Old
News: May 26, 2005 to July 16, 2005
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1:32
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16
Jul. 2005 (Sat); Post #602
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First of all: Fantastic Four sucks. It is, without a doubt, the
worst movie I've seen this year. Beefy and I saw it while we were
in Bellevue (right after dinner at I Love Sushi). Poor acting, horrible
dialogue, a lame plot, and it ends with an obvious setup for a sequel.
And it's not like it gets bad towards the end; it's terrible from
the very beginning of the film. About 30 minutes in I was already
thinking about leaving the theater. Man. Do not see Fantastic Four.
Saw my grandma Scott, uncle Bob, and my cousins in Buckley. I'd
driven my parents' Denali up with Beefy following in the Explorer
(a new vehicle for my grandma since her mini-van is on its last
legs). The Explorer had some fairly major problems as we came into
Bonney Lake/Buckley, but Beefy kept it under control. Got it to
a repair place in one piece. Spent the night at my uncle's. Weather
was very nice on Thursday, overcast and raining a little on Friday.
Driving in Seattle was an interesting experience... pretty scary
and a bit frustrating. It's especially strange to me to drive on
freeways three stories high. We got lost some, but managed to eventually
get where we wanted to go without asking directions. Luckily, Beefy
and I have some amazing navigation-fu ninja skills between us. For
future reference, the hierarchy of mapping sites (from most to least
accurate) is this: Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, MapQuest. IME, anyway.
Something weird was going on in Bellevue Thursday night... tons
of cops everywhere blocking off seemingly random streets. We saw
this one guy get caught between the railroad-crossing-arms around
9:00 pm because he didn't know how to deal with the police car turned
across the road on the other side. He nearly got hit by the dinner
train.
Anyway, the AIS interviews went well. Great facilities, interesting
courses. Extremely expensive, however.
Most of you have probably already seen Google
Sightseeing, but check it out if you haven't. As of the 12th,
it has support for the Google Earth program.
An impressive mountaintop palace... found it on WAKA.
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10:55
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13
Jul. 2005 (Wed); Post #601
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Okay, so I'm very likely moving to Seattle at the end of the summer.
Beefy and I are going up tomorrow for interviews at the school and
to look at apartments. Will be coming home Friday night.
Probably shoulda posted this around the 4th, but whatever. This
collection
of fireworks labels amused me. One image towards the end is
a little NSFW.
GURPS Powers got pushed back; won't be released in September after
all. But it sounds like GCA 4 is coming out really soon (Armin D.
Sykes did a "Designer's Notes" feature in the latest Pyramid).
Speaking of Pyramid, there was another S.E. Mortimer article that
I really liked in the July 8th issue — "Pulling
your Weight: Ropes and Cordage." Really interesting stuff
with lotsa crunchy stats at the end.
Didja know Girl Genius
is turning into a webcomic? I'm not really pleased... hopefully
they'll still produce trade paperbacks.
I got almost all of my DVD
collection entered on DVD Profiler. 247 items, not counting
dupes. The program itself is really neat... produces charts of distribution
by genre, average SRP (Suggested Retail Price), DVDs per MPAA rating,
etc. BTW, did you know you can get the original 1968 Night of the
Living Dead movie on DVD at Walmart for $1? Apparently it's public
domain now... you can actually download
the whole thing at archive.org.
Saw War of the Worlds with Beefy last Thursday. Fantastic movie!
Really loved the whole film. The schmaltz level was entirely appropriate
(something I'd worried about at the beginning, what with Dakota
Fanning and the whole divorced-dad-trying-to-connect-with-his-kids
thing). Surprisingly scary. The tripods look really, really cool.
My mom gave me a couple T-shirts and a Motorola m500 MP3 player
(5 GB) upon her return from New York City. Pretty cool. I loaded
up the player with all my favorite songs, but there's still 1.57
GB free on it.
EternaBeef could be a reality. This
article discusses producing lab-grown meat on an industrial
scale. I like this part: "... meat makers may one day sit
next to bread makers on the kitchen counter."
Thought I'd mention The
Impulsive Buy. It's basically a collection of funny reviews
of cheap stuff you might find in a convenience store. The
Message Whore is a similar review-blog run by a guy I know from
AnandTech (Lord Jezo), but he mostly just reviews food products.
