The Gamer's Quarter

[dhex]

NSFW:

the worst fucking pothead nonsense i've ever seen in my life. it makes fox news look like the lotus sutra.
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[dhex]

alternately, 19th century new drugs journalism.
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[dhex]

what the hell is the miyamoto candidate?
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[dhex]

http://www.reason.com/blog/show/118631.html

warning: this is a little rough. it's a marine who was very badly burned in iraq and came back to get married. he's tremendously disfigured - there's a timesonline.uk story in the comments section of the reason link with more details.
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[Nana Komatsu]

[Mister Toups]

the news story is actually pretty heartwarming.
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where were you when nana komatsu got a wii?

[dhex]

it's something else.

so is this
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[dhex]

on a lighter note, the road to serfdom in cartoon form


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[dhex]

a friendly libertoid code-nerd hooked a bunch of us up with a greasemonkey script that filters out the more egregious commentors on hit and run (reason's blog, which is now entering a severe political hackery decline phase) and i have to say it's quite excellent. plus i can expand it by adding names/emails.
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[dhex]

this greasemonkey script for phpbb boards makes reading some tech and official game forums possible again.

it's awesome. zog bless greasemonkey.
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[Nana Komatsu]

You didn't add me did you? ;_;

...

what am I saying, he can't see this anyway.
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resetbutton.net: videogames for unattractive people

[dhex]

there's nobody to filter at tgq. don't be so goth!

but like, say, the evga boards or rpg codex, yeah. it's actuallly really neat (a little [x] appears next to each name and you can automatically filter by name, email or ip, or collapse/expand as you wish, etc)

the h+r one is far more useful, not to mention whole threads where the exchanges only read

"post by monkeyboy"
"post by cheesedoodle"
"post by look i have a blog look look look"
"post by cheesedoodle"
"post by cheesedoodle"
"post by monkeyboy"

it's like seeing the face of god, or that one time i saw an suv of teenage dads blasting some horrible freestyle crash right into a fence cause they were too busy demonstrating their genetic dead ended-ness. man, that's like a blowjob from jesus, you know, when the universe conspires to give you a perfect view of excellence in motion.
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[dhex]

here's a pretty decent essay on why some young women are drawn to rand's fiction

and a less interesting one on william james and isolationism
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[dhex]

indesign on osx (10.3.9) is fucking retarded in the way it handles memory management.

shit, if i'm still here in six months i'm getting a new machine with 4gb of ram. hopefully i won't be, however...
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[SuperWes]

Hey Mike, I know you played Area 51 and hated it, but you also played Deus Ex and loved it. I'm interested to hear your take on this. Here's a choice quote:

[dhex]

i'd play it, or demo it, presuming it runs on my pc by the time it hits.

however, i don't think "the government is fucked" is a novel message in games.
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[SuperWes]

[Dracko]

[dessgeega]

i dated someone who was a fan of rand's fiction. i asked her "but isn't it a bunch of capital-affirming gobbledegook?" "oh, her ideas are terrible," she said, "but i like the way she writes."
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[Shapermc]

[Dracko]

[Shapermc]

[dhex]

as much as i like joyce - and he is indeed in my holy three of the truly great writers of the 20th century - i can't really get behind telling people to read finnegans wake. if people choose to seek it out, they will - like the grail.

i'd be far less frightened of someone who was into objectivism than someone who genuinely thinks she wrote well. the combination, of course, tends to be murderous. but just like i know a reasonable thelemite, i also know a decent objectivist chap as well. the article was kind of juvenile itself, but that's to be expected. it underestimates - seriously underestimates - the appeal and need for antinomianism in the lives of young adults, especially those who are too smart for their own good. one might as well accuse anyone, anywhere, who doesn't fit into a particular social community/kin and peer group (regardless of the dominant functionality, be it radical, conservative or even objectivist) of merely being "rebellious" or "difficult."

a little bit of rejection goes a long way.

on that note...

what i've never understood is this connection between joyce and the concept of the truly unreadable - every rand bashing session at h+r generally turns out a few of these, though the current thread is quite genteel comparatively - but lionized by the ivory tower/cultural elites type of books. it's true that many people who hold up joyce haven't actually read a word of him, and it is probably remarkable that he still holds a place in the modern discourse despite being white, male, straight, european and dead all at the same time. maybe it's the fart sniffing or catholic church bashing that gives him a pass, i know not.

