Rotten Circuits

Whip of the Red Hunter

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 03:40:30 GMT

I read this last year when deathboy posted it, and it's certainly worth reposting:
http://spiritualmonkey.livejournal.com/478311.html

It's a rather dark christmas story, an alternative take on the Santa myth.

Discount on a paid account

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 02:25:01 GMT

If you have a Paid or Permanent account, you can now send 10 of your non-Paid friends a $10 coupon. Your friend will be able to purchase a Paid Account for $9.95 (instead of $19.95) for one year by enrolling in our automatic payment plan or make a manual payment of $15 (instead of $25).

* All Paid and Permanent accounts can send out the coupons by clicking here (it's also under Friends -> Holiday promotion in the site header)
* You can also send to people not on your Friends list by manually entering the username in the field provided
* If your friend declines the invitation, it will be returned to your available invitation pool and you'll be able to send to someone else
* You can send the invitations until January 15th

Yep, the automatical yearly payment takes the discount, so that's $10 off not just once but apparently *in perpetuity* if you want to sign up now. If this worked for renewals I'd be asking one of you to give me a code b/c I pay $35/year including my extra userpics. So this is a seriously good deal!

If anyone wants to take advantage of this, let me know - I have a permanent account, so I can comply ;)

NSFW: Sunitha Krishnan's Fight Against Sex Slavery

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 03:45:02 GMT

We think we know the horrors of the world. We think we understand them, and that we're doing the best we can, but that we've got our own problems to deal with...

Remind yourself.

You don't need to volunteer. You don't need to donate. Just stop thinking of victims as less than yourself, or than anyone else. Accept them as the same as yourself, and try to make sure that the people you know and the people you love do the same, and then you can say that in some small way, you're doing your part.

New Years Party!

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 00:52:21 GMT

We're having a New Year's Party! And, so long as we know you, you're with someone we know, and/or you let us know you're coming, you're invited!

We reckon it's a great idea, because:

1. longpig's awesome sister elanya will be here
2. If anyone else is having one, we haven't heard about it yet (aside from the awesome Crumpwrights! Alas, they are too far :( )
3. Our place has 3 decent-sized rooms, all connected, which can accommodate snack tables

So, set the date (that's December 31st, New Year's Eve,) bring some booze, and come and enjoy our snacks! We'll probably get something going on the projector, and maybe some music in the spare room.

Kids absolutely welcome! We have a kid-friendly dog, so that shouldn't be a problem at all.

I <3 Magnetism

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 15:27:00 GMT

Much more exciting: magenetic monopoles exist!

Movember photos

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 14:08:12 GMT

I'm late sharing the awfulness that was my final Movember mustache with you. I tried to put together enough material for a time-lapse photo, but really all that changes is my hair, so I gave up halfway through the month. You can see those photos on my Movember page:

http://ca.movember.com/mospace/214677

and a couple that never made it that far:

And now, the finished product! 1 month of growth!

This'd be great if it meant I didn't have to shave, but unfortunately, there's basically a mustache there, but it's pale blond and invisible!

Your Mind at Work

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 13:40:41 GMT

Occasionally throughout my life I've been wonderfully complemented by a question:

"How can you be so calm/nice/easygoing/patient/thoughtful..."

I call it a complement because all of those are things I strive to be, and it's great to know that I'm having some kind of success from the point of view of people who aren't me.

However, while I've tried my best to explain my methods, I've never had a scientific, brain-based reasoning behind them. Then I watched this video yesterday:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeJSXfXep4M

Google Tech Talk
November 12, 2009

ABSTRACT

Presented by David Rock.

In his new book "Your Brain at Work," coach David Rock depicts the story of two people over one day at the office, and what's happening in their brains that makes it so hard to focus and be productive. Not only does he explain why things go wrong, but how you can train your brain to improve thinking and performance at work. Based on interviews with 30 neuroscientists, he's developed strategies to help you work smart all day.

Learn how to:
· Maximize your mental energy by understanding your brain's limits
· Overcome distractions
· Improve your focus through understanding the nature of attention
· Reduce stress levels with brain-based techniques
· Improve how you collaborate by understanding the social needs of the brain

You can learn to be more productive, less stressed and stay sane by understanding your brain.

