Why the Controversy of Steamy Sex Scenes?

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Twin Peaks is a lie

Remember Twin Peaks, from a few posts back?

It's a lie. Here's a side view.

To my grief, Twin Peaks has indeed proved placentine, but no matter: I can work with that. I'm currently transforming Twin Peak into Twin Tower:

I've fortified the hilltop with the tree into the top level of my tower, and started working down from there.

**

Epic Island, stretching in three directions around Twin Tower, really is epic.

What makes it even more interesting is that the area around Twin Tower is honeycombed with caves.

And more caves.

I'm not normally so much into spelunking, but when you see something like this, how can you not be intrigued?

**

Twin Tower is set up nicely for now. I have big plans for the site, so I'll be back later. Now, though, it's time to swing back to base.

Every time I visit my tower, I remember why it is that I build these things. Just seeing that makes me happy.

After a quick pit stop, it's time for more work. Here's one of the dugouts for my Blood Bowl pitch:

And with that done, I'm off back to Twin Tower. Here's a view from the top level:

The secret to a good Minecraft base is simple. When I build, I prefer to use stone: it's not flammable, and it melds perfectly into natural stone. However, when you mine stone, you get cobblestone, which is a lot less tidy. Here's stone and cobblestone side by side; the stone is the smoother texture.

As you can see, I used cobblestone for the floor of the dugout, but stone for my towers. To make stone, you process cobblestone in a furnace; basically stone is cobblestone + fuel. The easiest fuel available is lumber, specifically planks, which you get from chopping down trees. So ideally, the perfect Minecraft base has a supply of lumber and cobblestone.

This is why the easiest way to build is to dig down. On the ground, you have trees you can harvest for lumber during the day, and at night, you dig down to collect cobblestone. Twin Tower is especially easy to build, because instead of having to mine for cobblestone and then build up, I'm hollowing out the peak into a tower. Here's what I get up to at night:

And with my furnace happily blazing away upstairs, converting cobblestone into stone, I'm set to begin expanding my tower. As Twin Peak has incredibly sheer cliffs to the north and west, but lower slopes to the east and south, I plan to start expanding east and south. First I'll build two auxiliary towers next to Twin Tower, so the next morning, I start building the first one.

My plan is to eventually dig out a deep trench that separates Twin Tower from the rest of the hill, so having delineated that, I start building what will become the parapet of the east tower. The sheer cliff is just to my right, so I'll have to watch my step. I place a block of stone, step to the right, place stone, step right, place stone, step right, OH SHIT

fwee

BOOM

Respawning.

2010 In Review

Instead of recapping the entire year, which is never any kind of fun, I will just go over some of the highlights of 2010.  It was a pretty damn good year.

-I finally bought a laptop, which has pretty much been the best investment ever.  Sitting on the couch while writing these posts is much better than sitting at a desk.  Speaking of posts, 2010 was my busiest year with over 300 posts.  That is kind of exciting (or lame depending on your POV).

-I went to a bunch of sporting events this year.  A few in Pittsburgh, a couple in Altoona, and one over at State College.  I also got to enjoy tailgating for the Blue/White game and the Temple game.  I even made a trip to Washington D.C. to see the Nationals and Pirates play.  Speaking of awesome sporting events, I experienced two firsts:  my first Pens game and my first regular season Steelers game.  I also got to see Stephen Strasburg make his minor league debut against the Curve.

-This was also a very sad year since two of my favorite TV shows ended:  Lost and 24.  I actually did a couple of special things to commemorate such great shows (even though 24 constantly pissed me off with some of its stupid story lines).  My Best of 24 was pretty cool (at least I thought so), yet none of you jerks commented on it.  Also, I was so impressed with my Lost GOTW and the amount of work I put into it, and again, no one really noticed.  I think it caused me to die a little inside that no one said how awesome it was...

I will post it again for your enjoyment, only in a slightly smaller version.  Do not strain your eyes too much trying to enjoy all the hotties.

