photo..."
Now if only it had been a single woman who had asked, Chris might have had to find his own ride home. I guess I have to keep waiting to cash in on that fifteen minutes...
(Edited when somebody pointed out that as the date of the story was on the article, I didn't need to estimate how long ago it was published. I is dumb.)
As I prepare to write up a character for another new game, I found this list of the Top 10 Least Played D&D classes useful.
Oh, and JP? This link's for you--though the rest of you might like it too.
Tuesday, January 15, 2002
God giving Adam a hot mankiss: only the smallest taste of the amazing Brick Testament. While reading, ask yourself: how many weeks' take from the collection plate do you think the Reverend Brendan Powell Smith converted directly into plastic brick form? Or, more interestingly, do you think his parishoners are allowed to tithe in Lego?
Another link, in case you're looking for a car: the Badi Dea Motor Company.
Monday, January 14, 2002
Neat! Search engine now added to site--check it out in the left sidebar and search for your favorite word!
Expect output to this page to slow as I begin to follow the advice of this article.
Flee evil with this collection of opt-out links--never see an ad for the X10 wireless camera again!
For those of a scientific nature, enjoy this discourse on the Death Star trash compactor.
OD's Babbletalk of the Day Award goes to: Rene Elizondo, ex-husband of Janet Jackson, who claims in his divorce petition that he has "a Self-Defeating Personality Disorder, with Depressive and Dependant Personality Traits".
Back in my day, we just called it "high school".
You know, I actually started making a list like this one back in college? If only I'd had the Internet to help me out...
For those who spent their weekend surrounded by scribblings on bits of napkin trying to unscramble my Blogger Code (or more importantly--and more probably--for those who decided even considering such a thing was a waste of time), I now provide a link to this BlogCode decoder. There are a few things about the decoder's interpretation that I might question, but it's accurate enough that I'll let it stand.
Maybe I've never said so, but I'm not a big fan of condiments. Ketchup, mustard, mayo....eww. Anyway, just to prove that despite my own proclivity the universe is still in karmic balance, I present: The Condiment Packet Museum.
The AP's story on the president's pretzel-induced "fainting spell" (a spin-ready phrase if I ever heard one) is rollercoaster ride of a read; first you laugh, then you start to get bored at the excruiating detail, then you laugh again, then you start to wonder why it's almost as long as today's coverage of the ongoing investigation into Enron...
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