Yikes

By now the takedown of Megaupload.com is old news. Never mind that there were files on there that weren't current movies as the Feds/Hollywood believed: most of the files at Macintosh Garden and Retromags were there, and now all that lost material must re-found and re-uploaded...if ever. One thing that is certain is the countless man-hours of people uploading those things there.

And that was without SOPA and PIPA, which Congress thankfully shelved. This also means that Lamar Smith, the Congressman who created SOPA, will probably lose this November, which means he might lose to a Democrat. (No great loss: he seems to be a RINO...what Republican could ally himself with left-wing Hollywood? I smell corruption)

I was doing online homework and seeing if Java was Universal (it was--the online homework's help page was somewhat out of date...possibly dating back to 2006!). This disturbed me:

Trip Generation

In the book, SimCity 2000: Power, Politics, and Planning Revised Edition, which is a wonderful book from a bygone era when Prima strategy guides were far more than essentially a GameFAQs guide with pictures, an interview mentions Trip Generation, in which Fred Haslam (co-designer of SC2K) receives a book called Trip Generation. According to Haslam, Trip Generation "is over a thousand pages and weighed more than both my cats. And it was nothing but graphs and numbers."

In my college library, I found a copy of Trip Generation, 5th edition, which either changed the page thickness since the edition Haslam received (likely in the early 1990s), or something because even though it has over 1500 pages, it doesn't weigh much (less than my adult cat at her weakest point). So, what is it? It measures, I think, the time of driving time and what type of trip (stop vs. destination) all with hundreds of graphs and frightfully specific "Land use" types, everything from a Racquet Club (462) to a High School (530). There's a difference between "Movie Theater without Matinee" and one with, and between a Supermarket and a "Supermarket, Discount". This being 1991, there was no "Supercenter / Discount Store With Supermarket" or even "Hypermarket".

There was a table of shopping centers and who stopped there on a pass-by trip or a destination (a study) that included some bygone names like the original Shoppers World and Manalaplan Mall. Both of these malls were gone even 12 years ago, though there were a few malls that are very much alive and well today (even a Kmart in Dover, Delaware, though the late 1980s was a very different time for Kmart). The book was extraordinarily confusing and would be a mess to fully implement in an early 1990s computer game (especially since all the commercial buildings in SC2K were more or less indistinguishable). I was going to attach some pictures to give you an idea on how weird this book is, but I ended up not taking, somehow, the picture I wanted to take (showing a typical page, in which there's an incomprehensible graph about something involving square feet as well as some chart), and instead took a picture of the wrong page. I have two pictures, however: one of the index (this doesn't have everything, though, it skips a lot) and one of the lists at the beginning (which has some of the stats of the main book, however, none of it lists the actual locations in which studies were done)

Stolen content frustration

Today was the first day of classes. Nothing too hard, ate at a Chinese food stand on campus, talked with people, overheard conversations (like someone calling "Statistics" as "Sadistics") but the really frustrating thing was going online to possibly update my local blog, only to find that some unscrupulous spam site/blog stealing service called "Kalibooks" had stolen v4 of the Road Rename list I was planning on updating and was apparently getting Google hits (stealing mine). I had sent something to them, but I doubt it will do anything. Something to keep an eye out for (I should probably contact other bloggers, maybe someone will file a DMCA report), but not enough to lose sleep over.

Hostess bankruptcies and soda mixtures

The other day I hypothesized that perhaps the bankruptcy of Hostess Brands will cause the 2012 apocalypse. Sure, Hostess Brands has gone bankrupt at least once, and the company said the production of their deliciously unhealthy products will continue. But sometimes companies that file Chapter 11 die. Sure, most airlines filed for Chapter 11 after 2001 and live on, but Borders filed for Chapter 11 in February 2011 and closed before the end of the year. So, what if Hostess Brands files for liquidation, and Twinkies and others disappear permanently because the bakeries close? Then, people start mobbing stores for the last Hostess sweets. Every Walmart, grocery store, and convenience store gets raided, and people start hoarding them, stealing them, or killing each other for them. If there's two-packs of genuine Twinkies in a vending machine, pull out those quarters. If it's been sitting on a Kmart shelf for years, it's fair game: those things last longer than the plastic around them anyway. Eventually that will lead to the world being thrown back to the Stone Age. How it goes from missing snacks to collapse of civilization, you tell me, but hey, it could happen.

