Things Trying to get Into Your Head: Your Pets

I'm not much of a pet person to be totally honest.  Yes, puppies/kittens/giant pythons are adorable and all, but they also leave fur/snake skin all over the place.  They also make your house smell like an unfortunate combination of sweaty fat man and the the Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch.  Also, the bastards are all kinds of emotionally manipulative and they know it.

If I look cute enough, he won't mind the puke all over his clean laundry!

Seriously.  We all know that one lady with the entire feline population of a small country living in her house.  You don't really want to talk to her, you hate going over there and every night you keep up the same mental mantra: I swear to every higher power I can name, I will never, ever end up like that crazy cat lady.  I might end up dying in prision through a horrible combination of drinking pruno and getting raped, but at least I'll be better off than the crazy cat lady.

That could also be just me.

You see, the thing about crazy cat lady (CCL for short- using an acronym will also make me sound smart), is that the cats are her furry little children.  CCL exhibits the same behavior we expect mothers to show their little ones, except with her cats.  It is fucking terrifying to watch.

Watch the video- I won't describe it in text.  That is a CCL in her full glory.  Complete with a shining song about the greatest cat in the United States, Champer-Damper.

Also, I think she can be euthanized in 10 different states.

Men may also not be safe from CCL-like problems.  It is true that men generally bond better with dogs.  The research is still ongoing and nature likes symmetry, so I wouldn't be remotely shocked if puppies can replace kids for men, just like cats replace kids for women.  We don't see crazy dog guys because men already are under pressure to drink and be manly from society, but I've covered that already.

I'm not anti-pets at all, don't get me wrong.  I do want a cat (just one, no more), but I also want to name the cat Plato so I can yell at an ancient Greek philosopher to get off the counter.  Other name ideas I'm thinking about are those that have some religious significance.

Bad cat!  I told you not to go in there, Mohammad!

More Drinking Games!

I've got an old post about drinking games to play along with Disney movies because I think that copious amounts of booze improve any situation and that nothing is sacred.  I figure it is time to revisit that theme- but this time I'm gonna expand our drinking game topics to pretty much anything nerdy.

Many of the games I'm going to post rules for I've played- so this is a thank you to all my real life friends (yes, I have those.  Shocking) that have gotten trashed with me over rounds of Mario Kart.

The best kind of triforce- the Boozeforce.  It contains the powers of intoxication.

Note: If you're looking for some themed video game cocktails, I suggest the Drunken Moogle.  Also, they have a compendium of geeky bars in the world, so if you need computer help or want to argue about Star Trek, check that out.

On to the games!

The My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic Drinking Game

There is only one rule: take a drink for any and all references to anything to do with actual horses.  That's a drink for any time Nightmare Moon comes up, for example.  The opening title sequence has five drinks involved, just for reference.

Hardcore: Certain episodes fall under hardcore category all by themselves.  "Sweet and Elite" has at least 24 drinks in it, 19 happen within a 2 minute time period with the song, "A Pony Everypony Should Know".  Rarity wants to get you smashed.  The pilot is also pretty cruel, mainly because Twilight Sparkle will not shut up about Nightmare Moon or Canterlot.

However, if a particular episode just seems to be falling a little flat- "Sisterhooves Social" only has 10 drinks, if I remember correctly- then just drink every time the color pink is used gratuitously.

Drunk Driving: The Mario Kart Drinking Game
Open up a bottle of beer/pour yourself a glass of wine/crack open a can of jet fuel.  Start up a race.

You are not allowed to finish the race until your drink is empty.  Get a new drink for every new race.

Hardcore: drink jet fuel.  Seriously.

Super Smashed Bros: Brawl

Start up a 3 minute timed match with items on high, but the only item allowed is the Smash Ball.  Drink when:
-you die via someone's Final Smash
-you don't get the Final Smash
-you use your Final Smash and don't kill anyone (oh hai thar, Peach).

Hardcore: after the match, add up your KO's and deaths.  Take that many drinks.