i'd like to think it's because his genius is so transcendent that people cannot deny it, no matter how much nonsense has been pounded into their heads by academic brainwashers of questionable taste and talent; it may just be that people feel they cannot read ulysses, and fall into lockstep with the prevailing opinions rather than reading dubliners or portrait of the artist. which is unfortunate itself, because i can understand not wanting to read ulysses - if you're not familiar with irish history, catholicism, turn of the century dublin, republican politics and french, a lot is going to be lost - but i don't understand pretending to have read it. is it worse to be though uneducated by some or to pretend to be educated? it's as confusing as holding up joyce as the cornerstone of a tower of babel that a real or imagined intellectual elite merely pretends to scale because long books of unwavering genius are too much to handle.

then again, a rand fan would say the same thing. such is life.

there are so many better writers to pick, fiction and nonfiction alike, to demonstrate the questionable taste of the self-congratulatory and self-absorbed. (for example, agree with her or not, judith butler.) instead they point to joyce or foucault. foucault was unnecessarily dense, politically naive and occasionally questionable in the scholarship department, but he's full of interesting ideas that are presented succinctly despite translation. i think people hold him up because he's probably the most famous of the recent dead frenchmen, or because he's been namechecked a lot. sort of like julius evola, oddly enough, who i'd also recommend - with the same caveats - from the other direction. i like the balance actually; read a history of sexuality and then evola's yoga of power or even ride the tiger - the connections are remarkably similar in parts despite their stark differences on political and sexual metaphysics. i have a lot of sympathy for evola's wackadoodleness, but i have a fondness for wackadoodles of a certain stripe, regardless of whether or not i agree with them whatsoever, or even if i just like the cover art, like my current bathroom reading. the cover is great...

speaking of great covers i have been utterly unable to get into house of leaves. the font thing is kind of annoying, but it's just so unbearably cute.

in shittier news,
another texas swat raid death

edit: dracko, did you actually finish the fountainhead? if so, kudos, as you're more man than i.
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[Dracko]

I was joking about Joyce, man.

And yes, I did. And Atlas Shrugged. Don't ask me to remember them, the only reason I read them at all was to prove a point. I've quickly attempted to give my brain a thorough enema of that filth.

That involved a lot of nut brown ale, cider and Borges.
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[dhex]

well, i try to warn people off of finnegans wake until they've digested other things, since i tend to think of joyce as an important (or even Important) writer. i realize you weren't pulling the sort of schtick i mentioned above.
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[dhex]

[dhex]

[nICO]

[Dracko]

Is A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man required reading before tackling Ulysses? I was told something to that effect.
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[helicopterp]

Required reading?

Well, I hate the word required, but I would argue that it's highly reccommendable to start with Portrait. Firstly, because it's a fascinating book. Then, because Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses is even more interesting once you get a sense of how he developed.

I'm actually in the throes of writing a paper on Portrait and some of its bearings on the early episodes in Ulysses right now. I hope to have it finished in a few hours.

Dracko, I know you've read Ulysses. You really ought to treat yourself to Portrait, too.


About five years ago I read Rand's Anthem because everyone else I knew was reading Rand. Anyway, Anthem blows. Its message (and I indeed read it as a didactic work) is repulsive. The writing is even worse. Rand has the characters speak in the first person plural before this great revelation when a couple of them finally discover the pronoun 'I'. At best, it was cute. I'm not sure I would really even go that far, though.
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Like you thought you'd seen copter perverts before. They were nothing compared to this one.

[dhex]

yeah, portrait before ulysses is probably the only way to go. or at least the easiest. it makes the beginning of ulysses make sense.

[dhex]

apparently i wrote a book about god and baseball
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[Dracko]

When I was made to read Brave New World, I had a very hard time seeing what was supposedly so dystopic about it. I still do.

We is a great book, though. Far better than 1984 in any case.
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[nICO]

that is classic! good job man!

[dhex]

vibrators are still illegal in alabama (NSFW site link, the story itself is fine, if maddening

the full opinion is here, in case you want to bypass xbiz.com

i like robert nozick, and i liked him more as he got older. (not being a doctrinaire minarchist/libertarian/whatever, i don't care if people change their minds as they grow older) he's an interesting guy to read, especially out of modern philosophers. anarchy state and utopia is still worth a flip or two, even now.

the dystopic side of brave new world, in a nutshell:

- no autonomy
- narco-slave state
- massive censorship
- breeding humans as slaves
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[dhex]

a final thought before bedtime:

strippers are scary, but burlesque is just plain weird.
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[Nana Komatsu]

http://blog.flickr.com/flickrblog/2007/02/photographing_s.html
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resetbutton.net: videogames for unattractive people

[dhex]

http://www.flickr.com/photos/photosquirrels/173658273/in/photostream/

man, that one's unreal. is that fucking thing smiling?
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[dhex]

what does 200 calories look like?
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[dhex]

http://www.mapsofwar.com/ind/history-of-religion.html
http://mapsofwar.com/ind/american-wars.html
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[Swimmy]

And on that note, for those with access to Jstor: an economic model of war politics. For those without, summary here.
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"Ayn Rand fans are the old school version of Xenogears fanboys."
-seryogin

[dhex]

i will have to read that paper later.

some notes from a long weekend:

- i hate css and web design in general. much like ballroom dancing, i am just not built for these things.

