Overheard on Dreamwidth

Depression: The Game

Tue, 15 May 2012 07:20:11 GMT

rosefox and xtina have a new metaphor:

Xtina was feeling blue, so I went in to give her a bit of comfort, and naturally our conversation took a sharp turn into complete bizarre surrealism within a few minutes.

X: Depression is just so boring. And I feel like it'll get better, but then it'll get worse again, and it goes on forever.
R: It's like you're trying to beat the boss at the end of the level, and you've played it a million times and you can't quite get that last move, and you know that when you finally do beat it you'll just have to play another level.
X: And the next level is exactly the same! Have we not evolved beyond Pacman?
R: Depression really is a lot like Pacman, isn't it? You're running around in a maze of infinite loops while ghosts try to eat your head...
X: Plus Tetris.
R: Wow, yes, exactly. Ghosts trying to eat your head while blocks are falling on you.
X: And you have to get all these precise moves exactly right or you'll die. And you're frantically eating pills.
R: Can you imagine if someone actually coded Pacman plus Tetris? It would be the worst game ever! And yet everyone would play it!
X: "Depression: The Game." All the blocks are grey. At intervals they turn into trollfaces.

Context has also invented the Bad Idea Rat.

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Someone should make a blog: Reviews of horrible wines

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 22:30:10 GMT

And evith over in capslock_dreamwidth (apologies for the caps if they are too much for folks, but that's just how we roll over there) could make submissions:

WINES I HAVE LOATHED:

IMMATURE WHITE VINEGAR WITH A DOLLOP OF CORN SYRUP AND A PINCH OF PENCIL SHAVINGS.

A DEEP RED PAINT THINNER WITH AN AFTERTASTE OF LICKING A VIOLIN BOW.

WEAK HAND SANITIZER FLAVOURED WITH GREEN GUMMY BEARS, NO ALOE TO SMOOTH THE AFTERBURN.

AND IN HONOUR OF A PARTICULARLY TERRIBLE PSEUDO-CHAMPAGNE:

AN IRREDEEMABLE, HUMOURLESS GLASS OF WET YELLOW RAZORBLADES: ZE BUBBLES, ZEY DO NOZZING!

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Do not pass go

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 16:31:31 GMT

yeloson is annoyed by meandering rules writing in games design:

The handholding part is where you assume a) people have played rpgs before, b) they've only played one way, c) all of your rules are described to people who fit that subset, not people coming new to roleplaying.

It's like trying to describe chess by all the ways in which it differs from Monopoly.

"First you grab all the pieces that are your color. They are set up in the spaces as follows, but don't worry! There's no rent to pay! Which is good, because you have no money!"

Context is locked. QWP.

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Rope Quest

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 19:12:35 GMT

roadrunnertwice is doing a well documented, awkwardly implemented home improvement project:

Uh, where does rope come from, anyway? Like, thick natural fiber rope. Boat rope. I was pretty sure I'd never seen it at Fred Meyer, and Next Adventure and REI only stock modern synthetic ropes meant for climbers. How the hell did I nearly reach 30 without knowing where to go when I need rope? What the fuck kind of sailor am I, anyway? So I asked Twitter.

I got some very well-intentioned replies, and I now know several sources in the Pacific Northwest for nice-smelling rope that feels soft and won't chafe too badly or leave splinters. (Ladies.) I also learned that I can save a lot of people (including myself) a lot of awkward blushing if I mention WHY I'm looking for rope in the first place. So, that happened.

Anyway, it turns out the answer for workmanlike manila rope is the Pope Rigging Loft, in industrial Northwest Portland.

It was butch enough in there to raise real questions about how I got to be such a sissy. Heavy presses. Men in construction gear loitering manfully. 1" steel cable rope harnesses for god only knows what. Spools of cable the size of a Honda. Hand-painted sign from the '80s explaining that OSHA says you can't go in the back. You get the idea. And then I rolled in on my little bicycle and asked for a mere twenty feet of manila. "You have some marine project you gonna use this for?" asked the guy. Nope, just indulging my nesting instinct.

They sold me some rope, though!

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If there ever a spirit animal for him was...