Final Fantasy X: Fuck It, If I'm Drinking Alone, I Might as Well Play a Video Game


-drink every time a character ends a sentence with, "you know"
-drink after every overdrive
-drink after anyone talks to Tidus, but doesn't use his name
-drink every time Kihmari is in a scene but doesn't talk
-drink every time Tidus does something stupid
-drink every time Yuna apologizes (That's three for the "I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm sooo sorry" in Luca)

Hardcore: drink after every battle


Happy drinking!

What ever happened to winter?

*Update on politics: SOPA/PIPA are unlikely to be passed during this session of congress, which may as well be chalked up as a win for the Internet.  Megaupload got taken down, which totally sucks for a lot of people.  Hackers responded by bringing down some pretty government wall paper.  Meanwhile, the MPAA made a total ass of itself.  Good to see that even special needs people can flourish in today's society and become leaders of large organizations*

I'm almost positive that whatever runs the weather has been trolling the shit out of me.  I mean, we're in January, also known as one of the winter months.  It should be, oh, I don't know, mildly cold outside?  As in, shorts and a T-shirt should not seem like a comfortable clothing combination if you're significantly north of the equator.

And yet, when I go outside (this does happen- but it's rarer than finding a shiny pokemon) shorts and a t-shirt seem like a good idea.  Ignoring any and all complaints about a lack of fashion sense, actually looking decent, wearing pony gear, etc, of course.

Point being that it's really damn warm for winter.  Really, really damn warm.  Annoyingly warm.

And since building my country-wide blizzard doomsday device has suffered several setbacks due to the fact that you apparently can't import black market plutonium and that cold fusion hasn't been invented yet, unless you're trying to steal money from people.

Other setbacks- Arnold doesn't want to deliver really bad one liners for me

But, horrible Batman movies aside, I'm not the only one getting irritated that the weather is rather temperate and pleasant.  This mild winter totally sucks if you're a farmer and you rely on a large-ish snow pack to prevent spring droughts.  In fact, the entire US has been undergoing a shit load of not snow, as more than 95% of the US has had below average snow cover.

Why?  I'll wait until Al Gore is done shrieking about global warming.

He isn't going to stop any time soon?  Damn.  Alright, on with it then.

It turns out, climate is really complicated.  According to smart people who look at clouds all day, the reason for this stupidly warm winter is the lower edge of an atmospheric pressure pattern called the Arctic Oscillation.  This lower edge is called the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), and has been screwing with the jet stream like a really persistent stalker.

The jet stream is a current of air that we more or less rely on to keep temperatures where we expect them.  When it deviates, we get a change in climate.  And it's been hanging out in the North Pole, probably trying to start it's own Occupy protest because it didn't get what it wanted for Christmas.  And as such, it's been cock blocking the cold fronts we usually get when winter happens.

Why is the NAO allowing the jet stream to hang out like a house guest whose welcome wore out two weeks ago?  Scientists got shit.  Some are claiming global warming (duh).  Others have decided that its the sun's fault due to high sunspot activity- then they went back to playing Minecraft.

Personally, I blame Santa.  1% of all the world is hogging 99% of all the cold air.

Ho, Ho, Ho, motherfucker

Update:  After I wrote this, the state of Washington went and declared a state of emergency due to having stupidly large amounts of snow fall (over 24 inches.  You could loose an entire midget in that).  Either this is an example of local weather not actually reflecting climate, or Mother Nature is pantsing climatologists again. 

Both are equally likely.

SOPA and PIPA

I'm not gonna lie, I'm a little scared of this post.

The pair of legislation- SOPA and PIPA in the US House and Senate- is not an easy thing to tackle.  This isn't like finding fun facts about crows or looking at statistics in porn or bitching about the space program or defending the color purple.

This stuff is serious.  This stuff is a legit issue.

I was going to ignore it, or tactfully dance around it while talking about other things, but then the Internet went and blacked the hell out, making it a big issue.  As they rightfully should have.  But I can't just ignore it anymore- and neither, as a blog reader, can you.

Because it's just plain ignorant to do so now.  That's the opposite of what the blog was started to do.  Time to man up.

Just like Jesus would have wanted

In brief summery, the bills are an attempt stop online piracy.  They allow the U.S. Department of Justice and copyright holders to seek court orders against websites accused of copyright infringement, or accused of spreading copyright infringement.  The court order could include barring online advertising from the website, barring search engines from linking to the website and requiring Internet Service Providers to block the website.

