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2003 February 28, Friday.

It has been my pleasure to receive some of the finest hate mail imaginable over the last few weeks. This one from from jeremy.freedman@verizon.net manages to include racism and a death threat!

Your cute little game is a font of cliches, lies and ignorance. No bad words for Arafat the Jew Hater? Guess you have to hold the Arab wogs to a lower standard of behavior so they can always be the victims, unless they are our allies. Love your comment on Nigeria. A vacuous comment from a disappointed contestant is no big deal, after all, all the violence was caused by Muslim fascists, none of the contestants hurt a soul. Lucky you live in a free country where traitors and appeasers like you can run their mouths all day with no repercussions. I'd like to engage in an intellectual discussion, but sometimes morally and intellectually superior people have to get off their high horse, drop the pretence of enlightened arguments and just tell some phony traitor to go die. Hey, if the Islamicists ever did win thanks to traitors like you, they'd probably slit your throat first cause they hate turncoats more than we do.
Sincerely, Jeremy Freedman
Where do I start with Jeremy? Let's take it from the top.
No bad words for Arafat the Jew Hater? Guess you have to hold the Arab wogs to a lower standard of behavior so they can always be the victims, unless they are our allies.
Well Jeremy, I hold my all my correspondents to a basic level of civility. I presume they won't use racist terms like "wogs". Just so you know, it's in the same catergory as the "N" word. I find that obnoxious, but then I'm just one of those wishy washy liberal types.
Love your comment on Nigeria. A vacuous comment from a disappointed contestant is no big deal, after all, all the violence was caused by Muslim fascists, none of the contestants hurt a soul.
Jeremy has no problem with the multi million dollar Miss World event being held in a country where the most extreme form of fundamentalism exists. I do.
Lucky you live in a free country where traitors and appeasers like you can run their mouths all day with no repercussions.
Hmm. I would classify the danger of receiving hate mail, racist abuse and death threats to be a repercussion, wouldn't you Jeremy? What's next? A burning cross on my front lawn?
I'd like to engage in an intellectual discussion, but sometimes morally and intellectually superior people have to get off their high horse, drop the pretence of enlightened arguments and just tell some phony traitor to go die.
This quote would be funny if it weren't sad. I find that it's quite difficult to engage in "intellectual discussions" with "morally and intellectually superior people" who are comfortable using racist terms like "wogs" to describe one billion human beings. Once again, it's amazing how flippant some people can be about wishing death on their peers.
Hey, if the Islamicists ever did win thanks to traitors like you, they'd probably slit your throat first cause they hate turncoats more than we do.
I can just imagine Jeremy tingling with pleasure as he imagined my throat being cut.

What a piece of work is man!


2003 February 27, Thursday.

An east German nostalgia theme park is being created by a company in Berlin. It's going to have border guards, fake east German currency, and really bad food.

There's a piece of amateur fiction that's well known on the sci-fi conference circuit called The Eye of Argon by Jim Theis. It's a failed attempt to copy the Conan novels.

It's famous for being one of the worst pieces of science fiction/fantasy in the history of the world. Competitions are held where the contestants must read it aloud without laughing. Here's the first paragraph:
The weather beaten trail wound ahead into the dust racked climes of the baren land which dominates large portions of the Norgolian empire. Age worn hoof prints smothered by the sifting sands of time shone dully against the dust splattered crust of earth. The tireless sun cast its parching rays of incandescense from overhead, half way through its daily revolution. Small rodents scampered about, occupying themselves in the daily accomplishments of their dismal lives. Dust sprayed over three heaving mounts in blinding clouds, while they bore the burdonsome cargoes of their struggling overseers.

"Prepare to embrace your creators in the stygian haunts of hell, barbarian", gasped the first soldier.

"Only after you have kissed the fleeting stead of death, wretch!" returned Grignr.
It doesn't get much better than that, unfortunately! Here's a page with more info. It has links to many translations, including Italian, French, Portugeese and Russian.


2003 February 26, Wednesday.

Three fine examples of Redneck haiku:
Tonight we hunger
Grandma sent grocery money
To Jimmy Swaggart

cunfedurat flag
snug around yer purdy mouth
don't yew tell mamma

skid marks on the pavement
possum runs away
no dinner tonight

2003 February 23, Sunday.

A site devoted to end of the world scenarios... Exit Mundi Pick your poison.


2003 February 21, Friday.

Some amazing flash games from orisinal.com
Ferry Halim (the programmer/artist) is a wizard. If you play only one, try this one. It's a bit like tetris, and very addictive.


