(Cross-posted to WWdN)

The final table of the 2005 World Series of Poker started at 4pm yesterday afternoon, and wasn't finished until just after 7am today. I'm not sure, but I think that's a record. I'd call Pauly to be sure, but something tells me he's crashed out until at least Sunday.

Two qualifiers from PokerStars made the final table, and one guy, who qualified using free play points, made it to the final two tables, finished in 13th place, and won $400,000. Not bad for a freeroll!

Speaking of Pauly and PokerStars, we're doing a charity tournament on Sunday in memory of Pauly's friend Charlie Tuttle:

Charlie is from Clarksville, Tennessee and he's a twenty-six year old music enthusiast who loves hanging out and playing poker with his friends. Charlie was dealt a bad hand in life when he was diagnosed with terminal cancer, which he has been battling this past year. A couple of weekends ago, he was hospitalized because two tumors in his chest pressed up against his lungs, causing him breathing problems. I don't have to tell you how serious his condition was.

Felicia Lee, who is fighting her own battle with cancer, knows several top professional poker players, so she got several of her friends to call Charlie: John Juanda, Marcel Luske, Max Pescatori, and Barry Greenstein to name a few. In fact, when Barry Greenstein won his bracelet in the $1,500 Pot-Limit Omaha event, he dedicated it to Charlie.

As Pauly wrote:

Situations like this one make you reassess what's really important in life. Las Vegas is a city built on greed. Poker is a game that often attracts some of the lowest forms of life. However, in the past two weeks, there has been a small group of professional poker players who have earned my respect and admiration. Amidst all the darkness and debauchery, I have caught a few glimpses of the bright side of humanity. The hearts of some of the biggest sharks in Las Vegas are filled with compassion.

Thank you, Charlie, for inspiring us all. We'll never forget you.

Charlie passed away on June 22 and his friends have organized a charity poker tournament this Sunday at PokerStars. It's going to be a lot of fun, and I hope to see lots of WWdN readers there.

Details:

SUNDAY, JULY 17th
18:00 EDT (15:00 CDT)
PokerStars
Buy-in is $20 — all of it goes to charity.
"WPBT Charlie Tournament" under Tourneys -> Private tab in the lobby

I'm sure this is just begging for vandalism (unless those douchebags have grown up and finally kissed a girl) . . . but there is an error on my Wikipedia page that needs to be corrected. I'd do it myself, but that's against Wikipedia editing policy.

I am not in Brother Bear. Willie Wheaton, Wil Wheaton, Jr., and Reginald Maudling (Mrs.) are all not me. I've tried to get this taken off imdb, but someone (well-intentioned, I'm sure) keeps putting it back, and Wikipedia editors (also well-intentioned) are putting Brother Bear back up . . . so we're in an infinite improbability loop, and my towel is getting dirty.

Would someone please correct that, and cite this journal entry so it doesn't get corrected back?

In a way, this reminds me of the Iraq prisoner abuse story, in that it seems to be getting coverage outside the US (especially the line " Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. " Which, coming in 2002, from a high level (albeit foreign) source, would be a rather big story, I would think.

Update: Well, a bit of noticeis being taken now.

From The London Times:

DAVID MANNING
From: Matthew Rycroft
Date: 23 July 2002
S 195 /02

cc: Defence Secretary, Foreign Secretary, Attorney-General, Sir Richard Wilson, John Scarlett, Francis Richards, CDS, C, Jonathan Powell, Sally Morgan, Alastair Campbell

IRAQ: PRIME MINISTER'S MEETING, 23 JULY

Copy addressees and you met the Prime Minister on 23 July to discuss Iraq.

This record is extremely sensitive. No further copies should be made. It should be shown only to those with a genuine need to know its contents.

John Scarlett summarised the intelligence and latest JIC assessment. Saddam's regime was tough and based on extreme fear. The only way to overthrow it was likely to be by massive military action. Saddam was worried and expected an attack, probably by air and land, but he was not convinced that it would be immediate or overwhelming. His regime expected their neighbours to line up with the US. Saddam knew that regular army morale was poor. Real support for Saddam among the public was probably narrowly based.

C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.

CDS said that military planners would brief CENTCOM on 1-2 August, Rumsfeld on 3 August and Bush on 4 August.

