Bay 12 Games Forum

This is a side tangent, but does anyone else like Metalocalypse? I feel like I'm playing Doom when I watch it: lots of blood, and I'm having a great time, but I can't sit there for more than half an hour because it's just too brutal.

Metalocalypse is f'ing METAL. Oh...yeah, i guess that's self-evident.

I've been a fan of Brendon Small ever since "Home Movies" (which is brutal in its own dry humor way). The fact that he actually composes and plays Dethklok's music is just golden.

Despite having major, major issues with the Catholic Church (not Catholicism in and of itself, just the organization) and not being a big fan of the current Pope, I think arresting the Pope is a bad idea. And that was my opinion even before I found out Richard Dawkins supported it.

Yes, sexual abuse within the ranks of the clergy is a major problem that needs to be addressed. Yes, the Vatican seems unwilling to admit and confront this problem honestly. But antagonizing the entire congregation of the Church and causing a direct conflict between secular and religious authority is not the way to fix it.

We settled this issue in 1648. Secular authority trumps religious authority within the realm of said secular authority. Hence, use that secular authority to prosecute the actual guilty individuals. I realize that the Church has obstructed this process to some degree by shuffling priests out of jurisdiction before their crimes are fully discovered so they avoid prosecution. Perhaps that's the bigger issue to address--pressuring the Vatican to make priests available to stand trial in their old parish/diocese/etc. If they refuse to cooperate, then use diplomacy and secular authority to work out extradition treaties. Eventually, the only place they could hide pedophile priests would be in the Holy See itself.

I think the bigger pressure on the Church to correct these problems is going to be the internal one--the fact that Catholics are leaving the Church in droves every time these scandals break. Ireland is going through a wave of de-Catholicization unheard of in its history. America went through the same thing a few years when abuses in the Boston diocese came to light.

There's another angle to this: protecting themselves from asinine lawsuits when users don't get the maximum bandwidth ALL THE TIME.

I used to work with a number of ISPs back in the late 90s when things were still on dial-up, and some of them actually had lawsuits levied against them because users were "only" getting a 52Kbps connection when they advertised 56K service. Of course, in the US, FCC regulations actually limited the amount of power a 56K modem could use, and thus there was an inherent technical limit of around 53K. If you were operating under laboratory-perfect conditions. Add in issues with wiring, cable quality, modem quality, etc. and the average user could reasonably expect anywhere from 22Kbps to 48Kbps, and the number varied as conditions changed.

Some people didn't want to hear that jibba-jabba, and sued their ISP for false advertising and/or breach of contract. And sadly, a lot of civil court judges are technically illiterate, so they didn't toss these claims into the dumpster where they belong.

Penrose Pickled Hot Sausage.


They're little, coarse-ground sausages made of "mechanically seperated chicken" and pork, then bathed in a hot pepper and vinegar brine for months on end. Totally a white-trash delicacy. It's tough to escape my roots.

Sadly, Con Agra bought up the brand a few years back, and recently made the decision to stop selling them in jars. Now the only ones you can find are little individual shrink-wrapped sausages at particularly skanky gas stations.

It's just not the same....you need to have that jar of spiced vinegar to take your breath away when you open the lid. Plus, there's nothing like eating your way through a whole jar at one go (at which point my wife will usually avoid me for the rest of the day...)

Gorillaz, Mos Def, Talib Kweli, The Roots, OutKast, Cypress Hill, Jedi Mind Tricks (YMMV on that one...), Wu-Tang Clan, Digable Planets, Arrested Development.


'Course, I have a particular "style" of hip-hop that I tend to like, so again your mileage may vary.
 

I periodically look around when I'm driving, and have flashes where my mind pictures what it would all look like as burning rubble, like after a nuke or carpet bombing or such.

I think that's more common for my generation than people like to admit. We were raised on stuff like "The Day After" and "Damnation Alley". Or even that scene from Terminator 2 where the playground gets nuked.

I can understand why the Poles might be a bit...paranoid about their neighbors to either side (*cough* Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact *cough*).

And I can understand why people outside of Russia trust Vladimir Putin about as far as they can throw him.

That said, the more that comes out, the more this looks like a bona fide accident.