Also in terms of food, today, while eating at the University "Commons", a dated establishment located in a lobby connecting four dorm buildings together (and I know it's old: the tables were black with multi-colored triangles), I created what I consider a new soft drink mix: Big Red and Dr Pepper, giving it the name "Red Pepper". I can't tell you the exact proportions, but it looked good, the bubbles on the top resembled mixing Cherry ICEE with Dr Pepper ICEE, one of my all time favorites.

New Semester, New School, New Blog Concept

I haven't been updating this blog lately. Mostly, it's been playing out like "Whatever doesn't fit in Facebook, other blogs, or other forums" and that ends today. What replaces it? I'm not sure yet. I already revived Two Way Roads for one last post, and I may do more of the type. First, even though I've designed a prototype that may work, SimCity 4 stuff is BANISHED from Carbonizer, and Pseudo3D's SimCity 4 will be revived as an HTML page. Carbonizer! has gotten a mild name change (no exclamation point, for starters) and a new theme (light blue? meh) I don't know what the future holds, but it probably won't have any daily-running comic strips as proposed, or angry political rants, which is a good way to drive out potential readership. Neither have which have happened, and probably won't.

I can't make promises on what will happen, but Carbonizer is ready for the future!

Liquor stores and elementary schools

DISCLAIMER: This blog post is primarily comedy/satire and serves as mostly to point out things that we may be blind to based on preconceived notions. I feel that to-be-mentioned undeveloped land will probably not be an elementary school or liquor store

I was pretty depressed recently to see an elementary school so far south of town in what was until relatively recently, a rural area.

And given there is undeveloped land nearby, I sometimes wonder if they'll place an elementary school near me. Alternatively, it could be another outpost of a liquor store, which thrive because grocery stores cannot legally sell liquor without a special license that forbids under 21s from going in (some allow them to be accompanied by parents, some ban them outright). And we all know that liquor stores and elementary schools cannot be near each other.

Here's how it's better to have a liquor store near you than an elementary school.

1. Elementary schools generate a ton of traffic both in the morning and the afternoon, and parents often do rude things on the road to get their Special Snowflake to school on time. Believe me, I've seen it. And unless the school is really small or it's near stoplight-controlled intersections, it might back up for at least a half a mile.

2. You'll never be able to utilize an elementary school. Unless you have a child that fits in that spectrum, locally, it's K through 4, it's just dead weight. Conversely, a liquor store you COULD use, and unless it's small and seedy, you can find gourmet food there. At the very least, you could use it for cooking your own gourmet food (the ones that require high proof alcohol, and usually trace amounts at that).

3. You'll have to keep moving if it's an elementary school. For example, unless you're inebriated or under 21, a liquor store is okay to browse in or even look as you go by. You can window-shop to see if they have a tasty microbrew, or just admire the beer signs they have up. An elementary school on the other hand, if you idly watch kids in the playground, even if you have no bad intentions, and one of the "guard teachers" notices you, congratulations! You may have just earned your description in the local news, and now the police looking for a "potential pedophile".

4. Near schools, you'll probably run into a School Zone, even if you aren't near traffic. This isn't bad when it's local traffic, but if it's a large road, then expect to get knocked down at least 10 miles per hour, if 15. And because these things are on a timer, not when anyone is active, the thing just blinks all day (sometimes even on holidays), causing frustration to innocent drivers like you. Why? It's For The Children, of course! And, if you're unlucky enough to live near it, you'll be running into School Zones and parents, every weekday except for the summers.

5. The authorities are in the wrong place. In larger liquor stores, usually there's someone at the door to check IDs, to see if that guy with peach fuzz is just a kid or a 21+ customer who can't grow a beard yet. That same guard, while not a police officer, will probably make sure Joe the Homeless Alcoholic doesn't panhandle customers, because they've got a business to run. Alternatively, in elementary schools, they have real police officers inside, but it's usually Officer Friendly teaching kids to not to do drugs (in some cloying, condescending way that probably does more harm than it helps). Meanwhile, when teachers leave to go home (usually late at night), there's probably not a security camera, much less a uniformed officer, to prevent teachers from getting robbed (my 4th grade teacher was robbed in the faculty parking lot).


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Of course, for a community as a whole, elementary schools are far more beneficial (and not all liquor stores are created equal...), but in the short-term, it's a bit of a toss-up.