The two broad US options were:

(a) Generated Start. A slow build-up of 250,000 US troops, a short (72 hour) air campaign, then a move up to Baghdad from the south. Lead time of 90 days (30 days preparation plus 60 days deployment to Kuwait).

(b) Running Start. Use forces already in theatre (3 x 6,000), continuous air campaign, initiated by an Iraqi casus belli. Total lead time of 60 days with the air campaign beginning even earlier. A hazardous option.

The US saw the UK (and Kuwait) as essential, with basing in Diego Garcia and Cyprus critical for either option. Turkey and other Gulf states were also important, but less vital. The three main options for UK involvement were:

(i) Basing in Diego Garcia and Cyprus, plus three SF squadrons.

(ii) As above, with maritime and air assets in addition.

(iii) As above, plus a land contribution of up to 40,000, perhaps with a discrete role in Northern Iraq entering from Turkey, tying down two Iraqi divisions.

The Defence Secretary said that the US had already begun "spikes of activity" to put pressure on the regime. No decisions had been taken, but he thought the most likely timing in US minds for military action to begin was January, with the timeline beginning 30 days before the US Congressional elections.

The Foreign Secretary said he would discuss this with Colin Powell this week. It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran. We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors. This would also help with the legal justification for the use of force.

The Attorney-General said that the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action. There were three possible legal bases: self-defence, humanitarian intervention, or UNSC authorisation. The first and second could not be the base in this case. Relying on UNSCR 1205 of three years ago would be difficult. The situation might of course change.

The Prime Minister said that it would make a big difference politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the UN inspectors. Regime change and WMD were linked in the sense that it was the regime that was producing the WMD. There were different strategies for dealing with Libya and Iran. If the political context were right, people would support regime change. The two key issues were whether the military plan worked and whether we had the political strategy to give the military plan the space to work.

On the first, CDS said that we did not know yet if the US battleplan was workable. The military were continuing to ask lots of questions.

For instance, what were the consequences, if Saddam used WMD on day one, or if Baghdad did not collapse and urban warfighting began? You said that Saddam could also use his WMD on Kuwait. Or on Israel, added the Defence Secretary.

The Foreign Secretary thought the US would not go ahead with a military plan unless convinced that it was a winning strategy. On this, US and UK interests converged. But on the political strategy, there could be US/UK differences. Despite US resistance, we should explore discreetly the ultimatum. Saddam would continue to play hard-ball with the UN.

John Scarlett assessed that Saddam would allow the inspectors back in only when he thought the threat of military action was real.

The Defence Secretary said that if the Prime Minister wanted UK military involvement, he would need to decide this early. He cautioned that many in the US did not think it worth going down the ultimatum route. It would be important for the Prime Minister to set out the political context to Bush.

Conclusions:

(a) We should work on the assumption that the UK would take part in any military action. But we needed a fuller picture of US planning before we could take any firm decisions. CDS should tell the US military that we were considering a range of options.

(b) The Prime Minister would revert on the question of whether funds could be spent in preparation for this operation.

(c) CDS would send the Prime Minister full details of the proposed military campaign and possible UK contributions by the end of the week.

(d) The Foreign Secretary would send the Prime Minister the background on the UN inspectors, and discreetly work up the ultimatum to Saddam.

He would also send the Prime Minister advice on the positions of countries in the region especially Turkey, and of the key EU member states.

(e) John Scarlett would send the Prime Minister a full intelligence update.

(f) We must not ignore the legal issues: the Attorney-General would consider legal advice with FCO/MOD legal advisers.

(I have written separately to commission this follow-up work.)

MATTHEW RYCROFT

My last two funny posts (here and here) got nothing but serious responses..and one even got modded "Informative."

It

was

a

joke...

Arrrrrrrrrrgghhhhh!

Pauli's exclusion. Naievely put, two things cannot share the same state. Simple.

Let's tweak it a little, and see what happens in a given case. And yes, I do have an agenda with this. In no way do I suggest that any of this is correct, or relevent. It *will* be consistent relative to itself, however.

We're going to change Pauli to include the object in question - no two states the same, which includes the object itself. Once it is in a given state, it *must* change.