Both are updated pretty regularly.
Started going to Club 24 again; I'd stopped because I had to watch
a bunch of pregnant mares between 10 pm and 5 am for like a month
and a half. They added these devices to all the machines where you
can plug in headphones and select different audio channels like
on an airplane. Kinda neat.
Cool Flash
animation.
Whale biologist!
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7:38
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7 Jul.
2005 (Thu); Post #600
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Whoa, post #600.
I've been meaning to add a blogroll to this page, but couldn't decide
how to without having to edit the actual template. So here's my
temporary, improvised blogroll:
Ordered the Red vs.
Blue seasons 2 and 3 DVDs. Really liked the first season, but
I haven't kept up on downloading the episodes. I think the last
episode I saw was #35. Also picked up the Shawks
DVD (contains eps. 1-14).
Here's a really awesome Beatles
medley (.RAM format) by a group called Vocal
Majority. About 11 minutes long, very enjoyable.
And here's a page of Latin
quotes and phrases that I had fun skimming through. My favorite:
Interdum feror cupidine partium magnarum europe vincendarum.
This Flash about the growth
of the United States was fairly interesting. I liked it, but
the narrator could've used a little more practice IMHO.
Heard about Scott
Haring's accident via the Illuminator. Really sucks, he was
injured and and his 13 year-old son died. I exchanged a number of
posts with Mr. Haring when I was just getting into GURPS, probably
around 1997 or 98. He went by "sdharing" on the OpenRPG
forums, IIRC. Didn't even know he was affiliated with SJG till much
later when I noticed his name in Reign of Steel. Anyway, very sad
business.
So last weekend Jones kind of screwed us. He never showed up for
the game he was supposed to be GMing. Justin called him around 6:00
pm or so to find out what the deal was and Jones basically said
that he didn't come because he didn't feel like it. Justin asked
him if he'd be coming at all and he said no. Did he plan on communicating
this to us at all? Nope. Then he asked if we should even bother
keeping our characters and he said no. Both Justin and I had spent
a bit of time on our characters too, so it was especially disappointing.
Since I'll never get to play it, I scanned my character so it wouldn't
be, like, a total waste of time and effort. (Pages 1,
2, 3,
4, and 5;
JPEGs, ~50-100 KB each.)
Hanwool has apparently moved to California without telling anyone...
he got a job down there. I think he's staying with family ATM. Won't
be back for quite a while. More on this story as it develops.
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5:40
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30
Jun. 2005 (Thu); Post #599
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Summary of the day's events thus far: Got up, checked/replied to
email, went next door and ran off a couple checks for the clinic,
mowed the front lawn (and set sprinklers out/turned on the pump
afterwards), came inside, did my web-browsing ritual (Slashdot,
SE, blogs, Audioscrobblers, blogdex, Wikipedia's main page, a few
webcomics (since it's Thursday, only Able & Baker, PvP, Natalie
Dee, Toothpaste for Dinner, and the usual syndicated stuff was new),
4chan/b, PostSecret (nothing since the 26th), PSPupdates.com, SJG
Forums (nothing in my subscribed threads), Daily Illuminator, SlickDeals),
tried to stitch up a tear in one of my shirts, went back to the
clinic to run off a garnishment-correction check, picked up my September
2005 issue of Analog which had just arrived, came home, had a peach
Snapple, AIMed with Beefy about tonight's plans.
Found another useful Wikipedia entry: Recent
Deaths.
One of my comments on Slashdot actually got modded +5 Insightful.
Woo. It was from the article on France building that fusion reactor.
Have you seen the latest King
Kong trailer? Just came out today. The movie looks pretty cool,
but I have a hard time buying Jack Black in a serious role. Well,
one much less comical than his others, anyway.
I bought the Hazzards' CD,
"So Pretty." Only $7 plus shipping. I'd have bought the
Amateur Transplants
CD too, but it requires me to fill out a mail-order form and write
a check. The Hazzards' process is much simpler, just a few clicks
in PayPal. Wish these bands would sell their albums as MP3s instead;
after all, I'm just going to rip the CDs and then put them on the
shelf forever. BTW, you can download an MP3 of the Hazzards' Let's
Get Romantic for free on their site.
