A Shoggoth on the Roof!

Well, it’s been a while since I’ve made an entry. This has sort of been because I’m busy, but has more to do with the fact that I’ve been playing way too much Civilization III. I bought it months ago but didn’t actually have the time to get into it until my two weeks off over Christmas and new years. Now I’m a hopeless addict, and spend my evenings plotting how to get hold of that aluminium resource just inside French territory, or how to get the Aztecs to attack the English without implicating me. Great stuff!

I really have to complement Firaxis on the new resource and trade system. In Civ II you could cut yourself off from the rest of the world and power on to building the spaceship. In Civ III you have to expand to secure sources of horses, iron, saltpeter, coal, rubber, oil, aluminium, uranium and a few I’m probably forgetting. And while you’re at it you need to find luxuries like dyes, silk, furs and ivory to keep your people happy and distracted. And you can trade all of this, so if you’ve got more iron that you need you can exchange it with the Chinese for some of their excess silks. Cool!

Anyway enough rambling about geeky computer games. What else have I been doing?

Well one thing I did do during my break was try to grow a beard. One of those funky Generation-X style goatee beard things, just for the heck of it. I was under the strange impression that this might make me look cool, so I stopped shaving my chin for a week. I’ve always had particularly fast growing facial hair, so I figured a week would be long enough to see how it turned out. So, how did it turn out? Horribly, that’s how.

It appears that while my facial hair grows very quickly (particularly just below my lips) on my chin proper it’s virtually non-existent. So, after a week of careful cultivation I had a thick, caterpillar like growth immediately under my mouth, and below this a great bald patch with a total of six straggly hairs attempting to cover it. This looked utterly ridiculous, so before I went back to work on Monday, I shaved it all off. So much for looking cool πŸ™‚

I am looking a bit paint spattered though. I decided over my break to get on and do a proper job of painting some of the Call of Cthulhu figurines I bought some years back. I’ve got a shoggoth, three deep ones, and a yithian, and all were sorely in need of a decent paint job to replace the seriously desultory ones I perpetrated when I first got them. So to that end I headed off to Games Workshop at the Galleria on Saturday to purchase some paints.

This was actually a bit stressful as I haven’t been inside a Games Workshop store in years, and despite my supreme geekiness I’ve never been all that comfortable around hard-core wargamer geeks anyway. To make matters worse of course it was Saturday morning, which meant there were several games in progress in the rather minuscule store and you could hardly move for tape measures and Tyranids. But I’d done my research and had a full list of the paints I wanted, so just shoved it at the guy behind the counter who flicked them out of the racks with remarkable speed and efficiency. I handed over the cash, grabbed my receipt and then fled before I could be attacked by a genestealer πŸ™‚

Now the great thing about Citadel Miniatures paints is that they all have highly creative and funky names. You don’t just buy “red”, you buy “red gore” or “blood red”. You don’t purchase “purple” you purchase “liche purple”. So rather than thinking to yourself “I’ll try a mix of dark and light greens with a touch of grey and a yellow wash” you can think “I’ll try a mix of dark angels green and snot green with a touch of codex grey and a bad moon yellow wash”, which is infinitely more entertaining.

So, I’ve spent the better part of the weekend teaching myself to paint figurines. Which is harder than it sounds. I started on the shoggoth, on the basis that it would be difficult to mis-paint a festering protoplasmic ooze. As it turned out this was quite easy to achieve, so my shoggoth is now weighted down with about six coats of chaos black and dark angels green (which should at least make it easier to run away from Mountains of Madness style). But I finally got the hang of it, and the final layer of paint looks quite spiffy. I’m working on the deep ones at the moment, and they’re starting to look OK. I’ll probably post pictures when I’m done.

So yeah, that’s been my last few weeks. People waiting on emails should get them over the next couple of days (sorry about the delay), and I’ll try and update a little more regularly from now on (yeah sure).

PS: Rebecca is staying for a few days. Cool πŸ™‚

Dawn of a New Wyrmlog!

Well, as I’m sure some people will have noticed, I’ve done a redesign. Woo-hoo! Not only does the Wyrmlog now look ultra-cool (ha!) but it’s been streamlined. Yes! The new Wyrmlog with 35% less graphics to download! That’s over a third people!

Of course (being a real programmer who codes on the fly as opposed to sitting down and planning stuff out on paper) I will have inevitably screwed up somewhere. So, if you encounter any weird errors please email me and let me know so I can get on and fix them (eventually).

