New Text For People

Whoo! I just got back from a huge, loud rubberband fight in Hoerner, the quiet dorm. One of the students there opened up a bag of assorted rubberbands and just started shooting them, apparently. More people joined in, and I showed up just as it was getting really crazy. ^^ I am quite tired.  (Also note the posting time :P)

Unrelated: I'm starting to worry about my math class, apparently the professor expected tables of embedding functions for our answers, rather than than a brief statement of how they work, like the question asked... (Its like middle school all over again! No!!!! >.<) He also didn't mention anything about tables in class, perhaps he assumes we're just too dumb to think without them? I know I personally don't think in terms of tables until I'm desperate, which is exceedingly rare, so this requirement seems more like a joke than anything. Anyway, if I fail that class its because I refuse to comply with asinine answer formats, rather than a lack of understanding.

Final note: Philosophy has gotten really interesting! Finally. I think I understand Plato's concept of ideal forms a lot better now, and Kevin (the professor, at Quaker schools you refer to everyone by first name...) has directed me towards some texts by Hegel that apparently match the way I think reasonably closely. Fun! ^^

Also, send me email! You have the address... ( I know my audience. ^^)

Settled In

I apologize for the delays in updating this, my life has been somewhat busy. Anyway, fun things:

My mattress pad thing we got at Target has completely and irrevocably flattened out. This is exactly the reason I objected to it originally, in addition to the fact that it bunches up.

I have discovered I would be a good fascist. Vote for me!

Earlham is actually very close to a Purina plant, and so the entire campus frequently smells like dog food. >.< (Its apparently the Purina plant that makes the bizzare feeds, so technically it smells like Purina Monkey Chow, which has an identical smell.)

I have not deposited any money into my checking account for Earlham yet. The bank closes too early for it to be convenient.

I have gotten somewhat good at racquetball.

I miss the doggies... and Christen's dogs too...mainly Giles.

Speaking of Giles, I have started watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I've started to like it quite a bit. Kudos to Landon for discovering it before I did.

I have done laundry.

I have started obsessively brushing my teeth. Not sure why, might herald fun OCD times ahead.

Almost everyone xcept me has gotten sick. I'm next... :O

I have purchased one of those rings that consist of three linked rings that you can roll up and down your finger. It is the Ultimate ADD toy.

I have become a complete social butterfly. It is quite funny.

My math prof. has failed to understand Godel's Incompleteness Theorem several times in class now, and has asserted several times that no axiomatic ssystem is complete. This is incredibly funny to me, and any of the Mathcounts homeschoolers who happen to find this blog.

That seems enough for now.

Earlham so far...

Yay! I finally flock set up, and can use it to write about stuff normally. I haven't updated my blog since Westlake apparently, so a summary: summer was good.

Anyway, I have safely arrived at Earlham, and am taking Discreet Mathmatics, Acting 1, Beginning Racquetball (sp?), Philosophical Analysis, and Dreams and Delusions, which is apparently a German Lit. course. Fun fun. A full course load, but I get out around noon. And I get more vacation time than I did in high school, which rocks quite hard.

My roommate is v. cool, he aparently actually is a Quaker, which is fun. He also is really good with computers, although in somewhat different areas that me.

I have gotten to know a huge group of people, I think I actually might know more than any other freshman on campus, my rival being Molly, who lives down the hall.

I havn't really gotten homesick yet, and for those who are betting on it, I havn't unpacked my stuff yet.

Thats all I'm going to write for now b\c I am getting really hungry and need to get food, special greetings to Christen and Emory, and to Emory I also say "HA HA HA HA HA HA! I have less school and better classes than you! AND I DON'T HAVE TO GO TO THEM IF I DON'T WANT TO!"

To Mom and Dad, I do go, no worries. ^^

Oh, Its Been Far Too Long!

!!!!!! Far too long since I've last written. i've obviously gotten back from Indiana, more than that, I've also managed to get rejected from Reed and will be going there next year. I've also finished my BCIS stuff, and now must take the finals, and pass school for a couple more weeks, and then Im DONE! ^^ Cheerful as always.