I did a backwards-link check for my site and noticed I was on the
blogroll of the Blog of
Doom, Michael Shaffer's site. I read his recent entries, plus
a few older ones at random; I deem him entertaining. I especially
got a kick out of June 25th's "maaan-porse" anecdote.
Need to add a blogroll to this site.
| The
first issue of my 1-year Analog subscription. That's my new
comforter it's lying on... has a lot of satin and faux-suede
on the quilted side. |
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6:35
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28
Jun. 2005 (Tue); Post #598
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This news.com.au story on "zombie
dogs" has been linked to a lot. Originally saw it on Slashdot,
but it's since been mentioned on SE and a lot of the blogs I read.
Basically, these scientists developed a technique for killing dogs
and then bringing them back to life after they've been dead for
an extended period of time (i.e. a few hours). Supposedly there's
no ill effects after the animals have been revived, no brain damage
or anything. They said they plan to test the process on humans within
a year, but I don't see how it could be done legally in the US...
after all, the person actually dies in the process. But the
whole thing is still pretty cool.
I had to talk to Netscape tech support a lot today in the course
of trying to fix someone's DUN connection. Unsurprisingly, they
use an Indian call center for the service. Anyway, I made a number
of calls and talked to Mike, Janet, and Nicholas. At the end of
my call to Nicholas, he asked if I had any other questions. I said,
"Well, just out of curiosity, isn't Nicholas kind of an unusual
name in India? I mean, it's a little weird that I never get anyone
named Sanjay or something when I call here."
He laughed and said, "It is the, ah, name I am given."
"So it's not your real name?"
"Ah, no."
So Netscape makes their Indian call staff use Anglo-American names.
Somehow, that seems kind of wrong to me.
Been playing Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War lately. Probably because
Jones has been talking about getting into the miniatures game. I
told him if he started playing it I would too. Checked out the official
web site; I think if I end up playing, I'll start with a Tau
army.
Loved Monday's
Penny Arcade. My friends and I can identify with that just a
little...
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3:30
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27
Jun. 2005 (Mon); Post #597
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Okay, so there wasn't any GURPS on Saturday. Jones had a last minute
wedding he had to attend or something, plus he was sick. Beefy won't
come over on Saturdays anymore unless we're playing RPGs and Hanwool
had to go fishing with his dad, so Justin, Paige, and I hung out
and played games. After some games of Uno (Paige won twice, IIRC)
and Star Wars Trivial Pursuit (Justin won by a lot), we went to
Kennewick and got Scrabble, Apples to Apples, and some really good
ice cream from MaggieMoo's (I had Better Batter and Udderly Cream
mixed with almonds). Jones arrived about halfway through the scrabble
game, so we dropped it to play Apples to Apples (it requires a minimum
of four players). Scores at the end of the Scrabble game were P-112,
J-69, and H-182.
Apples to
Apples is great. We played about four games of it. There's a
bunch of variants listed in the rules, most of which are actually
interesting and fun.
Decided to keep reading Roma Eterna. The ending to Faustus'
story was actually pretty good and I really liked the entirety of
Horatius' account about being exiled to Mecca. Everyone seems a
bit too aware of the Hebrews though... like they go out of their
way to comment on how quaint Judaism is. It didn't make sense to
me until I found out the first six chapters were originally published
as individual stories. I like Silverberg's style; it's easy to read,
but sometimes his choice of words is a tad bombastic.
Been playing the Battlefield
2 demo this week. Seems a lot more realistic than BF1942 (esp.
with the sprinting/fatigue stuff) and the graphics are better, but
I don't think I prefer it to the original game.
It really irritates me that Steve Jackson Games made Armin D. Sykes
(the guy who made GCA)
remove the 4th edition data files so early. They disappeared April
14th and here it is, almost July, and still no "official"
GCA program. I've got the full version of GCA 3 since I bought GCA
2, but it's useless to me without the 4th edition GDF/GDS file.
I could understand removing the files a week before the release,
but 2+ months? There's not even an official release date for SJG's
GCA. AFAIK, there's no other program for 4e-compliant character
creation... looks like GURU and Character Maker don't get updated
anymore. Bah.
