About six months ago, I did a silly thing.

I bought a car.

But that's not silly, you might say. I suppose, that depends on what sort of car I bought. What I bought, was a Mazda Rx8. You know, with the wankel engine.

Now, a picture should've immediately formed in your mind if you're in any way knowledgeable about cars and you're probably nodding your head and going, yep, that's a stupid thing to buy. It made sense at the time, believe me. It's a sports car, but because of the unique engine having a low-tax capacity and the fact that it was registered as a 4-door saloon means that the annual tax and insurance I pay on it, is a good deal less than I would otherwise.

It still took me a while to find a good one. The first one I tried was a shed, with a dying engine. But, the third one I found - which I bought - is fairly decent. Good engine, solid interior. All happy.

The thing I'm finding with this car however, is that it tends to make demagogues of people. If you drive it, you either love it or hate it, and it makes you want to shout about it. You can probably guess which side I fall on.

I paid about 4,900 for it. Since then, I've had a full service that cost me a grand, then another grand in a repair and upgrade of the ignition system. It's a lot of money for me – but at the same time it's not especially something I regret doing.

Because this car's just so damned intoxicating. I'm not sure what it is exactly.

I learned to drive in the family diesel. It was a chugging, gutless, heavy thing but harmlessly numb to drive. It sort of made the process of operating it as forgettable as possible. This Rx is basically the exact opposite to it in every way.

It allows you to be involved, if you want to. It tells you what it's doing and responds to you. The front wheels snout there way over imperfections in the road, tugging at the wheel to let you know what's down there. Inside meanwhile, it's comfortable, with a proper entertainment systems and enough luxury features to make it feel like a proper, high-priced Grand Tourer. Then put your foot down in the right gear and it takes off with a howl from the engine.

That engine is part of it, I think. It's a wankel motor. In this day and age, it's literally unique. It's an endangered species, slowly becoming rarer and rarer. No more are being made. It's entirely likely that no more will be made for road-going vehicles. The experience it offers is effectively unique.

It's this compact little cube of power. And because there's no reciprocating motion in it like a conventional engine, it runs smooth as a turbine, without ever feeling under stress. There's no vibration like you feel with any conventional engine, no harshness. There's effectively just three moving parts in it; two rotors, and an eccentric shaft.

And that's its biggest strength, but also the biggest weakness of the engine. When something does go wrong, it has a tendency to cascade through and damage more and more parts, until it finally kills the motor.

A worn sparkplug damaged an ignition coil on my car. It also damaged the catalytic converter by blasting it with unburned petrol. I replaced the sparkplugs, but the damaged coil continued to get worse before finally failing. It was replaced with an upgrade kit that came in at a cool 500 quid. The damaged catalytic converter finally failed and clogged itself, effectively half-blocking the car's exhaust and causing the engine to run hot and suffocate on it's own backpressure. Eventually, that'd kill the engine seals, which kills the engine.

I had the catalyst removed before that happened. It smells like a refinery fire going down the road, but it seems to back to full health. Still, there's the possibility that I did damage to the engine core that'll show itself in the near future.

And that's the first thing that everyone says to me about it. Don't you know those things like to blow their engines? Well, yeah? The engine seals do tend to wear out; it's the nature of the beast. You can help it live longer by adding a little lubricating oil to the fuel, and changing the engine oil regularly – but eventually it's going to lose compression and say 'nope'.

And when it does, I'll end up paying another 2,500 to a specialist to overhaul it.

Why would I do something that mad?

It's almost quixotic, isn't it? It just sort of makes you do it, like an addiction. And I can sort of justify it, buy saying that with the cheaper tax and insurance, I'm saving the cost of an engine overhaul every year compared to owning another car with similar performance. Buy a BMW, being the obvious suggestion.

But none of them will be quite like the Rx. None of them will have that eerily smooth engine. None of them will scream up to 9500rpm, with the only sign that the engine's in any way perturbed by this being a little beep from the tacho. And if you just need to get somewhere down a motorway, it'll happily sit back and let you get on with getting there, humming quietly along.

There's another thing I like about this car. Since that first service, I've done a lot of my own maintenance on it. I fitted the upgraded coils. I replaced the brakes. I can follow the maintenance schedule, no problem. It's just that simple to work on. It's probably one of the last cars that responds really well to the home mechanic. And it needs some care in the way modern cars just don't.

Maybe that's it.

It's the end of an era. It's the last of the affordable, entertaining, sports cars that used to proliferate before the automobile became an appliance. It's the last wankel – the final-result of a fourty-year experiment that was long since abandoned by everyone else. It's one of the last cars that can be worked on effectively the amateur at home. It's not a corporate exercise in cynicism and artificially packaged, overpriced fun, but something put together because the company doing it decided it would be a fun and interesting thing to do.