David Rock is a thought leader for the brain-based approach to coaching. David coined the term 'NeuroLeadership' and co-founded the NeuroLeadership Institute, Journal and Summit. He is also the founder and CEO of Results Coaching Systems, which helps Fortune 500 clients worldwide improve thinking and performance. He has authored four books, most recently 'Your Brain at Work'. He is on the advisory board and faculty of international business school CIMBA, and a guest lecturer at Oxford University. He consults organizations including Ericsson, Publicis, NASA, Accenture, EDS and the US Federal Reserve. He lives between New York City and Sydney, Australia.

The mental process and techniques he describes are a large part of how I shape my personality. When I hear bad news, I go right into problem-solving mode - how can I fix this, or even turn it into an opportunity? I'm far more likely to use this method of dealing with a problem than to suppress it.

The big part that I wasn't aware of was of how much of our (and my) lives are governed by the threat response. When someone asks you to do something hard, or criticizes your work, BAM! Threat. When think you ought to talk to someone you don't know? Threat. So I guess next I'll work on recontextualising that - I'm already able to handle that response, but I didn't realise how often it occurs.

This ties in pretty well to a long-term line of thinking for me - when I was in my teens, I noticed/decided that I didn't really fear death. I've got a good, logical set of reasons why it's not scary, but I always found it a bit weird that my brain was able to handle that - as my biochemist friend Chris argues, surely fear of death is a survival mechanism, and lacking it just makes it easier to die?

Working from the ideas in the video, it seems to me that accepting death will/has made it easier for me to deal with threatening scenarios, and thus has actually increased my survivability.

Happy birthday Ruminator

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 17:39:04 GMT

Have a great day! I shall be spending your birthday afternoon learning to save lives, so that's good, right?

Beautiful

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 14:14:06 GMT

“When LEGO executives recently discovered that adult fans of the iconic plastic bricks had hacked one of the company’s new development tools for digital designers, they did a surprising thing: They cheered.

Unlike executives at so many corporations, who would be loath to let their customers anywhere near the inner workings of their software tools, the LEGO honchos saw an opportunity to lean on the collective thinking of an Internet community to improve their own product while bolstering relations with committed customers.

All it took was being open-minded enough to see that their biggest fans weren’t trying to rip them off; they were trying to improve LEGO’s products in a way that, just maybe, the company’s own designers hadn’t thought of.”

Here, via the awesome essay Finding the truth in systems: in praise of design-hacking by Scott Burnham.

Movember

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 16:24:40 GMT

It was pointed out to me that while I put some information on twitter and facebook, I have neglected to tell LiveJournal that I've been participating in Movember.

Movember is a yearly charity event in which participants grow a moustache to support prostate cancer research.

As many of my friends know, my ability to grow facial hair is... limited. We could use other terms to describe it, like "pathetic" or "child-like". So what better way to put that ability to use by amusing you all with the truly sorrowful results of a month of letting my upper lip do its thing?

My donation page is here: http://ca.movember.com/mospace/your-donation-page/
You can visit it to see the progress of the early days. I haven't updated it for the rest of the month, so that the final growth will have more... impact? (Disclaimer - it's really because I forgot :/)

So, if you're feeling flush, click the link and send a donation for a good, and bizarre, cause!

Excellent articles from meallanmouse and elanya

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 17:00:48 GMT

Read them. Think about them. And then think about them again. And then bloody well change the way you act.

http://yesmeansyesblog.wordpress.com/2009/11/12/meet-the-predators/
http://finallyfeminism101.wordpress.com/2009/10/19/rape-culture-101/

How I Sleep

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 12:12:27 GMT

A quick thought on the way out of the door - longpig often has trouble sleeping (although not so much recently.) I have always had a tendency to wake up a couple of times in the night, but when I go to bed, and even more so when I go *back* to bed, I'm out like a light. I can turn the alarm off and go back to sleep literally before I've woken up enough to realise that the alarm went off.

(I've also had a tendency to sleep-walk occasionally, and to hold a conversation in my sleep which I won't remember when I wake up. At various times this has terrified me - what if I told someone a secret, like about what I got them for Christmas, while asleep? Luckily, sleep-me is discrete so far.)

