Category: General

Abstract Appeal, a blog run by a Florida lawyer, has a summary of the Terri Schiavo case. He includes a painfully stark summary of her medical condition, and links to various rulings in the case.

I could get all political, but you know whether or not you think the federal government should be deciding if a woman with no cerebral cortex should live or die. Either way, it’s sad that she’s being used as a political pawn.

I report, fanboys and fangirls decide. Hey, this is the second in quick succession after Brad and Jennifer — does that mean there’s a third to come?

As they may have told you, it is snowing pretty hard in Boston. Out of boredom, I went ahead and set up my web cam to look down on my parking lot. Pictures follow. The first one is current; the following ones go back 15 minutes per picture. If you’ve been watching as much Japanese horror as I have lately, you can join me in studying the images for signs of long-haired girls returning from beyond the grave.

Beyond the cut, the curious will discover a map for the interactive fiction game The Awakening. The map contains spoilers for the puzzles, but not for the story.

I found the game to be a moderately effective (if short) piece of horror. There’s essentially one big reveal, and during the course of the game you get closer and closer to it. The scale of the horror remains constant. You’re not constantly discovering that things are worse than you’d imagined; rather, you’re discovering the ways in which they are bad. Which is OK, but it’s no Anchorhead.

While it’s based on a Lovecraft story, it’s not really all that Lovecraftian. But it is creepy.

How to help tsunami victims. For general news (and more relief links), try Wikipedia.

The University of California system has put around 1,400 academic books online; several hundred of them are available to the public. Chuck Jones, Mexican counter-culture in the 60s, 17th century French pamphlets, a pirate atlas, an 18th century Indian travel narrative, MacArthur in Japan, phew. Sorry, that got a little heady there.

Some of the links are meaningful, some are tongue in cheek, and some are reaches. It’s my favorite Christmas song. Merry Christmas, y’all.

It was Christmas Eve, babe
In the drunk tank
An old man said to me, won’t see another one
And then he sang a song
The Rare Old Mountain Dew
And I turned my face away
And dreamed about you

I could have been someone
So could anyone
You took my dreams
From me when I first found you
I kept them with me babe
I put them with my own
Can’t make it all alone
I’ve built my dreams around you

“What is there to do on a Friday night in LA?”

Go to a trendy Thai restaurant somewhere in West Hollywood. Flirt with the waitress, who turns out to be the lead in a new indie film directed by some guy who was discovered three months ago by Stephen Soderberg; she’s waiting to get experience so she can get further into the character. She invites you to an after-hours party thrown by Parker Posey. You get there, with her, but it turns out that Parker Posey lost all her indie cred when she appeared in Blade: Trinity so you and the waitress and a guy you meet at the party who plays bass for the best post-punk melodothrash band in Serbia all take off together in his original VW Beetle and wind up at a permanent floating poker game slash rave run by Wil Wheaton down in Venice Beach. He really digs finding out what you do and you and the waitress and the bass player and a hitchhiking chick who you picked up and who turns out to be an activist poet from Venezula on a speaking tour to raise money for the cause, you all go play some D&D with Wil as the GM. It rocks a lot. You fall asleep in the middle of the game and wake up sometime Saturday in a box at the Staples Center. There’s a cigar on your chest with a note — “You can play a rogue in my game any time, love, Wil!” You smoke the cigar while watching some kind of existential circus preparing for the evening’s show; while wandering out of the building later, you run into Arnold, who is smoking the same kind of cigar. He likes you because of this and offers you a job as an aide, but you turn it down because of moral qualms about the Kennedy family. As you make your way back home, you realize that the cigar was laced with some obscure hallucinogen, or maybe the street really is filled with mimes reenacting the siege of Stalingrad? It’s so hard to tell in LA. Finally you get home, where the waitress is waiting, and she made some soup in a really grounded down home kind of a way and it seems like the beginning of a beautiful friendship that will last at least for the rest of the day. Saturday night? Well, that’ll be a completely different story.

From the auction catalogue for the upcoming auction of Acclaim’s assets:

Lot 73: 1 (One) *Sub Zero Side by Side Refrigerator.
Lot 74: 1 (One) Lot – Contents of Refrigerator

“This place is not a place of honor.
No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here.
Nothing valued is here.
This place is a message and part of a system of messages.
Pay attention to it!
Sending this message was important to us.
We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.”