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Out looking around for more Frazetta desktop pictures, as I am inclined to do occasionally, I can upon the news that Frank passed away this week. While I suppose that it’s not exactly a tragedy as he was 82, it is still sad news. He was certainly the greatest artist of the, um, “dark violent fantasy warrior genre” (certainly a few notches above his contemporary Boris) and he was a major icon of my youth. (NYT Obit: Frank Frazetta dies at 82).
While I am still quite fond of his art, with my fixation on fantasy role playing back in the day, Frazetta’s art was very inspirational in my teenage years, and quite ubiquitous due to my reading and re-reading of the the classic Conan novels and seeing all of those early Molly Hatchet album covers. He was probably the most iconic figure of fantasy art during the early 1980′s and remains very inspirational to this day, especially his Death Dealer series.
While I love the Death Dealer as much as the next guy, I admit that my favorite image of his is probably Flesh Eaters, just for its dark and evil goodness.
But the one that comes to mind the most would have to be Silver Warrior as I clearly recall one day in the early 80′s when I saw a big tour bus parked in front of the Hilton Hotel, the side of which was adorned with a huge rendition of the Silver Warrior. At the time it seemed like the most awesome thing I had even seen and when I took a look at the front of the bus, what band name did I see there but Molly Hatchet. Nice.
As a memorial, I’ll be using Frazetta for my desktop for a while and now I really want one of these statues… Hint hint…
So this week I started reading Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks (An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms) by Ethan Gilsdorf. While currently I am at a part that doesn’t really interest me… It being about the SCA and LARP and such things, I find the book to be somewhat reviving. As (like the author) another of those many boys who spent their high school years of the early 80′s lost in the land of AD&D, soda pop and primitive computer meanderings, I find it somewhat refreshing to be reading all of this. Though I never left the RPG world quite as completely as he did, as though it’s been well over 20 years since I played a pen and paper game, in 1989ish I seriously played Bard’s Tale on my IBM Model 25 and though the 90′s went by without much of that sort, I have played the Baldur’s Gate game series for many a year and even dabbled in MMORPG with the free Runescape.
But I do still have a soft spot for the old games. Specifically AD&D which dominated my waking hours from about 1981-1985, but also Traveller (my favorite Sci-fi game, where you could spend so much time preparing to play the game that you never even had to bother with playing it) and the I.C.E Arms/Claw/Spell law series (also called Rolemaster) which I still think is the best bunch of RPG rules I have ever encountered. Once I start thinking about it though, all those other ones that I played around with at that time pop up in my thoughts: Top Secret, Paranoia, Stormbringer, Star Wars…
Like the author of Fantasy Freaks, I have remained disdainful of people who play pen and paper RPG’s for all of these years, and I am wondering how genuine that is. Do I really have disdain for such things? If so, why do I still have all of those above listed games stored away in boxes? And why do I feel so fondly about them and those glorious days of yore?
I used to gripe on this topic a lot at the Ol’ Penguindevil), but I don’t think I have really broached it here. The topic is, of course, the looming threat of Brain cancer caused by cell Phone usage (and all other wireless technologies, if you asked me). It has long troubled me (though not really surprised me) how little play this gets in the American media, while many European media outlets and University seem to have no qualms about questioning the long-term safety of excessive usage of such technologies. Now though a nice article has appeared at (of call places) GQ, Warning: Your Cell Phone May Be Hazardous to Your Health.
It includes such exciting and reassuring tidbits like :
Though the scientific debate is heated and far from resolved, there are multiple reports, mostly out of Europe’s premier research institutions, of cell-phone and PDA use being linked to “brain aging,” brain damage, early-onset Alzheimer’s, senility, DNA damage, and even sperm die-offs (many men, after all, keep their cell phones in their pants pockets or attached at the hip). In September 2007, the European Union’s environmental watchdog, the European Environment Agency, warned that cell-phone technology “could lead to a health crisis similar to those caused by asbestos, smoking, and lead in petrol.”
And…
Interphone researchers in Israel have found that cell phones can cause tumors of the parotid gland (the salivary gland in the cheek), and an independent study in Sweden last year concluded that people who started using a cell phone before the age of 20 were five times as likely to develop a brain tumor. Another Interphone study reported a nearly 300 percent increased risk of acoustic neuroma, a tumor of the acoustic nerve.
As the wife and I aren’t big cell phone users, I don’t have many personal worries for us, but as I complained about a year and a half ago in my PD post convenience or death, the thought of children using them makes me very queasy. Especially our little one. While she is not the age to have her own phone (and, as far as I’m concerned, won’t be until she is old enough to move out on her own) she certainly does occasionally get one plopped in her hands so that she talk with someone.
Of course, who cares? We all know that American’s generally only like movies with happy endings.
I thought that this was a disturbing piece of information that I discovered via the Powell’s Books blog: Big city left with no bookstore. The story is that Barnes & Noble closed the B. Dalton’s Bookstore (B. Dalton’s? Seriously? I had no idea that those stores still existed) that was in a mall in Laredo, Texas. The trouble is, this Dalton’s was the only bookstore remaining in Laredo! It seems a bit strange to me, of course. I live outside a town of about 7,000 people which has a bookstore, and I work in a town of 8,000 people (though, admittedly the population probably doubles during the day due to it being the state capital) that has at least 4 bookstores that I am aware of. So imagining a place of 250,000 people not having a bookstore (in fact, seemingly it is about 150 miles now for them to go to the nearest bookstore) is a bit hard to do.