Now, let's make a 5-space. It'll be our typical XYZ, plus a B that we don't perceive (which is just a plain-old axis, just like X and Y and Z, and it is orthogonal to them), and a time (which is also just a plain old axis, orthogonal to the rest).

Let's stuff a singularity S at our origin. Our universe is born, we now have an object, and it has "state" as defined by our space. There's a problem - S has state, and our modified Pauli says it has to change. So, it moves. How far? How fast? Well, far and fast enough that it'll resolve the exclusion - per "tick" of the clock, it'll move its own radius from where it was. Also note it cannot go backwards - that "state" is already occupied.

Note that it doesn't matter what direction it goes - any will do. Just for yucks, let's say it initially started moving along B. We can easily have picked X or Y, but let's pick B.

Within the XYZ subspace, S isn't moving. Neat, huh? That's why we picked B.

So, let's give our little friend a kick in the pants. We induce a small velocity along X.

Question - it's been trucking along B in order to resolve the exclusion, at the rate of one radius per tick. Now that there's an X componant to it's velocity, does it need to travel along "B" a full radius?

Nope, it doesn't. "Speed" along B will decrease. In fact, if we "kick" up the speed along X to the point where S is now moving "one radius per tick", any speed along B will go to zero, won't it? After all, the displacement "per tick" along X is now adequate to fully resolve our exclusion.

So, we've created an interesting game which effectively has a similar rule to one in real life - there's no such thing as a standing wave.

We can expand our game a little bit - let's get rid of B.

Instead, let's say S initially "decided" to start travelling along T. How far, how fast? Again, one radius. (Yeah, I know there's a contradiction floating around here in regards to the definition of Time. If we're allowed to neglect friction, we can neglect this too. We're demonstrating a concept.)

So, S is cruising along T... and again, within our XYZ subspace, you and I would not perceive it as moving. We start our displacement along X - and S slows down along the T axis. How much? Well, Pythagoras solved that one - a^2 + b^2 = c^2. Keep pushing S faster along X, and displacement along T slows down even further. Finally reach the speed along X that resolves the exclusion? Displacement along T stops dead in its tracks. S is still moving, though, you'd better believe it.

Let's modify our game once again. By virtue of the exclusion, we've effectively asserted that S must move one radius per tick. The result, when XYZT is viewed as "flat" and "static" (unchanging) is that S is a long smear. There is no "time" in this view; all of the positions of S are kinda glued together to form a solid extrusion.

We're going to add a new assertion - when our space is viewed this way, S must be *continuous*. No gaps, breaks, cuts, jumps. Switching back to our "more normal" 3-space + time, this means that S *must* move one radius per tick, never slower, and *never faster*.

Moving faster, after all, would cause a break in the continuity we just defined.

So, let's replay our game one more time. Add speed along X, and T slows down etc. Keep going faster along X until displacement along T stops. Try to go even faster along X - and you can't, you'd "break" the smear (extrusion).

Do NOT try to apply this game to real life; the first thing you'll notice is that, if you *reduce* the speed along X, the exclusion must be resolved by a displacement along another axis - and no duh, that's the whole point of the game. But you'll notice that there is no rule for *which* axis that'll get picked - B, Y and Z are all just as likely. We don't observe that in real life, though - when I hit the brakes on my car, it doesn't usually start sliding sideways or flying. Usually.

Still, it's interesting to see the effect.

If you're *really* bored, (and I mean **really**), follow up on the a^2 + b^2 = c^2 thing. It'd be merely an exercise, but attempting to relate it to inertia / mass increases at relativistic speeds might be fun (even if futile).

Regarding space being a 3D thing or not - it's all about perception, and perception is why it's such a challenge.

Consider something, a game merely provided as a thought experiment.

Consider a creature who lives in a 2D world... that is, his perception is limited to exactly one single plane that is infinitely thin. Grab a stiff sheet of paper, neglect friction, and pretend it has no thickness. We're going to try to see what our creature sees, the same way he sees it, and eventually see how it scales as "dimensional perception" increases.

Take a round pen, and "intersect" the middle of it with our plane. ----|-----
Our creature will perceive the pen as a circular wall... remember, he has no concept of "up" and "down". Easy.

