Percentage who believe that the tenets of of Astrology "probably" or "definitely" have some scientific truth: 48 -- Harper's Index

(Percentage by which these two groups overlap: 99% -- Flux, speaking from his arse.)

Daily Rambling
Ooh, bad Flux, 5 days w/o updating!  I really need to get this damn thing online, so I'd have more motivation/pressure to get up a daily, or at least weekdaily update.  I do have an excuse though, as I'm typing this on my new computer. 1.4GHz Athlon, 512MB RAM, GeForce 2, etc.  Not state of the art, but for $850 it ain't bad.  At least there's one thing that seems to be cheaper, and that's computers.  Can get something now for less than $1000 that wasn't even possible a year ago, and would have cost $10,000 if it had been.

Unfortunately it's not a good excuse, since I got it yesterday late, and the old one still worked fine, and in any event, there's 3 or 4 days before that without an update.

Lots of work on the D2 site, and trying to do some Warcraft 3 testing, though that's only really become possible now, with the new computer.  Old one was 533MHz, 256MB RAM, and a Voodoo3 3500, and it was totally unplayable.  No more than 4 or 5 FPS, super jerky, even with everything turned down on detail levels, 640x400 resolution, etc.  No fun.

New one plays the game super smooth, though I don't really enjoy it.  Somehow it's lacking in the visceral enjoyment or slaughter and mayhem that Warcraft 2 gave me.  I like the concept of the game play, much more active and on a smaller scale than most RTS games, where you just want to amass the biggest army possible to control.  War 3 has many design features that force you to use smaller parties and worry more about individual unit survival. Anyway, I have no desire to discuss Warcraft III here; if I wanted to or had anything enlightening to say, I'd do it on a forum or player diary about it.

This may get the award for the least original rant of the month, but it's been clogging up my ideas page for a week, so here goes.

Olympics coverage in the US is always awful.  Tons of cameras, good angles, complete jingoism.  Figure skating they show basically everyone in the competition, but other sports, you'll get the US guys, and maybe part of some other country's competitors, if they do well.  I couldn't watch anything of the Olympics last time, from Oz, since it was so horribly packaged, with every single event showing some long, sentiment-dripping portrayal of the one US competitor who might have some hope in hell of finishing 10th, if all of the Europeans and Asians tripped at the starting spot. Even mainstream media idiots noticed it eventually, and there were jokes about how every single one of the US athletes seemed to have overcome a horrible childhood illness and been raised by wolves after their parents were killed in a barn fire.

The only event this year I've watched more than a few seconds of was the men's snowboarding halfpipe.  I love snowboarding, halfpipe especially, it's great in the Xgames on ESPN.  The Olympics would figure to have the best in the world, and they had a great run, enormous pipe, so huge airs.  There was a qualifying, which figures to be mediocre, with the best guys saving it for the finals, and lots of less quality guys crashing and burning, or just mediocre'ing.  They showed nothing from that, which is sort of a shame, but you figure most people aren't real into Snowboarding, so what can you do.

However in the finals I'd like to see all or most of it.  The are 12 finalists, 2 runs each, and a run takes like 30 seconds, so they could effortlessly edit it down and show every single run and even some reaction crap and scores after each run, in what, 30 or 40 minutes?

It's on for nearly an hour, and NBC shows 9 full runs, 7 of them by the 4 Americans in the finals.  They did show part of a 10th run, but it was the other one by an American in the finals, one on which he lost it and nearly crashed, and they showed him flailing for balance about 3x in slow motion replay, so it was probably longer in actual air time than the full runs.

They did have somewhat of an excuse, being as the US guys won all three medals, but I'd so much prefer to see the actual goddamn event, rather than just the Americans, with stupid interviews and commentary over it. 24 runs, we get to see 9 of them, and the only reason we saw anyone but Americans was because the other 2 were riding near the end of the finals, and that let NBC show the Americans who were in first and second looking semi pensive as the other guys rode, trying to beat their scores.

And it wasn't even edited well, the US guys they'd show 30 or 45 seconds of them standing still, pre-run, and then 30 seconds of them looking up into the sun at the scoreboard after their runs, waiting for scores to appear.  At least they didn't do any heartwarming bullshit about how some guy's dog was hit by a snowplow when he was 8, and how that turned him to snowboarding and it was always his dream to win a gold medal for Rex.  Though I'm sure they would have if they'd thought of it.

Virtually all of the events are like that, the US coverage is the US athletes, and maybe the winner from Russia or Norway or wherever.  Events the US doesn't win in are hardly shown at all, since god forbid we enjoy athletic competition and striving, unless someone from our country is going to win it.

Perhaps NBC is right, and the average American viewer is so stupid and small-minded that they'll only watch a sport if they have someone to root for from their country.  But I sure hope not.

I remember the 84 Olympics in LA, and watching most every day for hours, when I was like 13.  IIRC they showed almost a live feed, every competitor, every event, and it was fun since you got to see the build up, see the good and the bad performances, so you could compare the two.  Of course I was a kid then with nothing better to do than watch 8 hours of TV a day, I certainly wouldn't sit through that now, but it would be great if the network showed all of the good performances, and edited them down, to cut out the chatter, the waiting around for scores to be posted, the guys warming up pre-event, etc.

Sometimes I'll catch some of it on Mexican TV here, and even though I hit mute it's much better.  (And mute on NBC isn't a bad option, with Bob Costas' squeaky voice on half the time.  He's tolerable doing news, unlistenable play by play, when he gets excited and sounds hoarse.) Univision shows the whole thing, replays of crashes, better camera angles, and not all the overproduced schmaltzy crap we get spoon fed on US TV.

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