"The thing I don't know is: if Kaylynn had failed and Ben had died, would I have just exited without saving and maybe tried again someday, or would I have saved, and played her from here on with the consequences of that tragedy?"

This reminds me of the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Real Life." The holographic Doctor decides he wants to better understand the Human Experience (a common desire among androids, holograms, ex-Borg, etc., in the Star Trek Universe) and creates a family on the holodeck. A perfect, cheery family practically right out of a 1950s sitcom. B'Elanna objects that he's not really learning much out of this, and offers to tweak the program to make it more realistic...

Voyager attracts a good amount of criticism from Star Trek fans, much of it deserved, but this episode is worth watching.

Edited by author 07-08-2005 12:43 PM
"Hard to get into writing humorous or ironic or intellectual or trivial, or even deep and insightful, log entries in the shadow of people being blown up in London."

At least you're in good company: "[T]here is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre." -- Kurt Vonnegut, in Slaughterhouse Five

I must concur in part and dissent in part with your earlier reader. Tea is tannic, but not bitter, when made properly. However, tea is often over-brewed, and when over-brewed, tea is both tannic and bitter.

As a point of comparison, red wine is tannic (some types more so than others; Cabernet Sauvignon tends to be especially tannic) but never bitter (unless something's gone horribly wrong with the wine).

Let us pause for a moment and remember Plurp, who has been constantly attacked by eagles for a year now.

"There has a sequence of photos within it in which a female otter is tied to a bed and an otter in a leather mask breaks open oysters on her bare stomach."

The Story of Otter?

Edited by author 03-02-2005 06:32 PM
"This is a directory of 2160 online papers on consciousness and related topics."

Curse you. Philosophy of consciousness is one of my recent interests. I've finished Dennett's Consciousness Explained and am about halfway through Searle's Mind. Now I need to take a year off of work so I can read through all these online papers.

My understanding is that a trademark is for, well, a "mark," most often some kind of identifying logo, while a design patent typically covers an entire object. I'm not sure I'm explaining this very well, and yeah, it does seem like a rather arbitrary distinction.

Which is of newing year. Which is of exploring. Which is not here.

Yeah, in general I think the artistic potential of the HTTP 403 status code has been underexplored.

Inspired by "sexygrrl404," an idea for one of those customized 403 pages. (I originally thought of this for a 404 page but realized it worked better for a 403 error.)

A 403 error page which plays a snippet of En Vogue's "My Lovin' (You're Never Gonna Get It)."

I are Chuck. I are not yrrah. I are not there. I are not of the boatswains?

Who are chuck? Who are harry? Who are not here. Who are not of the smelling.

Small web! I've contributed quite a bit of content to the TV Tropes Wiki you cited. Including the original B5 entry. (Of course, it being a Wiki, I can't take credit for the entire entry as it stands now.)

Recommended kids' book: Coraline, by Neil Gaiman. I recently read this (and by "read," I mean here "listened to the audiobook") and enjoyed it very much. Very creepy, and very good. In addition to it being a good book on its own, there's two other benefits you may be interested in: it qualifies for your "Vasty Houses" list (at relevance level 2, or possibly 3), and it ends up with a very positive view of Coraline's ordinary, rather humdrum real parents.

Knowing of your interest in the strange response of some humans to some words, I thought I'd draw your attention to this AskMe thread.