So, the question in my mind, is how did I get this way? I wasn't always conditioned to sleep so well - in fact, I clearly remember going to my parents aged 10 or so, and asking them "How do I go to sleep? I've forgotten" which confused them greatly. They gave me some good tips, but I was disappointed that there wasn't a formula.

So, my method is to read books. From a really young age I used to read a *lot*. I'm talking about getting a book from the school library, and finishing it in two hours (when quiet reading time had finished, and I was supposed to be doing maths.) After that, I'd get *another* book before we left school, and finish that in the evening. We'd go to Milton Keynes library every other weekend or so, and I'd carefully select 10-20 books (they put up the limit at some point) and finish them before Thursday.

All this time, I'd *always* read when I went to bed. There's a point, though, especially when you're lying down, that your eyes defocus or close, and the book slips from your hand. To start with, my response was to shake it off, prop myself up and carry on reading. But as time went on, I trained myself that when I woke up once after reading, I'd quickly find the book, jam a bookmark in it (if my finger was still in the page) and lie down to sleep.

Later, I got into video games, movies and friends, and didn't have as much time to read. My sleeping during that time was varied, but never awful - I'd have some nights where I couldn't sleep for a long time, but usually I'd drop off. Sometimes I'd read a book, in fact.

Much later still (we're talking maybe a couple of years since I read a book cover-to-cover) at university, I started getting into reading again, and I discovered something crazy - reading made me fall asleep. I'd start reading, and drop off. I've slowly trained myself out of that, but I can still produce the state that it put me in, and fall asleep pretty quickly. If I put my mind to it, I can even sleep badly on a sunny day - I've always been a non-sleeper in daytime.

So my theory is that you can train yourself, by doing a specific thing until you are too tired not to sleep, to not only make that thing a trigger for sleep, but learn to recreate the mental conditions for sleep.

And to read a lot of books!

The Power of Packaging

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 12:41:27 GMT

GOG, or Good Old Games is a bit of a ronseal site. They take ~~popular~~ excellent games of any era, and repackage them to work on XP, Vista, W7. They also tend to work under linux with WINE pretty well, I've found. The prices are pretty reasonable - a game will tend to be $5.99 or $9.99, and a lot of the time similar games will be bundled for a lower price - i.e. Buy Oddword: Abe's Oddysee and Oddworld: Abe's Exodus together (which I did, earlier this year.)

They're not the only company out there doing it - Steam has it's share of old games, as do gametap and the other download services. But they are unique in several ways.

Firstly, you're not just buying the game. These are games from the era where the box art was beautiful (because sometimes the game wasn't) and the manuals were detailed (because there was no GameFAQs to tell people how to play.) So GOG give you the manual as a PDF, to take home and print (this is key for games like Beneath a Steel Sky, which used the manual as DRM, and for Fallout, which uses the manual as a 2-semester module and doorstop.) They have a virtual shelf, where you can arrange all of your games and see the box art. On top of that, they give you much more - icon packs, desktop wallpapers, soundtracks - whatever quality bonuses they can scrounge up for a game, you will get access to - even if you already bought the game when they acquired the bonuses.

Secondly, you're buying *THE GAME*. This is key to why I'll buy my games from GOG over Steam for preference.

When you buy a game on Steam, you're buying the ability to download the game through Steam, launch and play the game through Steam, but all at the discretion of Valve. If the servers go down for good, you can never download the game again. You can kind of back it up, but it's a bit technical and not something that most people are likely to do.

When you buy from GOG, you download an installer specifically for the game you bought. It has no checks in it, no DRM. In fact, the worst DRM you'll run into is in-game manual lookups, which is another reason it's key that they provide the manual. Install, run. If I want to back up my game, I just pop the installer onto a CD. Need to redownload it? There are no limits on how many times you can get it from your account (pay attention, Codemasters.)

All of this makes GOG a very compelling service for me, which makes it really hard not to buy incredibly good games like Sanitarium, *even when I already own them*!

Maybe they'll have the soundtrack...?

Tired, Work, Dog News

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 15:38:38 GMT

Ok, so mostly it's me that makes me tired, but work contributes!