Also, it makes the streaming of copyrighted content a crime, with a maximum penalty of five years in prison.  Immunity is given to websites that help in rooting out online piracy, and given to websites that unknowingly host copyright infringing content.  Unknowing websites would still be liable for damages, however.

I tried to untangle the legalese, promise.

Lets get one thing out of the way- copyright infringement is bad news bears.  Period.  On a fundamental level, it's the theft of an idea.  I do not support that- if I found someone copying all my blog posts, I'd be a little pissed off.

I take it back, I'd be amused... unless they had more readers than I did.  Then I'd be calling in fire and brimstone like a vengeful Disney villain.

How I would try to stop copyright infringement.  This is also why I'm not good at politics

That being said, there are a few key points in the summary that leave me feeling like I swallowed cat vomit on purpose.

First, it doesn't sit well with me (much like cat vomit) that copyright holders can seek these court orders.  I'd feel a little better about the whole thing if they needed to go through a more complicated process with the Justice Department that involves some sort of proof of malicious intent/desire to profit.

I'm a big fan of due process and making sure some fictional amoral company isn't out to try and ruin it's competitors with this bill.  Which would be all the companies, as CEOs are generally goddamn psychopaths.

The next two issues are more complicated.  I'll handle the technical one first, then the legal one, and if you're not asleep by then I have some high grade chloroform.

The technical problems all stem from the whole "ISP's blocking websites" part.  Believe it or not, your ISP does not monitor your traffic- in fact, generally, your ISP could care less about what websites you visit.  Actually storing and checking all of that information would be a royal pain in the ass.

Think about the steps required to validate traffic for a second:
First, intercept every packet of data that goes through an ISP's gateway.  The largest size a packet can be is 1.5 Mb.  That's _tiny_ in today's web, a 30 second YouTube video could have up to three thousand of these packets (not all the packets are actual video data- there is a bit of overhead).

Never you mind the amount of data that an online game might generate.

Next, check the IP destination address of every packet.  This is easier than you might think, because IP addresses are always stored in the same place.  After that, compare the IP address to some table of blacklisted websites, and if you get  a match, drop or (even worse) reroute the packet or generate a reply that explains the content you're trying to access is blacklisted.

That's a lot of work.  I'll use numbers to help quantify how much effort just got placed on ISPs.  Let's say there are 10,000 blacklisted websites after SOPA gets passed.  IP addresses do map to a general ordering (numerically), so the number of steps it would take to search the list for a match is log(10,000), or 4.

That doesn't seem like a lot, you say.  But watch.

Every packet has to be checked, so our fictional you tube video would have to go though 12,000 steps, plus the steps required for the request packet (under the best circumstances, 4).  And it would have to undergo all these steps at each new gateway hop.

I did a trace route on my laptop on my university's network accessing part of my university's website.  I had to go through three hops to get there.

This gives us a grand total of something like 36,012 additional steps for a 30 second clip of How I Met Your Mother if you happened to be on the same network the video was hosted on.

I like to think Barney would appreciate the amount of computational complexity required to watch him

And that's not even the part of the bill anyone is complaining about from a technical side.  All the math geeks are more worried about the extra load on DNS servers as they now have to blacklist name queries for copyright infringing content.  That shit is easy (as DNS request packets are singular, leading up to only 24 additional steps).  But you'd need to do the IP based scanning and blocking as well, or else we'd just go back to memorizing the IP addresses and not the URLs of our favorite pirate websites.

And yes, this means DNS packets would have to get IP scanned, so for our example, that's now 288 more steps.  You see how this stuff ramps up very quickly.

The fact is, when you look at the sheer amount of traffic on the Internet, it doesn't make any sense to try and filter all of it.  God forbid you start adding to the load by sending reply packets back saying that a website was blocked, especially if the ISPs end up getting staggered (ISP blacklists get de-standardized, as one ISP starts blocking a website another ISP doesn't know about).

And again, I haven't even started on the first amendment stuff or privacy stuff yet, so lets dig into that, shall we?

First, a picture:

It's a new thing- brass bands and rap.  The guy in the center is gonna lay down some phat rhymes

Now, lets play a fun game- how does this violate SOPA?

