The Three Laws Of Idiocy

First Law: An idiot may not improve their life or, through inaction, allow their life to be improved.
Second Law: An idiot must obey any advice given to them, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
Third Law: An idiot must protect their own ignorance as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Idea: Terminator Time Travel Rules

Rules:

# All travelers must be covered in organic material. This means that any clothes or weapons the traveler is carrying will be destroyed.
# The destination date must be a whole number of years before or after the current time.

How to win:
Get future gun and dead dog.
Put one inside other.
Send dead dog back through time, then yourself.
Re-acquire future gun.
PEW PEW PEW
Win!

Fiction: A Chip Off The Old Block

Issac first thought about the possibility early last November, watching a bunch of MIT geeks combine two duplicators together in order to copy their Thanksgiving turkey. If you can combine two duplicators to copy a turkey, how many would you need to copy a human? To copy yourself? Another you, to deal with all the rubbish stuff, like putting out the rubbish, leaving the real, true you free to focus on the things that truly matter, the stories to read and play and dream..

The procedure on their website seemed simple enough: it didn't touch the actual duplicating circuits, which merely needed connecting in parallel. The main engineering problem would be making the boxes fit together to be big enough to hold him, and enlarging the particle intake. A more pressing concern was cost. In order for the Issacs to fit into the copyboxes, twelve duplicators would be needed. Twelve very expensive boxes. One was affordable, but twelve? Where would he find the money?

The answer came to Issac in a very disturbing dream. Rice on a chess board, towering above him. Pyramid schemes, elevating those at the apex to the heights of wealth. Bacteria, duplicating themselves and spreading across the screen. Rabbits, multiplying like, well, rabbits. But where's the rice coming from? The pyramid scheme collapses when there's no more schlubs at the bottom to con. Bacteria will expand only so long as there's nutrient. And one rabbit on its own won't do much, but two...

As soon as he could the next day, he rushed to the computer and ordered two duplicators. The installer had never set up two machines in the same building before; what's so important that you can't carry it upstairs and copy there? On the other hand, it's his money to waste so why worry? One in the kitchen, one in the basement, a copied cuppa and then off to the next appointment.

The next few months were gruelling for Issac. Dismantle the second duplicator, study the pieces, determine how many are needed, and run them through the kitchen machine. Painstaking, tedious work, with a few mistakes and singed fingers, whilst the basement machine grew in size. And then, trying to figure out little improvements, like a delayed-start timer, and handles to the inside of the boxes.

And then, just as quickly as it had started, it was finished. All that remained was the testing. Issac crammed the copybox full of a week's shopping, found the copy button looking quite insignificant attached to this behemoth, and pressed. Five minutes later, it pinged. Issac opened the second copy box and saw another week's shopping. It worked!

He couldn't wait a second longer. All the shopping wass shoved into the kitchen; the only things to remain were a bottle of sparkling wine and two glasses. Issac set his watch for five minutes, input a ten second delay on the machine's timer, and pressed the start button again. One Issac hopped into the copybox, lay still, and waited.

Light! Light everywhere. Light suffusing his entire being. His instincts overrode his mind as he put his hands over his eyes, only to realise that it wouldn't help; somehow, the light was coming from inside his own eyeballs. No chance of looking at the watch. Just try to focus on breathing, pray you're not blind forever, and wait for the machine to finish...

After six eternities, the light faded with a muffled ping. Issac threw the lid off the box and clambered out. His eyes could barely focus, and the world was dark, blurry shapes slowly congealing into recognisable structures. It was fifteen minutes until he focused on the two glasses on the table and realised. The other box hadn't opened.

Issac slowly walked around to the second copybox, took a deep breath, took off the lid and looked down on... Issac. There he was, same hair, same moles, same t-shirt and jogging trousers, same stains. And very, very still. No pulse. Issac went over to the table, opened the wine, poured two glasses and thought about what to do with his identical corpse.

20min Fiction: Multicoloured Pencil

The multicoloured pencil skittered across the page. Currently it was in a yellow and green mood, the writing flowing onto the page promising the stories of spring. The blue and purple leads held back, not wanting to ruin the author's current sunny disposition.

It was a day when everything just clicked, the author thought. A spring day, with the just-opened flowers waking the world from its wintry slumber, and the spring-coloured pencil writing a springtime story of abstinence, growth and chocolate.

But then the reality of spring hit. Bees. Bee stings. Pollen. Sneezes. Everyone around you sneezing. Hot, sticky days. Boiling-hot buses.

Being stuck on a boiling-hot bus on a sticky day surrounded by sneezing, stinging bees.

The pencil scrawled on, in purple and blue.

Mass Effect 2: Finale thoughts

Total spoilers below! Don't read if you haven't yet finished the game, yet care about the outcome! Also, don't read if you don't care about the game at all, since it'll make no sense to you.
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No, but, serious.
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This is mainly to get my thoughts down on pixels about that ending. Firstly, my decisions.

Imported my 'toon from ME1, female soldier Paragon, and kept to that throughout.
Fully upgraded Normandy, apparently. EVE Online taught me to armour tank. And shield tank. And, in a surprising turn, gun tank.
Tech Guy? Legion. D'hoy.
2nd team leader? Garrus. You know he'll get that shit done.
Biotic peep? Jack.
Escort the crew home? Grunt.
Final party? Legion, Jack.
Save the bad guy's toys? I've played 2 games being goody-two shoes. Heck no.

Got full crew survival. No romance, though: I was hoping for Kelly. Obviously, that fell through. Instead I look at Liara's pic all wistful like. And there was me thinking I was on a promise with both Jacob and Garrus. Mordin even blew me off, in an excellent bit.

And now, the future. I'm not too bothered about any disadvantages my methods might have created going into number three; surely they'll have to design the game to be winnable from the worst position, rather than telling some of their fanbase they played two of their games that they paid hard money for all wrong. Suspect the rachni'll feature heavily, as will the newly good geth. Also, the third game better live up to its promise. ME1 was good. ME2 was brilliant. I sincerely hope ME3 continues the trend.
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And so, this blog. I'm pretty sure I've bleeped up any chance it had at #oneaday status. Now the question is, do I get back on the horse and attempt daily posts again, or save it for when I've got something I really need to express?

"Time will tell. Sooner or later, time will tell." *plays Hellmarch.mp3*

Terrible Idea: 2010progressbar

Create a new Twitter account, called "2010progressbar".

Divide the year into 100 equal chunks. Nice and easy. Enter "1/1/2010 00:00:00" into an Excel sheet, drop down and add 3.65 days to the above cell, then fill down to calculate all the other percentage points.

Somehow set the Twitter account to tweet "The year 2010 is now 10% complete" when the year is 10% complete. (Saturday, 6th Feb, 12 noon) Repeat for every per cent.

Become scarily aware of the constant, persistent passage of time.

Spotify playlist: “Got to have faaaaaaaaaaaith!”

Still in blog coma land. To tide you all over, here's a link to a Spotify playlist I made based on this article on The Onion's AV Club. Sadly, I could only find fifteen of the twenty-six songs in the article. If you manage to find more songs from that article on Spotify, please leave me a comment below.