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 19:06:55 GMT

linaerys says it not like it is but as it should be:

I am getting really freakin' tired of hearing how we should respect Rick Santorum for the consistency of his beliefs, even if we don't agree with them. This is usually said by progressive men and is about his views on sexual behavior. (I refuse to call it sexual morality.)

I don't care if his views are consistent when they are also evil. Hating gay people is evil. Forcing a woman to carry a non-viable fetus to term is evil. Forcing a woman to bear a child of rape or incest is evil. Forcing someone to go through an unwanted pregnancy at all is evil. I would rather a little less consistency and a little less evil.

I think Mitt Romney has the soul of a garden slug, but his inconsistency means that occasionally the wind that blows him around takes him somewhere positive.

Give me inconsistency or give me context! QWP.

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An Ode to Pie

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 03:12:31 GMT

Or so flyingthesky started out to write. Considering it ends with

who even lets me write poetry
this was a terrible life choice
(like most of my life choices)
and I should probably shut up now

I wish I had some key lime pie
but I am sadly lacking
and I misplaced my tardis
goddamn daleks

we may assume it derailed hilariously somewhere along the way. Context contains the beginning four stanzas, which make the ending far, far better.

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Player choice doesn't have enough effect on the ending, either

Sat, 07 Apr 2012 19:47:07 GMT

evith has been very sick for six weeks:

And then, influenza. Fever of 103 and the delusion that the illness was some fancy new DLC from Bioware designed to make videogames more challenging. NB: You cannot uninstall the flu. I tried. It does not work.

(Context is locked. QWP.)

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Go the Fass to sleep

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 01:02:24 GMT

sapote has some observations on the nudity of Michael Fassbender:

Every so often I see pictures of Michael Fassbender (like this NSFW set on T-LO) and I'm reminded again that his face does, like, nothing for me. I think it's because he looks vaguely like someone I could be related to, assuming my relatives were really super into the gym? Not enough that seeing him naked freaks me out, but enough that his face makes me think more "dude looks like he needs a nap" then "gee willikers his nouns my verbs".

Context is like a germanic robot sent from the future to wear suits.

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Watership Down

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 17:19:44 GMT

whatistigerbalm has just gotten around to reading it and cannot help but express glee about mismatched expectations:

I figured, it's a classic, it's about bunnies, it'll be some sad shit for kids where IDK somebody's bunny wanders off and dies or something. I did not expect BUNNY SPARTA: TOTAL BUNNY CARNAGE EDITION. Loved the hell out of it!

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The silence of the blueberries

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 08:43:46 GMT

vass has made a very upsetting smoothie:

The drink will be a fetching shade of purple, one you'd be very happy with as a fabric colour, but maybe not so much as a beverage. The thickness will be perfect: that's just enough ice cubes. The taste will be indescribable, but I'll try anyway: very sweet, very chemical, very swampy, with a sort of grainy aftertaste. Faintly like blueberries, but blueberries to which something terrible has happened. Like they had their little blueberry eyes sewn open and were forced to watch the Australian prime minister and leader of the opposition debate global climate change, punctuated by rest breaks in which they're forced to watch an inexpert person play endless rounds of Angry Birds. With the sound up. You can hear the green pigs laughing as you drink it.

Context has a new blender.

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Citation style for the internet age

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 19:20:23 GMT

thefourthvine: ...So what's the proper reference citation for This Guy I Knew Who Said That Thing That Time?

ellen_fremedon: Guy I Knew, T., like last year or something. "That Thing That Time." Journal of I Read It Somewhere Common:Knowledge, it was like right on the front cover - or maybe it was on the internet or some shit.

(Context is locked, sorry. QWP.)

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But I like it!

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 22:13:30 GMT

kareila can make her child say anything:

"But I want to go with you to the dentist!"

"[preschool aged son], my dentist doesn't have fun stuff in the waiting room, like yours does. They only have boring stuff like magazines."

"But I like magazines!"

"But they're not kids' magazines, they're about boring things like foreign policy."

"But I like foreign policy!"

