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The vodka is good, but the meat is rotten
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| I collect spores, mold, and fungus. |
[01 Jul 2009|12:20pm] |
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 silly |
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The Ghostbusters movies have been on a lot lately (probably due to the release of the video game) and last night they were both on right in a row and I watched all of the first one and most of the second. I think I've realized I'm carrying a pretty big torch for Egon. Gotta love those brainy guys. (Unfortunately Harold Ramis hasn't aged all that gracefully, but oh well.)
Speaking of guys I never found all that hot when I was younger but have sort of awakened to over the years, I find Jareth the Goblin King way hotter now than I did when I first watched Labyrinth. For that among other reasons, I'm dying to watch that movie again, plus Kevin has never seen it which needs to be remedied immediately. Maybe that'll be my next splurge with the Amazon gift certificates I get from my credit card.
Lastly, HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO COURTNEY! Hopefully you'll read this on Facebook, but I'll give you a call tonight anyway. :-)
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| What I've been doing for the past month |
[29 Jun 2009|10:14am] |
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 accomplished |
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I can finally talk about a project I've been working on since the end of May, because I gave it to the recipient on Saturday! :-)
The day after I got the invitation to my friend Meredith's baby shower, I bought yarn and started knitting a blanket, because spontaneously knitting gifts on a deadline is just how I roll! The knitting portion actually only took about 3 weeks, and then I sewed a flannel backing onto it. I'd never sewn fabric to a knitted object before, but I'm happy with the results!
( On with the show! )
It actually wasn't the only handmade blankie Meredith got; another lady made a tie blanket, and yet a third lady made a gorgeous quilt! Meredith's daughter will have no shortage of lovely blankets to snuggle in! :-)
P.S. I just realized there's no real sense of scale in the pics. The blanket measures about 40"x40".
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| How a geek gets a haircut |
[27 Jun 2009|05:39pm] |
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 happy |
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I knew just how I wanted to get my hair cut; I even had a picture of Mandy Moore that was exactly what I wanted. Unfortunately, this morning I realized I had forgotten to print it out at work and our printer at home was out of ink. I wanted to put it on my iPod, but apparently even though it can play videos, it can't store pictures. I couldn't get it onto the digital camera either. So what's a girl to do?
( I know! )
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| Bayside vs. (Uncanny) Valley |
[25 Jun 2009|10:17am] |
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mood |
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 freaked out |
] |
Did anyone else check out Jimmy Fallon's interview with Zack Morris? Did it come across as a bit creepy and uncanny valley-ish to you? Mark-Paul Gosselaar is still a good-looking man, to be sure, but he is much too old to play a high-schooler anymore, and so in his Zack Morris getup something just looked...off. I didn't even watch it with sound, and I'm not sure whether that would have helped or not.
Even though the uncanny valley freaks me right the heck out (o hai thar, fear of mannequins and ventriloquist dummies) for some reason I can't get enough of reading about/seeing examples of it. More examples for your perusal so you may be freaked out as well.
Also, please take note of my amazingly clever subject line. I am so awesome sometimes.
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| Screw you, mid-June thunderstorm! |
[24 Jun 2009|08:42am] |
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mood |
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 annoyed |
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Thursday night it rained like crazy. Friday night we discovered that our new basement carpet (you know, the one that was just installed about six months ago?) was SOAKED. D-: Nothing like unexpectedly spending your weekend Shop-Vaccing the hell out of your beloved basement carpet. It's just damp now, but I'm a bit worried about the padding underneath. The basement smells slightly musty and I'm afraid we didn't dry it fast enough to prevent mildew. :-( I guess we'll wait and see if it gets any better.
It occurs to me I never posted any pictures of the basement after we finished it. So without further ado, here's a (very) brief history of our basement.
( Before )
( In Progress )
( Finis! )
That's pretty much exactly how the basement still looks, i.e. no furniture because we're slackers. This turned out to be a blessing in disguise because we didn't have any furniture to move before sucking the water out of our carpet.
We think the water got in because our sump pump was emptying into the backyard, and the backyard was a lake to begin with due to the fact that it's a downhill grade towards our house. So the lake that was our patio would seep into the sump pump, and then the sump pump would send it right back into the backyard. We're not sure where the water seeped in; the sump pump itself doesn't appear to have overflowed. Kevin attached a hose to the sump pump pipe and ran it to the front of the house, so hopefully this will not happen again.
