Month: June 2014

Scorpion Chronicles 12

Tonight’s kill count: 2. You are resurgent in your numbers. Is this an attempt at a siege, or merely the result of a new generation? You have boiled forth from whatever fetid holes you have hidden yourselves away in to test yourselves against me. You have found ruin. You are unmade. I have crushed you in the most literal sense. You cannot hope for victory. You cannot even hope to be left live. There is nothing here for you, unless you are some kind of emo suicidal scorpion, in which case my home is a veritable festival of suffering. A dark carnival. In which case, step right up. I have such wonders to show you.

 

Scorpion Chronicles 11

Tonight’s kill count: 1. Did you think I had forgotten, scorpion? Did you hold the false hope my vigil had lapsed? Or were you arrogant enough to believe you could enter my lands unchecked? Yours was a fool’s errand. I greeted you with poison and stone. Your broken body was left spasming along the fence.Do you now understand the folly of your ways? There is no mercy here. This is no place for your kind. I will not bother to break your spirit. I have no illusions that you can be taught. I will give you only death. I will never stop. You have unleashed a titan. Do you feel the heat, scorpion? Do you mistake it for the lingering remains of the summer day? Simpleton. It is my wrath, and it burns brightly for you.

Anniversay Email 12

Congratulations on 8 years at <COMPANY>! That is twice the average life span of an opossum, and nearly 81x the lifespan of a honey bee! You have also provided more value to <COMPANY> than either of the above, several fold! Unless we have some secret rabies project. In that case then the opossum might win. I mean, you can’t compete with a rabid opossum in the field of rabies. The opossum is going to win on experience alone. I guess I could try contracting rabies and testing that theory out. That would be the scientific thing to do. I’ll be right back.

One last thing: You haven’t seen any rabid opossums running around, have you? Probably not. Thought I’d check. Maybe I can find some bats or something…

Ragnar Trails Endorses Racism

The following were recently shared on the Ragnar Trails Facebook page. It is a running group called Team Cannibals that wear tribal makeup and in one case full on blackface. It looks like young people, so I’m going to assume this was done out of ignorance, not malice, but the people running Ragnar’s social media presence should certainly know better. This is cultural ignorance/misappropriation at best, and worst case overt racism. Shame on the Ragnar organization. I am rethinking running their McDowell Mountain event if this is the sort of thing they not only endorse, but celebrate.

06/13/14 UPDATE: In fairness they did finally remove the video (I contacted them about it) but they did not issue an apology in any form.

ragnar 01 Ragnar 02

Anniversary Email 11

Greetings and happy anniversary, <NAME>! Your work here at <COMPANY> is highly valued, and consequently you have been selected as the lucky recipient of our MANDATORY body upgrades program, our most popular employee rewards program among those not eligible to receive it! Please select no less than THREE of the following:

  • Slinky legs
  • Randomly timed, high velocity ejection bladder
  • Reverse porcupine quills – When something touches you, you get stabbed
  • On fire hair
  • We duct tape two VERY angry wolverines to your thighs – Admittedly we got sort of lazy on this one
  • Excessive sweat glands
  • Swarovski Crystal skeleton – So we were watching the newest Indiana Jones movie and were trying to find a way to workshop something with the fridge, but then we thought “Those crystal skulls have gotta come from some place” so we decided on this.
  • Constantly bleeding eyeballs
  • Sandpaper skin – Such that you might constantly, gradually abrade everything you come in contact with. In good conscience we won’t apply it to your thighs to avoid hurting the wolverines.
  • Butter fingers – Not like you are clumsy or anything. We just replace your fingers with sticks of butter. This is not recommended for Arizona summers.

I’m sure you agree these high value body modifications will be a welcome addition to your daily life. Just think of all the things you will be able to do! Things like… uh… wait… hold on a second… Well, ok, so if you know anyone who has never seen a wolverine, you can show them TWO. That is pretty great. I’m going to just go ahead and mark you down for that one right now.

Our surgeons will be with you shortly! Please note, they don’t believe in anesthesia. Not that they have issues with it, they just don’t believe it exists. Or maybe they have never heard of it. I don’t know how they train surgeons in Tajikistan. Either way, you aren’t getting any.

Congratulations again! I am sure you are as excited as we are about these upcoming changes.

