Cleverbot FTW: Miley Cyrus edition

Visualatorialization

The public pronouncement of a blatantly biased opinion based off of nothing more than a momentary visual assessment of the subject (visualitoriazationee).

Noun: Visualitorialization

Verb: To visualitorialize

Adverb: Visualitorializationly (to be used when the manner in which a judgment is rendered is of a similar fashion to that of a visualitorialization, but not quite so)

Hearts of Iron II: Operation “Better Dead than Red”

As you may recall from my last post, the remains of the Axis war machine were being repaired by the French for their own personal use and Turkey was a broken and defeated country.  With the threat of an Allied offensive from Turkey and French-occupied Germany at the forefront of their concerns, the Soviets decided to take on the might of the Allied war machine.  Apparently the industrial powerhouse of Eastern Europe were too tantalizing a target for the Soviets to pass up!

Theme adjustment

The theme of the blog has been adjusted to reflect the attitude conveyed by our endless ramblings about “The War”, such nonsense as psycholinguistics and the general feeling of mild snobbery. I suggest readying an early session of tea and crumpets and listening to this whilst viewing the site from now on:

I am not sure how long this theme will last so all of you that accidentally ended up here looking for real Spore news enjoy it while you can.

Empire: Total War Campaign Multiplayer… please?

Remember when people finished games before releasing them? Games had their share of bugs to be sure, but for the most part the lack of any way to alter the shipped product post release meant that developers had to work long and hard to ensure that as many bugs as possible were squashed pre-release. This is not the case in this day and age, because while downloadable content allows for wonderful new experiences, it also allows developers to release unfinished products and expect player’s money and faith.

Violins FTW: Dmitri Shostakovich

I recently purchased via Amazon a recording of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphonies 8 and 9 performed by the Aviv String Quartet. While the technical quality of the recordings leaves much to be desired the music being conveyed is nothing short of incredible.

Hearts of Iron II: After Action Report

For those of you who don’t know what Hearts of Iron II is: it is the most awesome WWII simulator available on the market today.  Hearts of Iron III may supplant it, but that hasn’t been released yet so I can’t know for sure.  Anyway, a couple of weeks ago, I convinced Fiercemudcrab to give it a try.  At first, the enormity of the game seemed a little overwhelming and he didn’t seem to like it.  A couple of days later, however; he decided to give the game a fair chance to prove itself.  He was intrigued.  That made me so happy that I grabbed my laptop and rushed to his house where we proceeded to set up a LAN game so I could fully instruct him on the game’s many intricacies with a thoroughness that only a veteran of many years could provide.  After a couple of experimental games where we terrorized the world first as Sweden and Finland, then as Canada and Australia, we decided that we were ready to take up the cause of the Allies as the US and UK.  What follows is a summary of the incredible 15 game years of constant war and outrageous alternate endings to WWII that we could only wish would have really happened.

Update!

Nothing was happening…

That is all.

Noam Chomsky and Psycholinguistics: A Newcomer’s Rebuttal

Descartes’ meditations are a wonderful introspective look at the human condition and what it means to be a thinking entity. Whether or not Descartes’ work is truly wonderful has been a manner of contention, and slightly unnoticed has gone the debate over whether or not his works were written by a machine. One may be surprised to hear that it is actually commonplace to believe that his works, and all other literary endeavors are actually the byproduct of a biolinguistic machine that resides within each and every human.

History FTW: European Expansion and Native Americans

Now the title I’ve selected is pretty broad, as it covers the dealings between Native Americans and Europeans on two major continents over the course of about three of the most important centuries in human history.  The subject is also controversial, owing to the European domination and abuse of Native Americans as we see it today.  The Europeans, the Spanish and the English in particular, have been seen as especially hard on the Native Americans in terms of their treatment of them during peace and war.  I don’t believe, however; that this is necessarily true.  The fact that the Native Americans were severely mistreated is certainly true by today’s standards.  The question is why the Europeans pursued the path they did in dealing with the Native Americans.