- i am pretty tired of being sick.

- sabra brand hummus is crack and i just found out why - it's 800 calories per package.

- when someone really likes a certain kind of music or a certain band, it gives them a blind spot from which they cannot always escape. hopefully, as we grow older, that blind spot will lessen and become a bit more nuanced. part of that is always seeking out new music in weird places, especially as one ages, in order to avoid the "in my day" syndrome as well as giving a sense of scope and history from which to form opinions. it's also helpful to avoid the "forgetfulness of past orthodoxies" (a smart phrase from an otherwise goofy man of a dodgy legacy) and the slayer t-shirts or getting drunk at a kmfdm show or wearing out the pretty hate machine cassette back in high school or being really into iron maiden in sixth grade, etc.

i pick on my wife for having so many fucking annie lenox cds or , in general, the decemberists - but i also used to be on the promo mailing lists for reconstriction, cleopatra, metropolis, etc in college. i had a bunch of wumpscutt cds too. dodgy haircuts, bad clothing (that hasn't really changed, though) tastes change, as people change, and though some of this is surely the illusion of being able to avoid music i would find it hard to listen to (no radio, ipod, mp3s, being alone in an office, etc). outside of my pet peeve about blasting one's car stereo - and the resulting "teenage dad theme song" syndrome* - i got to great lengths to avoid being a dick, if only because i know i care quite a bit about it. ultimately, that's no way to care about anything.

*(sample lyrics "i'm sorry you didn't pull out / too late to go on the lam / but you can't pretend your life isn't over / by loudly pumping that jam"), i also have this daydream where i travel strapped to the top of the cab of a flatbed truck, 30k watts worth of bass drivers in the back, and blast 80hz tones up and down flatbush ave, greenpoint, bay ridge, etc, while screaming "I AM YOUR GOD" and "BOOM BOOM HERE COMES THE BOOM" or even "DO YOU LIKE THESE FLY TEST TONES, YOU FUCKING DEGENERATE PIGS?" through a megaphone; in my dream teenage dads of all races, creeds and colors actually melt like the dude from raiders of the lost ark. seriously, i hope every single bass blasting piece of shit in the world dies of painful cancers in their eyes that migrate to their balls and make their dicks fall off before they die.)
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[Nana Komatsu]

[dhex]

fer reals. i spent three hours saturday trying to figure out why i couldn't get a box to float centered. i double checked it against other examples - and then i even copied those examples. still no dice. thankfully it looks ok left justified, and people seem to not notice/care, but still...it's maddening.

unrelated: i just had my second keyboard at work crap out on me in the past six months. sometimes it seems like apple has a hole in their quality control routines, because i treat this stuff good (i'm not drinking soda or eating roasted marshmellows over the thing, i'm not using it to attack mice or co-workers, etc)

on the plus side i accidentally threw it into high contrast reverse mode (whatever that's actually called) and scared the shit out of myself before i realized it was an accessiblity thing.
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[Nana Komatsu]

If you want a box to float in the center of the page using CSS, usually you can do this:
<style>
.csshackcontainer { width: 100%; text-align: center;}
.floating { width: 100px; margin: 0px auto; }
</style>
<div class="csshackcontainer">
<div class="floating">Hello fucking world</div>
</div>

This works in virtually all the browsers, otherwise most people just succumb to using the <center> tag.
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resetbutton.net: videogames for unattractive people

[dhex]

well, after some poking what happens is i can get it to float, but the actual box isn't fixed width (650px in my case) but scales with the page:

http://conchobar.org/test/test2.html

the original:

http://conchobar.org/test/resume.html

it seems kind of pointless to sweat in a way, since everyone i've shown it to seems to be into the left justified bit.
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[dhex]

what i meant to post originally: a really good thread on the rpg codex, or rather, a very good question:

where do dungeons come from?

[Nana Komatsu]

[dhex]

thanks! i will keep fighting the good fight and try to figure out why i can't force this fucking thing to float center at fixed width.

unrelated: this made me laugh, and then not so much.
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[dhex]

NSFW movietime:

vx gas attack by skinny puppy

and in honor of presidents' day:

brad neely's washington video

and for good measure

his version of the story of sodom and gomorrah
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