I don't wanna butt in, but... *butts* I have a Warlock figurine.... wanna be best nerd-friends?

>> ^Lann:

That is so awesome! That makes that one mouse sooo much cooler than the ALL the others.
In reply to this comment by UsesProzac:
Thank you, Lann! That means so much to me.
By the way, I started playing with a D&D group every other Sunday. I have a druid and the mouse you made me is my animal companion, a dire rat. I bring the mouse and my druid figurine with me and it makes me feel so cool and geeky, hehe.
In reply to this comment by Lann:
You are such an awesome mum...

That is so awesome! That makes that one mouse sooo much cooler than ALL of the others.

In reply to this comment by UsesProzac:
Thank you, Lann! That means so much to me.

By the way, I started playing with a D&D group every other Sunday. I have a druid and the mouse you made me is my animal companion, a dire rat. I bring the mouse and my druid figurine with me and it makes me feel so cool and geeky, hehe.

In reply to this comment by Lann:
You are such an awesome mum...

Thank you, Lann! That means so much to me.

By the way, I started playing with a D&D group every other Sunday. I have a druid and the mouse you made me is my animal companion, a dire rat. I bring the mouse and my druid figurine with me and it makes me feel so cool and geeky, hehe.

In reply to this comment by Lann:
You are such an awesome mum...

>> ^Mauru:

What an absolute bunch of horse-crap. If your reasoning sounds like an haiku, it is probably made for the stage. If it is made for the stage you are playing with words. If you are playing with words and you mean to educate, ... ah well, you can probably suspect the value of your reasoning.
We are officially entering the ether of ideological comparison. Go ahead guys. You know how well this has worked out in the past.
I'd feel a lot better if I didn't have the suspicion that this guy got his patriotic hard-on during that video.


Are you talking to me, or talking to him...and furthermore, what are you even saying! I require specificity. Are you saying the Quran doesn't state those things? Are you saying he is taking them out of context? Just saying something doesn't make it so, you must plead the case. The whole point of this thread was to avoid group thing dynamics where you just state things carte blanche to resonate with your fellow minded friends and to engage with the core issue with specific, and perhaps, personal examples. For example:

>> ^Bloocut:

@GeeSussFreeK-Symbols are used, not unlike roughy remarked, by evil fuckers who know how to use them-similar to product placement in cinema. See a symbol enough times then whatever value placed upon it by the bulk of society, becomes the acceptable shit-think.
Symbols contain both intrinsic and adventitious meanings and when used effectively they can convince or otherwise influence the most moral souls to commit unspeakable inhumanities.
To the more enlightened of the planet who take the time to use their computers to explore the history of the place rather than looking at cartoon characters through scopes or hundreds of pairs of tits or listening to National Public Radio, well, it's grammar school time.


At heart, I am an anti-establishment, non-traditionalist, don't-tell-me-what-to-do type of person. So, when I hear rhetoric about the "man", and zombie mind control, I usually bite hard. When I first read this, I was like "right on, fight the power", but then I started to examine the core of the argument, and look into personal examples and found it held less water.

Symbols only matter when you care. A symbol for you doesn't really work for me at times. For example; I still have my tattered, unusable bible, my lego collection that I never use, books galore, star wars figurines, ect. They all have very little rational value. The raw materials couldn't fetch much of anything on any market. But they all have real, deep, and meaningful value to me. Symbolism is a deep part of my life and I didn't even realize it, and in fact would of said I am very iconoclast if I was asked.

It isn't for a lack of enlightenment or reason, I would say I have a slight deal more of that than the average man (not much though), but what I value naturally reflects itself in how I deal with objects of my fixations. I don't care for churches persay, so making one of blowing one up is silly to even care about, but if you grabbed 30 of the worlds fastest graphics processors and melted them down right in front of me, I would be disturbed. Of if you grabbed my legos which I don't use and burned them, the depths of my sadness would be hard to measure. Or to abstract it away to a level of symbolism, if people that made those items went out of business, I care (RIP BFG video cards).

Far be it a stretch of the imagination that people would use symbolism under false pretense to manipulate people, I am sure it is done all the time. But that only strengthens the argument that the mosque could potentially be built under false pretense inasmuch as the people who are offended by it. Everyone here could be guilty of some hidden, secret agenda, who is to say? I just wanted to point out that people getting upset about something that isn't a direct offense but a symbolic one aren't very different from you or me; they just care about a different set of things.

>> ^blankfist:

Do you mind citing?


I did some figurin' using ANWR's numbers, back when the Right was making a big stink about it, since it's the favorite one to get trotted out. At peak output (which it wouldn't reach for more than a decade if we opened it now), it would account for less than a million barrels a day -- ~0.5 to 1.0% of total global oil production (which is ~85 million barrels a day) and <5% of (current) US oil consumption (~20 million barrels a day).

If it were possible to exhume all of ANWR's estimated oil (7 billion barrels) in one go, it would last the United States one year.

