ThinkingSkull.com

As the midnight hour draws near on the East Coast, I am reminded by the visible clock at LHCountdown that on 12am Tuesday the Eighth of July, 2008, the Large Hadron Collider will be activated.

Now, for all you non-comic book reading, unintellectual sheep who have no idea what’s going on in your world (in which case it’s bloody unlikely you’re reading this anyway), start-up sequences are nearly complete on an underground ring about 17 miles in circumference at a location where France borders Switzerland. Using super-cooled electromagnetic rings, the world’s largest and highest-energy particle accelerator will race subatomic particles, protons in this case, and smash them into one another (hence the term “atom smasher”) in the hopes of releasing energy and discovering new or previously undiscovered theoretical particles (that all sound just like those big words they use on “Star Trek”). Detection of such things could provide insight into the origins of the universe… or rip a hole in the space-time continuum that may swallow the known universe right after letting in a bunch of extra-dimensional critters to knock humans down one step on the food chain (have you rented Stephen King’s The Mist yet?)

So, while my own clock on the right is counting down the days to the end of the Mayan calendar, remember this: if you suddenly find yourself living next Monday over and over again or realize that your spirit is no longer contained by a body of flesh, at least now you’ll have some idea what happened.

I love Diablo. Diablo has always been like Guantlet but takes itself way more seriously. It’s a personal dungeon crawl filled with undead things in an immersive atmosphere.

I’ve tried World of Warcraft, but the game play flexibility and options just don’t seem as important with so many non-linear, time-filling… well, bullsh*t quests. Seriously, I have to fight a pig? No, wait, kill twelve spider monkeys? Like any good adventurer, I want to start where it’s dangerous and deadly, not tromping through mud because “the local guard” needs help when they’re not watching a bridge. Don’t get me started on the auctions.

Now Blizzard has announced Diablo III is officially in the pipeline. The official site already has what I want to see and a twenty-minute featurette with sample intended game play. Like anything Blizzard does, there’s no street date yet, but if they’ve got this much going on already, we should be within a year undead-stomping, demon-slaying, cinematic-reward happiness.

Wow. From “Witchblade” to “Fathom” to “Tomb Raider” and a host of other stories and artwork, I actually own signed and framed pieces of art by his guy. If this doesn’t inspire would-be creators to do what it is they’ve always wanted to do, take heed: your birth certificate has an expiration date and for a few it isn’t very far off. Gonna miss Turner’s stuff.

… and I can’t think of anything to say about that, except maybe…

“Ratsh*t, batsh*t, dirty little tw*t,
96 a$$holes tied in a knot,
Yay! Lizardsh*t! F*ck!”

Give my regards to Sam Kinison (if you meet him hell). And Dean Winchester.
You will be missed, sir.

Yep. Sure did. Nice and quiet so far, but if Al Gore doesn’t stop talking about it, bad things may happen.

Imagine if you could only log onto the Internet using your real name, communicate with only one email address, and be charged with a felony for every time you didn’t? What if anonymity online became a criminal act? It could happen… and sooner than you think.

In an article entitled The Girl Who Will Change the Internet?, G4’s TheFeed laments the decision by their overlords to discontinue using “screen names” or any form of anonymous logons other than their own names for any posts. This is a preemptive compliance with something that could become very real because there have already been attempts to make it happen.

The article describes 13-year old Megan Meiers, a girl with a history of diagnosed mental problems who was duped into believing the fake “Josh Evans” was a real person and eventually committed suicide over what she perceived to be a good and trusted friend turning on her. Worse yet, the fictional boyfriend was actually the mother of a childhood friend who was using the account and fake identity to monitor her own daughter’s well being. With nothing in the real world to actually charge the woman with other than being mean and irresponsible as an adult, pressure on law makers have forced them to come up with “one count of Conspiracy and 3 counts of Accessing Protected Computers Without Authorization,” essentially described as lying to the MySpace servers.

Anyone who knows me at all knows I’m signed up all over the ‘Net as “Grim D. Reaper.” The character is a fictionalization used to promote my movie website and, frankly, it has met with positive response. Before that I was “The Crystal Lich,” which is a little harder to visualize conceptually and hence the reason for the change when I started making promotional YouTube videos. But am I committing a crime, a felony no less, by representing myself as a character?

A friend of mine suggested the following: if a blanket rule of non-anonymity were criminalized throughout US history, would Samuel Clemens have been thrown in jail for publishing his works under the pseudonym Mark Twain? How about Stephen King for using Richard Bachman? Vampire author Anne Rice as erotic writer Anne Rampling? Pen names and screen names are ways of creating identity and often self-marketing to avoid “brand” confusion, and just because you’re not a multi-media conglomerate business shouldn’t mean that you’re not allowed to use the freedom and freebies of the Internet to accomplish the same thing.

While what happened to Megan Meiers is a tragedy, the fact was that she was doing things that should have been monitored and that her own parents have a certain degree of responsibility as well, creating any blanket rule criminalizing anonymity would be too ambiguous. The same rules that already apply to discussing sex to a known minor online being illegal (and damn well should be) could be extended to include suggesting tasks harmful to the minor.

