fiction is lying.

Mass Effect is one of those games that changes the way you think about games and what they should do for you and what you should do with them. That’s where I’ve been. I didn’t know I had been waiting for the damn thing my whole life. This shit changes what your mind lets qualify as epic.

(and basically every single thing to suck about knights…gone)

I rate it a million stars. That’s a space joke.

I guess I’ll mirror stuff I write on last.fm about songs here:

I’m intrigued by this phenomenon of a metal band here and there that are brutal as shit, yet end up being from some odd place (France? metal?) and have lyrics and themes out of left field (the environment? whales?).

A good example of how these out-of-nowhere combinations work very well is Gojira. It’s French technical death metal about environmental subjects. Flying Whales sounds like an Earth Day festival being torn down by whales with chainguns. You’d never think this stuff would be so epic, until you consider the big picture.

I am talking about the band Gojira and song Flying Whales. I’d let you hear it right now if Mog hadn’t got nerfed to uselessness by being bought by Rhapsody. You could say they got owned for being so shitty. The one use of the site is now ruin’d.

Oh, and I don’t feel like crawling all over the place looking for a flash mp3 player or something right this second. It’s always GIVE IT NOW with you people.

Also I’ve been working too much so I got no patience and that’s why I’m not entertaining you.

So this crazy shit about what day is the most depressing of the year. There’s this theory about “blue Monday” which is basically:

…calculated by Dr. Cliff Arnall…and has been quoted in the popular press, although there is little if any scientific basis to his methods…”the fact is that Cliff Arnall’s equations are stupid, and some fail even to make mathematical sense on their own terms.” The date was calculated by using many factors…weather conditions, debt level, time since Christmas, time since failing our new year’s resolutions, low motivational levels and feeling of a need to take action…typically falls on the Monday of the last full week of January. This would make 21 January the Blue Monday of 2008.

So it sounds like it makes sense, awesome arbitrary formula, and it certainly aligns with a damned full moon week this year. That’s a one-two menstrual punch for some. Then TIME magazine has to get all pseudo-tech with the whole idea:

Aside from the fact that Arnall’s theory has been discounted by many in the academic community, I’ve got a better way of finding the true nadir of depression: Look to our search behavior. If we think we’re suffering from a real bout of the blues or a mental crisis, we’re likely to Google the symptoms. In fact, online searches for “depression” are among the most popular searches sending traffic to the 5,900 sites that we track, but the peak is not in January. According to our Internet behavior, our depression spikes reliably in mid-November every year, right in time for Thanksgiving, the launch of the holiday season.

That’s true too! Holy shit!

Or maybe we’re just all crazy. I know I am blessed with my own manstrual cycle that tortures me every four weeks. Serious.

The doctor guy says the best day of the year is in the 24ish part of June also.

I examined a pamphlet book type thing that fell on my head one day in this video.

This is part one of three. Stay tuned for the rest (the video feed on the right or do your youtube thing on it or whatever), which is a detailed discussion of your options when approaching the arena of electronic games in a manner that doesn’t piss off god.

IN FACT see you tomorrow here is part 2 and part 3 (it is arguably worth watching all three).

srsly u guys

not a needle/haystack type thing

If you have the kind of brain aids that makes you constantly need to feed it more things, you might be interested in oddly detailed, guided tours through history. If you’re interested in that or learning how we learned how to learn, you’ll like this:

I know some people could be sensitive and call it dry, but James Burke is a pretty serious cut-up considering his field of study, and I’ve worshiped his books for years. Note that this is part 2 of 5 of episode 1 of 10. This can be a serious fast track to general knowledge of the history of science, and is almost an eerily appropriate primer for skeptical thought and understanding of the scientific process and how it effects history, all under the umbrella of chaos! This is multi-threaded teaching and thinking.

In the closing scenes of The Day the Universe Changed, Burke suggested that a forthcoming revolution in communication and computer technology would allow people all over the world to exchange ideas and opinions instantaneously. Subsequent events seem to have proven him right. His views of the connected nature of history have also been substantiated by recent research in chaos/complexity/network theory.

Essentially anything here is going to be similar or have an even wider berth, but I definitely suggest Connections as it caused a bit of an educational revolution that logically played out to its fullest form on the internet.