Even though everything is reporting that it was the only bookstore in town, I can’t help but imagine that there must be at least a few used bookstores there. Doesn’t every place have some old feller sitting behind a counter selling musty old hardcovers? Anyway, it is disturbing for a number of reasons. It implies, of course, that there is scarily little interest in books in Laredo, also that there is little interest there in supporting local businesses (as I imagine that thousands of people in Laredo probably buy books, they just do it online). While those are both sad, I think that this part of the story is the most disturbing:
Barnes & Noble says it closed the Laredo store as part of an overall strategy to shut down the chain of mall-based bookstores. Even though the Laredo store was profitable, the overall chain was losing money, according to company officials.
So Laredo lost its bookstore, not because the population didn’t support the store by buying enough books to keep the store profitable, but because the store didn’t fit into the “strategy” of the multi-national chain that owned it. Talk about being at the mercy of corporations. You’d think that if it had a profitable customer base, the company could at least have remodeled it and reopened it as a Barnes & Noble.
when you’re immersed in Media (TV, Video Games, Web Browsing) for seven and a half hours a day? Following up yet another link on Slashdot, I ended up at an article at International Business Times (Youth plugged in nearly most of the day) that was one a new study by the Program For The Study of Media and Health, Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds that states that youth (ages 8-18) are spending more time utilizing media (from 8 hours and 36 minutes per day for white, to 13 hours a day for black and hispanic). The report is pretty interesting because the results are split up in all sorts of ways (by type of media, by age, by ethnicity, by parents education level, etc) so there are lots of numbers and charts. Sadly, I don’t think that I would fare well in comparison, as I spend probably 8 hours a day just listening to music, my total figures might look pretty high.
The report itself is certainly worth reading: PDF here.
In other exciting computer news, Net-Security.org has an interesting article about peoples password habits. According to research done on 32,000,000 user passwords leaked from something called “rockyou.com”, people still don’t worry much about their online security. Though the report covers some interesting information, the most eye catching is a list of the most commonly used passwords on the site. The top ten passwords were:
1. 123456
2. 12345
3. 123456789
4. Password
5. iloveyou
6. princess
7. rockyou
8. 1234567
9. 12345678
10. abc123
Sadly, and somewhat embarrassingly, my name was the number 18 password, used by 14,329 users.
Report: PDF here
There are some exciting new twists (well, new to me anyway) to one of my favorite subjects: The impending doom possibly brought on us by the Large Hadron Collider. In the eternal case against it that never seems to move forward, the angles of destruction seem to be more interesting than I had imagined. Not only is there the danger of a black hole that lingers so long that it destroys the earth, but this article, The Case of the Collider and the Great Black Hole at MIT’s Physics arXiv links to a very intriguing document in which a lawyer, Eric Johnson, attempts to put the general facts together so that if it ever does go to court, there will be strong groundwork for the judge to evaluate the case, or, as they say:
First, the relevant facts of the scientific debate and its human context are memorialized and made ripe for legal analysis. Next, the article explores the daunting challenges the case presents to equity, evidence, and law-and-economics analysis. Finally, a set of analytical tools are offered that provide a way out of the thicket – a method for providing meaningful judicial review even in cases, such as this one, where the scientific issues are almost unfathomably complex.
The document itself, The Black Hole Case: The Injunction Against the End of the World, is one of the more fascinating things I’ve read. He points out that in addition to the Black Hole endgame, there are the following theories to watch out for:
1. The strangelet scenario. According to theory, a strangelet is a tiny, stable chunk of “strange matter.” Undoubtedly, a “strangelet” sounds much less frightening than a black hole… The fear is that if high-energy particle collisions created a strangelet, the object would initiate a chain reaction that would convert all of Earth and everything on it into “an inert hyperdense sphere about one hundred meters across.”
2. The magnetic monopole sounds perhaps even more benign than the pluckily named strangelet. But, according to hypothesis, a magnetic monopole would be just as lethal to the planet. The worry is that a particle accelerator might produce a tiny bit of matter that is magnetically active, but only has one magnetic pole—that is, it would contain a net magnetic charge ordinary magnets have both a “north” and a “south” pole, the magnetic monopole would, for example, have only a north pole. Once produced, the fear is that a magnetic monopole would cause the protons in normal atoms to decay, initiating a runaway process that would convert and destroy the ordinary matter making up the Earth – eating it up, in the words of a CERN theorist, “Pac-Man style.”
3. The bosenova (pronounced “BOE-suh-NO-vah”) (or “bose-supernova”) scenario predicts a lesser harm than destruction of the entire planet. Instead, the hypothesized harm would be like a small version of an exploding star, destroying only a piece of Switzerland and France.
