I saw this link on Twitter today. Alas, it is not real, but a shoop. Still, it generated a chat most amusing with a friend - a chat I wish to share with you!
me: dude, check out the link that @choochoobear just tweeted.
11:28 AM Mysterious Friend: How to fold a flag?
me: no, after that
11:29 AM Mysterious Friend: W! T! F?!?
11:30 AM me: yeah, pretty much my reaction
11:33 AM Mysterious Friend: What's the purpose of that hideous fellatio hole in his face?
11:35 AM me: My bet is that a sex toy factory had an overrun on the Hungerin' Hank sex doll, and someone had the bright idea of dressing it up like Superman and selling it to the kiddies
11:39 AM Mysterious Friend: Makes more sense that i want it to. I bet Lex Luthor has like 12.
11:41 AM me: the Vidal Sassoon model Superman from the mid-90's when he "died" is his favorite.
He loves to just cuddle close and stroke its hair.
11:46 AM Mysterious Friend: Part of me shuddered when I read that...the other part imagined him doing it wear a Lois Lane outfit. I am a conflicted man.
11:47 AM me: The confliction is funny, though.
11:48 AM Mysterious Friend: Ultimately that is all that is really important.
me: indeed
11:49 AM Mysterious Friend: If we lived closer I would attempt to coerce you into starring as Lex in a short film based on this.
11:50 AM You'd make a good Lex Luthor.
11:51 AM me: Thanks, but there is no way I am dressing up as Lois Lane. Bitch has Barbie proportions, and my waist is waaaaay to big!
11:52 AM Mysterious Friend: We wouldn't focus on that.
11:53 AM Really the focus would be on the red dress and putting on the make up.
11:56 AM me: This is the song that Lex will sing as he gets dressed:
11:57 AM it's even funnier if you know that Maia Sharp is a lesbian.
12:03 PM Mysterious Friend: That is perfect.
12:04 PM me: Lex ends the song sobbing the last refrain quietly while using the hem of his dress to smear-wipe the tears that are ruining his mascara.
12:05 PM Mysterious Friend: You are a true genius.
I don't know how I missed this but I wish it had come out on the Wii.
12:06 PM me: what, the Superman Sex doll? Now, that would be an awkward accessory
Mysterious Friend: Seems like more of a Kinect accessory.
12:09 PM me: oh man, wouldn't that just make it awesome? "Mount Superman from behind, and thrust wildly to simulate sex - the screen will vibrate erratically when climax is near - when vibrations are at their peak, donkey punch Superman to ensure ensure highest score!
12:11 PM Mysterious Friend: That would make an awesome mini game. Would it come with little purple trunks that have a pocket in the crotch for the nun chuck?
12:11 PM me: Nah, you just stick in your pants
12:14 PM Mysterious Friend: I already do when ever I play baseball on Wii Sports.
12:16 PM me: Really? I do it for Tennis and Bowling. I like to imagine that my testicles are detachable, and that they are the size of cannonballs.
The Space Shuttle Endeavor is being decommissioned, and prepared for her final resting place at the California Space Center. Here she is docked at the International Space Station on May 28th, 2011, during her final mission. For extra poignancy, listen to The Last Watch by Stan Rogers while viewing this picture full-sized, or reading about Endeavor's 19 years of service.
I've spent the last hour reading Cracked.com, and I am nothing if not entertained. However, that has not helped me write anything. That's okay though, as I have a plan.
Not a cunning one. Or a clever one. It's possibly a stupid one, but...
So, here's my plan; I transcribe a recipe a friend sent me. It's actually from The King Arthur Flour Baker's Companion, but I wouldn't have known about it with out my friend. So, he gets the credit.