Spin the pen in various directions, and note what happens - and remember, we're only interested in that infinitely thin section that our creature can perceive. You can produce spin 0 (if the pen is a cyllander), spin 1, spin 1/2, spin 2... you can create all types of "spin" based on the direction you rotate it. Interesting. Note that this is not necessarily the same "spin" that the quark-heads talk about, but it demonstrates a fair part of the concept. It certainly demonstrates the concept of things "coming into view", and will probably make our poor creature pull his hair out. It's especially interesting because our creature sees the pen changing - shape, size, you name it - but you and I know that the damned pen isn't changing one bit.

Now for a really neat demo - tilt the pen, and hold it still. ------/-----
Without rotating the pen, move it straight up or down. What's our creature going to perceive? Yep... he'll see the "pen" (the big circular wall, which is now an oval due to the tilt) moving across his plane. That's neat, and a good concept demonstrator - but it isn't the really cool part. The really cool part is that he'll see the pen moving along the X-Y plane- despite the reality that it's really moving along the (unperceived) Z axis. You can see that the pen has no horizontal motion whatsoever - yet, horizontal motion is exactly (and only) what he perceives. Take a second to reenforce why he perceives it that way, and make the reasons work. Remember, we don't care what his perception is, there is no horizontal motion in reality. The motion is all in the unperceived vertical. Period. The only thing changing (not moving, but changing) is the point of intersection with his ability to perceive, the cross-section within his perception.

Finally, grab a more complex object. Something fun - a coffee mug perhaps, or a fork, or even a pair of scissors. I'll use scissors, because I enjoy cutting things... and when we're done, we can use them to wreck havoc on our creature's universe.

Open the scissors up a little, and hold them below the sheet of paper. What's our creature going to perceive? Nothing.

Now, lift the scissors and stick the points into our creature's plane of perception.
-\/-----
OO
Our creature will perceive the scissors as intially one, then two completely separate objects as the points come into view, right? And what else... they will appear to spontaneously exist. Of course, you know that the scissors have always been there, just not within the creature's view.

Things get interesting, though - if our creature decides to kick one of those objects, he'll notice that the other object moves a little. It'll make no sense to him - the two objects have nothing to do with each other, yet they almost seem to be... I dunno... entangled somehow. (And no, I'm not suggesting that this is how entanglement or pair production works, this is just a method of showing how a limited perception can create the illusion of such a thing.)

Move the scissors up, and notice that our creature would see the two objects moving toward each other, and also get bigger (as each blade gets thicker). Keep moving up, and our creature will be astonished when they actually merge (at the hinge-point). Keep moving up more, and more, and the creature will become baffled as the merged object suddenly breaks back into two separate pieces, moving away from each other. Move it up some more, to the handles and beyond, and our creature will see the two chunks break into four (when the handles are intersecting) then back to two (and the end of the handles), then suddenly shrink away to nothing!

Wash, rinse and repeat the game with something incredibly complex, like a lawnmower. Our poor creature is going to need a good stiff drink after trying to explain this one to his friends, I tell ya...

The one very cool thing about this entire game (and it is merely a game, it is not reality by any stretch) is that we've beaten the 2D perception of a 3D object to death, so we can see how it scales up. What we can do now is repeat the game, using a 4D object - namely, let's introduce what we perceive to be time into our game. Do this any way you like - open and close the scissors, spin them as you move them up and down, let them rust, whatever. You will rapidly discover that our (now hopelessly confused) creature cannot differentiate the 3D game from 4... he won't be able to tell how many dimensions we're throwing at him. He'll perceive them all as one single "dimension" that he calls "time". Think about when we played the game the first time - what we call Z in our perception, would be "time" in his, right? We then replay the game with both our Z and our time, it's still just "time" in his. He cannot tell if there is only one unperceived dimension, or one hundred... these extra vectors are all summed together into one, for him.

Now, stick your head out the nearest window, and watch a car drive by. You should be able to see it in a whole new way - as if you were some poor (hopefully drunk, by now) creature, perceiving a shifting 3D cross-section of a god-knows-how-many dimensional *static* object. There's still motion, for sure - but it isn't necessarily the object that's "moving", is it :) The thing that's actually moving just might be the point of intersection between our... uh, perspective-space and the object, and the "object's motion" is merely a side-effect of us only seeing a limited cross-section of a larger-dimensional solid.

