The USS Quad Damage

Nerds tend to eschew formality of any sort. They’re not impressed by one’s job title, for example, or any of the other appurtenances of authority.

Indeed, that’s practically the definition of a nerd. I found myself talking recently to someone from Hollywood who was planning a show about nerds. I thought it would be useful if I explained what a nerd was. What I came up with was: someone who doesn’t expend any effort on marketing himself.

A nerd, in other words, is someone who concentrates on substance. So what’s the connection between nerds and technology? Roughly that you can’t fool mother nature. In technical matters, you have to get the right answers. If your software miscalculates the path of a space probe, you can’t finesse your way out of trouble by saying that your code is patriotic, or avant-garde, or any of the other dodges people use in nontechnical fields.

– Paul Graham(link)

The reason I like House is because the main character is an uber nerd, albeit a medical one. If you think about it, there is no other (western) TV show which has a nerd as the main character, especially one which upholds one of the golden tenets of nerd-dom. Hell, there’s even a bit in the show when he tells Wilson and a coma guy about why he became a doctor, and it was basically what good ole Paul Graham wrote: He wanted to be right, because no matter what, one day people will have to listen to you (if they want to live).

Now I’m just waiting for Knuth to write something about Vampires and I can explain why Van Helsing is such an awesome movie.

I’ve never understood how you were meant to do your day-to-day activities when nothing is open outside of business hours. During business hours, isn’t everyone supposed to be working? I’ve never understood why I can’t do _consumeristic_stuff at midnight on a Sunday. The only way to do this stuff is if you don’t have a job, or if it is your job to do this stuff, or if you take time off work somehow.

I like internet banking, because I don’t want to stand in line waiting to hear some noob telling me I can’t do whatever it is I wanted to. Cheques are shit. It means I have to wait in line to have some noob telling me I can’t extract that money. I don’t even know what line to wait in, and there’s some assumption that everyone knows what you gotta do with cheques. It’s like getting an LP today. WTF are you supposed to do with that shit?

First I went to the post office, where she looked at me like I was asking for ear-sex. She quickly said “We don’t do that sort of thing here”, anxiously looking around, and stopped making eye contact. I’m pretty sure the post office did. In the seedy underbelly of Campbelltown, I’m sure I remember getting a Cheque into my bank account, but it seems Chatswood was too good for me. She recommended I go to the bank, where I could get myself “serviced”.

The bank made me want to vomit. No instructions or anything. You walk around feeling awkward until you get to the far back of the bank, where the tellers are. The tellers told me to fill out a deposit slip, which was completely nonsensical. It wasn’t until I noticed that instructions for filling that thing out were on the table which I was filling the deposit slip out on that I realised that I’d probably filled it in wrong. Hell, it was asking for all sorts of weird information which was not present on the cheque.

I filled in whatever I could, and after all that, you know what he told me? He told me to go to another bank, because even though the cheque’s got his bank’s name on it, I gotta go to the bank which I’m transferring to. By this time that bank had closed.

When I am king they will be first against the wall.

Hollywood is notoriously bad for computer usability. Not only does it show things completely unrealistic in a computing environment, but worse, it sets up terrible expectations on users. By contrast, I always look at Anime showing great ways of interacting with computers in the future. One that I liked in particular is in Ergo Proxy. As a show it may not be great, but it’s got excellent computers, and I would love to see people with cash demanding that kind of usability in the future.

Clan Clan Choko made it’s debut in Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory tonight manifested in myself and Harpreet, and already we’ve made a strong impression. As little as a half hour into the game, the following question was raised:

Does Clan CC eat dick?

The answer, unanimously, was “yes”. The other interesting thing about this is that now, we are officially “Clan Clan Choko”. Both myself and Harpreet are both very proud.

In order to achieve this accolade, we worked hard to avoid all knowledge of Wolf:ET, even whilst playing the game. It helped have a fair bit of accidental friendly fire, as well as getting killed at the first sign of trouble. Clan CC has a rich and vacuous pedigree of noobs. We would call it [CCC], but then people might call it Clan CCC, so it’s Clan [CC].

I’ve been watching Heroes recently. I’ve been meaning to watch an American program with a story which goes somewhere (as opposed to Anime, which is rarely episodic), and I figured I stood the greatest chance watching Heroes.

It’s not so great. It’s OK, but it’s not so great.

Firstly, having as many characters as they do really slows the plot down to a crawl. If you don’t watch 8 or so episodes in a row, you feel like you haven’t gotten enough story. They’re cutting back and forth so often that you wish they concentrated on one story arc, and then re-told it from another perspective, ala pulp fiction.

Secondly, this show, like all the other American shows with stories that go somewhere™, is full of “mysteries”. I’ve had enough of random shit happening because I don’t know why. Good storytellers don’t need to have arbitrary mysteries to keep an audience hooked. There are many points during the show I say “so.. why am I watching this? Why are you, the director, or scriptwriter, telling me this other than to waste my time?”. I mean, the show is tight on time already considering the number of characters they’ve got to churn through. I want to see meaning, not mystery, especially when the expectation is that I’m going to see so many that eventually I’m just going to expect Deus Ex Machina to solve all your crappy storyline bungles.

