Happy Birthday, Shizno!

You are 7 years old today (Jan 18).

Obligatory baby picture:

New Scientist describes Climate Change Dragons

In the article “The road to climate hell”, University of Victoria (Canada) environmental psychologist Robert Gifford writes:

“A few years ago I began researching this problem [of why humans are not taking enough action to decrease emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases]. If so many people are concerned about the climate, why aren’t more of them doing something about it? [...]

It quickly became apparent that many of the barriers to action are not structural, but psychological. They are what I call the Dragons of Inaction. In mythology, dragons take on a wide array of forms, and Asian dragons can even be benevolent. However, as a Westerner, I use dragons as a metaphor for these obstacles because Western dragons always seem to be blocking humans from some goal or aspiration. Perhaps another less obvious reason for this choice lies in the world itself. these barriers are a “drag on” progress.”

===

and I’m like =>:-[            ]

It’s like this guy read my posts.

The current science on climate change is that it’s not only upon us, but that it has crossed a barrier to it being irreversible. Gifford goes on to name the dragons (including such terrible foes as Ancient Brain, Ignorance, Optimism Bias, Perceived Inability and 29 other guardians of inaction), and tell you how these dragons force humans into thinking they’re ineffective, lazy, uncaring, greedy and unrealistic.

I’m proud to say my kind does a fantastic job, in both senses of the word ‘fantastic’.

Gifford concludes his otherwise lovely treatise on dragons with a bit on how to slay them. I wouldn’t bother reading that bit. You’ve been doing very well ignoring the aerial rubbish you’ve been emptying into the air: why start being responsible for the enormous effect people have been placing on the planet for the last 100 years? I wouldn’t give it more than a passing thought while you’re idling your car in traffic today.

Welcome Home (feat. Eltanin)

https://soundcloud.com/oroboros/welcome-home

Well… Arse.

I didn’t know Monty Oum (really KNOW him) and had never had the pleasure of meeting him. No big thing, given I’m roughly 12,000 kilometres away from Austin, Texas. But I certainly appreciated his creativity, his cool and his craft.

A few years back, I started leading a team to create a little machinima production which turned into an elaborate monster that’s still being developed :) One of the things I wanted was little songs in it, much like how modern medical dramas like “House” and “Grey’s Anatomy” have those songs that epitomise the themes of the episode. One track done with DaftProdigy was about a moment when the show’s heroes crash in a mysterious land in very tense circumstances. It’s a song of awakening… and its haunting repercussions.

So this short song is not at all about Monty, and reading anything into Monty through this song would be delusional. But that said, it is a sensitive track (or at least, that was the goal), and Daft and I would like to acknowledge his creative gifts to us all by dedicating this unreleased track to his memory… AND his creative legacy, may it continue.

PS. Sorry about the lengthy lead in, but there’s an action sequence this track fades up under… kinda important…

Happy Birthday, Shiznoes!

On Jan 20, 2009 'The Shizno' podcast (formerly 'The LFTO Shizno') was launched on www.podbean.com. (It's now hosted on Talkshoe, with a front door on Tumblr here: shizno.tumblr.com/ ) It was about 2m30s long, just had myself and a certain time-warping Alpha-fragment co-hosting, and featured the first .m4a podcast on Rooster Teeth, incorporating time-synced images. The podcast grew out of a desire to express the Let's Figure This Out Networking group's factoids and opinionoids on Red vs. Blue, in a different environment. Since then the format of the show has undergone several cast and format changes, but has remained solid to its prime mandates: 1) Have fun 2) Begin to exercise critical thinking skills 3) Defeat any critical thinking with left-field tangents and wild speculations 4) Know Your Show 5) Defeat 'Know Your Show' trivial buffs with left-field tangents and wild speculations 6) Have fun The Shizno only runs during active RvB seasons, because we've learned from both the LFTO Thread (long since abandoned by most of the regulars brought together by Season 6: Reconstruction) and the LFTO Networking Group that off-season discussion turns bitter, negative, repetitive and gruelling. So happy birthday, to everyone who has ever taken part in the Shizno! (I know who you all are: I keep meticulous records). We're 6 this year... so we're half as old as Red vs Blue itself, AND WE'RE CATCHING UP. ...Bugger off Xeno, we've so got this.

Life on other planets? Deal with ours first...

...Oh. Greetings, influx of new... followers? Try not to disturb the stacks of coins. Yes, that includes pinching them. I write short essays about people in much the same way people write essays about gorillas. Like this one...

I am an ardent follower of your exploration of outer space. I worry, however, that you might find something.

Humans have never been comfortable living with each other, let alone other life forms. It's always been 'investigate, then subjugate or die'. Humans have only recently uncovered evidence that their closest relatives, neanderthal man, who lived beside them in Eurasia, didn't just die out during an ice age some 40,000 years ago, but were absorbed through interbreeding.

But... what leads two species to interbreed? Homo sapiens was on the rise. They had numbers. What prompts a rising species to start interbreeding with an 'oddly different' one? According to the evidence, neanderthal man had a larger brain and stockier build, probably stronger, but less agile and adaptable than its spry cousins.

One mechanism that brings similar species together, indeed, even the same species separated by a few thousand years of environmental isolation, is slavery. Many modern European conquerors know all about that. Kidnap some victims, force them to do your work for you, and on occasion, when drunk on power, take advantage of them.

I say "slavery", but that's high pejorative of course. If it's a completely different species subjugating another, well, that's just "domestication", and that's COMPLETELY different.</sarcasm>

I, for one, hope to embrace other sentient, curious lifeforms from anywhere and revel in the possibility of exchanging knowledge for mutual benefit. Humans, on the other hand, have very different motives. First Contact between exoplanetary species will not be conducted by hippies. It will be done by armed warriors, after the hippies have spent far too short a time studying the E.T.s and the business moguls have spent... well, close to everything.

But as much as I enjoy watching the progress of space exploration, I do wish people would get their own house in order first.

Oh yes: Happy birthday rane0 :)