You’re like that crazy hobo on the subway demanding everyone justify the moon ferrets. But moon ferrets aren’t real, so why waste a bunch of time explaining that to a stinky hobo. But I’ll try, because I’m a retired accountant, and when people like you try to use stats it is like watching a monkey humping a football. So amusing, but kind of sad.
Larry Correia, “Run Forrest Run!”, Monster Hunter Nation, 2014-11-05.
October 26, 2018
QotD: Mis-using statistics
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October 25, 2018
Every publication in Canada must have had lots of volunteers for this story
In the National Post, Marie-Danielle Smith gets high for science!
I just remembered I am supposed to be writing.
I am stoned on legal weed, which finally came into my hands this morning after six days of waiting. Thank you, government!
It is a different thing to get high alone — to get high alone for work reasons, right after question period. I’m sitting at my dining room table, drifting off every now and then to examine the patterns on my stuccoed walls or to focus, intensely, on the album I am listening to, the one that Kurt Vile and Courtney Barnett collaborated on. It would be a different thing to get high with the two of them.
The first thing you notice, after opening the cardboard box, which is just a little too large for your knapsack (backpack? knapsack? backpack?) … uh, you notice how much packaging there is. Tape. Crumpled-up papers. A box with government warnings and the logo of the licensed weed producer. A plastic bottle inside with a child lock cap that reminds you of Advil.
“She’s so easy,” sing Courtney and Kurt, repeatedly. Such a good album. This song has been on forever. Time stretches out. I’ve smoked a sativa-heavy hybrid strain called “Super Sonic,” which is supposed to make you feel creative rather than sleepy. On the Ontario Cannabis Store website, it’s described as having “a strong, earthy, sweet aroma, reminiscent of Quantum Kush.” I don’t know what Quantum Kush is but maybe our prime minister can explain it? (Remember that time? Anyway.)
Of course, not everyone is impressed:
I’m thinking of trying to write one sober, see how that goes https://t.co/woerC0verT
— Colby Cosh (@colbycosh) October 24, 2018
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October 24, 2018
How long can you go without sleep? | James May’s Q&A (Ep 14) | Head Squeeze
BBC Earth Lab
Published on 5 Apr 2013James May talks us through how long you can go for without any sleep.
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October 20, 2018
Don’t waste your time coming up with something original … use this map for your next RPG campaign
The Only Fantasy World Map You’ll Ever Need
by EotBeholder
Thrown together on a whim, yet meeting the needs of busy (or lazy) Dungeon Masters to this day, EotBeholder’s epic “Only Fantasy World Map” has all your role-playing game geography requirements covered.
Here’s something I threw together for the game I’m running with some coworkers. I plotted out where everything was going to go on a world map then decided, yknowwhat, let’s just keep the serial numbers filed off, so now it’s a map good for every RPG setting ever. Starting in the Tiny Bickering Fiefdoms is traditional but anywhere works. (My players are mostly from Tortuga.)
EDIT: Wow, almost four years later and this thing just exploded. The internet is a thing of mysteries. Thank you all! A lot (well, a number) of people have requested a blank version so they can add their own names… yeah, sure thing. To anyone asking for permission to use this for their own campaigns… I mean it hardly qualifies as “original”, so as long as you’re comfortable stealing from someone who steals from the people who only steal from the best, knock yourselves out 🙂
If I could make some additions (which I suppose I could, but, nah) I’d call out the Boring/Doomed Pastoral Village somewhere in the Tiny Bickering Fiefdoms or the Land of Poncy Knights, and also add a Giant Wall to Keep the Monsters Out. Giant walls are so hot right now.
H/T to Rob Beschizza for the link.
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October 18, 2018
QotD: Relationships with much younger partners
A contemporary of mine, after a number of marriages, found a girlfriend less than half his age of a transcendent pneumatic beauty who hung on his every word — and dumped her after a couple of months. Why, I asked — she was perfect! “Too many things we didn’t have in common,” he said sadly. Like what? “Well, the Eighties.”