One of the key words here is “known,” because if a child misrepresents themselves as an adult online, then either the child or the child’s parent must assume some responsibility (last time I checked, no one’s blog comment system came with a government ID check nor could many afford to implement one). With regard to the Megan Meiers incident, the adult in question knew that they were talking to a child, knew who the child was, and instigated the cruel crowd mentality that has destroyed plenty of childhoods. The other word is “task,” which I have used in this preliminary bit of text: “to hold responsible any adult knowingly suggesting to a minor any task intentionally detrimental to the minor’s welfare.” My thoughts are that willfully making statements resulting in a child’s death would certainly infer responsibility.

“Conspiracy,” sadly, is broad and ambiguous enough without adding “Accessing Protected Computers Without Authorization” as code for “you lied on your sign-up form.” While everyone (including myself) thinks the woman being charged should shoulder some responsibility for this (even if its just community service educating minors on the dangers of the Internet), these broad charges resulting in a conviction could set the precedent needed to again attempt to make ‘Net anonymity illegal, and that’s a bad thing.

My name is Alan Smithee, and I approved this message.

A co-worker actually asked me this question today (along with indicating that Halloween was the other one). Nice to see I’m leaving an impression, huh? Very nice.

All chant! “The night time is the right time… the night time is the right time… the night time is the right time… the night time is the right time…” (with full apologies to Adam Sandler).

I believe that the art of embracing divine inspiration is the happy frustration of trying to arrange 26 letters into a cohesive thought onto a clean slice of a processed dead tree.

Too much? Yeah, too much. After a little though, I’m dropping the clean slice of a processed dead tree. And so, the edit:

“The art of embracing divine inspiration is the happy frustration of trying to arrange 26 letters into a cohesive thought.”

Much better. No, wait. “The art of?” What kind of pretentious verbiage is that? Okay, one last revision.

“Embracing divine inspiration is the happy frustration of arranging 26 letters into a cohesive thought.”

Wow… that’s almost an email signature. I’ll work on it again later.

Most people who fly anywhere at all in the United States are pretty used to the new routine (laptops out, shoes off, carry on bags through “the machine,” ID and boarding pass, please). Most of the security people at each of the terminals I recently went through we’re all pretty joyless about their jobs… EXCEPT in Las Vegas!

At the ‘D’ terminal gate, a jealously-enormous television screen shows you what can and cannot taken on the plane. To illustrate the fact, “Star Trek” Federation “Red Shirt” security personal demonstrate what can happen when a Klingon tries to sneak guns and knives through the checkpoint. Hilarious, yes (especially for 1337est geeks like myself), but isn’t this clearly promoting “species profiling?”

You be the judge. Check out someone’s YouTube video of the educational film.

Two things: I was wrong, and boy was I wrong!

Even upon opening the storage container, there was a sense of underestimation. Inside were a washer and dryer, a full-size fridge, pieces to a bed, and over a dozen or so odd boxes, containers, and trunks covered with sheets of plastic (images coming soon!) So I asked innocently, “Which stack is mine?”

My friend laughed at me. “Here’s a hint: it ain’t the appliances or the bed.”

Uh oh. What I’d guessed to be a morning or an afternoon project turned into a morning AND afternoon project. I decided to do this in two phases. First, get rid of the stuff I definitely wasn’t keeping, like a fish tank, old lamps and antiquated electrical stuff, art supplies long dried out or ruined, and other general junk. Sadly, what was left could still fill over three foot lockers, much more than I could afford to ship back.

After a quick stop to eat at a west-coast-staple Carl’s Jr. (which Hardee’s on the east coast is quickly transforming into in every way but name), we sought the shade of the garage for the second sort. Sadly, all the magazines had to go to make room for the actual books and such, and there were many. Starlog, Fangoria, “official” film magazines, gaming rags, you name it, plus various pieces of outdated paperwork in the form of old bills, empty notebooks, and shreadables.

This second sort was hands on; I meant to touch everything to ensure it was seen to be sorted before keeping or tossing. Among the keepers were two college yearbooks, a high school yearbook, class ring, senior key, pictures and advertising for various theatrical work I’d done prior to enlistment, and an unusually sentimental number of pictures from events I didn’t recall documenting. There are enough images that I’m considering doing a mandatory half-life montage, but we shall see. Apparently I’ve reached an age where I don’t look back on old photos in horror but as a chance to think of my younger self as another person from another time (DeLorean and sports almanac not included).

In the end, two foot lockers remained that weighed in at 95 pounds each, so the whole bit on the plane was out and Greyhound Xpress shipping was in. Although their website estimated less than 3 days shipping and about $60 for under 100 pounds, that price of course doubled (two trunks), incurred a gasoline surtax of about 10% each on top of it, and would take a week. Fortunately it’s now all done and everything is on its way; on to the Winchester Mystery House!