Todays thinking is not about Quake, because I say so, but rather about Corintians 1, Chapter 13. Its the one that has "And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love." in it. Slightly different than Quake, eh? I'm considering adopting this text as one of the fundamental texts of my religion, ZetaChristianism, because it reveals a lot about how the world works. This is just a rough sketch of all the things I think about this passage, I am planning to write an essay or something about it later.

Anyway, first part, verses 1-3 (I'm getting these from here, by the way):

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.

I see this passage as being the definative valuation of a human being. If a human being cannot love another, then they may be considered lessened in value. Hence, the racists and homophobes and bigots are among the lowest in the eyes of God, for they hate millions or billions of people, by default. Note: in this passage even if the person posesses strong faith, but does not have love, they are nothing. This is important, as it establishes the grounds for the recognition of hypocracy.

Next,

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.

Love is established as being all manner of good things, the most important one that catches my attentention is "Love is not evil but rejoices with the truth." First off, 'evil' is opposed to 'truth' rather than something like 'good'. This fascinates me for reasons I do not understand. That love does not delight in evil establishes a method of acting that will avoid evil and tend resove into good- feel love and joy and it will flow naturally from you. I must stop here as my post is getting too long, I may continue later. Or not, depending what I am thinking about. ^^

"Tut, Tut, It looks like rain..." -Milne

&-(x)

How to solve a problem like Maria

Recently, my middle brother seems to have taking a liking to the game of Starcraft, and I have been dominating him all day. He's so funny when he's losing horribly...

Last night I was bored, so I came up with a list of about 20 or so new variants for more interesting gameplay in Quake or any other FPS that cares to implement them. I release them out into the world, with the request that if you actually do something with them, you mention me somewhere. Here are some of the more interesting ones:

TimeQuake: Players can jump a second or so back in time, with possible variants of one person can jump player positions back in time, and one can jump object positions back, or timejumping is based on powerups, or whatever. This assumes a good enough physics engine to simulate objects being flung around by natural forces, and probably a very small player limit. It would also be possible to implememt this Soul Caliber style, which would probably be the most interesting.

LavaQuake: More of a level design than a variant, a FPS taking place inside of a lava lamp, using the lava as the playing surface. It would just be cool, especially if the surface somehow reacted to your presence. This would also be fun with the next variant.

StickyQuake: Gravity is local and surface based. I.e. You can walk up walls and ceiling, and stay there. Imagine fighting in a parking garage style level with this, or a two story level with a hole, or a lava lamp, or best yet...ya know that painting by M.C. Escher?

BennyQuake: One of the weirder variants, its potential lies more in combining it with other levels. Anyway, think back on those cheesy cartoons you watched way back in the day, specifically Scooby Doo. Remember how there was always the monster chase scene where Scooby and the gang would run about through doors in a hallway running away from the monster, and they would wind up all shuffled randomly, sometimes chasing the monster or running into each other? I thought this would be entertaining to be doing this while shooting people. What makes this interesting is the sheer amount of random crap that can be introduced into a scenario this way, shopping carts full of weapons, other bots, anything.
More and odder Quake tommorow.

Have a fragment: "I made floating soap today. I think we'll make all of our stock that way." -James Gamble

")

Generalized Blog Post Format

I've completed my Biology test, and I think I did fairly well, I'm pretty sure I at least passed. Wikipedia is the best study tool ever! ^^ Now I just need to start working on my BCIS stuff, or I won't graduate! Yay! And possibly write a letter to Reed detailing my growing obsession with the college, I'm sure they'd like to hear about it. I also need to get my blog promoted somehow, it disappoints me that I have only one loyal reader. (Hi!)

I have designed a generalized format for my blog posts, which I hope to adhere to in future posts. It is as follows:
Updates to my life and Meta-comments. (Stuff I've been doing and my thoughts on it.)
Idea. (Whatever ideas I have at the moment. The actual purpose of this blog)
Fragment. (This is a part of some greater work, whether real or implied. That made sense.)
Smiley. ( :), etc. It is my closing remark.)