2003 February 19, Wednesday.

Iranian backed forces enter Northern Iraq. Scary.


2003 February 17, Monday.

Finally! The Stupid Security Competition, a site where you can submit your experiences with the most inane and useless security measures. Here's what they say:
"Even before 9/11 a whole army of bumbling amateurs has taken it upon themselves to figure out pointless, annoying, intrusive, illusory and just plain stupid measures to "protect" our security.

It's become a global menace. From the nightclub in Berlin that demands the home address of its patrons, to the phone company in Britain that won't let anyone pay more than fifty pounds a month from a bank account, the world has become infested with bumptious administrators competing to hinder or harass you. And often for no good reason whatever."

2003 February 15, Saturday.

Check out whitehouse.org, a parody of the official whitehouse web site. Even better, check out the mail they get. It seems that a terrifying number of people think that it's REAL, and worse, some of them like it!


2003 February 13, Thursday.

Color coded alert system, by Mark Fiore.

Fred on Everything has lots of articles written I think, from a conservative/libertarian perspective. Although I don't agree with everything he says, he frequently hits the nail on the head. This piece, "De-minding our young", is about literacy:
A peasantrified population is, among other things, politically malleable. A bright child of seven who reads turns into a kid of eighteen who thinks, at least during moments of hormonal respite; who graduates to serious history and literature and, when lied to, will go to the library and check out a book. Those who live for television will believe what they are told, having no inkling that they are being bamboozled. Is this intended, or just incidental to the larger aims of our cultural vandals? I don't know.
I don't think he's talking about the current war situation, rather the culture in general.


Quote of the day, from wearethechampions@hotmail.com:
"They are all brainwashed and programmed into hating us and funding them! See Palistine! Iraq paying Suicide Murderers! The Phillipines! Pakistan! Africa! EUROPE! Take a manly defensive stand. You still owe an apology to the doc and ME and you still owe me an answer- what is your idea(s) to deal with these situations??? Capitulation? Constructive critisism please- or shaddap. Get a day job- go back to Ireland and solve your own problems- ya got enough of them there- do a slide show on pub bombings."
This guy manages a remarkable piece of xenophobia. He manages to fit in almost the entire world. He left out those bastards in Antarctica though. I love the line about "Pub Bombings". Yeah, all them drunken Irish deserved to die, eh "wearethechampions"?. It seems this fella gets his information from LANDOVER BAPTIST.

Wow.


2003 February 12, Wednesday.

Lots of email. Mostly positive. Much is funny. Some is opposed, but very intelligent. I don't want people to get the idea that all the pro-war folks are nuts. Some are a hell of a lot smarter than I, and my hat's off to them for making me think very hard.

Thanks to all who have contributed, pro or con, in a tone of civility and mutual respect. It warms my heart. Then "David Gress" sends me this:
This is not a game, them threatening to attack us with biological and or dirty weapons is not something we in America. Saddam is a dead man walking and has been for over 10 years.Lets just get it over with, kill him and move on. While we are at it, lets kill you too.
"Web cartoonist killed by guy who can't construct sentence." The headlines flash across my mind's eye. He's pretty clear about wanting me dead. Thought I'd put it up here since it's the first one. It doesn't bother me really...I was prepared for it. Strange feeling, watching the cold little words on a page: "lets kill you too." The least he could have done was get the punctuation right.

"If you're going to kill a man, it costs nothing to be polite." (My hero, Winston Churchill). Looking for a great book to read? "My Early Life" by Churchill, basis for the movie "Young Winston". A great read.

update: David has since contacted me and said he was joking, and that he was sorry that I misunderstood. That's ok with me: No hard feelings. As one of my visitors has reminded me, there are guys in jail just for making threats online. I can't tell from a text message whether someone is "for real" or not, and have to maintain a "zero tolerance" policy.

A more common theme, predictably, is the "go home to ireland" school of silliness. The bizarre assumption that I hate America. (On two separate occasions I have had to resist the impulse to kiss the ground getting off the plane in LA having been overseas. Have you ever SEEN the ground at LAX airport?)

So, let me deal with the going home thing. It's an interesting scenario. (And y'all know how much I love scenarios).

Most obviously, a foreign national disagreeing with U.S. administration foreign policy is not grounds for expatriation, YET.

Secondly, the US currently stations warplanes at Shannon airport, Ireland, in spite of a traditional Irish policy of neutrality and Article 29 of our beloved constitution (we've got a constitution too). Don't mention it, glad to be of assistance any way we can. It doesn't bother me personally. I think it's great that we can help. I also think it gives me just a teeny weeny stake in the argument.

