Monday, December 25, 2006

Merry Yule!

Yeah, I do Christmas in the secular sense, but we're a pagan household.

My haul: One Wii, Sudoku for DS, some long underwear, a blanket, a sweatshirt, and a long-sleeved T-shirt from a University that shares our name. Oh, and $15 in gift cards from my managers, and some awesome socks from my secret Santa (thanks!). The kid's haul: Every toy in the Western world plus a few books and some clothes.

Happy Christmahanukwaanzakuh to you!

Also, Io, Saturnalia!

And, XKCD wishes everyone a Merry Christmas

Friday, December 22, 2006

You Don't Know Jack is back on the web! W00t! I used to spend many, many hours on the Bezerk Games site--does anyone know if there's still a webhost for Acrophobia? Someone brought it back a few years ago, but it only went up to five letters, not seven, and the environment just wasn't the same. Man, I miss the old site, though.
The Boy Who Lived Before
This is mellow-fun but requires math. Do not play it with a six-year-old over your shoulder saying "put the number there!"

An interesting twist in perspective from The Onion.

For the romance fans

Slate just reminded me that the annual It's a Wonderful Life airing will be Sunday night... Nay, nay, I must celebrate the last week of our cable with the annual marathon of A Christmas Story. My fiendish plan is to drive everyone else into bed annoyed with it by 11 or so Sunday evening, then, umm, fall asleep on the couch until Santa comes and help him arrange the treats for the family in stockings all over the living room. I'm not usually the last one up, so I will have to chase everyone off to bed to do mom's Christmas-Eve work. In real life, this translates to dozing lightly while watching the marathon, then getting breakfast on early.

Wednesday, December 20, 2006

I accidentally grabbed some adware, which wants me to reboot the computer *before* an uninstall. The problem is, my computer doesn't work after a reboot. Gah!! Maybe I'll try a Windows reboot.

So, while I screw around with the computer, enjoy the ten dumbest deaths in history (veracity of this list is not guaranteed by this blogger, feel free to hit Snopes).
If this article on free will doesn't give you something to think about, you may be closed-minded.

I'm not sure I posted this article on the goodness of the shrooms, so just in case... and they're talking about massively upgrading the warnings on OTC meds today, to go along with the war on cold medicine and the war on pain patients... isn't it time to start rethinking this whole thing?

To the abstinence-only idiots: duh. (You know what was different in the past? If you knocked her up/got knocked up, you were expected to get married. Also, that the teenagers were more likely to hook up with one partner and be stuck with them forever--but that horse has left the barn, folks. Sorry)

Baby Jesus = garden gnome?

I'm amazed I didn't hear about this before, but apparently an Austrian girl was kidnapped and forced to live under someone's garage for eight years. From age ten to age 18--and she said she complained to him that he ignored her. I wonder if he had a tumor. And I hope she can get disability to help her get back to society.

Side note: My Google weather says it's warm and snowing (hey, 32 and going up to 38F is warm here!) in North Pole, but cool (still ten above--I'll check the sign across the road and unplug the car!) and going down to cold (like 10 below, anyway) in Fairbanks. Usually they're identical. This makes no sense.

Some days I feel like there's not enough of me. I didn't sleep--well, only a couple hours. I tried. Couldn't calm my mind enough even to meditate, which can lead to sleep when I am tired. Also, I have been getting angry and misdirecting it--I don't really even know what I'm angry at sometimes, but I am angry because I have trouble standing up for myself at home--if I want to watch a movie or play a game or fuck or have Spirit come to bed to snuggle and fall asleep I can't say anything most of the time. It's getting to me and I can't fix it without getting bitchy. They're shutting our cable off in two weeks (less!), which I found out yesterday because I happened to look at a newspaper, and that's going to make it worse by giving Spirit a reason to be on XBox 24/7. He got on my ass about getting it taken care of, which I had already said I was going to do, by "warning" me that I wouldn't be able to get him to do anything else. WTF can I do, with 12 days until our cable goes to static and having to wait on the apartment complex to secure a new cable? And why can't I explain that tag-teaming in to someone else's game, when I can't even establish a profile on that game and use it to play with someone else, feels totally useless to me, like he'd be better off just playing with the computer and I'm an intruder? Why do I always feel like an intruder in my own life?

I love the M&Ms commercial this time of year. (He IS real... They ARE real!)

Monday, December 11, 2006

Rant: "Preppie, we just lost our girl to a NERD!"

