In response to holyoutlaw posting the Fart in the Duck song, I give you the Indian Nipple Song!


So, dish herpes on the head! Pull slinky and make me fart!

Say it isn't so! Oh well, I'm still going to see it Thursday night, May 7th, at 10:00 PM. Even if it is cool and exciting. BTW: There was a cancelation, so I have a ticket available for anyone that wants to join our group!


Trekkies Bash New Star Trek Film As 'Fun, Watchable'

ETA: A link to the Darwin Day site.

Although, actually, I've met Neil Gaimen and he is a sweet guy. I can't believe he would ever do this to a stupid reviewer.

Besides, they deserve to suffer more...

Featured on Boing Boing today. These are mine and live in my cube at work. I won them a couple of years ago in a costume contest!








If you zoom-in (keep clicking on the picture) you can see that the packaging graphics use Seattle (including Space Needle) as the city under attack by the giant teddy bear.

Kirk vs. Picard. Are there parallels in religious doctrinal debates?

In an attempt to show how capable the open source Blender 3D animation application is, the Blender community has created a short subject and distributed it with a Creative Commons license.



Complete video here.

I'd say this is pretty convincing proof that Blender is up to the task of creating animations as good as any from the commercial competition. To me this raises another question: By lowering the cost of entry, will this mean we get more animated works from outside the established production houses?

Mind you the real cost of an animated video isn't the 3D modeling tools or even the render farms. The single biggest expense is the time of the many creative individuals you need to drive those tools. That factor doesn't change. But it does mean that these creatives now have access to a free alternative toolset and therefore we may have more artists and animators learning how to use them.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Of course someone could really change the game by coming up with an animation tool simple enough to use that it lowers the total hours required for a minute of animation by a full order of magnitude. If that happens, all bets are off.

Phil Bowermaster has a Declaration of Singularity.

Coke-spray inducing sentences like this: What is well past a joke is the need for creative market-based solutions to the problems of the farther left.

Atheist and evolution blogger P.Z. Myers was ejected from a screening of a pro-creationism film because the director didn't want him to attend. The punch-line is delicious!

(Some explanation of the post title here.)

Suppose that one follows the Strong Anthropic Principle line of reasoning far enough to believe the Simulation Hypothesis and accept that we are living in a simulated reality. The first question you have to ask is: Why?

There are many possible reasons why someone might run such a simulation (including you and me in it). However, let's face facts: Our own little slice of reality (virtual or not) is certainly not a simulated heaven. Moreover, it seems unlikely someone would recreate everything we know in order to study a historical period when they could just read the actual historical documents. (Except, that is, if they are studying the effects of small decision changes to historical outcomes. In which case one has to wonder if we got the short end of the 'What if the 2000 USA election went differently?' stick or not.)

When you get down to it, the most likely reason why someone would go to all the trouble to create a simulation as complex as our world is, quite simply, entertainment. This could take many forms: Ant farm. ("Watch them scurry when I do this!") TV show ("Hilarity ensues when George Bush invades Iran.") Or even MMORPG. ("Stressed out by modern life? Play 21Cen and return to the simpler times before the Singularity.")

The thing is, if a society has reached the point they can play a sim game where the sim characters can play sim games, then maybe it makes some small amount of sense that they might find it fun to be here. But it sure makes one think their own reality must really be the Suxx0r...

What if there was a scandal about performance enhancing drugs in literary circles?

Stephen Granade's hilarious essay, Speculative Fiction Authors Considered As High School Students, is pretty much spot on:

Young Charlie Stross is the one with the interface glasses and all of that computer equipment, though his friend Ken Macleod runs a close second in terms of number of gadgets. The boy in the red cape and goggles is Cory Doctorow. He’s something of a Singularity student, though he uses more tag clouds than is usual. And Vernor Vinge is next to him. He could be sitting at the seniors’ table, but he stays at this one instead.

That’s the seniors’ table over there. They’re done with their exams. Many, though not all, of them are just marking time until they graduate. Generally they stay quiet, though you’ll have to watch Harlan Ellison. Mr. Ellison! I see you preparing to throw that food. We’ve had enough of that this year, thank you.

Read the whole thing! Nisi Shawl, Jay Lake, Ted Chiang, and Elizabeth Bear all get namechecks, but David Levine is unaccountably missing...

Certainly not anyone who has a Jingle Jugs.

These might seem like a good idea in crowded hallways or supermarket lanes, but considering that many people don't even use the direction signals on their car...

I suppose it really isn't any sillier than using a treadmill or a stairstepping machine. But the Shovelglove seems weirder to me for some reason.

I don't know... Pretending to shovel dirt or churn butter just seems wrong, while pretending to ride a bicycle seems like a normal thing to do. Is it because the one is a simulacrum of work while the other is ersatz recreation?

R. K. Milholland, writer and artist of the successful (and irreverent, salacious, cutting, etc.) Something Positive webcomic, has a new goal in life and he would like your help in achieving it:

Apparently, thirty seconds of ad time on Martha Stewart's tv show costs only $10,000. Spend up to $250,000 and she'll mention the product on the show.

And I never thought I'd want to do another money drive again. I was wrong. So goddamned wrong. Does anyone know if she has a standards of what will and won't be advertised?

If I could have S*P advertised on Martha Stewart's show, I'd die a happy man.

Oh, you aren't reading Something Positive? Well, get started already!

Go ahead, I'll wait...