But anyway that’s not what I came to talk about. Came to talk about stir-fries.

Ever since Rebecca bought me a wok last year (awesome gift or what? πŸ™‚ I’ve been trying my hand at stir fries. With a few exceptions they were all… edible. That’s about the best you could say about them. Until last night that is…

Somehow last night I managed to make a totally kick-ass fish stir fry. It tasted good, it smelled good and it even looked good, an aspect of the culinary arts I’ve never been particularly talented at. I mean, if someone served this stir fry up to you at a restaurant, you wouldn’t send it back! So, I’m pretty chuffed with myself, even though I have no doubt that I’ll never be able to repeat the process again in my entire life πŸ™‚

But stir-fries aside, I’ve finally decided to jump on the bandwagon that every blogger seems to be jumping on these days. Yes! It’s time for some self-indulgent navel gazing as we take a look at my search engine referer logs!

The reason I’m doing this is I had a glance at them yesterday, and found them quite amusing. For instance someone out there seems to be very concerned about the relationship between Marion and Carl in that execrable TV production Dinotopia. My logs indicate searches for in dinotopia do marion and carl fall in love, in dinotopia do carl and marion fall in love (because reversing the names will turn up so many more results of course!) in dinotopia do marion and carl get together, and Who does Marion love in dinotopia.

I find it highly gratifying that my vitriolic diatribe against the Dinotopia mini-series comes up in the first few links on Google for all of these searches. I find it even more gratifying that anyone searching on this subject from now on will end up at this entry, since it mentions so many Marion, Carl and Dinotopia keywords (he-he!). Self-reference can be a wonderful thing πŸ™‚

However, ironically, the query at the heart of all these searches is one that I am actually able to respond to. The correct answer to the question “In Dinotopia do Marion and Carl fall in love?” is… (highlight to read – standard anti-spoil technique)

WHO CARES!!!

I hope that clears that up πŸ˜‰

There were a number of other Dinotopia related queries such as dinotopia albino, dinotopia AND romana dennison and why did the sunstones fail. I don’t know much about Romana Dennison, but I can say with a fair amount of confidence why the sunstones failed. It’s fairly simple. If the sunstones didn’t fail, then the writers would have had to come up with some kind of original (or at least coherant) plot for the mini-series and that was way too much work for 4:30 on a Friday afternoon. Case closed.

Moving down the list we come to an entry for actress “Stacy Haiduk”. Apparently someone out there is so into the lovely Ms Haiduk that they were prepared to wade through 21 pages of Google search results to get to my one mention of her in relation to “Kindred: The Embraced”. Now that’s either true devotion or pathological obsession – I’m not sure which (the fact that I was prepared to wade through 21 pages of Google search results to secure this information is neither here nor there πŸ™‚

Some of the rest are just plain weird. Like “William Shatner’s New Year Party”. I’m sorry, was someone actually searching for this? Did they want to attend?! I tell ya there are some real sickos out there.

And “psychic morlocks”. What the…? I know I carried on a bit about Morlocks a while back, but psychic ones? Someone has way too much time on their hands.

Hmmm, someone like me obviously. OK, I’m going to shut up now πŸ˜‰

New Year Phone Miracle

Well, it seems that my answering machine wasn’t killed by my short circuiting scanner the other day, it was merely stunned. I decided to give it one more chance today and plugged it in, only to find that it worked perfectly. Which given the fact that nothing I could do would get it to function yesterday or the day before is pretty damn odd. Obviously some kind of new year miracle (either that or a Telstra engineer broke in here overnight and fixed it).

In other news I’d like to make some apendments to the lists of the most beautiful and cutest women in the world published on this weblog on December 12 (yes, I’m very bored again :). Recording Artist Sophie Ellis Bextor is added to the Most Beautiful list, taking position four. Actress and former fiance of Marilyn Manson (damn that must be annoying, I am yet to see any kind of media reference to her that doesn’t slip in her engagement to the freakish Mr Manson – what was she thinking? πŸ™‚ Rose McGowan is provisionally awarded position number five, on condition that she eat something and cease her continued and quite remarkable impersonation of a stick. Finally everyone’s favourite Elf princess Liv Tyler is awarded position four on the Cutest list.

