I had a great game going, Alexander, Standard-size Pangea map, King difficulty. I had already eliminated the Netherlands and Korea and was just lining up Poland in my Early Infantry, Heavy Artillery, and WWI tanks sights. I was pulling in over 200 Research points a turn, about 300 gold a turn, and my army was the strongest in the world.

I even kept people happy with entertainment districts and luxuries.

Then the game crashed. No error message, so hopefully it's still there, but I am quite annoyed.

I did find a fun tactic. If you're playing an aggressive civilization (Macedonia, Mongolia, etc.) and you play with the Secret Societies mode on, and you get the Voidsingers, chose Crusade when you get your religion. Because the Old God Obelisks that replace the Monument pump out +4 Faith a turn, and have a Great Work slot. So build up an army of Missionaries, go covert, then attack with a +10 for attacking a city of the same faith.

Really pissed. I've invested about 14 hours into this game.

So I have embraced conquering a bottle of Corona. Victory is mine!

This is recycled from last year and updated a bit. Because I still see that same thing.

It's Super Bowl Sunday again, and I'm ignoring the game. I am so done with Tom Brady and the Patriots. They cheat. They've been caught cheating more than once. Which sucks because Brady is an amazing quarterback, but now his legacy is tied to all the shenanigans pulled by Bill Belichick. I'll catch the highlights later on ESPN. I really just don't care this year.

But the end of football season means that baseball, and my beloved San Francisco Giants, are just around the corner. FanFest is next Saturday, and pitchers and catchers report in Scottsdale soon after that. Soon enough, I'll be hearing those familiar voices on KNBR calling games and heaping scorn on the Dodgers. Because that's what the Orange and Black nation does. BEAT L.A.!

Seriously, Beat L.A. With a stick. I hate the Dodgers.

But along with the overblown end of the NFL season came something I've come to dread on social media. People adopting elitist, dismissive attitudes about sports. Sadly, some people I consider friends do this. It annoys me no end, and I have to keep from exploding every time I see it. So I'll just explain why here in this space.

Calling all sports "sportsball" and pretending to be confused by the basic concepts of the game are insulting. Refusing to admit that sports are popular to a wide audience of all backgrounds is delusional. Whining about people spending money on watching sports is rude and controlling. If I choose to spend money on a Brandon Crawford jersey and pay to go to a game that's my business.

I have friends, some of whom have done the sportsball thing, who spend thousands of dollars every year to attend science-fiction conventions around the world. I love conventions, but you don't think that someone somewhere isn't rolling their eyes at this? Two men I am proud to call friends have devoted thousands of hours and an equal amount of money to creating fantastic costumes and props and are now running a World Science Fiction Convention, which is only slightly less challenging than planning D-Day. Surely there could have been a better use for that money, some would argue. But it's what brings these people joy. So fuck off and let them enjoy it.

So, why do I enjoy sports so much? I love watching skilled people do things that I could never do. A Major League pitcher can top 99mph on a fastball. The batter has less than a second to identify the speed and motion of the ball, make a swing/no swing decision, and commit to the act. Literally, the slowest part of this action is the signal from the brain to the muscles to move. Yet a good batter will make contact over half the time.

A NFL quarterback has to be aware of the position of the other 21 players on the field from the moment he gets the ball in his hands. He has to be able to track his receivers and throw the ball into a crowd and get it to the right guy. See how well you do at this when being pursued by guys who are big, fast, and strong. A few years ago my mom and I get great seats for a 49ers preseason game. We were right down on the sidelines near the end zone. We saw exactly how fast these players are, and how hard they hit.

There you go, I love sports because I love seeing amazing things unfold live, done by people who have honed their athletic gifts to the finest edge.

But there's another reason why I love sports, and football in particular. 49ers football is one of my few good memories of my late father. Dad and I never got along. I often say that he wanted children and got Californians. Dad grew up in England during the Depression and WWII in a military family. He simply wasn't prepared for kids with political opinions and a sense of personal freedom. We locked horns on everything.

But on Sundays, we were a family united. I was raised a 49er Faithful. I joke that my first words were "wait 'till next year!" We lived and died by the Niners. Even when all my friends were rooting for the Steelers or Cowboys, the two dominant teams of the 1970s, I held fast to my roots.

My parents had season tickets at Candlestick Park, 45-yard line, right under the press box. Sometimes, I'd get to go to the game with Daddy. I can still remember riding up the long escalator while holding his hand, cheering as John Brodie let the Red and Gold down the field, getting to eat hot dogs and candy, and mainly just being with my dad as we followed the family religion.

