A cute little movie about playing Warcraft, that get's at the question that confronts everyone at some point past level 80. I absolutely no idea if it would have appeal outside the community, as they say. I've started playing again, partly because I'm curious about the expansion, but mostly because it's just a more rewarding game than anything else I play. It's so good it makes you question the idea of playing games, of recreation itself.
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(1)
08:27:24 PM,
Saturday 20 November 2010
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It's astonishingly how viscerally I dislike the monarchy. Everything it does annoys me. It's sort of like Justin Bieber, only it's been around for a thousand years. It's not that it itself is so egregious, it's just a moderately bad idea at this point. It's the adoration of the poor benighted masses that irritates me.
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04:02:51 PM,
Friday 19 November 2010
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This map kind of blows my mind, even though it should be obvious from looking at a globe. It's easy to forget there's just as much earth south of the 40 S is there is north of 40 N. The ocean, it's big.
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(1)
12:21:03 PM,
Friday 19 November 2010
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Susan Boyle keeps covering songs I like. I'm worried about this. Her cover of Skeeter Davis's The End of the World is uninspired, and her cover of Crowded House's Don't Dream It's Over is agonizing. I hate to think that there are millions of people out there buying these albums that don't know the originals.
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11:55:28 AM,
Thursday 18 November 2010
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As a fairly regular reader of Andrew Sullivan, every time I see something about Sarah Palin elsewhere, I feel a bit like I've slipped into some sort of horrible alternate reality where his pet nightmare has escaped and is running loose. She's just not supposed to matter outside his overheated imagination.
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(3)
09:21:18 PM,
Wednesday 17 November 2010
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I'm starting to think tax reform might actually happen. This is probably ridiculous of me, but that our tax code is riddled with corruption, unnecessary complication and ambiguity should be something that tea partiers and progressives can agree on. Unfortunately, it will probably just end up with a chorus of hacks defending various deductions, and not go anywhere.
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04:09:58 PM,
Wednesday 17 November 2010
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The perfect subtitle for a Slate article. How to sell horrible counterintuitive column ideas and look smart doing it. I'm really starting to like Dave Weigel.
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03:09:55 PM,
Monday 15 November 2010
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Old Sturbridge Village is an excellent sort of museum. More museums should have pigs. We went on Sunday. There was an excellent, extremely abridged sermon read, about the importance of missionary work, which made a lot of sense of why Gibbon was controversial, why the history of the early church was such a loaded question. The purity of the early church and the age of miracles was central to their understanding of history and progress. The notion that progress and Christian missionary were one and the same rather took me by surprise, but it makes all the sense in the world. It's easy to lose track how radical and idealistic the puritans were, and that their greatest accomplishments in education and industry came from the same organically out of their millennial Christianity. I wish I had a text of the sermon to link to. It was very cleverly written.
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02:55:04 PM,
Monday 15 November 2010
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There should be a Fiorello! revival, or a film version, or something. It's a musical about LaGuardia by the team that did Fiddler on the Roof, and I want to see it. They make movies of absolutely everything, and LaGuardia was awesome. How many movies do we have about Italian gangsters, but none about the great Italian reform mayor of New York, who ran them out of town? Also, he was adorable! Here's a picture of him taking a sledgehammer to slot machines. Here is a clip of him speaking against prohibition.
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08:51:37 PM,
Friday 12 November 2010
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Why I have no loyalty to my company, chapter 14: Health care elections don't roll over. If you don't fill in your form by friday, you're uninsured in 2011. This is absolutely not how it used to be back when we were a company that helped other companies design their healthcare plans. But now we're a mega-corporation that hates it's employees.
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(1)
04:11:08 PM,
Wednesday 10 November 2010
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I basically feel I'm too smart to need to put any effort into learning programming languages. As such, I absolutely despise Perl. Perl is the programming language for people who like memorizing star trek technical specifications. Most languages you can read and debug without being fluent. Perl you absolutely can't. I prefer a pile of COBOL or SAS to Perl. Yes, it's possible to write good code in any language, but Perl actively discourages it. Being concise is a sin, not a virtue. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is my grump for the day.
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12:33:30 PM,
Wednesday 10 November 2010
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Keep Calm and Carry On.
so much cooler than
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04:03:18 PM,
Tuesday 9 November 2010
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