Laugh at me. Please.

I frequently lament the absence of a good nonsense movie in today's world. I once explained Monty Python to my brother as "do you find a sheep exploding to be funny? Then you laugh."  The end of their show and the beginning of the Monty Python movies pretty closely overlapped by the rise of the Zucker, Abrahams, Zucker movies and National Lampoons. The early 80s was probably the high water mark of the nonsense comedy film.

Airplane. 

Because the Catholic Schoolgirls In Trouble clip is just too damn funny for family consumption.

I would suggest that these are the best of the nonsense movies because the laughs come first. The jokes run the spectrum from high-brow word play to slapping each other with fish. But the jokes are never second to a plot point and they are never abandoned for a happy ending.  At the end of Airplane! or Animal House, the characters are victorious in landing the plane or destroying the parade, but they don't give up what made them funny.  The characters continue to be horrible people, and we are still laughing.

Idle games and the scale of money.

To explain an idle game is to have already lost the war.

Idle games are just that, your car is running. All the time. And you get points. But it’s not your car. It’s your computer. What you hook to that computer as it idles, the sequence you attach those things, and how much patience you have to wait, all determine your success at the game. Hit on the right combination, and the numbers go exponential. Initial clicks that counted by ones, then tens, then hundreds suddenly go into the sextillions and septillions.

Really, it was 10 million years of waiting on the next upgrade.

In short, the only thing worse than explaining an idle game is actually playing one.

A book review! This is the end of days.

At the end of 2015, I finished off a novel and realized it was the fourth book that I had read in the year. This represented both a success and a failure. I didn't get through four entire books in 2014, so go me! But I probably could have done better. My count for movies was close to 50, and I polished off eight multi-season television series, about twenty seasons in total.

2016 will be different. Two full weeks into the new year, I have finished a 1300 page book. It was an ebook, but it was by Neal Stephenson, so it's listed at 880 pages in the dead tree editions. Woot! It compares interestingly to a couple other movies, so spoilers ahead.

Where we're going, we don't need books.

At least dead tree ones. They're heavy. And flammable.

Gaming on this side of the Unpleasant Ditch

I've had interesting thoughts. They've tackled the topics of the day. There were many very insightful concepts and perspectives bounced around. They never made them to the page. I've been playing a new game.