Disordered Thoughts and Curmudgeonly Ramblings
Max Headroom! M-M-M-Max Headroom!
So, it’s the 22nd of November 1987. You’re in Chigaco Illinois, and you’re settling down to watch the late night showing of the Doctor Who serial The Horror of Fang Rock. Fifteen minutes in, this happens…
How could I not have heard of this before? It’s awesome!! 😀
(I’ll try and blog a bit more this week – work’s been insane)
(Oh, and the link’s probably not safe for work – or at least any work that values good taste)
Oh now really!
Way to rip off sample art from Fallout 3 guys.
Way to go.
(Oh and it’s not computer generated either!)
Frankly I only play games in which Cavendish’s Gambit is banned…
There’s a great game of Mornington Crescent going on at the moment over at the Zompist Bulletin Board.
Just though I’d mention that 🙂
Ligers do not in fact have magical skills
Yesterday I finally got around to watching a film I’ve been meaning to for ages – Napoleon Dynamite (it was on special at JB’s and I needed something else to buy so it didn’t look like I’d gone in there just to get season four of Gilmore Girls :))
Well what, I ask you is there about this film not to like? Creepy Uncle Rico, ligers, time machines, llamas, holy statues protecting the school hallways and truly awful portraiture. It’s an exuberant paean to sheer, small town pointlessness, and probably the best thing I’ve watched all year to date.
I’m off now to brush up on my computer hacking skills!
How to win friends and poison them with mocktails.
Quite a while ago the Dragon’s Landing (which is currently on hiatus) put the call out for beverages to serve in the bar of their (completely fictional) inn. I don’t think they had much of a response, but due to a combination of boredom and caffeine craving over my two weeks off I managed to come up with one – a cocktail (or mocktail?) that I have decided to name the “Gary Gygax Wyvern’s Blood”.
(Call it my own little tribute to the master – it’ll have to do until we can get the Tomb of Horrors built for him).
The recipe is as follows…
(If you want to go alcoholic you could possibly replace the water with some kind of spirit – in this case it should be called Dragon’s Blood)
Voila!
It’s probably only my deranged tastebuds that will ever actually like this bizarre combination, but I throw it out there in case anyone has a party coming up and needs dare/torture material.
On a similar theme Ryan alerted me to the “Skin Disease or D&D Character?” online quiz. I got 94% – I would have done better except I presumed no one would be stupid enough to name a character after an infectious plague (I was wrong :)).
Reminding everyone of my stirling efforts
Just a note to say my FreakAngels Google Earth file has been updated.
(See, with the old editor I never would have jumped on to post something as short as this. It’s freedom baby!)
(Quoting Austin Powers. Someone please shoot me.)
Boasting about something completely non-boastworthy
I’ve reached 100 edits on Wikipedia. Woo-hoo!
Does this mean I qualify for a “Wanting recognition for something totally inconsequential” Barnstar? 😀
(Back at work, bah!)
Finally did the thing I should have done long ago
You know the hardest thing (for me) about maintaining a blog has always been the amount of work necessary to actually make an entry. Not the writing bit – I suffer from near permanent literary diarrhoea (wow, that sounds unpleasant) – but the spell checking, the mark up, the logging in to my account, the posting, the proofreading – you get the idea.
(Yeah, yeah, this is what comes from co-opting a system never intended to do blogging for the purpose of blogging – I’m lying in a bed of my own making, I know it.)
When the blogosphere (or at least my own personal part of it) was fresh and new, this wasn’t a problem. I was so enthused about posting my own brand of inane chatter on “the interwebs” that the inconvenience was worth it. Seven years on (I’ve been writing this thing for seven years!? Copre Sanctum!!) the allure has faded. I can’t count the times I’ve had things to write about, but just haven’t had the energy to face the rigmarole of getting a post up. The end result? A posting rate declining faster than the US dollar.
But no more! I stayed back at work tonight and got a nice, simple, secure and (above all else) easy page up that automatically takes care of spell checking, markup, logging in and posting – all in one integrated action. I write, I click, and the post is up!
(You know, the kind of thing proper blogs have had for years.)
So, from now on expect more blogging action, more often! Who knows, I may even have time to catch up with the rest of the web and program in comments.
As a final note I thought I’d write about something (or rather someone) I’ve been meaning to mention for ages. About a year ago it suddenly occurred to me (I was probably quite bored) to track down the origin of that bizarre “lolwut” picture. You know, the pear with the teeth, and the giraffes, and the lighthouse thing?
So I poked around, and discovered the deviantART portfolio of one Ursula Vernon.
I was hooked (go on, go take a look).
Not only is her art fantastic, but she accompanies most works with a short piece of narrative, which merely hooked me more (go on, take another look!).
I make a point of checking her gallery for new work at least once a week, and recommend that you do so too. Go on! Do it! 🙂
(My favourite is the Carousel Walrus)
OK, enough waffling for now. Look forwards to more posts. More posts! MORE POSTS!! MWAHAHAHAHA!!!
Farewell to the milkiest Battlestar of them all
Well they’ve (apparently – I’m not looking up the exact details for fear of spoilers) announced the end of Battlestar Galactica – conincidently on the same day my season three box set is shipped by Amazon. This is actually perfectly fine by me, the basic plot couldn’t possibly keep going season after season after season without the series turning really stale. Ending while it’s still a reasonably good show (as far as I know, only having seen seasons one and two) makes sense.
(It also gives them a great opportunity to pen a really crappy sequel series featuring flying motorcycles 🙂
As regards my box set, it’s going to take over a month to get here. This is merely more evidence for my sea otter theory regarding Amazon deliveries to the Asia-Pacific region.
PS: Why Milkybar? Trust me – linguists will be wetting themselves over that one 😉
A big damn new start
So, I’m going over to Fabian’s place tomorrow, and he’s insisting that I bring my still-in-development Firefly card game, Plyin’ the Black (apparently people like it – I’m as surprised as anyone). So I fire up Open Office to print out a new copy of the rules. It tries to open the rules document as an ASCII file.
“That’s weird” I think, but I figure that if the .odt file is corrupt, I always have the .pdf version I saved. So I go to open that. No dice, Adobe won’t recognise it as a valid pdf.
Suspecting that something is up, I check out some of the other files in the directory. Then all the files in the directory. They’re all corrupt!
There’s only one explanation. I’ve been got at by the Hands of Blue!
Now normally I’d be in complete despair at this point – months of work down the drain. But I’m actually quite blase about it. All of the core mechanics of the game are in my head, and this gives me the opportunity to start over again without the baggage of all the arbitary rules I made up to get the game working in the first place. So Plyin’ the Black will rise from the ashes! (insert obligatory comments about big damn heroes, doing the impossible and being mighty. Oh and she’s our witch.)
(The only downside is I’ll have to type out all the rules again in an authentic Firefly accent. Last time I was talking like a cowboy for a week!)
In other news I have a new monitor. A 22″ HD LCD, which takes up a lot less room and has a much sharper and brighter image than the decrepit old CRT I was using. I’ve still got to get the resolution and colours completely calibrated, but it’s a major improvement. I’ve finally joined the 21st century! (in terms of monitors at any rate 🙂
