Hey Ben,
Ever heard of this stuff:
http://www.gametab.com/jump.php?89462
I had no idea people were making mods for Starcraft, though, it makes perfect sense. Know if these are any good? I like epic story-driven games of any kind.
All posts by cmgp
Hopping mad…
Mark, way to get the site back up. I’m loving it.
Spring has sprung in Boston-hitting 85 on Monday. Sadly, since then it dropped 20 degrees on Tuesday and another 10 today. Oh well, anything is better than 40 degrees. Potted some flowers on the patio over the weekend. Good, clean summer fun: marigold, nicotina, and something else that is supposed to have the color “blue Hawaiian”…
Schrag, did you catch that Red Sox game last night? After trying to get into the Bruins (only had a few days for that) and watching the Celtics give it up last night, that leaves the Red Sox as the team to watch until the Patriots get rocking this fall. I’m down with the Cory Dillon trade. He is definitely a question mark, but I think he’ll bounce back from last year’s injuries to rack up some yards for the home team…
Schrag, where’s the review of that dessert buffet? I need to know if it’s any good…
Radiohead
For all of you Radiohead fans, the UMASS Drumline has recorded it’s own arrangement of OK Computer‘s “Paranoid Android.” It’s worth a listen (or two)…
Yo!
Thanks for bringing the blog back up Mark. Don’t sweat bringing back all the old content; I am sure you are plenty busy with other things.
Congrats on the glorious victory, Melhus! How long did that take, having to play 20 games?
MIT IVC Wins NECVL Championship (in consolation bracket….)
MIT’s Intercollegiate Volleyball Club won the New England Collegiate Volleyball League “B Flight” championship at Fairfield University this past weekend. We entered the tournament ranked 9th (of 20) and finished in the same position by beating UConn in two games (denying them an opportunity to win another championship this weekend!). On Saturday, we beat Maine and Sienna in two games. We also played the number one seed UMass Amherst and eighth-seed Army very closely, losing in three. Sunday morning, we were dismantled by Northeastern (in two) in a cross-over match that sent us into “B Flights.” We then rallied to beat Southern New Hampshire and Providence College in three, before taking UConn apart in the finals. IVC brought only six players, so we played a significant amount of volleyball (8 matches, 20 games). We also overcame a bad habit of losing our first game in every important match (except UConn) by ten points.
Personally, it was the best weekend of volleyball I’ve ever played, but today, I feel like mush.
Name in the Hat
a friend requested the rules so this is what i wrote him:
N.I.T.H. (I like the abbreviation) does indeed involve teams and a time clock. you partner up (sometimes we break up “couples” to make things more fair) and a round consists of one partner drawing names from the hat for one minute. so another person needs to keep time.
**basic rules and guidelines** (boy, I’m gettin’ involved now. I should probably start capitalizing.)
*Each player writes, legibly, 5-10 names on uniform pieces of (recycled) paper. The number depends on how many players total there are and how long everyone wants to play. I like to pick a theme for myself so I can pump out names quickly – famous Marthas, actors who’ve costarred with John Cusack, etc. Not necessary, but helpful for speeding things along when you have perfectionists and drunks in the crowd.
*The names should be of single people (not groups), either real or fictional, that one believes more than half of the people in the room have heard of. Bad examples are “The Beetles,” “Max Weber,” and “My neighbor, Harry.” Try a specific Beetle and Max Weber only works with sociologists.
*If some explanation seems necessary to distinguish a name, put it in parenthesis below the name. That stuff may be given as a clue during play.
*Fold the papers the same way so people can’t tell which ones are theirs. Put them in some kind of hat-like vessel. Like a hat.
*Draw numbers to find out who goes first. Find two volunteers to share timing.
*Decide how many rounds will be played. The rounds look like this: #1 say anything but the name. Sing, gesture, and talk really fast trying to get your partner to find the right association. You may not spell things out or say any particular letter. You may not say the “name rhymes with something” but you may say “it sounds kind of like that thing that does this thing…” #2 use only three words – hopefully memorable words used in round one. This includes “the” but excludes “ummm.” This is where more gestures, humming and grunts become useful. #3 grunts and gestures only. Any memorable gestures from previous rounds are especially useful. Many people break into Charades in this round. That’s fine, but it is also fun to stay unstructured.
