2004.05.16
In other news, I was going to mention this yesterday but wasn't sure if it was allowed to be made public yet...my mom is moving back from London after her 3 year stay there...to Boston! That's really cool, my Aunt and I are really looking forward to it. This wil be the first time since I was in high school, when we were (obviously) in the same house that we've lived anywhere near each other. Of course, some aspects might be a little weird...except for a brief stint with the UU I haven't gone to church in the interim. And I wouldn't mind going with her sometimes except for the usual "oh, so where are you going to church now" questions.
Cartoon of the Moment
--Cartoon by George Beker for Creative Computing's 1978 book 101 BASIC Computer Games. The robot illustrations in that book were a huge influence on me as a kid...I was just knocked out at implausibly-specialized yet believably-drawn robots, they seemed so cool. The book has recently been scanned and published by the fine folks at AtariArchives.org.
Footage of the Moment
Here's a clip of a house getting eaten by a tornado. (Heh, boingboing say it's a 26.6 Meg link, but my new 802.11g linksys router thingy let me download and watch it in realtime on my laptop...neat.)
I was thinking that tornadoes must've even scarier when people didn't have a car that could probably outrun it if need be...you would just see this wrath-of-god funnelcloud coming down on you, and all you could do is hunker down and hope.
Oddly, just the other day Peterman and I invented a...I'm not sure what the game is, "metagame" isn't right, "alternative play mode" is correct but an ugly phrase...involving tornadoes inside of Mario Kart Double Dash. On the Dry Dry Desert level there's a tornado that winds it's way around the track opposite the direction of travel of the players, and I had previously thought about an "alternagame" of just being a "storm chaser", just following the tornado and seeing how it made it's way through. But then we got into playing chicken, seeing who could get their kart closest without being sucked in, with the added fun of trying to push the other player in when they were closest. It would make a great minigame, points awarded if you were closest, but a penalty for being sucked into the funnel.
Self Indulgent Thought of the Moment
You know, maybe this is just "observer effect", but it seems like a lot of stuff happened in the spring of 1974, around when I was being born. Honestly, more than I would have expected taking into account that I'm more likely to have my eyes open for that particular year. Like, according to this Tornado FAQ, there was a "super-outbreak" of tornadoes a few days after my birth. Watergate was coming to a head and Nixon would resign 4 or 5 months hence. And I think I read that streaking was the big national fad. What a time!
Query of the Moment
Mo used to handle the bills and all that crap, so of course now I have to get back into doing that. Just out of curiosity, what kind of schedule do people use for handling that? Every day? Every couple of days? Every week? Every two weeks?
It's an enormous pain in the butt. Especially since my "Spam" detectors are still a little weak when it comes to snailmail, and so I have to open a lot of semi-official looking envelopes.
But I do have a shredder, and that's always fun. And we already know how I feel about letter openers.