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Le Morte d'Arthur

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 15:45:55 GMT

nanila takes a tangent from a rebuttal on ereader criticism to describe an English literature classic:

For a start, I think it is rather obvious that Ms. Mangan does not have to make the 2-4 hour daily commute to/from her job that many Londoners must. If she did, she would be as immensely grateful as I am that I have not had to carry dead-tree editions of The Life of Samuel Johnson and Le Morte d'Arthur around with me on my journey. Excuse me, I have to go on a tangent now. Speaking of the latter, I feel like people, particularly my high school English teachers, have been keeping things from me. Why oh why did no one ever tell me that it is, in fact, hilarious? I realise this will have been obvious to people who majored in literature and humanities and the like, but for this scientist, discovering that Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail is actually not a parody but a faithful re-enactment of the stories contained in L M d'A was a revelation. If you were an Arthurian knight whose history was being retold centuries later, you really were in danger of encountering dwarves who would leap out from behind trees and whack your horse on the head. The dwarf would then force you to fight two other knights and when you defeated them, would suddenly and inexplicably experience a change of allegiance, reveal that he knew exactly where you were going and would help you on your quest. Castles populated entirely by women were a terrible peril for all good knights. Every sexual encounter seemed to beget new knights determined to kill their fathers. Also, every joust ended in a bonfire's worth of shattered shields and lances. It's a wonder there were any trees left in the forests in Arthurian England. And do not get me started on Merlin, who reveals everyone's fate in the first ninety pages, including his own, thereby completely spoiling the rest of the book. Within four pages, he manages to fall in love and gets himself sealed up in a tree by a witch, removing him from the remainder of the story just as the reader has decided his character is the most interesting one in it. This was a clever literary device in the fifteenth century? What? I mean, it's amusing, but no wonder modern storytellers are so obsessed with giving Merlin something other than a deus-ex-machina persona.

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Why there are no gay people in space

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 03:08:31 GMT

damselfish has written a short satire story about romantic interest complaints in Mass Effect 3 because:

FTL is not too fanciful to suspend disbelief for, but gay people are. It made me wonder if their ideas of FTL were related to the statistical probability of the proportion of queer characters to straight.

Would this mean a ship full of queers would go faster?

The story ends thusly:

And that is why there are no gay people in space. They are moving away from you at an increasing rate, and like the light from a star, you will only see their image thousands, millions, or billions of years after they have moved on.

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Thu, 01 Mar 2012 18:51:10 GMT

foxfinial is back from her holiday with pictures of a beautiful St. Petersburg church, including this scene:

Also, although you can't quite see because of flare from the lights on the gold mosaic tiles, this is God impregnating Mary with his mouth-lasers.

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Ahhhhh, the influence of Austin Powers

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 19:06:53 GMT

Note that it's not "Cooking in a Nutshell". This is cooking in a nutshell: "Help! I'm in a nutshell! how did I get into this nutshell? oh well, better make the most of it. What's for dinner? Nuts, I suspect." - gominokouhai describes the new book Cooking For Geeks. I giggled muchly.

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Posting access

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 00:34:21 GMT

I noticed there was a discrepancy in membership vs. posting access, left over from a beta bug, so I went through and granted posting access where it wasn't. You should now all be able to post entries if you weren't able to before. Carry on!

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I'd read that.

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 22:45:23 GMT

runpunkrun has Feelings about the Regency romance genre's overused tropes:

You know what? I want to read a Regency romance about the second most notorious rake in London. He's pretty good at flirting, but that other guy is always swooping in and stealing away his conquests. It just drives him up the wall! So the second most notorious rake in London decides to do something about it. No matter what it takes, he will win the title of Most Notorious Rake in London. The current Most Notorious Rake in London thinks this sounds like good fun, as a little competition always makes things more interesting. They start showing up at all the same parties and watch each other keenly, studying the other's moves, getting into his head, exploiting his weaknesses, admiring his talents, enjoying the tightness of his breeches, going riding together, falling in love.

Context is reading a lot.

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Capslock Science: Magnets edition

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 22:44:41 GMT

JUST SAW "HOW ITS MADE" ON MAGNETS. THAT SHIT IS FOR REAL. I THOUGHT MAGNETS JUST SORT OF EXISTED.

THEY DON'T.