Any section that I don't have any material for will be left out.

Have a fragment: "Vladimir: Well? Shall we go? Estragon: Yes, lets go. They do not move." -Samuel Beckett

8]

Poof.

Returned from Indiana a while ago, but had to study for a biology test for Credit By Examination. Sorry for the lack of updates.

I recently realized that blogging my thoughts is going to be more difficult than previously imagined, because my thoughts tend to be more rapid-fire than I would like, and that doesn't transfer well to being written down.

Have a fragment: "Horrible in ways too pastel to be imagined" -Bobshush

^^

Indiana

OK, loyal reader: no updates until probably at least Wednesday, am going to go visit Earlham College in Indiana (Indiana, oh you can sail the seven seas, Indiana...), and won't be back until I'm far too sleepy to write on Tuesday. As stands now, I'm currently too sleepy to write anything good, and so I leave you with this final thought: Acccording to Wikipedia, the reason why the inner spelling of 'Wednesday' is so messed up it that is was named after Wodin, Norse god of stuff. Saturday is the only day not named after a Norse god, it is named after Saturn, a Roman god. G'night.

Today

Ah, yes, today was fun, and only partially because it marks the first day of spring break! I may have accidentally made a substitute teacher a huge fortune, oops. I was outlining a random business plan and marketing scheme for some stuff I had thought up, and he seemed like he might actually do some of it...The world is in great danger, my ideas are loose! Just to be able to demonstrate that I thought of it, I'm going to mention it here: caffinated cereal. Wouldn't that be awesome? Yeah. And it's my idea, I own it. Mmm. (C)opyright Me. It was during SAC lunch, so, um, yeah. More proof.

After school, the rest of The Hoard and I went around and did stuff. We have an after school board games group now, and thats really fun. Plus, I get to root around through my old games and play them again. Currently, we like playing Perspective, which is basically 'History: The Board Game'. Seriously, the game is just putting events on a timeline. It has no right to be as fun as it is. We played two rounds of that, and then we spent three hours trying to get organized enough to get food. We're kinda pathetic that way. We eventually wound up getting pizza at Slices & Ices, which was dirt cheap and is some of the best pizza I've ever had. Definitely eating there again. Then we just proceeded to drive around totally lost, which was entirely my fault, but fun anyway. Then we distributed individual Hoard members to their respective houses, and that was my day. More stuff actually happened, such as my car needing to be jump started and the hobo stalking us, but I don't feel like writing about them, so you don't get to hear about them. So there.

Vote for Jesus! Vote for Kinky! Vote for Frankenregan!

100 Hits!

Wahoo! We've reached the hundered hit mark! I feel special. I'm going to convientiently ignore the fact that probably about 80 of them were me.

Design of the Roman Camp

Essay Essay Revolution 2: Electric Boogaloo Madness!

Well, due to an overwhelming number of requests, we've decided to do an article dealing with the Fung-Shui of a standard Roman Camp. (We never knew we were so popular among the soldiers! Keep sending in your letters!)
For those of you who don't know or are purposefully ignorant of the things, Fung-Shui is the barbarian art of placing buildings and furniture so that positive forces are maximised. Our resident Fung-Shui expert, Mufeng, had this to say: ' What you want to do is arrange related buildings and items in such a way that positive energy flows from the entrances of the tents flows around positive chi points of inflection. This will maximise the total harmonic efficiency of the structure.'
We thought he was making stuff up too, so we fired him and analyzed it the good old fasined Roman way: Does It Work? From this point of view, it is remarkably well designed. In three of the corners, we have the troop barracks bunched together for maximum efficiency. However, in case of a sudden attack, the tents are spaced far apart enough that troops are able to file out quickly and efficiently. Immediately below the barracks are the graineries, providing an abundant supply of food for the barrack's occupants.
In the center of the fort is the command headquarters, centrally located for ease of shouting at the garrison, and making it the most defended sector of the camp. The tribune lives in the remaining corner of the camp, and the whole structure is surrounded by sturdy walls.
All in all, this structure works. It provides the maximum amount of defences for a minimum of effort and resources. The buildings inside are all positioned in a well designed vaugely circular fashon, and the structure can be emptied or closed off ao a moments notice.
Once again, our army comes through again with another well designed procedure. We give it 5\5 Decapitated Barbarians.

