Originally Posted by Jetée (Post 2877067)

Man... that's out of this world big. (I've probably heard of larger images in size, but none that intrigue me as much as what you just spoke for.)

plus... even if/when you do download the thing, I'm not sure that Windows Picture Viewer is going to like opening up a 500+ MB file. Do you have a metric/ft/pixels converter handy? I'm sure it is easy enough to find with "pixel foot converter", but... I can't even comprehend how large in diameter it must be (say: wider than my village block?)

Originally Posted by BadNick (Post 2877339)

woof woof woof ...just a few barks to add another post.

Originally Posted by ring (Post 2799975)

Oh yes. My 'out of sorts' & cranky moment, has passed over.
Brushing up on word & phrase origins, is therapeutic.

"Q From Ron Vaughn: Where does the expression out of sorts come from? What are sorts in this context? My wife accuses me of this malady and I know what she means, but I don’t know why I know.

A English idioms are often extremely puzzling and their origins are notoriously difficult to track down. So people invent all kinds of yarns to make sense of them.

The most common story about this phrase refers to the printer’s word sorts for the individual metal characters in his boxes of type, so called because they have been arranged, each into its own compartment, with all of one kind together. It would obviously be a substantial inconvenience if a printer were to run out of a sort during composition. The problem with this story is that the figurative expression out of sorts is recorded much earlier than the printers’ term; the first recorded use of it for printers’ type in the big Oxford English Dictionary is from as late as 1784, from Benjamin Franklin: “The founts, too, must be very scanty, or strangely out of sorts”. It would seem he was attaching an already well-known idiom to the printer’s trade, not the other way around.

A second idea is that it has something to do with playing cards. A pack that hasn’t been shuffled is said to be out of sort and not suitable for playing with. The problem with this is that the OED doesn’t give any example of its being used in this connection, which it surely would if the expression had been common.

The Latin original of our word sort was applied to a piece of wood that was used for drawing lots. Later, still in Latin, it developed into the idea of one’s fate, fortune or condition. This was the first meaning of sort in English, in the thirteenth century. It survived until shortly after Shakespeare’s time, until about the point that out of sorts is first found. But sort soon evolved another meaning in English that related to rank, order, or class. It was used to describe people, especially their qualities or standing. There were once phrases such as of sort that implied high quality or rank. Others that we still use today, such as of your own sort, the right sort, or of all sorts, evolved out of the same idea.

It would seem out of sorts developed from this idea of quality (lack of it in this case), perhaps influenced by the other meaning of fate or one’s lot in life, so implying that fortune wasn’t smiling on one, or that all wasn’t well."

Originally Posted by ring (Post 2800088)

I'm trying to recall the instances you speak of.

Perhaps when you begin a reply with: "Not to be snippy here."
The next poster may well decide, "I'm on the defensive, cuz he's going to get snippy."
When in fact your intentions were exactly the opposite.

But, by mentioning that fact, up front, that your post could be offensive,
that puts the idea, 'offensive' at the forefront of the reader's mind.

I'm just brainstorming here...that's all.

I'm curious to what 'the lying down game' might entail.

Originally Posted by BadNick (Post 2726991)

carrot,
my kid told me he has to "turn on my mod" and then the game lets him put betty's underwater so he can better blow up unsuspecting passers-by.

Just from overhearing conversations from my den, I gather that these mods, of which there are many, are frowned upon by some serious players since it's basically cheating by use of some weird hack to the controller or game software. I think my kid has other mods that greatly increase his firing rate and other such useful war capabilities...though I think he's finally realizing that to gain respect of his fellow soldiers, he has to kill everybody within the rules.

Do you ever use a "glitch"? I think that lets you move through the landscape in "unnatural" ways...like getting from here to there without passing through the space between, or you can walk through walls and over roofs that are normally inaccessible...so I'm just learning this from hearing "our recon plane will find them wherever they hide" and other such banter.

Originally Posted by jewels (Post 2850997)

You're definitely not the waste. Just a bit wasted!

http://usingit.files.wordpress.com/2...-explosion.jpg

Sounds as though you could use a rest from all that work anyway. As long as it doesn't keep you from TFP.

Originally Posted by Jetée (Post 2727322)

it may be a page or two late, but... more "Infopornomagraphics!"

The Hierarchy of Digital Distractions


if this works hotlinked, click here:

Originally Posted by Jetée (Post 2785201)

I used to play a PC game called "Chickens from Space", and it somehow was a religious-type game. Not bad, but weird... also enjoyable, though random in its message.

I'll try to find it for you while you compose your thesis on "chicken entropy".