And now the big one. About 150 miles across the Irish Sea lies the Sellafield Nuclear Facility, a nice big juicy target any madman would relish. One lucky hit on it, or any of Britain's nuclear power plants and the entire country is toast. Gone. As in No More Ireland. Ever.

If the U.S. or British government policy backfires catastrophically, my country could conceivably be wiped off the map. No more aran sweaters, no more Tayto crisps, No more Podge and Rodge, and no more crappy St. Patrick's day parades.

How dare you imply that I have a cushy option of running home.

BREAKING NEWS: There are no borders, there are no nationalities, there are no civilians, there are now no safe places. Terror, like everything else has been GLOBALISED. I live in LA, which has to be on the terrorist's hitlist. I like it here, and I'm staying. We're all equally capable of being killed, so get over it.

Some of the folks out there seem to want to live in a country where dissent is crushed. Fine...then YOU leave. North Korea is nice this time of year.


p.s. Nobody will be happier than me if Saddam is overthrown in a superbly executed military strike with minimal ill effects. I like the people who live in the region, and they deserve a break.


2003 February 11, Tuesday.

Clay Bennet's new cartoon. Orange Alert.


2003 February 10, Monday.

I'm sitting here, staring at my monitor, numb. CNN and Yahoo and God knows how many sites and papers have picked up the Reuters story about the Gulf War Game. I'm getting 4 or 5 emails a minute. Thanks for all the kind comments, and donations. It all helps.I won't be able to answer all of the emails. I do read them all though. Many have similar themes, so I'll address them here.

About the game. Yes, I know it's not a game. The best description is "a clickable slide show". Try saying clickable slide show 10 times in a row really quickly and see how much you like it. I call it a game. Saves me the bother of biting my tongue.

Some people seem to take my "99.9999% accurate semiotic analysis" thing as genuine. I'm afraid it's just my impersonation of a ghastly post-modernist college professor. Keyword: tongue-in-cheek.

Some people have been telling me that the war won't turn out as I have predicted. D-Uh. Newsflash. I know this. They'll probably fudge through. But they might not. The game (or clickable slide show) can be summed up in two words: WHAT IF? All I'm asking you to do is drop the SADDAM = HITLER thing for 2 minutes out of your life, take WHAT IF for a ride, and if you don't like it you can forget about it.

Some seem to miss the point that the game portrays a sweeping military victory for the US/allied forces in Iraq. The evil consequences only happen AFTER the game ends. The victory is pyrrhic. This is a very possible outcome, in its most general form.

And all appearances to the contrary, I am not a democrat. I am not personal friends with Ted Kennedy, Hanoi Jane, and/or the Clintons. I am not now, nor have I ever been a member of the Communist Party of America, so help me God. However, if I am brought before The House of UnAmerican Activities Committee, I would be happy to provide them with a list of known communist agitators currently working within the Hollywood animation industry. (That might create some nifty job vacancies for chaps like me).

I just got a great email from "Matt Race":
"You must be French. I think your web site sucks. Why don't you move to Iraq? Communist hippy."
Maybe I should change my name to "Dermeau". Mon Dieu, the ennui!!!


2003 February 09, Sunday.

I've been getting a LOT of emails lately, and the majority are overwhelmingly positive. Some of the "critics" just don't seem to get it however. Out of the 12 messages in my "negative" folder, 2 are literate, 1 is written in a strange version of the english language, 8 are childish to varying degrees, and one is from a psycopath. Infantile Ad Hominem attacks are common. Sounds like the republican party to me.

I thought I would share some samples to give you a feel for the level of what passes for debate on the internet.


This one's from Scott Protzman (sprotzman@pol.net) apparently he's a physician!:
"One billion Muslims want to kill us already, you spineless moron."
We should forgive Scott. He's exhausted, just having returned from a comprehensive tour of the planet earth. He has personally interviewed every single Muslim on the face of the planet, and interviewed them to see if they want to kill us. Way to go Scott! You must have racked up MILLIONS of frequent flyer miles!


James Cordeiro (rsalem@axion.net) snarls:
"You mean you not getting enough from Sadamn, he needed it to gold leaf his crappers? Why don't you simply ask for a a couple of mill from the DNC? or maybe Jane Fonda?"
These ones are the best. Apparently I'm personal friends with Ted Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, and now Jane Fonda. Maybe I will ask Barbarella for a couple of million...