If you answered, it doesn't, stop using your brain and really look.  No, not at the subject of the picture, at the background.  That's the Foot Locker logo back there, and as such, is copyrighted.  I assure you, no one took a picture of street performers and then checked with Foot Locker if it was OK to post online.

You see, with the language of the bill at it's current spot, stuff like this (which isn't a bad picture, to be honest) would be taken down along with all the other pirate websites.  This is how SOPA is purposed to work.

And within lies the rub- intellectual property (what SOPA is really trying to protect) is a very hard thing to define.  When are you simply taking pictures in front of a giant fucking sign, and when are you actively trying to steal the idea on the sign?  What it all comes down to, at some point, we- as a culture- lost respect for artists.

That's what this is all about- not corporations trying to get money, not about the US trying to censor things.  It's about art (and the most popular way to consume art, entertainment).  At some point (right around when Napster started) we stopped giving any value to creative efforts.  Why bother paying for them when we could get them for free, after all?

It was a bitch having to go to the store and actually pick out a song we wanted to hear.  But you did it anyway, you got the CD just to find out that all the other tracks sucked ass.

Why do all of that when you could get the song you actually wanted for free?  Why just stop at one song for free, might as well get the whole album too.  Hell, screw that, just get the entire disography, maybe you'll dig the sucky parts later.  Never any thought like, "wait- maybe the person on the other end needs money to survive?  And that if I value something, maybe I should pay for it?"

This isn't a problem with other things (like food.  Or computers).  We seem to have the market concept down when it comes to tangible, actual things.  But after we cheapened music, we cheapened software- video games, primarily.  Then we cheapened images (do Google searches for copying images from devantART).

Something like SOPA or PIPA needs to exist to try and give value back to creative efforts.  There are ways for creative efforts to exist within this new "entertainment is a free right" society we have now- just look at My Little Pony for a great example- but it shouldn't be that way.  I don't know the right answer. I do know the wrong one, however.

SOPA and PIPA are well meaning, but at the end of the day, impractical and silly.  I think that with some more discussion, perhaps some temperance and moderation- we can find a way to make everyone happy.

Purple is the most manly color of them all

There comes a time in your life when you stop associating colors and "girl" colors and "boy" colors.  This usually happens right after, eh, third grade- you discover girls and wonder what all the fuss about cooties was after all.

No, this isn't a post about sex and porn.  I just did one of those, you pervert.

Long ago, (when the blog was young) I started a post on a statistical breakdown of North American superhero comic book sales.  The post did what it was supposed to- undercut an argument that recent comic book art (and the resulting sales the new style generated) were sexist by implying that they were to statistically insignificant to matter, and that a tiny part of the population was just being allowed to read what they wanted.

I canned the post because that's a horrible thing to go around a write/try to prove.  And that it's basically hollow.

Figure A: Male superhero vs Female superhero.  Yeah.

Remember, this is a new reboot of the DC comic book franchise, more or less.  This is how they want to depict things to appeal to modern audiences.

Just keep that in mind while we launch into the topic at hand.

Currently sweeping the Internet is the story of how a brother argued for his younger brother's right to get a purple controller as a gift.  The pair were in a videogame store, and the older brother let his younger brother pick out a game with a female protagonist and a purple controller to play on.  They were being brothers (as brothers are) and taking their time in the cornicopia of brightly colored fun that videogame stores can be.

The father of the pair walks into the store, and proceeds to stereotype himself expertly as "white trash".  He ends up yelling at his younger son over the choice of videogame and controller color.  The older brother then does the most badass and cool thing possible- gets his younger brother the gifts he wanted anyway.

It's sort of heartwarming, except for the fact that this story shouldn't be a story at all.  It's absolutely retarded- if yelling at your kid over something so petty as the protagonist/subject matter of a video game and control color sound like a good idea to you, then don't procreate.  Ever.  Period.

There is scientific proof that girls and guys are drawn to different colors- so yes, purple is a color that is favored more by girls.  But you don't have to always play to statistical norms.  For example, everyone (according to the statistics) prefers blue hues, but I know plenty of people who are serious fans of bright green or bright orange.

