I recently saw the new Star Trek movie, and had mixed feelings, especially regarding the treatment of Vulcans and of Trek continuity. And frankly it didn't seem all that "off" until the entry of old Spock, who reminded me of the deliberate pacing and conversation-driven nature of the original two series, especially the Next Generation episode " ( Read more... )

Roleplaying games: perhaps the gold standard in nerdiness. A bunch of people spend their Friday nights sitting in a basement, rolling dice, and talking about how the dice tell them they're winning a battle against an evil wizard. That was the basis for a large percent of my undergraduate friendships ( Read more... )

I rather doubt anyone (except maybe Susan) will see this, but I've decided to return to my journal, for now at least. It's been quite a break, and one I'm not totally sure why I needed, or why I now feel the need to return to my digital pages. To put my thoughts up for the world to see (or, more likely, ignore ( Read more... )

Whose job is it to save the world? And how do you go about doing so? It's a rather frivolous-seeming question in some lights, but it's definitely a question that's in some way lodged in peoples' minds. I mean, it's the ultimate call to action: to try and SAVE THE WORLD--it's hard to imagine a threat to something bigger where human agency is even ( Read more... )

I just got back from Beowulf as I type this opening. I'm about to go to a party, so I'm not going to finish the post here and now, but I want to start while everything's fresh in my mind ( Read more... )

Last Friday, I reached a meaningless-yet-somehow-important milestone in life: I turned 25. A quarter century. Drinking age plus four. Whatever. Just a number, but a nice round one, that makes you sit up and take notice ( Read more... )

The echoes of your face still haunt me ( Read more... )

Humanity: such a strange creature are we. A tribe built all of individuals, a strange anomaly of negative entropy, bestowing unheard-of order unto the world in which we live. A network of minds, each of which is more complicated than the most phenomenal computer any of them can dream of. Six billion existences spread across the globe, each ( Read more... )

The other day, I was reading and came across a reference to temple prostitution. This is a practice reportedly practiced long ago at the temples of Ishtar, which involved a woman being required to go to the temple and wait for a man to give her a coin (I *think* a special coin just used for the purpose), at which point she would "have to" go with ( Read more... )

AutoSummarize has various settings, ranging from a set percentage of the original work to set lengths of summaries. For this, I chose 100-word summaries, because they're quick and easy. Well...there's a problem. Poetry works much better: usually the breaks *are* sentence breaks, so you've got less worry: certainly I'm not going to reformat an ( Read more... )