I'm not suggesting that this is the case, but suddenly a photon spontaneously changing into an electron/selectron pair that move away from each other suddenly takes on a whole new... view. Or, the right-hand-rule - an electron following a helical path in an E-field? What if we took our pen, and made it wobble as it moved along? Fun games, regardless of how wrong they are.

It's all about perception, or lack thereof.

What would it be like if we ran our banks the way we run our elections?
I suppose something like this...

Some questions remain in bank audit

IP newswire
Dateline: your town

Another box of money was found in the offices of Central Fiduciary Fidelity Financial Faith and Trust (CFFFF&T) today, as its audit entered its second week. Witnesses said that the box, about two feet high by two feet wide and three feet long appeared to be stuffed full of bills but they were unable to guess the number or the denomination. The audit, which many believe to be unneeded, was called by the managers of a defunct savings and loan in response to the demands from their customers, some of whom claim to have lost their life's savings.

This is the fifth such box identified at CFFFF&T, though there is as of yet no official word on how much money has been found in total. Bank officials issued a statement last Wednesday when the fourth box was found, saying that manually counting the money is a waste of time, but will be done if there is sufficient pressure from the media.

There have been widespread rumours floating around the internet for months, claiming that the nation's banking system is in serious trouble. Many of them point to incidents such as these as supporting their claims. Banking industry analysts however have repeatedly said that it was not uncommon for boxes of money to turn up in various corners of busy banks, and the alarmists who say otherwise or claim that it points to a bigger problem are just crackpots. CFFFF&T President Karl Blackwell agrees.

"They just aren't seeing the bigger picture" Blackwell told Faze The Nation Friday. "Banks are in no way close to collapsing. In fact, many banks are reporting record profits for the tenth year running. People need to just keep making deposits and leave the boring details to us professionals. We professionals? Whatever."

In any case, no one expects the total amount of money found in CFFFF&T's audit to be anywhere near enough to affect the banks financial statements, which were filed amidst great ceremony last Friday at a lavish party held in honor of the bank's current accounting firm, Outron, Rove and Lark.

But extra cash is not the only problem Blackwell has had to deal with lately. There have been scattered accounts of people accidentally depositing more money in their CFFFF&T accounts when they intended to withdraw funds, due to an error in the banks touch-screen ATMs. Blackwell stressed that such minor miscalibrations are to be expected when dealing with complex electronics. "Computers," he pointed out at the time "are only as good as the people who program them and the people who use them. Expecting computers to be perfect is tantamount to expecting perfection from people. I'm not saying it was necessarily user error--just that you can't proof that it wasn't."

And CFFFF&T is not the only target of criticism. Banking industry critics also point to problems such as the recent payday backlog in Ohio, where some banking customers had to wait for up to ten hours in freezing rain to cash their paychecks, especially in poorer neighborhoods. They claim that many customers couldn't wait that long and were forced to leave without cashing their paychecks, and that others who did wait were turned away or had their checks taken from them because they were at the wrong window. Some even go as far as to suggest that this represents an unearned windfall for the banks.

Seasoned industry watchers dismiss such claims as mere speculation. "No one know for sure that people left without cashing their checks," explained one expert who asked to remain anonymous. "They are just basing the theory that the banks somehow benefited from keeping people from cashing their checks on abstruse statistical arguments. There is absolutely no evidence of fraud. We've been very careful about that. Besides, if they couldn't make it that day, there'll be another payday in, what, just under two years, isn't it? They can cash their checks then."

Most people agree with the experts. But not everyone.

Some fringe critics are even calling for a total rework of the banking system, to more resemble the nations electoral process where detailed paper records are kept of every vote and there is an elaborate system of checks and balances. A spokesperson for Piebald Industries, which makes both voting machines and ATMs calls such demands unreasonable.

In an interview with Newsweak magazine, Piebald spokesperson Ryan O'Dear was quoted as saying "A paper trail for every deposit and withdrawal? Receipts? Automatic and transparent auditing? I don't think the people demanding such things realize how much it would all cost," he said. "And given the insignificance of most ATM transactions, it hardly seems worth it. After all, it's only money. It's not like we're talking about control of the free world or anything here."

I just got back from Starsky and Hutch.

Surprisingly funny. I bet the DVD will be great.

