The Phantom City

I got nothing, so how about some Wikipedia?

• Cat, a domestic feline, Felis silvestris catus
• .cat, a top-level domain
• cat (Unix), the concatenate program in the Unix operating system
• Cat (Red Dwarf), a character in the TV show Red Dwarf
• Cat (role-playing game), an indie role-playing game about cats
• Cat (kingdom), a Dark Ages Pictish kingdom

Note the Coat, Legs, Claws, Face, Fangs and Tail attribute system in the role-playing game. Nice. “I have a strong, healthy coat!”

There is an interesting article by Steven Pinker at Edge about the declining instinct towards violence.

In the decade of Darfur and Iraq, and shortly after the century of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, the claim that violence has been diminishing may seem somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene. Yet recent studies that seek to quantify the historical ebb and flow of violence point to exactly that conclusion. - A History of Violence

I’d say we aren’t as violent. I haven’t killed anything since last night (a bug), and this very morning I drove to a building, obeying traffic laws along the way, and handed someone some green paper with a mutually agreed-upon value in exchange for food. Right now I’m in another building, using my skills in exchange for more tokens of value, which I can convert into green paper when I’d like. It’s hard to create that sort of framework without a declining instinct towards violence.

However, it’s also clear that when we choose to be violent, we have the capability of being much more efficient about it, thanks to the organizational and technological benefits of the same social frameworks that help reduce our tendency towards it.

There are creeps everywhere, man! They don’t even attack…they just keep taking punishment, and they just keep moving, like they don’t even feel it!

For me, the sign of a good game is that hours after I play it, I’m sitting there thinking about better ways to play it. By that measure, Desktop Tower Defense is a good game. It looks easy at first, but then you start to realize the enemy (creeps) is getting a little farther each time, and those backup towers are starting to come into action, and you realize you aren’t going to make it another ten levels, and another hour has passed in defeat.

Link courtesy of Jeremy Zawodny, who warned us all.

…you probably don’t really want to know.

Courtesy of What Were They Thinking?

…hit it with a tiger.

Courtesy of The Absorbascon.

The Buck Rogers pilot was released in theaters before its TV debut, and X-Ray Spex has the movie’s far different take on the opening credits.

While it would be hard to complain about Erin Gray in a silver suit, I wonder why Buck appears to be making out with Tootsie? (Those are some huge glasses/goggles/whatever.)

Yes, it has come to this. I have reached the conclusion that Marvel’s last two big events — House of M and Civil War — have actually served their purpose, despite less-than-stellar plotting and shaky characterizations. Their purpose was to get me excited about this summer’s event, World War Hulk, by making me hate the Marvel Universe so much I’ll enjoy seeing Hulk taking his revenge on it.

I also find it interesting that after the eight-issue House of M, and the delays in shipping the seven-issue Civil War, World War Hulk is only set for five issues. C’mon, there’s more smashing to do than that. Hulk Smash Earth-616!!!

See the trailer.

(I wonder if they’re taking a lesson from DC Comics, where they worked out a lot of their character mistakes by have Superboy punch them?)

Wow. I was surprised when I flipped to CBS, expecting to see a Division I game, and saw Barton College playing in the Division II Men’s Basketball Championship. Even though they were five points down to Winona State, the defending national champion, with a couple of minutes left, it’s not every day you get to see a small school down the road — Wilson, NC — playing on national TV.

I’m glad I caught it. Barton fell to seven points behind with 50 seconds left, and then senior point guard Anthony Atkinson, who grew up in Wilson, commenced the best clutch performance that anyone is likely to see at any level this month. Atkinson scored 10 points and made almost every defensive play during those final seconds, including a breakaway layup as time expired to win the game for Barton. That kind of effort was fairly common during the tournament for Atkinson, who apparently just wanted to keep playing.

Update: Video of the final few minutes.

Despite the popularity of personalized homepages, I hadn’t been using one. At home my homepage was the normal Google search page; at work it’s a wiki I use for taking notes.

Well, my tab order has now changed. I’m using my personalized Google homepage, with my Google Calendar, Gmail, quotes of the day, a NASA picture, and weather. All of this was available before, so what made me change?

Google started offering visual themes for what had been a boring page. I tried it out, and was mildly impressed with the results. Still not that interested, until I realized the themes change depending on the time of day. So now I have the Tea House theme, with pleasant green accents across the page, and what appears to be a hat-wearing fox that lives in a house in an orange grove. The fox does different things depending on the time of day, such as having lunch in the grove right now. (It looks like sushi, not squirrel.)

Yes, that was the tipping point for me. My first tab in Firefox is now set to the adventures of a hat-wearing fox that doesn’t really do much all day, but appears to be very happy doing it. It also shows my email, appointments, local weather, and the like, but who cares? The hat-wearing fox is having lunch, so it must be time for lunch.

(I think I’ve regressed to kindergarten. What I’m hoping is that the hat-wearing fox naps during the afternoon.)

Update: The fox just washes clothes all afternoon. Yep, fox clothes.

Ahhh, I’m back.

The last post I’d written, I just started a new job. It took a fair amount of time just to figure out what I was doing, given the fact I had worked for almost seven years at my previous job. It’s strange going from being the person who knows almost everything to being the newbie again. Now I’m learning what it’s like to schedule my own day, rather than have various “crises” schedule it for me. Maybe that’s what happens when you go from tens of thousands of users on a few apps to dozens of users on many apps.

In the meantime, my wife and I also got the flu, which was much fun. I don’t really remember my second week at this job. I know I was here most of the week, but I’m not sure what I did. I think I may have just stared at the bright screen for hours. I left a few cryptic notes for myself to decipher, however, so perhaps I’ll understand one day.

Blogging wasn’t the only thing to go by the wayside. New job stress, plus flu, equaled temporarily postponing my otherwise successful attempt to lose weight this year. I noticed yesterday I had gained five pounds back. Guess I should start again. Doesn’t seem fair that just because you eat bad and don’t exercise that you should gain weight, though.

Well, hopefully I’ll be more active here for a while. I wouldn’t want this blog to die, largely because I’d probably forget to take it down from its lifetime hosting account. It would just sit on the net, exuding an air of slight mystery, like some really uninteresting Neolithic village.