Archive for ‘comics’
Still playing with cryptocurrencies. I took a long break, because basically my beginner’s luck ran out and I didn’t know how to deal with the first series of reverses I got. Nothing terrible happened, things went down when I expected them to go up. So I essentially started over again, with even weirder currencies.
It’s basically Bitcoin and a bunch of other folks. All of the other, lesser cryptos have value, but it’s highly variable and not based on much. I’ve been messing with Mazacoin, because I’ve been paying attention for a year or so now and I like them best. They’re based on something real, they’re based on something I support, I like their approach to the technology, and they actually seem to be doing things consistently. This puts them way above Namecoin, who have the most interesting idea but seem to be doing absolutely nothing with it.
They aren’t doing anything mindboggling — they’re just trying to give an economic option to the Lakota Nation — and I don’t think they’ll ever reach parity with bitcoins or even pennies. But it’s a part of the experiment I support.
The other one that I’ve recently gotten into is Dogecoin. Dogecoin is a joke, but it’s also a joke that got serious, and anyway cryptocurrencies are all a joke anyway, especially all the ones besides Bitcoins, and Dogecoin seems to be in on the joke. Sponsoring the Jamaican bobsled team was sheer genius, as was funding a NASCAR car…is that how you say it? Or do you just say NASCAR? Does it have to be capitalized? Anyway, that was a good move, or at least I’m pretty sure it was, although it’s pretty obvious by this point in the paragraph that I know absolutely nothing about NASCAR at all.
Anyay, a joke that survives the first cycle of funny-to-not-funny is a meme, and a meme is a good basis for a coin, and I like dogs. I see people wearing Dogecoin T-shirts (that may be because I live in Austin, but still), and they are proving that they can do things with the money. Works for me.
Somebody sent me PDFs of the entire Spelljammer system from AD&D 2nd edition. Looking through them (they are impossible to read) it’s really striking how half-good half-great it all is, and how much love I have for such an obviously flawed work.
I’m stopping myself from revising Spelljammer from the ground up. I have the ideas; oh, I have the ideas. But I do not have the time, so it has to wait.
The good thing is that this is a super obscure AD&D campaign world from 1990, so I wouldn’t have to change much to make it entirely my own. In fact, my basic ideas about how space travel would work in a fantasy setting are totally different from theirs. I have very little interest in any of the monsters or locations they worked out, the “crystal spheres” stuff is so bad that it still annoys me in 2014, the mage and helm concept is so dumb and totally makes sailors useless so I’d toss it out wholesale, and it’s not like there are that many great character designs or ship designs.
The only stuff I really want to keep is a couple of the better ships, a few of the monsters, the Rock of Bral, and the word Spelljammer. I could cut that out and have something that was 100% mine that I could really do something with.
BUT I AM NOT GOING TO.
Not until I find a way to make it pay.
I don’t actually play video games, but here are six video games I would play if somebody else made them:
1. A game where you play a tribe of cavemen and you have to conquer the entire world. Like Civilization but instead of tech advances like space travel you have tech advances like “slightly sharper flint axes.” The game could go thousands of years before the invention of bronze. This would work really well as an MMO.
2. A war game where you play a general and you can’t actually see all the fighting — you can only see where you are. Scouts and messengers bring you reports and you have to run the battle by giving commands and hoping that they follow them.
3. A platformer like this:
4. Blood Bowl. Football is more fun with orcs and elves.
5. Warhammer 40K but with good rules. Unlimited customization for all soldiers.
6. Eve Online actually sounds great, I just need one that is a) free and b) I have time to play.
I worked on this page a lot because I wanted it to look cool and for no other reason. Not sure I got there. I hit the point where the story was conveyed so long ago, but there was something more I was going for and I’m not sure what it is.
So today is the 155th anniversary of John Brown’s oddly-fated raid on Harper’s Ferry. As much as I’d like to boil the event down to one or two pithy lines, my reading on the subject has not refined my thoughts. Instead, it’s just tossed new thoughts on the pile.
So the best I can do are some pictures worth a thousand words, more or less. Let’s say twenty.
I have added two new Disney movies to my collection of favorite Disney movies. Man, having a kid was a great way to rediscover how good the old animated Disney movies were.
First, Sleeping Beauty is the most unutterably gorgeous animated film ever, and I should know, because I’ve seen near all of the really pretty ones. I mean the ones that take five or ten or fifteen years to make — I’ve seen most of them, and they’re all really gorgeous, and the Thief and the Cobbler is the best, but Sleeping Beauty is the prettiest.
It utterly changed the way I look at composition. Expect a lot more strong horizontals and verticals from me in the future. Expect a lot more reason behind me using diagonals.
The story, sadly, isn’t much. It’s Snow White but slightly better.
I’m also into the Rescuers, which is the apex of the Silver Age. The story’s at least a little better; it’s chock full of pathos at least. It’s about innocence and the defense of innocence and the power of the powerless and etc. But it’s also gorgeous. It was the last movie that Disney’s Nine Old Men worked on and boy did they put their hearts and souls into it. Madame Medusa is an utterly unforgettable villain, even creepier and more off-putting than Cruella De Ville. Actually, neither one is worse than the other, it’s just a terrifying world that contains both of them.
All those guys down there yelling at the Guatemalan immigrant kids, I have no doubt whatsoever that logic and rationality lead them to that. I mean, look at this passion:
Look at their absolute rational commitment to our economic abstractions and the concept of law and order. It is a vast tower of logic that they are screaming from the top of.
But it’s perception that should tell them, hey, I’m screaming at children. This is wrong. It doesn’t matter why this seemed like a good idea, any time you’re an adult screaming at children you’re pretty much in the wrong.
The Official Liberal Position on the Six Great Issues of the Day (and Feef #183)
by Geoff on October 6, 2014 at 0515I’m not liberal at random — I made up my own mind about things, and was pleased to find that there was already a political movement there when I got there. On five of the great six issues of our day — abortion, Israel, gun control, the War on Drugs, and the death penalty, there are perfectly clear, perfectly rational answers, and the liberals are a group of people who have arrived at those answers. No conspiracy needed. I like that.
Gun control: we need some of it. Too many guns.
Israel: we still love them, but this is crazy. We don’t want to send you money or weapons any more.
the War on Drugs: just quit it already. Shut the whole thing down.
Death penalty: Not worth it in a civilized nation, cut it out.
abortion: It’s nobody’s damn business, so back off.
on the sixth issue, income inequality, if they knew the right thing to do, liberals would do it. I feel exactly the same way.
I’ve decided that I no longer like Andrew Jackson at all, not even a little bit. I never realized that his presidency was the codification of White Supremacy, the moment when America’s uneasy truce between European, African, and Native American collapsed and the white people just started being utter assholes about everything. The Indian Removal Act was all him, he supported slavery and oversaw the codification of the slave system into absolute monstrosity, and he gave the millions of acres of land that he stole from the Indians to slavers so that they could greatly increase their holdings and the profitability of slavery. So at least he’s consistent. And you have to admit that he was personally a hell of a guy. But it really doesn’t matter to me any more, because he caused genocide and made slavery worse and essentially placed America on a collision course with the Civil War. He got rid of some corrupt bankers but only replaced them with other corrupt bankers, so big deal.
His combination of nativist race war and credulous suspicion of bankers, verging on conspiracy theory, is intensely familiar. I’ve seen this strain of Americanism before. Jackson was the first Tea Party president.
tl;dr I want Andrew Jackson off the $20 bill