First, I’ll let you get up to speed here, as well a short summary. A Lagrangian Point is a point where you can be between the Earth and the Moon and not have the pull of either body’s gravity take you to them. There are a handful of them in the Earth-Moon System, and they are not unique to Earth either. Anywhere there are orbiting bodies, there are these gravitational “back-eddies.” These Lagrangian points are cool because you can just sit there and be pulled along with the Earth and Moon and not have to worry about falling to either of them. They each pull you an equal amount and you just float.

A Lagrangian Point is an ideal location for a micro-gravity semi-stationary space platform of significant size. On this platform, you could have a factory churning out space-ships and launching them from there. If you could take advantage of a zero escape velocity, think of all the cool stuff we could put in a spacecraft not mostly dedicated simply to getting to space, and focus on the stuff for being in space.

Getting into outer space from Earth is no small feat because you have to push so very hard. Most of the volume of a spacecraft launched from Earth is devoted to getting to orbit and beyond.

There’s a major problem with all of this though - there always is, isn’t there? I don’t see this discussed whenever I happen upon Lagrangian Points out there on the Intertubes, but what happens when the mass of whatever placed in the Lagrangian Point is no longer neglibile? It changes the system. The Lagrangian Point for a two-body system will move. Intuitively, to save energy, you would simply move the space-station to the new point. Doing so would move the point further, and continuing to move would be like chasing your own tail. The more prudent solution would be to maintain the relative position between the two bodies and hope for the best.

Then again, a non-negligible mass is nothing small. To be considered significant, the mass of such an object would be so large, that technology may have advanced enough to build a structure of such a size that we could live on it and move to wherever we wanted. Planets be damned!

“‘Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That’s not my department,’ says Wernher von Braun”
Tom Lehrer 

*It turns out I just had to read further, and I’m not the only one to think of the problem of stability. Honestly, I’m not surprised - far more and smarter people than me are astronomers and physicists, and this is their bread and butter. Small observational platforms already exist in specialized orbits around other Lagrangian Points

It’s that time again! What does the weird shit I say really mean? I’ve roped Ame into some of my habits and some of hers as well, so let’s get this party started!

• “Potato, potato.”
  Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends has a character named Eduardo. In one episode, he was handling potatos and would regularly say “potato, potato” in his goofy little way. Now whenever potatos are mentioned, I think of this and sometimes I break out with my own “potato, potato.”
• Belt Line
  In Dallas, there’s a road called Belt Line. This road sprawls allll over Dallas in a giant loop, and if you travel pretty much anywhere in the city, you’ll encounter it. For a short time, I did a fair amount of driving around the city and it seemed that Belt Line was everywhere. Eventually, I saw it as my nemesis (memesis!) and cursed its name every time I passed or crossed it. “Belt Line!” I’d say through gritted teeth, and shake and pound my fists in anger. Silly of course, but definitely cathartic. Now, I live kind of close to Belt Line and I got really tired of doing the whole theatrics thing, but Ame and I still use it as an expletive every now and then.
• Bananaphone (Boop-Boop-a-Doop-a-Doop!!)
  Another expletive for Ame and me, this is of course from Raffi’s instant classic, Bananaphone. Instead of saying “bullshit” or “what the fuck?” we might just burst out with “what’s all this bananaphone?” or simply “Bananaphone!” Another part of the song is “Boop-Boop-a-Doop-a-Doop!” (apparently the sound dialing a bananphone makes). We usually reserve this one for when someone is acting like an idiot or oblivious to their surroundings and we make fun of them to eachother.

  Ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring. Bananaphone!

• Fuzzy
  When the animals are acting bad, usually Eris, Ame and I say their being fuzzy. Eris’s pupils dilate to the size of small planets, and she gets super-alert. Welcome to FuzzCon 5. She tears around the house, jumps on things, terrorizes the dog, through chair legs, and over and under everything else. I’m not sure if the newspaper comic Get Fuzzy has anything to do with this phenomenon, but I do want to explain the FuzzCon sub-meme here. If you’ve seen War Games with Matthew Broderick, you’ll know that DefCon stands for Defense Confidence. DefCon 5 means the defenses are at their most confident, and DefCon 1 the least. With FuzzCon, the opposite is true, but it makes sense. Fuzzy Confidence 1 means there’s almost no fuzziness, and FuzzCon 5 means Eris is full on fuzzy.

I’d nearly forgotten to review this one! First, some really quick background. Mother 3 is a Japanese game, the sequel to Mother 2 (released as Earthbound in the US for the SNES), and there is no official Nintendo translation. Skilled fans tinkered with the game and made a patch for the game to change all the Japanese to English. I used this patch and ran the game in a GBA Emulator in my down-time at work with the volume almost all the way down. It was a little odd, but I finished it. So now, on to the review!

The game starts with the game teaching many of the mechanics of play, running especially, and some combat too. The plot kicks off on a pretty dark tone with important people dying, fires, disaster, the works. The story is the heart of the game, and I don’t want to give away anything at all, so I’ll focus on the other stuff. Don’t get me wrong, the plot is engaging, and the events and dialogue are humorous when they need to be.

