Daily Links Discussion

[briggsb]

Here's the thread to discuss BBspot's Daily Links.

[Blaine]

Re: The New York Times study on laughter, I think of two stories that I've read.

The first is Stranger in a Strange Land, by Heinlein. He basically describes laughter as a coping mechanism for pain. The main character was raised on mars and doesn't understand humor until he sees a monkey beat the crap out of another one, and then get beaten up in turn. He finds this funny, as would we all.

The second one is a short story by Isaac Asimov. I can't remember the name of it. Basically, some research was being done into why humans laugh, and the fact that they actually figured it out turned off the human humor mechanism in the species. Jokes stopped being funny. I did some quick google searches, but I couldn't find the story. I just found some article about how Asimov inspired Bin Laden.
_________________
www .Run To Win.com
www .The First Time Home Owner.com

[billyfens]

At my house, we had all of the values memorized. This resulted in "long version" games as short as 15 minutes.

[Half-Mad]

[billyfens]

If you roll a "ten," you move from "Go" to "Just visiting," or from "Just visiting" to "Free parking" (for which you GET NOTHING! NADA! YOU LOSE!), "Free Parking" to "Go to Jail," and then back to the beginning again.

$2 rent for Med Ave.
$4 rent for Baltic

$6 for Oriental and Vermont, $8 for Connecticut...

I could still play a 15 minute game.

We'd pay each other while rolling.

[briggsb]

Our Monopoly sessions would last forever. I don't think we ever played until someone lost.

[Turing]

Monopoly (or monopoly rip-off) sessions at home usually lasted 3 or 4 hours, and by then we'd all be so sick of it we'd just stop the game.
_________________
Hey, look at me
Casually
Walking away like Action Movie Hero Boy

[ThE_ED]

The monopoly sessions here always lasted for hours as well. That made it all the more interesting to play with some friends on rainy days. I'm not sure if anyone even knew the proper rules. Nice to see that people play with the same custom rules no matter which country they're from, I guess the game really is the same everywhere except for the streetnames and currency. (I still say "guilder" in older games though, not "euro".)

I hardly ever play Monopoly anymore, Settlers of Catan is the most popular game now.
_________________
"The owl tells the sparrow that her head is big." (Hungarian proverb)

[Scott]

In Canada, Monopoly is a Crown Corporation game and, therefore, subject to government restrictions. It's illegal for us to play monopoly without at least one politician and a low level bureaucrat present to preside over the game.
I always play The Mountie.
_________________
I wish I was never artificially created in a lab!

[frequenicity]

Re: Foobar2000

I have been using this program for a little over a year or so...and I highly recommend it to anyone who is looking for an alternative to Winamp/Media Player/iTunes/Whatever. It is incredibly lightweight, completely gapless in track changes, and has one of the best decoding engines I have heard. Plus, the original code (I believe) was written by someone who worked on the development of an earlier version of Winamp (Pre-AOL Suck days).

[Turing]

I still use the old WinAmp. I think the 2.8 or 2.7 version. Mmm lightweight.
_________________
Hey, look at me
Casually
Walking away like Action Movie Hero Boy

[wicco]

I've been using musicCube lately, but will definately take a closer look at all the possibilities of fooBar2000.

[briggsb]

I've been switching between lots of music players now that Musicmatch has pissed me off. I've used Winamp, iTunes, Foobar2000, the google gadget that uses wmp. I can't decide which to use. In my searches I did find this handy lyrics plug-in that people might find useful:

http://www.crintsoft.com/

[goombot]

I'll have to check out FooBar. One of my biggest complaints about media players is that when they're upgraded, they tend to steal all of your default file associations again, even if you tell them not to.
_________________
www.vegetablesofthemind.com

[Scott]

Have you tried VLC? It's cross platform. I'm not sure what you expect from a media player. http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=07/03/08/1839232
_________________
I wish I was never artificially created in a lab!