Words to Live By

I'm stealing a line from Warren Ellis:

"Remember Warren’s Rule: if I’ve been awake less than two hours, it is Morning, no matter what the clock says."

Alax has kinda managed to sum up my whole lifestyle

http://buttersafe.com/2009/04/30/the-darkness/

Old Jews Telling Jokes

Via the ever dependable Jordan Reed, score another one for the internets: http://www.oldjewstellingjokes.com/

Link clearing house, tuesday afternoon edition

Bruce Sterling on the flupocalypse.

Oh my gosh, Disney Fans, how great does this sound?

"...You know anything about Spiders?"

This clip is positivly paleolithic in internet time, but in case anyone missed it, Kevin Smith talks about how his draft of Superman went down.

(His script is floating around the internet somewhere, and makes a great chaser to this story.  One of the better meta-jokes in the script is that all the characters reuse names from other Kevin Smith movies.  Also, the "gay R2D2" is named "L-RON", which I thought was hysterical.

Well, that's one tiny problem solved

As alert readers of this space will recall, Heidi and I both got iPhones about a year ago.  Something that's been driving me crazy is the device name of the two phones: in both iTunes and on the phones themselves, they list their names as what I was expecting; "Gabriel's Phone" and "Heidi's Phone".  On the network, however, (for example, inside the router) they're both listed as "HEIDI-S-PHONE".

That's... a little suboptimal.

So, I finally did a little digging today, and turned up the fact that network devices can't have an apostrophie in the name.  "Aha," I said to myself, said I,"let's try something here."

A quick edit later, and "Gabriel Phone" was suddenly showing up in all the right places.

Since that clearly wouldn't work as a name, I needed something new.  Something both without an apostraphie, but grammatically correct.  A proper name of some kind?  What would a good name for a loyal sidekick that was as annoying and rascally as it was helpful.  Obvously, I only had one choice - and named it Floyd.

Happy Earth Day!

In honor of Earth Day, a piece of Trivia. The picture to the left here is nicknamed "The Blue Marble," and is a photograph taken on the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. (the last manned mission to the moon.)

It is, essentially, the only full picture of the whole globe ever taken, without having part of the planet in shadow, or needing computers to fill in the gaps.

Here's where this gets fun. The image is easy to spot, since it has that distinctive arrowhead shaped cloud hanging right over the horn of Africa. So, here's the game: every time you see an image of the Earth - in movies, magazine ads, computer games, science articles, whatever - take a look for that arrowhead. Odds are, it'll be there. After a while, this kinda turns into "Where's Waldo" for space buffs - pretty much every picture of the earth is THIS PICTURE. How cool is that?

Lego. Rock. Band.

So, Harmonix pretty much had me at "Lego Rock Band is coming for the Wii." But then, they had to go and level that one up - one of the songs in the setlist is going to be "The Final Countdown?"

DONE.

"That was like financial chicken soup."

Elizabeth Warren, Harvard Law Professor, Chair of the TARP Oversight Committee, and all-around adorable aunt sterotype, drops by the Daily Show to talk about the ongoing econopocalypse.

About half-way, it looks like she's going to gown in flames - not because she's incapable, but because the banks and the Trasury deaprtment haven't been giving her anything to go on.  Then, she turns the bus around and gives the single best summary of the financial situation and the hsitorical precidents I have ever seen anywhere.

Guys, this all just might work out.

The Somali Pirates have a blog

Of special note is their proof that Obama is the worst US president in a century.

Dave Arneson invented Hit Points

Roll that thought around in your head for a while. If you're reading this blog, odds are you've played at least one game in the last 30 years with hit points. Or Armor Class. Dave Arneson invented both of those. He also invented Role Playing Games.

He died last week.

