Beatles Not On Rock Band

The Beatles are going to make their own game instead of joining up with Rock Band or Guitar Hero. Who made this disastrous decision? Since Ringo Starr is incapable of making a mistake, I can only assume that this is Paul McCartney's doing.

Pleas From a Data Entrant

As someone who professionally enters data, I send this plea to the rest of the world: Please do your end of the job. When you fill out a form, keep in mind this simple rule: someone else is going to have to deal with the stuff you write, no matter how badly you write it.

In particular, try to avoid indicating that a field is blank by filling it with a vertical line. In our culture, that line has another meaning.

Permanent Majority

Isn't it funny that within 8 years of the establishment of the "Permanent Republican Majority", we're seeing the largest growth of the Democratic Party since FDR? It turns out that when a party has everything, they completely blow it. Odds are extremely good that we'll see a filibuster proof majority in the Senate, and a comfortably sized lead in the House.

NPC: The Game

Here is my gift to the world: an idea. NPC: The Game, stars you, but as an NPC, who has to walk around and say the same thing over and over again. You also jump out around corners, only to be cut down by much more powerful player character. You get sick of this kind of treatment, and decide to do your best to make the PC's life a living hell. The drive of the game would be parody of the major genres.

World Of Goo

As you probably know, World of Goo is out, and the demo is free on Steam. I'd highly advise at least trying the demo; it's a lot of fun by itself. I'm on the fence about buying it.

TF2 Hiatus

Valve has announced that they're not releasing any new TF2 content until the next year. That sucks. I was a little impatient with their roughly bimonthly release schedule, but I could handle it. I'm not sure I can be so blasè about not getting my spy update for more than three months.

Napoleon And Alexander: Foe-Yay

The French had beaten the Russian Army. All that remained was a treaty. For the discussion, the Tsar Alexander and the Emperor Napoleon created a building on a raft floating between the two armies. Both Emperors set out to the raft simultaneously, but Napoleon had naval rowers hurry him across to arrive first. He quickly moved across the hut, and opened Alexander's door as he arrived at the raft.

As the Tsar entered the building, he said to Napoleon, "I hate the British as much as you do." and Napoleon responded, "then we already have peace." Smiling, Alexander said, "then what shall we do for the next fifteen minutes?" Returning the grin, Napoleon simply replied, "I think I have an idea." as he closed the door behind them.

Three minutes later, a more rumpled but still grinning Napoleon emerged from the raft, and called for the treaty negotiators and a physician.

Napoleon

I've been listening to a Napoleon Podcast, distributed by The Podcast Network, Australia's first podcasting company. Anyway, Napoleon is a pretty amazing guy. Few to no people have been so successful in war for so long. Depending on how you count it, Napoleon was batting over .950 for about 20 years.

He is possibly the only person in history to be the recipient of a declaration of war. That is to say, an alliance of nations declared war against a single person. Not the country he ruled, but a war against a single man.

When he suffered his first exile, he returned from Elba and retook France in less than two months, and all without firing a shot. This might also be an event that has never occurred before or since.

If you guys are lucky, I might write some moderately erotic fanfiction featuring him and the Tsar Alexander.

Haircut

Today is a day that will be spoken of in legend. For today, I am having a haircut. A haircut not administered by myself.

Economy Freeze

You want to know the problem with the economy? It's complicated, but here's the basic deal: companies aren't willing to loan out money to other companies because they might have such severe secret debt that the creditor might not get paid back, since the creditee might go bankrupt before they paid the debt back. This is what happened when Lehman Brothers went out of business.

This problem is particularly exacerbated by the fact that in the past few years, companies have been selling insurance against another company going out of business. It was seen as such a safe bet, that everyone did it, and people that were holding insurance would sell a slightly pricier policy to another company, thereby making "free money". The problem is, if any company on the chain of insurance become unable to pay through going out of business, the entire thing goes down. If the entire market went into free fall, these bits of insurance would explode and kill most anything involved in them.

What the government needs to do is what it did in the Great Depression. It needs to go into companies' internal affairs and certify them as being sound. Once the fit businesses are publicly declared as such, it will eliminate much of the fear preventing day to day lending.

The Bush Administration will not do this, however, because it is against regulation or Government interference. This could lead to a global economic collapse. It doesn't matter how much money the Government pumps into the economy, companies will not be willing to loan to each other so long as they don't know who's standing on the brink of a precipice.

Japanese Space Elevator

Apparently about a month ago, Japan announced that they'll make a space elevator for 10 billion dollars. If it's actually possible to do it that cheaply, or even if it cost 100 billion dollars, then every country in the world that can scrounge up that much money should get on it today. It cuts the price of putting something in space a hundred fold.

If Japan (or any country) has a space elevator, and no other country does, then there will be no "American" or "Russian" space program. There will be no national program but the one that has the space elevator. If you could do a project for 1% of its original cost, it makes any inconvenience worth it. A space elevator makes getting into space so cheap, that you could go for your vacation.

It's too bad that the American government has no sense of vision, has no direction, and has absolutely no sense of priorities, since I guarantee that building a space elevator of our own would give innumerable benefits, and we're going to be late to the party, because we're focusing on stupid things of the moment.

You Lose

So, the bill passed, and everyone in America lost. I won't blog about it anymore, I swear.