I'm back to wandering through Google maps, checking out whatever corner of the map intrigues me at the moment.

So I got to thinking about an old nature show describing the way the Hawaiian island chain is the result of a tectonic plate drifting over a hot spot in the mantle. Google long ago added sonar maps of the sea floor to their offerings. Today I just got to wandering along the submerged chain that never quite broke free of the surface when I panned across this.



Now the existence of that airstrip is going to bother me until I figure out when they decided to scrape up enough mud to break the surface, and what it was used for.

UPDATE: So, entirely too much surfing at work has answered my question. It's French Frigate Shoals Airport on Tern Island in the French Frigate Shoals, part of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. And now I have a new site to chew up my time for a while.

Posted in Weird Wide Web by: Will at 11:26 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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Today is not a day for picking up trash, or planting a tree, or any of that other feel good bullshit. Today is a day for grief, sorrow, and anger.

Grief for those who directly lost loved ones...

Sorrow for the rest of us...

And righteous anger for all...

Drink like you've never drunk before.
Fuck like you've never fucked before.
Profit like you've never profited before.
Turn every dial to 11 and let those goat-fuckers know what it means to really live.

Posted in Politics by: Will at 04:04 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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I've been online in varying capacities since October 1998 when I first signed up for AOL and paid for a second line to be strung into my parents' house.

For the first year I just bounced around doing not much. I didn't know a lot of people online. I'd IM with a few classmates I knew from meat-space, but that was about it. I hit various boards dedicated to Xenogears (because I was a total fanatic at the time), and played around on mp3.com before it turned respectable.

Then my friend Josh introduced me to the Wheel of Time series around Thanksgiving of 2000. I devoured the first 8 books in about 2 weeks. I read at work. I read before bed. I read on the fucking toilet. Then I immediately read them again. I started coming up with wild-ass theories about where the story was headed. Who was really who in disguise? On and on it went.

Not long after New Years 2001, I stumbled across a fansite called wotmania.com. It was a fanatic's dream. Theory posts! Encyclopedias! Vibrant discussions of all things Wheel of Time! Then there was the community itself. People from all over the world were on this site. Aussies, Scandis, Brits, Canucks, you name the place and there was probably somebody from there.

I was home! But...

It wasn't until that summer that I finally stopped lurking and devouring theory posts. Somebody asked about my favorite subject: Xenogears. So I just had to chime in. Suddenly I was involved. I dove in to a religious discussion. We talked politics. I lived on that site for the next three month.

Then came September 11, 2001. The board was chaos. Nobody knew what was going on. Every whacked out theory you could imagine was being thrown about. In the following days, I was flying around any board I could think of. RPGFan, theGIA (you might be noticing a trend...) Somewhere I found a link to Bill Whittle's page, ejectejecteject.com. From there I found IMAO, USS Clueless and Instapundit. Overnight I became a blog junky. Wotmania was always where I started my day, but blogs began to quickly consume a large part of my online time.

Wotmania was always a hard place to be a Conservative. With the large numbers of international readers, the politics always tacked heavily to the Left. With the war in Afghanistan all ready in full swing, and the war in Iraq becoming more inevitable by the day, the boards became a very contentious place in 2002-2004. The craziness of the 2004 election is what finally drove me out of the Community board, and I stuck to the Games board where I didn't have to deal with politics anymore.

In the last five years, I've probably only ventured back into the Community board a handful of times, but the Games board has always been my homepage. Alas, the Games board has always been a little backwater that few people even knew existed. Eventually the regulars said just about everything there was to be said. We'd all gotten older and gaming time had become harder to find. In the last year, there were rarely more than a half-dozen threads visible (visibility was a combination of activity and posting date) at a time. On occasion a fresh face would pop in and start asking questions we'd covered so long ago we couldn't even remember where to link them.

In the mean time, the Community board, and particularly the Chat Room were giving Mike, the owner of the site, unending fits. So in late January of this year, he announced he was shutting down the whole site to focus on his research. There was a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth, but in the end there really wasn't anything to be done. No definitive date was given, but "August" was thrown about.

A couple people stepped up, and with some of the site source code that Mike allowed them to use, began trying to clone as much of the site functionality as possible in 7 months. (Wotmania has been an ongoing development project by Mike for 10 years. One single message board and simple chat room exploded into a half-dozen custom-coded forums, a custom chat room, an internal noteboard system, personal user journals, polls, theory libraries, encyclopedias, and even a miniature point system for no reason other than to have it, plus tons of other things I probably don't even know about because I haven't been out exploring the far corners of the site in years) They just managed to get the replacement site up in time for H-hour on D-day.

At midnight tonight, wotmania went off-line for good, and a huge part of my online life went with it. I managed to be there at the very end when the chat room finally winked out of existence. I got over most of the grief back in January when the announcement was made. I've had many forums I loved close on me, so I've had plenty of practice getting over this sort of thing, but wotmania was always there to come home to.