4. The vacuum transition scenario, also called the “vacuum bubble” or “space transition” scenario, has the unique distinction of portending something even worse than the annihilation of Earth. Specifically, a vacuum transition would destroy the entire universe… The worry with regard to the LHC is that one of the accelerator’s high-energy particle collisions might shift the fabric of space and time into a more stable state, a “vacuum bubble.” The universe would not disappear altogether in such an event, but it would cease to survive as we know it, and humanity would pop out of existence.
Anyway, these are all fascinating, no matter how crazy they might seem to be. CERN’s response to all of them seems to be that if such a thing could happen, it would have happened already… Which seems a bit dubious to me. I do think that there is a great difference between what happens naturally in physics and what people/technology try to make happen with their magnets and particles. Plus, it all sounds way to much like The Quiet Earth to me…
I am sure that we all recall my exciting computer history: Using a 7-year old PowerMac on a dinky 15″ gateway LCD monitor, then buying a happy little 22″ LCD for it and immersing myself in that glory… Then buying a Toshiba Vista laptop for school related work.
Well, that was all going around fine and dandy. but as I may have reported earlier, there are some things that old Mac just couldn’t quite do. One of which was stream Netflix movies and watch movies/shows form Hulu in a respectable fashion. When I let Caitlin know that we could easily connect the laptop to the big newish monitor, we started doing that and so now, for awhile, I have been doing the tiresome task of squeezing the laptop onto my desk, switching the monitor (each of the computers use different connectors to hook up to it) and watching stuff through the laptop. Turns out that I got tired of doing that, so yesterday I hatched a nefarious plan…
I moved the Mac! Then I reorganized the desk to have it be for the big monitor and the laptop, and brought the crappy little Gateway monitor out of retirement and moved it into the kitchen with the Mac. I know, sad and true… It felt like we were moving to Vista for the primary computer and relegating the Mac to a secondary role (which, I suppose, is what we did) but it does have its advantages: One, I don’t have to switch things around whenever we want to stream a movie and, two, I now have my beloved Mac all to myself again!
Continuing with the shocking parts though, we trotted off to Best Buy today and I spent money on two things that I dislike (Wireless and Microsoft) and bought a MS Wireless mouse and keyboard. Will the wonders never cease?
Now all that I have to do is move all of my MP3′s from the Mac to the new external hard drive to see if I can utilize that as a media drive for the vista computer. Once I reformat it for use with both…
Not that this will be much of a surprise to many of use, but in 2009 the sales of Vinyl LP’s is at the highest level that it’s been since they’ve been tracked separately from cd’s in 1991. Okay, so they aren’t even one percent, but I still like it! Strangely, nearly my entire history with record collecting has seemingly taken during the decline, as I didn’t start really accumulating them until about 1993.
What I like even more about this increase is the thought that more turntables might become available. For a while there it seemed like high-end and low-end were the only, options, with few models readily available in the mid-price range. While I am using a nice Technics right now, it is a loaner and it might be nice to get a reasonably priced new one rather than replace the broken motor on my Rega.
The New York Times has an article about it, the cleverly titled Vinyl Records and Turntables Are Gaining Sales, that is pretty thorough. Though you could still read it and not realize that most everything (especially major label-wise) has continually been produced on vinyl this whole time. Sure, maybe it would be import vinyl, but it has still been out there.
One thing this leads me to think about, which I think is one of the key elements of this, is that digital media isn’t, well, real. It’s just a stream of zero’s and one’s that can be easily reproduced eternally. A record (and the jacket and liner notes that goes with it) is an actual unique physical object, not eternal, not reproducible. Even if there are a million copies of that record, each one is in itself a unique and one of a kind object. I don’t think that the resurgence of records is all about nostalgia (though, some of it certainly is), but in an era where digital technology has cheapened things and devalued what it means to possess something, I think that some people are thinking that it would be nice to genuinely own a piece of music that you like (and the ephemera that goes along with it), rather than just an endlessly reproducible copy of it.
Though you could make the same argument about CD’s, the small format of the packaging is certainly less endearing, and, at its core, it is still just a digital blob. Try and play a CD with no electricity and you won’t get much. Records on the other hand… The music is still in there.
Is the ability for people to put things out into it. One fine example is the following. This was copied from a product review page at NewEgg (here) :
iNDiFiNiTY
Pros: i wrote sumthin b4 but i thought of new important things n plus i got nuttin to do… lol
it got da free space measuring thingy even tho im not 100% surte how it works… lol
speed seems good… lol i did bout 200gb in lless den a hour…
Cons: costs a shytload more… ths costs 30 dollars more den da essential one… same color n size… everythin da same except diff models…
Other Thoughts: rlly fukn bored… lol n plus 2 4 stas = btr ocverall rating… lol
As I ignore everything that is quite that dumb. But while browsing around today I stumbled on an article from a NASA scientist that was responding to some of the stupid questions that he has received about fears they have delveoped because of the movie 2012.
Sure, it is irrtating to read about just how dumb people are, but his responses are fairly interesting, and it ais all so funny that it might be worth a read.
Nibiru and doomsday
Reading some of these question helps to remind me of how it is that people have believed such terrible and dumb things through-out history. Gullibility, laziness and self-importance are hallmarks of our kind.
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