{"id":1189,"date":"2010-07-04T17:42:45","date_gmt":"2010-07-04T23:42:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/?p=1189"},"modified":"2010-07-04T17:44:47","modified_gmt":"2010-07-04T23:44:47","slug":"civ-sabbath","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/?p=1189","title":{"rendered":"Civ Sabbath"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday afternoon and this morning, while taking codeine for my delightful headache, I’ve been playing another round of Civilization II.\u00a0 You know, that 14 year old game that I can just never get enough of.<\/p>\n

This time, I was playing as the Zulus.\u00a0 I’m fond of reading (via text-to-speech software) Wikipedia articles about the history of the “civ” I play, so I read the rather short article on the Zulus, then read about Shaka<\/a>.\u00a0 Oy.<\/p>\n

So when his mother died, he apparently went batshit crazy and:<\/p>\n

…ordered that no crops should be planted during the following year, no milk (the basis of the Zulu diet at the time) was to be used, and any woman who became pregnant was to be killed along with her husband. At least 7,000 people who were deemed to be insufficiently grief-stricken were executed, though it wasn’t restricted to humans, cows were slaughtered so that their calves would know what losing a mother felt like.<\/em><\/p>\n

I don’t care where you live or what your system of beliefs is.\u00a0 Doing that to a people is fucking stupid.<\/p>\n

Other Zulus felt the same when he flipped out like that, and they killed him.<\/p>\n

Anyway, don’t ask me how, but while looking for articles on Zulu history to read, I ended up reading the Wikipedia articles about the Black Sabbath studio albums.\u00a0 And lots of other related Black Sabbath Articles.\u00a0 So my weekend has been exactly like this:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
\nExcept that screenshot is from Civ III.\u00a0 Minus Ozzy.\u00a0 He’s not a world leader in the Civilization games.\u00a0 Until Civ IV.<\/p>\n

And reading all about those albums and songs and tours reminds me that I need to Mikeify my Black Sabbath albums, both with Ozzy and without.\u00a0 By that, I mean that I will invite Ozzy over to my place, and I’ll Mikeify them in his presence, and again when he goes home.<\/p>\n

Nah, I mean that all the albums from “Heaven And Hell” onward need to be dug out of my mp3 archive DVDs and re-done using the full knowledge of what I do that I have now and didn’t have when I hastily did them years ago.<\/p>\n

And as an added bonus from my weekend of Sab and Civ, I’m finally, FINALLY re-doing the solo Ozzy albums that I copied to digital format from my cassette tapes.\u00a0 They were among the first I did, so there’s lots of cleanup and adjustment to do.\u00a0 I turned up the bass and treble too loud on the first several dozen cassettes I did, and also I didn’t eliminate all of the background noise.\u00a0 I’m fixing that right now.\u00a0 And because I have cassette copies of all that stuff, I have the following albums which were deleted from Ozzy’s catalogue and will no longer be issued on CD:<\/p>\n