Sure, there's a bit of resentment, but then again I can understand where Mike is coming from. Robert Jordan died before finishing the series (a topic that was morbidly theorized and joked about constantly on the boards given his glacial pace of writing in the latter books.). Mike had lost interest in the series a couple book prior, so it's understandable that he was simply tired of supporting a site that no longer held any passion for him. Each new book would create a surge of excitement amongst the people still dedicated to the books, but for many, the site itself had become the reason to stick around. There was a community that evolved out of the mutual interest in the books, and the community has outlasted the books.

Whenever someone posed a question to Jordan that he intended to answer in latter books, he always responded, "Read and find out." As an homage to their roots in Wheel of Time, the new home is located at readandfindout.com. This new home has a WoT specific forum for those who still want to discuss and speculate on what Jordan's widow may be able to do with his notes for the last book, but it's really about serving as a new home for the Community.

If you find yourself bored, stop by the Games board in the Entertainment section. You'll find me going by Yaminohasha. Stop in and say hi.

Posted in Books by: Will at 10:48 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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1 Bummer, Will

And, between Robert Jordan and WoW, you really need to find a better friend than Josh. He might as well be turning you on to crack

Posted by: Kerith at September 01, 2009 05:35 AM (XREOa)

2 Heh. You say that, but when's the last time I touched either of those things?

Speaking of crack... Whatever happened to getting back in to Diablo 2?

Posted by: Will at September 01, 2009 06:52 AM (9dEae)

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Anyone from Arizona over a certain age will instantly recognize this show.

If you're interested in finding out more about the longest running children's TV program ever, try here.

Posted in Random Debris by: Will at 12:46 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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The lyrics are a way too somber for my mood, but the instrumentation is beautiful.


And on a very much lighter note...

Posted in Random Debris by: Will at 05:13 PM | Comments (12) | Add Comment
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1 Hmm...

Hmmmmm...

Posted by: Kerith at August 24, 2009 09:43 PM (XREOa)

2 Are you flirting with me? You're a married woman. ;-)

Posted by: Will at August 24, 2009 10:39 PM (9dEae)

3 What?!?! What kind of woman do you think I am????

I was merely finding a song that might describe your current mood, similar in fashion to the songs you posted!

Posted by: Kerith at August 25, 2009 03:59 PM (XREOa)

4

It was quite cute. Thank you.

(I think I need to start catching Scrubs reruns)

Posted by: Will at August 25, 2009 08:10 PM (9dEae)

5 So I don't need to beat up Kerith, right?

Posted by: Mrs. Peel at August 26, 2009 03:38 PM (7ern4)

6 No, no. Kerith's no threat. She's one of the good err... guys.

Posted by: Will at August 26, 2009 04:29 PM (WnBa/)

7 All righty then.  *returns brass knuckles and blackjack to the closet*

Posted by: Mrs. Peel at August 26, 2009 04:33 PM (7ern4)

8 o_O

Umm... Which closet were those in?

Posted by: Will at August 26, 2009 07:47 PM (9dEae)

9 Same closet the .38 was in.  Didn't you wonder why you didn't see it?

Posted by: Mrs. Peel at August 26, 2009 08:13 PM (7ern4)

10 I think I might be in love with Mrs. Peel. Brass Knuckles AND a .38???

/swoon

Posted by: Kerith at August 26, 2009 08:29 PM (XREOa)

11 Well, I wasn't exactly worried about getting shot. I was too distracted to ask to see your piece.

Back off Kerith, she's spoken for. (See what you've done now Mrs. Peel? She went from flirting with me to flirting with you.)

Posted by: Will at August 26, 2009 10:09 PM (9dEae)

12 heh, well, I can handle that.

Posted by: Mrs. Peel at August 27, 2009 05:23 AM (7ern4)

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I must admit, I got a little puckered just watching that. It's surprising how little contact there is for as tight they're racing.

Posted in Weird Wide Web by: Will at 03:45 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Everybody go consume some charred meats and observe pyrotechnics.

Posted in Politics by: Will at 06:50 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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I'm not going to write much about the trip, I'll just cut straight to the pictures.

(picture-heavy below the fold)
more...

Posted in Random Debris by: Will at 03:18 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
Post contains 269 words, total size 3 kb.

1 Looks like a beautiful place.  Those desktops are nice, too, but of course I am contractually obliged to use only space-themed shots for my wallpapers. 

Posted by: Mrs. Peel at June 24, 2009 03:32 PM (kTwMy)

2 So I need to some how get some astronomy into my next set of pics? I'll need a tripod, but I think I can manage that.

Posted by: Will at June 24, 2009 06:43 PM (RMeRQ)

3 Cool.  Thanks for sharing.

Posted by: Michael at June 24, 2009 08:54 PM (rX6iH)

4 Very beautiful!

Posted by: pajama momma at June 24, 2009 09:09 PM (kWQTL)

5 Thanks. It's nice having this kind of place to escape to just a few hours away. The pictures don't really do it justice.

Posted by: Will at June 24, 2009 10:06 PM (RMeRQ)

6 Yeah, around here, our closest state park is a great place to go if you like swamps and alligators.

(Actually, I do like that park.  There are several hiking trails, lots of birds, and a nice observatory.  I don't like the alligators, though.)