There, that’s more than enough Geekery for today I think πŸ™‚

New Scanner = No Answer

Well it’s a new year. Hooray. *sigh*

You’ll have to excuse me for not being terribly enthused. No big reason for it, I’m just tired. I stayed up last night to see in 2003, and haven’t caught up on my recomended daily sleep intake yet. Once I get a decent night of rest I’ll probably be more excited.

So, did I spend the night partying away then make out with some gorgeous brunette on the stroke of midnight? No. I spent it scanning in and piecing together road maps in Adobe Photoshop while watching some weird French movie about philandering 18th century philosophers (and pigs, although they didn’t do much philandering) on SBS. Compared to some new years eves in my experience, not bad actually πŸ™‚

Now of course in order to scan, I would require a scanner, and since my old one won’t work in Windows XP (grrrr, grumble, moan, growl) this means I must have purchased a new one. Which I have done. Yesterday I walked into town (I just missed my train, so decided to check out the new cycle path on foot) and bought a Hewlett Packard Scanjet 3500c, which I’m very very happy with.

What I’m not happy about on the other hand though is what happened when I plugged it in. The power cord is one of those freaking stupid ones where the pins stick right out of the transformer, making it virtually impossible to plug it in to either a power board, or any socket less than a foot above floor level. So, I was trying to fit it into the one spare socket on the power board I use for my computer equipment when ZZZAAAPPP!!!! I was hurled across the room by a massive electric shock… OK, no I wasn’t, that’s a lie, but there was a loud zap and bright flash as a short circuit arced across the pins.

Naturally I was highly concerned for my computer, it’s peripherals, my stereo and my answering machine (all of which are plugged into the board). Happily on testing, the computer and stereo were fine (I dread to think what would have happened if I followed the instructions in the installation section which tell you to install the software then plug in the hardware while the computer is turned on – who writes these things?) but my answering machine is dead. Well and truly dead. Which is a pain because I’d just thought up an amusing new message. Grrrrr >:(

I’m not pleased. Hewlett Packard owe me a new answering machine damnit!!

But that aside, happy new year everyone! πŸ™‚

The Two Towers (Part 2)

(OK, where was I?)

The Alliance of the Two Towers
One of the biggest problems in Fellowship was the characterisation of Saruman. Inthe novel Saruman appears to be working with Sauron, but is in fact playing a verydangerous game of betrayal in an attempt to get the Ring for himself. He’s running aroundtelling everyone what they want to hear while building his own army to take over theworld. He tells Th

The Two Towers (Part 1)

Well, it’s been a while between entries hasn’t it? There’s two reasons for this. The first is Christmas, which tends to mess things up fairly effectively, and the second is HEAT.

For the last week or so Perth has been stuck in one of the most appalling heatwaves I’ve ever experienced. A high pressure system stabilised in the bight, fixing a low pressure trough down the coast in such a way that it started wobbling irregularly back and forth and sucking down moist, warm air from the tropics. The end result of which was temperatures between 20 and 25 at night, and 35 to 40 during the day, all with sappingly high humidity. So, I haven’t been up to much except sitting in front of the TV and sweating, which is annoying because I’ve only got two weeks off work and I’ve gotthings to do!.

But anyway it’s over now, and we’ve got a nice break with temperatures in the mid twenties for a few days. Then it’ll start getting hot again, although hopefully less humid. Hopefully.

So, what did I get for Christmas? Let’s see…

1: A bunch of rather amusing books from Ali (although she says that they’re last year’s presents, and this year’s are still to come πŸ™‚ including The Worst Case Scenario Survival Guide – Travel, which has some truly delirious “emergency phrases” in the back in German, Spanish and Japanese (“Hello – I have been seriously injured” “Can I borrow a towel to soak up the blood?” “Why is the water brown/green/black?”).

2: A very entertaining V-CD from Helen, and a picture of Cliffords Tower in York, which we were talking about at one point.

3: An ornamental statue of King Arthur from Mum and Dad, which is nice if not terribly practical.

4: A copy of the Pixies’ Trompe Le Monde from Andrew, which rocks.

5: A garlic holder, a wallet and a few other sundries from various English relatives.

6: A large food hamper from Aunts Faye and Beverly who seem to be under the impression that since I moved out from home I have been completely unable to feed myself.

7: Probably a fair few things I’ve forgotten about.

So all in all a fairly good haul.