It's crazy though. We got SO MUCH rain and snow last year and didn't have a drop of water in the basement, and then one night of rain did this. Unbelievable.
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| Yo dawg... |
[16 Jun 2009|04:08pm] |
There's a billboard for McDonald's new brownie melts that says "I like chocolate with my chocolate." Every time I pass it on my way home from work I get the urge to snap a picture and superimpose Xzibit's face on it.
That is all.
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| I haven't forgotten |
[29 May 2009|03:02pm] |
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mood |
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 excited |
] |
I promise I still have every intention of doing a full write-up of the Japan trip. I'll buckle down and start on that this weekend.
A couple weeks ago I bought the last Rammstein CD I needed to complete my collection. Oddly enough, it was their first album, Herzeleid. I love it, as is the case with the other four albums.
Lest you think I am a frenzied fanatic deaf to any flaws in my favorite band's music, I'll have you know there are several of their songs I do not like and will skip over pretty much every time they pop up on Purple Fury (my iPod). One of these is Küss Mich (Fellfrosch), which I would actually really like if it weren't for the unfortunate presence of that cartoon head-shaking sound effect throughout the entire thing (think Disney's Goofy going "aiiee-aiiee-aiiee-aiiee-aiiee.") I also don't much care for the English versions of Engel and Du Hast.
***
There's a new idea I've had that I'm hesitant to bring up because of how much I talked about wanting to program games and start an indie game company, and now I seem to be temporarily abandoning that dream. :-P I'm not quite ready to talk about it in full yet, not until I've actually made some progress, but I will tell you I'm expecting this book to arrive from Amazon any day:
On a less entrepreneurial note, I'm expecting Wrath of the Lich King to arrive in the same shipment. :-)
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| Leavin' on a jet plane! |
[11 May 2009|04:32pm] |
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mood |
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 giddy |
] |
Well, not for about 20 more hours, but wow. In less than 36 hours we'll be in Japan! Eeeeek! Still have lots to do.
I've taken care of important things like buying Chrono Trigger for the DS and buying yarn for a brand new knitting project. Minor details like where we're staying when we get there are still up in the air! Ha.
Actually I do have a list of hotels that look good and I'm making a hotels.com reservation tonight. We're a fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants kind of couple! I'm not worried, though. When Kevin was in Taiwan on business, he switched hotels partway through the trip to go to a less expensive one since he was staying a few days extra for pleasure. So he's comfortable with the idea of booking hotels when we're actually in the country. Plus we're not sure exactly how long we want to be in Tokyo, then Kyoto, then possibly elsewhere, so there's not much point in making ALL the reservations ahead of time. As long as we're not sleeping on the street, I don't mind an adventure!
Or we could just stay in a manga kissa!
Sayonara, I'll put lots of pics online when we get back. :-)
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| Thanks everyone! |
[05 May 2009|08:26am] |
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mood |
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happy |
] |
Thanks for all your compliments on the doily! *rolls around in affirmations* Hee.
I thought I'd post one more pic that might give you an idea of the scale. It's blurry, and the doily was still folded in quarters, but here's a picture of it in my hands:
( IT'S ALIVE )
Unfortunately these and the previous two pictures are the only ones I have of the doily (not including one that I accidentally took while trying to turn off the camera.) They were taken with my mom's camera because I accidentally broke mine just before I was going to take pictures of the doily at home. :-( I think I stepped on it a little while the telescoping lens was out, and it got bent and wouldn't retract into the camera when I turned it off. Kevin's attempts to fix it were unsuccessful. I had to quickly take the doily out of the gift bag at the party (before my great aunt and uncle arrived) and snap a couple quick pictures with my mom's camera.
While it was a bummer I couldn't get pictures of the doily on our new kitchen table, it's an even bigger bummer that it broke a week and a half before our Japan trip. :-/ We're going to stop at Best Buy tonight to look for a new camera. *sigh* Oh well, now Kevin and I are even; we have no honeymoon pictures thanks to his digital camera taking a quick dip in the ocean on our way out to the stingray sandbar. Although we never did check the memory card, plus the cruise ended in a fiery blaze the next night anyway!
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| It is finished! |
[04 May 2009|09:25pm] |
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mood |
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accomplished |
] |
It took me a month to make, and the last week or so I was working on it in just about every minute of free time I had, and I gave it away in an instant, but I'm so proud of it!
