COTTON THISTLE CLEARANCE
Random musings from the noggin' of Knolltrey (Best viewed on a monitor running Mozilla Firefox, with a brain running on a case of Grolsh...)
Friday, 28 March 2008
It is put down by everyone far too often... Mood: celebratory Topic: A Hello to Arms
I'm making things official today:
It's the newest linguistic holiday of the year:passive-voice day!
Ah, yes: that great modifier of the English language, providing grace and nuance to our words for over 1000 years, and a stick to the craw of many a modern high-school and college English teacher.
Honestly, a language without the passive voice should be shunned by all; such a thing would surely be hated by me; really, wouldn't such a stale language have your disgust?
I'm really not being glib, either: next to Paralipsis and Litotes, passive voice is my favorite thing about English. My bell is really rung by it!
Right, I'm being an a**hole about it, here, but I had way too many teachers in my time who would go into convulsions at the mere sight of a phrase written in passive; the obvious thing to assume about such a phrase is that it's lazy writing, and that there is no possible way one could use the passive to add nuance to a passage.
In such cases we've got Occam's Razor working against the voice, plus the fact that about, oh, 80% of the time or so a teacher is actually right in telling their pupil that the passive voice should be shunned.
(...did it again: hehehe...)
But there's that 20% when it works, either as a subtle driver of understatement or, especially, a qualifier in a character's dialogue, and simply using its active counterpart would be less effective.
Alas, finding an educator willing to listen to such arguments is rarer than finding gold nuggets in a stream.
(unless, of course, the nuggets would be found by someone with enough dedication and, oh...
Your Favorite Webservice Sucks... Mood: accident prone Topic: A Hello to Arms
Bloody f**king fantastic...
Tripod's HTML source code editor is flubbed beyond recognition: it won't accept any of my manual changes such as (hypothetically...) adding a quicktime movie embed into this post. Geeesh! The only solution would be to upload the movie directly into the account I use for this blog and let the idiot-proof script automatically determine how to display my movie, but I'm maxed out on space here...
Anyway, if I want to link to a movie, then, I have to do something retarded and unimpressive, like this:
Believe me: if I knew how to actually work at teh interweb I'd make my own website from scratch, but of course I can't, and I'm not willing to put in the hours to make this place respectable...
but facts are facts, and Tripod sucks!
The vid's nothing special: just me playing around with Windows Movie Maker and some sill pictures of the Czech Hedgehog from TYPERS. I found the images whilst cleaning out my HD recently; they're rejects, or at least they were, 'cause I hated 'em. But, tone down the color, add a jaunty tune (My obsession with One Wing Angel continues...) and make the pictures move around a-la Ken Burns, and it's tolerable. Came out better 'n I thought, anyway...
EDIT: I've got a second version where I show a bit more of The Creature at the end (too much in my estimate) but seeing's how the framerate and resolution of the version I did post suffered in the translation, I might put that one up at some time, too.
Shane's been drinking tonight, and that has a way of making a person pine for stuff...
...in my case, I'm pining for the northern part of the non-emerald isle...
I took that picture a couple years back from the Eastern shore of the Northern section of Loch Lomond (got that? good). Them's the Arrochar Alps in the background. Left to right are The Cobbler, Ben Ime and, last but not least, the might Ben Vorlich (...not the tallest, but thanks to Scott... ah, well: long story...)
At least, I THINK those are them. I'm pretty sure about Vorlich, anyway...
And there's nothing to do downtown, anyway... Mood: caffeinated Topic: Entertaining Insights
I'm checking out the stats on the hypothetical new Al Burj building they're semi-planning to put up in Dubai at some undetermined date.
The specs are all horseshit, I must say. They want it twice as big as Taipei 101, for one thing, and that entails 228 floors and a first-to-last-floor height just above 850 meters (I won't go into spires or antannae. Hey, developers: nobody f**king cares....)
It's already planning to be downgraded: there's no feasible way to cobble together such a structure, and this kind of sophomoric bravado really towers over anything I've ever seen...
...sorry...
Anyway: the thing won't be half-as-tall as expected, likely, but I thought I'd do a little experiment: given that this place was SLATED to be the tallest building in the world, I thought I'd do a little hypothetical side-by-side with TYPERS' own Distelspitze Tower, seat of the Allied Military and headquarters of the Superior Joint Command:
Yeesh...
This is one of those reality-laced moments where I get to savor some bitter herbs: this is indicative of how far I sometimes overshoot. Let's assume Distelspitze is exactly 700 floors (I'd envision that some floors would have VERY high ceilings, so this number is again on the low-side, but let's not muddy the waters...)
a tower that tall would be, at a minimum, THREE TIMES as big as this Al Burj nonsense in its planning stage. Its height, again a minimum, would be around 2550 meters or, for the rest of us Americans, 1.58 miles. That means that an executive anywhere in the upper third of the building could effectively join the mile-high club just by nailing his secretary from the comfort of his own office (gotta admit: that would be a GREAT pick-up line!) A base-jumper would experience 43 seconds of free-fall (factoring in terminal velocity... I think...). Actually that's not right: roadkill would experience that time of free-fall: a base jumper could wait a little under 26 seconds before even deploying their chute and reach a safe landing (provided the prevaling winds haven't smacked 'em back into the tower's side... that's one way to ruin a Friday afternoon board meeting you booked in the good conference room with the window...)
