Wikipissing

The latest wikileak is certainly an interesting read, putting the average internet user into a position of unrestricted and bluntly honest language.

Journalists could learn something from reading these documents. Not only the scandals of Countries calling each other names and gossip about who insulted who at state dinners. But the language itself, honest, blunt, straightforward and easy to understand, implying little and talking only of concrete ideas, not obsolete tit bits.

There are many around the world condemning these reports. As though governments departments being honest and transparent is too dangerous. Secrecy, diplomacy and innuendo seem to be the mainstay of failed representational government. No blood will be spilled as a result of the documents becoming public. But perhaps the questions they prompt will force a change in the political game.


It is already obvious who leaked these documents. Expect more leaks to come, and plan on having nothing to hide.

Empty bottles

Being evil is like being in love, you don't know why you are, you just are.

MASH

I have been watching MASH for a while now, and the prospect for a new season starting any day now has me excited

Of course after all these years you could hardly expect Alan Alda to come back as Hawkeye, maybe a cameo at a USO show, but he strikes me as heavily Yosarian inspired; far too insane to return to the theater of war as a spectator.


I am sure there is plenty of young, new talent in the US and Korea just waiting to get in on the action.

Danger danger, we are all in danger

"The greatest scourge visited on our community is the vile scourge of illicit drugs" -Kenneth Jones Deputy Commissioner of Victoria's police force


Image of "high potency" cannabis lifted from the ABC website. Looks like ditch weed to me; check out those stems and leaves.

Murder, rape, arson and rape are so passé.

The free market is dead.

Spider Jerusalem

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas reads as a tale of two cities, if the book were cut in half along the spine.

The violent conflicting ideologies, the excesses brought on in part by a cornucopia of psychoactive chemicals and in larger part by the raw psychic energy efficiently piped into vaults of the wealthiest few.

The most dangerous thing that comes to mind, is if this man were ever to become polite, sober and calm. If were to happen, we would all become a little less sane.

White cholera

Does your clothing define your profession. Physicists and engineers by and large seem to have split from the mandatory lab coat common to the technical application of scientific theory.

I work on a boat (motherfucker, don't you ever forget). It pays well and the crew are some of the most charming and motley people I have ever had the privilege of having met.

I work behind a bar, pouring drinks for the astute and the abominable, the influential and the abysmal.

My uniform is white. The collar tight around my neck when I try to wear it done up is also white.

I now owe ~40k AUD for an education at the university of Melbourne and the university of Queensland. I have learned fascinating things about the minute and gigantic world that surrounds us. I have learned terrible things about the people that surround us.

Working in a bar makes me happy. I serve drinks to people who are out on the river enjoying themselves. Their jovial attitude is at times contagious. I work very hard, but I enjoy myself.

The easygoing and touching people I find myself in contact with at the bar are not the same people I have found in a lab. My research work at MUARC was fascinating and the people I worked with were interesting. But my honors year has provided a different perspective.

Perhaps it was merely the small lab I was working in, and the specific staff with which I came in contact. My sample size is small, yet I fear a possible dystopic propensity towards self deception and malicious skulduggery that goes with a career in a laboratory.


Or maybe I have yet to see it on the boat. The world is mine. So it goes.

World's Scariest Police Chases

I finally got a epsxe working on kubuntu 10.04 with a PS3 controller.

This thread did most of the work for me.

joypad.cfg was a joy to configure, but once I got it working it felt good. Though it kept trying to use the sixaxis which is upsetting. Manually assigning keys using the .cfg file saw that through.

So, best games to play. Well Symphony of the Night is a classic that makes the latest DS releases pale in comparison. The difficulty is pleasing too; a far sight from the soft, bared underbelly of Dawn of Sorrow. In fact, it even gave the steep yet truncated Order of Ecclesia a thrashing. A skeleton killed me before I realized that saving religiously was essential to progression.

The only things I miss from the DS titles is the secret walls at every junction.

Actually thinking back, I don't miss the piles of useless items and abilities to collect.

