May 2013
3 posts
Star Trek proves the death of the American Dream
I like the 2009 Star Trek reboot, and its sequel is even better. That probably loses me some nerd cred, because according to the Internet I’m supposed to be up in arms about how J.J. Abrams has turned Star Trek into a Star Wars clone, and those IDIOTS at Paramount should go back to making movies/TV series focusing on the TNG era.
…Because Star Trek: Nemesis was such a critical and...
The bullet I dodged
Some interpretations of quantum theory say that every possibility eventuates. In other words, anything that can happen does happen, and every time there’s a choice between A or B, the universe splits. To give the crudest example I can think of: In Universe A you say “Damn the torpedos, full speed ahead” and fuck that girl, to hell with finding a condom. In Universe B, you play it...
April 2013
3 posts
The Universe at 1 : 299,792,458 scale
“Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space. Listen…”
Light travels 299,792,458 metres per second in a vacuum. That’s fast. It’s so fast that a beam of light takes just 1.3 seconds to travel from...
25th century spambot
YOUR ASSISTANCE IS NEEDED
Dear friend, I am contacting you for a business opportunity that would be mutually beneficial in ways you cannot yet imagine. Please forgive me if my English is substandard, as this language is no longer a primary method of communication where I come from.
Please allow me to explain the particulars of our possible business arrangement. My name is Selwyn Armbruster,...
Don't stop believing
Things I stopped believing in, and how old I was when I stopped believing in them:
Parental infallibility: 5
It became obvious relatively early on that my parents were just making shit up as they went.
Tooth fairy, Easter bunny: 7
I milked both of them for an extra year, though. Money for nothin’ and chocolate for free.
Santa Claus: 8
Likewise, I professed belief for another year...
March 2013
1 post
Sideways thinking
After my epic motorcycle crash in November 2012, I sent my bike back up north to Mt Manganui, to the dealership I’d bought it from, so they could repair the damage done to it. For the most part, the damage was cosmetic; most of the fairings on the left side were destroyed, as were the turn signals, headlight, front mudguards, clutch lever, and left mirror. They fixed or replaced everything...
February 2013
2 posts
Murder on two wheels, resurrection on two legs
Motorcycle: A mechanical contrivance designed to murder the uncoordinated, inattentive, reckless, and/or stupid.
On 22 November, my BMW G650GS arrived in the driveway. I’d been waiting for it for nearly a month. $14,000 worth of motorcycle arrived at last, brand new and gleaming in the summer sun. Not a scratch on it, and less than five kilometres on the odometer.
When I turned the key,...
Under a billion suns
I pull into my driveway just after 10 pm. Gravel crunches beneath my feet as I walk toward my front door. In my backyard, silhouettes of trees rise against a spray of stars. That bright trail of far-flung suns draws my eyes farther skyward, straight up, and I want a better view.
On a whim, I pack my dog into the car and drive to the river track. I’ve never been here at night, though...
January 2013
3 posts
"Things will get better"
September 2012: On an oddly warm early spring afternoon, my wife left me without warning and without any prior indication that anything was wrong. I went from happily married (I thought) to alone and devastated in a single afternoon.
“Don’t worry,” my friends and family said. “Things will get better.”
November 2012: I wrecked a brand-new $14,000 motorcycle the day...
The James Bond CliffsNotes
Most people know the main tropes of the James Bond series:
“Bond. James Bond.”
“Shaken, not stirred.”
“Oh, James!”
In other words, suave, sophisticated dude travels the world’s exotic locales, battling evil and killing dudes when he’s not busy seducing women, boozing, or gambling. Occasionally he uses gadgets of varying degrees of ridiculousness...
How I spent my summer vacation (in an alternate...
Today is the final day of my summer holiday that started the evening of 21 December. I could go on about what I actually did, but I thought it would be more fun to check in on alternate universe versions of myself and see how they made out over these past 16 days.
Earth 42: The morning of December 21, I got on my motorcycle and drove to the inter-island ferry in Wellington. I spent the next two...
December 2012
3 posts
2012 in review
Being a social media whore makes it a whole lot easier to do these end-of-the-year review things, where I look back over the previous 12 months and try to figure out what the hell happened. For the past several years I haven’t had much to say; 2009 through 2011 was pretty uneventful from my perspective, with neither major setbacks or noteworthy accomplishments. In fact, I spent most of those years...
