Allamorph

[quote name='Botar'][color="#008000"]Geese,....[/color][/quote] [center][img]http://www.calliebowdish.com/Birds/CanadaGeeseCOPR111905_2228.jpg[/img] [left][font="Calibri"]Also, that was quick.[/font] [/left][/center]

[FONT=Calibri]She's right, you know. I am terribly fond of sunshine and bubbles, my favorite animal is the unicorn because it is so dazzlingly white and pure and unreachable and if you have no idea what sarcasm is then you should retire from the human race because sooner or later I'm going to piss you off and you're going to think it is my fault. It will be, of course.[/FONT]

[FONT=Calibri]It ticks me off when hosts of shows on the freaking Food Network can't be bothered to pronounce something as simple as [i]pico de gallo[/i] correctly. I could understand if it was something like Etruscan, but we live north of an entire continent and a half that speaks dialectual variants of the language. It's by no means dead, and by no means difficult. And people wonder why Americans are stereotyped as ignorant.[/FONT]

[font="Calibri"]The has been enough sap in the past page and a half of this thread that I could have made enough syrup to eat six dozen Belgian waffles and still been able to call my plate Lake Butterworth's.[/font]

[quote name='Humaru']Hey OB leaders...I was wondering if there were gonna be any other new skins for the OB website.[/quote] [FONT=Calibri]As has been said a few times elsewhere, new skins are in the works.[/FONT]

[quote name='Ravenstorture']50?!! That's around the hottest temperature recorded in Os-trayl-yah! How are you still alive?! Oops, gotta go... it's lunch time![/quote] [FONT=Calibri]That's Fahrenheit, hun. 50 Celsius would be ridiculous.[/FONT]

[FONT=Calibri]I am tempted to call copyright infringement on your avatar.[/FONT]

[quote name='Tonks']If you haven't already, you should read his book [b]On Writing[/b]. It's a "memoir of the craft," which means its a memoir of his life plus a lot of great writing tips.[/quote] [FONT=Calibri]It's on my To-Buy listâ??if only just to see what he has to say.[/FONT]

[FONT=Calibri]Voluntary hyperventilation is actually a semi-decent way to allow yourself to hold your breath for just a little longer than you really can. Tricks your mind into thinking you have too much air. You learn things like this when you live next door to the World Record holder for Living Human Crotch Stain.[/FONT]

[quote name='eleanor']Did you watch Battlestar Galatica?? Caprica was slow to begin but it picked the **** up, as my friend put it. And if your answer to the first question is no, watch it immediately.[/quote] [FONT=Calibri]I'll tackle BSG 2.0 if you'll tackle Farscape. I almost said Babylon 5 but that **** is pricey. And I don't know if it's readily available in libraries/rental stores.[/FONT]

[quote name='Raiha'][font="Times New Roman"][size="3"][color="#9932cc"]I try to drink water, but driving stick and unscrewing caps of bottled water is hard work.[/color][/size][/font][/quote] [FONT=Calibri]I just leave the cap unscrewed and stabilise the bottle between my legs. Should be easier for you, anatomically speaking.[/FONT]

[FONT=Calibri]A person died this past week at Bonnaroo. His internal temperature was 108. I'm pretty anal about staying hydrated in the summer, except for two things. I don't like being outside at all in humid weather (gets harder to breathe, and I don't breathe enough as it is), and I don't like stopping what I'm doing every ten minutes to take sips of stuff. So I'll go for about an hour and a half or so doing whatever I need to do at the time, pit stop hard for Gatorade and water, and then head back out in it. Incidentally, prepping with one of those 12oz "shot" bottles of Gatorade (come in twelve-packs) makes a heck of a difference.[/FONT]

[quote name='chibi-master']D'aaaw, you're even more of a softie than Allamorph! [/QUOTE] [font="Calibri"]You are very easily swayed, I think.[/font] [QUOTE=Magus]I do know I'm gonna stay away HP and Windows Vista.[/QUOTE] [font="Calibri"]Gateway gogogo. And Vista should be fine now that most models come with enough standard RAM not to die horribly while trying to support the graphics. Also I miss Dead Like Me. It's really too bad that Sci-Fi shows so much crap lately that all their good shows fizzle pathetically into obscurity. [/font]

[FONT=Calibri][color="#8b0000"]Mr. Maul[/color]'s current avi-ban is quite interesting to me.[/FONT]

