New Testingstan

joviwan wrote:is this overt obliviousness you cultivate here an elaborate gag or are you serious?

some exaggeration, some time-shifting

i think my first introduction to billy joel was in the.... 7th grade when we listened to the "if that's moving up than i'm moving out" song over and over again to talk about what the lyrics meant. much of the class knew him, i didn't have any clue. i'm not sure i could have named his name back then tho even after that class.

since then, i've heard more of his work, i'm familiar with many of his songs now, but still haven't actually sat down and listened to very many of them. tonight i listened to "My Life" for what probably isn't the first time, it felt familiar but i didn't know it. i do know it now and indeed it is pretty good.



but i play with the obliviousness since it has been very real for me in the past. (and hell still is for a great many things though now i'm at least vaguely familiar with a variety of topics; i'm not so ignorant about my ignorance)

yeah, i didn't listen to most newish popular music at all until like ten years ago. for instance, i didn't even know who Metallica were until 2005.

and i didn't have the internet until late 2004 so like for example i got on the "all your base" bandwagon waaaaaaay after it had gone.... and i did not know that. at least with Metallica, i knew i was late to that party and could pretend to be cooler than i was or whatever. with all your base i thought i had found something new and cool and had to tell the world. LOL



bottom line i'm poking fun at myself with some exaggeration, but it isn't all an act

oh a more recent lol:

the first time i heard that "baby baby baby" song by justin bieber was when the child i was babysitting sang it. i thought she made it up off the top of her head to celebrate the birth of her little brother

my error was not corrected until a couple months later.

I see. thanks for answering, sorry if I came off snippy

Ralin wrote:So they do their victory dance, then turn and look behind them. And they see this: http://i.imgur.com/Kxh1B9C.png

Welcome to the Sixth World, chummers.

That reminds me of the towering Tyrell Corp. pyramids from Blade Runner.

Big Orangutan wrote:That reminds me of the towering Tyrell Corp. pyramids from Blade Runner.

It's the Renraku Arcology from the Shadowrun cyberpunk RPG setting. I'm sure there was plenty of cross-pollination between it and Blade Runner, or at least shared inspirations.

"Giant fuckall corporate pyramid" is a staple of the cyperpunk genre.

Different take on Renraku in Shadowrun: http://www.harebrained-schemes.com.s3.a ... e_1920.png

Bubblegum Crisis OVA: Genom Headquarters (http://www.cyberpunkreview.com/images/b ... isis15.jpg)

man i just steal all my campaigns by adapting westerns

I did have one game planned for my old RP group that would basically have been ADOM set in the Wild West. With, like, monsters and mutations and stuff. The final battle with the eLDar cHAoS gOd would have been set beyond a gate in the air above Nazca. I was going to go, "Bizarre, unimaginable images flash before your eyes. It looks sort of like this.

Also the events of the movie Tremors IV would have been canon for this campaign, and Hiram Gummer would have been a prefab PC option.

i just watched "the hunger games catching fire" (with my mormon peeps!)

i haven't seen the first film yet but i liked this one, i'm looking forward to watching its sequel too

i can't wait to see the government fall. i guess that's what the title is about, the revolution is spreading

another thing i discussed tonight was the "let it go" video again. i was going on about how much i like the clothes and one of the other people there mentioned the symbolism of how the first dress is all like enclosed and the second one is all like out there

and duh, as soon as she said that i agreed entirely, but i never thought of that myself. i guess i was too busy tweaking the second dress to be just a wee bit more conservative so i'd be more comfortable wearing it myself to consider what it actually meant in the context of teh story lol

(and then i started to question: should i have said "i'd wear 'em both" out loud? oh well, i don't care what they're going to say. let the storm rage on, the cold never bothered me anyway.)

So I was reading the Wikipedia article on the passenger pigeon and I think it's definitely my new favorite extinction story. There were billions of those fuckers in North America when colonization began and we wiped them out within a few centuries. We weren't even trying, it was just that easy to kill the stupid little things! My favorite part is how once we got their numbers down to the point where they could only form flocks in the thousands they stopped mating at all because they were so depressed. Definitely an animal the world can do without.

Victory!

Losonti Tokash wrote:man i just steal all my campaigns by adapting westerns

Have you done any based on A Fistful of Dollars or The Magnificent Seven so you could adapt a western that's adapting a samurai movie?

why do humans like to wallow about in slime on rainy days?

well let us look at it from an evolutionary point of view

humans have spent 90% of their evolution in the stone age
and the stone age humans spent 90% of their evolution as apes
and apes spent 90% of their evolution as primates
and primates spent 90% of their evolution as reptiles
and reptiles spent 90% of their evolution as fish
and fish spent 90% their evolution as amoeba

since humans were amoeba for 99.9999% of their evolution, it only makes sense the human brain would still be wired like an amoeba brain, and amoeba just love slime

heh
anything particular that prompted that?

http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/ ... nounc.html

I KNEW IT! I FUCKING KNEW IT! I'VE BEEN SAYING IT FOR YEARS!