So that's just ANWR--but what about all of the other off-limits places? Here's the EIA's report. In short: If the outer continental shelf were opened now, nothing much would change through 2030. There's an estimated (undiscovered) total of 50 billion barrels of oil that are currently off limits to drilling. Total US production would be 1.6% higher than the reference (no OCS drilling) projection for 2017-2030, and 3% in 2030. Finally,

Although a significant volume of undiscovered, technically recoverable oil and natural gas resources is added in the OCS access case, conversion of those resources to production would require both time and money. In addition, the average field size in the Pacific and Atlantic regions tends to be smaller than the average in the Gulf of Mexico, implying that a significant portion of the additional resource would not be economically attractive to develop at the reference case prices.

More numbers: In 2008 the entire world produced ~26 billion barrels of oil and the US produced about 1.8 billion--which will stay essentially flat through 2030 even if we opened ANWR and the OCS to drilling.

The US's total proven oil reserves are about 21 billion barrels--maybe a total of ~120 if you go with estimated undiscovered oil--compared to 1200 billion (proven) for the entire world.

Sorry for some inconsistent numbers: Figures are from 2007, 2008, and 2009, so there are some inconsistencies there. I think I properly kept barrels per day lumped together and barrels per year lumped together.

But anyway: The US has a total of less than two percent of the world's proven oil reserves. We currently produce around 5-6% of oil. Oil is a commodity and gets sold on the world market; more than a fifth of US oil is exported even while we're using 4x as much as we produce. Opening protected areas to drilling would have a marginal impact on total US oil production and an even more marginal impact on world oil production.

Oil reserves.
ANWR oil reserves. Sorry for Wikipedia links--you can follow their citations.

Edit: I used this page too.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'art, hot, skill, craft' to 'art, hot, skill, craft, glass, cat, kitten, blower, figurine' - edited by demon_ix

>> ^mintbbb:
Woooooot! Congrats dear, you sneaky thing! You hit 500 after I go to sleep!

THat's not all he sneaks around doing after you go to sleep...

...I'm, of course, referring to the after hours civil war figurine painting he does

Yeah the dialogue seemed a little fake to me, but that could've been camera shyness. I mean, the doll figurine looked real enough... maybe this was legit.

Not sure if this is going to help secure the pending marriage, however

moral courage, character, integrity, political decency...... oh hell, sign me the fuck up!!....highest office in the country, on the heels of 30+ years of oligarchy??? Sure, why not, guess we can take a chance that this is not another fekkin' ruse-sign me the fuck up for the nice guy nobody....after all, it's either him, a mannish girl-Friday for the elite, or Skeletor. Lessor of 3 evils, or 3 for the festival, 1st choice easy, 2nd choice bit harder, and third, more difficult but doable a figurine......

Lessig uses all the right pills to get all the right thrills, softspracht, even-meter, so calm and convincing-pitting dem against repub, like it isn't a scrimmage of the same team-members with different colored jerseys.......JEEZ!

He he he... this sounds familiar, there's a woman in my hometown I've known via my mother since I was a kid, she has over 9,000 mice collectibles that she decorates her house with at christmas and then gives home tours, I couldn't find any pics on the internet, but there was this article from ornamentcollectors.com:

"Collector Bobbi Beagle takes the holiday phrase, “Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse,” to a whole new level. While the 9,000 mice in her collection don’t stir, some 4,000 of them — all in Christmas themes — do put smiles on faces, especially children's.

At this time of the year, Mrs. Beagle and her husband, Art, open up their Overland Parkway home to neighbors, friends, family and strangers who want to see the very neatly displayed and overwhelming collection. Even Mrs. Beagle admits to the extreme numbers in her collection.

"It's mind-boggling, actually," said Mrs. Beagle. Both she and her husband, who are in their late 60s, are retired.

Mrs. Beagle, affectionately known as "Mrs. Mouse" or the "Mouse Lady" who lives in the "Mouse House," decorated four seven-foot-tall trees with about 700 mice ornaments on each tree.

Why mice and not the conventional collections of snowmen, Santas, snow globes, ornaments, or Christmas villages?

"When I was little I used to love Tom and Jerry, and when my oldest boy, now 46, was 8 he made me a mouse ornament.

"As he got older the mouse got uglier and I kept moving it to the back of the tree. My family kept buying me mice as a joke, and now its grown to this," said Mrs. Beagle, who collects mice at craft shows, garage sales, and through figurine collection companies."

"Catch the gay" and the Big Daddy figurine were awesome.

Actually, for those of you who are to young to know about the really old anime and toy collection, the answer Dik Dik was most likely referring to the character of the M.U.S.C.L.E series. You probably have never seen the anime, but most of us old farts probably remember the small rubber flesh colored wrestling figurines they were sold as.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_Muscle

looking up dik dik on youtube sheds a bit more light on things.

Man, can't believe this expired in queue, this deserves a Bill Shatner award er sumpin', but she is taking herself pretty seriously. Wonder how she decorates, bet she has poor taste, like crapitamante' and figurines n' stuffed animals an' shit! Bleegghh! Give that woman a cigar!
(She's on that big screen down at the MIB Headquarters.)

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

Why does this seem so much more brutal when it's a bunch plastic figurines as opposed to fullly rendered 60 FPS, anti-aliased goodness?