[quote name='Cat']2. Raiha tells me that one of the many translations for the word 'Otaku' is 'House.' If OtakuBoards were a house Raiha would spend all of her time in the [b]Kitchen[/b].[/quote] [FONT=Calibri]I think you are going to die. This message comes with a pre-added 15% gratuity.[/FONT]

[FONT=Calibri]Speaking of smilies, my old () face is now ruined by some horrid-looking yellow ping-pong ball in the middle of it. Is there a way we can disable auto-conversion of text to smilies for individual posts? Or is that something that is applied to the entire user-view of the site? If it's the latter then nevermind, I can cope.[/FONT]

[FONT=Calibri]It won't be. That's why it's called 'change', bucko. ()[/FONT]

[quote name='CaNz']...i dont condone making fun of Allamorph [size="1"]he dislikes me enough already![/size][/quote] [FONT=Calibri]If I disliked you, I would have told you. Besides, I make fun of everyone, moreso if I enjoy their company, and if I couldn't take a little haranguing coming back at me then I'd need to have my ego deflated considerably.[/FONT]

[font="Calibri"]H'okay, reading list update. [b]Turn Coat[/b] was, as I anticipated, rather enjoyable. Not much else to be said there; regardless of the skill with which it was constructed, it is a book (and series) for pleasure and not for profundity, so I won't prate on about it. Plus it's book Eleven in the series, so saying too much of anything could tick people off. ^ ^ Concerning [b]The Dead Zone[/b]: This being the third book by him which I have read, I have come to believe firmly that Stephen King is a man unsatisfied with merely creating characters that live and breathe, but who insists on making them as real as your best friend. I came to this thought after reading only [b]Duma Key[/b], but after [b]The Green Mile[/b] and now this book I am certain of it. I have not once come across a spoke line or internal thought or action which felt to me deliberately placed to move the story in the 'proper' directionâ??at which point I usually mutter irritable phrases like "oh come on" or "are you serious" or "okay okay enough already". And in addition to that, of the three that I've read only [b]Duma Key[/b] came the closest to what might be called a happy ending, and oddly enough I count it the weakest of the three, although that's somewhat like saying Beethoven's 2nd Symphony is his weakest; it's still fracking Beethoven. [b]The Hunchback of Notre Dame[/b] is an extremely tough nut to crack. First off it was published about six years before the beginning of the Victorian era, which succored my nemesis Charles Dickens, and it is accordingly pithy. I mean, [i]ventre Dieu![/i], it does go on. As I was telling [color="#da00ad"]Kei[/color] just last night (I think), it seems to be the style of that time period to hide whatever story might exist in the author's mind inside a myriad of intellectually stimulating but completely unnecessary dissertations about, for instance, a garbage pile in the street gutter, which is only important because one of the characters leaned against it in order to feign a drunken stupor and is never seen nor heard (nor smelt) from again. Victor Hugo devoted an entire chapter (eight pages of small-print) to describing every facet of the cathedral of Notre Dame which had not been previously explored a hundred pages ago when he first took a half hour in introducing the reader to itâ??and then devoted another chapter (twenty-five pages) to a detailed description of 15[sup]th[/sup] Century Paris. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing. I mean, if I ever want to know anything about 15[sup]th[/sup] Century Paris, I know which book I'll start my referencing with. According to the appendix (which was cut off, to my great displeasure), Hugo spent three years researching the physical setting for his novel, and afterwards was basically The Authority on the matter, so intensely did he hound after the material. But, for the love of Godâ??and this is nearly the same issue I had with Dickensâ??I just wanted the story! =P Thankfully, when Hugo [i]did[/i] get around to storytelling, and rather unlike Dickens, I feel, he was magnificent. [spoiler]It also wasn't a happy ending by any means, and reminded me very much of Shakespeare's tragedies, except more poetic.[/spoiler] The degree of intricacy to which Hugo wove elements together was quite clever, and although I feel his verbosity made a few points here and there somewhat transparent and would have benefited much from a less Victorian approach, but it never really detracted from the machinations of the story itself, which rather impressed me. The book was a ridiculous undertaking. All told, I think it took me three, maybe four days to finish. But it was decidedly worth the endeavor. My only regret about it is that the last part of the appendix, containing the last two pages of the afterword and the entire bibliography (in which I was quite interested when I spied it in the chapter listings) was missing from the book. I don't imagine the remaining three will take me nearly as long to complete. Plus I don't have a week utterly consumed by first my grandmother (who deserved the attention) and then Bonnaroo (which was very very hot) preventing me from reading. =P[/font]

