Life on Mars?

Nick just revealed that one of our favorite albums from our teenage years got 75% of its appeal from emotional retardation, not the quality of the music.

And he’s right!

Late Night Computer Setup

Step One:

When doing something you really should not have agreed to do in the first place, the first step is to find music you can work with.

My choice for this is NiN’s ‘Pretty Hate Machine’.

It’s suitable. It work.

One of the signs that I was starting to listen to good music was when I was finally able to list a lot of music that was not about love.

And once again, after tragedy strikes the nation our wanna-be puppet masters rush in to try and grab a few more of our strings. Whether it’s Dr. Phil or Thompson blaming the event on video games before we even knew who the culprit was, or the gun control nuts wanting to blame the whole affair on a piece of metal instead of the person pulling the trigger.

It’s sick.

Holidays are always best when there are babies and other small children around. It just seems so much more magical when you add in their wonder about what’s going on.

The best thing I’ve come across in trying to learn Japanese is something Alex showed me, a game called Slime Forest. Essentially it plays like an old-school SNES RPG. The difference is that when you try to attack something, a katakana symbol will appear over the enemy’s head, and in order to successfully attack you must type out the sound that that symbol makes.

Deceptively simple, but pretty effective.

My birthday is coming up, which gives me a good excuse to do things with my friends!

But I don’t know what to do with this excuse. Maybe a dinner sort of thing, watch a movie? Go to Kimo’s? Applebees might be fun. Hmmm… A combination perhaps!

Help me think of something Pat.

The most depressing story I’ve read in a while.

I played with legos a lot as a kid. Me and my friends would construct entire worlds with cities, barren wastelands, fortresses, allies and enemies. It was fun. It was a world we could live the adventures of our imaginations in, a place that we felt we had a hand in creating. We could write the stories there. Makeshift lego wargames even served as my first introduction to tabletop roleplaying.

These kids are having their imaginations neutered. You can tell straight off from their idea to create ‘Lego Town’. I have never met a kid who wanted to build a city with communally owned property when given a crate full of legos. They do look for the ‘cool pieces’, but those pieces weren’t doors or windows. They were plasma guns, swords, castle walls, ion shields, drawbridges. It’s unsaid, but the ‘teachers’ here obviously didn’t allow any pieces like that. How are children going to grow up to be model World Citizens if they play with guns and swords? Legos are about building, and how can you build a society on tools of death? The teachers are terrified of kids, they’re terrified of play.

My nephews, Hans and Jaeger learned very early how to turn their hands into guns and sticks into swords.  That’s just what boys do! But Matt and Mystie took a different approach than taking a hard look at the assumptions and associations of power that the use of force implies and its application in a corrupt, oppressive capitalistic meritocracy (I think I just got sick saying that). They’re teaching their sons about the just use of force, defense and protection. They’re teaching Hans and Jaeger how to recognize and protect the good guys, to not attack the unarmed and defenseless. Hans watches out for bad guys and slays dragons with his sword. That’s education!

Still, thats the implied, unsaid of the article. Any article about kids building things with legos that doesn’t have ANY reference to swords, guns, castles, pirates, police, kings, or ninja means something weird is going on. ; ) The point of the article is essentially about how once a small group of kids started playing with the legos, they didn’t want to share with anyone else who wanted to join in.

Instead of teaching the kids about how they bought the legos for everyone, and why sharing is important, the teachers believed something far more sinister was going on. No, the children were showing their “assumptions about ownership and the social power it conveys — assumptions that mirrored those of a class-based, capitalist society — a society that we teachers believe to be unjust and oppressive.”

Children don’t want to share! Such greed could only be from over exposure to capitalism!

To summarize the rest of that imagination-neutering, navel gazing, rubbish: The teachers ban the legos and hold meetings with the children about the nature of ownership, rights, and power. They bring the legos back after groundwork is layed about how all buildings in the new lego town will be equal, none will be “Over-Average” (What kind of kid uses the word over-average? That HAS to be made up.), all buildings will be public, and lego people can only be saved by groups, not individuals.

The kids never learned about how to share. They got a lesson about how everything, if not equal will be made equal.

Why isn’t there a rapper named M.C. Escher?

A good white russian tastes just like chocolate milk. :]