As an RPG, combat gets you from point A to point B. It’s pretty straightforward in this game too except for one thing. If you can time your button presses with the beat of the music, you can get multiple-hit combos for extra damage. This mechanic is not required, but it will give you a slight edge. On an emulator it’s a bit difficult due to the precise timing required, you can train yourself for the delay, but I still only got one 16-hit combo ever.

I wish I could speak better about the music, but as I had the volume turned pretty low, I couldn’t fully appreciate it, but from what I heard it was good.

The game-scripting was pretty top-notch too. Only once or twice were there times I couldn’t progress because I didn’t do a particular task to trigger an in-game cinematic. One I particularly remember was an area I knew was inaccessible, so I looked literally everywhere else attempting to locate a way around it. The solution was simply to walk up to the obstruction, thus triggering the next event. Boooo.

Animation was excellent, and I can’t swear by it, but certainly cool if it’s there, but the walk cycle speeds for characters of different heights were different! A very nice touch that adds depth. I thought the spell effects in the combat system though were a bit flat. Maybe I’m spoiled by 3D, but I remember the effects in Mother 2 being more ambitious and hefty.

Oh, something that almost ruined the game for me. After defeating the last boss, a cinematic plays and then fades to a ‘The End?’ screen with no credits. And that’s it. I looked around the Internet to see if there was anything past the ambiguous ending, but turned up almost nothing. One tidbit I found, and this doesn’t give away anything, just “walk around” while on the screen. Things pick up again and you get a real ending. Pissed me off though.

Again, I won’t go into details, but there is an explanation in the game that answers a “why?” question. It’s not satisfying at all, and smacks of laziness. The problem with the answer is that it had no chance of enhancing the story - it could’ve been glossed over and there would have been no damage. Sometimes a plot hole is just a plot hole, but patching it up is harmful.

All in all a decent game, not as entertaining as Mother 2 in my opinion, but still good.

• Rating: ««« (out of five)

One of the many things that makes me a bad person: black humor. No I don’t mean “soul humor.”

The other day, Ame and I were at Garden Ridge Pottery (If you don’t have one in your area, think a really big arts & crafts store), and on one of the bargain tables there was book titled The Bump on Santa’s Noggin. It was kind of cute until I thought about it a little further.

Ostensibly, one can assume the book is about how Santa hits his head and forgets Christmas. Of course this is a feel-good book, so he recovers his memory somehow (probably by huffing “reindeer dust” or something) and Christmas is saved, the end. Why does one lose their memory in the first place from a blow to the head? Brain damage. A better title would be Santa Gets TBI.

I knew it was bad, but I started chuckling in the store, trying to keep it to myself (yeah, right). Ame asked me what was so funny, so I told her and started laughing harder. I swear she thought it was at least a little funny, but she’d never admit it. In truth, TBI is no laughing matter, but that’s what makes it so funny! I told you, black humor.

Some people just cannot speak. This is different than not being able to read, and realize illiteracy makes me sad. Not the same thing here. Not being able to infuriates me. People call in, and sometimes I really have to bend my brain into a weird shape to understand what people are saying. Accents can be difficult, especially native English speakers from other countries. South Africa is cool to listen to, but an Outbacker from Australia (is that the right term? I’m not Australian, but I am talking about someone from the desert, definitely not Sydney.*) is a bit weird.

The most common speech problem I’ve encountered is the “Swallowed R” or, more whimsically, “Wubble-yoos.” I don’t know if “Swallowed R” is the technical term for it, but this is my lay-term. Here are some examples of what I mean:

• R is pronounced “ARRR” not “ahwll”
• One, two, thwee, foall, five, six, seven.
• The quick bwoeln fawkes jumped ovahl the lazy dalg

That last one may not be fair or nice, but that’s an extreme case of Wubble-yoos. I’ll be cool here though, sometimes speech impediments can’t be helped and I don’t hold it against people with this issue - that’s not the kind of asshole I am. What does bother me is people being lazy about their elocution and enunciation.

Please, please, please (I can’t stress this enough it seems!) open your mouth and use your tongue and teeth to form your words, people! Just because you’re okay sounding like a four-year-old (I’m sorry, “foall-yeahl-ahld”), and those around you are used to it, doesn’t mean it’s acceptable outside your bubble.

Take a damn English course and get it right! Make it your second language, and if you still can’t swing it, make it your third language too. Language is important, and, while I understand the natural evolution of a language is to reduce muscle-movement complexity (look at Chinese), don’t push towards that harder! If everyone pronounced things how they felt, nobody would know what the hell anyone was saying!

*As I was writing the word Sydney above, a call came in and it was an American calling me via VOIP from Australia! How’s that for a coincidence? I asked him what the proper term was for someone from the Outback, and he said that one would say they were “from the bush.” neat!