skinnerclan.org

I wanted to take a little time this morning to archive some of the statements I’ve proposed on SoapBoxxer. I agree with nearly all of them, though there are some where I have not determined a position on. Many of these have discussions and supporting rationale for both sides of the issue. To see details on a particular statement, use SoapBoxxer’s search function to find it.

• HDTV + HTPC > Cable
  • I’ve got this sweet setup, it’s way better
• It’s okay to get fair use content from Bittorrent
  • There’s plenty of fair use content on BT, and it’s fine to use it.
• Thin client computing will become mainstream in the business arena in the next 20 years
• God is real
• To know what you ought to do and not do it is sin
  • This is strait out of scripture, of course. Ref: Jas 4:17
• Ron Paul should be president
  • I’m a big Ron Paul supporter. People think he’s crazy, but whatever. He’s one of the only people who’s willing to bring this country back to the rule of law.
• As a nation, we should not be in the business of taking over other countries and setting up puppet governments
  • A reference to Iraq. Obviously.
• If we go to war somewhere, we shouldn’t then clean up the mess we made of the place
  • Why are we there again? Didn’t we bomb them for a reason?
• There is something instead of nothing

So my pastor has spoken on the topic of Christian suicide before. I believe his position on this issue stems from his belief in the doctrine “Once Saved Always Saved” (ie you can’t lose your salvation once you’re a Christian). Anyway, I was listening to the Bible on my commute home last night and I heard something that may conflict with his espousals:

1Co 3:16-17 ESV Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you? (17) If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him. For God’s temple is holy, and you are that temple.

Hab 1:2-4 ESV O LORD, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not hear? Or cry to you “Violence!” and you will not save? (3) Why do you make me see iniquity, and why do you idly look at wrong? Destruction and violence are before me; strife and contention arise. (4) So the law is paralyzed, and justice never goes forth. For the wicked surround the righteous; so justice goes forth perverted.

Last night, I was watching this 2.5 hour long documentary on abortion called Lake of Fire. I figure it’s something I’ve been taking a stance on lately and it’s worth watching something like this. The documentary is supposed to be “even handed”, and to a certain extent it is. But they spend about half of it covering Christian and Catholic vigilantism.

Anyway, regardless of the inherent spin the documentarian put in it, those are actual incidents and rationales. I kind of felt like there was a flaw in the rationale for the vigilante, however. I mean, the argument is as follows:

1. Babies are human beings from conception
2. Human beings have a right to life
3. If I kill someone in defense of a human being, it is a justified action (defending the life of another)
4. Therefore, killing an abortionist who would kill a human baby in the womb is a justified action

So these guys go out and take a shotgun to abortion doctors.

Friday night bowling

Usually I play board games in Meriden on Fridays. This past Friday was different in that the men’s ministry at the church had a bowling night. It’s been a while since I’ve bowled, and I was looking forward to it. I bowled 170 the first game, 155 the second game, and 114 the third game. There were two other scores amongst the 16 guys who bowled 3 or 4 games that night: 175 (I think perhaps Jay got that) and Nelson’s crushing 188! The other bowlers kept on speaking about the fluid style I bowled with, occasionally saying it was very “zen” and “smooth”.

I didn’t really tank on the third game. They turned the lights off and the black lights on, and had these runway lights along the bowling lanes. So you pretty much couldn’t see the lane, but the pins were lit up in normal yellow light. With that, I decided to “unzenify” myself and just toss the ball down the lane.

Normally when I bowl, I see and feel the pins and myself in relation to them. I feel the ball. I adjust my placement until it just “feels right”, and then I slowly walk towards the throwing line. I release the ball and send it, not fast, down the lane. I am able to be fairly accurate this way: even to the point of targeting single pins leftover for the second shot.

I’ve played Santiago three times thus far.

Rules

The game is fairly simple mechanically: you have an empty tile-based board, and you bid for tiles which you must place. You have control markers on the tiles, but these markers will go away unless the tiles are adjacent to a stick, which may be placed in between the tiles on the board. The person who bid the least for choice of tile gets to decide where the stick is placed each round (and the stick must be placed). The other players offer up victory points as bribes to the person who bid the least so that their tiles don’t lose control markers at the end of the round. After 11 (or 9 in a 5 player game) rounds, the game ends and you score up.

Each tile has two attributes: the number of control markers it’s owner gets to put on it when it is placed, and the color (ie “crop”). Both of these attributes are important.