Which brings us to sex. Nicola has just exclaimed with unusual force that she has never slept with a 60-year-old and she’s not planning on starting now. Nobody wants to think about 60-year-olds doing it, least of all 60-year-olds. Another contemporary pointed out that it wasn’t finding the first grey pubic hair on yourself that was the doom-laden shock, it was finding it on the person you were sleeping with.
A.A. Gill, “Life at 60”, Sunday Times, 2014-06-29.
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October 17, 2018
QotD: “60 is the new 40”
… over the years I’ve watched people my age go from rarely mentioned as sportsmen and pop stars to more commonly as leading actors and television presenters and now ubiquitously I find myself in the thick of captains of industry, ennobled politicians, retired sportsmen and character actors. You only notice the accumulating years in relation to other people.
Last week an editor breezily mentioned that as I was coming up to a milestone decade would I perhaps like to write something about it? You know, is 60 the new 40? Why do you make those little noises when you get out of a chair? Am I considering getting a shed, or a cruise, or Velcro? And what about sex?
The only people who ask about significant birthdays are younger than you. No 70-year-olds are inquiring about my insights on being 60. Age is the great terra incognita. But then, all the people who tell me to do anything are younger than me now.
And please, can we stop this “60 is the new 40” thing? No one is saying 20 is the new 10. And who wants to be 40 anyway? An insipid, insecure age.
My generation, the postwar baby-boomers, are over the meridian of our vital parabolas. We’ve done our best and our worst, overachieved and underperformed, are either preparing to bask on the sun loungers of our success or suck our bruised fingers in the waiting rooms of failure. So 60 is both a personal summit from which to look back, breathing heavily, hands on my knees, and a generational one.
A.A. Gill, “Life at 60”, Sunday Times, 2014-06-29.
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October 15, 2018
QotD: Bureaucracies
… bureaucracies have lives and characters of their own, irrespective of the sort of men they employ. The public schools are made up mostly of good people, but they don’t work very well. One imagines that most IRS agents are scrupulous and dedicated. (The DMV people just hate us.)
Kevin D. Williamson, “Agents and Agencies: Donald Trump should push for intelligence reform”, National Review, 2017-01-06.
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October 14, 2018
NPCs belong in video games or Dungeons & Dragons campaigns, not in the real world
Brandon Morse on a term that’s migrated out of its original gaming context and being used as a label for social justice warriors:
If you’ve ever picked up a video game that features other characters that are controlled by the computer, then you’ve run into non-player characters or NPC’s.
NPC’s serve a host of different functions depending on what the program you’re playing with needs them for. They’re the villagers in Skyrim, Toad from Super Mario Brothers, and the ghosts in Pac-Man. NPC’s may have dialogue, patterns, and personality, but at the end of the day, they’re just a program with pre-set behavioral patterns decided for them by a developer.Now let’s pretend we’re taking this article from the top…
If you’ve ever stepped onto a college campus or a protest demonstration that features people with neon colored hair screaming at the top of their lungs about identity politics or a social concern then you’ve run into a social justice warrior or SJW.
SJWs serve a host of different functions depending on what activists, politicians and the media need them for. They’re the crazed people trying to beat down the Supreme Court door, the Antifa members threatening motorists, or the male-feminist roundhousing a woman for expressing pro-life views. SJW’s may have dialogue, patterns, and personality, but at the end of the day, they’re just a program with pre-set behavioral patterns decided for them by professors, activist groups, or the media.
The comparison between NPC’s and SJW’s is pretty striking and simultaneously hilarious.
H/T to David Thompson for the link.
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October 13, 2018
QotD: Evolution
Look… Just because H. habilis was several branches back on the family bush doesn’t mean we’re supposed to stop being handy.
I get not carrying a pistol. It’s not for everybody and, if done with any level of seriousness, demands certain commitments and obligations that not everyone wants to undertake, and that’s cool. It’s still (mostly) a free country.
But how do you go through life without a flashlight and some kind of knife? Our most primitive ancestors carried sharp rocks around with them. Hell, carrying a sharpened rock around in case of future need is basically how we tell where the apes stop and the people start in our fossil family album. If they could have carried a light around without it burning their fingers or going out all the time, you bet they would have.