THESE FUCKING WIZARDS MAKE THEM OUT OF MAGIC SAND MOLDS AND MOLTEN METAL THAT BURNS THE MOLDS FROM THE INSIDE OUT AND THEN THEY BASH THEM WITH SLEDGEHAMMERS AND PACK THEM IN MORE SAND AND HEAT THEM TO FUCK KNOWS HOW HIGH AND THEN CHARGE THEM WITH ELECTRICITY.

--kestrel_hawk

BASICALLY, SUPERCONDUCTORS ARE SUCH STONE-COLD (LIQUID NITROGEN COLD, BITCHES, AND THAT'S THE NICE ONE OF THE FAMILY) BADASSES THAT WHEN THEY ENCOUNTER A MAGNETIC FIELD, THEY'RE ALL LIKE, "DID I SAY YOU COULD TOUCH ME, BITCH? NO, I FUCKING WELL DID NOT," AND THE LINES OF MAGNETIC FORCE ARE ALL LIKE, "OH SHIIIIIIIIIITTTT" AND AVOID THAT MOTHERFUCKER. EXCEPT THEY CAN'T GO TOO FAR AWAY, SO THEY SORT OF DIVERT AROUND THE SUPERCONDUCTER AND HOLD IT ALOFT LIKE THE GODDAMN KING OF PHYSICAL LAW THAT IT IS. SUPERCONDUCTER GOES WHERE IT WANTS (GIVEN IMPETUS BY AN OUTSIDE FORCE, BECAUSE IT HAS MINIONS FOR THAT, BITCHES). PHYSICISTS HAVE BEEN BEATING THEIR BRAINS OUT TRYING TO EXPLAIN THE GODDAMN MEISSNER EFFECT FOR ALMOST 80 FUCKING YEARS. THAT'S HOW BADASS THE MEISSNER EFFECT IS.

--paxpinnae

context thinks science teaching should go this way

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The two options of New England Snow

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 22:37:03 GMT

When faced with the horrible inevitability of Snow, you have two options -- you can either have relatively mild temperatures accompanied by big wet slushy flakes that will weigh down powerlines and knock over trees and generally just fucking suck, or you can have tiny little relatively harmless snowflakes that will do little damage, but that are tiny because it is fuckoff balls-to-the-wall cold and going outside will make you cry tiny salt-lick popsicles of sorrow.

context is learning about winter in New England

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You can never have just one

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 03:19:24 GMT

Kinks are not like Pokemon. You don't collect them, put them in folders and then use them to outdo fellow collectors.

Kinks, my friends, are like Warhammer. You start off with small ones, and you primp and polish them, and put them on display when you're not using them. You add newer and bigger and more complicated ones to your army, but if you're doing it right, you have a horde of lovingly tended simple kinks as well, the footsoldiers to your war machines.

And then, you don't take them in one-on-one combat, oh no. You launch entire campaigns.

Context is flocked, QWP, and decidedly divergently geeky.

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Wed, 18 Jan 2012 11:23:21 GMT

The takeaway from SOPA and the NDAA: Congress threatens us with indefinite detention without trial? We'll grumble about it. Congress threatens to screw with our Internet? WE WILL SHUT THINGS DOWN.

—hatman, here

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YKINMKBYKIOK (SFW)

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 06:26:07 GMT

Now, speaking for myself, I find doing paperwork (even kinky paperwork) pretty tedious and unsexy, and I'd actually rather do my taxes than go through about two and a half thousand questions about kinky acts and whether I want to do them. But that's basically just "not my kink" --

Context has definite opinions on BDSM checklists.

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Things Trojie learned at writer's group

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 07:23:48 GMT

* Sometimes, you have to explain that you're talking about D&D, not S&M, when you say you're a dungeon master. Because it's not nice to confuse people about those two things.

Context is flocked, QWP, and has hair that eats souls.

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mjg59 reminds us that architectural choices haunt you forever

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 00:30:00 GMT

Your 1920x1080 TV takes a 1920x1080 signal, chops the edges off it and then stretches the rest to fit the screen because of decisions made in the 1930s.

Context is annoyed that a HDTV does not act as sensibly as a HD monitor.

ETA: fixed link, which apparently was caught in a DOS file name convention time warp.

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