End game scoring is as follows: each orthogonally contiguous area is scored in turn. A player receives a number of victory points equal to the number of tiles in that area multiplied by the number of control markers they have in total in that area. So if I have 7 markers on an area that has 9 tiles, I get 64 victory points. If I have 4 control markers on an area that is 3 tiles large, I get 12.

There is this site called SoapBoxxer I ran across today. On the front page, I came across the following statement, which (as a user of the site) you are encourage to “Agree” or “Disagree” with.

The statement

The statement in question was this:

“It was pretty cool of the Christian god to sacrifice (unto himself) his own human incarnation in order to placate his own voracious thirst for blood.” — Logomotive (468 auth) on April 07, 2008

This is the “Have you stopped engaging in bestiality?” kind of question. Answer “Yes” and implicit in it is that you in fact did engage in bestiality at one point. Answer “No”, and you admit to it!

My response

For posterity’s sake (and because the formatting was stripped from my response on the site, making it less readable), my response is recorded here:

A very unfair way to phrase the statement. God does not have a “voracious thirst for blood”. But blood does have a place as a meaningful sacrifice, and:

Excellent weekend! I thought it was going to be dreary all weekend long, and I stayed out late on Friday playing board games with John, Melissa, and Paul. John and Paul and I played Khronos (wherein I taught them how to play by soundly winning), Mhing (which was enjoyed by all), and Santiago (which was a hit, though I got crushed!). I didn’t wake up until 9ish on Saturday, and around noon I realised that it was really nice outside, contrary to expectations.

Hiking West Peak

I’d missed out on the AT hike Kevin & co were doing (since I’ve needed to have left around 7am to make the trailhead), so I went to my trusty West Peak around 1:30. I used my small Mountainsmith lumbar pack and Go-lite jacket (which soon found itself strapped to my pack, since it was so “hot” out), and the Marmot shoes I’d picked up over winter to deal with the rain and snow.

There’s this side trail off the main trailhead (the one that branches on to the road up the mountain) that goes steep up the cliff, and that’s the one I took. After a couple of rests going up the bluff, I found myself at the pavilion. There was a turned over, full sized propane grill inside of it (sans tank). I was pretty tired, and the sun was bright and the day was pleasant, so I just laid down on the rough mulch that’s been spread in that area and took a rest.

I’m nearing the end of the second book of “A Song of Ice and Fire” by George R.R. Martin. Exactly who was behind the death of Joffrey is a little muddled. I’d like to submit for consideration that Varys and Illyrio Mopatis were the main orchestrators of his downfall.

Consider this: Petyr Baelish returns from courting Lysa Arryn after Stannis’ host is broken outside of King’s Landing. Once Sansa is put aside by Joffrey, she meets up with Ser Dontos in the godswood. It is then that he gives her the hair net of amethysts with at least one stone that is actually the crystallized “Strangler” poison. He tells her that it is “vengeance for her father”, so Dontos knows what he’s giving her, and what it is to be used for.

At this time, house Tyrell has bound itself to house Lannister. Mace has taken a seat on the Small Council. Loras is a new-made member of the Kingsguard. Margaery is betrothed to Joffrey in much the same way that Sansa was; but they have been away from King’s Landing pretty much the whole time Joffrey has been king and don’t know that he’s “a monster”.

So we know that Littlefinger had a hand in the death of Joffrey, and he claims that the Queen of Thorns (Lady Olenna, Mace’s mother) actually did the deed. We saw her mess with Sansa’s hairnet, so that makes sense.

There are some days when my tongue needs to be reined in. Today is one of those days.

Twice today I have been extravagantly sarcastic, in a flippant way. Not mean spirited, but still…

In the first instance, I’d ran across a game named “Aquaretto”. Thinking this to be a jest of some kind, I found out that it was a legitimate, soon to be released board game expansion for Zooloretto, which itself is a board game version of the card game Coloretto. I was a little incredulous, because the game was marketed both as an expansion to Zooloretto and as a standalone product. In Zooloretto, the theme is barn animals. In Aquaretto, we’re talking about dolphins. It was frankly an absurd idea to market it as an expansion thematically.

I decided to one-up them, and so I started a thread in the game’s entry on BGG entitled Dracularetto:

In the next expansion (cum standalone game), players take the role of a vampire. At night, they go and lure victims into the graveyard. They then bring the victims home into their lair. The vampires can consume as much as they like of only a few types of blood, so they must be wary. Any hot blondes they encounter they will take as dark brides!