I do miss the extra side quests from Portrait of Ruin and Order of Ecclesia. Though both games suffered from a chronic case of the shorts and really needed the padding.

Having discovered a good 23% or thereabouts on my first hour of play, I figured eh, the game is five times as long as that, give or take retracing my steps.

Then I discovered it is ~200% exploration and the castle inverts itself at some point.

Oh joy! I started wishing the latest attempt at 3D was more Metroid Prime 1 or 2 and less Devil may cry about the rent while living in a loft of a Castle named Devil Castle Dracula.

Well, dying often and having to reload from the title screen derails my playing. For times like this I have World's Scariest Police Chases.

I didn't do any research into the title, just thought world's blankiest blank was a good genre to get into and popped it on.

Well. I got in some GTA style driving on free patrol then tried the missions. Stopping cars by ramming them was pretty fun, the driving tests not so much.

Then I was told to pull out my gun and disable the car I was chasing.

Yep, the narrator explains in a serious voice, that split second decisions like steering well or deciding to shoot at a car you are pursuing is what police must do to "save lives and keep the peace". I really hope this game was funded by the police in part.

By now I am back in freeplay, pulling drivebys on pedestrians that dare to dodge my SUV as I bare down on them. I start thinking that GTA is only so fun. You are a criminal, that is your shtick. Break some laws, get money, take your cousin bowling...

I think a police sim that allows you to be crooked as hell, generally disobey the law and cause chaos would be a great game to play.

And I just remembered the millions of hours spent with nelix playing Crackdown. Now it all makes sense.


I am going to keep pretending World's Scariest Police Chases is a simulator designed for recruitment. It feels better to drive the opposite direction from cars you are meant to chase, do burnouts through white picket fences and wildy discharge firearms while driving along the middle of the road.

Yes

Turns out I have liked progressive rock and progressive house for a long time without knowing it.

Or knowing what is progressive about these genres.

Drama by Yes is on par with Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd.

I can see the inspiration that the Boards of Canada must have taken when making The Campfire Headphase. The opening Machine Messiah is so deliciously animu, I ^.^'d.



When I spend time with people who are happy I feel I am making them sad by contrasting emotions. A sort of contagious Eeyore.

The Dao of Pooh, simplistically approaching perfection, fell short in its analysis of Eeyore. True melancholy is knowing things will always be bad, no disappointment, no excitement, no change. A perfectly harmonious and unpleasant life.

Spend you time with people who are unhappy. They have the most realistic understanding of the world to be found in the world. Believe the worst will happen and you will always be right.

A words in a pattern

The world I build of myth and play,
I gladly tuck inside today.
Without a world of truth and sorrow,
The path I walk has no tomorrow.

Sass found this

I had written this on the back of a birthday card while asleep. As such I forgot it existed.

Law is enforced with practicality and governed with ideology.

Nostalgia is my time machine

Sitting back and coping with it seems enough some days.
Technically I am still moving forward.
I get the feeling I did high school and uni because I wanted to in part, but also because I didn't want to worry my parents about my future.
But no matter what I do I will be fine at it.
I believe that.


You know the little buddha in the temple in thailand? I am more jaded than that buddha

Perception is not a cone of information you are aware of, it is a filter of all the information you do not see

One cannot listen and talk at the same time, as well we are aware. Already there is more information than can be communicated within a human lifespan. Since expanding lifespans would only expand information, as with day to day conversion of sensory data to perception, filtration is the solution.

Superior secret pizza dough recipe

You will need: Things to cook pizza.

Put on the oven before you forget, it really sucks to have it ready and a cold oven to put it in.

180C probably will work.

Put a teaspoon of sugar, a teaspoon of salt and some yeast in a cup, put warm water in the cup and let it sit.

For the dough you mix two cups of flour together until the flour is evenly spread throughout the whole bowl. Add in some oregano, basil, parsley, paprika and cayenne pepper along with a tablespoon of olive oil. Mix that through as well.

Put the yeasty drink in the flour and mix it up until you get a dough. Be gentle, you do not have time to mess around waiting for it to rise a second time. The less you handle it the softer the dough.