( O DLY? )
It's hard to get a feel for scale, but as predicted, it's almost exactly 2 feet across. A monster!
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| Yay, I'm now what used to be the best |
[27 Apr 2009|02:43pm] |
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 rushed |
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In WoW news, Zarindine is level 61! Too bad level 80 is now the highest you can get. :-P
I have been KNITTING MY BUTT OFF all weekend. The deadline for the doily (a.k.a. the day of my great aunt and uncle's anniversary party) is Saturday and I have about 9.5 rounds to go. Did I mention there are over 1000 stitches per round now? Yeah. I may need to give my wrists a vacation after this. Also, it's a freaking monster; although it's hard to gauge the true size while it's all scrunched up on the needles, I'm pretty sure it's going to be over two feet in diameter.
We got our new kitchen table on Saturday! (It's about time; we ordered it in January and they told us it would take 6-7 weeks.) We love it; the chairs are so comfy and it looks great. I'll probably take a picture of the never-ending doily on it when it's done, so I can show it the AND the table off all at once!
We put the old kitchen table in the basement, which makes it the official first piece of furniture down there. Yay! Now I really want to go buy a TV stand so we can move the TV down there and stop using it as a monitor. :-P
Which reminds me...I honestly don't know if I can go back to playing WoW on a small monitor! I've gotten so spoiled by playing on that behemoth that I'm not even sure a 26" will do it for me. Kevin "jokingly" brought up the idea of getting a second 52" TV, but I was kind of like O_O about that. I wouldn't mind getting maybe like a 36" TV to use as a monitor, but two 52" TVs in the house, and one of them being used ONLY as a computer monitor, seems decadent to the point of embarrassment.
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| R.I.P. Bea |
[27 Apr 2009|08:32am] |
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mood |
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 sad |
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Golden Girls star Bea Arthur dies at 86
The Golden Girls has been one of my favorite TV shows since I was young, and Dorothy is definitely my favorite character. I wish I could have had a chance to meet Bea Arthur in person.
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| Something for everyone (I hope) |
[15 Apr 2009|01:40pm] |
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mood |
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 blah |
] |
My subject line refers to the fact that so many people on LJ and Facebook from so many different facets of my life read this, that I'm often at a loss as to what to write about that will interest everyone. So today you all get game programming, exercise, and World of Warcraft. Yeah I know, that list sucks. Oh well!
The other night I actually worked on Quadrablox (my Tetris clone) for the first time in several months. I'm working on getting the rows to animate as they're eliminated, rather than instantaneously disappearing. The game board is 10 squares wide, and what I want is for the center two squares of each completed row to disappear, then the next two, then the next two, working outwards till the row is gone. (Obviously this would all happen in a smooth, eye-pleasing manner.)
Right now, I have a bug where the first row I eliminate disappears instantaneously, and after that, every time a piece is placed, the game acts as though a row is being eliminated (i.e. it makes the sound and the "Rows Completed" counter goes up, but visually nothing actually happens.) Eventually the pieces build up to the top of the game board but instead of getting a game over, pieces keep coming down faster and faster as the row count increases and the level continues to increment. I let it get to about level two-hundred something before I stopped it, and let me tell you, no human alive can play Tetris at that speed (or probably anything past level 30, for that matter.) It's pretty LOLtastic. I wonder if I can capture video of this somehow, instead of writing a long, confusing paragraph about it.
Easter weekend was nice. We did all those things I mentioned we would do, except the working out, and now I sort of feel gross from eating all those big meals and sweets and not exercising. I've been meaning to start taking short walks every day when the weather warms up (15 minutes right when I wake up, 15 minutes over lunch, and 15 minutes in the evening), but now I think I'd better suck it up, put on some layers, and start this routine NOW even though it's still a bit chilly (~50F) around these parts.
I also want to make sure I keep weightlifting. I'm still weak as hell, but over the past month Kevin and I have been fairly good at getting to the gym at least once a week, and I was already starting to see a minute amount of progress as far as how much weight/how many reps I could handle. I haven't gone in over a week and I really don't want to backslide.