Silicon Valley and Efficient Problem Solving

This is in reference to the following clip, which is INCREDIBLY NOT SAFE FOR WORK:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zYWyXwKrHg

First, any good engineer would have determined that the sorting process alone would take more time than they have available. You would be better off using the other guys to spin up multiple instances of the same two handed process. Then you don’t have to account for hand dominance, either, you can just swap them out easily. And this is entirely ignoring blowing dudes at the same time. Just really shoddy problem analysis.

Basically, this is like trying to brute force a password. Now obviously variables like password length, mixed case, alpha numeric, special characters, etc all effect the time to crack it, but all of those are outside of your control. You could find them out, but that takes time and a different skill set. You are better served focusing on what you can control: number of threads attempting the crack and/or better hardware/faster algorithm. In this case better hardware/faster algorithm would mean hiring a professional. More threads is more people. They can realistically expect a portion of the audience to be female, and of the remaining men only a percentage will be gay or bisexual. Further, if they only need a plurality to win, they don’t have to jack off everyone, but rather a subset, controlling for those who would accept the hand job but then vote for someone else anyway. I don’t always recommend just throwing hardware at a problem, but this is one of those instances (tight time frame/brute force) where it would apply, giving you time to sit back and engineer a better solution later, once the immediate need is fulfilled.

Bioshock Infinite

I just recently finished playing the DLC for Bioshock Infinite. While I felt that the game play was much improved, particularly in Episode 2, something about it was bothering me. That something is that it makes Zero Fucking Sense.

This is going to contain HUGE GIGANTIC SPOILERS for Bioshock and Bioshock Inifinite. Maybe Bioshock 2, but I don’t know because I didn’t play that one. Anyway, you’ve been warned.

So, Bioshock Infinite ends with Booker drowning himself because it will undo all the Bookers and therefore Elizabeths in all the multiverses. It ends with them all fading away. Only not really! Booker and Elizabeth are back in Episode 1, this time in Rapture! Which takes place during a later time period, so I guess the Lutece device also does time travel? Whatever. It doesn’t matter!

We find out this is Booker/Comstock, only instead of baby finger taking Comstack this is baby decapitating Comstock and Elizabeth tracked him down to exact the most convoluted and contrived revenge I’ve ever seen. Basically if even one thing went ever so slightly wrong with her plan, Booker/Comstock would never have the realization he had. If the Big Daddy was not in that exact spot he wouldn’t get his justly earned gigantic drill bit spinal tap. It just seems like a lot of effort to drive home the fact that the guy is a dick right before he dies.

In episode 2, we come to find out she didn’t even plan all that well, because after hollowing out Booker/Comstock for use as a punch bowl, it turned on Elizabeth and killed her. That leaves sheer blind luck as the only explanation for how the events in episode 1 played out. Also, why didn’t she just escape through a tear in reality? She can do that. Also, why didn’t the Lutece twins get a taste of some drill bit action? You know what? It doesn’t matter. A different version of her comes to that same reality, and somehow ends up in the exact place Booker/Comstock died, unconscious next to his body. Only there is no lighthouse that leads directly there, so that means she entered Rapture, fought her way back down to where Booker/Comstock was, and decided to take a nap. It is there she learns that she no longer has access to all her powers because she entered a reality in which a version of her has died. What that has to do with anything I have no idea. When Comstock tried to kill the Lutece’s it simply scattered them throughout time and the multiverses, but I guess that involved one of their devices exploding.

In episode 2 a big point is made about getting the Big Daddy’s to imprint on the little sisters, only… if they were not already imprinted, why was that Big Daddy in episode 1 so hell bent on murdering Booker/Comstock when he tried to grab the little sister? She even calls it Mr. Bubbles, like the little sisters in Bioshock 1, which occurs chronologically later.

And if you can time travel, why not just go to the exact moment before Booker/Comstock loses the girl, get her yourself, then make a show about what a dick he is before shooting him in the face? It seems like a whole lot of effort for the sake of a poetic death.

In the end, the DLC attempts to tie Bioshock Infinite in with the events of Bioshock 1, therefore lessening your agency in the first game. It was all a master(?) stroke by Elizabeth and/or the Lutece twins to save one particular little sister. Nevermind the scores of others that died during the fall of Rapture. They don’t count. It also supposes you did the honorable thing with the little sisters in that game, which not everyone did.

It takes an already confusing game and adds another layer of complexity on top of the narrative, a narrative that was already straining its ability to contain itself.