BTW, There is this guy in my class named Mufeng, he just sort of pisses me off on a regular basis. I felt compelled to add him in this essay.

Seige Weapons

More essay fun!

How many of you have had the problem of nosey or randomly intruding neighbors? The sort who just won't leave you alone, no matter how many restraining orders you give them? Well, these helpful ideas may help you keep them at bay, using the same weapons or troops bravely fighting in Carthage are using!
You may want to try putting one of the newest line of catupults from SeigeCo in or on your home, the Onager. Designed to destroy walls without leaving them even the slightest chance, the Onager is high class neighbor intimidation. Also available are smaller models, the Scorpion and the 'Little Rockflinga'.
However, if your neighbor happens to live in the same block of flats as you, you don't particularly want to destroy load-bearing walls by accident. Which is why you want the Ballista, a rapid-reloading crossbow-like weapon, ideal for taking out small, fleshy, moving targets!
If you have a budget, you might want to invest in a seige tower. While these can be picked up relatively cheap (<2000 drachmas) at a millitary surplus heap, these tend to be spotty and not always reliable. Its much better to have one custom built to suit your own personal needs than to get one used, and tests we have conducted here at Better Rome And Garden havbe showed up to 90% more efficient destruction with newer models. A newly built tower also has the advantage of being new, which adds to the jealosy factor for your neighbors. Using these things is pretty simple, just hide whatever othe conventional weapons under them you need and slowly drill down your neighbor's defences.
Of course, if its just their dog that bothering you, you can always just put up sharp spikes.

Our neighbors at our old house actually did the sharp spikes thing, but they hid them, so if a dog tried to enter their yard, it would impale itself. We think they were schizophrenic. (They had delusions too, but thats another post...)

The Dress of A Roman Soldier

Have to write assorted essays for Latin, The first one is the dress of a roman soldier, they are all written from the perspective of the period magazine, 'Better Rome and Garden'. Enjoy.

When you are assembling your own personal Roman Army Montage (tm), accuracy will be of paramount importance to you, so for your convinience we've provided a short primer on the traditional garb in the Roman Army.
The most common type of soldier in your Roman Army Montage (tm) will of course be the common legionary. Those little floofy hats you see your friendly neigborhood garrison wearing are called galea. For construction, we reccomend a feather glued to a small peice of foil. On the torso, you will want to put on a lorica, or breastplate as its known to our barbarian readers, on top of a simple tunic. Because you will prbably be making quite a few of these, you will want to tend towards cheap materials, get a cheap fabric for the tunic and just cut it into squares, unless you're obsessive, in which case more detailed instructions can be found in the Library of Alexandria. For the lorica, we reccomend more foil, experiment to get the cuts exactly right. Lastly, you will want to make your soldiers some tiny solea, or sandals (barbarians!). We couldn't really find a really effective metod to make these, but we came close by taking a mosaic tile, one of the square ones available in any good marketplace, and splitting them and half (Your tile merchant should be able to do this for you). Then, tie them on using some coarse string.
For accessories, you'll want to make a gladius, a pilum, scutum, and a small basket containing some grain. For the gladus, just wrap some foil on a stick, its that easy. use a similar procedure for the pilum, but remember: the pilum is designed to bend in the center after throwing, so put a slight break in the middle, and only put foil at the end. For the scutum, just fold a sheet of foil around a glass for the curvature, and attach to the hand by means of a small peice of wood through the scutum. With the basket, we can't offer much advice, but we have had some luck by making the baskets out of walnut halves. Separating them proberly is tricky though, so it's definitely a job for the slaves.
One last thing to remember: The centurion is only distinguished only by a galea perpendicular to the soldiers head. Happy crafting!

gladuis=sword, pilium=spear, scutum=shield.