Granola S'Mores Bars
2 1/4 Cup Rolled Oats
1/2 Cup All-Purpose Flour
1/2 Teaspoon Salt
1 Cup Graham Cracker Crumbs
6 Tbspns Unsalted Butter/Shortening
6 Tbspns Golden, Maple, or Dark Corn Syrup
1/4 Cup firmly packed Light Brown Sugar
1 Cup Semi-sweet Chocolate Chips
1 1/4 Cups Mini Marshmellows
Pre-heat oven to 350
Lightly Grease 9x9 (or similar size) baking dish
In medium bowl, mix together Oats, Flour, Graham Crackers Crumbs, and Salt - set aside
In Medium sauce pan, melt butter and then stir in Syrup and Brown Sugar over Medium Heat.
Once sugar is dissolved, add Oats mixture, stirring until all is a gooey, delicious mess
Press about half of mixture into baking dish - start with a large pile in middle of dish, and use fingers to press outwards to edges. Sprinkle Chocolate Chips evenly over top, followed by Marshmellows. Top with remaining gooey crust mixture, place in oven; Bake for 15 to 20 minutes.
Allow to cool for 20 minutes, then cut into squares.
Now, while I may have taken some small liberites with the language, that is the recipe as it was given to me. My version is much the same, though differs on a few key points.
1) I double the recipe. These things are delicious, and won't last a minute around hungry friends. That's great if you are a selfless and giving paragon of altruism, but if you harbor even the tiniest bit of selfishness in your black heart the way I do, then you are going to want to make sure you get yours!
2) I use a 9x12 baking dish. This is because I doubled the recipe.
3) I use dark maple syrup. It is delicious.
4) I use Salted butter, and only half the salt.
5) I don't "sprinkle evenly", I bloody well layer the damned chips on!
If you end up making these, please let me know how you liked them. Personally, I'd keep a batch handy all the time if I wasn't so lazy.
So, let us assume for a moment that the Singularity is going to happen. We are all going to get eyes that can see UV, near-infrared, have infinite zoom, and biomechanical chips in our head will allow us to record and upload anything we see to a matrix that will make the Internet look like the telegraph. Synthetic myomers and carbon fiber nanotubes will allow us to become faster, stronger, and have greater endurance than the heroes of myth. Sort of like the Borg, but with better fashion sense.
And our caloric intake is absolutely going to go through the damned roof! Really, short of implanting nuclear batteries, or converting our spleens into fuel cells, we are going to need some way of providing energy for all these wonderful new toys. So, what about solar power?
Last night I was reading yet another article on sunscreen, and Point 4 combined with Comment #7 and Comment #12 deep in my sub-conscious, and then burst forth right as I turned out my light and my head hit the pillow. What if, instead of simply absorbing UV radiation and releasing it as stray electrons, sunscreen was made up of nanomaterials that could absorb the radiation and instead of releasing it, concentrated the electrons and stored them, or channeled them into whatever bionic doodad needed it?
These solar collectors could be part of the standard nanotech package that every transhuman child receives, and would act foremost as protection against the malignant rays cast upon our planet by the Evil Daystar!
These nanomachines would pull double duty as solar cells, channeling energy into devices that needed it, but their efficacy would be limited by their relatively scarcity in the body. However, if a person finds that they have a huge demand of power, or their fuel-cell spleen is in need of a recharge and no cheap whiskey is available, the nanomachine sunscreen could be directly applied to the skin providing a significant boost of power. Cheap brands would lose efficiency and be flushed from the body after a period of 6-8 hours, but more expensive sunscreen would actually permanently boost a person's power generation capabilities and resistance to UVA and UVB radiation.
Now, I just hope the Singularity gets here before I die of old age.
My laptop just glitched the eff out. Made like it was rebooting without me doing anything but using the touchpad. This coupled with it's new-found ability to overheat the wireless card and shut it down makes me think it might be time to invest in a new machine.
Looks like I picked a bad month to stop rolling drunks for spare change.
Now, the original meat of tonight's post was going to be some poetry that I have been working on for the last few months. I was going to use some of the downtime while at work to complete and edit some of them, but alas, it was not to be.