It's a passion-project, and maybe that's why it inspires so much passion in some people.

I've taken a few people for a drive in it, and the response has always been the same.

I can't believe you bought this thing, and I'd never buy one myself, but I'm glad it exists.

I guess I'm just one of the madmen who feel the need to keep these unusual things moving, because when the last one finally splutters to a halt, the automotive world will be a less interesting place to be.

Would I suggest someone go out and buy one? Probably not. But if someone came to me and asked me if they should buy one, I wouldn't tell them not to.
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--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?

Here's a query for Windows7 that I hope someone will know the answer to, because I can find no solution on Google -- It's almost like no one has ever asked this before.
How can I use Windows 7 Search to look for all MP3 files in which the title or artist fields on the "Details" tab are empty?  Can I do this at all?  I know that entering 'title:""' in the search prompt doesn't do what I want -- it seems to match everything instead of nothing.  Anyone have an answer?
Thanks.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

It's easy to forget, but under the depression and angst and judeo-christian mythology, there's the guts of a genuine grand science fiction plot spread over aeons of time. Maybe that's what I like about it so much.... there's a lot more going on. Or hinted at.

----------------
When we stared into the desolate abyss of annihilation, we created the Evangelion. It was our hope that, long after we had gone, some marker of who we were would remain, that someone would find it and the human within and know that this is what a human being was, and what humans had accomplished before time overtook them. It was eternal proof of mankind's existance.

Now, we know our existance was planned. Humans are not a natural species. The roadmap to our evolution is written in our genes, our past and future development encoded aeons before the first basic proteins came into being.

That's a staggering thing to process. For many people, it's a frightening concept. Thoughts turn to Gods when such things are suggested.

But, whatever they were, we call them the First Ancestral Race.

They were a people who were born on a world formed when the Galaxies themselves were young and the Universe was filled with brilliant stars. They grew and evolved beneath this shining new sky until they reached point where they could leave their homeworld behind and turn outwards to worlds beyond theirs.

They reached out, searching for others like them in the vast cosmos of possibility, certain that sheer probability guaranteed that somewhere, someone else had to exist.

And they found no-one.

The cosmos that greeted them was a desolate and empty place, scorched barren by the death-spasms of hypergiants.

Gradually, they came to realise that they were an accident in time, a race born billions of years too early in a universe actively hostile to life. They were an infinitesimal fluke so unlikely, that the chances of them ever finding another civilisation like themselves were so small as to effectively be zero.

They carried on nevertheless, striving towards new heights and new understandings in the hopes that they might somehow find a way to find someone out there. They mastered the clockwork chaos of the cosmos in ways that would be like Gods compared to us.

But they were still mortal. They were still fallible. They were lonely. The inevitability of entropy, that all things must eventually run down, finally caught up with them. And they were faced with the knowledge that, not only where they alone, but that every single thing that they had ever achieved would be lost. Everything they had done and achieved would be gone, and nothing and no memory of who and what they were would remain because there was nobody to remember them.

And faced with the stark desolation of time, they made one last great effort to leave something behind – some marker that they once existed, and someone to know that they once where. They created these automated terraforming systems we called Seeds of Life and launched them across empty space towards young stars which looked like they might one day in the future form worlds capable of supporting life.

Five billion years after they passed into the ashes of history, at least one little ember of who and what they where still burns.

Us.

And with us, their hope that someone, somewhere might grow to a point that they could reach to the stars and maybe find some evidence of who they once where. And hopefully, a universe teeming with life for us to meet.
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--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?

All I can say (because I'm laughing so hard) is:

YES!!!! (NB: trying to set size to xx-large here)

(NOTE: Watch through the credits)

As if we didn't have too many ways to waste time already... archive.org now has dozens of video-arcade games online.

http://archive.org/details/internetarcade

(We may need to update many of the pages linked from http://allthetropes.orain.org/wiki/Category:Arcade_Game ...)
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

Wonderful... 
Youtube's new copyright rules and reporting structure were incredibly bad when they were implemented last year. Now stalkers, terrorists and other dangerous sorts have found loopholes in the new system to get personal info on their enemies or potential victims. If youtube doesn't do anything to address this problem, could it be the end of the platform?
EDIT: Here's the original article link: 
http://www.dailydot.com/politics/dmca-y ... -al-hayat/

As a result of recent developments in the Pottermore thread (namely, JKR posting Dolores Umbridge's biography, which holds a couple surprises), I've decided to post the following scene as a teaser.  It was written before Rowling posted the Umbridge bio, and I was... darkly amused at how close I came to the new canon with what some prereaders said were exaggerations.
Enjoy.

Specifically, three days in February - which is all that it'll be open anyway.

http://www.sjgames.com/general/press_re ... 41106.html]SJGames will be opening a Munchkin store in NYC (specifically, 353 West 46th Street) on Valentine's Day weekend. Apparently, SJ will be there.
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

This is a collection of ideas that's been bouncing around my head for some time now.  Over the last couple days, they've been coalescing into part of a tabletop RPG.  I'm a lot better at worldbuilding and general design than I am at mechanics, so bear with me, please.Setting:  High fantasy.  Civilization exists, but is constantly under threat.  Monsters- stronger, faster, tougher than mortal man- roam the wild places of the world, striking out against towns and villages.  Magic is fairly common- maybe one in ten has the talent for it.Character System:  This is the core of what I'm going for.  The thought that prompted this whole thing was basically 'How do I make fighters and wizards feel distinct, badass and balanced?'  The answer was pretty simple.
There are three general character classes.  Casters are your wizardly sorts- inherently gifted with magic, focusing on casting spells in battle.  Clerics make pacts with supernatural entities- primarily gods, but demons and unaligned spirits are also options- who use magic on their behalf.  The magic they get is more refined, more complex than Caster magic, but also less flexible.  Finally, Combatants are, on their own, entirely mundane.  They compete with Casters, Clerics, and the superhuman monsters of the world through unparalleled martial skill, borrowing the magic of others (in the form of stat-boosting enchantments and magically empowered equipment), and finding non-magical ways to get things done.
Note that this isn't a class system.  Instead, character development is done more like the way White Wolf handles it- characters earn XP, which lets them buy skills, spells, proficiencies, martial arts, spirit pacts, enchantments... basically, every form of character development possible.  Certain purchases- the unique features of each class- tend to be mutually exclusive, but everything that isn't directly excluded (or dependent on an excluded purchase) is available.  The rub is that class features synergize.  Investing in a class gets you discounts on further purchases tied to that class, and investing in skill/spell/martial art trees gets you additional discounts on the rest of that tree.  The more you specialize, the more you get out of it.  Ironically enough, some class features can offer discounts on out-of-class features that synergize well.
I'm envisioning each class as being very wide- wider than any one- or three- characters can possibly master.  There's room to specialize, to play each class several different ways, even before you start to consider multiclassing.  The Combatant, for instance, can be played as a traditional thief, ninja, fighter, ranger... basically, as any mundane class.  Cleric encompasses the D&D cleric, (parts of the) warlock, druid, and artificer, just off the top of my head, and Caster can be played as a wizard, sorcerer, (the rest of) warlock, and many more.
Magic System:  Here's the other bit that really inspired what I have.  'Magic' is the ability to 'push' against the fabric of the world.  If you wanted to put it in sci-fi terms, think of it as an inherent ability to make 'waves' in the quantum foam.  Each wave has a limited- and incredibly blunt- impact on the world; useless on its own, but when you put enough waves together in the right positions... you get a spell.
'Spells' are four-dimensional patterns, drawn out of magic, whose creation has a useful effect.  This isn't easy to do; casting a spell is a lot like drawing a picture on the surface of a lake by running around the edge of it with a wave generator... only in 3D, instead of 2D.  Half the effort involved isn't even spent creating the pattern, but neutralizing the bits of the waves that aren't part of the pattern.  When you don't do that, you get the effect you want... plus a menagerie of other, random, side effects.
This is where the name comes from.  The people of this world think of it as, metaphysically, a tapestry.  Magic is the act of reweaving it into a new pattern.  Gods, demons, and spirits- technically all the same thing- are repeated motifs.  A god of fire, for instance, is the pattern of fire, shaped by belief into a sapient being.  This is why Clerics are different from Casters; instead of doing magic themselves, they have spirits (who, existing only as patterns, are not limited as mortal beings are) performing magic for them.  Spirits can shape patterns more complex than even a dozen Casters working in unison... but each Cleric can only get a fraction of their attention, and they don't quite understand the mortal mentality.  Clerical magic is less flexible than Caster magic because the Caster can cast what he wants at the time; the Cleric can only receive the precise boons their pacted spirits have agreed to provide.
More on this later, as I think of it... and as people ask questions.  Please, offer anything that comes to mind.  Questions about what I've written?  Elaborations?  Suggested game mechanics?  Quibbles?  Even suggestions on where to ask?  Post it!