Since at least Arthur C. Clarke’s Against the Fall of Night the idea of mind taping has been knocking around in science fiction for decades. Some examples are William Gibson’s Dixie Flatline and Frederik Pohl’s heechee prayer fans. A particularly good portrayal of how this might be done is Rudy Rucker’s Software. When roboticist Hans [...]
Nearly a month ago, my friend Victor bought and downloaded Portal, a first person action game that involves puzzles, the legacies of faceless defense corporations and bizarre physics. He invited me to try my hand at it. The game very strongly reminded me of Paranoia, right down to the jumpsuits and manipulative, deranged robots. For [...]
[Victor, Greg and Ralph in attendance on 11-18-2007 between 3:30PM until about 9:30PM. Greg was running Thalin and Chingara. Victor was running Mandark and Stirge. Ralph was running Dwalor and Telwyn. Hilda and Helga started off in Greg and Ralph's hands but when combat started, Victor was mostly calling the tactics. The Circus is currently [...]
Yeah, I’ve ranted about this before. I think it bears repeating. What is Thanksgiving for? Really? If it’s supposed to celebrate national identity, we’ve already got a zillion holidays for that, Veteran’s Day and Independence Day for starts–and some that some of you out there wouldn’t consider as days of national pride like MLK Day [...]
A few hours ago a friend sent me mail about Philip Pullman’s fantasy series His Dark Materials. One of the novels in this series was recently made into a movie called The Golden Compass. Apparently there is some controversy over this series, which I have not read and only heard about recently, that the books [...]
So I upgraded to Ubuntu 7.1 last weekend. Things went very smoothly. Prior to this, System76 sent out some upgrades for their hardware drivers, perhaps in anticipation of everyone migrating to 7.1. There was really only one hitch. My screen brightness now twitches on occasion. This is due to a known power management bug that [...]
Victor, Greg, Ralph and Ian in attendence. 9-23-2007 around 5PM until about 9:30PM. However what follows is really a summary of two sessions: To recap briefly: The Circus is in Darth Lom, driven there primarily by Thalin’s vague but powerful paranoia and his obssessive curiosity for the histories and cultures of this ancient land. But [...]
In early August my cat, Lola, was diagnosed with failing kidneys. The vet put her on a special diet, subcutaneous hydration and prescribe various medicines but the prognosis wasn’t good. It was mostly wait and see. She was old, over 16 years old. Years ago when I set up this site, I promised myself I’d [...]
Actually, that’s not strictly accurate. I don’t want to throw a keyboard out of a window. I want to remove the Microsoft branding from my Linux laptop keyboard. I don’t think it’s really spite. Microsoft makes a decent enough set of operating systems and applications. It’s just that it reduces my cognitive dissonance to have [...]
So I’ve had my new Darter Ultra laptop for about a week. I’ve noticed many improvements in speed for many tasks–still image rendering, page loading, conversion of file formats, copying large files and so on. I’m very pleased. A very small warning for strangers out there considering buying a System76 machine. They don’t exactly ship [...]