i think i want to found the church of alan moore - be a moorist.  his notion of afterlife is extremely comforting to me: 

we might get this life forever — you'll have to read the book to get the whole thing, but I tend to think that it's a pretty watertight theory: That you don't get reincarnated as somebody else, but that you get reincarnated as yourself, over and over again. You have the same thoughts, and you never know you've done this [before], except for those little moments of déjà vu.

—

i'm a little addicted to the website freerice.  it's a really basic vocabulary type quiz, but for every word you get right, the site donates 20 grains of rice to an underprivileged country through the UN world food program.  how cool is that?

This man has robot girlfriends.

Where to begin?

1. I need to set him up with this girl.
2. Eric and I have been texting for weeks about him being a pleasurebot. Don't ask. But yes, more robot sex.
3. Someone, perhaps my boss several months ago, and I were discussing teledildonics. Which might be one of the most fun words to say. Seriously. Try it. Anyway, this article discusses it with a straight face. Sweet!
   

   It has a chatbot which controls the speech. It also has a teledildonic device. Teledildonic devices were invented in the '90s so that people could have sex through an internet connection. If you plug that into a lifesize doll it makes the doll able to feel what is going on. In this way you have the first sex doll that can consent in English to what you are doing to it.

(via fimoculous)

Update: mightygodking posts about dilton doiley (a minor Archie comics character) having a sex doll. It's on the brain today, clearly.

My last computer purchase was in 2000. Yes, it's time. This Dell has held up well with only one rebuild in the last 8 years (that is, once I got rid of that awful, awful beast called WindowsME and moved to XP), but it will soon be time to move along to something new. So, I wanted to pick your brains out there (figuratively speaking, of course):

Do I go Mac or PC?

As some background, I use Photoshop A LOT, and I'd also like to be able to put together home movies and burn them out to DVDs and at some point scan really ancient negatives from the 1940s. I also build the occasional website. Also, I last used a Mac back in 2000, and have flitted back and forth between platforms since I started using computers back in '91.

 I have read that Macs can run your old PC software. I was curious how useful/practical this is in reality. Will my existing peripherals (USB printer, SCSI negative scanner, modems) work with a Mac? I have to say, I'm somewhat unenthusiastic about the PC prospect in that it can't be good when manufacturers start offering the OLD operating system as an alternative to the latest and greatest. Does Vista suck that bad?

Seriously, how can the new macbook air:
a. be 1800 dollars
b. not be a tablet
c. not have a touch screen

Is it really too much to want/expect it to be closer to a tablet, closer to a very large iPhone? I want something nice to rival a Kindle, something I can read comics or books on without it being clunky or having a keyboard.

Perhaps the market will prove me wrong, but I can't see anyone buying this machine at that price.

Also, 2.99 for a movie rental that
a. gives you 24 hours to finish watching it once you start
b. is only offered for rental 30 days after the DVD comes out?

Really? Why would I ever use this?

Color me sadly disappointed with this batch of releases. I will not even discuss the pathetic appleTV "upgrade." I can't decide if Apple is purposefully screwing up their living room plans to stay friends with the media companies or if they simply really don't understand what these boxes need to deliver.

I look forward to the Air becoming a tablet. And dropping in price by about half. Then let's talk.

my celebrity gossip habit is OOC. every day, as my treat and wind-down after work before todd and zane come home, i read, in order, the superficial, perez, tmz, and X17. seriously!

i suppose it's a better vice than the booze i used to guzzle or the boys i used to…chase, but it's probably just about as unhealthy. do i really need to speculate on celebrity pregnancy, check out nips slips, watch clips of C-listers getting denied at hyde, view pictures of britney in a public gas station/behind the wheel/at starbucks?

the answer, of course, is yes.

there is email bankruptcy and then there is email bankruptcy. i believe i just fell into the latter:

i just lost all my work email prior to this month. it happened through a series of unexpected blunders and problems — first outlook (in parallels) nabbed it all off the server. poof. ok, so i have a local copy. this was a week or two ago. then today, i boot up parallels and the disc image crashes and corrupts. poof. email gone. im a genius — i actually deleted the file fragments before opening outlook, thereby confirming that this crap is gone.

i'm sure i could spend time fixing it, but i've decided it doesn't matter. i have a clean mailbox, i have all my sent messages and email is not my primary form of communication at work.

so it sucks, but i'm going to psin it into a positive. and not waste anymore time on it.

still. it kinda sucks.

as of today, marvel is offering a subscription model to read their comics online through their flash-based reader. they have launched with 2,500 comics and a 10 buck a month or 60 buck a year pricing model.

obviously, the kids are going back and forth over this — on the one hand, many people want to download the issues to read offline. they want to feel like they are buying something, similar to itunes music store. the flip side is that everyone is pointing out that a lack of drm on the files would cause even more rampant piracy.

i can see it both ways. really, if you are reading comics on your computer, you can prob get online as well. and only a fool would believe that there isn't already rampant comic piracy all over the net.

so, yes, this is probably a good move overall. laods of digital comics for cheap. this will be a true starter when we get better tablets. unless my screen resolution is higher and my laptop lighter, reading sequential art on it will suck.

it will be interesting to see how quickly dc follows suit. since dc is owned by time-warner (cough aol cough), it is somewhat embarrassing that marvel beat them out the gate on this. coupled with the damon lindelof piece in the nyt a couple of days ago, its becoming easier to imagine a future where all our media is nothing but streamed bits.

finally, i am amused that the response was so great to this marvel news, that their site has been failing all day, resulting now in them taking the entire marvel.com site down. they must be pleased, even if its upsetting to have to pull the entire site offline.

marvel launches online comics initiative