Best part was how anyone in the theatre under 30 didn't get about 70% of the best jokes.

Now I'm hoping that they'll make a CHiPs movie. I wonder what other late 70s to early 80s TV shows would translate well into movies?

Oh, and if you're not watching TRIO every night, you're really missing out on some fantastic television.

There's no "Ask Slashdot" topic available for user journals, but I am intrigued by this reader's question, and I thought it was worth a try to tap into the collective wisdom of Slashdot.

Hi Wil,

you mentioned some time ago in your blog that you did a presentation on writing your book(s) using open source tools. Have you posted these slides (or whatever the medium was) anywhere?

I'm asking as I am about to embark on a writing project that will be north of 80,000 words (assuming I get past the 5,000 word 'pain barrier' that killed me last time) and recent experience with M$ Word has, quite frankly, scared the bejaysus out of me.

Anyways, if you get this it would be great to see you share some of your experiences using OSS to write.

thanks
Conrad

[1]http://www.wilwheaton.net/mt/archives/001401.php

I replied:

Hi Conrad,

Sadly, I didn't use any slides . . . that's *way* over my level of preparation for anything I do.

My talk pretty much focused on how I used OpenOffice.org to compose and edit my two current books, and what some of the pitfalls were.

I can summarize briefly for you: OO.o is a fantastic word processing suite, and did everything that I needed it to do. I was particularly impressed by the "stylist" in OO.o, which exists, I think, because they use some sort of XML-ish language behind the scenes. The stylist allowed me to assign something similar to "classes" to diffferent areas of my text, and was extremely useful in the design of "Just A Geek."

The only time I ran into an annoying limitation was moving to and from the .doc format, because OO.o and MSWord don't play nicely in regards to formatting. I worked around this by using .rtf format, when I needed to send my work out to other people (for notes and stuff). There were a few limitations in formatting, but they were purely aesthetic and didn't affect the actual data in any way.

I briefly looked at Abiword and KOffice, and found them both to be well-written and stable, but they were far more limited than OO.o.

In terms of just putting together a manuscript without regard to formatting, you could work very easily with Kwrite, or Kate, the same way that many other writers use BBEdit on the Mac.

When I finally had a finished product that I liked, I used OpenOffice.org to print to a .ps file, then used the ps2pdf13 command line tool to convert it into a .pdf document, which I sent to my printer. I understand that the newest version of OO.o has a very robust built-in pdf converter which makes that extra step unnecessary. I should also point out that converting files to .pdf on *nix always results in smaller filesizes than if you'd done it on a Mac or Windows platform. Hooray for us.

I'll post this e-mail to my Slashdot journal (CleverNickName) and maybe some of the Slashdotters will have good advice of their own to share with us.

Best of luck with your novel. Just go one scene at a time, and you'll be past 5K words before you know it!

Wil

My presentaton was pretty much limited to "I like this, I don't like this, and this thing was cool." I didn't have the time to get into a 1:1 comparison among all the different Open Source word processing suites. Do Slashdotters have any comments or suggestions? I find myself using Kate more and more when I compose weblog entries or shorter columns for magazines and the like. I occasionally use Abiword to compose and format letters and fax covers when time is a factor (Abiword loads much faster than OpenOffice.org.)

You made the top ten list!

No PointsName Hp [max]
1 20342 Morc-Mon-Hum-Mal-Law died in Sokoban on level 6 [max 9].
Killed by an owlbear. - [79]
2 15917 Morc-Mon-Hum-Mal-Law died in The Dungeons of Doom on level 12.
Killed by a xan. - [68]
3 4171 Morc-Wiz-Orc-Mal-Cha died in The Dungeons of Doom on level 6.
Killed by a water elemental. - [59]

It's cold comfort to be three fucking rocks away from beating Sokoban, only to have a fucking OWLBEAR show up out of nowhere, and whack 70 fucking hit fucking points right off you in one fucking turn.

Gods, I love this fucking game. >:-)

RetroCRUSH is a pop culture website run my my friend Robert Berry.

