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Netflix does what many have been recomending
Lots of technologist have been suggesting that the entertainment industry should view illicit Internet sources of their products as indicative of unmet demand. Netflix is doing just that. Senior executives from Netflix have explained their method for choosing which programs to license for the service: they buy the rights to the most-pirated shows in each…
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Nice Try, Pharoah (520 BC – 380 AD)
Once again we made a choice to go with a new guiding principle in our governance. This time it was Meritocracy. By rewarding those who do the best work, our citizens become happier. A gloriously large empire such as ours takes time to link up all its cities. In 360 BC the main Chinese road…
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A Living Wage? What a concept!
I heard about this on Boing Boing and then a month later on Marketplace: a sushi restaurant in New York that has eliminated tipping. Sushi Yasuda decided that instead of making people sit there at the end of the meal and agonize over how much to give the wait staff, they’ll just pay them the…
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I often feel like the main character of this short film
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Solo Empire, Pyramids, and Republic (1600 BC – 1300 BC / 2560 BC)
If I may step out of the fictional narrative mode I’ve been using for a few weeks now, I have to say that it’s a shame these two games are my first Civ games in somewhere between 6 months and a year. Unfortunately, I didn’t listen to my brain for the first half dozen or…
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Survivorship Bias and the Brain
Earlier in the year I came across an io9 article around 15 science fiction and fantasy novels that were rejected by publishers. The implication, of course, is what fools those publishers were – look at how many sales these books got and how how popular they remain today. Some of the books included The War…
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My favorite Hitchhiker’s Guide Quote
“And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting on her own in a small café in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all…
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I Think You’re An Ignorant Savage and New Social Policies (2620 BC – 1960 BC / 3280 BC)
A bearded leader of some so-called civilization met with our Beneficent Empress, Wu Zetian. At the time we did not know where his cities lay. Savages attempted to attack Beijing, but we destroyed them by bombarding them from the city gates. We shall soon have to send an army to destroy their camp. We finally…
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Teenagers, Sex, School Sex Ed, and The Church
When I became sexually active (which I’ll loosely define as when I started trying to kiss and touch girls), here’s what I’d been told: School: there are tons of diseases you can get so don’t have sex Parents: If you have sex, make sure you use a condom to protect from aforementioned diseases as well…
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Science and Female Sex
First of all, it’s a complete accident of timing that this post appears next to tomorrow’s post. I wrote tomorrow’s post about a month before I wrote this one. With that out of the way, let’s talk about one of the most interesting things I recently learned about the fairer sex and, well, sex. What…
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Memory Wipe: A Stroll Along Pop Culture Memory Lane
I’ve blogged in a similar vein before, but it’s really neat to come across AV Club’s Memory Wipe. Someone (or a group of writers) who seems to be about the same age as me, give or take a few years, is taking a look back at the pop culture of our youth to see if…
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Meeting the Neighbors and Reaching the Coast (3220-3100 BC / 3700 BC)
One of the ancient ruins explored by our soldiers had a group of uncivilized survivors. Seeing the awesome nature of our forces convinced them it would be in their best interest to join the Chinese Empire. Their extra labor was quite welcome. Our warriors trekking to the north found two barbarian encampments. In order to…
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Baltimore Comic-Con is this Week!
Here’s a photo of Stan Lee, the man most responsible for modern comics. See more photos from last year’s Baltimore Comic-Con here. Sadly I won’t be able to attend this year due to a family commitment.
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Three Female Pin-up Artists
Boing Boing linked to an article about three women who worked in pin-up art. (While most of the images are tame enough to view at work, there are at least three drawings of fully nude women in the article, so it’s up to you) I was fascinated by this because it seems odd that women…
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August 2013 Video Games
Civilization V (31 hrs) – I’ve been playing with Dan and Dave via Giant Multiplayer Robot. You can follow posts about the game with Dave here. You can follow the posts about the game with Dan and Dave here. There will be a long overlap between those two, however, the one with Dave started a…