And that's the week.

[silveradept]

Ran my errands today - not complete success as the books were not all bought, but the rest got done. I'm glad it's all finished, there. But then again, there's the classes coming. The classes, they're coming.

Played three games of Literati tonight - two against 2dlife and one against 2dlife and annaonthemoon. The first game, I actually beat 2dlife, after getting blasted by an 88-point play early on. The second game, well, it turned out poorly. There was a 79-point play that really hurt, and then in the end-game, there was another bingo that he played. I didn't make it to 200 points. He had 314. The third game, well, I got snookered all over the place. Bad letters and no placement. So my Literati skills are still not quite up to par.

Lockheed wins the contract to develop the new space shuttle. We'll see if they can design something that doesn't have problems in the heat, or things breaking, or other such.

9/11 commemorative coin. Because there's nothing more American than profiting on other people's misery and capitalizing on disasters. I wonder how many people find this tasteful...

Human Card Game: War - line 'em up and let 'em wander about. It'll be more fun if people hide what kind of card they are until they pick a target.

Drinking your juice may prevent Alzheimer's. So drink up, kiddies!

Lucas's Last Supper - there's an interesting idea. Of course, this can probably be done many times over.

A nightmare scenario of the future - one where nothing changes at all. And if it continues on this way, there's a chance that when America goes, the world goes with it. I hope that the world stays around, and humanity with it. It'd be nice for us to survive long enough to bring us all back.

Last thought for tonight - kickoff tomorrow at noon. Once again, the padded rugby season is upon us.

Comments

[wanderingbhikkh.livejournal.com]

To your last link:

I've studied enough history and anthropology to learn something very valuable...humanity fucks itself over pretty often, but we keep surviving it. To put it another way: The empire must always fall, but the world never entirely goes with it.

That's terribly reassuring, actually. Humanity will keep plodding along, never quite getting it done right, but never completley fucking it over, either. Clear away the barricades and we're still there!

All of a sudden, the wars and the disasters are a lot less overwhelming...still tragic, still horrible, but not leaving you standing in mute terror.

In conclusion: Humanity does suck, but not bad enough to disappear.

[sharpsight.livejournal.com]

M) ...Unless the biosphere collapses entirely, in which case we'll need desperate (and extremely difficult and prone-to-failure) measures in order to either survive or escape. But yes, the Earth is too large for non-world-destroying nuclear warheads/bombs alone to make it completely uninhabitable.

[sharpsight.livejournal.com]

M) The random war: interesting if some people deliberately to be vulnerable and scared while actually being the highest cards: their prey would come to them, though eventually the others would catch on.

[silveradept]

Depends on whether you play the Stratego Variant, where two defeats ace is the two should contact each other.

[sharpsight.livejournal.com]

M) *puzzles over grammar* What does that mean in practice?

[silveradept]

In a game of Stratego, there is the General piece, which defeats all it comes across, except explosives and a piece marked Spy. Spy loses to all things except the General.

A stratego variant for War, then, would mean that when an Ace (which beats all) encounters a two (which loses to all), the Two defeats the Ace.

[sharpsight.livejournal.com]

M) Interesting: thus achieving a loop-back, where no one's destined to win or lose... but still, if you're neither an ace nor a two, isn't your eventual defeat--no, wait, the aces could take out all the higher cards, then the twos could take out the aces, then you and the lower cards could take out the twos, and then you could take out all the lower cards... all those the same card taken by higher cards... got it. Tricky and assymmetrical, but certainly interesting. *nods*

[silveradept]

Without the variant, the only way to win the game of War is to win the aces in War. With the variant, even if all the aces and twos are captured, it's still possible for someone to reverse the flow - suffice it to say, war takes forever to win, but Stratego War takes even potentially longer.

[sharpsight.livejournal.com]

M) Wait... 'Ground Zero'... am I understanding this correctly? They're actually grubbing through the ruins for the silver for this? *feels sick*

[silveradept]

There's a good chance that they found it in the normal excavation/recovery process, and someone decided, "Hey, wouldn't it be great if we made commemorative coins out of this?" rather than, say, using it to help victims where it would do good. As I said, there's nothing quite so uniquely American as the ability to profit off a disaster, no matter how bad the disaster was.

[annaonthemoon.livejournal.com]

Welcome to corporate America, my dear. Where one man's tragedy is another man's money making scheme.

[annaonthemoon.livejournal.com]

The game was fun, but frustrating. But I thikn in a three player game it's always rough on the person who goes "last", because any holes the first person gives up inevitably get taken by the second person. Although, I do enjoy the words we came up with :p

I didn't know that Lockheed even had ever made a rocket....strange.

A Transformer coin? Oi. Didn't the original commemorative coins get made from "silver found at ground zero"? What happened? The first set flopped, so they melted them down to use again to make this next set of pointless patriotism. I mean, really. To mark the fifth anniversary, $5 of every 2001-2006 World Trade Center Commemorative order is donated to official 9/11 family charities and memorials. oh, is that all they can spare off their $50 price?! If they didn't have to pay for the silver (since it was stolen from ground zero), why can't they give over more of the profit to the memorial fund? Honestly, if they were being selfless and selling it as a fundraiser to help those families still struggling, I might not be as annoyed by it, but really...this is coroprate america at it's best.

Human cards, eh? hehe eeenteresting.

Drinking juice, eh? See? more reasons why vegetarians are awesome :D

I like the star wars last supper, but a few things are weird about it. I can't quite put my finger on it though.

The last article, scary, but true to some degree. “Know Your Enemy,” cries CNN. They should look in a mirror. How true.

Yay football :D The UM game ends just in time to catch the PSU game on ESPN2 :P

[sharpsight.livejournal.com]

M) Or like Shakespeare's mulberry tree... wait until the land's owner has it chopped down, publicly buy the wood, then sell mulberry-wood items with the same claim of origin forever at high enough prices to afford discreetness.