Not for lack of time, but rather for lack of effort I mean, yes, of course it was due to a lack of time! Haha! Really, I mean what else could it be? You see, the problem with polishing something to make it spiffy and neat is that sometimes a turd is a turd. These silk purses will not be turned into sow's ears anytime soon.
However, I do have something poetry-related to bring to the table tonight! Some months ago I posted a poem called Lavender Flames at Twilight. It was based on a dream I had (one of the few I managed to write down before it fled), and the image of the rockets lifting into the sky stayed with me for weeks afterwards.
Then about a month ago I ran across this link to the English Russia blog, and marveled at how the pictures of the Soyuz rocket launch matched so closely to my dream. A few of the pictures are included below, but I strongly recommend you go to the site to see all of them. They are breath-takingly beautiful, and awe-inspiring.
That right there? That is a 34 ton javelin giving the finger to Earth's gravity as it hauls it's precious human cargo (and lots of supplies) to the International Space Station. And that. Is. Awseome.
Alright yes, I have been phoning it in (once in a literal sense) the last few days. And tonight isn't going to be any different. I finally finished reading the FFIX Let's Play that I started nearly a week ago, and it was simply much more interesting than trying to dredge up something from the depths of the Internet. Don't worry, the FFIX LP is going to be one of the samples in my Let's Play post (COMING...at some point, maybe), and you can read it then.
You know, what the hell - I have twelve minutes until this needs to go live, so why not talk a bit about Final Fantasy IX? It was the last jrpg that Squaresoft made and released before they were bought out by Enix, and as far as I am concerned, the last good Final Fantasy game they made. From FFX on, the stories focused more on melodrama and emo whining than character development world-building.
FFIX, however, was filled with unique and interesting characters that lived in a fully realized world. Even the NPC's that you would only see once had little phrases and unique sprites that said more about them and their backstories than any main character from Final Fantasy 12.
Sadly, Squaresoft bet far too heavily on the uncanny valley, and when their cgi magnum opus tanked they became a prime target for a buy-out. It is everyone's loss that Enix did the buying.
Alas, poor Squaresoft. We hardly knew ye.
Hey look, a cute picture of a cat!
Yeah, I got nothing else, but in my defense my new roommate moved in tonight, and we're out at a bar celebrating.
Yes,I did nothing but read Let's Plays, but that is completely beside the point! Plus, this is my first attempt to post from my phone.
Oh Internets, you know me so well! It's Day Four of this thing, and I still haven't figured out how to plan ahead and get a topic lined up for the day's post. Not that this is an unusual behaviour for me; homework assignements, projects, and papers were always being saved put off until the last minute. It's not so much that I crave the thrill and excitement of shaving it down to the wire, oh no! It's just that nothing focuses the mind quite so wonderfully as imminent death.
A friend of mine told me that if I fail this 30 Day Challenge, I have to film myself watching 2 Girls 1 Cup. And that. Ain't. Happening.
Death of Decency and Good Taste is Death all the same, so it was with a little bit of elation that I ran across something that caused ideas to gel, and my Muse to visit me from whatever part of my mind she usually resides.
Oddly enough, it was a comic about a writer's muse, from the excellent (and strongly NSFW) webcomic Oglaf. Seriously, DO NOT click any of these links if vaginas, naked breasts, or Ents with very literal morning wood offend you (or would get you fired).
Truly, anyone who with a creative bent knows how horribly demanding a muse can be. (Un)Fortunately mine's ADD is just as strong as my own, so she gets bored quickly and leaves. Which is only one-third of the excuse for the brevity of this post. The other two-thirds are that it is bloody difficult to type one-handed with an 18 lb. cat purring on your chest, and the fact that I really didn't put much more thought into this at all.
I started this post the other morning after getting only 3 1/2 hours sleep, and then abandoned it when it became obvious that I had all the mental capacity of a senile mouse. However, the urge to blog stayed with me, so I left all associated tabs open. And glad I did, because I ran across something else online that I wanted to add to the post. Also, because I currently have the attention-span of a hummingbird's heart beat.
