tekHedd – the blog

As we all know, May 6 is the National Day of Prayer, on which we are encouraged to pray to strengthen our faith and our communities. Prayer helps strengthen our great country at a national level, but what can you do to strengthen your community locally?

I reflected on this question for a while, and asked friends for advice. My nonchristian friends tell me that hands that help are better than lips that pray.

Reflecting on this wisdom, I found my answer: stoning!

A National Day of Stoning

I hereby put forth May 7 as the “National Day of Stoning.” You’ve just spent a day praying, now it’s time to do some good for your community. I propose one short, official day when we are encouraged to stone heretics and heathen unbelievers.

Honour killings have been practiced for centuries to strengthen and purify communities. While stoning unbelievers to death is not necessary, it does prove your piety and discourage retribution. I can not recommend this practice because killing is illegal–But who can blame you if you get carried away! It’s such a great feeling to be on the delivering side, confident in the knowledge that you’re not the one being stoned, and therefore you must be projecting sufficient levels of piety.

Some might say that a Day of Stoning is unfair to atheists, or to people whose religion does not support stoning. Well, I’m glad to say that it’s not! Most major religions support stoning (read your bible!), and anyway, it’s only just the one day. Counting the National Day of Prayer, you still have 363 days of godless constitutional law and equality. And anyway, even if it was every day, it’s not a violation of anybody’s rights, because you don’t have to participate if you’re not religious.

Come on, it’s fun–I’ll cast the first stone!

Updated. See the latest entry for details.

The latest versions of the Quotes Collection plugin have changed the get-quote function. Here is an updated version of the quotescollection_get_quote function that does not waste randomness.

function quotescollection_get_quote($condition = 0)
{
        global $wpdb;
        $offset = rand( 0, quotescollection_count($condition) );

        $sql = "SELECT quote_id, quote, author, source
                FROM " . $wpdb->prefix . "quotescollection
                WHERE visible = 'yes'";

        if ($condition)
                $sql .= " AND " . $condition;

        $sql .= " LIMIT " . $offset . ", 1";

        $random_quote = $wpdb->get_row($sql, ARRAY_A);
        if ( !empty($random_quote) ) {
                return $random_quote;
        }
        else
                return 0;
}

The shipping version of Quotes Collection uses “ORDER BY  RAND()”, not a big deal, but hey my randomness is precious.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/quotes-collection/

I’ve been sucked back into Fallout 2 again, because of the release of the Restoration Project version 2.0. And wow is the game a lot better than I remember. Maybe that’s because I actually found the north half of Gecko (the Junkyard) finally, after what, 10 years? And some of those broken quests are unbroken now.  Somehow the game is a lot more fun when you can actually achieve goals.

So, yes, this means that I actually am driving the car for the first time. The wasteland is a lot more fun when you’re mobile. The master’s army still tears me up though…and it seems like there are way too many great guns. I forgot about that aspect of the game.

Because they made guns plentiful and powerful, the biggest problem in Fallout 2 is that nothing was rare and special. Well, the biggest problem was previously that you couldn’t complete the game because it had so many bugs and that a lot of quests were simply impossible to complete because they weren’t finished. With unofficial community patches that is all fixed, and the game design flaws can be promoted to “worst problem” status. And there are plenty of problems with the game design: blah locations, plot twists that play fast and loose with game canon, and as far as your character is concerned it really forces you to play a specific way–that is if you want to finish the game. (These flaws were faithfully reproduced and expanded on in Fallout 3, of course.)

But it’s a lot better than without the restoration pack. Even at its worst, it’s still Fallout.