I saw Land of the Dead on Friday. In the context of George Romero's
other zombie movies, it's terrible — definitely the weakest
of the four. It's the "wookie Christmas special" of the
Dead series. As a standalone horror movie, it's decent; slightly
above average. I don't have much else to say about it except that
John Leguizamo and Robert Joy (Charlie) were both really good at
playing their parts. I wonder if the Charlie character was an intentional
Flowers for Algernon reference.
I got a 1 GB memory stick for my PSP. Thanks to SlickDeals,
I only paid $90 for it which is an amazingly good price for them.
Now I'll have enough space to store a few TV episodes or a whole
movie. Woo.
Participated in an MIT survey on weblogs. Here's a link:
Apparently Alan Moore got mad at DC comics over the way they're
handling the "V for Vendetta" movie and severed his ties
to the company. At least there'll still be one more Moore League
of Extraordinary Gentlemen graphic novel (Dark Dossier). Sposed
to be out later this year.
Thought this
little email exchange was pretty funny.
Man, that Tom Cruise is a nutball, eh? I saw that clip of him on
the Today Show on VH1's "Best Week Ever"... what a freak.
"NO MATT!" is a meme on the chans now, heh.
An amusing Simpsons quote I saw on Slashdot last week:
Prof. Frink: Let the commencement beginulate!
| A good picture from May's Pullman trip that
I hadn't thought to use before. This was taken in front of
Beasely Hall on the WSU campus. |
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3:21
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24
Jun. 2005 (Fri); Post #596
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I finished reading Haunted earlier this week. Whittier's
second story (towards the end; second to last chapter, I think)
is really good. IMO, this is Palahniuk's third best novel (Lullaby
and Invisible Monsters are better). But I even liked
Diary, which I'd rank seventh, so that's certainly not an
unkind assessment. I started reading Roma Eterna, but it's
a lot drier than I thought it would be based on the short story
I'd read in that science fiction compilation. If it doesn't pick
up in the next fifty pages, I think I'll switch to something else.
Ordered a used copy of David Brin's Kiln People on Amazon,
partially because of this
thread on the SJG forums. I liked his "uplift" books
so I have good expectations for this one.
Forgot to mention that we played GURPS last Saturday. It was a one-shot
game where everyone played mundane characters. Really mundane; like
25-45 points. Kind of a horror/ mystery thing. There were some complaints
about having to play such weak characters, but the group performed
very well. Not a single casualty (though Jones did have his left
arm blown off with a shotgun). Good role-playing all around, IMHO.
Beefy's review was favorable. This Saturday we're playing Jones'
game, which he's said is going to include elements of steampunk,
magic, and swashbuckling/piracy. I'm looking forward to it... I
have a basic character design, but haven't gotten past that since
the point limit was a bit hazy when we last spoke.
Watched a bunch of movies this week (and am seeing at least one
more tomorrow). Beefy and I saw American Psycho (the director's
cut) and The Life Aquatic on Tuesday and Jones and Paige joined
us Wednesday night for A Fish Called Wanda. Can't wait to see Land
of the Dead later today. I've loved all of Romero's zombie movies...
even the remakes of Night and Dawn that he wasn't really involved
in.
Got a working NES emulator for my PSP from psphacker.com.
Must've played three hours of Zelda and Dragon Warrior III on it
this evening.
June 22nd's Daily Show was really great. Samantha Bee's nerd impression
was the funniest thing I'd seen on the show in a long time. Beefy
called it the best Daily Show ever. Gotta download it for that clip
alone.
teh br1dg3t (animated GIF; 464
KB)
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7:04
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21
Jun. 2005 (Tue); Post #595
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Stopped posting for a while again. Meh. Looking forward to a couple
movies coming out this week: Bewitched and Land of the Dead. And
next week, War of the Worlds. Beefy and I saw Millions
last night. Really good. Only very slightly schmaltzy towards the
end, well within the limits of acceptability. The stuff with the
saints was all pretty funny, especially the bit with Saint Joseph
in the nativity play.
I was involved in a discussion on the role of the federal government
on the SJG forums and needed some information on the federal law
enforcement agencies. The "Major Agencies" section of
this
page proved enlightening. Who knew the US Postal Inspection
Service was the oldest federal law enforcement agency still in existence?