But I will get to that new addition at a later point. For now, here is the gist of the post; space, as my college friend Isaac was wont to say, is big. Now, Isaac was actually referring to mere intra-system distances (specifically cislunar with regard to the L-1 and L-2 Lagrange points, and the scale of your average O'Neill Cylinder), but the sentiment becomes even greater the farther one travels from Earth.
Now, this comic reminded me that astronomers had recently completed the largest 3D model of the Universe from data collected during the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III. In boring old 2D, that model looks like this picture:
Neat to look at, but it doesn't really give a body a sense of scale, does it? For that, we need to go with something like this image:
Centered on the Virgo Supercluster (wherein our very own Milky Way resides), with a scale of about 1cm = 1 Billion lightyears, this picture uses information from earlier SDSS's to map out our Universe. But even this picture fails to give our brains a proper grasp of the immensity of Everything. Fortunately, it is from atlasoftheuniverse.com where one can "zoom out" from 12.5 lys from the Sun all the way up to 14 Billion lys from the Sun, allowing one to adjust their sense of scale. Go ahead and click through. I'll wait.
Back? Good. Impressive isn't it. How the individual stars cluster and clump into groups, which then form galaxies, that then themselves become parts of clusters and super clusters. Still, if that didn't break your mind and make you feel utterly insignificant, yet vibrantly alive, then I have one more thing to show you.
This is the Millenium Run/Simulation, done by the Virgo Consortium. First run in 2005, it attempts to simulate the birth and growth of our Universe from the Big Bang to the Present Day. As you watch, keep in mind that the filaments and points of light are not mere stars and nebula, but strands and globular clusters of galaxies. Billions and billions of galaxies.
I can watch that video over and over and over again, and my sense of awe and wonder grow every time.
The last thing I want to add (and the thing that I mentioned back in the first paragraph) brings the scale back down to the merely Human. It is a gorgeous time-lapsed video of the Very Large Telescope in northern Chile.
I've asked it before, and I'll ask it again; what have we lost as a civilization that we can no longer see the starry sky? Where has our wonder gone?
What does it say about me that I am far more interested in where this shot was taken, than I am in the subject matter?*
*and no, "I'm gay" is too obvious.
What does it say about me that I am far more interested in where this shot was taken, than I am in the subject matter?
To say that the Jetto J43SP-C (Space Plane-Cargo) was atmospheric-capable would be to stretch the definition of "capable" to uncomfortable dimensions. Sure, it had forward canards to balance the the tail-heavy ship's tendency to "sit up" on final approach, and many papers could be (and have been) written on the brilliance of the stacked rear wing design, and how robust and rugged it was. The same could also be said for the OMS systems which were close cousins of those on the original Space Shuttle. Simple and efficient, they made the J43SP-C pirouette like a dancer, but only in micro-gravity
Then there were the engines. When Jetto was designing the the J43SP-C, they went in for simplicity and reliability over flash and glitz, hence their use of anonther Space Shuttle technology, an upgraded SSME, as the primary propulsion unit, with two JATO engines providing addition mission-specific thrust. The genius behind those was that an expended unit could be jettisoned after lift-off (much like the Shuttle's SRB's), and new ones slid in and locked into place. Of course, since most companies only ever used the J43SP-C in microgravity environments, the JATO's were mostly considered to be dead weight and never installed.
So why was this light cargo workhorse mostly confined to LEO-to-GEO flights, or packet runs to the Lagranges? Because this was all too often the end result of a J43SP-C entering into any atmosphere denser than that of Mars.
All art by Dimitri Popov. Go here for his spectacular portfolio. These designs were for a FPS, Exodus From the Earth, that was released in 2008, and then promptly vanished from gaming consciousness.
A quick post before bed. This picture was taken in my backyard one lovely summer's eve, back in August.
