“Copypasta” is the 4chan term for chunks of text that get reposted a lot. Most of it is just useless meme detritus; fake letters from George Zimmer, stories that seem interesting at first but devolve into Fresh Prince of Bel-Air lyrics right before the good part, etc. But some of the scary/creepy ones are pretty good. Like the “Holders” series, which has been around for a long time. Obviously /x/, the Paranormal board, attracts a lot of these. Yesterday I saw one that was new to me — part of the “black eyed kids/people” series. An excerpt from the beginning:

I work at the local YMCA as a youth counselor, one night as I sat in the parking lot clearing room on the seat next to me for my friend to sit down this kid comes up to the side of the car, immediately as this kid gets near us we can tell something is wrong, my friend just hopped into the back of the car and we lock all the doors. The kid didn’t say anything, but before I realized it I had rolled down the window, when I got a closer look at the kid I was alarmed at how young he looked, I’d say about 7-10 years old.

He was your average very blonde white kid, pale skin, but he gave off a terrible aura of bad things. He told me to let him in the car, never giving a reason, I was compelled by some force to open the door, but my friend kept telling me “there’s no more room” The kid began to repeat this phrase back, sounding very angry. “NO MORE ROOM, NO MORE ROOM” at this point he and I made eye contact, I saw that his eyes were fully black, no whites to them at all. He grabbed my arm through the window, and dug his fingernails into my forearm, his skin was cold. I shoved him from the window and shouted “THERE’S NO MORE ROOM” and slammed my foot on the accelerator. We drove over the curb and flattened a bush before leaving the parking lot, as we sped towards my friend’s house we saw this kid twice, once at a fruit stand, and again at a red light. We sat in my friend’s garage for about an hour before getting the courage to go inside; we immediately set about locking all the doors in the house and closing all the windows.

You can read the whole thing, and the rest of the series, here.

I’ve been doing a lot of SketchUp modeling lately. Right now I’m working on spaceship with tethered multi-level spin-grav pods. I was just about to figure out the necessary RPMs and difference in gravity between the first and second floors when I realized I was coming up on the IMBC deadline awfully fast. I had bookmarked a page (I thought) that had really great spin-gravity equations on it, but I can’t seem to find it ATM. This page of formulas is pretty good, but the stuff it says about RPM tolerance is a lot different from what I read on the other one (it said most people could tolerate 6 RPM with about 50% getting nauseous at 9 RPM, IIRC). Have to research that a little more.

[Edit: Found it!]

The Hairspray movie is debuting here tomorrow. I’m sure it’ll be a huge abomination compared to the Broadway show, but I’m going to see it anyway. I can’t even begin to tell you how terrible the casting choices seem to me… I can get behind Christopher Walken and Queen Latifah, but I’m sure the rest will be vastly inferior to the cast the actual musical had in February.

So I forgot to mention I finished Hyperion a few days ago. The ending is kind of a letdown. Ever read Rendezvous with Rama? It’s like that. Plus the last story, the Consul’s tale (“Remembering Siri”), is easily the weakest of the six. I’ll definitely read the sequel, if only to find out what happened with the Templar (Het Masteen)… But that’ll have to wait until after I finish Charles Stross’s Accelerando.

Lots of thunder here tonight. Must’ve been a nearby lightning strike a little while ago too since the lights all flickered in a weird way.

Brett dared me to mention state Senator Rodney Tom in tonight’s post. So nyah. I guess the coming race between him and Dave Reichert is going to be something special. I like Reichert, mostly because he so thoroughly trounced the incompetent Darcy Burner in a debate on Upfront with Robert Mak last year. Actually, I don’t care for either’s issue positions, but at least Reichert is experienced and well-spoken. I’ll take wrong and eloquent over wrong and clueless any day.

Have you seen this Real Lives sim? It’s kind of popular on 4chan ATM. Basically it lets you live out an entire life as a random person from a random country. You make decisions about investing, education, career, marriage, etc. Along the way it gives you facts about your assumed homeland. It’s very simplistic, but oddly enjoyable the first several plays. I’ve been running simulations in it to see if I can amass a million bucks USD. I got pretty close with one guy ($699K), but died of a freak stroke at 56.

Here are a couple of our dinners from the past few days. The steak and orzo with broccoli was last night’s. Orzo’s pretty neat, BTW. This was the first time I’d used it (excluding experiences with Rice-A-Roni). I prepared it like a risotto; came out pretty good.