I went to Seattle on the 10th and came back late at night on the
11th. Went to the aquarium with my uncle and cousins, had sushi,
and did some computer work for my uncle. Helped my cousin Celina
set up her iPod Shuffle. The sushi was really good. My mom and I
went to "I Love Sushi" in Bellevue. I had yellowtail sashimi,
salmon and tuna sushi, green bean tempura, and deep-fried green
tea ice cream. It was all extremely good; the ice cream and salmon
were especially scrundelescent. Got a bargain-priced encyclopedia
of mythology at Borders in Sumner. Stayed at a Red Roof Inn near
the airport in Seattle.
Here're some pictures from the trip:
The Seattle Aquarium (lower left) and some of the skyline.
| My grandpa Scott used to work as a soda
jerk at this place when he was 14. It was supposedly the tallest
building in the city at the time. |
| The wharf. We had lunch near here (The Fisherman's
Restaurant) and met Andi's friend Kiki and her little sister.
My salmon fettuccine was very good. |
When I got back that Saturday night, everyone was occupied (bachelor
party, sleeping, etc.) except Justin. We played Uno and Gloom. He
won the former and I the latter.
The following Monday night Jones, Paige, Justin, and I played Trivial
Pursuit 6 and Uno. I can't quite remember who won TP6; I think it
was either Paige or myself. We've played a lot of it lately, actually.
I've played against Beefy and Hanwool singly (beat 'em both, hah)
and we had one 2 vs. 3 game (Paige and I vs. Justin, Beefy, and
Jones; we won). I really hate that Sports and Leisure category.
I started playing Pirates
of the Spanish Main. It's a fun miniatures wargame. I've got
about twenty ships now. Beefy, Jones, and I had a good match the
other night with Beefy playing the El Acorazado, this crazy five-masted
Spanish juggernaut. Very hard to derelict.
Found a neat date
calculator on timeanddate.com. They have some other stuff there
that's kind of nifty if you're bored, like a birthday calculator
that tells you when you will-be/were 1,000 weeks old, 300,000 hours
old, etc. I turned 200,000 hours old a week ago today.
I started watching Lost last week. By episode three I was hooked.
Can't wait for season two. Lost's Wikipedia
entry is pretty interesting if you follow the show. If you haven't
seen it yet, I suggest you download season one. It's only 8.5 GB,
not counting the special.
I'm trading MP3 collections with this guy in Australia, Adric. We're
cross-sending three DVDs each. Should be pretty awesome. He has
a lot of Tenacious D. Speaking of MP3s, I started using Audioscrobbler.
Here's my page,
but it's not really working properly ATM — their servers are
really overloaded.
Need to wrap this up; Beefy's coming over and I want to get some
dinner.
Here's
an incredible collection of music from Super Mario World as performed
by this guy who calls himself XOC. Of the twenty-one tracks, I added
fifteen to my collection. My favorite is "Forest of Illusion."
Didja know there's
going to be a Family Guy movie?
Ginormous jellyfish.
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10:53
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5 Jun.
2005 (Sun); Post #594
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More downtime last night/early this morning. There was a hard drive
failure on the server and I had to update my DNS. There's a whole
thread
about it on the HostPC forums if anyone cares.
There was some discussion on Slashdot recently about the possibility
of a future manned mission to Mars. In the comments, arguments against
funding such a mission began to crop up. Some users kept repeating
that tired assertion that we ought to "fix things" on
Earth before spending money on space exploration. I've always felt
that sort of reasoning was fallacious. One could apply it to practically
any pursuit they were against... Like, "Why waste money trying
to cure a rare paralyzing disease when you could invest it in research
to cure a common but deadly one?" or "Why spend time watching
TV when you could be helping out at the homeless shelter?"
The "charity-instead argument" is stupid. No matter what
you choose to invest your time or money in, there's almost always
going to be something nobler you could be doing with those resources.
But if you funneled all your effort towards altruistic works, you'd
have no life. And if everyone did it certain important advances
would never be made. A lot of technology that's ended up saving
lives/improving the quality of life was developed because the creators
and those funding them were motivated by greed and opted to invest
their resources in it rather than some kinder charitable act.