Stayed up until the wee hours on Friday playing DDO with freakwoman, fuelled by all the Red Bull that I had at the office party. It was much fun, and we were super-effective, burning through a whole adventure pack!

Of course, I then had to get up at 7 to let the dog out, so I was operating on about 2 hours sleep for all of Saturday! It was fun though - we went to the pet store to get new food for Sierra.

We were warned that she wasn't eating when we got her, and so I'd assumed initially that it was psychological and that she'd eat when she was used to the routine and the new environment. However, 5 days is a bit long, and she did eat the beef and rice we boiled for her when her stomach was upset from the anaesthetic. So at the pet store we picked up a bunch of free samples for her to try.

For the rest of Saturday, I did a lot of dog training, played some video games, and tried to watch Starship Troopers 3, but I was too tired to handle how bad it is! In the evening I did a taste test with Sierra - put out two crunchies from all the different samples in a line, to see what she ate. She hoovered them all up, except for the super-expensive, meaty crunchies we bought first!

More DDO on Sunday, full of hilarious fail - we tried a lot of really hard missions. I'd do "the pit" again maybe after I level up (it's long and convoluted, which I like,) but none of the rest. We did a couple of easy ones too, to make ourselves feel better - undead and troll smashing :V

Since the taste test, I've been feeding Sierra the free samples each in turn, and she seems pretty happy with all of them - today she finished the whole bowl! Hurray!

Umbra: Earth's Secret History TODAY!

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 12:45:53 GMT

Hey all - just a reminder that we're still on today!
You will all be expected to help eat our leftover Halloween candy :P You're welcome to bring yours too, and we'll all... "help" :V

Nick Griffin Question Time

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 16:59:48 GMT

So, I watched the show yesterday, and the thing that's been running through my head the most since then is:

"Indiginous English? What the hell are you smoking?!"

The audience were with me, too - the reaction was overwhelmingly negative and derisory. And it's pretty obvious why.

There are no "indiginous English" people. The Celts, from Southern France, trace back to Africa like everybody else. Every other country in Great Britain except England can claim some kinship to the Celts, as they were pushed out and enslaved by the Romans. The decendents of the Romans were slaughtered by the Angles and Saxons (mostly from South Germany), who created what became England on their twice-conquered land. They were mixed with Viking raiders. In turn, they were conquered by the French. Since then, the royal line has been mixed with others from all over Europe, and occasionally further afield, and sent out their mixed-blood subjects to all corners of the globe, bringing back slaves, subjects and employees from the lands that they in turn conquered. These people gained their freedoms and fortunes, and became accepted into Great Britain (an economic union, created pretty much under duress, with the Celtic countries,) too.

That's a massively shortened version of our cultural and ethenic history, and still any fool can see that there's no room for any kind of person "native" to Britain.

Umbra: Earth's Secret History Sunday November 1st

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 23:26:22 GMT

We are on for Sunday evening! We finish D2 at *around* 6ish, so let's say from 7.

I'm currently expecting to have 6 players, so if you fancy coming and you didn't vote in the poll, let me know and I'll do extra pregens (I'm looking at you, moonandtree.)

I'll make a scene-setting post later in the week, once I've written more of the material.

Umbra: Earth's Secret History poll reboot

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 20:18:08 GMT

Ok, so in the interest of maybe finding a date where more people are available, I've expanded the options, so please reanswer here (sorry to make you do it all again).

I've got enough to run, but I was hoping that mousme could come, as she doesn't get to make it to games so often, and of the previous options, she's only free on days where at least two other people can't make it (not counting those who haven't responded).

View Poll: Umbra: Earth's Secret History poll reboot

Umbra: Earth's Secret History one-shot Game next week

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 23:46:16 GMT

So, as previously mentioned, I'll be running a one-shot systemless roleplay game next week at our house.

I'll be making pre-gens, so all you have to do is:

1. Tell me which day you can come:

View Poll: Secret History Preferred Dates

2. Turn up and game!

A little to report

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 15:46:02 GMT

Work trundles on, life trundles on. My evenings with longpig are still lovely, despite us not having the money to do anything exciting - Hazel makes a lovely and generally new meal every day, and then we play games together or watch shows that we got behind on during the move. I look forward to getting home every day, and enjoy my work most days too, which is more than I ever expected of life.

