For Viewing Using Eyeballs
Behold! I have located for your edification a variety of works by the Gobelins school of animation, which you may or may not enjoy depending on temperament and cranial composition.
French again, I regret to say. Damn you, Frenchies!
Still haven't gotten my comics from you, either.
I'm not sure what kind of rehab you need if, while pondering Monkey Island 2, something in your head starts chanting "Young Lindy - he was the cabin boy" to the beat of It Dread Inna Inglan.
This Post Is Also Delayed
Inkognito is a game, a game with very cool bits which suffers the unfortunate fate of being based on Clue-style game mechanics (which means the way to optimize the decision making process is very transparent, reducing the game to a mere series of random chances). I am embarking (I think) on a project to make rules which are more fun to play with.
This is as far as I've gotten:
This Post Is Late (But Inspired By Arrianos And The Shout Box)
IV.3. Insignia marches into Kyropolis
Kallisthenes tells us that the following morning was marked by heavy rains and storm clouds. Insignia, however, was impatient and would not delay in marching into the city, which was largest of them and had a higher wall, having been founded by Kyros. It was a city famous for its medical practitioners, the so-called Kyropraktes.
Because the greater and most warlike (and cowardly) part of the barbarian troop had fled into that city, it could not be taken in the first onslaught; wherefore, Aristobulos tells us, Insignia took her robodyguard, her shield-men, and the drunken archers from Hedonia and snuck in through that hole in the wall which had been made if a river should ever chance to meander through the city.
In this second onslaught she was wounded; Aristobulos says by an arrow in the neck. Ptolemaios, however, recalls it as being an anvil from a catapult, which had hit Insignia's right calf. This is Ptolemaios' explanation of Insignia's characteristic limp and unrefined tendency to kick incompetents with the left foot instead of the right.
Approaching the city gates to let her armies in, Insignia encountered the high priest of the city, followed by four slaves dragging a cart with containing a puzzle-box, as wide around as a bull and similarly high. In a shrill voice, the priest proclaimed the prophecy, that no invader should conquer Kyropolis that could not solve the puzzle.
Upon hearing this, Insignia ate him whole.
Kleitarchos claims that feeble cries for help could be heard for several minutes, but both Eratosthenes and those physicians of the modern day with whom I have consulted reject the possibility of such a thing.
After this thing, Insignia kicked the gates open with the left foot, set the troops to rake the streets and walls of enemy soldiers, and ordered the raging pyromaniacs of Syracuse to burn the temples of the ignorant box-worshippers (Insignia herself venerating the mighty barrel). The pyromaniacs, seeking materials for torches, disassembled the puzzle box and lit the bits on fire — and in so doing fulfilled the prophecy, maintains Ephemerídes, who always wants closure on these things.
Thus had Insignia taken six cities and made their inhabitants slaves, in the space of three days.
- So, basically, when scientists describe what the universe looked like ten billion years ago, or when they describe conditions in distant galaxies, they assume that the same natural laws are uniformly valid throughout the aeons and across the light years. But this is just an assumption, and the scientist has no means of testing its veracity.
Billy looked at professor Brainy with large eyes. He could recognize the tone in the professor's voice, that tone it always had when the old man was on the verge of plunging into one of his long-winded arguments, and Billy was eager to accompany him.
- What if the assumption were false? What if the natural laws that are valid here on planet Earth are totally different from those that govern distant stars. Maybe that's why we have yet to come in contact with extraterrestrial life forms; maybe the natural laws of distant planets don't allow life? It wouldn't require more than a minuscule change in the values of some of the fundamental constants of physics to make life impossible.
The professor took a break to take a sip from the glass of water that stood on his desk. His eyes were coming alive with a strange glow.
- Or what if the natural laws have changed over the course of time? Have you ever wondered why, despite ten thousand years of human civilization, it is only during the last few hundred years that we have perfected all the technological wonders that we have today?
Billy was listening intently, but a strange triedness was coming over him. There was a low buzzing in the back of his skull that wouldn't let him focus entirely on the professors words. Some of the old man's reasonings were slipping away from under his feet.
- Or take this old mystery of evolutionary biology; the human species is without question one of the most succesful species in the history of this planet. We have conquered more or less every single land environment on earth, and we have, um...
What was the professor saying? Billy didn't get half the words the old man was uttering. Was he being unusually obtuse, or was Billy just in a stupid mood? He didn't know. Something in the dark corners of his brain was telling him that something was not right, but he couldn't remember what. A bug of some kind was sitting at the professor's desk, but Billy couldn't tell which kind it was. Was it a fly? Or maybe a, wassername, wasp? Shit, what was that old geezer saying?!
- Er... we are succesful. That's the whole point. And it's thanks to us being, um, smart. So if, um, smartness makes you so successful, why haven't there been any more animals as smart as us before? Why don't we dig up the bones of some smart dinosaur from the, whatsitcalled?
Billy got the sense that the professor was coming close to an important point, but he could no longer remember how the argument had started or what it was about.
- The cretaceous! Yeah? Why dontcha? Well, maybe intelligence requires some specific, ummm, some specific set of natural laws that have only existed for... umm... for a limited time... umm... and will some day cease to... umm...
The professor's voice trailed off. He stood up.
