awesome
endermen
Notch has a very cool blog post on the new “enderman” creature he’s adding in 1.8 – I can’t wait to play that release. Sounds like great fun.
bah
Finished training Long Range Targeting V over the weekend… Kind of disappointed with the results.
It only got me a few extra km of range. I can lock things about 90 km away now. I wanted to be able to target things well over 100 km away.
It looks like the only way I’m going to do that is with some kind of sensor booster… But that’ll take up a mid-slot. And I’m currently using those for my tank. Don’t really want to sacrifice anything in there.
Bah!
blame it on the games
Slashdot | The Oslo Massacre and Violent Video Games
Media hysteria is once again blaming a real life massacre on violent video games. But looking at every single gaming reference in the Oslo killer’s manifesto shows that such accusations are ridiculous. He played games to unwind from plotting and used them to mask his activities.
You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.
We started out with a terrorist attack… But once folks discovered that he was a Christian instead of a Muslim, he became an extremist and it’s just a massacre now…
And now it isn’t because he was a Christian fundamentalist, it’s once again the fault of violent video games.
The fact of the matter is that this guy was a Christian fundamentalist. A right-wing extremist. No amount of spin is going to change that. You may very well be able to deflect attention away from that fact, but you can’t change it.
This was a terrorist attack. The man was a terrorist. He was trying to use terror to force a change in policy – that’s pretty much the definition of terrorism.
But we’re going to minimize it and sweep it under the rug and pretend like this isn’t a serious problem… Because he’s Christian, and so are a bunch of folks here in America.
Stupid.
the john next door
I used to have a subscription to NewsWeek. Used to be a pretty decent magazine. Well, I thought so at least… I was younger, maybe I just didn’t know any better.
Regardless, I let that subscription run out years ago when I stopped caring about the magazine. The articles seemed less and less substantial, more and more sensational. There just wasn’t much point in reading it.
And, it seems, things haven’t changed much in the last few years. Or, if they have, they’ve changed for the worse.
NewsWeek has a new, sensational article about The Growing Demand for Prostitution. Except that it doesn’t actually talk all that much about prostitution… It lumps pretty much every kind sex entertainment together and calls that a “growing demand” for, specifically, prostitution. But, what can you expect from an author who calls herself a sex work abolitionist? She’s obviously got an axe to grind.
Which isn’t to say that biased people can’t do good research and write good articles… Honestly, everybody is biased in some way. And good reporters are constantly putting aside their biases in favor of objectivity. But this article doesn’t do that. She doesn’t quote any real sexologists or sociologists or anything.
And then she rolls out the whole “human trafficking” thing… Somehow she leaps from legal sex entertainment like strip clubs to children being sold into sexual slavery. Without, of course, a trace of actual evidence.
Somehow “Nearly 100% of men in the study said that minors were always available for purchase in Boston” even though about half of the men she interviewed had never seen so much as a lap dance.
I guess I’m not surprised that garbage like this is getting written. The United States is going through another Puritanical phase… Or maybe it’s always been this way, but less obvious. Regardless, there are a lot of folks out there who don’t want you to enjoy sex, who don’t want you to drink alcohol, who don’t want you to have an abortion, who want to make sure you go to church – basically who want to turn the whole of the nation into some kind of fundamental Christian state.
But I am surprised that something like this made it into NewsWeek.
Then again, when CNN’s breaking news revolves around a new viral video on YouTube, I guess maybe I shouldn’t be.
too hot!
This whole week has been hot, humid, and unpleasant.
We’ve got air conditioning here at work… And a window-mounted air conditioner in our bedroom at home… But that’s really about it. So I’ve spent an awful lot of time being sticky and uncomfortable lately.
Ran a bunch of errands yesterday. Went to the doctor, got the car services, things like that. Things that I can’t do after work or on the weekend. It was a productive day… But, given the heat, I probably would have been more comfortable in the server room here at work.
Terri and I retreated into the comfort of our air conditioned bedroom very early last night. It was either that, or just sit around and sweat. It was really too hot to do anything. Even just playing EVE or surfing the web was too much of an effort.
It keeps feeling like we’ll get a storm… It gets windy and the sky will cloud up, there’s a feeling of something looming… But it just hasn’t happened. I think a good storm would be nice. Maybe it’d cool things off a bit.
Hopefully the heat will let up soon. I really don’t like weather like this.