[FONT=Calibri]Every now and again, clicking the "latest post" balloon on the right will not take me to the latest post but will plop me on the first page of the thread. It's not consistent, so I'm not sure how to replicate it. Incidentally, is there a way to get back the "latest unread post" option. Hunting backwards through the new posts isn't technically difficult or strenuous, but it does take up a good bit of time.[/FONT]

[quote name='James'][font="Palatino Linotype"]But acknowledging the value of competition does not automatically mean that you're a loser if you are in second place. I know that you guys were really specifically talking about sport, but I raised this because I suspect that the dismissal of competition and its real value seems to be part of a broader attempt to wrap the current generation of children in cotton wool as much as possible. It brings to mind insipid (and apparently recent) terms like "marketplace of ideas", which can be a pretty unhelpful euphemism for "all ideas are equally valid, even those without any supporting evidence or logic". We certainly don't do very much to give students the ability to discriminate between reasonable ideas and junk ideas if we keep pushing that line.[/font][/quote] [font="Calibri"]Yes and thank you. I tend to think this has come from a growing inability to distinguish in-the-moment the dual meanings of a pair of words ('right' and 'wrong') and the gradual corruption of the meaning of a third ('judgment'). To wit, telling someone their opinion is 'wrong' is no longer understood as 'incorrect' but as 'evil'â??as if it is somehow morally 'wrong' to have an opinion at all, which is obviously not the case. I mean, the only people who have no opinion about anything are either dead or irreparably stupid (i.e., a living vegetable), and I refuse to believe anyone is devoid of the capacity to form an opinion, whether it's correct or not. The other option, of course, is that it is somehow morally 'wrong' to [i]be[/i] incorrect, which again is obviously not the case. To me, the only part of having an opinion for which one might at all worthy of being disparaged is insisting on [i]remaining[/i] incorrect in spite of obvious proof. The word 'judgment' is currently (and erroneously) synonymous with 'condemnation'. 'Judgment' actually has no negative meanings, and is defined as[size="1"][sup]*[/sup][/size]: [list=1][*]an act or instance of judging.[*] the ability to judge, make a decision, or form an opinion objectively, authoritatively, and wisely, esp. in matters affecting action; good sense; discretion: [i]a man of sound judgment.[/i][*]the demonstration or exercise of such ability or capacity: [i]The major was decorated for the judgment he showed under fire.[/i][*]the forming of an opinion, estimate, notion, or conclusion, as from circumstances presented to the mind: [i]Our judgment as to the cause of his failure must rest on the evidence.[/i][/list]...and is actually synonymous with [i]discernment[/i] â?? a faculty which is [i]prized[/i], rather than frowned upon. A judgmental person is capable of making judgments about situations. And again, that should apply to anyone living; if you don't make judgments as you go through each day, you might as well be on life support in a hospital. It is not morally wrong to be ignorant or lacking in experience. (Hell, if it were, it'd be morally wrong just to be two years old.) It is not morally wrong to be [i]literally[/i] wrong. You can't learn unless you fail. And often you can't know you've failed unless someone else shows you so. The problem is that no one wants to say so because they never know when someone will descry them for being 'judgmental' when they're only trying to provide illumination and clarity.[/font] [size="1"] * Definition taken from Dictionary.com[/size]

[font="Calibri"]The only pointless part is this:[/font] [quote name='Anyone']I love to argue.[/QUOTE] [font="Calibri"]There is no purpose to recreational arguments. Therefore they are pointless. [/font]

[quote name='CaNz']Borderlands' final boss [spoiler]Destroyer from the Vault[/spoiler][/quote] [FONT=Calibri]Seconded, and not just from a difficulty standpoint, either. It's like the story took a ten second awesome boost and then ran out of gas. I was all excited after Baron Flynt because the game was throwing something tactically different at me and I was having to adapt on the fly with less-than-ideal weapons at my disposal, but the sections following weren't as long or as difficult as I was hoping. [spoiler]And then we reach the Vault and I get all excited again for some intrigue concerning Steele and then she's stabbed like Steve Irwin in reverse and all of a sudden we're fighting Cthuthlu's face? And that's it? End of the story, play it again or go to Zombie Island? Way to rush the climax, there, guys. =/[/spoiler][/FONT]

[FONT=Calibri]The new Messenger system makes things very interesting with game mechanics in mind. Hunh.[/FONT]

[quote name='Vicky']It's not called Soccer it's called football anyway =p. 'Cause you kick a ball with your foot.[/quote] [font="Calibri"]It's not called football, it's called fútbol, you English prick. =P[/font]