I'm not finished, yet: given modern flexible skyscraper frames (designed to ride-out mother nature, not withstand her and get broken in two for its trouble): if Distelspitze were rocked by a particularly windy day (as one might often have in a place like Spindlespire Ridge) and, as a consequence, it listed to and fro at an angle of one single degree at its base, the occupants of the very top floor would rock back and forth in the air a distance of 89.25 meters, side-to-side-to-side.
That's one rollercoaster I wouldn't pay the price of admission for...
EDIT: On later consideration, I recall that Chenine Chovert lives on the 250th floor of her superskyscraper in Nash Ultima, so if the Al Burj actually does get built to order (Which it won't...) we'll already be well on our way to the civilian-version of the superskyscraper as I describe it.
700 floors in still WAAAAAAAAAAAY futuristic... but maybe possible, given where we are, now...
And you gotta admit: Ainsworth would have a really killer view, if not for all the clouds in Spindlespire...
I don't know what else to say, really. I was gonna give this post a day to mull it over, but the news makes me depressed. Really depressed. And that's just the way it is, so I can't be eloquent and sagacious about it.
He was a scientific researcher, an author, and a speculative futurist. And now he's gone over the eternal falls: beyond the confines of special relativity, the limits of light, or even the scope of mathmatical singularities.
Not all journeys into the infinite aether require Monoliths, after all...
I suppose I can make myself feel better by getting angry about something...
Well, not angry, really... just creeped out.
You see... there's this site out there, somewhere... and it contains...
...it has...
...eeegh...
...R-Type porn.
Yeah: you read that right.
Now, to be fair, not all the images are actually pornographic, but I ain't linkin' to the damned thing because a) it creeps me out and b) we're talking loli and shota stuff, here. Not the worst the 'net has to offer by any means, but still...
eeegh.....
So how do you make R-Type porn, you might ask? Well... think of it like... if a bunch of underage girls wore spaceship-model suits for Halloween...
eeegh......
You should've seen how the Platonic Love turned out....
UGH: never mind: just never mind. I'm gonna go throw up for awhile. Then I'm going to church....
Seein' red Mood: cheeky Topic: Scientific Progress...
Not that I'm getting into a lazy habit of simply posting links to pages that everyone already knows about, mind you, but I hadn't checked out the AVGN's page in some time, and lo to my surprise, he went and reviewed the Virtual Boy, of all things...
Talk about a disaster. I picked up my Virtual Boy system a year and a half after the thing's launch at an Electronics Botique: it came with all the games in the above review, minus Nester's bowling, and it set me back a grand total of $25, every-bloody-thing included.
To this day I feel it was one of the worst investment choices I've ever made.
Now I will say this for that idiotic system: Warioland is still one of the best sidescrollers I've ever played on any console system. But Rolfe's point is valid: why the hell was it on Virtual Boy, huh?
Scientific Progress gets a major eye-strain headache and stumbles off to lie down...
Just a cropped rehash of the 'Quint giving the finger' pic, this time with some ocular coloration (don't worry: I'm quickly getting tired of this little trick and I think this is the last you'll see of it).
Also, on that tangent: the answer is that nobody died at the end of 'Filial Affection'; stop asking.
The chapter 'Evolution' is... evolving, anyway. I've still gotta 'parse' the dialogue a bit.
Dog Days of Spring Mood: lazy Now Playing: "Margaritaville" by Jimmy Buffett Topic: General
I'm on vacation for the week. Spring Break, and all of that...
The internet here costs $10 for 24-hour access, so I don't have to tell you that updates'll be sparse. With a copy of Heinlein in one hand and a Mai Tai in the other, though, I won't really care.
It's a 'working' vacation only in the fact that I plan to knock out some TYPERS. How much depends on the local climate.
And on the strength of the bartenders' Mai Tais...
Yeah, yeah: I know. The idea itself is less than original, and all it would take is a trained monkey on their development team to suggest such a thing.
But the fact remains, boy-o's: this trained monkey already beat you to it.
And, for the record, a brain-computer-interface won't "read a pilot's neurons"; that'd be like scanning a blank piece of paper. It reads the electrical impulses from those neurons.
Yeah, I'm nitpicky: what can I say?
Coincidences aside, I'll know if something's really up if the North American release of "Command" has a ship named Chaste Gazer in it.
celebratory
accident prone
sad
Aaaaaahhhh....
caffeinated
down
cheeky
silly
lazy
incredulous