Posted by: Mrs. Peel at June 25, 2009 05:24 PM (kTwMy)

7 I think I'll take black bears over gators.

The lake is really popular with eagles. There are a bunch of trees with giant nest set into the tops. I thought about putting up a lot more pictures of the dam, but I was honestly surprised how little (none, really) security consideration there was.

Posted by: Will at June 25, 2009 08:00 PM (RMeRQ)

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Not quite one year ago, we went camping at Hazlet Hollow, one of the campgrounds in the Horsethief Basin Rec Area near Crown King. Just a few days after leaving, some dipshit got lost, set a signal fire, and proceeded to burn half the mountain down. We had heard the campground was spared, but much of the area around it was burned. This last weekend we decided to head up there and see how bad things looked.

(Picture heavy below the fold)
more...

Posted in Random Debris by: Will at 11:53 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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I haven't had the hiccups in years. It's a good thing too. When I get them, they don't go away until it's gone well past annoying, blown right through painful, and settled somewhere near "just kill me now." This afternoon is gonna suck.

Posted in Meh by: Will at 03:37 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Caught myself humming these today.

Posted in Meh by: Will at 11:40 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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Today was a good day. Somewhere between...

and...

Posted in Random Debris by: Will at 11:36 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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So this morning I and a couple friends arranged to take a short drive outside of town and hike Four Peaks, a local geographic landmark northeast of Phoenix.

However, when they saw the weather looking like this...


Ok, maybe it looked a bit more like this...


Suffice to say I quickly found myself on my own. So I decided to at least drive up and see how things looked (but I'm not dumb enough to do the full hike alone).

(It gets picture-heavy below the fold)
more...

Posted in Random Debris by: Will at 08:32 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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While I was thrashing about looking for something, anything, that would pique my interest enough to write, I realized I don't have an "about the doucheb... author" page. That is now remedied. It will eventually end up somewhere in the homepage template.

Posted in Meh by: Will at 10:00 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
Post contains 46 words, total size 1 kb.

This has been percolating around in my head for the last week. I know there's got to be more examples to flesh it out, but I can't bring myself to trudge through more of these bastards' crap.

We like to point to Obama's various screwup on his first world tour as signs of a weak and unserious mind. But the more I look at his actions, the more I see a pattern that was noted before throughout the Rush kerfluffle in January and February.

Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.

That's Rule 13 (which, depending on your source, may or may not even exist). We know Obama was raised drinking deep from the far-left koolaid; where all the world's ills are attributed directly to western liberal democracy and the United States in particular. In order for leftist utopia to emerge, the United States must be brought to heal, or destroyed all together. That's his target.

Freeze:
-Present a weak and rudderless national defense posture. Don't respond to provocation; cut the defense budget.
-Propose massive spending increases with deficits that will bankrupt the country in short order. Create so many domestic problems to contend with, we can't effectively handle international ones.

Personalize:
-Lay the blame for the current recession and any other current bugbear at the feet of the United States. Give all the world's problems a uniquely American face. Domestically, it may be "the previous administration," but internationally it's all about "Americans" this and "America" that. Failures are "American," successes are "Multi-national."
-Be perfectly content with the eliminating the US Dollar as the standard world currency.

Polarize:
-Insult the leaders of our most steadfast allies through poor decorum and double-speak.
-Leave those nations most depending on our support (Israel, Japan, Iraq, Taiwan, South Korea) wondering if they can really depend on us at all.

All of these actions serve to isolate us from our allies and weaken us in the eyes our enemies. He's looking to turn us into an international pariah worthy only of ridicule, leaving the US no different effectively than North Korea.

Posted in Politics by: Will at 04:04 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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I always had my suspicions. It was always subtle and just beneath the surface. I expected better craft than this.

I'm about three chapters in to book 7 of the Malazan series and Erikson has given up on playing it straight. He'd descended into full-on Canadian Twat Lefty Wet-Dream Political Allegory Theater. A group of Letherii calling themselves the "Patriotists" is running rough-shod over the local populous searching for political dissidents and torturing/disappearing academics and intellectuals.

This better improve quickly or I'll burn the fucking thing in effigy. Christ, how many people have I recommended this to by now? I'm going to have a lot of apologies to write.

Posted in Books by: Will at 09:18 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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It's not to say no one does it anymore, but the concept and use of the term seem to have dropped out of the blogging lexicon.

Every once in a while you'll come across something that resembles a good 'ol fashion Fisking, but the ruthlessness and bile just isn't there like it used to be.

Posted in Random Debris by: Will at 03:22 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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The cake may be a lie, but don't tell that to the singing computer program.

Posted in Weird Wide Web by: Will at 02:44 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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The folks were rummaging through some old boxes this winter left over from when I moved out. They collected a bunch of books they thought were mine (but I know they aren't, technically, as most were published before I was born), and brought them over in a little sci-fi care-package.



more...

Posted in Books by: Will at 08:50 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
Post contains 64 words, total size 1 kb.

Sometimes we're graced to be in the right place at the right time, even if it's only obvious after the fact.

H/T:IB

Posted in Random Debris by: Will at 02:14 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 26 words, total size 1 kb.