"Dem" is too busy to bother with a complex rebuttal:
"what a peice of crap"
Poor Dem. I kept correcting his spelling and grammar until he threatened to kill me! (Turns out that he's a parent, apparently!)


Lisa Wright tries her hand at a backhanded compliment:
"ooohhh, algorithms. you completely assume the terrorists move at will in the "near future. intertaining, but pure fodder"
Lisa ignores the fact that terrorists move at will in the PRESENT, never mind the future. Interesting that 90% of my "fodder" has been culled from all the quality newspapers of the western world, conservative as well as liberal. Guess they're just fodder too though.


"X" caught my attention with his first sentence:
"Just saw your projection of the most likely outcome of a new war in the Gulf. Looks great.

How about your projection of the most likely outcome of the war against Nazi Germany? We really should have kept away from those guys. I mean, that war was reeeeeeal dangerous. Germany, Italy, Japan... hell they were so scary and they could have really made our lives miserable. Chamberlain is our role model (not that war mongering Churchill!).

Keep up the good work.

EBN"
"EBN" accepts the SADDAM = HITLER equation as though it were a given. Sadly, history is not mathematics. Here's a dandy passage from that revolutionary Trotskyite NAZI-appeaser publication, the Washington Times:
"Hitler conquered all of Europe from the Arctic to the Aegean and from the Atlantic to Stalingrad. And Saddam? He invaded Kuwait, a sandbox half the size of Denmark, and got tossed out after a 100-hour ground war. His country has been overflown 40,000 times by U.S. and British planes and he has not been able to shoot a single plane down. He has no navy, a fourth-rate air force, a shrunken, demoralized army. His economy is not 1 percent of ours."
The best bit is that the passage above was written by my close personal pal, Patrick J. Buchanan, former White House assistant to Presidents Nixon and Reagan.


Gannonfam5@aol.com completely misses the point:
How is this a game? Do you really think repeatedly hitting the "continue" button is fun? As for your propaganda, I will quote what they used to say on "Hillstreet Blues". "Go out and do it to them before they do it to you." Bomb Iraq.
All right, so Gannonfam5 actually makes a valid point. Technically, Gulf War 2.5 is NOT a game. It's a satirical cartoon (or propaganda, if that helps you sleep better at night). So arrest me.

It's a little scary to be taking foreign policy tactics from a TV show. Wasn't the original Hill St. Blues slogan "LET'S BE CAREFUL OUT THERE?"

Guess which one I prefer...



2003 February 07, Friday.

The game's up. The British "dossier" about Iraq's terrorist activity was largely plagiarised from an article by Ibrahim al-Marashi that appeared on the Middle East Review of International Affairs last September. This was the dossier described by Colin Powell at the UN as "...the fine paper that the United Kingdom distributed... which describes in exquisite detail Iraqi deception activities."

Laugh or cry? I don't know. This quote from The Guardian sums it up:
"Apart from passing this off as the work of its intelligence services," Dr Rangwala said, "it indicates that the UK really does not have any independent sources of information on Iraq's internal policies. It just draws upon publicly available data."
So you see dear reader, you or I can become intelligence agencies too! All we have to do is visit a bunch of political websites, cut and paste all the scary bits into one document, and voila, it's WAR! Full article.


2003 February 05, Wednesday.

Clams for peace! REMEMBER: If you send no clams, you are all for children being shot in the knee caps and being left for dead!!!

War Posters have been issued by the whitehouse to boost citizen morale.


2003 February 04, Tuesday.

Oops.


2003 February 03, Monday.

I love the space program more than most. It's time however, to scrap the shuttle. Gregg Easterbrook in Time writes:
Why did NASA stick with the space shuttle so long? Though the space shuttle is viewed as futuristic, its design is three decades old. The shuttle's main engines, first tested in the late 1970s, use hundreds more moving parts than do new rocket-motor designs. The fragile heat-dissipating tiles were designed before breakthroughs in materials science. Until recently, the flight-deck computers on the space shuttle used old 8086 chips from the early 1980s, the sort of pre-Pentium electronics no self-respecting teenager would dream of using for a video game.
Full article.

This is chilling. An earlier article by the same writer, in 1980:
The external fuel tank, for instance, is full of oxygen and hydrogen cooled to - 400°F. to make the gases flow as liquids. Ice will form on the tank. When Columbia's tiles started popping off in a stiff breeze, it occurred to engineers that ice chunks from the tank would crash into the tiles during the sonic chaos of launch: Goodbye, Columbia.
Full article..


2003 February 02, Sunday.

"Letting George do it" from Fred on Everything.




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