`So all those nefarious plots, the terror cells under the bed, the scheming evildoers whose awful engines of destruction needed to be rooted out by spying on, well, everyone? The extra surveillance has yielded few prosecutions, a tremendous shocker I’m sure.
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I don’t really know what this is, apart from looking like the start of a fantasy story, but it fell into my head, more or less in one piece, this morning:
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Due to the the rather fragile state of my technical infrastructure, I’m planning to move the hosting of my blog to another server. I don’t know how smoothly this will go… while I’m hoping for no downtime, there maybe some interruptions in service.

Dino Run (also available here) is a very cute and fun retro-style side-scroller in which you control a velociraptor running away from the blast wave of an asteroid, trying to avoid the disaster that’s wiping out your (and other) species. It’s a style of game I haven’t played much in quite a while, and it’s a lot of fun.
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I’m deeply conflicted about this little piece of video reworking. Partly because it’s unbelievably inappropriate on a bunch of levels—comparing the Democratic nomination struggle to World War II and comparing Hillary Clinton to Hitler, for example. Partly because it relies upon the audience not understanding German, which disturbs me for other reasons (and since I understand German to an extent, it’s also jarring). But the fact remains that, despite its being just wrong, it’s still funny—at least it is today. It’s extremely context-dependent, and months from now I suspect this piece will be regarded as something of an embarrassment. (The other context that makes it more acceptable somehow is that apparently the piece in question has been re-subtitled many times already for other things, and already constitutes a meme that is here being reapplied.)
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Of course this is merely a news report and might not actually be true in all its particulars, but sadly, I feel like it probably is:
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Short post tonight, because I’m way too tired. But I thought I’d leave you with this piece of choice propaganda: John Hagee claiming that it’s easier for students in public schools to get abortions than aspirin. See that link or after the jump for the video.
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High Geekery, this. Webcomics, one about a band of D&D characters rendered as stick figures, the other about a wargaming geek sucked into another dimension… I discovered both of them quite recently, despite friends who are into The Order of the Stick and the fact that Erfworld appears to have garnered critical acclaim.
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Alpha Assault is a fun little game. it takes place on a hex-based board, with a letter in each hex. You have to make words out of the hexes that are adjacent to each other, while some of your tiles get taken over by the enemy (who’s trying to capture your castle hex).
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Snooker is an oddly hypnotic sport to watch. I used to get sucked into it when it was on television in Ireland, but it’s not the kind of thing that gets airtime here (and I don’t watch television per se here anyway). You can still find it on YouTube, which is great, but to really watch it for a long time you need high quality and a large screen.
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I’ve been playing around with literary awards in Freebase recently, mainly the novel/fiction Booker, Pulitzer, National Book Award, Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards.
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I was going to post a link to this Clay Shirky article yesterday, but then saw that it had made it to BoingBoing and decided not to bother.

However, I think it’s worth posting even if most readers do check BoingBoing. It’s rather interesting, and worth calling out.
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I’ve been re-reading Hellboy, one of my favorite comics. I got into it a few years ago and it took me a little while to figure out why I liked it.
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I came across typeracer last night and have been playing it, on and off, since. It’s a really simple idea, just let people type short paragraphs as a kind of ‘race’, first person to finish wins. Car graphics show your progress in comparison to your competitors.
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I found this essay on the relationship between Fight Club and Calvin and Hobbes to be completely hilarious:
“Fight Club: The Return of Hobbes”.

I came across this video via a BoingBoing comment today, and like it rather a lot.
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My server went down again today. It wasn’t a serious problem, just needed a reboot. But that’s been happening more often recently. It needs an upgrade, but an upgrade is risky—and I don’t have a backup server right now.
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I went to the Shadowmoor prerelease yesterday, and quite enjoyed it. It was a lot more fun than the last prerelease for me. Partly because I went on a Saturday, and because most of the usual crew were there.
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I just read this article about women cyclists at risk in London, having come across it on a friend’s LiveJournal. The basic gist is that women are more likely to be accident victims because they’re less assertive on the road, and in particular because they don’t run reds and are thus more likely to be in the blind spot of large trucks about to turn at an intersection.
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Is the success of English as a global language going to effectively kill English as we know it? That’s one of the fates suggested by this New Scientist article. Despite recently reading a friend’s criticism of New Scientist articles, I think that this one is still interesting (even though I’m not sure the article is “science” per se, just interesting speculation).
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I did my taxes today, naturally on the last day possible. I intended to do them with the paper forms as usual, but problems with the PDF forms for the California filing pushed me, finally, to do them online.
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I discovered Ampersand over the weekend, via a link off Feministing to Alas, a Blog. It’s a political cartoon that runs quite rarely, but I like a bunch of the pieces of it. Not all of it, but enough to think it’s worth a look.

Meanwhile, still no server.

Server’s still dead, and I haven’t managed to revive it so far. I suspect that the earliest the site proper will be back up is Tuesday.