The Beach
It’s raining, but he doesn’t care. It’s time to go to The Beach.
Water falls in great torrents, making his errand seem that much crazier than it might have on a sunny day. His dog briefly stirs in the back seat as he taps the brakes, trying to keep his distance from the lost tourists in front of him. For once, he doesn’t begrudge them for travelling more than 20 kilometres below the speed...
Soundtrack for the year 2012
I’ve assembled a 42-song soundtrack that sonically maps out the experiences I had this year. Well, the last four months of it anyway. This exercise will be of precisely zero interest to anyone but myself (as with most of the things I do in my spare time), but I don’t really give a shit (ditto).
Even passing familiarity with any of the songs below and/or my craptastic final 120 or so...
September 2012
1 post
3 tags
"Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal."
“Truth is stranger than fiction” is the strangest truth of all. If I tried to do the opposite of some infamous memoirists and sell my true life story as a fictional novel, no publisher would ever agree to sell it. The twists and turns of my life defy any idea of narrative cohesion. Roughly once every five years the thread of my life takes an abrupt, hairpin deviation, and I find my...
August 2012
1 post
10 things Coca-Cola won't tell you: A satire of...
This Marketwatch post by Quentin Fottrell, “10 things Apple won’t tell you”, perfectly exemplifies why people who don’t understand tech shouldn’t write about it. Right out of the gate, the top 10 format is a warning sign of a fluff piece. When you feel you’ve got to round it out to a nice, even number like that, it’s a virtual certainty that at least one...
July 2012
1 post
Travel time from Los Angeles to Beijing, via...
“With karate I’ll kick your ass from here to Tiananmen Square!” —Tenacious D, 2001
How long would it take for you to arrive at Tiananmen Square if Jack Black used karate to kick your ass in Los Angeles?
Let’s suppose Jack Black kicks your 80 kg ass with 270 Newtons of force, which Livestrong says is the force an average football player imparts to the ball....
June 2012
1 post
The Damnable Cycle
“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stomping on a human face… forever.”
Or, if you’re an American curious how your government really works, you can merely watch for easily discernible patterns. I call it The Damnable Cycle.
Cycle 1: Republican President
Characteristics: War, or at least massive military buildup. Low taxes for the rich. Massive deficit,...
February 2012
1 post
Hippies, I am sick of your bitching
I spent weeks last year, and the year before that, being inundated by morons claiming that Apple’s products were assembled by legions of Chinese children. None of these mouthbreathers bothered to actually read Apple’s annual Supplier Responsibility Report; instead, they just parroted whatever sensationalist bullshit they’d read in birdcage-liners like The Telegraph or Gizmodo.
...
January 2012
2 posts
Why I'm in no hurry to return to the USA
I live in New Zealand, and I have for the past 3.5 years. I’m probably going to have to move elsewhere within the next year, and my wife and I have been tossing around ideas for where to go next. Australia is at the top of our list, with the UK a distant second.
Nowhere in any of our discussions have we seriously considered moving back to the States. My wife is less adamant about it than I...
7 tags
Review - The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword
I’ve just finished playing through The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword. While the game was enjoyable overall, Skyward Sword definitely wasn’t without its flaws… some of which bordered on downright maddening and greatly detracted from the experience of playing it.
Story
Skyward Sword’s story is the first sign of the game not being put together altogether well. The Zelda series...
December 2011
1 post
Best/Worst Everything of 2011
2011 wasn’t too bad… except for January and October. Both of those months sucked.
Best of 2011:
Greatest Personal Accomplishment: I climbed a mountain. So awesome. I’d say earning my Master’s degree is a decent runner-up, though.
Best Film: I saw only one film in the theatre this year, which was likely the lowest number in my entire adult life. Looking at the list of...
October 2011
2 posts
2 tags
My rider for speaking engagements
After having read through Richard Stallman’s epic rider for speaking engagements, I decided it was a good idea to come up with one of my own.
Here’s the info packet about my speeches. This information is essential for planning my visit and speech. Please forward it to anyone who is interested in organising a speech for me.