And damn it, I like the color purple- especially the deeper shades.  So, yeah, this is kinda personal.

Not only do I know that Periwinkle is a color, but it's one of my favorites

The idea of femmephobia- that boys are afraid of "girly" things because it emasculates them, is alive and well.  The silliest part is that even little kids figure it out from the other side of things:  that it's really, really retarded that girls sections of toy stores are baiscally pink isles.

It's equally retarded that the boys isles are the blue ones, but this idea seems to have gotten less traction.  This isn't about being gay, or bi, or whatever.  Google's already got all that covered with the "It Gets Better" video.  This is about simply preferring different things that what other people expect you to.

And yes, it is enough to make you feel left out and alone- perhaps not picked on as badly as someone who really is different, but enough to make you feel like there isn't anyone else in the middle: not man enough to play WWII shooters and football, but also not gay.

Not that there aren't some some amazing articles about it, don't get me wrong.  But I want to say it loud, I want to say it clear:

Colors are no more than light being reflected (or not reflected) into your eye.  Clothes are no more than fabric, dolls no more than plastic or stuffing.  Do what ever you goddamn want- whatever makes you happy.

To the kid who wanted a purple controller: you deserve the games and controllers that you want, not that anyone else wants you to want.  And don't you ever forget that.

Never fear, manned space flight proponents, DARPA has got your back!

NASA was not a pretty place in the dying days of the space shuttle.
I happen to know an inside source- several things in this post are not going to be cited because of this. For the first time in blog history, you'll need to take a little bit of this on faith. But before we get into any of that, there is something you really should know about NASA in general and the space program of the United States.

Um, how do I say this nicely, they're rather derptastic over there. And not just a little, they make silly mistakes way more often than people who shoot things into space on aluminum bullets propelled by giant explosions should.

For example, there was a time when a bat was caught clinging to the external fuel tank (the big orange part of the shuttle) before a launch. This discovery ignited a serious (read as- two hour) effort to figure out if the bat posed any danger to the mission. The launch team pulled out all the stops; they even had a guy furiously searching Wikipedia to figure out if bat guano was corrosive. They gave the bat an official debris tag, and tracked it with a high speed camera until the external tank broke away from the shuttle.

In a nutshell, they shot a bat into the upper atmosphere (it probably burned and died, if the airstream didn't suffocate it and the g-forces didn't hemorrhage it to death). This would be plain awesome and not retarded if on the same mission, a massive chunk of ice did not score part of the same external fuel tank on the opposite side from the bat.  Apparently, no one was paying attention to that side.

Yeah.

So, it really came as no surprise when I learned that there was a commercial bid to fly the space shuttle rather than mothball it to oblivion. Private companies thought they could do better than the bureaucratic nightmare that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration can occasionally (read as: often) be.

Fact: There are more politicians than engineers in this photo.

It's not like NASA had anything to worry about with the idea of competition, right? They had the Ares 1 rocket, TIME magazine's invention of the fucking year back in '09.

Hilarious fact- NASA had, to use the scientific term, jack shit. Any and all Ares 1 rocket tests that anyone had done were of old solid rocket boosters from the space shuttle launched on their own to see how fast they could go.

If you're following the theme, this means that NASA really did fear a commercial company running the space shuttle better than they did, because NASA had no alternative. They had a lot of bluster and smoke and mirrors, but those things have never helped me pass a calculus test.

The current manned US space program is, "Fuck it, we'll let the Russians do it."

This could be a Russian launch stand, or a Transformer.

So, NASA did what any good government funded corporation would do when they're about to lose a metric fuck ton of face- they refused to sell the shuttle commercially.

Never fear, it the Russians won't have a monopoly on manned space forever, as commercial companies are again trying to pick up the slack NASA left behind as they try to work the great can of BS, the Ares rocket, into service. No, seriously.

That and DARPA has decided that they always hated logic and reason with a passion anyway, and are still going ahead with the 100-year star ship project. This is happening despite the lack of any real funding by the government for manned space flights.

Right. Why did we let go of the space shuttle again? I mean look at it.  It’s metal as fuck.

Space Shuttle launch pad, or a Metallica album cover?

