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Bacon Eiffel Tower!

Yes! YESSS!!! I have made it through another week without blogging politics!!!

Oh, god <sobs into her hands>.

We’ll get through this. We’ll get through it together.

More people playing with their food here. Looks like a decent righty blog, if you fancy poking around. And you think you can read financial prognostication right now without popping a blood vessel.

Try to have a good weekend, everyone!

January 4, 2013 — 11:51 pm
Comments: 27

We’re winning ONE of the culture wars, anyway

With all the (perfectly justified) handwringing about the culture wars and how we’re decisively losing them, I’d like to point out one battlefield that right-libertarians have absolutely PWNED!!: computer games. Particularly first-person shooters.

Partly because geeks trend libertarian. Partly because you’re, you know, shooting stuff. Partly because these games tell stories, and dystopian, Road Warrior-type stories are a fun and obvious way to tell stories about, you know, shooting stuff.

Most games of this kind are, I reckon, 80/15/5 libertarian/conservative/sociopath. Varies, depending on the game and your own playing style.

In most of them, government is either useless or actively working against you (not necessarily counting the military in a military game). And while Black Mesa or Aperture Science have a shockingly lax attitude toward employee health and safety, nonetheless it looks like corporate labs are the only player up to inventing a portal gun. You’re the lone, heavily-armed, super-athletic Randian bad-ass that’s single-handedly going to save the frickin’ world (or the embers of it, anyway) whether it likes it or not. You are capital-I Individual.

Even cooperative games, you’re cooperating to throw pipe bombs at hordes of onrushing fast zombies.

Don’t underestimate this. Playing 8 or 20 or 300 hours worth of game is an incredibly vivid and personal experience, and an awful lot of kids are playing an awful lot of games. It’ll be hard to make a liberal out of anyone who grew up being Gordon Freeman, the one free man.

Curious? Sure you are! The mega games distributor Steam is having their annual holiday sale. Up to 80% off a lot of great games.

I think I’ve scooped up about ten games for under £20. Total.

January 3, 2013 — 11:09 pm
Comments: 36

Okay, then. How about this?

I tried to dabble a toe back into politics today, now that the holidays are pretty much past. Read a few headlines, browse a few articles.

No. No no no. No, sorry. No.

So, screw that noise. Let’s do something else. Again.

I give you — the largest coffee pot and coffee cup in the world. From Stanton, Iowa — “the White City” (I didn’t ask why it’s called that; it didn’t seem right). They are, of course, cleverly disguised water towers.

The pot is 36 feet high and 20 feet wide. It holds 640,000 cups or 40,000 gallons. The cup is 96 feet tall, holds 2,400,000 cups of coffee or 150,000 gallons.

In 2001, the cup tower was entered in the trade association’s national “Tank of the Year” competition and won first place. The makers of the cup, Phoenix Fabricators and Erectors, Inc., had entered the contest every year since the beginning — that’s fifteen years! — and this was their first win.

If I told you they were a Swedish coffee pot and cup, would that give the game away? Of course it would! Stanton, Iowa is the birthplace of Virginia Christine — but you know her as Mrs Olson!

So join me in hoping everyone in DC dies horribly in a fire and goes straight to hell!

January 2, 2013 — 10:47 pm
Comments: 22

Have you ever heard a chicken sigh?

Oof. Sorry. Got all jammed up today. So please enjoy this snapshot of my chickens.

It’s been raining for weeks here. Raining and windy. We’ve had floods and villages cut off and everything.

Rain means chickens don’t come out. “Mad as a wet hen” is a real thing. I tiptoe out in my silly rain hat, open the chicken house…and there they are, glowering back like the Four Chickens of the Apocalypse.

But today, it was sunny! And, oh – the time they had. They went places they aren’t supposed to go and ate things they aren’t supposed to eat (styrofoam, poisonous rhubarb leaves and bits of coal, mostly). It was chicken heaven.

It’s back to chicken apocalypse tomorrow.

— 12:04 am
Comments: 42