Stretched out ahead of her, the land was red and orange, scattered with yellow grass and rocks. Hard country, hot and dusty and lean, but she had plenty of water.

She didn’t look behind her. She knew what was back there.
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As I sit on my throne, I think of my Queen. My ex-Queen, now gone, gone but alive but not forgotten.

I think of my Queen.
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“You need us,” said the djinn, “To realize the world you want.”
“But what’s in it for you?”
“The fulfillment of our function. We exist to serve.”
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I noticed the link to A Softer World on xkcd (which I’ve been reading for a while) today. And got hooked quite quickly. I love the humor, and I love the gut punches it delivers as well. This post is to tell you to read it (and xkcd, if you don’t already).
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I am completely disgusted by the outcome of the “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” case. It doesn’t seem that surprising, but the expansion of powers of school administrations is simply awful.
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I was reminded of this today. It’s something of a nostalgia trip, having been online for years, but it’s definitely worth reading if you haven’t come across it before—and re-reading if you have: The Evil Overlord List.
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I’ve been reading danah boyd‘s work about online public spaces for a few years, and recommend her writing generally. Today I read one of her essays on how class divisions are being reflected online, specifically in the makeup of social networking sites.
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I’ve been watching the third season of Deadwood, and it’s amazing.
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After not playing computer games for quite some time, I’ve gotten sucked into some quite addictive Flash games. I mentioned Desktop Tower Defense last week, and I’ve played that quite a bit while failing to quite get past the Hard level. THere’s a new version, 1.5, out today, which introduces some new things, like towers that don’t do anything except boost the damage of towers around them.

I tend to lose interest in games like these relatively quickly (in contrast with, say, MTG, which has held my interest for more than a decade), but at the start they grip me quite strongly. As proven again today by Bloxorz.
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I just read an article about the ACLU’s plans to give out video cameras to local residents in St. Louis for the purpose of videotaping the police, and I also read the Fark thread on it. I’m rather disturbed by the number of people in that thread who exhibit such hostility towards the idea that the police should be monitored in such a fashion.
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I love table tennis. It’s a fantastic game, and one that I’ve loved for years. I played it a fair amount in college, which is when I became good enough at it to really enjoy it. Since then I’ve played it very little, but Metaweb has a table, and that’s reminded me how great it is.
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Which is a shame, because I rather like the stuff. Am probably mildly addicted to it, in fact. But this post makes me aware of a bunch of thinsg I’ve been ignoring about it—primarily the true nature of “crystalline fructose”.
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Yesterday’s New York Times Magazine has a good article on what being a gold farmer in World of Warcraft is like. I read the author(Julian Dibbell)’s book on the topic of MMORPG economies, Play Money, last year and liked it. Reading the book, or the article, or Edward Castronova’s piece on Everquest currency years ago, all bring forth a similar feeling: disjointed vertigo.
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I haven’t been playing any computer games recently apart from doing the Daily Set Puzzle and playing DDR. Some games have sounded interesting in the abstract, but nothing really grabbed me. This afternoon I came across Desktop Tower Defense, a Flash strategy game, and that was more or less the end of my afternoon…
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I’m currently reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness, which is excellent, and which I’ll probably write more posts about once I’ve finished it. Right now, I find quite striking his approach to overcoming human irrationality: he assumes that overcoming it is near-impossible and so seeks instead to avoid triggering it.

For example, he writes about how status is extremely relative, such that a family with an income of about $500K/year who live on Park Avenue feel like complete losers because they associate with much wealthier people. He then notes that they could try to rationally overcome their feelings of status anxiety (by comparing themselves to the larger population), but that this is unlikely to be effective, and his suggestion is to move to a poorer neighborhood and associate with poorer people. The irrational status comparisons will continue, but now they’ll be more favorable.
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At the Gas and Oil Exposition in Calgary, representatives of the US-based National Petroleum Council and ExxonMobil gave a presentation on how to make gasoline from human remains, projected to be much easier to acquire as climate change kills an increasing number of people.

This turned out to be a hoax perpetrated by The Yes Men, who do specialize in this kind of thing.
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The Irish Green party have gone into coalition with Fianna Fáil—and with the remnantds of the Progressive Democrats, and a few Independents. I have to say that this appears to be a triumph for FF, who have managed to secure a substantial majority in a situation where they’re not reliant on any one of the three smaller groups.
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I recently watched the first season of HBO’s Rome. Like most of the series that HBO produces, the quality of the production is extremely high, including the acting, directing, and writing.
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I found both the French Open finals this year somewhat disappointing. Henin’s win was clearly deserved, but Ivanovic could definitely have played better. As for the highly-anticipated Federer-Nadal final, I thought it was quite a letdown.
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After some IM discussion about the tendency that humans have to over- or underestimate risks (a topic that I’ll probably post about fairly soon) and about how our belief structures will tend to alter our risk and probability projections (a topic I touch on frequently) my friend Brian passed along links to some Derren Brown videos. Derren Brown is a kind of “magician”/con artist/hypnotist. I’d never heard of him before, but watching his videos has made me reconsider quite a bit about human nature.
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“Airport security” is getting more and more ridiculous. It was already quite ridiculous, but the reactive nature of it, so apparent over the last couple of years, makes it more so. Some guy tried to use “shoe bombs”, so now everyone has to take their shoes off. There was an alleged plot involving liquids, so now they’ve banned liquids from planes (despite the fact that such a plot was foiled in the 90s, too, and wasn’t exactly a new attack vector).
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I loved Guns, Germs, and Steel, which I consider an extremely important book for understanding how the world came to be the way it is. Collapse is more important for understanding where we may be going.
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When I moved to Ireland as a kid, I really didn’t like learning the Irish language. It was difficult and awkward, and on top of that was bound up with a number of other problems.
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