On Boxing Day (of course) I went off to see The Two Towers with Ryan, Fabian and Michael. Ryan had booked tickets for the first showing (at 10:00 am), which was pretty cool since it meant queuing outside the Galleria waiting for them to open up, then racing in like rabid lemmings to get a good seat. We even met a genuine Orc from the Helm’s Deep sequence, and since we had a spare ticket let him have it in exchange forlistening to his stories about the filming (he could have been lying, but he had authentic looking papers, and the stories were good).

So, what did I think of the movie? Frankly I was disappointed πŸ™

The Fellowship of the Ring was excellent. OK, there were numerous scenes left out for sake of brevity, some of the characterisations were way off, there were a number of plot alterations and several plot elements were skimmed over (some of which were amended in the special DVD edition), but on the whole it stuck to the novel pretty closely. The Two Towers on the other hand. Oy.

The movie is not Tolkien’s Two Towers. It has plenty of elements taken from the book, but ties them together into a very different plot. Given the remarkable effort at veracity in Fellowship I’d go so far as to call part two an outright betrayal πŸ™

So what’s so wrong? I’ll deal with the problems point by point.

(This entry was way too long, so I’ve cut it into two. I hope this works πŸ˜‰

Alisen Down Week – Apparently

Dreams can be very odd things. Particularly the waking up bit.

On Saturday night I dreamt that I was back at high school. My entire class was there, it was the beginning of a new school year and we were all sitting at long tables in the quadrangle, waiting for the previous year’s results to be handed out*. After a bit of preliminary faffing about the staff got their act together, and started walking up and down the tables handing out report cards. Eventually they got to mine.

I checked it over, and everything was fine, pretty much exactly the marks I expected. Until I got to the bottom of the list and saw my grade for English Lit. 8%!!

It was at this point that I remembered (with a sense of crashing doom) that 90% of our English Lit mark was assignment based. On the first day of term they’d handed us out two major essay assignments to be handed in at the 6 and 8 month mark, and I (in my usual sloppy fashion) had put them aside to look at “later”, and completely forgotten about them. The fact that the staff hadn’t mentioned them since didn’t help.

Looking around at my fellow English Lit students I could see that I wasn’t the only one in this predicament. About a dozen of my fellows scattered throughout the crowd were looking seriously startled. Just to my left, Alison Ranger (on who I actually had a big crush throughout year 12 which is no doubt why she made such a prominent guest appearance πŸ™‚ was looking particularly frantic. Just as we were all about to start noisily protesting, our Lit teacher (who was sort of a combination of Mrs Wolf and Mrs Beam, my Lit teachers from years 12 and 11 respectively) got up and started haranguing us.

First of all, she confided, she was very disappointed in us all. Fully half the class had failed to hand in our assignments, and she was tempted to fail us all. BUT, she had decided to be merciful, and was giving us all one month to get one or both of the assignments in. Which, if we valued our marks, we would.

Everyone let out a small sigh of relief. But by the same token no one was prepared to relax. The assignments were BIG. Like thesis big, and we only had one month to do them both. The sense of crushing doom was replaced with one of sickening tension, and it was clear glancing around that every single one of us was just itching to get up and tear into the library which was just across the quadrangle. But we had to wait until we were dismissed. So we just sat there, tapping our feet, grinding our teeth and sweating. Also (in my case) attempting to remember what the heck the assignments were actually about, never having seriously looked at them. I asked Alison, but before she could reply, I woke up.

Now, here’s the weird bit. I lay there in bed planning out what I was going to do. I knew that I could probably throw together a halfway decent assignment on JRR Tolkien, but before I could do that, I’d have to find out exactly what was required. I went over some possible angles, such as how his writing was affected by his time fighting in the trenches of World War One, or his dualistic and somewhat contradictory views on creativity. After a few minutes though the worry got too intense, and I woke up some more. Enough to realise (with an enormous sense of relief) that I graduated from high school nine years ago, and got an A for Lit.

So yeah, like I said, odd πŸ™‚

Anyway, in a remarkable change from the way my life has been running lately (rent inspections, major projects due with a week to do them in, a certain so called “designer” from a certain so called “design” company) the universe has decided to be uncannily nice to me this week. Not only is episode four of The Dead Zone on this week, the one featuring Alisen Down as a guest star, but starting this Saturday, new episodes of Mysterious Ways!

Time for the Myposian Dance of Joy!!

