I need Peter the Great

For the first time in my life, I'm suffering from a toothache. I can see what all the fuss is about now. I have to say, it's pretty irritating.

PS. I'm over it now.

Photos, No Contest

Although I had a photo for the subject of games, no one else sent me one, so there will be no contest today. Instead, I'll just put up some pictures that I've taken lately.

Major History

When I tell people that I'm a history major, the most common follow-up is, "and what do you plan to do with that?"

All people with a good knowledge of history have two options:

1. Create a crazy theory where the "progress of human history" will lead to some sort of utopia (or more rarely, a dystopia).

2. Look with a melancholy resignation on world events. (History people know what I'm talking about.)

I'm probably going to stick with option 2. Although our technology may have improved, our society has only "improved" past the Ancient Romans in a few areas, and has actually regressed in others. Unless some mutation in the human strain causes a real change in the course of events, we'll be no better in another 2,000 years.

PS.
The problem with the possibility of a "new" human arising from the current breed is that the current breed is optimized for one function: preventing the growth of things different from it.

Illness in the Family

I am sick. Take pity on me, people of the world.

Photo Contest: Wheels

Well, I've been a slacker lately and I don't have a photo for this week's photo contest. Someone else did, so I thought I'd put it up even though he has no competition.

This week's subject was Wheels. Next Week's subject is Games. If I don't have a picture for that, you'll know that I'm done.

Ratatouille

I just saw Ratatouille. Excellent. The thing with Pixar is that they produce a product that excels in all it's various parts. They are never satisfied with doing an acceptable job, they do an exceptional job. In everything. The writing, voice acting, and music are all excellent, but I think the graphics stole the show. Never have I seen graphics that good before.

I shouldn't say graphics, because that implies that it's simply a matter of rendering power. The images of Ratatouille are art. I believe you could take a random frame from a pixar movie and odds would be good that it would be impressive by itself.

The short before the movie proper was also very good.

Ratatouille gets 1 out of a possible 5 Ron Perlmans. Congratulations!

1/5

Oblivion

I've been playing Oblivion for the XBOX 360, and I think it's pretty good. It has its host of little glitches, but it saves often enough that it's always possible to just go back.

My favorite personal glitch: fleeing from an enemy in the sewers, I jumped away, only to fall through the floor and into the water below. The walls of the sewer were solid from the outside, but were only visible from the inside. I could see into the rooms, but I was trapped outside. Fortunately, the game doesn't check whether there's a wall between you and a door, or I never would have escaped.

In the capitol city, there's an officious guardsman who wants to destroy the thieves' guild (of which I am a member). I saw him walking along the road, snuck over to him, and picked his pocket. Now I have the police chief's key to the city. Stuff like that is what makes the game worthwhile.

Internet's back, thank god

There was a rough patch recently where there wasn't any internet at my place. Blaming a person who I don't like and who has sole access to the hardware responsible for the problem would be petty, so I'm not going to. I'm just reveling in the recovered internet.

You may have noticed that there hasn't been a photo contest for two weeks now. It seems that the contest may be dead. We'll see by next monday.

Cavemen Don't Exist

Some people say that modern television is bad. I think this is terribly inaccurate. In fact, modern television is unacceptably poor. The fact that someone is turning a commercial which mentions cavemen into a program is the latest symptom of the disease that is modern television.

Anyway, the program seems to think that cavemen are a separate race from us human beings. They are not. In fact, the "cavemen" of this program seem to lack the defining characteristic of cavemen. They do not live in a cave. The writers are probably thinking of Neanderthals, who have two advantages in my mind:

1) Neanderthals are a separate race from us.
2) Neanderthals are real.

See, cavemen are not real in the generally accepted sense of the term. At no point in human history were humans limited to living in caves. Caves have always been a shelter for man, and they remain so today, but never has man been limited to living in caves alone.

So why do we think of cavemen as being a class of historical persons? Because artifacts are perfectly undisturbed in caves. A group of prehistorical men could camp in a cave for a week and we could find that camp today, relatively undisturbed. When prehistoric man left a camp next to a stream, it would quickly be destroyed by wind and water erosion (and a variety of other factors). Since the proof of cave life was so much more preserved, it may have seemed that early man lived there exclusively.

Anyway, I already saw Cavemen when it was called 3rd Rock From the Sun.

"Look! We're from outside your culture, so we're doing something that someone in your culture wouldn't do!"

(laugh track brays)