Anyway, I wouldn't have a problem with the government increasing
NASA's share of the federal budget to, say, 1% (compared to the
0.67% they received
in 2003). That would be more than enough for the proposed lunar
outpost and the manned Mars mission (estimates, adjusted
for inflation, put the cost at $725 billion over 34 years, i.e.
$21.3 billion per year). A lot of people in the media and congress
have incorrectly
pegged the cost much higher than that.
There was a great article on light sources ("Lighting
the Way" by S.E. Mortimer) in May 27th's Pyramid. It has
a useful darkness penalties table and detailed stats/descriptions
for 29 light sources from TL 0-8. There're stats for five different
kinds of candles alone! Wish they'd do more articles like this.
I've been playing with Context
Free. It's a (freeware) program that lets you edit and render
"design grammars." Really, it's for making grayscale pictures
out of circles and squares. I wish they'd add a way to end recursive
rules after a certain number of executions. Like, for-next loops
or something. Anyway, it's kinda fun. Here's a rendering of one
of the scripts (source) I wrote:
There are four Jokes
with Einstein flashes now. Good stuff. Ordered season two of
Home Movies on Amazon. I'd have started with season one, but the
episodes I've seen from it weren't very memorable and squigglevision
drives me nuts. Did you know Home Movies was originally unscripted?
The original five episodes of the series, back when it was on UPN,
were completely improvised. After Cartoon Network bought it in '99
they started using scripts, but a lot of stuff was still adlibbed.
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11:45
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3 Jun.
2005 (Fri); Post #593
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Those of you who checked this site Tuesday evening might've encountered
this ugly little notice:
Seems I went over my allowed bandwidth for the month. At
midnight, the site was back up; only a few hours of downtime. Today
I checked my site's stats and found it'd already gone through 744
MB in three days. At that rate, the site would've been dead on the
24th. So I looked around about getting a package with higher bandwidth
limits. Turns out the good ppl at HostPC had doubled
the quotas on all packages $25 and up on May 14th. All I had
to do was submit a helpdesk ticket with a copy of my receipt to
get the upgrade. So now I've got 12 gigs of bandwidth per month
and a half gig of storage. Pretty sweet for $25/year. Anyway, now
I can handle up to 390 MB per day... since the site's "only"
doing 248 MB per day, there's adequate room for growth.
Blah, enough hosting stuff. I happened across Natalie
Dee's site a few months ago when someone posted the "dogs
are awesome" entry on 4chan/b. I did a little sleuthing
(i.e. Googled) and discovered that Natalie Dee and Drew (creator
of Toothpaste for Dinner) are siblings, which explains the otherwise
uncanny similarity between their sites. Drew's came first (in September
of 2000), Natalie's showed up about a year later.
Another follow-up to something mentioned in the last post: Found
this Contagious Media
index of their most popular sites. Maybe something to check
along with Snopes before you forward that next "amazing, real"
web site link.
Did you know you can watch a lot of PBS shows on their web site
for free? As an example, here's a link to the Scientific
American Frontiers show archive. I love these... switch output
to the TV, right-click, Zoom > Full Screen, bam: edutainment
for an hour with no waiting. Especially handy because you can't
BitTorrent SAF eps or buy full seasons on DVD. Speaking of DVDs,
I bought the complete Black Adder collection and seasons 1-5 of
Are You Being Served? from Amazon. Also got Roma Eterna and
Haunted, both in hardback, for under $20 total. Oh yeah,
and I signed up for a year-long Analog
subscription (really been enjoying the SF short stories in the anthology
I'm reading ATM).
PostSecret is an anonymous
confession site like grouphug.us, but with better content more consistently.
Instead of accepting submissions via the web, they require ppl to
mail them on postcards which get scanned. I assume there's a screening
process too since none of them seem too lame. Their legal
notice is pretty cool; it says you can't use their images without
written permission etc. etc., but also says "If you are a blogger,
you may post one image as a link." So here's one I liked:
Apollo Pony is big collection
of nifty videos with no ads and a very simple layout. Fast server
too. MetaCafe
is a similar site, but less awesome. Looks like everything streams.
