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World O’Crap has a long post up noting the comments, ideas, and random, ignorance-filled rants of people from the Christian Broadcasting Network’s Halloween page. THe CBN, of course, is the home of the 700 Club and other such travesties. Anyway, go read the World O’Crap post.. good stuff there.

BBC News has the following article up: California wins anti-spam case, detailing how the State of California fined a large spamming firm $2 Million under one of its new spamming laws.. looks like finally some of these things are taking effect.. we can only hope this continues. Death to spam!

Just in time for the Spooky Season, the Psychical Explorers present Psychical Explorers: Zombie Combat Techniques. Be ready!

I’m a big fan of living forever. A lifetime of reading bad sci-fi, and impressionable college years spent reading Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition have molded me into someone who trulty beleives we will defeat aging and death within the next 100 years. Yeah, I’m a whacko.. but I’m not the only one. Just found out about The Methuselah Mouse Prize, a prize fund to be awarded to the researchers that manage to get a mouse to live past a certain age. Mice, of cours,e like most living things, have a certain expected life span. They also have a lot in common, genetically speaking, with humans, which is one of the reasons we keep running so many tests on them. Well, the Prize will be awarded to those who mange to extend a mouse’s life, through a variety of means, past a certain point. From their website:

The Methuselah Mouse prize is an initiative designed to further the development of truly effective anti-aging interventions, by promoting public interest and involvement in research on mammalian life extension and by encouraging more such research to be done.

Sounds like a noble enough endeavour to me!

You may want to start saving now, because this is what you (yes, you) are getting me for X-mas: The Complete Far Side: 1980-1994.

Weighing in at some 19 lbs., and containing over 4.000 cartoons, it’s all packed in there in 1,250 pages in 2 harcover books. ::love::

I just discovered World O’Crap, a left-leaning political blog by some.. err.. people. Anyway, point is, it’s a complete hoot to read, the author(s?) is absolutely brilliant and angry and dead on funny… No punches are pulled, no quarter asked or given. t’s one helluva ride, folks, and I highly reccomend it. (The link goes to one of the best rants I’ve read so far on that site)

So here I am, stressing/buzzing/jumping with excitement and nervousness over NaNoWriMo in a week and a half, and ph34ring with great ph34r the possibility that I will be hit and waylaid by a crippling bout of writer’s block, and then Wil Wheaton comes along and says he’s got writers block, and proceeds to write a brilliant little short piece about it.. Damn him for r0xx0r1ng so much!

Christian Urban Legends.

If you’re a christian, you should appreciate the fact that many urban legends about your religion, many of them casting it in an unflattering light, are being debunked.

And if you, like me, are forced to suffer (evangelical) christians in your family, circle of friends, or regular daily life, you’ll also appreciate the debunking of many myths these people have used to try and convert others to what is, imho, a massive mistake. That’s right, Dubya never ‘witnessed’ to a young boy on his campaign trail. Stop spreading it around. Besides, Dubya ‘witnessing’ at me would only make me want to be a christian even less.

Christina Blogs for Jesus: Why is it that every time I run into an evangelical christian, I die a litle more inside? Go, click and be outraged.. but don’t bother writing her. There’s no getting through to that type. She’s lost to us, brothers and sisters, lost. Too bad about her giving home-schooled kids a bad name, tho.

Some random entries from my current NaNo notebook (residing on my Z, of course):

Going with the Snowflake writing process… first step:

One line synopsis of the story I’m gonna write.
A high school girl discovers she’s Satan’s daughter, and now daddy has to save her from some overzealous angels. Oh, and did I mention that daddy quit his job a few decades ago, erased his own memories, and now works as a private detective among the humans?

Okay, well, that wasn’t really one line, but it gives me a good starting point. This novel is gonna be absolute dreck, but at least NaNo gives me an excuse to get on with it and write the damn thing.. I can sacrifice this crappy plotline to the gods of NaNo.
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Finally got off my ass and did a tiny update over on AniGaming: put up a new side menu with new graphics and rollovers. Looks pretty good, works pretty good too, I think. Only problem is that I seem to have fuxx0r3d the little popup boxes in the Who’s Online box below it.. should be a fairly simple fix, just tweak a few pixel values.. I’ll fix it tomorow. Late now, going to bed. More later.

If you love me, you will buy me this.