Flour everything in your kitchen, flour is the best lubricant for this sort of nonsense. Graphite is better than oil in a lock, flour is better on your pizza.

Do not put graphite on your pizza.

Roll it, put it on a greasy tray or pizza stone, but if you have a pizza stone you probably already know how to make good pizza. Bake it for about 12 minutes 23 seconds or so.

Take it out, put on tomato paste or sauce, sprinkle some oregano and onion if you are into that sort of thing.

Cheese goes on, you can use a lot of bad cheese and get something soggy and bland or buy some decent cheese and get something crispy and delicious. I used coles brand pizza cheese because I am currently financially poor. A good mix of cheese suits your taste buds, but as a general rule use a 2:1 ratio of mozzarella to cheddar and top with some Parmesan.

Mushrooms are the key here; there is never a good reason not to eat mushrooms. Eat lots of mushrooms. Mushrooms.

Then some other stuff.

Bake it for a while longer, maybe 23 minutes, your guess is as good as mine, then pull it out and eat it.

I make two pizzas using this method. Since pizza is mostly flat the only thing that limits the size of a pizza is the oven. You can make one massive pizza.


Remember Area = Pi times radius^2

Best regards jessta

Grow your own China

China is an interesting thing to watch.

There is a building pile available money, and more economic freedoms for the increasingly fat middle class.

But without freedom of expression of the individual, to what will it amount?

It is easy enough to find dissent against a authoritarian regime; no matter how submissive a population you breed, there will always be idealists.

But enough of that, I do want to go back someday and more importantly, I doubt I will change any minds based solely on flawless logic and biting wit.

I am more interested in what a lack of freedom of expression does to creativity.

Ask anyone where a cheap forgery of a famous brand name comes from, they will say China. Ask them where the real thing comes from, it is China again. The same people make the same items in the same factories in near identical conditions. The branding is markup, well that and the intellectual property.

Here is the crux, the mistaken believe that ideas can be possessed, this hideous concept sees children being bullied by Liar Cohen.

The EFF makes more articulate arguments on the subject, so I will not dwell here, but merely pause to remark that information wants to be free and charging for ideas slows, not facilitates their transmission.

In a world where knowledge is fast reclaiming its place as the only true capital, it is vastly important that people interact. Vocal and overly vocal idiots from all over the globe can get together to mock every topic of thought. This is a fantastic thing.

Back to China, music, the arts and especially writing have taken damage from the lack of freedom of expression. Unable to safely express themselves, potential artists have taken to coping western classics to sell as cheap forgeries rather than creating their own work.

The latest pop hits in China last years, being rehashed and remixed slightly while reeking of vanilla. There are no surprises here, with active repression of creative tendencies endemic in the culture, children grow up learning that to be unique is a bad thing.

Am I asking too much of a civilization that is over nine thousand years old? Surely all the good ideas like umbrellas, gunpowder and the Dao have dried out the cultural creativity and left little more with which to innovate.

No! If America can reinvent the toaster for over a hundred years, China can continue to innovate and create new works of art long into the twenty third century and beyond.

How? Well turning around a culture of ridicule of difference, isolation and fear of an authoritarian regime is not an easy task. Luckily the government needs to do absolutely nothing to allow a renaissance of free expression and exchange of ideas. Unfortunately no government has ever willingly conceded power, censorship or control.

Where does that leave the people?

Well, I would say that is up to them.

China has been looking West since Nixon dropped by for a chat and some tea.


West China is where the next change will start.

Console wars

Not one game has made me want a third generation console.

Motion control, hrmm...


One of these looks like fun.

At least Sonic vs Mario as means of console decision is no long an issue.

Oh wait.

Building blocks

I just got Linton in the Melbourne cup sweep for MUARC.

Number 23.


Thanks Erin, you've been buying me a ticket in this race for longer than I can remember.

If you rung it then you should have put some like on it.

The socially acceptable are asphalt
Ubiquitous they pass without notice
Worn down by societies movements
They crack underfoot