I'm not a little unwell, I'm damn crazy

See title.  No idea why anyone would argue the other way around, especially in today's society. If you say, "I'm sick," everyone either wants to burn you with fire or stick you in a hazmat suit. At the very least, you'll have a fun time trying to be around kids from any set of parents.

But if you claim that you're crazy, then people want to give you a free t-shirt.  Clothes cost money, so better damn believe that I'll take as much free shit as possible.

I'm actually pretty excited- I've passed the 3 month blog mark... sorta. Most bloggers quit within the first three months, and I'm still writing and kicking, so that's great.  Even better, despite a short lived StumbleUpon ad campaign inflating my view numbers, I do, intact, have a semi-devoted tiny readership. And I'll fucking take that. I'll take the shit out of that.

Like this, but with less rape

At any rate, I'm very happy with how far the blog has gotten. Despite the fucked up links, despite the horrendous typos and grammar, despite the shoddy posting schedule, it's still here. And with the New Year, it's time for me to try to make it even better.

I promise to bring in the New Year with something the blog had for a little while, and then lost: a backlog and editing- which means, no more horrible, terrible, no good, very bad typos.  Having a backlog means better grammar (but I've got a long way to go in that regard- and I'll still break the rules on purpose every once in a while).  Having a backlog means no more rushed posts.

I started this wanting to do it right, and damn it, I'm going to do it right.  You guys have dealt with my growing pains, and I virtually pinkie promise all of you that this blog will be kicking until the world ends.

Note: joke may be on you, considering the world is slighted to end this year. Then again, I've already survived like 4 predicted apocalypses, so I'm not all that worried.

To everyone still reading this (and any new readers I get): you guys fucking rock harder than you know. Let's fight ignorance with a healthy dose of snark together.

No post on Thursday due to being down with the sick, normal posting to resume Tuesday

See title.  I was supposed to write Thursday's post before I left for work, but I woke up puking with a migraine instead.

And then after work I went and got very drunk, because fuck my health and making sane, rational decisions.  As it stands, I'm not particularly up for trying to scrape together a post to try and make up for it.  So, I'm taking a vacation day.

See you guys Tuesday!

The grand ambitions of the people that deface websites

(The continuing crisis: still don't have Internet on my main laptop.  Netbook seems to be working, so at least I'm writing on a computer I actually own.)

Did you know that we can use songbird brains to synthesize estrogen?

Or, right, blog post.

As most of you know, I'm a bit of a fringe guy when it comes to computer science.  I work in a pair of very low profile fields (Computational Geometry and Geospatial Programming) that don't do anything cool, haven't done anything cool for years and have no plans on ever launching a robot that can make a cat happy via a good brush down.

Side note: that robot is damn awesome.  It is remotely controlled via a pair of Wii-motes, a treadmill, and everyone's favorite controller for everything except gaming, Microsoft's Kinect.  And yes, outside of a minor head bashing, the cat really does seem to enjoy itself.  I took this as a sign that cats will ally themselves with our future robot overlords and work as spies- cute and cuddly during the day, giving away valuable intel about the human resistance at night.

It may already be too late

"Relimited, what the hell were you doing, going on about your stupid computer science work when you had the cat brushing wonder up your sleeve?" I hear you ask in my head.

I hate to say this, but you're being a bit of a dick.  I had a point and was getting to it, but no, you just want the good stuff.  Fine.  Jerkface.

It turns out hackers plan on having their own satellite grid.  Yeah, that's right- those nerdy kids back in high school have decided to stop taking your shit and want to launch the Hammer of Dawn to prove it.

Not really, but the basic idea is that individuals and small groups will have access to launching and maintain their own satellites.  The real trick isn't the stuff in space, but the ground stations required to monitor the stuff in space, so you don't lose track of where the hell the stuff is.

Honey, where the fuck did you leave the remote?

The hackers hope to have low cost ground stations you can buy for about $150 on a non-profit basis, which actually is pretty cheap.  The end goal is to have a totally privately owned space-based internet for hackers and their friends.

So, when the government introduces bills like SOPA, hackers go, "Fuck you, I'll just surf the web from space!"  Which is exactly how real life problems should be tackled- always go for the most awesome solution.