Well, Well, Well

Well, well, well. It's been awhile. I've been on a hiatus of sorts I guess, but now I'm going to post again.

So, what to talk about. This is always kind of a hard process, so i hard the idea to give you my procedure for deciding what the heck to write about. Here's how it all goes down:

1. First thing I do is quickly think of a Plan A for writing that is very bad and a Plan B that worse. This basically serves the purpose of putting me in the mindset, Okay. Plans A and B both failed. Time to think this whole thing over again. That's based on the principal that when creating courses of action, never have a Plan B. Plan B is always second best, while Plan C is the result of fresh thinking. Actually now that I think about this step is pretty worthless.

2. Second is sit there for awhile and just let my thought settle down. I sift through all of the my ideas looking for a good one. This is basically like sticking your hand into a toilet that's been used several times and not flushed and hoping to find a diamond. Surprisingly enough I have found many diamonds in that toilet, if I do say so myself.

3. Third is to start resisting the anti-productivity crusade that my pleasure-seeking brain embarks on. It's kind of like after rummaging around in the toilet for awhile, all you've found of any worth are a few rocks and you want to go outside.

4. If I haven't already, find a diamond in said toilet.

5. And finally, if I haven't found anything, I do a post like this. Most of my posts with lists or descriptions of things that I like were the rocks I mentioned in step 3. Although, I like this idea much better on paper than in my head.

Having said that, I say to you in the immortal words of Adam Savage:

"Don't try this at home."

Omake: Deductions

So I'm currently listening to another episode of my favorite book, HPMoR. The author sometimes has interludes with short parodies of things like the Matrix and Hamlet. I though that might be fun.

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"Your father wanted you to have this."

Ben Kanobi handed the thin silver tube to the boy, the young one.

"Mmm." Luke took the tube, seeming distracted. He absentmindedly pressed the button, and looked only mildly surprised at the solid beam of light emanating from it.

"You said my father was killed by the Dark Lord Vader. Where was he killed?"

"I do not know. Why?"

"Deductions."

Luke turned to Leia.

"Did you ever really know our father?"

"Of course."

"Who was the last person he talked to?"

"Emperor Palpatine. Why?" 

"Deductions."

Luke stared directly at the black mask of the dark one.

"You killed my father."

"I did so much more than that, Luke..."

"What color was his lightsaber?"

"Blue." The shadowed one said instantly.

"As I thought."

"You are foolish. That useless information. Why would you ask it?"

Luke only smiled.

"Deductions, father."

Random rants part two, holiday edition!

So recently I was looking through our school's book drive selection and found a moderately interesting book about Hanukkah. So I picked it up and was looking through it and found the holiday referred to as 'Chanukah.' What? since when is Hanukkah 'Chanukah?'

Anyway, glad to have that out of my system. The Internet: great place for venting.

So here are my least favorite things about Christmas.

1. 'I want a dog for Christmas, Charlie Brown!" GRRRRRR! This one made me mad. I was watching A Charlie Brown Christmas on ABC a couple days ago and an ad came on for another Peanuts Christmas movie: I want a dog for Christmas, Charlie Brown! So I thought, cool! Another Peanuts movie! So I watched a little bit and then I realized: It wasn't the same voices! Charlie, Linus, Lucy, and Rerun (give yourself 4 points if you knew Linus and Lucy had a younger brother) all had really strange voices, And I was just very very very very very very very very very very very very ANGRY! SO I turned of the TV and skulked (I like that word) for a few minutes. (Bonus Peanuts Trivia question worth 50 points: what instrument does Charlie Brown play?)

2.Not being able to think of more than one thing I don't like about Christmas.

So, as I write this it's raining pretty hard here in Pacifica. It's 3:30 on December 21st, 2012. School recently ended until January 11th. I'm happy. Anyone else?

A friend once asked me...

A friend once asked me if Amazon, Firefox, Google, Apple, Internet explorer had a fight, who would win?

Here's what I wrote back to him:

Internet Explorer, with its weak speed and links, would be KO'd by Firefox almost immediately. But wile Firefox was gloating, Google would delegate Chrome, its fastest member, to sneak up behind Firefox and drive one of its many apps right through Firefox's links. With IE and FF out, Windows and Apple would secretly team up, since Google can only exist in them. But while they tried to find Google  It would seek refuge in neutralist area Linux, where it could begin its plot. Meanwhile, Amazon would be slaughtered at the hands of a thousand iPads, despite the Kindles they had sent against them. Apple and Windows would go to war, with Androids infiltrating and stealing Intel from Apples base and Apple firing their giant lawsuit cannons at them as they left, and managing to get most of the spies. But while they did this Windows would plant a gaming bomb in their base and completely demolish their apps & games wing of their base. But in this disarray, Windows would be assaulted on all sides by the Android phones they had commissioned to aid them, since they secretly reported to the newly returned Google. Google would command them to attack and Windows's phone section would be captured, but their hardware area would be protected due to its heavy defenses. Apple, meanwhile, would execute a pincer move and trap Google between Apple and Windows, causing Google to be destroyed in an instant. All areas of windows except for their Apps & games &and hardware sections would be bombarded until surrender, but Those two would hold out. Eventually, though, Siri charmed her way into the hardware section and caused complete chaos by impersonating the voice control app and ordering the evacuation of all areas. With the Windows army flushed into the open, a bloody battle would take place until the Windows army was beaten down to their last few survivors: The director of the Windows Games section and the last three surviving Windows Phones. The three would beheld captive until at one point, the three Windows phones manage to escape through the weakened Games section of the headquarters of Apple, taking the director og Windows Games with them. The four would escape to a faraway place, perhaps Ubuntu, where they would bide there time and regrow their empire, even bargaining with Ubuntu, gaining A few thousand Linuxian soldiers in exchange for partitioned support on Windows 7. Eventually, Windows would grow into a new breed: Windows 8. And they would return to fight with the titans subsequently created by Apple such as The IPhone 5 and The Ipad Mini. But that's another story...