I’ll decide the topic of the speech beforehand. What...
1 tag
George Lucas has a strange sense of justice
Anakin Skywalker: All limbs chopped off, third-degree burns over most of body, requires permanent life support. Much later, after life support system is shorted out by Force lightning, suffocates to death.
Obi-Wan Kenobi: Killed in lightsaber duel.
Qui-Gon Jinn: Stabbed in chest, killed in lightsaber duel.
Mace Windu: Force lightninged off of skyscraper.
Multiple Jedi: Killed by battle droids,...
September 2011
9 posts
2 tags
Emperor Palpatine's cause of death
Since Return of the Jedi’s release in 1983, it’s been assumed by many that Emperor Palpatine’s death was a result of the despot falling all the way to the central core of the Death Star. Onscreen evidence even seems to bolster this theory; the Emperor is visible for roughly seven seconds following Vader hurling him down the shaft, and roughly two film frames after his body...
Ten reasons I didn't read your email
Every day I have to sift through what I can comfortably say, with no hyperbole, is a shitload of email. So much that I wouldn’t have time to read it all from beginning to end even if that was my whole job. There’s a decent chance I skimmed your email instead of reading it if I didn’t think it was all that important, and there’s an even greater chance I didn’t read it...
My Favourite Memory
Inspired by Fifty People, One Question
With all due deference to my wife and our many happy years together, my favourite memory pre-dates meeting her by nearly four years.
March 15, 1999, around 10 A.M., I left Puget Sound Naval Shipyard as a free man. For the first time in nearly three and a half years, my destiny was my own.
Since October of 1995 I had been enlisted in the United...
4 tags
How long would it take us to build the Death Star?
“That’s no moon. It’s a space station.”
“It’s too big to be a space station.”
How long would it take to assemble the first Death Star in Low Earth Orbit using the same construction techniques used to build the International Space Station?
This analysis makes a number of assumptions, first and foremost that assembly of a 160 km diameter artificial...
5 tags
Building a better Episode I, Part III
This is the final segment in a three-part series on re-making Star Wars Episode I into a film that doesn’t make me (and millions of fellow Star Wars geeks) feel like barfing from our eye sockets every time we watch it. In the first part I discussed general issues with the film; in the second post I discussed three different ways to address those problems. In this third and final segment, I...
5 tags
Building a better Episode I, Part II
Yesterday I outlined general flaws with Star Wars: Episode I. Today I’ll focus on three specific things that could have made the movie much more watchable.
Step One: Anakin and the Queen must be adult characters
To make Episode I a film that is, in short, worth a shit, you basically have to scrap its entire premise. “Let’s see what Darth Vader was like when he was just an innocent child”...
6 tags
Building a better Episode I: Part One
Many months ago I went over the general issues and problems with the Star Wars prequels as a whole, and I promised to produce my ideas for Prequels that Don’t Suck. Well, I got a little sidetracked. It’s not my fault. But let’s start with the worst offender. This will be the first post in a three-post series on how to transform Episode I from the steamiest turd in the franchise into a film that...
1776-2001
It’s ten years later, and everyone’s supposed to share what they were doing on That Day. So here goes.
I jerked awake at 6:30 in the morning for some reason, a full hour earlier than I’d planned to wake up. I stumbled out into the living room of my Kennewick apartment and turned on the TV to catch the usually banal morning news.
The first thing I saw was something about the...
The best revenge
I guess that now it must be around ten years to the day since the last time I saw you in person. It no longer matters enough to me to remember the exact date, and I’m too lazy to go back through my archives and look it up.
We hadn’t been dating for long, but we felt like we’d known each other for years already. I guess that was part of the problem, at least for you. You’d...
August 2011
2 posts
Form letter for E-Dickheads
Dear (Your Name Here):
Sometime between my first coffee and last beer, you’ve chosen to contact me either through email, Twitter, or the comments on (Site Name Here). Before today I had no idea you even existed, but you’ve made your existence known — loudly and repetitively. You have reared up before me for a singular purpose: to prove yourself right and prove me wrong, whatever the...