Edit: Holy cow, I cut this one close. Apparently my web server’s clock is 3 minutes faster than my computer’s. Yikes.

If you read Slashdot or Engadget, you’ve probably heard about the Amazon Unbox/TiVo deal. I tried it out yesterday, linking my Amazon.com account to my TiVo account entirely via the DVR interface. It’s a real pain to enter the passwords with a regular remote (directional buttons to select characters, guh) but at least you only have to do it once. (I wonder if the next TiVo series will have “point and click IR” like the Wii does.) Once that’s done, you can rent/buy Unbox media just by entering a five-digit PIN.

I remember there being a lot of contemptuous whining on Slashdot when this service was announced back in February. A lot of people seemed to think the prices would be so ridiculously high that no one would use the service. “1-day movie rentals will cost $15! This is Nazism!” They cried. But yesterday I rented Music and Lyrics for 99¢. The download was pretty quick (accessible within 15 minutes) and I can now view the movie any time in the next thirty days, even if I disconnect the TiVo from our home network. Here’s where some misconceptions arose about users having access to the movie for only one day: Once you begin playing the movie it starts a timer to delete the file in 24 hours. You can watch it however many times you like within that 24-hour period.

You can also buy movies and TV shows with TiVo/Unbox. This sounds kind of lame at first, since you can’t transfer these from your TiVo (not legitly, anyway), but the cool thing about it is that you’re not really buying that specific file — you’re buying the ability to download that media. So you can buy an episode of Stargate SG-1 on your TiVo, watch it, delete it, and then a year later re-download it on your computer. The Unbox service has some annoying “only store on two devices at once” DRM stuff, but the idea of free, eternal, offsite storage for your purchased media is pretty boss. I could imagine trading in all my DVDs for digital versions like that years from now when this sort of thing’s been perfected.

Of course, for now I’m still wary of non-TiVo Unbox. When I tried it in ’06, the software stopped working after its first use on my PC and wouldn’t uninstall (or update/repair), though I was still able to watch the downloaded WMVs. (This was back when Amazon was giving away TV episode downloads with regular purchases.) But if they could work the kinks out and expand their selection, I might get into it. The same model has worked amazingly well with MTGO.

(Hm, yet another single-topic post. I think I might do more of these.)

(Today’s post is about moral philosophy and Star Trek. You might want to skip it if you think that sounds boring.)

Star Trek has some really screwed up ethics in it. Especially Voyager and Enterprise. On Voyager, for example, Janeway frequently risks the lives of the entire crew to save a single person. “All for one” is a noble principle, but it implies some kind of consensus on the part of the “all.” And that’s not what Janeway does — when she decides to put every person on her ship in danger to help one or two people, she doesn’t ask the crew if that’s okay with them. She just does it and arrogantly assumes everyone else will agree that her decision was the most righteous one possible.

Consider the episode “Fury“; because of some time-travel mumbo-jumbo, Janeway knows a former crew member from the future will be boarding Voyager to kill a few security personnel and render the ship vulnerable to aliens that openly plan to kill and torture the crew. This former crew member has psychic powers that make her immune to hand-to-hand weapons and force fields; once aboard Voyager, Janeway would have no way to physically stop her. Here’s the ridiculous part: The captain has an opportunity to blow up the traitorous individual’s shuttle before she can get near the ship. Instead of doing so, she lets the amazingly dangerous half-crazy super-powered woman come aboard and then tries to talk her out of killing everyone. How is that in any way rational? It boggles the mind to think that anyone would actually equate a 60/40 shot at saving one elderly person with the lives of over a hundred men and women.

But that kind of senselessness is nothing compared to the episode of Enterprise I saw today: “Dear Doctor.” Basically, there’s this less-advanced alien world with two species of intelligent humanoids on it. One species, called Valakians, has some kind of genetic problem that will render them extinct in two generations. It causes pain and crippling in about one-third of their population (which is fifty million). The doctor on Enterprise develops a cure, but he and captain Archer decide not to give the information to the Valakians because doing so would interfere with nature, which might have “wanted” that species to become extinct. But just to show they weren’t total monsters, the Enterprise crew left the Valakians with a medication that would delay the appearance of symptoms for a while and reduce pain.

I can understand some of the logic behind the Prime Directive; you don’t want to give potentially dangerous technologies to people that aren’t mature enough to use them responsibly. Same reason you don’t hand a loaded pistol to a five year-old. I get that. But what’s the downside of saving lives when it costs you nothing? How can abiding by nature’s will (i.e. “what would have happened if we hadn’t interfered”) be considered a good basis for a system of ethics?