- God! So fucking hard to think... need some air...
They boy at the chair saw the old man walk out, and returned his attention to the bug at the desk. It sat there for about a minute, and then it buzzed off.Then the boy got up. He was hungry, but he couldn't quite remember what one was supposed to do when one was hungry.
The day she turned ten, she was walking down the street with her
daddy. "I want that! It's pretty!" she said, pointing to an
ornate old bottle in a window. And since it was her birthday, and
her father loved her very much, he bought it for her. Inside the
bottle there was a genie, and like all genies, he granted her
three wishes. Her first wish was a puppy. It was small and brown
and lovely, and for a few hours the girl was completely
satisfied. Then she wished for a body of gold. The genie, who was
a very old and powerful genie, and who had granted many, many
wishes since the days of old Babylon, said to the little girl: "I
see how it will be. You will spend your last precious wish on
undoing the second, and you will be left feeling empty and
unsatisfied, forever cursing that you didn't spend your wishes in
a wiser way." So the little girl stood a while in deep thought.
Then she wished for immortality, the power to shape worlds, the
knowledge of a thousand gods and the keys to the mirror worlds.
She's been running things ever since.
It is not true that, as has been claimed previously on these pages (or rather, on other pages bearing the same name; for has not the philosopher said that it is impossible to immerse yourself twice in the same newspaper?), that it was young Groats who solved the fundamental problem of the self-propelled automaton – that is, the weight of the fuel burdening the machine so that more fuel is required, et cetera.
How could it be? Have we not ample evidence from sources which must in this very case be considered reliable even though they are no doubt under most other circumstances lying and scheming bastards just like Groats himself – that is, his relatives, who, one would assume, would take every opportunity to glorify (one would say, vain-glorify, if there was such a word) the achievments of said Groats. But instead they claim that after a scant few years of primary education – surely another piece of evidence, if one was needed, against the ridiculous claims with which the reader is no doubt already aquainted but which will nevertheless shortly be related – he spent the rest of his dull and uneventful life within the walls of the family home (surely a rapidly disitegrating hovel!) and came nowhere near (because of the great distance merciful Geography put between that place and the one not yet named but, by the generously provided context, easily recognizable) the Institute.
It is certaily not true that Groats, or somebody claiming to be him, walked into the Institute with a slight limp, dressed in a great dark cloak and with a hat at all times covering his head and obscuring the features of his face and, in a voice somewhat lacking in vocal range and intonation but nevertheless clearly audible, dictated the solution to an astonished Third Secretary who was, by chance, having his meager breakfast on the steps to the First Floor. On my honour as a scientist, it never happened!
Professor E. C. Frankenhofer (retired)
I Almost Forgot The Week Thing Already
So.
I ordered three Cités Obscures albums this week. Well, not bad, huh? Not bad, Clocky? you might say. And well you might, because those are some mighty fine comics as far as I'm concerned.
Only, they've not been properly translated, not all of them anyway (I understand Brüsel and The Invisible Frontier have passable translations), so I got them in French. (Which, as it turns out, I can read without much trouble without having bothered to learn how — in fact despite having actively tried not to learn the Snootybastard tongue.) Mind you, the writers are Belgian, but so are all French comickers.
If you bother to read parentheses, you may already know I'm none too fond of France and its inhabitants. I used to feel that there were only three good things to come out of that wretched abyss: Verne, Dumas and Asterix. The tally is building up rapidly, however. Brotherhood of the Wolf! Mechanical Dream! And now, the Obscure Cities!
I actually think I can hear Gérard Depardieu laughing now, a deep, pleased »a-honh-honh-honh« toasting my slow defeat.
Couldn't you have written in Flemish, bastards?!
Creationists assert that the creatures of earth have been designed by a conscious force (i.e. God), rather than having evolved through the process of Darwinian natural selection. This is patently ridiculous for several reasons, but there is one fact that more than any other once and for all disproves the notion of intelligent design:
The absence of flying whales.
I mean, seriously! What kind of designer would create an entire inventory of lifeforms only not to include flying whales?
There are other compelling arguments against creationism, like the lack of hyperintelligent octopedes or the existence of Clockmaker, but I think I've made my point.
The world was coming to an end. The gilded emperor was raging. 'This is ridiculous!', he roared at noone in particular. 'We are humans! There is no technology that is beyond our scope, no aspect of nature we can't tame. Shall we let such a puny thing as the Eschaton come in our way? We must toil ceaslessly to find a way of stopping this madness!'
The silver emperor was more laid-back. 'Relax', he said to his colleague. 'Chill! Smoke a joint! The world is ending, and there's nothing we can do about it. Might as well learn to enjoy it.'
The gilded emperor mobilized his vast empire. Every man, woman and child worked like an ant to stop the Eschaton. The silver emperor, on the other hand, did nothing. He just chilled on the balcony of his palace, sipping gin&tonic and letting one of his favourite concubines give him a back-rub.
In the end, both died. Of course they did. It was the end of the world. You can't stop the end of the world, silly!
Now, you might think the moral of this story is "Hard work doesn't pay off. Don't try to change your situation, it won't do you no good!". If you do, you're stupid. This story has no moral. It's a historical account, not some fable, you moron!