Why do I watch this show? It's sort of funny, but it portrays the worst in stereotypes and all the reasons I hated (HATED!!) high school. I might find something else, but we get about 20 channels, and I don't feel like finding a DVD every morning.

There would be nothing, I repeat NOTHING, wrong, or even unusual, about the hot head cheerleader going for the geek tutor. Awww, she went more for a guy with brains and a real personality than for the jock or the super-popular class clown with money and a reputation for getting around more work than he does.

(OK, yes, Screech is a giant dork besides being a geek, but only on a show like Saved by the Bell
would all the geeks be giant dorks).

Yeah, I realize this rant is as outdated as SbtB itself, that the hawtness of the geek has been recognized and celebrated now--yet, on Heroes a couple weeks ago, the geeks were still a large group of walking stereotypes.

Then, maybe I'm just jealous, because my school totally lacked a geek subculture, so I didn't fit in with, well, anyone, until college.

20 days without it

I thought about this article, 20 Days Without a PC, for a while. I decided I could live for 20 days without the email, the blog, even without AskMeFi and little time-wasting computer games. But I could not deal with having to pay bills and budget by hand.

(I have gone 20 consecutive unwired days this year, incidentally--at a time when there were no bills to budget because we were between places, had no money because we were waiting on Uncle Sam to pay us back cost-of-living expenses, and it fell right between the truck payments--which is the one bill I have to pay by hand anyway).

Wednesday, December 06, 2006

The tenets of Condomism?

From the so-called "liberal media" comes this tripe.

I wanted to work myself into a good rant about the lost liberalism of a media that probably never had any and how this piece illustrates that. But I'm too tired, so a point-by-point comment on a list in the article:

Here are some of the tenets of condomism:

  • Every person capable of giving meaningful consent is entitled to unlimited sexual activity.

  • What's entitlement got to do with it? Biology dictates that sex will happen. Do we (the Condomists, I mean) have to go through individual records to prove that sex happened as long as there have been records (at least), or do you stupid abstinence-only fucks believe that poor nutrition caused that high percentage of children to be born seven months after their parents' marriages? The difference now is that the stigma on sexual activity has dropped so we're not forced into marriages with people with whom we'll have no relationship at all, or a one-sided or forced or abusive relationship, within a couple years (and still be stuck, because the divorce taboo dropped with the sexual revolution, too).

    By the way, this is what happens when people place a high priority on abstinence. It doesn't happen, and the people who have had sex become convinced that they have done something horrible and dirty, and will hide it at any cost.

  • All negative consequences of sexual activity can be controlled through the use of contraception. Sexual Transmitted Diseases can be controlled through the use of condoms. The probability of pregnancy can be eliminated through contraception, properly used.

  • Eliminated? No, but reduced more than abstinence-only programs have managed. Because those programs get the wrong ideas in the heads of young, unmarried people who are, in fact, likely to have sex, and who were almost as likely to go have sex sixty or two hundred years ago, and those who become sexually active do so with no idea how to protect themselves, in the event of sexual activity, leading to higher disease rates and more abortions (or more children left in garages because their mom's can't admit to them).

  • No one is required to give birth to a baby in the event of pregnancy. Abortion, for any reason or no reason, at any time during pregnancy, is an absolute entitlement.

  • Some of us have noticed that making abortion illegal or difficult to get does not reduce the number of abortions significantly. It does, however, increase the risk of women dying of infections after unsafe illegal abortions. It also decreases the risk of fully-formed babies dying, neglected by mothers who can't care for them (emotionally, financially, or otherwise).

  • Any negative consequences of sexual activity that cannot be handled by contraception or abortion are not worth talking about.

  • Anything is worth talking about. Liberals who would silence those who disagree with them aren't worthy of the name. However, we don't feel as though those who express those opinions, promoting ideology over facts, need to be in top policymaking government positions on sexual education and policy.

    Tuesday, December 05, 2006

    Well... duh.

    (Mari-jew-ana's baad, mm-kay?)

    Friday, December 01, 2006

    Any Fundamentalist or other Biblical literalist who is outraged by this, take note: Your Bible is all for this practice. Read the Torah again. I'll wait.

    On a cuter note, the kid went to see "Babes in Toyland" at the local dance theater company today. "How was the ballet?" we asked him. "OK, but it didn't really have Babe in it." I try not to just collapse in giggles when things like that happen, but sometimes, I can't help it.