Found a stock.xchng link on some
lame site that was using a plasticboy
photo as part of the page template. The idea of the whole thing
is really neat... thousands of high quality stock photos that ppl
can use freely, even in commercial products. Good for desktop backgrounds
too, though you have to register (free) to access the high-res images.
Gaming tomorrow.
Hole in a lake. Click for full-size version (840
x 660; 94.9 KB).
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9:10
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30
May 2005 (Mon); Post #592
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K, here's a link dump. News at the end.
Saw this Snopes report on a guy whose brain
was infested with maggots when someone linked it off 4chan (they
were arguing about zombies or something). Anyway, it's really gross
but interesting if you can stomach the pictures. I think it's amazing
that the guy could live with his brain exposed like that for a significant
amount of time.
De-animator
is a flash game where you shoot zombies. Based on some short stories
by H.P. Lovecraft. (These
ones, specifically.) Great art, fun to mess with for a few minutes.
Here's a funny true story
by Scott Lynch from the "Customers Suck" LiveJournal.
Has a little bit of language.
The Chapman
brothers were on All Things Considered about three months ago.
(They're the guys responsible for Homestarrunner.com.) The audio
clip is 7m:32s. Light stuff... it's mostly the NPR correspondent
talking. Mildly entertaining if you've ever seen the Strong
Bad Emails animations.
Toothpaste for Dinner
is a... well, I guess you could call it a webcomic. By some guy
named Drew; updated daily. I bought one of their shirts.
This Ultimate Flash Face
thing is kind of like the facial composite programs they use instead
of sketch artists in police investigations. I made this
one, which I think looks a bit like me without freckles.
GURPS Powers
comes out in September. Link has a pic of the cover plus price and
a summary.
I thought these tiny
houses were pretty nifty. You can actually order one from this
guy, Jay Shafer.
Here's another funny business-related story from JayPinkerton.com:
Multi-Platform
Just-in-Time Point-and-Click e-Commerce Productivity Solution.
Really liked this one; well written.
Superdickery.com's Superman
Is a Dick gallery has some hilarious old comic book covers and
comments. I especially liked #13.
The Contagious Media Project
is an interesting attempt to popularize fake web sites through viral
advertising. I must admit I hadn't realized Fundrace 2004 was a
hoax until I stumbled across CMP's main site. BlackPeopleLoveUs.com,
one of their creations, is pretty funny.
Apparently some ppl are buying into this UFO
prophet, but to me it looks like he's got a friend in the trees
somewhere releasing weather balloons that get tossed around by the
wind. The nut says there will be many more sightings in the next
week.
Was going to link Cartoon-Fridge here, but it's since gone down.
Was really neat though — you could watch episodes of Family
Guy, Futurama, etc. through this streaming video Java app.
Weekend happenings: Another of the mares (Marcella) had her baby
(male) this morning at about 4:45am. She and her foal are less difficult
than Jasmine and her baby. This was her first pregnancy and my dad
had to give her a sedative so she'd let the baby nurse. Anyway,
now we're down to one pregnant mare. After she goes I can start
sleeping (more) normally again.
I got to learn to work a backhoe Saturday night. It's pretty fun.
I dug a hole in the field next to my house that was probably three
or four cubic yards in volume, about five or six feet deep. Used
it to bury some stuff this afternoon.
Won some stuff from the "Choose Your Destiny" game Burger
King's running... a small shake/hamburger and a small hash brown/small
soft drink.
Sadly, that's all I have to report since this weekend was so dull.
Paige/Ryan didn't return my calls, Beefy had to watch his younger
cousin, Hanwool's suffering from crippling laziness... hopefully
things will pick up when Justin comes back from Alaska. I'd really
like to play Gloom or have a big six-player game of Starfarers.
Wouldn't mind dusting off Pimp: The Backhanding either (though I
wish WW would produce a FAQ/errata for it). Oh yeah, and we haven't
played enough Alhambra IMHO.
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9:16
p.m. [GMT-7:00]
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26
May 2005 (Thu); Post #591
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Ummm, so I haven't posted in a long time. I only vaguely recall
what happened between the first of May and now, so here's a hazy
recap (with a few exceptions, most of the following happened in
the last week). Some of us went to Pullman for Hanwool's graduation.
