... and I haven't seen any one in a while.

Any of the local crowd want to go to a movie, celebrate the 2nd anniversary of Seattle's greatest store, or hang out in general this Saturday?

UPDATE:

I'm tentatively going to suggest Transformers at 1:05 pm at the Bellevue IMAX.

Also, I never realized there were three Ts in /tɛnətɪvli/!

Hearts cannot feel emotions

England[AP]- You do not feel with your heart horrible cold-hearted scientests announced yesterday, saying this to make up for their own inability to love.

The bad science men explained that the heart can only pump blood and if you feel sad or joyful that is your brain and not your heart. Whether tears come directly from the heart is still uncertain despite the meddling of these pathetic robot-like men who can feel nothing but jealously for normal people.

I hate these scientest men, I hate them with my heart.

I have begun the process of doing something which should have been done a long time ago. After all, it's how things are done these days:

Really, really good conversation at Bloggingheads.tv on cognitive scientific research on religion and religious beliefs:

My undergraduate advisor told me she'd never taken a databases course that wasn't horrifically boring. I have no reason to doubt her, and my own experience concurs that the subject is intrinsically soporific.

But still, we shall see...

For a while now I've heard very good things about the feature-length, mythological, autobiographical, animated, musical, one-woman production Sita Sings the Blues. It hasn't seen release due to copy right restrictions on the songs, but it's now available online. I finally watched it and it deserves all the praise it's getting.

If you have some free time to spare, you should definitely watch it.

That people are always declared to be irrational because they fail to act according to some model of rationality? It's never the model that's at fault, is it?

Anybody else using it and finding that it hangs constantly?

UPDATE: 'Twas Flash's fault. But the fix was ridiculously elaborate. It required a complete uninstall/reinstall of Flash, repairing disk permissions, and resetting Safari!

Once again the secret to enjoying things turns out to be low expectations. I saw Watchmen expecting to be able to denounce it as an abomination legitimately. I wanted to hate it, but I couldn't. Yes, it was a shallow copy of a very deep book, but it was a highly entertaining shallow copy.

UPDATE:

Working at MS has completely messed up my Unix command line muscle memory. I keep typing 'dir' instead of 'ls'.

My top sites according to Safari 4 on first launch:

1. Kingdom of Loathing
2. Google
3. Google Reader
4. Kingdom of Loathing
5. Kingdom of Loathing
6. Penny Arcade
7. Shlock Mercenary
8. My LJ Friends Page
9. Sluggy Freelance
10. Foxtrot
11. Elf Life
12. Real Life Comics

If there were justice in this world (and I wasn't too lazy to delete stuff from my book marks), Sluggy Freelance would be replaced by Scary-Go-Round (if the pattern I discern is correct).

I saw Coraline this afternoon. I thought John Hodgman's singing voice sounded suspiciously like John Linnell, and the credits confirmed my suspicions.

Say it ain't so!

That said, anybody want to see Coraline in the comming weeks?

You thought DC/MK, Star Trek/X-Men, Square/Disney were bizarre abominations? Ha! I give you Optimus Mouse!

I was woken up last night by an extremely bright light shining directly in my face. When I went to the window to see what the hell was going on outside, I realized that it was the moon!

Via the application of cold logic and demonstrate that I am probably a horrible person.

First a preamble: The following thoughts were occasioned by the recent Israeli incursion into Gaza. I think this action is plainly unjustified and immoral due to the fact that the Israelis are lashing out and endangering innocent lives without any clear goals. They have clearly fallen into the "We have to do something! This is something! We have to do this!" trap. That being said, the following occurs to me:

Gaza is essentially an anarchic region without any rule of law, whatever nominal authority Hamas might posses. In such areas occupation is always futile since an effective occupation involves seizing the reigns of power, and in places like Gaza, no reigns of power exist to be seized.

The only effective means to conduct relations with a lawless region are to ignore it, isolate yourself from it, or conquer it. Ignoring rockets being launched into your territory is an obvious non-starter. I'm not convinced Israel has adequately attempted to isolate itself from Gaza, but assuming for a moment that it had, this would leave systematic conquest (as opposed to taking pot shots at anyone who pisses you off) as the only option and effectively make it a form of self-defense.

If the idea of conquest as self-defense does not seem bizarre enough, consider that anyone who resisted a conquest-in-self-defense would be resisting a legitimate authority and thus, ipso facto, not innocent. None of which is to say that any and all possible actions by the conquerors would be licit in such circumstances.

Please keep in mind that I'm more interested in arguing about the merits of the abstract conclusion than whether the specific situation actually fits it.

I have not played it yet, but I just downloaded "I Love Katamari" for my iPhone.

UPDATE: Christmas/Shmistmas! In years hence I shall be posting this on December 29th

I though I'd make this a Christmas/Crimbo tradition, but I never quite got around to it (Too busy re-playing Tales of Symphonia). Nevertheless, here, belatedly, I re-present to you my magnum opus, the Great Mokushirokuology:

Gloria in excelsis Utenae
Et in mundo revolutio consilio discipulorum.
Laudamus te.
Pugnamus te.
Adoramus te.
Spondemus te.
Gratias agimus tibi propter Apocalyptem Sortis Absolutae tuam,
Domina Utena, Princeps Ohtori, Utena Pugnatrix omnivicens.
Domina Puella Revolutionaria, Tenjou Utena.
Domina Utena, Sponsa Anthiae Nuptae Roseae.
Quae efficis revolutionem mundi, supera nobis.
Quae efficis revolutionem mundi, errumpe putamen nobis.
Quae pugnas sub castello inverto, supera nobis.
Quoniam tu sola Victrix.
Tu sola Revolutionaria.
Tu sola Pugnatrix, Tenjou Utena
Cum absoluta sorte sub castello inverto.
Et dicamus: AM-MON-ITE!

Glory in the highest to Utena
And revolution in the world for the student counsel.
We praise you.
We duel you.
We adore you.
We engage you.
We give thanks to you for your Absolute Destiny Apocalypse.
O Utena-sama, Prince of Ohtori, Utena the ever-victorious Deulist.
O Miss Revolutionary Girl, Tenjou Utena.
O Utena-sama, the engaged of Anthy the Rose Bride.
You who bring about the world revolution, win for us.
You who bring about the world revolution, cause our shell to be broken.
You who duel beneath the upside-down castle, win for us.
For you alone are Victorious.
You alone are Revolutionary.
You alone are the Duelist, Tenjou Utena
With an absolute destiny beneath the upside-down castle.
And let us say: AM-MON-ITE!

One of the dangers of reading the bible in the original is the puns of incredibly high magnitude.

Take for example Genesis 37:5,

vay-yachalom yoseif chalom vay-yaggeid l'echayv vay-yosifu 'od s'no otho.

A literal translation of which is "And dreamed Joseph a dream and he told to his brothers and they josephed more hatred of him".

It's not like I shouldn't have seen this coming, however. Joseph was in introduced in Genesis 30:24 with the line

vat-tiqrah eth-sh'mo yoseif leimor yoseif HASHEM li bein acheir.

And she called his name Joseph, to say "Joseph the Lord for me another son".

I can't get to work! Woo-hoo!