Be on the lookout for this exciting new game from Rio Grande in October 2008!

Last year (or maybe longer?) I had a Netflix subscription. I got it because I wanted to watch Battlestar Galactica and a couple of other shows, and I don’t pay for cable, so it seemed a reasonable compromise. I dropped it when my TV watching started to peter out.

In the interim, they launched an internet based video viewing system. Essentially you could play stuff, but a limited number of hours. Something like x hours per $ you spent on the service. So if you spent $17 on the service, you’d get 17 hours of view time per month. Not bad!

Well I’m thinking to myself “I need to see this next season of Battlestar Galactica” and I figure maybe I’ll get Netflix for a while again. Then I see that their internet based video distribution is now unlimited. That’s right – a subset of their content can be viewed on demand online. And with an HTPC, this is totally sweet.

John Look and I have spoken about doing a 2p game theme night some time. I went over my games and targeted some games that excel at 2p that I think would fit the bill. The nice thing about some of these games (which I’ve marked with *) is that they’re not exclusively 2p.

Diebold Accidentally Leaks Results Of 2008 Election Early

When the Playstation 3 and XBox 360 came out, we started to have some console game systems that could hold a candle to a PC, graphically speaking. But when I’d read about the Nintendo Revolution (which was the code name for what is now known as the Wii) I was very impressed. I thought that Nintendo’s philosophy was right on the money – don’t just play a game of price and graphics oneupmanship with Sony and Microsoft, but innovate in a very radical way (the controller) while keeping the focus on the games.

The PS3 and 360 were trying to be a poor man’s computer, with games thrown in on the side. Putting Bluray on the PS3, in retrospect, was quite the coup, because for $400 you could pick up not only a capable game system, but also a Bluray disc player. But both of those systems were so very expensive, and their games so expensive, that it just didn’t make sense to me to pick them up. I mean, these console games, you play them for a little while and then you’re done. Like 20-30h of gameplay. On a computer, you can easily get 200+ with online gaming. Heck, you can get that with free games (eg Fear, AA, ET, etc).

Saturday Climbing

I went climbing on Saturday. I couldn’t hook up with my climbing partner Michael, so I went for some bouldering. It was like 5ish when I went and the place was only lightly populated. I worked a bit around in the boulder cave, then on the walls of the gym where people weren’t roped up.

They cleared away a lot of the holds in the boulder cave and it’s much nicer now. It was too chaotic before – way too many holds. It was hard to figure out where the route went, and you’d be on the wall looking for the next holds in the midst of a bunch of rudely tagged stuff. Now the wall is much more clean, and it’s easier to identify where you can “legally” use holds in a tagged climb.

So in the middle of my climbing session I tweaked my left shoulder. I was on the ceiling of the boulder cave and I went for the last hold on a new route with my left hand, and something went wrong because it just hurt and I dropped down and felt nauseous. I climbed a bit on the slab wall, giving that arm a rest, and moved it around until it felt better, and later went and completed the climb; apparently I had missed this one large red hold immediately prior to the last hold.

Anyway, on Sunday my shoulder was painful to move. I even tried putting my arm out the window driving (since it was fairly nice out) and that hurt too much to do.

I had a pretty good climbing session on Sunday. I’d given myself some rest during the week, and when I got to the gym I was met with success after success. Kind of.

There’s this one purple an orange route in the boulder cave I’ve been playing on, and I made it a hold farther this time than I had before. I’m not quite sure what I should do after that. I’m also not sure if I should have my left or right hand on the hold.

I also did this pink route in the back room on the boulder wall. No problemo.

Then I met up with Michael and we did this green and white route on the bulge wall immediately to the left of the entrance. It’s of a technical nature. Fortunately for me, I watched this girl do it earlier and pretty much used the same ideas she used. It’s quite cramped, with a couple of foot placements that you can’t see as you make them. A lot of small steps up. Very strenuous near the top.

There was also a green route (unrated) that I did for the first time as well in the back room, adjacent to the slab wall. I did both that and the pink route on that wall. I tried the black one, but my fingers weren’t up to the challenge at the time.

I did a pink route on an overhanging arête. I made it one move away from the top before I went hangdog. Once I recouped some strength, I was back in business and made it to the top.