*Partners alternate the jobs of guessing and drawing names from round to round.
*The guesser must say the complete name as it is written on the paper.
*When the timer says “go” the drawer starts drawing names. Each one guessed correctly goes in a pile by the partners. If the name in play hasn’t been guessed when the time is up, it gets folded and put back in the hat.
*The rounds are over when the hat is empty. Each team counts their pile of names. To continue to the next round, refold the names and put them back in the hat.
Tips for giving clues: Break the names into smaller parts. If you have Stewart, say the first syllable is thick soup and the last is stuff to put in museums. Think outside the hat.
Ski Cabin
We had a good time last weekend up at the Reed Ski Cabin. Diana and i drove up and hung out with good old george! Made a fire, cooked ribs, played poker, ping pong, watched a movie, chopped wood, played around in the snow…it was great! Here’s a pic of gwu and his $2 donuts that he gets from the huckleberry inn. Don’t worry, he gets them for free..part of the perks for working there!
Tough act to follow…
Schrag, I hate to post on top of your dad’s amazing essay, but I guess someone has to eventually do it. Why not me, the resident jerk? So, I just survived a five-day visit with my mom and sister in Boston. Here are the four of us out to dinner on Saturday night with Katrina-bo-bina. We had a good time together, even though I had to sleep on the floor the entire time (boo-hoo, poor me).
Looking forward to “The Return of the King.” In fact, I just mowed through the trilogy to brush up on the original story. I wonder how far into the “after party” Peter Jackson will take it… Speaking of after party’s, I still haven’t seen “Revolutions.” Are there any opinions out there?
Finally, does anyone else think that things are kind of strange these days? Strange weather, strange news, strange celebrity behavior… The whole Paris Hilton sex tape insanity, the white-gloved wonder molesting (?) little boys, tree-thieves… On CNN this morning, the coverage kept going between civil disobediance in Miami and news crews outside of a Santa Barbara police station. In California, there was nothign to see. In Miami, half of the “mob” was TV cameras and reporters. Some days, I think I liked the news better when it was things that have happened, not things that are happening (or not happening)…
column
Hi all. I just found this file on my PC. It’s a column my dad wrote for the Bee back in 1991. I think it’s pretty self-explanatory. It’s probably my favorite piece of prose and whenever someone tries to impose their version of “patriotism” on someone else (which happens a lot these days), I always think that my version of patriotism was defined in large part by this column.
ANNIVERSARY
THIS IS the story of a boy – he was not quite 10 at the time – who arrived in America 50 years ago tomorrow.
He was born a German Jew, and his story was fairly conventional for those years. He had fled with his mother, by train and foot, from Nazi-occupied Belgium by way of France and Spain. There was a narrow escape crossing into France, where they were taken off one train at the border; a railway engineer who, for a cabbage of francs, briefly stopped another train in the yards outside Amiens to let them off just before it reached the Gestapo checkpoint inside the station; a walk in the half moonlight across the demarcation line between the part of France that was then occupied by the Germans and the part that was then still controlled by Vichy.
At the demarcation line, where there was a fence, they had heard the police dogs and the voices of the patrol, but they never saw them. (Later, when he read in his history classes about escaped Southern slaves who were pursued by men with dogs, he remembered what his dogs sounded like in the night and thought he knew how those slaves felt.) After they arrived in Marseilles, they went from consulate to consulate and waited in the anxious lines to get the visa for Spain, the visa for Portugal, the transit visa for America. (In Lisbon, they met his father, who had escaped from a French internment camp. He remembered him saying he hoped the papers would be in order so that the Americans would not yank them off at Ellis Island and deport them.) There was nothing in those lines but the hope of America.
