I’ve decided on my next facial hair experiment. I was rockin the full beard, but decided tonight to shave it in favor of a father of Doctor McNinja ‘stach. My next project is one that takes real balls. Seriously, if you don’t have class S balls, you will not have the ability to grow this one.
Take a gander at this.
Ambitious? Yes. Doable? Absolutely.
Around actually. I recently started a new job doing the website for a local attorney running for congress. Also, I’ve been totally sucked into Valkyria Chronicles. If you were to put this game and Final Fantasy Tactics in PS1/2 controller terms, FFT would be the D-pad and Valkyria Chronicles would be the analog stick. Instead of the grid from FFT, you have a stamina bar and you can move anywhere you want until said stamina bar runs out. Also instead of swords and magic, you have WW2 era guns and tanks.
I’ve also been dabbling in 3D Dot Game Heroes where I’ve designed my hero to look like the Vic Viper from Gradius. Doctor Dic had an urgent message for me. It said, “Dash Boots Get! You can now run by holding Square.” The only thing missing from the scene was the Megaman boss weapon GET music. There have also been a few references to Demon’s Soul already as well.
These two games are slowly reminding me why I loved Playstation last gen.
Also, I leave you with this amazing gem.
In Greek mythology there was a hero named Theseus, renowned for various acts of heroism both dramatic and pedestrian, but most famous for slaying the Minotaur at the center of the labyrinth at Minos. Upon his triumphant return voyage to Athens, his ship was moored in the Athenian harbor as a national treasure. However, rather than being permanently moored and allowed to decay (like many other historical sites) the ship was kept in a seaworthy state so that it could be used to ferry city officials to various festivals on neighboring islands. Over the centuries, this meant that new ship pieces and hull patches were applied to the wooden ship as parts of it slowly rotted away… with the end result that, one day, every single plank of the ship had been replaced. In the minds of the Athenians (and a vast multitude of philosophers since) this raised a most intriguing question: since every last part of the Ship of Theseus has now been replaced, is the boat moored in the harbor of Athens actually the Ship of Theseus? Are the ship of legend and the ship today “the same” ship?
So… for those of you who are not yet aware, here’s a summary: I managed to land a job in Hawaii, I moved here roughly three weeks ago and have been unnecessarily busy getting temporary logistics and job-related rigmarole worked out… and that’s where I am/have been. Sarah will be moving here in late July or so, once she finishes college and the cats’ quarantine window opens. Hawaii doesn’t play.
As such, I’ve been way too distracted to be angry at or insightful about anything; so here’s a long-winded and vaguely poignant treatise I wrote a few weeks ago to help out Sarah on something she was doing for school. Her resulting paper was excellent, but I fear it may have fallen upon deaf ears; ironically, students in Communications classes seem to be those individuals who are least interested in hearing the ideas of others. And they chew their gum with their mouths open, belying an intelligence not dissimilar from many other ruminant mammals. Please note for the record that this was an excellent opportunity to use the meme “sheeple” and I exhibited remarkable restraint for a writer/satirist/philosopher of my modest caliber. I hope this can somehow begin to make up for my incredibly tasteless use of the “Sally and Mindy Super-Hottie” metaphor back in the day. Enjoy!
So in what I assume to be a last hurrah for Final Fantasy XI, SE is releasing both a new add-on (conveniently split into three parts for your wallet squeezing pleasure) and increasing the level cap to the Final Fantasy staple of 99. I can assume this means two things. It will take about a billion xp to get that far and someone will do it within a week.
Part of the reason I don’t begrudge people their religions is that the desire to fill up the gap between the Known and the Unknown is one of the defining characteristics of humans. We, as a species, don’t have ANY of the traditional “natural weapons”; we don’t have claws, or fangs… we have shitty senses, low physical strength, relatively poor balance… hell, we can’t even climb trees like we used to. What I wouldn’t give for a prehensile tail nowadays. No, the only things humans have going for them number three: upright bipedal locomotion, opposable thumbs and a complex frontal lobe. While the first two enable us to use tools, only the last is unique to humans; it is our intelligence that is our primary survival trait. Accordingly, our intelligence should be the facet of ourselves about which we feel the most insecurity… this insecurity should be a driving force towards learning survival lessons from the world around us. And anything that increases our chances of survival should increase our chances of reproducing, which in turn will reinforce the driving behavior in accordance with evolutionary statistics.
SO: humans, being exclusively dependent upon our intellect for survival (at least in hunter-gatherer times), should be accordingly paranoid about anything of which we perceive we are ignorant. To quote super-shady ex-SecDef Donald Rumsfeld:
“As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.”
Beautiful, eh? Inspired. Eloquent. Mother fuckin’ poetic, even. Honestly, Rumsfeld looks like the kind of person who cheats at strip chess and thinks date rape is cool if you can forge the victim’s signature on a Love Contract… but if we could choose anyone to be the Secretary of Defense, I really, really don’t mind if we pick the guy who’s willing to break the rules to ensure victory. Just don’t play chess with him, you’ll be fine.