OK, while I had thought of comparing certain aspects of Fight Club with Calvin and Hobbes, I certainly had never taken it as far as this post at metaphilm [archive.org] (warning: spoilers for Fight Club).
Category: Entertainment
Quotes from sleeping people
I found this node on everything2.
Yeah, we’ve got a few of those.
Harry Potter computer viruses
Inspired by finding a list of Babylon 5 viruses earlier this week.
Harry Potter virus: Looks like the last file of a virus you just wiped out, until you try to erase it–then it wipes your drive.
Voldemort virus: You can’t get rid of it, only make it dormant. It can be reactivated by the Wormtail virus up to thirteen years later.
Dumbledore virus: Scares off all the other viruses but never seems to actually *do* anything.
Hermione virus: Fills up all available drive space with files of useless information.
Ron virus: Contains code, some of it buggy, from the author’s five previous viruses.
Flashback Blog: Sanding doors
So my computer dumped my “Recent Items” list again and I had to go digging through my WP files to find the writing bits I was looking for. And I found some stuff that would have made great blog material if I’d had one at the time I wrote it. This one is from the summer I spent painting residence houses at UCI. I’d just been introduced to the wonderful world of sanding down semi-gloss paint to make sure the new coat would stick, and I was high on Babylon 5. So I started thinking, “What would the B5 characters say or do if someone asked them to sand doors?”
Ivanova: Doors? You want me to sand doors? This is a joke, right? John, this isn’t funny.
Garibaldi: Let me get this straight. You want me to sand doors…….do you have any idea how busy I am? Tell you what, you get someone–Zack! Will you go sand some doors for me?–and you just tell them I did it. Would that make you happy?
Lennier: (bows and leaves)
Kosh: (music) No… (more music)
Corwin: Nobody ever tells me anything around here, and now they want me to sand doors. I’m not sure, but I think I may have been demoted.
Zathras: Great door. Terrible door. But great hope for smooth finish. Zathras used to sanding doors. Doors understand Zathras. Doors always in the way. Much being pushed out of way. Just like Zathras. (this one is Kelson’s)
Morden: You say you want me to sand doors, but I believe I can do more for you than that. Let me speak to my associates and I’ll be right with you.
Lyta: The other Kosh never made me sand doors!
Londo: Yes. You want me to sand doors. But in the grand old days of the Centauri Republic, thousands of servants would have sanded thousands of doors at our slightest whim!
Vir: Londo….I don’t like this. I mean, I mean–bad enough you have me dealing with the Shadows…..and Mr. Morden, and keeping all your secrets……I just can’t take this any more, I–All right. I’ll sand the doors. But this is the last time, Londo.
Marcus: All right then, I’ll just go and…sand doors, yes….and then that’ll be the high point of my day. See you.
Further suggestions are welcome.
Fuzzy logic?
I finally saw Terminator 3 this weekend, and something has been bothering me about the ending (aside from watching the end of the world).
Skynet’s a distributed system. Presumably its intelligence scales along with the number of nodes it has. Those nodes are computers all over the world. Those computers are most concentrated in major cities. Skynet launches a global nuclear attack on those major cities. That wipes out a huge percentage of its own computing nodes. It’s also going to take out huge chunks of the Internet’s infrastructure, leaving many of the remaining nodes disconnected from each other.
In its attempt to wipe out humans, Skynet gave itself a world-class lobotomy.
I don’t know about you, but that just doesn’t sound like a winning strategy to me.
Of course they’re ready!
Who needs pesky things like walls, anyway? This is California! We don’t have weather! And the scaffolding just makes it easier to get in and out of the place!
(Of course, once the new tenants realize they’re next to a swamp – OK, a marsh – maybe they’ll want those walls!)
(Edited August 12: replaced image with a better photo.)
May contain articficial coloring
From a can of cherry pie filling:
