News You Can Bruise for 2002 May 24

Ever wanted to be surfing the worldwide markets like the hipsters in your favorite anarcho-capitalist cyberpunk thriller, looking for tiny inefficiencies on which to capitalize? You poor, deluded sap. What you don't realize is that that is incredibly boring. You can read press releases all day if you want to get a feel for it, but it's boring and it's going to be boring even when there's virtual reality involved.

In a shameless, yet funny bid to use News You Can Bruise as a soapbox from which to spout his deranged mutterings, Pete Peterson II writes:

So... is there such a thing as "altogether ooky action at a distance?"

Actually, you can read interesting press releases all day, but the same features that make them interesting also make them financially useless.

Mike Popovic fact-checks my stupid mistakes with such wit that I don't even care that he sent me the fact-check email a day after I'd corrected the mistake:

also, i think it is the Examiner and not the Chronicle that went to a tabloid format (and i don't even live there :)

In a shameless, yet implausible bid to spin the motivations of his former self, Pete Peterson II writes:

> In a shameless, yet funny bid to use News You Can Bruise as a
> soapbox from which to spout his deranged mutterings...

Who, me?!?

Mike is an evil genius (this is from a brainstorming email relating to the game):

apply the principles of judo: if your problem is coming up with an AI system for a team of magicians, you should throw more magiciains at the problem. If you had a team of, say, five magicians, you would have to deal with a lot of collaboration, dialog, and eventualy team spellcasting. if you had say, sixty magicians per team, they would of course be following a set of rules, regulations an procedures that evolved/mutated from something useful into a beuracratic nightmare that ensures very little ever gets done. In other words, you would be the United States Senate. Now you can simply deflect user interaction into a bunch of procedural red herrings, and not have to worry about writing and AI system, because no Intelligence will come into play.

Axis of Pasta update: consensus is that cheese is the missing third ingredient, though this has yet to be verified in field tests.

By the way, here is another Crummy.com pasta recipe:

Ad Hoc Pasta Working Group

Ingredients:

• 1/2 bag pasta (any non-spaghetti variety)
• 1 can soup (any chunky non-condensed variety)
• Pepper to taste

Instructions: Boil water and cook pasta. Heat up soup in microwave or on stove. Drain pasta and put into big bowl. Dump soup over pasta. Serves one, for two meals.

Note: do not make this for other people or they will think you are a slob.

"...a picture is worth a thousand databases." What about a database that contains pictures?