“Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it’s to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential-as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth. You’ll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you’re doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you’ll hear about them.” — Bill Watterson (via mikekarnell)
(via heyelaine)
If historical cases of hyperinflation — real, and now virtual — have one thing in common, it is the instinct among its victims to blame the symptoms rather than the disease. The Austrian economist Hans Sennholz noted that during the German hyperinflation, “intrigue and artifice” were believed to be at work. Similarly, a handful of Diablo 3 players, frustrated about the decimation of their purchasing power, expressed increasing suspicion of manipulation and conspiracy theories.
[W]hy [are] certain items priced [s]o astronomically high? Many of them are not even that good yet cost 100’s of millions of gold. … I have about 45,000,000 gold saved up [and] check every few days to see if I can get any upgrades that are worth the gold, but … everything is vastly overpriced … clearly controlled by the gold sellers.
…
Remembering that game economies are private and players are voluntary members, there’s no explicit mandate to ensure rigid inflation control as one often sees (however rarely pursued) in public economies. That said, knowing that gaming experiences can be upended by economic missteps, there is a clear business interest for gaming firms in keeping virtual currencies and the greater economies as a whole stable.
from A Virtual Weimar: Hyperinflation in a Video Game World.
Prediction: It will soon be common practice for every massively multiplayer game to have an economist on staff.
Hyperbole Is My Middle Name!: Improv Coaching Etiquette -
I’ve been thinking about making one of these for awhile. This first section is how I think indie teams and practice groups should interact with their coach.
- 24 hour notice for making any changes / cancellations. If you’re cancelling day of, you and your team owe your coach their standard fee.
- 2…
ANOTHER WEIRD PEANUTS STRIP
Maybe I am unaware of something Schulz is referencing, but nothing about this strip makes sense to me.
Why is Snoopy only wearing a hat for this one strip?
Every panel of this contains mystery.
EDIT:
Let’s look at this panel by panel.
Panel 1: Snoopy is not wearing a hat. He is looking at a globe, implying he doesn’t know where “the valley” is.
Panel 2: Snoopy is now wearing a hat. Schulz decided that Snoopy hopping off the top of his house is important action to show, even though Snoopy was not on the top of his house in Panel 1.
Panel 3: Charlie Brown reacts to Linus as if the date, once every half millennium, should be obvious to Linus. “Don’t you know?” Linus is reacting merely to the fact that Snoopy is passing by them, which must happen frequently. He should really ask “Why is Snoopy suddenly wearing a hat? Is it a special occasion?”
Panel 4: If today is the day, then “the valley” which Charlie Brown is referring to must be nearby, otherwise Snoopy could not make the trip in a single day. Referencing the valley as merely “the valley” implies that it is a well-known location. Is there another animal that has this behavior, that Schulz is referencing? If it were once a year, it may make sense, in the way that swallows or salmon or any number of other animals return to a single spot. But 500 years?
Panel 5: There is no new information in this panel. Linus and Charlie Brown are only repeating the same information from Panel 4. Snoopy has not walked far since Panel 3, which would suggest that he is walking incredibly slowly.
Panel 6: Charlie does not respond to Linus. Linus is imagining what this Day of the Beagle scenario must look like. Charlie Brown, however, responds as if Linus said something along the lines of “That must be lonely to go there.” Why is Charlie Brown worried about Snoopy having a good time? That isn’t typically something he worries about with Snoopy. Snoopy seems to consistently find ways of entertaining himself. Was it not fun when the beagles did it 500 years ago?
Panel 7: This is not a punchline. Snoopy doesn’t even express any anxiety for sticking out, which would at least be more Peanuts-y. He simply is asking whether he is the only one wearing a hat, even though he clearly is. Did the beagles agree to wear hats, but then Snoopy was the only one to follow through with it? Why do none of the beagles in the second row and back have bodies? They are just floating heads. Was Schulz thinking about how penguins meet, and how similar they look to each other? Also, they are clearly not in a valley. The only information we had about the location was that it was a valley…THE valley, in fact. This panel might work if every other beagle were drawn realistically, except for Snoopy. Wouldn’t be Peanuts-y, but it would at least lead to something.
Yahoo just bought this post for a billion dollars.
This is from a Howard Johnson’s children’s menu that explained the first 30-45 minutes of 2001, A Space Odyssey.
Kids are smart.
(via Dreams of Space)
Well, this is the coolest thing ever.
As is the other Hotspur.
The Skyscraper Scrappers are in “The Silent City”
JZT and Fe$h wrote a spec script for the Bill Engvall show. (Because, of course they did.) They emailed me to ask if I’d read a part in it. I was told I would be reading the part of “Curtis Retherford.”
This was JZT’s description of my character:
He’s a manipulative man. Quiet. He waits until he sees an opportunity to intervene. He has really been planning to murder the president all along.
SPOILER ALERT: It also contains these lines:
Yup. That’s me.
(This beats out the second-best description of myself I’ve heard in the last couple of days, which was Sarah Durfee describing me and Matt Mayer: “You’re both very picky and detail-oriented, but fine with being told what to do.” Durfee doesn’t follow me on tumblr, so she’ll never know I posted this.)
![fantagraphics:
bobdobalina:
[Peanuts, September 18, 1994]
HOLY SHIT
The tragic origin of Spike. (We’re still a couple of volumes away from this in the series.)](http://24.media.tumblr.com/8bad8bb3aaa6f40b1b32d3356c5d2ae0/tumblr_mmhg1ck5Ey1qirk1ao1_500.gif)
[Peanuts, September 18, 1994]
HOLY SHIT
The tragic origin of Spike. (We’re still a couple of volumes away from this in the series.)
World Of Fantasy #10, February 1958 cover by Carl Burgos