Even later, at the worst of our estrangement, I would call him every Sunday during the season to talk about the game. It was the one common thread that held us together. And when he died, I think my first reaction was that I was going to miss those conversations.

In conclusion, if you don't like sports, good for you. But don't think that makes you better than anyone else, and don't be a condescending twat about it.

Oh, and Go Giants! BEAT L.A.

If you are reading this and have a LiveJournal, go and delete it immediately. The new terms of service are binding only in Russian, so we have no clue what's actually in them. This is the final straw.

Ever since the sale to the Russians, LJ has slowly become unbearable. Good riddance.

Figuring out how to use my new program. This is going to take some work, but I think it's going to be a very good thing my writing.

For years I've been using Semagic's excellent client for posting to DW/LJ. However, it is becoming increasingly buggy and prone to doing weird things.

Any suggestions for a client that plays nice with DW?

Why do I even fucking bother?

As most of you have heard, the U.S. Treasury has announced that a new run of $10 bills will feature a prominent woman from American history. In a thread on the decision, people were making suggestions, some serious, some farcical.

I suggested Jeannette Rankin. Suffragette, Organizer, Social Worker, first woman ever elected to the House of Representatives, and active up to her death in fighting for weird concepts like "liberty and justice for all." Who also, as you'll see if you read that link (do so, she was an amazing woman), was the only member of Congress to vote against our entry into both world wars. I mentioned that, to show that even in the face of immense pressure, she held true to her principles, despite the cost. Which I find admirable in a person, especially in those times.

Well, boom goes the dynamite. What's funny was just how mind-boggling ignorant these fuckers are! They asked if Rankin was thinking of the victims of the gas chambers. The first death camp, Chelmno, opened the same week as the US war vote, and gas chambers weren't used until the spring of 1942, plus, that was Germany. We didn't declare war on Germany until December 11th, after they declared war on us.

Then I had to explain the difference between concentration camps and extermination camps. Then I had to explain that the "Nacht und Nebel" order was a secret decree, issued by Hitler the same day as the Pearl Harbor attack, and only applied to dissidents in occupied countries. Finally, that no one really knew about the Holocaust in detail until late 1944 when we started finding the damn camps and capturing SS officers and documents!

Once we were finally back to Japan, another idiot asked if she supported Japanese cruelty and domination of colonies taken by force. I replied that under that logic we should have declared war on King George VI and the British Empire for doing the exact same thing to Egypt, India, Ireland, and big chunks of China for centuries.

The reply? "Well, that's a different situation."

Where the hell is my SMITE button?

(Tip of the hat to Niece Prime for first calling me out on that.)

One of the things I've learned since starting at the YMCA is music really helps my 45 minutes on the bike go by much faster. I've had fun putting together work-out mixes, tending towards longer jams and good beat counts.

Today I was trying a new mix:

Metallica - ...And Justice for All (Live) 10:06

Grateful Dead - Help On The Way/Slipknot!/Franklin's Tower (Live) 18:58

Genesis - Domino: Part I-In The Glow Of The Night Part II:The Last Domino (Live) 11:21

Start pedaling, hit play on the playlist and . . . nothing. ...And Justice for All refuses to start. Go to the second track and everything is fine. But at the end of the music, I still have roughly ten minutes of work and a five minute cool-down. So I search for a good song. That's when I learn that close to 2/3rds of the music on my iPhone is on the cloud. I put it on my phone for a reason, not so I can be warned that downloading the song over cellular might cost me money.

This really pissed me off. It threw off my rhythm, really elevated my heartbeat, and cost me many spoons.

So I ask, on an iPhone 4, is there any way to force iTunes to actually put my music where I want it?

As a sign of how frustrated I was, I completely missed that I was lifting the wrong weight on the row station for my first set.

I've been getting a ton of email from camera whores. Today, I snapped and replied.

OK, who the fuck are you? If you offer me dirty pictures, I swear by the howling dark gods of my fathers I will track you down and pour Drano down your throat. I will rip your entrails out and set them on fire before I let you die. I will ravage your family unto the ends of the Earth.

So, what's up?

Be interesting to see if I get a reply...

Echofon, the preferred Twitter client for me and Kirsten, has stopped supporting their plugin for desktops.

Any advice on a good Twitter feed thingie that works both on computers and mobile devices?