Minecraft: RavWorld L-Train

I have now combined my obsessions with public transportation, Minecraft, and yarn into one! This holiday weekend I made an elevated train for the Ravelry Minecraft group server.

Here's the loop, counterclockwise:


The loop, clockwise, at night:


And the first RavWorld L-Train multi-player accident, caught on film!

News: More Fakebook Follies

• Since craigslist banned "adult services" ads, prostitutes have been flocking to Facebook.
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  (We are all going to assume that the cat has a thyroid issue, ok?)
• According to this, I am apparently much cooler now than I was "then."
• Because of yet another bug, Facebook has been exposing the supposedly-private information of millions of users for years.
• 
  
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  You wanna bet "Dan" doesn't get invited to any more family reunions?

And not Facebook, but we all know I hate Apple just as much:

• I've been saying Apple is a cult of nutjobs for years now, but brain imaging research has proven me right.

Spoonerisms: Kitties are Scientists, too!

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• Well, this one is more of a philosopher:
  
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Minecraft: Lo-res Public Transit, or, How I Spent My Weekend...

...or, rather, how I spent my weekend until the network at work crapped out and I had to stay logged on and keep telling them that, no, still slow, no, still way too slow, no, taking 6 minutes to transfer a 900kb file is not normal, kthxnbai.

But, before that, I started a public transportation system on the private server I play on (does that make it an oxymoron?) using the recently-introduced powered rails. Here's a video of the ride so far:

News: Cool Stuff

• "The Wire" considered as a Victorian social novel... instead of one of the most amazing shows ever made for television.
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  I make no apologies for thinking this is cool. Ask Brad about the Kirk Mutant Ninja Turtle I gave him all those years ago...
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  I had to hide this site from my cats, because they're not getting anything that fancy. Except maybe the beer tower.
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• A ukulele-playing Japanese band consisting of... amigurumi
  
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News: WTF Round-up

• A suitably whacked-looking man, in Florida, of course, spent 3 days in his motorized mobility chair chasing around a woman. Presumably the woman spent 3 days not calling the police.
• An impressive WTF:
  
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• Ummmm.....
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• 
  
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  Ooooh, I can return them without hassle? Why didn't someone tell me? I might have tried having one.
• Infamous Chinese iPhone manufacturing sweat-shop sterling employer Foxconn now requires its workers to sign a pact not to commit suicide.
• A NY Orthodox Jewish newspaper photoshopped out the women present in the now-famous Bin Laden take-down situation room photo, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Dude, WTF?
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  Just... facepalm...
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  I'm giving that thing about a month before it gets banned on city buses everywhere after multiple impalement-of-other-riders-when-the-driver-has-to-slam-on-the-brakes incidents. Seriously, folks, someone's going to get an eye poked out!
• And finally...
  
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News: Who's The Boss?

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  Except I always end up in the meeting where I'm either getting grilled about something or it's with that asshole who is always blathering on about absolutely nothing so he can feel important and (fail to) impress his colleagues and waste my time in general and isn't even the boss. And did I mention no one even brings us donuts?
  
• Well, the obvious answer is the cat is the boss:
  
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•  
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  Totally doing this, and maybe not even waiting until next April Fools day.
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• Instructions on making a yarn swift from an office swivel chair. Finally, a chance to do something truly productive at work.
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• A report shows that workers will destroy their own computers to get an upgrade. I know mine is going to commit suicide by jumping in front of an oncoming bus any day now unless my next upgrade request gets approved...
•  
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  Funny, that's also how cat owners tend to spend their tax refund...
• And finally, leaving you with this inspiring thought:
  
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Minecraft: Artsy-Fartsy

• I've cut out all the pieces from this awesome Mine(Paper)craft project, but they're sitting in my desk drawer at work, waiting for my next nervous breakdown for assembly.
• Share and try out seeds for the coolest Minecraft worlds.
• Minecraft as a teaching tool.
• The Smithsonian's American Art Museum will host an exhibition next year of "The Art of Video Games." Included on the list are my great love, Fallout; my great disappointment, Fallout 3 (Fallout 2 is missing); and... Minecraft! And a bunch of games, most of which I never heard of or gave a crap about, because before Minecraft I was too busy playing Fallout 1 & 2 over and over. Or something.
• I would totally get one of these if it came in diamond. But these magnets are pretty cool, too.

Air Journal: Bird- and Creeper-Watching

I went to Virginia for several days this past week to visit my aunt and uncle before the oppressive summer heat and humidity kicked in. Trip highlights:

• Because I refuse to pay money to check a bag unless absolutely necessary, I didn't check a bag. No one blinked at the metal knitting needles in my suitcase.
• Because no one wants to pay $25 to check a friggin' bag, the overhead bins fill beyond capacity on most flights these days. While we were boarding, they were again announcing the bit about putting your smaller carry-on item under the seat in front of you, etc., but certain rows didn't have that option, so they would have to put it in the overheads. The guy walking in front of me put both his suitcase and his backpack in the overhead bin. I was trying to give him the benefit of the doubt, like maybe he was seated in one of the mentioned rows, but no, he was just a dick who is Special and Above the Rules. Asshole. Good thing I'm not a flight attendant or I would have taken the thing out of the bin and shoved it under his seat with a very brutal smile.
• I almost didn't recognize my aunt Mary at the airport. Her hair had turned completely white. She was still short, though.
• I was her enabler for visiting yarn shops. On Cary St. in the artsy-fartsy area, we were walking from a yarn shop to a Thai restaurant (she had never had Thai food before), when I saw this chalk drawing on one of the ubiquitous brick walls in Richmond:
  