If someone actually makes the diorama described and sends me a photo, I will totally send them something cool. Not sure what yet. Email stuff to bobshush2 at yahoo dot what do you really expect here? org? its dot com.

Hmm, my blogging software is starting to do some weird stuff, updates may become sharply less frequent.

The College Board

I keep getting these emails from The College Board, which is weird, because I made a point of always saying I didn't want to recieve emails from them, ever. Thats not what this post is about. This post is about their logo.

What the hell is that thing? It's kind of like an acorn, but it has a leaf? Are they trying to evoke an apple, which would make sense? If so, they have failed miserably. It's all misshapen and deformed, like some sort of weird...weird thing.

Does anyone know?

Best. Word. Ever.

Sorry about the impulsive nature of this post, but you you have to agree, the following word is the Best. Word. Ever.

Ready? Enfeeblement.

Just say it out loud. Use it in a sentence. Appreciate its glory. And have a great rest of the day, wherever you are.

( Addmendium: 'Meagre' is a spectacular word too. )

Little Hampsters, Big Adventures

Grr, turns out I had the requirements for the AAS essay completely wrong. Turns out it needs to be like twice as long, have sources, and take place in the present. So now I get to totally rewrite it. Fun fun.

In other news, I'm comparing the Hamtaro themes from various countries, just to sort of things are different. The bad news is, my country got totally shafted! The english Hamtaro theme has the worst singers, like, ever. In spanish it actually sounds quite good, the singer is female (same as in most other countries), and can sing. In french it just sounds bizzare, its basically the same song as in english, but with the way the language is accented it doesn't flow well at all. But the best theme is the Italian theme, which has appropriate synthesizer music in the background (again, the english nations got screwed on this, there are random synthesizers everywhere). Also, the theme sounds insanely catchy in Italian. Its actually so much better, I'm sonsidering downloading the Italian translations of every theme song I run across.

technorati tags: bobshush, Hamtaro, Theme songs, Italian, Bad Synthesizers

Austin American Statesman Essay

Hey, I wrote this essay for school. Just thought someone might want to see the kind of crap I crank out for class...

The prompt is how can technology help response times to natural disasters, sorry it's not spellchecked.


Its a fine and glorious day! The sun is shining, the birds are singing, and all the cats are hiding under sturdy things. With a growing sense of dread, you too begin to start looking for somewhere safe, but it's too late. The ground grumbles and swells, and buildings start to come crashing down, many narrowly missing your head. Five minutes later, you're buried under a huge pile of rubble with nothing but a cat to eat should the rescue team take too long in finding you. Now what?
Fortunately for you, this is the year 2050, and many technological advances have been made. The Virtual UN has already conviened online and voted to send more than 300 Million dollars to help rebuild, with their deliberations helped along by voice translation software developed by Google. The rescue teams are aided with handheld sonar devices designed to help scan through large quantities of dirt and find survivors. After finding them, steamshovels with shovels built out of carbon nanotube weaves help dig them out. The cats survive.
It was a fine and glorious day. Now, you have no home, and food in the nearby future seems iffy too. So now what? Not to worry, you just head down to the nearby Amphibious Emergency Provisions Vehicle, conveniently provided by the Global Buearu Of Saftey, where energy bars packed with protiens and assorted nutrients are being distributed. There you also get a small mark on the back of your hand with a sharpie, to indicate you've recieved a protien bar.
To indicate where your house was, nanoswarms are already measuring the regions of the country affected by the disaster, and are redrawing the regions where reconstruction should occur and sending back data to a central server, which in turn calculates the amount of builders plastic to produce. The plastic is then shipped out in unmanned robotic trucks to wherever construction is needed. Once there, the trucks unfold out what is basically a gigantic printer: it reads in the surveys from the nanobot swarm and lays down the plastic in corresponding layers. You just sit and watch, because the mild sedative effects of a good meal are starting to take hold.
About five hours later, your house is rebuilt and the vast majority of the debris has been cleared and carted off to be recycled. As you go back inside, you think to yourself, "Why do these things always have to happen on weekends...?"

Aargh.