1 tag
Opinion: Josh M. Hurd is a complete assclown
Who is Josh M. Hurd? I don’t know. I had no clue he even existed until yesterday, when he decided to leave several insulting comments on one of the posts on the site I write for. He called me an idiot, a moron, and a couple other unoriginal things.
Obviously, he then had his comments deleted. I mean, duh, you insult one of the site’s news editors, your comments vanish. That’s...
July 2011
1 post
Foreclosed
I wrote this in late 2008, just before the last big election. Three years and four trillion dollars ago. It seems strangely relevant today.
“Backed by the full faith and credit of the Treasury Department of the United States of America.” - FDIC pledge
$10,552,644,988,309.52 - U.S. National Debt, 10/31/2008
Whiteman Air Force Base 02:17 CDT 31 October 2008 “Gin,” Jameson whispered, laying...
June 2011
4 posts
Blood makes the grass grow
October, 1995. Great Lakes Recruit Training Center.
Petty Officer Second Class Luce: “Why did you join my Navy?”
Various Recruits: “To learn a skill.” “For a career.” “My dad was in the Navy.” “To see the world.”
Me: “To get money for college.”
Luce: “BULLSHIT! You all joined the Navy to KILL! You’re all...
The delightful idiocy of the Apple ID
I have one Apple ID tied to iTunes purchases, one tied to MobileMe, and at least three others that aren’t really tied to anything.
My iTunes ID pre-dates the time when Apple required domain names to be appended to the end. So instead of BlahBlah@eatme.com, it’s just BlahBlah. Naturally, Apple changed things around for FaceTime and iCloud so that these types of accounts don’t...
Robber Barons and Highwaymen
The release of an unlocked, contract-free iPhone in the US can be viewed as a head-scratcher from the Americans’ perspective. Given that the GSM model of iPhone only has full compatibility with AT&T’s network anyway, the ability to switch to T-Mobile at will is a hollow victory at best — T-Mobile’s 3G operates at a frequency the iPhone doesn’t support. Apple itself and...
May 2011
6 posts
3 tags
3 tags
Product Review: Homo sapiens
Overview
The Good: Peerless operating system with essentially limitless potential
The Bad: Fundamentally flawed hardware holds the OS back
The Ugly: Inability to backup software means loss of all data is inevitable
Intro
Having existed in its current form for roughly 200,000 years (give or take), the current sapiens iteration of the human body represents an evolutionary rather than...
Dogs aren't dangerous. Idiot dog owners are.
I read an article in the NZ Herald just now that made me (PUN ALERT) barking mad. The article writer’s basic principle was sound — people need to get better control over their dogs — but the way the article writer stated the case made him/her sound like kind of a git. (I say him/her because the author had one of those gender-neutral kinds of names and I can’t be arsed to do any further...
If Star Trek films' subheads told the truth
For the most part, Star Trek films have subheadings that tell you almost nothing about the film. “The Wrath of Khan” and “The Search for Spock” are exceptions, but the other nine films give you no idea what to expect from their vague and occasionally bullshit titles. “The Voyage Home” as a title always makes me think of that film where talking dogs and cats make...
April 2011
2 posts
2 tags
Ten years ago, this happened
April 2001
People think they know about emptiness. Mention emptiness and they’ll think of a dark room with no furniture, or a desert that stretches to the horizon in every direction. Say the word emptiness, and people think of outer space. They’re all wrong. Emptiness is driving through Western Wyoming at fifty-five miles per hour with the only evidence of human habitation the highway...
The Right-Winger's Fantasy: John McCain's...
IN THE BEGINNING, America was in darkness. But John McCain said “Let there be light,” and lo, there was light.
On the first day, John McCain declared war on Iran. And behold, the stealth bombers loosed their arrows over the lands of Persia, and the Tomahawk missiles descended upon the land of the unbelievers. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad unconditionally surrendered, and the people of Iran...
March 2011
4 posts
2 tags
Eye PADD
I have an iPad 2. For now, I’m one of probably 25 people in all of New Zealand who can say that. Once it officially launches this Friday, that number will probably go up to 75 or so.
I won’t post my impressions here; they’ll go elsewhere, because on other parts of the internet, I get paid for that kind of thing. But I will post the following conversation I had with my wife.
...