Got all my eBay stuff shipped off except for the Super Paper Mario game… The winning bidder hasn’t paid yet. Gah, next time I set up auctions I’m going to specify that I’ll only sell to people with feedback scores of ten or greater. Oh well, if he/she still hasn’t paid by the 20th I can report him. I think eBay will refund my listing fee after that, right?

I made chocolate rice pudding last night. I’d have preferred the regular variety with raisins in it, but lacking said fruits I decided to throw in a packet of Swiss Miss. Anyway, it was the perfect way to use up some ingredients I’d been wanting to get rid of. (Namely some milk set to expire in a few days and a ziploc bag of steamed rice I’d been keeping in the freezer for over a month.) Tasted pretty good. Especially with a bit of ReddiWip on top.

Hyperion is getting really good. I was sure I’d hate the detective’s tale (“The Long Good-Bye”), but it turned out to be the most informative of the bunch so far. Finally, some explanation about the TechnoCore! The stuff (shamelessly) lifted from Neuromancer was more than a little cliché, but that only accounted for a few pages of the eighty-five comprising that section.

I learned today that there are actually four more books in the series — a further 2,176 pages. That’s a little daunting. Prior to this revelation, I thought all the mysteries would be wrapped up in The Fall of Hyperion, the sequel to my current volume. I like the setting and I’ve gotten accustomed to Simmons’s style, but I don’t know if I want to make that kind of commitment. These things should come with a warning — “Part 1 of 5 of a ginormous saga.”

Okay, GTG. (I shouldn’t have started this post at 11:30 PM.)

Robert pointed out something astute in his comment on my last post:

I know you said it was good, but you failed to mention ANYTHING positive about that Harry Potter movie.

There are a few reasons for this. Firstly, it’s easier to criticize. (I keep thinking back to Anton Ego’s words at the end of Ratatouille. Insightful stuff.) Secondly, I really didn’t want to write anything yesterday so I quit shortly after hitting my three hundred words mark. (105 days and there’re still three competitors in the IMBC! Crazy.) Also, it’s a little harder to talk about these later Harry Potter movies without spoiling things. But in the end there’s really no excuse for my omission.

Okay, so: The good stuff from HPatOotP (talk about an unwieldy acronym…):

• Harry reading Snape’s mind in a fit of exasperation. (“Legilimens!“) Pretty amusing. But, most importantly, it explained a lot of why Snape acts the way he does and why he (at least superficially) dislikes Harry in particular.
• Bellatrix Lestrange. I love the newspaper photographs of Azkaban prisoners — that ridiculous, insane screaming is such a cool embellishment for the setting. Bellatrix’s over-the-top crazy/evilness was funny and weird without detracting from the action. Plus that actress has such an interesting face. You know she played Ari in the 2001 Planet of the Apes movie?
• Dumbledore’s defense of Harry at the Ministry of Magic hearing. The subtle machinations of the council to exclude Dumbledore, and his clever anticipation/circumvention of said trickery, was delicious. Plus I’m a big fan of courtroom dramas. This is my fantasy: Law & Order: Wizard’s Council — a resurrection of Trial By Jury, but set in the Harry Potter universe. Sam Waterston and Bebe Neuwirth playing the ADAs (or magical equivalent). Come on, you know you’d watch that.
• Umbridge getting dragged away by angry centaurs. Doesn’t everyone love seeing villains get their comeuppance?

Those’re the highlights. There was the usual CG eyecandy as well… I didn’t care for Hagrid’s giant brother much as a character, but the animation was nifty. And as much as I normally dislike ground combat in movies, the one towards the end with Voldemort and his Death Eaters was pretty cool.

I watched What a Way to Go! (1964) last night. Rat Pack movies aren’t usually my thing, but this one was a lot of fun. Shirley MacLaine, Dick Van Dyke, Gene Kelly, Dean Martin… classic stuff.

I’m about two-thirds through Hyperion ATM. Simmons must be a real dyed-in-the-wool literary type — there are a lot of (often obscure) references to Beowulf and the stories-within-a-story framing and travel themes seem very reminiscent of Heart of Darkness. There’s probably some heavy symbolism with the character archetypes too: The priest, the scholar, the soldier, the poet, the detective, and the diplomat. Where have I seen that combination before?