• We drove out to my grandmother's farm near Charlottesville, where everyone and their Beltway brother is now building their ugly "farm-house style" McMansion where there used to be real, working farmhouses. Outside, I dodged a dragonfly trying to divebomb me. Geez, I hate those things! I forgot how many, well, insects there are there. Here's a view of the Blue Ridge Mountains from the farm:
  
• My aunt and uncle keep bird feeders in their backyard. While the hummingbirds have been absent this year, perhaps victims of the severe winter, there were still more birds than I see here in artificially-green desert. While the red-headed woodpecker we saw last time didn't show (its tree died and was taken out), we did see:
  • House finches -- by far the most common
  • Cowbirds
  • At least two pairs of cardinals
  • Grackles, with their striking light-colored eyes and brilliant iridescence
  • English (house) sparrows
  • A male red-bellied woodpecker, which actually has no red on its belly, but does have a striking neon-orange stripe on its head, which makes it look like a punk rocker
  • I think the other woodpecker was the downy woodpecker, but we only saw a female and only once or twice.
  • Starlings
  • Doves
  • The ubiquitous robin, which I miss out here. They also love splashing around in the birdbath.
• I somehow managed to avoid smacking my head getting into my seat until the last connecting flight home. I have a nice lump on my forehead.
• I was sitting next to a young woman who could not be not touching her MacBook, and what appeared to be her grandfather. As we were landing, she turned to the elderly man and told him she didn't think it would be a problem at the car rental place, but she just remembered both of them have expired drivers licenses. "But we're still licensed drivers." Um, no, you're not. Hence the "expired" bit. I was sorely tempted to follow them to the car rental place and laugh, but instead...
• I went to catch the Flyaway bus to Union Station (I flew out of BUR but flew into LAX for price and scheduling reasons). $7. Free (well, included in my monthly pass) bus ride from Union Station home. Ok, it took about 2 hours, but it would have taken a little less if I hadn't been waiting at the wrong corner for the connecting bus. And it has often taken that long with a shuttle, because you wait 20 minutes for them to come around, then you wait another 30 minutes while they keep circling the damn airport, then you're inevitably the last one off and all the people getting dropped off first all live 15 miles from the freeway, so it takes at least 2 hours to get home anyway. So I feel smug now :P
• Kitties were happy to see me! Yay! They quickly got over the smell of my aunt's two dogs. Or they're plotting their revenge for later, when it is a dish best served cold...

News: Dumbass Round-up

I am super mega-cranky today, so here are a bunch of dumbasses for your, um, enjoyment.

• Apparently craploads of people are asking "Who is Osama bin Laden?" on Yahoo! Answers, and they're almost all dumbass teenagers who, while yes, are too young to remember 9/11, have apparently not visited anything other than the Entertainment news section of a web site in the past decade. WTF?
• This teenage dumbass experiences instant karma. Well, 1-hour karma.
  
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• This dumbass decided to rob a convenience store while wearing pants so baggy, they had to be held up with one hand at all times. Unfortunately for the dumbass, both his hands were full.
  
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• Dressing your cat in a pink tutu? Man, you deserve anything you get for that.
  
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• After this sign went up, McDonalds was shocked to see a 20% drop in cheezburger sales.
  see more Lolcats and funny pictures, and check out our Socially Awkward Penguin lolz!
• Not sure who the bigger dumbass is here, the suspect carrying a chair out the door or the police who didn't notice some dude was walking out of the building cuffed to a chair.
  
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• The United States Postal Service managed to issue a Statue of Liberty stamp featuring a stock picture not of the actual Statue of Liberty on Liberty Island, but of the not-totally-accurate replica in Las Vegas. Morons.

After all this amalgamated stupidity, I am down with this cat:


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Other: Fun With Phonetics

I was driving out to the PetSmart after work because (a) by the time I got my butt motivated to leave this morning, the buses became annoyingly sparse, which mean that (b) I needed to justify driving to work and buying 30 pounds of cat litter will do it and (c) I got totally fed up with the local Petco because I never seemed to spend less than 15 minutes in line, so I refuse to go there anymore. The closest PetSmart is in Tujunga, and even though I'd been there before, I can never remember how to get there. I was using the Google voice navigation on my phone, and among other "quirks," it came up with some interesting pronunciations of street names.

Tujunga Canyon Rd. Ok, although there are many, many streets here with Spanish names, they never get pronounced correctly; they've been, um, anglified. "Tujunga" is an exception or at least close to one, as the 'j' is pronounced like an 'h'. Except the Google lady was using a hard 'j'. "Tuh-jun-ga Canyon Rd." Ok, so eventually I turn onto Foothill. That's a real English word, right? "Fooh-thill." Double fail. Well, I did get there, but still.

Knittin' Crap: Spoon Invades Photo, Gets Forked, News at 11

The Camera Hog struck again, but this time he got a little freaked out by my latest FO:



That's Beastie, the FreeBSD daemon.