Mwahahaha! Yes, I have convinced my friend Liza to do NaNoWriMo with me! I won’t be the only person I know going through this insane torture next month! Now if only I could convince Laura or some of the other folk I know… hmm…

Anyway, my NaNo planning is coming along.. I’ve got a bare skeleton of a plot outlined, and I’m working on characters.. and keeping my enthusiasm up by visiting the NaNo forums, which are absolutely nuts. Everyone’s downright giddy with energy and excitement as November creeps closer.. this is gonna be a blast. I’m insane.

Kill Bill is easily the best movie I’ve seen all year, and by far the best Tarantino flick ever. It’s an absolutely insane, over the top, brilliant, beautiful, hilarious, and astonishingly bloody tribute to Hong Kong action flicks, and you need to go see it, right now.

You’ve got Daryl Hannah as an eyepath-wearing nurse, Lucy Lui as an absolutely delectable yakuza boss, Vivica Fox as the deadliest housewife in recent history, and of course, Uma Thurman as the lead character, the film slices, dices, chops and skewers its way through some of the most amazingly choreographed fight scenes in my personal memory. I laughed, I went ‘Wooo yeah!!!’, I loved every second. God damn. I need to see that again!

Well, I’ve decided to take part in National Novel Writing Month, a.k.a. NaNoWriMo. What is NaNoWriMo? Here’s a snippet straight from the site:

“National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.

Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over talent and craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.”

I’m not sure what exactly I’m gonna write about, or what I’ll call my novel, but I do know this is something I have to do. I’ve been talking since damn near forever about someday sitting down and writing a novel, but whenever I start, I get bogged down with lack of desire, or in self-hatred over the perceived quality of my work. The structure of NaNoWriMo, however, forces me to get over the quality issue and focus on quantity, on simply having written, rather than having written well. Sure, whatever comes out of this month will likely be total and utter crap, but at the end of the month, I’ll be able to proudly say: I wrote a novel.

NaNoWriMo is also about community, strenght in numbers, and being able to have an experience that not everyone gets to have: the chance to be an artist, with all the drama , frustration and joy commesurate in the experience, but compressed into one intense month. Besides the intensity of trying to knock off a 50,000 word novel in 30 days, you get to commiserate on the forums with literally thousands of others who are doing exactly the same thing, and going through your same pains, joys, and frustrations. It ought to be one hell of a ride. In the meantime, I’ve still got a couple of weeks to plan and flesh ideas out in my head before I start writing the novel itself on the 1st of November. Feel free to shoot ideas past me for what I can write or what I can call my novel.

Large buttocks are pleasing to me, nor am I able to lie concerning this matter.
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Wether you’re a buddhist or not, there’s something about this that’s just plain neat: Digital Prayer Wheels. As my man Cory Doctorow so kindly points out: “Who needs Tibetan prayer-wheels when Buddhist theorists are out there reforming their theology to admit hard-drives as instruments of devotion?”.

Here’s the idea: for centuries, Buddhists have been inscribing mantras and prayers on the outside of tubes, cilinders, and wheels, and then spinning them. The idea is that as you spin the words of the mantra, the positive energy in the mantra spreads in all directions, puryfying you, those around you, and the entire area.

Well, the Dalai Lama himself has stated that hard-drives can be considered prayer wheels. Since all a hard drive really does is sit there and spin, by downloading a digital image, or just the words of a mantra themselves, onto your hard drive, you are making them spin just like on a prayer wheel. And thanks to the wonders of modern techgnology, with hard drives spinning at anyhwere from 3600 to 7200 rpm, your computer room, cubicle, or bedroom ought to be cleared of any negative influence in a jiffy!

I’m not much of a buddhist, but I could use all the good karma I can get, so I went to the page and downloaded the text, a couple of images, and a java applet, just to be sure. I’d download the screen sver too, but my screen saver efforts are for folding@home.

Yipe! This just won’t do.. This has to be the longest stretch in between blog rants I’ve ever done! Crap. And I promised myself I wouldn’t do this. Allright, anyway, I suppose there’s no use crying over spilled milk. So I’ll get back to the semi-regular updating today and tonight. Gots lots of little details that I should have been posting up. Just to remind myself and to give y’all a hint: DSL, NaNoWriMo, Half-Life 2, EMusic, LAN Parties, and much randomness. Also, snee.