BUT THAT’S only the background. The real story begins with the boy’s struggle, after the victory of their arrival in New York in June 1941, to make himself an American – first by make-believe, by trying to disguise himself as anything but German, and then, under the disguise, making himself into what at first he only pretended to be. Because nothing, not even the escape, was harder or more important to him than becoming American, he would never understand how others could take their citizenship lightly or treat their freedom so casually.
The coming of Pearl Harbor was a great blessing for him, for it made Adolf Hitler, who was his enemy, America’s enemy. He had seen and heard the Stukas and Messerschmitts in action in France and Belgium before Americans even knew the names, could talk about them with some familiarity and thus, at the age of 11 or 12, could make himself part of the war effort, and thus the nation, by proxy.
It was all work and, with it, a lot of pain: the funny clothes he wore, the mistakes he made in English; the sports, customs and idioms he didn’t know; the taunting from other kids and sometimes from teachers. He knew that to become something one had to give up being something else, but that didn’t lessen the desire to be accepted.
Because Hitler stripped all Jews of their citizenship, he had arrived as a “stateless person.” After the war – after Israel was founded and the Germans were making amends – he had the odd choice of becoming a citizen of any one of three states. Still it would never have occurred to him to choose anything else or hold anything in reserve. He had lived in three countries and gone to school in three languages, and America, even with its stringent demands, offered better terms for being the things he wanted to be than any place he could imagine. Not surprisingly, he would also become extraordinarily angry when his adopted country betrayed its promises, as it would sometimes do. It would always be a very personal thing.
Later he would come to know that the process of assimilation was far harder for people, many of them born here, who, because of the history of slavery, or simply because of their looks, could not disguise themselves as he had. How important it was, therefore, that judgment should not be based on looks or color of skin. He also came to understand why Hispanics or blacks wanted to preserve pieces of their own culture – as did Italians, Irishmen and Greeks. But it would always be incomprehensible how some could, at the same time, be so indifferent to the common political institutions and cultural traditions, most of them inherited from Great Britain, without which that pluralism would never be tolerated.
THE BOY, of course, is now a man. He understands that 50 years ago he rejected things that he didn’t need to give up. There was the picture of his late grandfather Ludwig, looking like the Kaiser himself in his spiked World War I helmet: How could he have accepted such a thing then? There had even been uncertainty about Schiller and Goethe and Beethoven. But he also understands, as some still don’t, that preservation of one’s roots has to be as selective as rejection. Does anyone wish to replicate the Mexican police system, Ethiopia’s government, Japan’s racial attitudes or Saudi Arabia’s civil liberties?
In the second or third generation, there is often a search for the old roots and rituals and customs. The children of Abraham and Naomi, named Shelley and Marshall, name their children Rebecca and Jacob; there are trips to the old country; the picture of the grandfather in the spiked helmet becomes history rather than embarrassment.
But usually the search is firmly grounded in the new roots, as it has to. The word American that comes after the hyphen is more fundamental than whatever word comes before it. People have tried to go back, but like the boy who arrived 50 years ago, not many really want to live where they, or their parents or grandparents, began. Those who go back to Italy or Germany or West Africa discover how American they are. And to search for a third choice is to search for what never was or can be. It is the pursuit of a shadow.
Um, my computer feels dirty now.
I totally agree with you Mark about the scientific method and all that. And I think the scientific illiteracy and the kinds of movies which do well in America both have their roots in the whole lowest common denominator syndrome. In fact, I pretty much agree with everything you said, now that I think about it. It’s just I am touchy about the whole argumentation style where someone tries to blame video games for making people violent, because the whole idea of them seeing violence so much desensitizes them. I don’t believe that about video games, and I don’t think that movies actually change their audience to make them more vapid and ignorant. I do suppose that the fact that dumb movies make a lot of money does lead to more dumb movies, but the people who go see them are dumb before, dumb during, and dumb after the movie and would be like that without those movies. I guess maybe we agree on that too… it’s hard to tell from your post. Anyhow, the end result is that my pops wrote for a porno mag and I’m gonna go see that “weather is bad” movie.
P.S. Hot beards site, Melhus! I’ll add it to my facial hair bookmarks directory.
P.P.S. Ha! Not one dirty link!