They make flashlights and knives small enough to accommodate any code, dress or legal, up with which you have to put.
Tamara Keel, “Look…”, View from the Porch, 2016-05-26.
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October 11, 2018
The wisdom of Zim Tzu, post-Eagles edition
After every Vikings game, win or lose, NFL rules require the head coach to meet with local (and sometimes national) media to discuss the most recent game and any other issues the team may be facing. It’s well known among the cognoscenti that Minnesota’s head coach Mike Zimmer considers this somewhere between distasteful and actual torture, but he forces himself to meet the ravening horde of unwashed media types … because he doesn’t want to get fined.
As a result, although Zimmer is known to be a straight-talker, what he says in these gatherings might not be exactly what he really means. Fortunately for those of us in the Vikings fanbase, the Daily Norseman employs the world’s leading Zimmerologist, the only man who can reliably listen to the words spoken to the masses and successfully decode the real meanings. Let’s hear it for Herr Doktor Professor Theodore “Ted” Glover:
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October 9, 2018
QotD: The universe
There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, 1980.
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September 28, 2018
The Death of Socrates
Andrew Heaton
Published on 17 Feb 2017A 100% historically accurate, clinical portrayal of the Death of Socrates.
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QotD: “Lite” beers
Then there was the fellow who sent an unlabelled jar of Bud Lite to a laboratory for analysis. A week later he received their report: ‘Dear Sir, we regret to inform you that your horse has diabetes’.
David Warren, “On beer consumption”, Essays in Idleness, 2018-09-07.
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September 27, 2018
Revising the accredited investor rules
Alex Tabarrok summarizes a suggestion from Matt Levine on how to improve the rules for accredited investors:
Matt Levine has an excellent piece on accredited investor rules and his alternative:
- Anyone can also invest in any other dumb investment; you just have to go to the local office of the SEC and get a Certificate of Dumb Investment. (Anyone who sells dumb non-approved investments without requiring this certificate from buyers goes to prison.)
- To get that certificate, you sign a form. The form is one page with a lot of white space. It says in very large letters: “I want to buy a dumb investment. I understand that the person selling it will almost certainly steal all my money and that I would almost certainly be better off just buying index funds, but I want to do this dumb thing, anyway. I agree that I will never, under any circumstances, complain to anyone when this investment inevitably goes wrong. I understand that violating this agreement is a felony.”
- Then you take the form to an SEC employee, who slaps you hard across the face and says “Really???” And if you reply “Yes, really,” then she gives you the certificate.
- Then you bring the certificate to the seller and you can buy whatever dumb thing he is selling.
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September 23, 2018
QotD: “Buggered up a perfectly good monkey”
[The title] is a somewhat sanitised version of a punchline to an Internet meme I saw sometime back, which (if I remember correctly) goes something like this:
GOD: “Behold! I have created Mankind!”
Angel: “You [deleted]-up a perfectly good monkey is what you did. Look at him — he’s got anxiety!”The meme goes on for a bit, and ends with the angel begging God to turn Man back in to a monkey.
Anyhoo, the punchline kind of stuck in my head — apparently it’s weird in there — and I have found that it is a wonderful comment for the occasions when “WTF?! Really?! W.T.F?!” just won’t do.
As a for instance, let us say you are observing a scene in which several laws of physics have been violated in a way only possible by a combination of an overabundance of hormones divided by an under-appreciation of mortality. Fire that is guaranteed to not be possible is possibly occurring, and something — probably important — is in a physical location that there is no sodding way for that something to be in. The young — they’re always young these days — person responsible is standing in front of you, twiddling their fingers in such a way as to suggest that the report that is about to cross your desk is going to be one of the more impressive works of speculative fiction/nitwittery you will read since … well, the last one … lacking only in the mention of the beer that someone was holding during the entire episode.
I find that glaring at the responsible party over your glasses, then performing a Migraine Salute while gritting out, “Yeee-up. Cocked-up a perfectly good monkey” manages to be completely apropos, yet just profane enough to properly convey my feelings on such occasions.
LawDog, “Because esoteric makes me warm and fuzzy”, The LawDog Files, 2016-12-09.
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