Perhaps someday I will tell you the rest of the story, but technically it's still being written right now. So someday, look for 'The Battle of Windows And Apple!'

Maybe I should write a book.

The strangest sentence in the history of the universe

I read a series of books called Artemis Fowl,  involving the personality transformation of a 12-year old criminal mastermind to a less evil 17-year old genius. And there's faeries with laser guns. Definitely read it. But anyway, there are eight books in the series, all of which I have read. I was recently rereading the fifth one and I came across what I believe to be the strangest sentence in the history of the universe:

"It's easy to imagine jumping into an inter-dimensional crater when you're rolling your cocooned classmates into a pit full of dung."

Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but that seems like a stranger sentence than you normally see in your everyday scifi/fantasy book. And I've seen some other strange ones:

"The etheral figure steppeed forward, his body glowing with an aura of bright green light he said, in deep bass tones: 'Pull my finger.'"

I'm not even going to go into the other ones that I've seen. But that's beside the point. I think emphatically that the first one is more strange. And, I'm interested to see what you have to say. Vote for one of these, or submit your own.

Go ahead! Vote!

Dude, I'm still alive

I play Minecraft. many of you know this. It's in my ASCOTWP, which by the way I don't like the way the computer wrote that.

Anyway, some background. Minecraft is a survival game where you start of with nothing. First you have to get some wood by cutting them down with your bare hands. Don't ask. Then you make the logs into planks, and some of the planks into sticks, and some of both into wooden tools like swords, pickaxes and axes. Then you mine up some stone and make stone tools. Then you mine up some iron, smelt it, and make iron tools. Etc.

In Minecraft, there are many monsters, such as:

Zombies. These monsters walk up to you and punch you. They're pretty easy to kill, you can do it with out a sword most of the time.
Skeletons. These monsters have bows and arrows, but they're otherwise like the zombies. They can shoot you from far away.
Creepers. By far the most annoying, these demons walk up behind you silently and then blow up, damaging not only you.
Spiders. Spiders can move very fast and climb walls, but they're less powerful than other monsters.
Endermen. The most difficult of monsters, they do the most damage, have the most life, can pick up and move pieces of the world, and can teleport. Weakness: water.
Slimes. Found deep underground, Slimes come in four sizes: tiny, which can't do damage and one punch will kill them, small, who split into four tinys when then die, mediums, who split into four smalls when they die, and larges, who split into four mediums when they die.

There are even more than that, but that's not the point. In recent times, my friends and I have been playing on servers with the modification "MineZ" which makes the game into a zombie apocalypse. Only zombies can spawn, they move a lot faster than normal, they do more damage than normal, and they have more health than normal. The idea is to survive for as long as possible.

One time I played on one of these servers and teamed up with a very nice player whose username I forgot. We had just begun to travel when a player ran by with about 15 zombies on his tail. We immediately ran with him toward the nearest city of Romero, where the zombies would disperse. When we got there, I lost sight of my ally while defending myself. Suddenly he said in the chat "NOOOOOOO" and then "You will be remebered". I finished off the zombies and responded.

"Dude I'm still alive."

"lol."

Fail. What made it even more funny is that I was murdered in the next 30 seconds of that exchange.

Sigh.

Random rants, part one

I wonder if football players and coaches care that their every move at a game is being televised, right down to the seemingly private moments on the sidelines when their mug shot fills the screen. What's up with that also? I don't want to see random photos of some guy's face on my screen! I want to see the flipping GAME. Well, not always. In fact I don't always watch foot ball. But still. They do it with baseball too, which ticks me off to infinity, since baseball is a game I do watch.

The number infinity irks me. There are only two mathematical functions which can equal infinity at all ever, and they're two that a lot of people might not recognize: summation (∑) and limits (abbr. lim). Those are both calculus functions by the way. I've noticed that not a lot of people I meet understand too much about calculus. What is this world coming to?!

Another irksome number is infinity's evil twin, epsilon (ε) or 1/infinity. It's a strange number, because if ) 0.9999999... equals one (proof at the end of this post) than 0.00000...1 must be zero, right? Apparently not. Because 5-ε<5, or so they say.

Proof:

Step one: 1/3=0.33333...
Step two: 2/3=0.666666...
Step three: 3/3=0.9999999...
Step four: 3/3=1
Step five: use "if a=b and b=c then a=c" proof format: if 1=3/3 and 3/3=0.999999..., then 1 must equal 0.9999999...

Q.E.D. :)