Assorted Thoughts 51: Humor Delayed By Summer Field Season Edition

• Everything I know about urban planning I learned from SimCity.
• Apparently small children are like orangutans. As soon as you look away they try to disassemble their habitat.
• You call it breaking and entering.  I call it farming XP.  Thanks, video games!
• Given how many people leave sporting events before the end to "beat traffic," I've found the best way to beat traffic is to actually watch the whole thing and leave after the end, because the parking lots are already at least half empty.
• I really need to create a "socially acceptable" playlist for whenever people might walk in on my music.  I'm tired of living in fear every time shuffle is on and a song ends.
• I'm pretty sure Florida is actually an evil wizard's plot to turn me into a sweat golem.
• Support group for those who abuse zombie-creating viruses: Necrotics Anonymous.
• In Florida, the members of the Mosquito Control Board are elected officials who campaign for the position.  I can't decide if that's a triumph of direct democracy or its ultimate failure.
• Seriously, what the hell can they possibly disagree on?  How do you differentiate yourself from the other candidates?

Assorted Thoughts 50: I Had A Bit Of An Idea Backlog Edition

• I will all too regularly forget to apply sunscreen, which is a problem when doing research on boats in Florida.  When that happens, I just treat my charred skin as a burnt offering to the Sun Gods, hoping to earn their favor in the shape of not getting melanoma.  If that's not how this works, it should be.  Gods love burnt offerings, right?
• The proper number of clips and straps on your dive gear is equal to N + 1, where N is the number currently present.
• Manatees are somewhat cute and beloved by millions. They are also slow, stupid, and regularly hit by boats. I'm sure there's a life lesson there, even if I'm not sure what it is.
• Is an excess of mangroves a call for manscaping?
• When traveling, I carry all my hygiene equipment (shaving supplies, hairbrush, toothbrush, etc.) in a Magic: The Gathering bag I got at a gaming shop.  The irony amuses me.
• There is such a thing as being too grounded in reality.  I don't even get superpowers in my dreams.  I have to pretend that I have superpowers in my dreams.  Kind of sucks.
• I also just had a dream where I was moving back into the dorms at my undergraduate school, only to get really confused halfway through when I remembered I graduated already and should be at a school on the other side of the country.
• Apparently I am on the lazy diet.  We currently don't have any easily-prepared food in the house, so I'd rather skip breakfast and go straight in to the lab than spend a few minutes cooking an egg and not being hungry.
• Florida is helping me answer the age-old question of "How much sweat could a Ben sweat sweat if a sweat sweat sweat sweat sweat?"
• Unfortunately, the answer appears to be "All of it."

Assorted Thoughts 49: Work Work Research Work Eats My Life Edition

• Could you clear-cut a bonsai forest with an ordinary lawnmower?
• Apparently the Marines are now advertising on the iPhone Scrabble application. I'm not convinced they know their audience.
• It's kind of amusing how in some respects grad students are lower on the lab totem pole than undergraduate minions. Our minions get these weird things called "days off" and are, on occasion, paid better than we are.  But then again, we do get to tell them to do stuff that we decide on.
• Technology is amazing.  The internet allows me to ask inane questions of anyone anywhere on the planet!  While I could easily look up what time it is in Japan, it's way more fun to send a message to someone I know who is living there asking what time it is.
• Getting told "You should start a blog!" causes some serious deer-in-headlights reactions from me at this point.
• If you're ever considering a business plan that involves selling ice cream from unmarked vans with ice cream truck music blaring from mounted speakers, stop it.  Saw one of those vans recently and it was the creepiest thing ever.
• If ever there was a machine that should be robust to violations of the directions, it's a coffee maker.
• A hellbender is a kind of salamander.  It is also an awesome name for a metal band.
• I recently started up the dictionary app on my iPhone, and it asked me both to allow it to send me notifications and to allow it to use my current location.  Exactly why does a dictionary need to notify me of anything?  Late-breaking changes to the definitions I use?  And what the hell does it want with my location?  It's a freaking dictionary.
• Hades was really worried when his dog started to have trouble walking, so he took it to the vet and was devastated to receive a diagnosis of Cerberus palsy.

