In order to ensure that only the best blog entries are posted here there is a rigorous approval process and extensive bureaucracy in place, which unfortunately results in many of the lesser-entries not making the cut and the blog not being updated all that frequently. Actually, that was a total lie, but it sounds cooler than the truth, which is that I’m just lazy and never get around to finishing or posting most of the entries that I start to write. You didn’t actually believe that whole thing about the approval process, did you? I mean, most of the stuff that gets posted here is barely readable. Anyway, like I was saying, most of the stuff that I start to write never gets posted, and a lot of it just ends up sitting on my computer until I come across it again and delete it. A lot of those entries are not really time-sensitive, so I don’t see any harm in posting them now, even though the two following blog thingies are a few weeks old at this point. Wait, there is harm in posting them? Well, I’m doing it anyway...

Want Citizenship? Buy me a Pint.

So, it may shock some of you to hear that I occasionally look up random stuff on the internet. I know, I know, the tubes are supposed to be used for serious purposes such as online banking or relentless advertising and I should really take my crazy escapades elsewhere, but sometimes when in a procrastination-induced state I can’t help myself. I had one of these random spurts the other night while I was talking to Chloe, and we somehow got on the subject of citizenship tests and over the course of the night took sample US, Canadian and British citizenship tests that can be found online. I thought that the US test was the most straightforward, with all of the questions focused on American political history or governmental structure. The Canadian test included a number of similar concept questions to the US test, but also had a few questions about indigenous people in Canada and even included one question about what should constitute a good environmental policy. It’s almost like Canada doesn’t want to pollute as much as other countries. I know, crazy right?

We did well on both the US and Canadian tests (and I’m sure that has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that one of us is American and the other is Canadian), and then decided to take our chances and try out a British citizenship test, figuring that put together we could equal the brainpower of one barely competent individual. Now, the previous two tests were very politically and policy-oriented, but if I didn’t know better I would say the UK test was not to become a citizen but a bartender. Apparently, over there it is not important for potential citizens to know the basic functions of government, but it is absolutely essential to know what to do if you ever spill some poor guy’s drink and get in a bar fight. The origin of Santa Claus (or Father Christmas, as our British friends apparently call him) is also information that is indispensible if you live on the other side of the pond. Needless to say, it became apparent after taking the test that neither of us are ready to apply for British citizenship. Maybe someday in the future we’ll have the courage to brave the (apparent) land of bar fights and roaming holiday figures.

Tampons, Estrogen, and Halo

Some of you may know that I am slightly obsessive about Wikipedia. It’s not that it’s amazing; it’s that it’s so amazing that it makes almost every other site on the tubes obsolete. I spend an obscene amount of time looking up random stuff that has little to no relevance to anything (see Mermaid problem) but is nevertheless hilariously entertaining to read. Rarely do I actually look these kind of things up from the get-go, instead coming across them randomly during my Wikipedia vagabonding. Chloe keeps telling me that I need to keep a record of my surfing so we can see just how big of a tangent I can get on when looking up a topic on Wikipedia, but I’ve always been too lazy. Last night however during my nightly searching she came up with the related theory that Halo is always only six or less clicks away from any given topic on Wikipedia. To test out this six degrees of Halo separation we decided to look up some topics that had no relevance to Halo or video games, starting with fudge. Sure enough, the difference between fudge and Halo was only five articles. We tried other random articles and got equally-effective results. Most of the time the key was to find a link in the initial article to the United States or another geographical topic, since from there you can quickly get to the article for Kirkland, Washington, which in turn links to Halo (Kirkland being the location of Bungie). Is it a cheap way of doing it? Perhaps, but it works.

Eventually, we tried out estrogen’s connection to Halo, and were shocked to find that it could be connected in only four steps. Next up on the list were tampons, which was still only five steps. I won’t post the exact process of getting from those topics to Halo, but if you want to you can try it for yourself, and I guarantee it works. Chloe used these results to argue that girls are truer gamers than guys, since testosterone was six clicks away. She must be right, since this was a foolproof empirical study.  

I began to think of more disturbing or disgusting articles to continue to test the separation theory, but Chloe’s evil eye and the funny feeling that I was about to be smacked compelled me to move on. Nevertheless, it was an interesting experiment. 

You may have noticed that this blog is slowly drifting away from strictly gaming-related topics to a cornucopia of random crap that one could call ‘uninteresting’ at best, but that’s the way it goes. What can I say? I'm expanding my horizons.