The weekends are generally great - we almost always see gats, sorceror, miseri and moonandtree, and occasionally mouseme too, and then Sundays are full of D&D - either my own Planescape game or curtana's excellent Diabolotin II, and generally some DDO too.

Last weekend we got to play DDO with space_gargoyle, and with shaphron and hdimagination too. More DDOing will be forthcoming! We also went shopping with rumplefurskin, and I got a great new sweater, which I haven't yet stopped wearing since Saturday...

This weekend, however, will be extra-awesome! We're going to amaena and rumplefurskin's Halloween party in Ottawa, a new place for me :V I am super-psyched. Then on Sunday, stu_the_elder and kittyfantastico are coming to Montreal, so we'll have a friend-heavy weekend.

This week I have been entertaining myself during slooooow builds with twitter, reading about how stupid people think that "girls are ruining sci-fi" and with some philosophical pondering courtesy of meallanmouse.

I'm not sure what I just saw, but I liked it...

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 11:50:32 GMT

http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/heather/michael-moore-schools-maria-bartiromo-capi

I just watch Joe Scarborough, loud-mouthed Fox show anchor, tell Michael Moore that he has "opened his eyes" to Republican responsibility in the unethical actions of large, deregulated companies. Then Michael Moore told Joe that he agreed small businesses are stifled by too much red tape, and that democrats were also to blame.

Brave new world.

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 15:21:05 GMT

Ugh. IBS again. So tired.

I had a great (IBS-free) weekend, lots of relaxing, followed by Thanksgiving pot-luck with mouseme, sorceror, gats, miseri and moonandtree. We played Arkham Horror with the Dunwich expansion - the game was bewilderingly nice to us, and we did pretty well!

Yesterday was the opposite of the weekend - back to work, deadline due, IBS attack etc. Then, in the afternoon, I got an email telling me that one of the documents needed for my permanent residency application was needed by 3pm, that same day! So once the meeting wrapping up the deadline was done, I scooted out of work, and arrived, document in hand, at the office at about 15:10, and stuck around until I saw the receptionist *hand* the document to the person who needed it.

Today is much more mellow - bug-fixing, and doing some of next week's work in advance :V

DDO Guild

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 11:03:07 GMT

In lighter news, we've been enjoying DDO a lot, and playing enough that we decided to buy one of the adventure packs with Real Money (tm). So we picked up Three Barrel Cove (can anyone guess the content?), which contains a lot of missions for a faction that we were interested in (The Free Agents) and Hazel suggested, while we were in the store, that I pick up a Guild Charter - which just happened to cost slightly less than my remaining credit.

So I'll be sending invites to join "The Rhenean Antiquarian Society" ((tm) and (c) curtana :V) to the characters we know as and when I see them online (you can't send offline invites, for some reason.) If you want in, comment here with your character names and I'll make sure I have you on my friends list.

I can't believe that I'm enjoying an MMO enough that I spent money on it - even less that I did so for the social aspect! Has the world gone topsy-turvey?!

Farewell, V.P. Dr. P.

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 21:33:15 GMT

I've been avoiding making this post since Sunday, but now is as good a time as any.

Dr. President Gaius Baltar passed away on Sunday. He was our hamster during the time we were living in Wales, and we had a lot of good times with him. When we left, we passed him on to Alex, who looked after him for the rest of his time.

He had a good run, I think. Qualifying as a doctor and elected President within weeks of his birth, Dr. President Gaius dedicated his life to novel food storage solutions, verifying structure integrity and peeing anywhere he wasn't sleeping. Before he was half a year old, he was (without his knowledge) nominated Vice-President of WARPSoc and won in a landslide vote, thereafter being known as "Vice-President Dr. President Gaius Baltar". A year later, and late in his life, he managed to hold on to the position for a second term, with a running partner (Mike I believe, who will be taking over Dr. President's duties as well as his own. I hope he's ready to chew on some walls.)

Alex's family have interred him under a flowerbed, in what I am told was a beautiful ceremony. I wish I could have been present, but I'm sure that he would have approved.

Happy Birthday!

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 17:41:12 GMT

I've only got one Sister-In-Law, and I wouldn't swap her for any other in the world. Have a great day, Heather!