Unlike his partner in crime Gary Gygax, Arneson kept a low profile, so over the last 30 years or so Gygax tends to get the lion's share of the credit for Dungeons and Dragons. By all accounts, that's more or less fair - Gygax created D&D, but Arneson invented RPGs. It's hard to imagine where the wold would be without him - even if you didn't burn most of middle school playing RPGs like some of us, take the computer game industry - billions of dollars a year, now, and essentially all of that attributable to RPGs in some way or another.

When Gygax died a year ago, the obituaries were verbose and plentiful - over the last week, that has not been the case with Arneson. (There are, of course, exceptions) I think most people just don't really know what to say.

Well, here goes: he came up with one thing, and it made the world a better place. I don't think you can ask for a better obituary than that.

Oh man, HOTU is down!

Did anybody but me ever visit Home of the Underdogs? It was an Abandonware site - where you could download old, long out of print computer games.

Amazingly, it tried really hard to be legal - or at least as legal as possible. Games that were for sale *somewhere* on the 'net couldn't be downloaded, and takedown notices from copyright owners were always responded to promptly. So, after being around for ten years or so, anything on the site was there thanks to the implicit permission of the owners.

In addition to just being a tremendous resource for old games, it had a wealth of other stuff - reviews, manuals, and the admin tried really hard to hightail games that no one played at the time - the Underdogs of the title.

So, it turns out that the site has gone down. A little digging reveals that this is because the web host has gone bankrupt, and taken their servers with them. And here's the gutpunch - the archive is now gone, having not been backed up anywhere.

There's a revival group operating out of google groups, which looks like it's going about as well as you'd expect - so not very well at all. The founder and admin of the site Sarinee "Fringer" Achavanuntakul has released what she still has into the wild under a CC license - so the database and the webpages are mostly still intact. Although, seeing as how the database turned out to be a 15meg Excel spreadsheet, that may not be as helpful as it sounds.

Still, I've got hopes that someone will put this thing back together. The site really wasn't all that complex by modern web 2.0 standards - the hardest part will be to get the thousands of games back. Still, bittorrent must be good for something besides linux distros and Doctor Who, right?

Someone who has more free time then sense should really spend a weekend and rebuilt it.

Finally, someone agrees with me

Every year after my birthday, everyone says, "man, your birthday sure makes you grumpy!"

Well, true.

On the other hand, at least T-Rex has my back on this.

MOON

I want to see this movie really, really badly, and I didn't even know it existed 20 minutes ago.

Why didn't anyone tell me Sam Rockwell was starring in a mashup of Alien, Silent Running, and Outland?

ALSO: directed by David Bowie's son, which is basically the only way to make this movie more awesome. And yeah, that's Kevin Spacey as the robot's voice.

Let's go ahead and put a fork in steampunk

Because someone went and built a steam-powered ipod charger. Seriously. The steampunk meme has now wrapped all the way around, and now people are just using 19th century tech around the home.


And, a bonus question to bake your noodle: what percentage of steampunk fans, do you suppose, are anti-nuclear power?

Heidi is excited!

Well, Swatch makes THIS now. My favorite Bond Bad girl of all times in kick ass watch form, fit for the hammer and cicle of our Cold War Childhood.

Heidi's "Things to Ponder"

Why do they have a Kosher symbol on Easter Candy?

Where is the Chocolate Sedar Plate for tiny Jews?

HERE IT IS: Shalom!

Happy Birthday to Me

I have apparently turned 31.

I'm as surprised as anyone.

April Something

Having my birthday on April 1 has given me a unique appreciation of April Fools jokes. Namely, I hate them with a deep and unfathomable passion. Which is funny, since I enjoy the rest of the wackyness that comes with the April 1 birthday - it's just the pranks that get to me.

Also, at some point about 10 years ago, the Internet decided to put all kinds of wacky stuff up for April 1. This was really funny in 1996. Now, it's just Internet Jackass day. Usually, I leave the PC off on April 1.

However, I did think these we're pretty funny:
Witchaloks!
Gmail Autopilot!
New Fark Experience!
New Think Geek Products! (With the bonus game of "guess which of these will become real. Me, I want one of those sleeping bags.