I just reinstalled Windows, and am now reinstalling all of the drivers I had to go download specifically to make the POS I call my computer work, and reconfiguring all the programs I had to recognise F:\ as my windows drive. Grr. But, Flock, an experimental open source browser I have, now mysteriously works. More as I decide to arbitrarily update.

More: Opera is being buggy now, grr. I think its because of the fact that the disk it's on is fucked, in a very slow 'I'm still working' kind of way. Plus, all my sound and USB drivers are gone too now it turns out, and my cd drive is no longer working. Fun times.

More: Re-installed Opera, seems to be working, but my third monitor is not working and it seems to be a problem with the video card itself. This is a very broken computer.

technorati tags: broken, very broken, very broken computers, bobshush

House Fire

A house down the street from us caught fire tonight. I had just come home from studying Latin for 8 friggin hours straight, I hate that subject, and shortly afterwords a fire engine raced past our house. We politely ignore it for a while, and then we go outside, like any other normal family would. There is a fire engine parked down the street from us, like three house down, and a helicopter flying overhead, using the whole spotlight thing. Its focused on a house way the heck away from out neighborhood though, which was weird. So I go closer to the house, and dad says 'Don't go too close! What if they start shooting?' I ignore him while pretending not to hear well. I am trusting God that I won't get shot, while rationalizing that if I do I won't have to take my Latin final. I really hate Latin. Somewhat acquiescing to dad's demands though, I get on top of someones mailbox. (Its one of those square limesone pillars with a box built in, it was quite comfortable.) I figure if shooting starts I can duck behind it. No shooting starts, and I learn from passerbys that it was a house fire. The ground was really wet, apparntly the firemen had been testing the water pressure at our fire hydrant. (Just a sentance for those crazy into small details, yo.) So I walk down the street in the direction of the supposed fire. All of the shiny cars were represented, tons of fire engines, police cars, an abulance, and a haz-mat car. Groups of people were situated at various 'polite' intervals on the sidewalk, where you could, of course, see nothing but shiny cars. Its one of the unintended effects of the lights is that it keeps people away by providing them something to watch without coming too close to the scene of the disturbance. I ignore them.
I eventually get to the house, and can't see too far, but deem it impolite to approach further. Damn shiny lights. Eventually I decide the whole point of coming was to see something, and so I disregard my feeling of trespassing and approach to where I can see the front of the house itself, the lawn of the hose across the street. There was a nice Chinese lady who came up to me
and started talking. She had heard the sound of what sounded like someone scraping a bicycle (?) across her driveway and had come out to investigate. What she saw was the flames jumping up really high and setting one of the trees on fire. She said that the house belonged to this couple who had two daughters, and that she wasn't entirely certain what had happened, but that she thought she had seen a barbecue pit and assumed that it had set the house on fire. Apparently the fire engines had been delayed a while, becuase the nighborhood association of some nearby houses had erected a fence through the road leading to the house, and this was not marked on any city maps. We discussed the possibility of a lawsuit. So we stared at the house for a while, and then a news camera arrived, and set up in the driveway of the house across the street. We decide to see what the camera is seeing, and move into the area next to the driveway, where the Chinese woman's son is standing. He was kind of cute. The family is also huddled in the garage. I opt not to speak to them. The roof of the house has been quite burned, and the firemen had chopped bits of the edges near the buned part away to check for embers. Some guy comes up to us and says that fire extinguishers really work, and hands one to the Chinese woman. He asks if she knows if it is a single use thing, I ask for it and tell him it says that you are supposed to throw it away after usage (its meter said it was empty). He also clarifies that it was an AC unit\heater that set the house on fire, not a BBQ pit. The area around the heater was fenced in, so it was an easy mistake to make. Plus, the smell of burning house is that of barbecue, and is almost rather tasty. (Reader response: You're creepy Bobshush!) I play with the fire extinguisher for a while, and consider asking to keep it, but decide against it. It would be a cool thing to have though. I give it back to the man, who says it was the Chinese lady's, and so I give it back to her. She says thank you and goes back to her house with her son. I leave because my toes were cold.