In WoW news, even though my blood elf paladin Zarindine is only level 58, I've created a new toon. :-P I now have a Draenei Shaman named Tristine on Kalecgos. Kevin's brother Nathan created a Draenei Shaman as well, and we're leveling up together. (We get triple XP through the recruit-a-friend thing.) We've only played two nights for about 1.5 hours each night, and we're already level 12! Sweet. I'm not abandoning Zarindine; I just thought on a whim that it would be fun to see what shamans are all about. Besides that, Nathan and Kevin have been leveling together with Kevin's main and one of Nathan's alts, and Nathan had been wanting the two of them to create new characters to level. (Kid really likes leveling I guess!) So now he gets to level with me instead!
Sorry, this was really boring. And I didn't even mention how I'm knitting this as a 50th wedding anniversary present for my great-aunt and uncle.
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| Gotta try to stay on top of this thing! |
[10 Apr 2009|02:48pm] |
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Busy weekend coming up. Tonight we're going to my parents' house to have a game night/early Easter dinner (since my brother and sister-in-law won't be available Sunday.) Every time we get together for a gathering/holiday with extended family, my siblings and I and our significant others always end up finishing out the evening playing games together in the dining room. (Apples to Apples is a common favorite.) EVERY SINGLE TIME, my mom says "We should really have a family game night once a month," but we never do! So Kevin and I were recently visiting my parents and I mentioned it, so we decided to shoot for Easter. I guess we still haven't quite broken out of the "only getting everyone together near holidays" mode quite yet, but it's a start! I'm really looking forward to it.
Tomorrow I think we'll try to work out since I haven't gone yet this week (Kevin did on Tuesday, but I've been feeling very tired and I have a bit of a sore throat.) We're going to an evening Easter service and then heading to my co-worker's house for another gaming party! That'll be fun too!
Sunday morning we're going to Easter brunch at Kevin's grandparents' country club, as we have done for the past few years. I am DEFINITELY looking forward to this! There's always so much delicious food, which further highlights the urgency of me getting a workout in tomorrow!
Last night was anime group which was fun. This is the first time I've been able to make it where we're in the big media room at the 'Stallis library. WOW, it was nice. I felt like I was at Otakon! It's my duty to reserve the room for next month, since there's a limit on how many times a person can rent in within a particular timespan and I'm one of the only other people in the group that's a West Allis resident. Another group already claimed the room for the 2nd Thursday in May (our usual night), so I'm going to try reserving it for the 21st instead--the day after I get back from Japan. o_o Hellooooooo, jetlag!
I think I've yakked enough for now. In my next entry I'll talk about how I finally worked on Quadrablox last night for the first time in months! :-D
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| *hurk* |
[01 Apr 2009|09:13am] |
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mood |
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silly |
] |
Sweet merciful crap, is a mock apple pie really supposed to taste like apple pie? It sounds disgusting. Don't scroll down and read the mock pecan pie recipe (complete with pinto beans) if you value your stomach contents. (ETA: Oh, I forgot to add, if you somehow make it past the mock pecan pie, you'll be treated to a cake recipe that utilizes tomato soup! D-: )
Why was I on Heloise's site? I got one of her books (Hints from Heloise) from the library a couple weeks ago as part of my "be more organized" initiative. The book was published in 1980, so there were some outdated parts that made me giggle. Such as when she said you can never have too much phone cord, because then you can do all sorts of small chores while you're talking on the phone! Hahaha.
On a similar note, there was a part in Mind Matters where the author referred to early magnetic memory storage, which was about 10 megabytes and the size of the bottom tier of a wedding cake. He went on to say how "just last week" he saw a laptop computer with 100 times that capacity. 100 times 10 megabytes...1000 megabytes...1 gigabyte. LOLLERSKATES.
I guess as long as I'm blabbering about library books, I'll also mention that I got a few cookbooks as well. It was a veritable parade of Food Network personalities; Ellie Krieger, Ina Garten, and Giada De Laurentiis. Saturday night I made Ellie's Fish Tacos with Chipotle Cream Sauce, and they turned out very well (though incredibly spicy!)
I'm also proud of myself because I assembled two lasagnas last...Tuesday I think, froze one, and baked the other for our dinner that night (and the leftovers lasted for several days.) So now I still have another lasagna all ready to go in the freezer! Sweet. Also, I followed a tip I found somewhere online, and lined the baking dish with foil and plastic wrap before assembling the to-be-frozen lasagna. Once it was frozen, it easily lifted right out of the dish, so the dish isn't stuck sitting in the freezer till we decide to eat the lasagna. Maybe that's obvious to all of you, but I thought it was ingenious. :-P
Now I leave you with an exchange I had with Kevin last night while we were making a homemade pizza for dinner:
Erin: Do you want me to grate the cheese?
