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Saturday, January 07, 2012

RANDOM THOUGHTS #70

Steve Cole muses: Just thinking to himself things he blogged before but thinks bear repeating. (This also increases the chance of someone finding them on a Google search.)

1. Every restaurant table needs a trash can. Give me a little bucket six or eight inches across and I will cheerfully fill it with empty condiment packs, soiled napkins, straw wrappers, chicken bones, and no end of other debris and detritus that I don't want cluttering up my table. The waitress, instead of picking that stuff up one item at a time, can just wait until I leave and empty the little bucket then.

2. My cats love canned cat food but only lick the gravy; they never eat the meaty chunks. So can cat food companies just sell me cans of cat food gravy?

3. If China can block everyone in China from reaching websites with anti-Chinese stuff (and, just recently, from reaching porn sites), why can't the US block anyone in US from reaching those foreign websites with pirated files or viruses, or from reaching file-sharing databases that contain copyrighted materials? For that matter, if the Great Firewall of China can keep Chinese from reaching such sites, why can't the US build a Great Firewall of its own to stop SPAM?

4. If Assange and Wikileaks were serious, they'd release the UFO alien technology files dating back to Roswell. I mean, really, given the amount and kind of stuff that's leaking, is there any doubt that (if those files exist) Assange has them already?

5. Note to PROJECT RUNWAY: Gray is not a color. Black and white are only barely colors. Show us color.

6. We wargamers (and I include RPG players in that honored group even if they reject the name) are a unique bunch, and a tiny tiny tiny fraction of the human genome. We're people who get our fun by making our own decisions, and taking responsibility for those decisions. We're risk takers, but not gamblers. Most humans want to sit on the sofa, watch a TV show or read a novel or comic book, and be scared out of their minds that the hero is going to be killed (or sent to prison, or kicked off the police force, or reassigned to Toledo). But there is always the secret and secure knowledge that at the end of the adventure, everything will be right back where it was, with the hero in the same job he was in when the season or series started. Wargamers are perfectly willing to risk the starship captain's life and career, and accept that we'll be starting over as an ensign in the next game if we got it wrong. This has many implications, the worst of which is that the wargame industry is very small with very few customers. If a higher percentage of the human race were instinctive wargamers, the wargame industry would be as big as the comic book industry, and even small game companies like ADB would have 20 or 30 employees and annual sales in the tens of millions of dollars.

7. I get really tired of (when watching TV) hearing "after the break". Guys, I am watching the show, I don't plan on changing the channel, and I resent the fact that two or three minutes of actual content was left out of the show to make room for this needless repetition. When I heard "after the break" I click the fast forward button, so I'm not hearing it anyway and it's just more commercial time as far as I'm concerned. And I am not watching the commercials either, not unless they have cute animals or cool sci-fi effects.

8. If you want your girlfriend to wear sexy clothes, consider that nothing is sexier than a wedding gown.

9. The American Civil War is misnamed, because a civil war is two groups trying to take over a single country. Robert E. Lee had no more interest in taking over Chicago and New York than George Washington had in conquering London. It could properly be called the War for Southern Independence or the War Between the States. For that matter, the American Revolution was not a revolution as the Americans were not trying to overthrow the British government.

10. Pet Peeve: Cop shows where the cop fires two shots out of his pistol, the slide locks back on an empty magazine, and the clueless actor continues to point the now empty pistol at the bad guy. Argh. The propmaster read the script which said "hero fires two shots" and put exactly two blanks in the pistol, so the weapon was empty and the slide locked back, making the hero look like a moron to anyone who has actually fired an automatic pistol. If there is some insurance or safety issue about putting a third round in the magazine for this scene, why not use a dummy round (available in any gun store) which will cycle like a normal round (and leave the slide forward) but won't fire?