They thought I was joking. But who's laughing now?

evilsoup wrote:heh
anything particular that prompted that?

Meh, every time someone mentions "stone age brains" and the large percentage of time spent there, I think of the literally billions of years spent as unicellular organisms, because large percentages are funny.

Someone on TV uttered the magic phrase, soo...
But what ticks me off is what a non-explanation it is, yet it makes everyone nod sagely in agreement. Typical example heard all the time: "People get fat because stone age brains like to eat shit."
Contrary to popular belief this is not an explanation. It is in fact several empirical claims about brains in general, and ancient brains in particular. It is also irrelevant, even if correct: If modern brains like to eat shit because stone age brains liked to eat shit, the relevant fact here is that modern brains like to eat shit. There's no reason for the explanatory chain to go deeper than that, and adding "it makes sense" reasoning, or wholly substituting it for empirical observations of current brains would only weaken the argument. Which however brings us to the most important point: Such observations are often lacking and, since the purpose is obviously not to discuss the hidden claims, it must be to silence discussion by trying to disguise the unsupported claim in question as a fact, backed by science or common sense. A rhetorical trick of the most annoying kind.


well there's also the whole phrase "people are compelled to do things by their brains" which implies some interesting dualism...

Just so.

Agent Bert Macklin wrote:First World Problem time: Why the fuck are audiobooks so expensive? My plan to rent from the library and rip is not working out because of shitty citizens not taking care of free items. Now I'm looking to actually buy the things.

I'm not sure this makes you much better. I mean granted you're not destroying stuff but that's a pretty low form of being a

“Sir, I have to warn you, this may well be committing a war crime. We haven’t had United Nations approval for any action and without a vote in the UN, we are committing an act of aggressive war, which is a war crime. I therefore rule that we must hold off any action until there had been a full meeting of the Security Council. I will also issue orders for the pilots involved in this incident to be arrested and brought up on war crimes charges.”

And then LTC Sarah "Mac" MacKenzie, USMC punched POTUS in the face before smooching with CAPT Harmon "Harm" Rabb, JAGC, USN. They were later locked up in a secret prison, but thanks to the investigative efforts of NCIS Special Agents Leroy Jethro Gibbs, Anthony "Tony" DiNozzo and Timothy McGee the location of the prison was discovered, and a successful rescue mission led by NCIS OSP Special Agents G. Callen, Sam Hanna and Kensi Blye, assisted by LAPD Detective Martin "Marty" Deeks freed them. Overcome with their patriotic duty, they nonetheless joined the heroic American forces in beating back the advancing legions of Hell.

Really any work of fiction can be improved by adding in the characters of the JAG/NCISverse.

I remember the TV Tropes Salvation War page mentioned "Al Bundy's heroic sacrifice" as a tear-jerker moment, but it didn't elaborate.

i think my income is almost official for 2013, coming in at about $14k, before taxes

....looks like bankruptcy after taxes. already running overall in the red and in the danger zone month after month, and now a $1000 tax bill on top of it? i've already robbed peter blind


i have one last chance to salvage this but methinks i gotta throw in teh towel. it was a good run tho.


on the bright side i have a potential opportunity to remain solvent coming up.... as a corporate drone sell-out. phone interview coming l8r this week. furthest i've gotten with these applications in the last five months - finally, one of them is actually getting back to me.

Have you ever just stopped and tried to picture how awesome it would be if Chuck Norris were to roundhouse kick that sacred white buffalo who the Native Americans believe is going to usher in a new era of world peace in the head?

Can't say I ever have

Ralin wrote:Have you ever just stopped and tried to picture how awesome it would be if Chuck Norris were to roundhouse kick that sacred white buffalo who the Native Americans believe is going to usher in a new era of world peace in the head?

What the hell are you talking about?

Losonti Tokash wrote:

Ralin wrote:Have you ever just stopped and tried to picture how awesome it would be if Chuck Norris were to roundhouse kick that sacred white buffalo who the Native Americans believe is going to usher in a new era of world peace in the head?

What the hell are you talking about?

There's this sacred white buffalo that Native American legend prophecizes will usher in a new era of world peace.

I want to see Chuck Norris roundhouse kick it in the head.