Assorted Thoughts 48: Oh Hi Florida, You're Really Warm Edition

• Are people in permanent comas fair game for vegetarian cannibals?
• Dear diary: Today my genius for humor was again unappreciated.
• Best convention double-booking ever: the Chihuahua Fancier's Society and the American Association of Deinonychus Breeders.
• I'm going to school in an area with the highest concentration of military power and installations in the world.  Needless to say, if the nuclear apocalypse comes, it's basically Target #2 in the United States.  Frankly, I think it's a bit comforting to know I'll be one of the first ones to be vaporized.  I'm pretty sure I'm not up to the task of fighting mutants for my survival, and I'd rather be fine ash floating across the wasteland on the breeze than having my guts torn out by savage quasi-humanoid monstrosities.
• Star Wars EU and sword & sorcery crossover: Game of Thrawns.
• Something I'd like to see: a chromed-out lowrider with massive subwoofers blasting NPR.
• I kind of want to set up an email account using the address 192.168.0.1@gmail.com and use it to send people creepy messages.
• Unfortunately, on further research, you need a letter in the address.  And as usual, I'm not as funny or creative as I thought, since people took a bunch of similar ones already.  Still open is 192.168.O.6@gmail.com, though!
• As a grad student, you rapidly learn that the best way to shop for office furniture is to go to Hall-Mart.  Walk down the hallways and see what people have left out without a name on it, then grab it and run.
• I definitely think that those biologists who study swallows must have a really rough time due to all the Monty Python jokes.
  

Assorted Thoughts 47: Guess Who Never Seems To Update Edition

• My latest genius idea for making my fortune: combining Choose Your Own Adventure books with Mad Libs.
• A song that wasn't popular in the '80s but should have been: "Gargoyles Just Want To Have Fun."
• It's hard to avoid the conclusion that your lab is filled with nerds when it's noticed that three of you are humming the National Geographic theme while cleaning the wet lab.
• Kermit the Organ Frog: It's not easy being spleen.
• What is lich?
• Baby don't turn me, don't turn me, no more.
• Subtitled for the nerd impaired.
• Did you hear about the rules fetishist? He got off on a technicality.
• I recently seriously changed my meds up for the first time in around a decade.  This is pretty cool, because it means I don't need to be doped to the gills to vaguely approximate a human being.  I'm really rather miffed, though, because apparently it broke my one superpower.  Since it has un-borked my metabolism a bit, I can no longer sleep forever.  Being able to zonk out for 14 hours at a stretch without effort was something I actually enjoyed.
• The platypus is one of a very few venomous mammals.  Male platypuses have a venomous spur on their hind limbs.  Being stung by a platypus is apparently not fatal, but might hurt enough to make you wish it was.  If I have to die at some point, I'd want to be stung to death by a platypus.  Both to be able to say I was the one person to get killed by being stung by an egg-laying mammal, but also so that anyone who saw my obituary or tombstone (because you'd better believe that would go on the tombstone) would have to lie awake at night wondering what the hell I had done to that platypus to earn such a fate.

Assorted Thoughts 46: Poor Sad Cubbies Edition

• This is the saddest ad I have ever seen, and I'm not afraid to say, I got something stuck in my eye while watching it.
• Vladimir Lennon: the only member of the Beatles less appreciated than Pete Best.
• Runners up: Paul McCarthy, Mandingo Starr, and George Harrison Bergeron.
• This joke got by with a little help from my friends.
• I think part of the comprehensive exams before a school lets you graduate with a degree in biology should be a test where you have to prove your worth.  You have to pet or otherwise touch three out of five harmless, but possibly gross, organisms to show you've mastered your fears of the natural world.
• "When you can touch the millipede in my hand, it will be time for you to leave, grasshopper."
• You know how if you run up a bill in a restaurant that you can't pay, you might be able to wash dishes to work it off?  Well, what happens if you're in Vegas and you can't pay at the brothel?
• Old robotics engineers don't die, they just become obsolete.
• How are the Ghostbusters like vampires?  Neither will cross the streams!
• Closed captioning for the mythologically impaired.

In Which I Attempt To Incite A Nerd Riot

One of the more common, and depressing, things people argue about on the internet is whether Star Trek is superior to Star Wars, and vice versa.  This is so often the subject of nerd-rage that Wikipedia has an article on the topic (though sadly, the talk page is mostly devoid of rage.  If you ever need to see meaningless pedantry in action, though...).  Usually, so far as I've seen, it focuses more on "Who could blow up whose ship?" and less on "Would I really want to live there?"  The sad truth is, when you look at it that way, there's a clear answer.

