Yesterday I read through the intro of Don’t Know Much About Mythology. It posited that one possible reason for myths was for the rich to control the poor. I thought, “Yeah. Makes sense back then with their god-kings, but we’re smarter now.” Then I thought about American politics and realized nothing has changed over the past 10000 years.

By the way, so much of the Christian discourse in America is so far away from the actual content of the Bible that regardless of whether you believe in Yahweh/God and Jesus’ divinity, you should regard most of what you think you know about Christianity as mythology.

I know I’m late to the game on this, but hurrah to JK Rowling for making the Harry Potter ebooks DRM-free! Just because of that, I’ll be sure to buy it this summer! Before I was scared about DRM-issues. I’ve been burned before - I have a bunch of Microsoft LIT books that I legally bought and can no longer read.

The Supreme Court rulings on campaign finance make me think of Animal Farm. All are equal, but some are more equal than others. (Because if money is free speech, some have way more free speech than others)

It’s once again time for my latest Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.

This time from the Cherry Blossom Festival. The blooms were predicted to come early that year, but lots of the trees weren’t in full bloom because of a cold front that came through.

It’s once again time for my latest Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.

This time from our trip to San Francisco for Daniel’s wedding

Only Civ this month as I’ve been focused on my semester work.

Civ V ( 29 hrs):

Mesa Bros:

It was my oldest game that didn’t yet have any war, but Germany broke the peace. In general, my style seems to be OK with AI warfare. Usually I can ramp up my units quickly enough to stave them off until they exhaust their units while I build up my army. However, I’ve noticed a slightly higher aggression rate in Civilization V compared to previous Civ games so I’ve started trying  to keep my unit counts high enough that most civs won’t spontaneously attack me. Didn’t work with the Germans, but after rebuffing their first advance, I may be able to steal a city. Especially since right after they attacked I was able to upgrade my catapults to trebuchets. We’ll see how this goes because at a theoretical max of 30 turns per month (usually because of our schedules I can’t do more than one turn per day and some days we miss turns), I may or may not have finished attacking the first city before April’s up.

Ok, Now you try it.

-Scarlett, handing me her new Slinky

I started 2014 with a bunch of music I’d acquired in 2013, but which I still hadn’t listened to. So I created a playlist with a high weight on unplayed music from Q4 2013 to Q1 2014. I changed my Amarok settings so that instead of populating the next 11 items, it would populate the next 3. That way if I was getting bored with the new music (a lot of which is music I got for free so sometimes it’s awesome (to my tastes) and sometimes it’s just OK) I could switch to another dynamic playlist for a while and I’d just be three songs away from hearing some music I know I like. I also bought an album with 100 of the best Beethoven compositions. However, since I’m scrobbling the orchestra that played it (not the composer), I’m not sure if any of them will end up dominating the list. (They didn’t)

Yesterday, just outside my neighborhood, my Civic reached 100 000 miles. So far the only problem is that the radio’s a bit wonky with the front speakers.

Skip to 28 seconds in. Sure, there are way too many Super Mario Brothers covers, but that theme is amazing as is seeing this performance of the theme on an ancient Chinese hyper flute. The instrument looks like something out of a science fiction movie.