Pictures:
It was fun, though apparently Beefy was sick and thought everyone
was grumpy while I got the impression that we were all in high spirits
albeit a little sleep deprived. Lotsa laughs. Hanwool's dad bought
us all Chinese food and it was good. I had the asparagus beef. We
stayed overnight and had to sleep in the basement at my evil
scary lovely sister's house, though this turned out to be
a good thing cuz the upstairs smelled funky. Anyway, the Pullman
trip was enjoyable. We cheered and blasted air horns when they announced
Hanwool's name at the ceremony.
Three pregnant mares were due to foal last Saturday night and I
got the job of watching them every night till each has given birth.
Not very fun... have to walk around in a dark field every half hour
between 10pm and 4am. Only one of 'em actually foaled Saturday,
still waiting on the other two.
What else? I got a PSP and some games (Untold Legends, FIFA Soccer,
Lumines). It's fun. Need a bigger memory stick so I can watch movies
on it... it only came with a 32 MB. I want a 1 GB version, but everyone's
either out of stock or charging way too much (i.e. up to $150 over
MSRP). I had purchased one through Amazon's Used & New market
system for $100, but they refunded my money a couple hours later
("the seller is currently unable to accept payment"),
which probably means the seller was doing something shady.
Hanwool, Beefy, and I have been playing a lot of WoW. My main character
is now a level 24 Night Elf druid on the Dalaran server. Cat Form
is pretty awesome. Hanwool and Beefy are playing hunters (a level
24 Night Elf and level 22 Dwarf, resp.).
Saw Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Star Wars Episode III:
Revenge of the Sith. Both good. All the critics are saying ROTS
is the best of the prequels, but I liked Attack of the Clones better.
Got some stuff at Barnes & Noble... The Ultimate HHGTTG (reread
the last part of Restaurant and all of Life about
a week ago), Hellboy: Wake the Devil (volume 2), and The Best
of the Best: 20 Years of the Year's Best Science Fiction. Reading
the latter right now. A few of the early stories sucked hard, but
the last six have been really good. One was a Roma
Eterna story by Robert Silverberg. Really liked it... plan to
read that book after Palahniuk's Haunted.
Arrested Development got picked up for a third season, which is
great. Also, I heard from Beefy that The Office was renewed but
Law & Order: Trial By Jury wasn't.
Oh yeah, the MPAA is going after sites that host TV show torrents
now. BTEfnet went down and there's talk about MySpleen shutting
down their site. Very irritating. And not easily justified either.
Shutting down sites that hosted movie torrents, like Suprnova.org,
was vexing but understandable; that's actual piracy. But TV-only
sites? This stuff is freely available. I'd be getting the exact
same end product if I bought a TiVo. And yet ppl who provide the
service for free (BTEfnet) are getting sued while those who charge
for it (TiVo) aren't. How does that work?
Just got a notice from my web host that I've used up 83% of my bandwidth
for the month... my account could actually get suspended until June
1st if I go over the limit. Looks like one of my pages, the O
rly? gallery, became much more popular than I had anticipated.
It's actually responsible for 5% of all the hits I'm getting from
search engines. (Somehow "giant catfish" is still the
number one phrase for this site with 8.4%.) 'Course, it's not the
only reason for the traffic increase.
The whole thing isn't too much of a problem... the worst that can
happen is that the site might see some downtime on the 30th/31st.
If I come close to the limit again in June, I'll move up to a better
(but more expensive) hosting package.
I downloaded the 2003 Battlestar Galactica mini-series and the more
recent first season. Really great. It's a little like Firefly with
more complicated plots and a lot less comedy. Season one left a
lot of stuff unresolved and had a huge twist at the end, so I'm
really eager to see season two, which starts on July 15th. I dislike
the theme song however. What is it with recent sci fi series and
bad opening themes? Enterprise, Stargate Atlantis... bad songs.
Everyone hated Voyager, but at least it had a great opening theme
song and video.
I've got a bazillion links I was going to post, but this one's way
too long as it is so I'll just add them next time. |
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"There
are two motives for reading a book: one, that you enjoy it; the
other, that you can boast about it." — Bertrand Russell
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