-There were plenty of great TV shows in 2010.  In fact, this year was a much better television than movie year.  Mad Men, Always Sunny, Justified, Boardwalk Empire, Treme, True Blood, Sons of Anarchy, Archer, The Walking Dead, and The League.  Also there were plenty of enjoyable shows like Warehouse 13, Eureka, White Collar, Human Target, and Supernatural.  I am sure I am forgetting some.

-Speaking of movies, what all did I see this year?  Iron Man 2, Inception, Kick-Ass, Hot Tub Time Machine, The Social Network, The Disappearance of Alice Creed, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Sherlock Holmes, The Chronicles of Narnia:  Voyage of the Dawn Treader and Daybreakers. I really feel like I went to the movies more than this, but I guess I did not.  I think there were a few movies I saw that were just crappy and I did not care about.

-I will not list all the books I read over 2010.  It was not nearly as many as years past, I think my total was only thirteen.  Granted, five of those books were around 1000 pages each, so it was probably about the same amount of reading as previous years.

-The biggest thing to happen in 2010 though was the changes in my life.  I met Lindsey and we moved in together up here in New Germany.  She makes me incredibly happy and I feel like a better person because of her.  If she is reading up to this point, I hope she knows how much I love her.  Sorry to the rest of you for having to read a little personal stuff.

-Now on to the best of list...

Best Movie:  This is a tough one, it comes down to Kick-Ass and Inception.  Many people will say The Social Network was the best movie, and I definitely thought it was good, but I look at it from the stand point of which movie will I watch more than once?  Which of those movies will I stop when I see they are on HBO and watch them from wherever they are in the film.  I would have to say that award goes to Kick-Ass.

Best TV Show:  All those great shows listed above, yet it comes down to two:  Mad Men and Sons of Anarchy.  I could not wait every week to watch these two shows.  And I usually watched the episodes again during their reshowing.  SOA was great, but did not compare to last season and at times I felt like the Tara storyline was dragging on.  MM does not have the action, but it just holds you in it's thrall each week.  It is hard to explain to people why it is such a good show.  Anyways, that was the best show in my opinion.

Best Book:  Only three of the books I read this year actually came out in 2010.  I think the best one of that small group was Are We Winning?  It was a great book and I pretty much recommend it to any baseball fan.

Best Comic Book:  I will not lie, I have not read many comics this year.  In fact, I stopped getting individual issues and decided just to get trades.  Of everything I read, I would say that The Walking Dead is still the best on-going series I read.  Maybe 2011 will be a better year.

Anyways, that is my thoughts on 2010.  Who knows what 2011 will hold for me...

It's the End of the World...

It was bad enough when everyone thought that the world was going to end in 2012, but leave it to a Christian group to up the ante on the Mayans.  These idiots think the Rapture will occur on 21 May 2011 and then world will end on the 21st of October.

Apparently this Harold Camping fellow tried this before back in 1994 (in case you were wondering, he was wrong back then).  He came up with his own dating system or something.  I would do more research into it, but I cannot get past all the Biblical quotes which are taken out of context. 

These people have spent money to put up signs to warn people about the coming Rapture.  Luckily there are some brilliant atheists out there who have challenged all this.  It makes me laugh that Christian groups spend so much money trying to get their message out there (it's already out there, no need to keep pushing it on us), and these people would have a fit if an atheist organization put up a billboard somewhere.

Is there anything better than sitting on a park bench telling you that you will die soon?  I like how it says save the date, like you should pencil it into your date book.  May 20th:   Haircut.  May 21st:  Rapture.

Fantasy roundup: part 1

I'm currently engaged in a large fantasy reading project, and every now and then I'll try to translate it into the odd book review.

Gene Wolfe: The Book of the New Sun

I bought the two-volume set, and I have a quarrel with the blurb. On it, no less a writer than Ursula LeGuin calls Wolfe's work "breathtakingly original". No, it isn't. The Book of the New Sun can be truthfully summed up as Elric of Melniboné in Jack Vance's Dying Earth. Add a pinch of Lovecraft and trace amounts of other ingredients, run the whole thing through a thesaurus, and voilá: the Book of the New Sun. Breathtakingly original? Hardly.