The Star Wars universe is one of endless possibility.  You want a wild planet filled with witches who ride giant monsters?¹ Sure!  How about a cyberpunkish cityscape?  Got that!  Technocrats?  Yep.  Cocky smugglers?  Oh yeah.  Basically, the Extended Universe has gotten large and absurd enough that anything you can imagine is probably canonical at this point.  It's hard to deny the appeal of Darth Vader, the Force, and lightsabers (just don't mention the midichlorians).  However, the downside of all this is that you will die.  Seriously.  Do you have any idea how often in the Extended Universe there are "Rocks and/or aliens fall, the entire planet dies" scenarios?  A billion deaths here, a trillion deaths there, pretty soon you're talking serious misfortune.  Grand Moff Tarkin using the Death Star to obliterate Alderaan was freaking child's play compared to the Yuuzhan Vong.  Odds are, you're not going to be a badass Jedi, you're going to be the poor sap murdered in a bar for looking at someone wrong and nobody will ever care, even when your body turns up in the local cafeteria's steam table.  Let's also remember this is the universe where slavery is reasonably common, local squalor is really squalid, and organized crime gangs don't just run parts of Mexico, they run the whole freaking planet.  It's like when the RenFaire nutballs generally forget that the laws of probability dictate that they're not going to be riding in on their mighty steed and saving the pretty princesses, but instead will be farming mud and plague and being nailed to a pole if they ever poke their heads up.

On the other hand, Star Trek's universe basically is a bunch of hyper-advanced species who all generally live decent lives.  The starting premise of the humans is that everyone got together and has a benevolent technocratic government ruling peacefully and giving everyone a fantastic standard of living.  Whee.  I could deal with that.  Hunger and illnesses are minimized or cured, there really doesn't appear to be nearly the seedy underbelly of society that exists in the galaxy far, far away, and even if you do end up dying horribly in one of the occasional devastating wars that wracks the universe, odds are that a series reboot or a time recursion or alternate universe handwave will make it all better.  Sure, things might be marginally less exciting² and you might have slightly fewer options to do whatever the hell you want and get away with it, but I think that's a fair trade for stability, safety, and living well.  I'd rather be on a five-year mission in a top-of-the-line, science-and-kickassery-ready vessel that has all kinds of creature comforts than be stapled into an armor suit that doesn't stop handgun fire and then die horribly when the ship I'm stationed on gets blown up by a bunch of plucky rebel terrorists scum, all the while not having proper safety equipment like guardrails or shielded exhaust ports.

To sum up, let's compare a few things here.  Who wins?

1. Badass starships.
• Gonna have to go with Star Wars here.  Trek gets points for effort.
2.  Utterly annoying aliens.
•  Um.  Call it a draw.
3. That one character everyone wants to be when they grow up.
• This one is another tie.
4. Hugely detailed backstory.
• Star Wars, far and away.
5. Would I ever want to live there?
• Absolutely Star Trek.  Space socialism wins the day.

1 I am ashamed to admit I knew the name of this planet off the top of my head.^↩

2 All I'm saying is that if this is significant enough to earn a page on your fanbase wiki (shut up, I know about the movie, that was just one thing and it has its own page, my point still stands), your universe might be a bit lacking in zest.^↩

Assorted Thoughts 45: I Still Think It's All Your Fault Edition

• I think I'm a video game savant when sleepy.  I get much better at a number of games when I'm only barely conscious to the point of not thinking or really seeing much beyond the screen.
• Some people get blackout drunk and do stupid things with their credit cards.  For me, it's not alcohol that does it.  I still don't know what exactly happened, but I ended up on ThinkGeek and suddenly my wallet was lighter but an awesome package was on the way.
• Based on his erratic voting record, I'm convinced Anthony Kennedy treats the Supreme Court as a giant game of D&D.
• "I rolled a 5 on the d20 of Justice.  Guess this law fails its Con save." 
• For all the griping you hear about how awkward and awful the federal government is and how much better local regions can do things, it's remarkable how much simpler the federal tax forms are compared to the states' versions.
• On a related note, apparently you can use your Facebook login to do tax preparation with H&R Block.  That seems like quite possibly the worst idea ever from a variety of standpoints - not the least of which is security.
• One of the better ideas I've ever had was to use an image of the One Ring as the icon for my folder of tax stuff.
• The best grocery store special I've ever seen: hefty chunks of cake for $1 each labeled "Oops We Baked Too Much."