Compromise and Conceit
Infernal adventuring…
Category: Nerd Culture
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The Guardian today has an article on gold-farming in China about gold farming in Chinese labour camps, which claims that prisoners in labour camps in China were (are?) forced to play computer games at night after they had spent the day at hard physical labour. The prison then sold the products of their labour to…
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It has come to my attention recently that some people consider Shrek to be a model libertarian, because he sets up his home in a swamp and defends his private property against all comers. Of course, in the sanitized version of this private property myth he doesn’t repeatedly sign and then break treaty agreements, kill…
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Everyone knows that Leonard Nimoy’s greatest achievement was his participation in the music video to The Bangles’ song Going Down to Liverpool[1]. This song was actually written by Katrina and the Waves, a British band, and covered by The Bangles in 1984. I have been a big fan of The Bangles ever since I first…
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Discussion of whether Jesus was a Vampire has taken an inevitable turn towards discussion of the Big J’s phylactery, the piss-christ. Now, I’m not a big fan of the piss-christ, I haven’t seen it in person but it doesn’t seem like good art and it doesn’t seem like a good contribution to the debate about…
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Rugby league is the one that’s like American Football played backwards, not the one with the awesome haka, i.e. not the one that’s actually engaging to watch. Rugby league is also a game that’s been plagued by image problems, and is suffering from onfield and off-field violence, both by players and coaches in the professional…
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Brian Murphy at The Silver Key has been running something of a series of posts on realism in fantasy, and his mild objections to it. I have been commenting occasionally in mild support of this trend, because I think that the fantasy genre is very conservative and needs to have its perspective broadened and conventions…
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On Tuesday I start working at the Tokyo University Department of Global Health Policy as an Assistant Professor, which means that on Sunday I am moving from Steamy Beppu to the City of Light. I will also be returning to full time work after a year working part time and being a househusband. This means…
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NASA today reports the initial results of the Kepler mission, showing that there are potentially millions of habitable planets around stars in the vicinity of Earth. The resulting menagerie of planetary candidates reads like a Traveller or Spacemaster planet generation table – it includes planets bigger than Jupiter, one planet with the density of sytrofoam,…
Compromise and Conceit 