I’m going to qualify my previous point: I really liked Paranoia Agent. That whole story is based around mystery, but how is it that they kept it so entertaining? Because the entire time, they’re explaining the mystery, not keeping it hidden. Everything you see is enlightening, not confusing. By the end, everything is tied up, nice and neat, and you kinda know it will be from the beginning, because of the skill with which everything is being handled. Every time you add a mystery, you have to give a clever explanation. It’s not a get out of gaol free card, it’s the exact opposite—a responsibility to cleverly make the explanation worthwhile.

Finally, the characters have universe-breaking super powers. Unless you do it in the micro (rhino runs into man, man somehow stays standing but rhino flies back), and only sparingly, breaking the laws of thermodynamics isn’t just acceptable, it can be downright hilarious. However, if you make a character which can do things that can fundamentally break down the universe, then you’d better well explain how he does it, as well as why he doesn’t take full advantage of it.

I’m not just talking about the guy who can bend time and space, either. I’m going to leave you to answer the question of exactly how heavy things are, and just how fucked up physics is, not to mention how much energy it takes, to move around when time is stopped. Even a superpower as cliche as flight has some fundamental issues. How’s he staying up there? How much can he carry while flying? What’s happening to the air around him?

The dumbest thing is how they explain it: Genetic Mutation. Of all things, Genetic mutation does nothing to explain how people can, without feeling tired, fly around or teleport. There’s gotta be a cost associated with the power, and in the end that would actually make for more interesting characters.

I’m going to give you a contrasting vision of super powers: In Elfen Lied, the diclonius (who are all little girls, because the show’s Japanese), have “vectors” which are effectively extra invisible arms. They use these vectors to do things like fly, use Telekenesis, etc. One of the characters actually gets all four limbs torn off (which is ほんとう かわいい apparently), but can still wear fake arms and legs and walk around using the vectors. There might still be problems, physics-wise, with this idea, but they’re a lot less offensive to my mind.

So, the show is dumb. I’m still watching it, but I’m not really enjoying myself. If the show ended due to lack of support, I wouldn’t care. I might even be a little bit happy.

Every now and then I look at the search engine terms used to get to this website. There have been some hilarious search engine terms in the past, like “Stupid Americans”, “What’s taters precious 2005”, “gay ‘can get fucked’ blog”, “Fuck my USS”, and of course, the old classic, “Kari Byron 3D Ass”.

However, I logged in to Google Analytics again to find something amazing. The search terms our viewers use are far more sensible than they used to be: “fun facts about Mozambique”, “tricep pain driving a manual car”, “logitech middle mouse button doesn’t scroll”, or “Donyelle Jones’ Eyes”. awww…

In fact, the silliest things I could find were: “karl stefanovic bald” (haha), and “giaan rooney’s nice ass”, both of which are perfectly OK things to search for, in my book. After all, they don’t want Giaan’s ass in 3D, do they?

Is this the end of the old, crazy, zany, silly Quad Damage? As long as Nathan is playing World of Warcraft and not actually writing anything, this reporter says “yes”.

This is Sunny Kalsi, signing off…

I watched 300 yesterday. Needless to say I was impressed. A lot of reviewers hated the movie. However, the problem with reviewers is that they give an absolute score, and if you asked them to justify the number of stars in comparison to other movies, they would fail. For example, does David really think that Spiderman 2 is better than Shaun of the dead?

I’m not saying it’s not, I’m just saying it wouldn’t be hard to find a pair of movies where one is clearly better than the other, yet David (or Margaret) has given them similar scores, or given the worse movie a better score.

So when going for a comparative measure, I think 300 is better than any other movie involving people with sandals, like Troy or Gladiator, or even Braveheart, when measured using any reasonable metric. The amount of chopped limbs is a reasonable metric. The amount of time Brad Pitt is on screen is not a reasonable metric. However, most movie reviewers gave Gladiator glowing reviews, and 300 has been lacking.

This is because they’re idiots. There are no two ways about it. There’s no room for interpretation here, 300 is better than Gladiator in every way, shape, and form, if only because it doesn’t have Russell Crowe, but more specifically because everything that Gladiator tries to do, 300 does bigger, better, and more awesome. It leaves a visual and mental impact like a punch in the face. Contrast with Gladiator, which… what was it about again? 300 is a movie where they’ve taken out all the bullshit. Everything is concise, and they spend every second of film doing cool shit. You cannot say you like Hero or “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” without saying you also like 300! To do so makes you a toolbox.

What I’m trying to say is, don’t trust the reviewers on this one, because 300 is one supreme movie. My brother would use the word “epic”.

Check it out here on Youtube. Sorry to everyone whom I’ve ever told that evolution is the way that we came to exist or that god didn’t exist.

Not only that but if your not convinced here’s another link to a video proving evolution doesn’t work via bananas.

Again my deepest and sincerest apology to everyone I may have divereted from their path of spiritual enlightenment and wish you the best in the future.