If that's true, then why does the same blurb say that it's been voted the best fantasy work ever, after the Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit? Because it is the best fantasy since Tolkien. Maybe it isn't built from the most amazingly original blocks, but I don't care, because it's mind-blowingly good. If you haven't read it, you must.

Wolfe is a narrator and, in Tolkien's terms, sub-creator, second to no modern fantasy or SF writer. The attraction of the books isn't so much the world itself, or even the narrative or characters, although I have nothing bad to say about any of them. It's the pure skill with which he weaves everything into an incredibly immersive and compelling text. The four volumes of the Book of the New Sun are that rare kind of fiction that you can't put down, and wish would never end.

I'm struggling to think of some kind of negative "however" here, but I don't really have one. Other than the afterwords, in which Wolfe pretends he's created the text by translating it from an original, which are stupid and only detract from the story. Don't read them, and you'll be better off. His taste for obscure words may take a bit of stomaching; it's a fine line between creating an exotic feeling and pure sophistry. I think it works, but that might conceivably be a sticking point.

Having said that, I can't recommend these books highly enough. If you're at all interested in fantasy and haven't read them, go do so. Now.

World Juniors preview

The hockey world junior championships start today. Funnily enough, Finland has managed to win once, in 1998. Mika Noronen stopped the Russians in the gold medal game, and Niklas Hagman's overtime goal gave Finland their only gold medal to date. The tournament all-star team included goaltender David Aebischer, defenseman Andrei Markov and Finnish forwards Eero Somervuori and Olli Jokinen.

The tournament, which is watched only in Canada, has been won by Canada 15 out of 37 times it has been held, including five years in a row from 2005 to 2009. Over the last eighteen years, they've finished without a medal only once. Every year, including this one, the Canadian hockey media makes a big deal about how Canada are going into the tournament as "underdogs", and nobody ever expects them to win. I mean, it would be ridiculous if one of the two countries that has totally dominated the tournament every time it has been held would be a favorite going in, wouldn't it?

Indeed, this year Canada are expected to finish a shocking 297th out of ten participating countries. Even though there are only 193 sovereign states in the world, it is widely thought that Canada's performance will be so poor that a hundred notional states will be invented and inserted into the hockey world ranking to fully express how badly Canada will do. Reports from Hockey Canada indicate that they don't expect any of the selected players to turn up, as the team was selected by randomly picking names from the Toronto area phonebook. The players thus selected were not informed.

Despite having more hockey players, both per capita and absolutely, than any other nation in the world, and being the only country that even notices the world junior tournament is on, the Canadian media are confident that this year will turn into another unmitigated debacle for the Canadian junior team. Prospects are so bleak that it will be an incredible upset if the team doesn't play so badly that every Canadian commits suicide out of shame at the end of the first period of play.

This year, like every year, Team Canada is expected to totally disgrace the nation at a tournament which they have so far dominated every past year. Despite having finished with a medal in seventeen out of the last eighteen tournaments, an eighteenth medal is considered highly unlikely and would be incredible, astounding proof of the ability of good Canadian boys to triumph against the terrible evil of foreigners, because they're underdogs. This seeming discrepancy is not one, because we don't say it is. When asked for comment, a Canadian hockey expert screamed about Lord Jesus Baby and talked about the troops.

Merry Christmas!!!

Hope everyone has a great Christmas!  I will be out doing family things.  Lindsey and I exchanged gifts last night.  Do you want to know what she got me?  She got me new gloves (if you ever saw my gloves, you would understand), Scrabble, and she got me Community season one.  Also she bought me a nice new thermal since I wear them everyday during the fall, winter, spring under my t-shirts.  Her big gift to me was a gift card to Best Buy towards buying my PS3.

I suppose you want to know what I got her.  I bought her a Crosby jersey, a Keurig, canisters, and a cutting board.  The cutting board was more of a gift to me, since when we make dinner, I always cut veggies and I hate our current cutting board, since it is tiny and very thin.

You might be wondering what is up with the fat, ugly chick.  Well I figure since none of you read this during Christmas, who would ever notice...

Or maybe she was my real Christmas present from Lindsey...I think I just threw up a little.  HAVE A GREAT DAY EVERYONE!!!