Names have been changed to protect the innocent...

[15:55] blinky: this was unexpected
[15:56] blinky: my CTO and 4 of our employees are recreating our office facilities
[15:56] blinky: in coffeemud
[15:56] blinky: . o O (?!?!)
[15:57] percussion: like a scale model?
[15:57] blinky: yes.
[15:57] blinky: atleast as far of a scale model as a dynamic environment can be explained in simple english text :p
[16:01] eaton: blinky, that's.... rather.... unexpected.
[16:01] blinky: eaton, it is... especially given that they didnt bother yet to modify the base races and classes in the mud as of yet
[16:02] blinky: so i am now logged in, and am an elf mage with his own personal assistant and a CFO.
[16:02] eaton: ...
[16:02] eaton: blinky, that is AWESOME.
[16:03] blinky: the scary thing is
[16:03] blinky: they want it to actually be an official communication channel for end customers
[16:03] blinky: like, 'dun wanna call us, fax us, or email us?'
[16:03] blinky: 'no problem, just log in to our mud, and convince our CTO to fix your transit uplinks over a duel with 2 forks'
[16:04] blinky: i do wonder how that would do.
[16:04] blinky: isp industry is not known for the open mindness and patience of the userbase...

I walked into the living room and found Catherine watching E!, a cable channel whose exclaimation mark identifies it as the most enthusiastic of all content providers. She was watching some sort of 'Girls Next Door' show about Hugh Heffner's girlfriends -- all four of them. Why? To figure out, she said, why a woman would do that

There's a priceless shot of three of them arguing about which Jim Carrey movie to watch while Hugh, nearly 80, watches with a detached and baffled expression. Poor, poor Hugh. You've surrounded yourself with identical blonde sorority girls, and now you must live with the consequences. After watching with her for half an hour, and carefully observing the behavior of the four, I believe there is a simple answer to Catherine's question: these women would not survive in the wild. The aggregate IQ of the Playboy Mansion is hovering somewhere around 250, I think, and that's including Hugh. I'm convinced that there must be full time security people making sure no one jams a spoon into the toaster at 3am.

There are many arguments regarding the pros, the cons, and the meaning of pornography in our culture. I don't want to imply that all women involved in the pornography industry are stupid. I just want to point out, based on E!'s inside look, that Every Time Someone Buys Playboy, They're Interfering With Natural Selection.

This one's all over the place; I won't even pretend there's a coherent theme to tie these bits and pieces together. In the world of politics, Christopher Albritton writes that the Iraqi Constitution situation might not be as grim as initial reports indicate.

so far it's not bad. There seems to be no role for the Shi'ite hawza, women are mentioned in almost every clause that guarantees rights, the court system is independent and liberal. Islam is the official religion and “a main source of legislation,” but religious minorities are guaranteed freedom of worship. However, no law may contradict the principles of Islam, democracy or the rights and freedoms mentioned in the constitution, which sets up an immediate contradiction when you get to the rights of women.

Pat Robertson pissed off almost everyone by calling on the US to assassinate Venezuela's president Hugo Chavez. Media Matters has the video clip of the statements in question. "...I don't think any oil shipments will stop," he said. "...It's a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with." What Chavez needs to do is ditch that oil and get his hands on some diamonds. Then he could count on Robertson's support. It worked for Seko.

My long-neglected personal site Predicate.org has received a drupal-flavored facelift, and a small crowd of compatriots are posting there now. It's fun to see it get off the ground; hopefully some of the other interesting folks I know will filter over there and poke around. I've debuted a couple of interesting drupal hacks on it, including comment threads with inline image uploading, previously impossible with the stock Drupal install. The patches might make it into the next official version of the Drupal core, which is quite gratifying. Whee!

As long as I've been alive, speculating about the end of civilization (and how to handle it) has been a favorite pastime for geeks. Books like David Brin's The Postman, Jerry Purnelle's Lucifer's Hammer, movies like Mad Max, The Road Warrior, Twelve Monkeys, and others all paint grim pictures of a post-collapse society. There's an interesting sub-genre of zombie survival planning, but it's really just one slice of the end-of-the-world pie.

The scenarios all differ -- nuclear war, giant asteroid strike, bioengineered virus, etc. The key, though, is a breakdown of the basic structures we take for granted in civilization and a mad scramble for survival by all the latte-drinking television-watching car-commuting folks that inhabit the first world. This morning, #plastic was buzzing with plans for farming and fortification based on recent news that China is decoupling its currency from the US dollar. That's an ill omen because of our debt dependency on China, and scenario-watchers cite that as the first pebble inthe economic collapse avalanche.

That's not the only plausible trigger event, though -- if there's one thing to love about the twenty-first century, it's the wide variety of doomsdasy scenarios available for modern civilization. No longer dependent on Cold War nuclear exchanges for our fear, we can turn to the collapse of peak oil, exotic mutating viruses, ecological disaster, and good old-fashioned economic implosion.

Almost all of the scenarios, though, boil down to a couple of key points: people will need to know how to grow food, defend their land and food from raiders, and adjust to life without lattes, ESPN, or commuting. The details vary depending onthe particulars of the collapse scenario, but the above three points appear in almost every one.

Being the geek that I am, of course, I'll take the next few days to outlin the scenerios that friends and I have brainstormed about. It should be a boatload of monkey-chuckles.