Lexical FreeNet is neat. I’m not sure if it’s good for anything, but it’s neat. The next time I want to generate connections between two random words, it’s the first place I’ll go.

I just realized that what I really want out of the Internet is a Television Without Pity for comic books. Chris led me to this revelation. Can someone do something about that?

Now I know what to do with my excess books. Money is good, too.

Let’s turn it around. Let’s say a 78 year old lawyer shot Dick Cheney in the face while hunting. Think it would have taken an entire day before the news was released? Think the lawyer would have had at least made a statement within a couple days of the incident? Think the lawyer would be able to skip being interviewed by the police until the morning after the incident? It’s kind of an unfair comparison; you have to be a little more careful when someone shoots an elected official. Still and all, it’s not as if Vice Presidents shoot people that often. You can probably treat such incidents as serious — rather than “sure, we’ll come back tomorrow and talk about it” — without placing an undue burden on the institution of the Vice President.

I currently have 13 entries for the Oscar picks, as follows: Kirby, Chris T., dancingshaman, telepresence, michele_blue, doogs19, Chad U., kodi, Wyatt, Cass, Brant, Kit, and twillitts. I’m dead serious about the sponsorship thing. I’m gonna throw up a banner for the winner. There is very little love for one movie as Best Picture, but I won’t tell you which one. Poor thing. I’ll post a summary of entries after the event itself, though.

I got nothing to say about the Oscars this year except for extended bitterness regarding David Cronenberg. That’s OK! kniedzw found an Oscar pool widget, and I thought that was cool, so I set up one of my own. Go here, make your predictions, and wait. The winner will get to be the sponsor of this blog for a week. I hear that’s a big thing.

Sadly, until this Audacity bug is fixed, I’m gonna have trouble getting the Doc Savage podcast underway. At least it’s a known issue.

So, steampunk. It’s a loose, poorly fitting excuse for a genre. The Wikipedia entry reveals that pretty definitely. You got your computer parables, you got your obsession with steam, you got your fantasy tropes. You do not got decades of cheap adventure novels defining the genre. We make do with what we have, thusly. Let us assume that the class warfare aspect of steampunk does not appeal to our prospective player as a primary focus of the campaign. I’m keeping the steam-powered automata-driven London, cause come on, how cool is that? The task at hand becomes finding a premise that makes good use of the setting. Doing Scotland Yard operatives is easy but then the setting is just background, rather than integral. ...

Seventeen years ago, I spent a month in the People’s Republic of China on a youth tour. There were 40 Western teens — mostly from the United States — and 20 Chinese teens on the tour. We travelled together for a month, from Beijing down through Shandong Province; we climbed Tai Shan, drifted along the Huang He by boat, stayed in Wuhan for a few days, and finally wound up in Shanghai. It was an amazing experience. ...

Rep. Boehner was elected House majority leader. This is kind of the most amusing outcome; it’s both a validation of the assertion that the Republican members of the House were too corrupt and a demonstration that the right-wing blogs aren’t much more effective than the left-wing blogs when it comes to Capitol Hill. Intriguingly, Shadegg dropped out after the first ballot, throwing his support to Boehner. Thanks for campaigning for him, bloggers: looks like he was basically playing kingmaker rather than really running. You could view that as a win in that he’ll have a chunk of influence, I suppose. ...