#Happy dance! Happy dance!#

OK, they’re not actually new episodes, there being no such thing (the series being axed and all), but it seems that Channel 10 (in their usual capricious fashion) messed around with the screening order and held a bunch back last year. So, one last season! Huzzah!!

I’m quite sure the majority of the ep’s will be pretty dodgy, they usually are, but so long as they feature Miranda, I don’t care!

I’m such a loser πŸ™‚

PS: Awesome show πŸ˜‰


* Not usual procedure, I should point out, at St Francis’s or indeed any reasonable school in the known universe


Bored bored bored

Prosecutor: Ladies and gentlemen of the jury. Who do you find more attractive. Tom Cruise or Mel Gibson?
Judge: What is the point of all this?
Prosecutor: Your Honor, I’m so confident of Marge Simpson’s guilt, that I can waste the court’s time rating the superhunks.
— The Simpsons

So, in a similar vein…

THE THREE MOST BEAUTIFUL WOMEN IN THE WORLD
(According to ME)

1: Canadian actress Alisen Down
2: Supermodel turned indifferent actress Mila Jovovich
3: [This entry has been edited by the censor under the Purple Wyrm protection act of 1997]

THE THREE CUTEST WOMEN IN THE WORLD
(yes, there is a difference)
(Also according to ME)

1: Canadian actress Neve Campbell (is this a pattern or something?)
2: German born American actress Alison Mack
3: Australian actress Abi Tucker (even if she was in Heartbreak High)

You can tell I’m bored can’t you? πŸ™‚

Eclipses

Eclipses. Eclipses are on my mind because there was one yesterday.

Not a total eclipse. Not this far west. You had to be in Ceduna (in South Australia) to see that (and about 30,000 people were). But we still got about 65% coverage here in Perth. Happily it got darkest just after 5:00, when I was waiting at the bus stop for my ride home.

It was weird. It was still bright enough to see easily, but everything seemed a little dim and fuzzy. I kept thinking I had my sunglasses on and kept trying to take them off, which must have made me look like a real idiot *g*. I took the opportunity to take a couple of photos, but you can’t really tell there’s anything different to normal, so I’m not going to post them πŸ™‚

But as I was saying, I was thinking about eclipses. The last time there was one (1999 was it?) the path of totality was a lot closer, up in Greenough. Ryan, Justin and I planned to head up in the Justified, but were defeated when it broke down only ten minutes or so from Justin’s house. So we had to turn around and go back.

We watched the show through my telescope from Justin’s backyard (not actually through the telescope I should add, we’re not idiots – I rigged it up to project onto a screen). It was pretty funky. It was a particularly hot and bright day in the middle of summer, the kind of day when direct sunlight actually stings when it hits your skin*. But once the eclipse started the temperature dropped remarkably. Before long a cool breeze sprung up, and you could wander around in direct sunlight with no discomfort whatsoever. It got a lot darker than it did yesterday and, sure enough, all the birds stopped singing.

Despite all this entertainment there was one offputting thing. In fact it was one of the most bewilderingly stupid things I’ve ever experienced. It was Justin’s family. While we were outside watching the eclipse, they were inside, with the blinds drawn, watching the live broadcast from Greenough on the TV.

As totality aproached they got frantic. “Hurry UP!!” they were yelling “QUICK! You’re MISSING IT!!!“. We weren’t missing it. We were outside seeing the world get dark, feeling the cold wind rushing across the landscape, actually standing in the moon’s shadow. OK, we weren’t experiencing totality, but the TV footage was certain to be replayed that night on the news – what we were experiencing was real, and one time only. I seriously felt like shouting back “No! YOU’RE missing it!!”.

Truly, truly sad.

In lighter news I received two separate emails from the Chief Accountant of Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation on Tuesday. They’re apparently wanting to transfer millions of US dollars through my bank account, and are prepared to pay me several million in thanks, but what is seriously surprising about all this is that there’s apparently two Chief Accountants of the NNPC. And they’re both Doctors! Doctor Bello Musa, and Doctor Idris Koma. Even stranger they both wrote exactly the same email! Word for word! If you ask me this is way too much of a coincidence and bears serious investigation πŸ˜‰

Also bearing serious investigation is the sign I saw at the supermarket the other day…

Panda!?!?

Well. What can you add to that? πŸ™‚


* Or is that just me? πŸ˜‰


Close Bitnami banner
Bitnami