28Jun2006 2120: Catan
One more thing. If you wanted to get one of my Settlers of Catan shirts but hadn't...you're out of luck. I actually got cease-and-desisted by Mayfair Games (through Cafepress) this afternoon. I'll rework the graphics to be less obvious, but the originals are now subucula non grata.
28Jun2006 2105: Supes
I had a revelation during last Friday's movie viewing whatever-we-call-it. It's not really "Sci-Fi Friday" until (a) Stargates come back and (b) somebody gets cable. Anyway, last Friday (two Fridays ago?) we were watching Batman Begins and it struck me that, here, I had the perfect superhero movie. It was the scene where Batman is fighting ninjas in an exploding house on top of the Himalayas. I had never thought of it in exactly that way before, with the italics and everything, but how can one top such a thing?
One cannot. And that brings us to Superman Returns. Superman Returns is a well-above-average movie that perfectly captures the spirit of the first two movies. By "capture the spirit" I mean "takes forever to get going and boils down to Superman vs. Lex Luthor and Some Rocks". This is what people want to see from Superman; a little rah-rah, lifting some heavy things, throwing things really far. The movie delivers that. Everybody should go see it once.
But I'll tell you something else. The X-Men cartoon was pretty much crap, and anyone who says different is speaking from nostalgia. The Spider-man cartoon was similarly crap, and the MTV CG version was killed too soon. But Superman...dude, I just saw him in one of the best cartoons ever made, beating the shit out of aliens, pounding Darkseid, Doomsday, real challenges. To then sit through a three-hour plot about Lex Luthor, a Luthor without any super-robots or anything...it was hard to take. This movie lays the groundwork for a total reboot of the movie series but is in itself not as exciting as Batman Begins.
But oh man did you see that Spider-man trailer? Now you have. Hell yes.
22Jun2006 2233: Last Dance
Tomorrow is the last day of my in-class Chemu trial. I gotta say I really didn't think that anybody would get all the elements in one week, but a fast computer makes all the difference. I think out of the whole class we've accounted for all four endings. Some people were even playing it outside of lab time, which is really what I was aiming for.
Of course, they're also quite adept at breaking things that I thought I fixed months ago.
17Jun2006 1549: For the Geeks
What would possess someone to put non-numeric data into a field representing a monetary amount?
For people who maybe don't want to hear me complain about ASCII currency encoding there's Cheshire Crossing, a rather ridiculous comic. Alice Lidell, Wendy Darling, and Dorothy Gale are at a boarding school watched over by Mary Poppins. There's not much comic there right now, but it has potential as a concept. I expect the eventual villain to be Mecha-Anne Frank, sent back to 1911 in a Nazi time travel experiment.
15Jun2006 0815: Stibium
I'mma drop some names here. Keep up.
Hey Coutnery Crumrin fans, today's Scary Go Round pointed me to Gunnerkrigg Court, a comic you will like. And the main character is named Antimony, which is a big win but also kinda crosses that off the list of 52 Yo Mama names I can use.
Corundum is mine, Internet. You hear me?
Courtney Crumrin haters, I also found something for you.
14Jun2006 1936: And Now Here I Am
...three classes (and two late-night cleaning periods later) and the vital save files are still on the hard drives, right where we left them. ITS Help Desk was very sorry about the lack of floppy drives, and assured us that the hard drives were still wiped out at 0300 each day.
I have come to understand that -- and I don't say this lightly -- ITS Help Desk is a den of lies. I have used this name before; on my own apartment, or a friend's apartment, and I think recently at a bar when they did not have ice cream sammiches that, goddammit, I needed right that very moment. But I do not use it lightly.
My DS Lite has shipped from Overstock.com, but (strike one) it's being shipped through the US Postal Service and (strike two) it's currently in New Jersey. I await the dropping of the other shoe!
12Jun2006 2215: So There I Was
...about to begin my all-important thesis experiment using my now-ancient chemistry game. I had everything in order: the students were split into balanced test groups, the computer cluster was reserved, I had twenty floppy disks ready for students to save their games on, and I had printed the frankly ridiculous number of surveys. I even arrived for the first day a full forty minutes early, just in case, right? In case the building was on fire and I could join a bucket brigade or something.
Everything was going a little too smoothly. Of course. When I arrived this morning I found that, sometime between now and two weeks ago -- when we reserved the cluster and tested the software -- ITS had taken another step in its long quest to upgrade the hardware and screw the student. Every single more-than-adequate machine, each with a zip drive and floppy drive, had been replaced by shiny new Dells that had neither. What the hell do I do with twenty plastic coasters? Is this the cluster we reserved? IS IT?!?
This paragraph also contains rage against ITS.
11Jun2006 2114: Mug Update
Potato Mug update: ground beef is indeed a winning topping, but I bet you weren't expecting scrambled eggs!!
And yes, I'm aware that KFC also has a potato mug concoction. I wholeheartedly approve of these "Famous Bowls", but only until I perfect a method of popcorning chicken at home.
In less than twelve hours my thesis game
will finally be unleashed released in a classroom
setting. And lo! The fifth seal was opened!
Morgion: "Hell yeah fire up the turkey-guts processor!"
05Jun2006 2220: Excitement
This past weekend I saw a baby deer running along a highway, watched normal golf on TV, watched Norweigian golf in real life, shouted "mushroom" into a microphone, and constructed an illogical prison for a logical machine. None of that is as exciting as it sounds.
I added another section under Coding, for interactive fiction. Can you escape my elaborately emo textual trap?
My IRA packet came in today, and apparently the online account was enabled late Friday, so tonight was spent on beer and investment opportunities. We'll know if that was a good combination in ten years.