Kevin: That would be great.
Erin: LOL
What? I never said I was difficult to amuse.
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| Ugh time to scramble for another update! |
[31 Mar 2009|03:28pm] |
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mood |
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rushed |
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Ok, just the highlights:
1.) Livejournal related: This will only make sense to my fellow sf_drama members. I am sincerely going to miss lost_kite; I liked her a lot. Although my suspicions that she was a guy were incorrect and my secret fantasies about [him] were rendered somewhat awkward, I'd still hit it. Mock me if you will, it's just the way it is! I think she was pretty freaking sharp, and I am truly sad she deleted. I hope she resurfaces someday.
2.) WoW related: My blood elf pally Zarindine is now level 51, woohoo! :-) She also obtained a robotic chicken as a companion, which makes me incredibly happy. Screenshots pending.
3.) Novel related: Well, it's the last day of National Novel Editing Month, and I didn't come close to 50 hours of editing. Not only that, but I'm pretty sure I want to start my novel completely over and change everything about it except my main character and her smoking hot android sidekick. (Well, I wouldn't be scrapping my novel per se, even though it does need a major overhaul; rather, I think I'd like to make the first book in my series [LOL] a different story. This one got a little too epic for my original vision of an episodic, Indiana Jones type story.) It's still been a lot of fun revisiting it, not to mention seeing my writing group again!
4.) AI related: No, not American Idol. Sorry, Idol fans! I'm talking about Artificial Intelligence. I've been taking an interest in it again; for those who aren't aware or forgot (so, for all of you), I took an intro to AI course in my last semester at Marquette, and it was my favorite class of my entire college career. I've always sort of wanted to get back into it as a hobby/possibly go back to school to study it, and recently I've been regretting that I never did so. So, I'm reading the ol' AI textbook again and I think I'm going to make a Sudoku-playing agent for practice. I'm also reading Mind Matters: Exploring the World of Artificial Intelligence, which is sort of a layman's overview of the history of AI, and is pretty interesting.
5.) Quadrablox related: I haven't done anything with Quadrablox in months. For those who aren't aware or forgot (so, for all of you), Quadrablox is the Tetris clone I programmed. It's a fully functional game; just not as pretty as I'd like it to be. I want to wrap that up so I can create an original game. Fortunately there should be some overlap between my AI "studies" and my game programming, so I won't have to sacrifice either of them to try to fit them into my ever-growing list of hobbies.
6.) Ever-growing list of hobbies: I'd like to learn to quilt. And make corsets. And play the harmonica. And finally paint some makeup onto my doll Sophia. And get into the steampunk scene. And lift weights. And make time to read more. And continue knitting like a freak. And of course I'll never stop playing video games. And and and and and and...
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| I love this. |
[20 Mar 2009|03:16pm] |
Dwan Ev ceremoniously soldered the final connection with gold. The eyes of a dozen television cameras watched him and the subether bore throughout the universe a dozen pictures of what he was doing.
He straightened and nodded to Dwar Reyn, then moved to a position beside the switch that would complete the contact when he threw it. The switch that would connect, all at once, all of the monster computing machines of all the populated planets in the universe -- ninety-six billion planets -- into the supercircuit that would connect them all into one supercalculator, one cybernetics machine that would combine all the knowledge of all the galaxies.
Dwar Reyn spoke briefly to the watching and listening trillions. Then after a moment's silence he said, "Now, Dwar Ev."
Dwar Ev threw the switch. There was a mighty hum, the surge of power from ninety-six billion planets. Lights flashed and quieted along the miles-long panel.
Dwar Ev stepped back and drew a deep breath. "The honor of asking the first question is yours, Dwar Reyn."
"Thank you," said Dwar Reyn. "It shall be a question which no single cybernetics machine has been able to answer."
He turned to face the machine. "Is there a God?"
The mighty voice answered without hesitation, without the clicking of a single relay.
"Yes, now there is a God."
Sudden fear flashed on the face of Dwar Ev. He leaped to grab the switch.
A bolt of lightning from the cloudless sky struck him down and fused the switch shut.
(Fredric Brown, "Answer")
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