A while back a friend of mine asked me to do an infrequent blog post about some of the webcomics I read; giving a little bit of what I liked/disliked about them; what drew them to me in the first place; and why I keep reading them. I said, "Sure, no problem!" and then promptly forgot about it. Well, while reading through my webcomics last night some thing caught my attention, as some things are wont to do, and it reminded me of my promise to my friend. So, here goes.
Of the thirty-one webcomics I regularly read, Supermassive Black Hole A* has possibly the most unique art style and layout of any of them.
Using only black, white, and every shade of grey in between, artist Ben Chambers has created a noir-esque space opera that, while still managing to hit several scifi tropes, avoids the cliches that cripples so many others. And he does so with a single-panel format. Granted, they are very large panels, but he gets away with it by updating multiple pages at once. More importantly, he has a firm grasp of "show, don't tell", and lets the action tell his story for him. In fact, he has another comic done in the same art style, The Princess and the Giant, that is completely dialog-free. I haven't really gotten into that one yet, but the narrative does not suffer from it's lack of words.
So, what was it about SMBHA* that reminded me that I had a promise to fulfill? It was a news post titled Phil Foglio AAAAAAAAAAAAAA (or words to that effect - I think I'm missing some A's), wherein Mr. Chambers waxes ecstatic about meeting Phil Foglio at a comic convention, and then completely (and justifiably) loses his shite when he learns that the esteemed Mr. Foglio reads SMBH.
Why is that a big deal? For those who don't know, Phil Foglio is a four time Hugo Award winning-author/artist of many, many things comic/scifi/fantasy-related. Girl Genius, for example (for which he and his wife have won two of those Hugos). Dude's big news. And he reads SMBH.
So, when I saw that news item I realized that SMBH was the first comic I needed to write about (and given my track record, it might be the last), as knowing that Phil Foglio also read the comic cemented SMBH in my mind as being a tier one webcomic. Maybe it doesn't have the following of Something*Positive or Questionable Content, but dammit, it should!
Let's Play - For Geeks that Want to Know if The Princess Really is in Another Castle, but are Too Lazy to Play Themselves
Reading some of my older posts, and laughing at my wittiness...ah, good times! Speaking of wit, or lack there of, Nothingman posted a comment on yesterday's article:
Yea and verily, he has a point. Of the eleven post I've made so far, I would say only two of them were actually interesting. However, I take exception to the idea that some of them were not from my heart - all my post are from the heart, though some (most...almost all?) do come from a rather shallow part of it.
Now, as some of you are no doubt aware, I enjoy playing the occasional video game. However, even with my copious free time uncluttered by such mundanities such are the lot of mere mortals, I find it difficult to squeeze in enough time to play the games I own, and thus so very many digital stories fall by the wayside.
That's where the Let's Play Archives come in.
A sub-forum all their own on Something Awful, Let's Plays are threads wherein dedicated crazy people play games that the rest either can't, or do not want, to play. These LP's are presented either as screen shots with commentary, or videos with commentary, and are quite often funny, interesting, and very engaging.
For instance, as I mentioned the other day, I recently finished reading through the LP of Final Fantasy IX. I had played the game years ago when it was first released on the PSX, but I never finished it, and watching the ending on Youtube just isn't the same without context.
And reading The White Dragon's LP provides more than context! He also provides interesting insights to the development and translation of the game, along with showcasing the shear amount of detail that went into even the smallest sections of the game. Character animations that were only used once! Text written on items that were too small for the PSX to render properly! Legitimate cinematic techniques used in a pre-render cgi cut scene!
Then there is the social commentary about Hawaii that The White Dragon, as a native Hawaiian, provides. His insight into the gradual erosion of his linguistic heritage; how the native Hawaiian community views homosexuals; and what a pain in the ass tourists are, make the thread worth reading even if you don't give two figs about Final Fantasy IX.
Continue reading "Let's Play - For Geeks that Want to Know if The Princess Really is in Another Castle, but are Too Lazy to Play Themselves" »
Posted at 09:27 PM in Video Game Commentary, Videogames | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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