On November 20, 2003, Robert wrote a humorous article called The Worst Sex Scenes Ever: A Look At The Most Unsexy Sex Scenes". On December 30, 2003, his article was stolen by the UK Tabloid The Daily Star. Robert writes, "The UK tabloid 'The Daily Star' printed the same feature, with the same movies I used (even failing to omit a joke entry for the film Deliverance that I also included in my feature). Instead of crediting my site, however, they credited a seemingly fictitious American magazine named FILM. Not only did they highlight the films I mentioned, but they lifted three separate quotes from my article and attributed them to FILM magazine readers who responded to a (apparently non-existent) poll." It was subsequently syndicated to at least 30 other news organizations without crediting Robert, who is the author of the story.

Robert recounts his conversation with Kieran Saunders, the News Editor at the tabloid: "He said, 'Well, if it's on the internet it's up for grabs. You can't copyright anything on the internet.' I told him that was untrue and he then refused to speak with me further, and said all future communication needed to be sent to their legal contact, Steven Bacon in London. I even tried to call back an hour later to speak with the actual author of the piece, Emily Rose, and Saunders answered the phone, stating, 'I told you never to call here again, speak to our legal group' before ending the call."

From bOINGbOING:

Brazil to fingerprint Americans in retaliation for Homeland Security indignities
The Brazilian government has retaliated against a US plan to fingerprint Brazilian visitors to the US by fingerprinting US visitors to Brazil. The judge who enacted the regulation has exempted citizens of countries whom the US intends to fingerprint from the Brazilian requirement, and has had a little Godwin's Law moment in his publicity regarding the decision:

"I consider the act absolutely brutal, threatening human rights, violating human dignity, xenophobic and worthy of the worst horrors committed by the Nazis," said Sebastiao da Silva in the court order released on Tuesday.

How dare they! How dare those ungrateful Brazilians! Don't they remember when the USA saved their asses in that one war? They OWE us! They're acting like the Bush administration ignores silly things like treaties, international law, and diplomacy! Those are just relics of the Old Europe.

I tell you what: if those Brazilians hate America so much, they should just move to France.

Someone left this in my blog. It must be seen to be believed.

The hilarious (and scary) thing is, the dialogue it generates is right on par with the stuff they used to give us to say.

I made it into the Hollywood Reporter!!

It's a very positive article, and it's nice to read something about me in the entertainment press that isn't framed in a negative light:

Wil Wheaton might have become a minor celebrity with roles in "Stand by Me" and "Star Trek: The Next Generation," but he has become a major online star with his www.wilwheaton.net Weblog. So much so that the actor signed a three-book deal -- for books directly stemming from his blog -- with a major publisher.

The first book from publisher O'Reilly & Associates is out shortly and is titled "Dancing Barefoot," a book Wheaton self-published and sold 3,000 copies of from his Web site in four months. Up next is "Just a Geek," which will contain some of his blog writings on the rigors of being an ensign on the Starship Enterprise. The third book is tentatively titled "Wil Wheaton's Website Design."

This is really awesome, because everyone in the industry reads the Reporter. I understand that there's a mention in Variety today or Monday, too, and together they could translate into some meetings for me.

O'Reilly put out a press release to announce my deal with them!

This is pretty damn cool:

Any honest computer geek will admit that his obsessive coding is, at heart, a futile attempt to create a world as cool as those depicted in science fiction. New evidence of the symbiotic relationship between Sci Fi and geekdom surfaced today, as O'Reilly & Associates, the geek publisher-of-record, announced plans to publish three books by Wil Wheaton, blogger, geek, and the actor who portrayed Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation.

"This is a very exciting relationship for me, for several reasons," said Wheaton. "First, I am a huge geek, and without O'Reilly, I wouldn't know HTML from LMNOP. I never would have been able to get Linux running, and Perl would be one of the not-quite-as-good-as-Mrs.-Garrett replacements on Diff'rent Strokes. Now, I'll be able to get my books into more stores than I ever was with my own Monolith Press. I can't wait to see how Dancing Barefoot does when it's got a major publisher behind it."

Wheaton's first two books, Dancing Barefoot and Just a Geek, are almost unbearably honest tales of life, love, and the rigors of being an ensign on the Starship Enterprise. First self-published by Wheaton in May 2003 and available only on the Internet and in select independent bookstores, "Dancing Barefoot" quickly sold out its initial run of 3000. The O'Reilly edition will be available in all major bookstores in early 2004.