My Life for Aiur
If you can understand this guy’s comedy routine, without speaking his language or checking out the title of the video…
then you might be a fan of Blizzard’s computer games.
(I had the Battlecruiser captain stuck in my head the other day. It was a strain not to start conversations in his accent.)
Stand back, I’m doing… stuff.
Most weeks I wait impatiently for my Kingdom of Loathing turns to build up to a useful level. This week, I’ve been sitting at the max of 200 turns for days, but I don’t have time to mess with it. I guess it’s a sign I’m using my time well… KoL isn’t exactly productive… but on the other hand, you can’t be productive all the time. Makes Jack a dull boy, you know.
On that note, I am going to watch a movie this weekend. Either in the theater, or from my list of DVDs to watch or re-watch. I don’t remember sitting through an entire movie since we watched “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” together.
One of the two 400MHz CRT iMacs that have been sitting in my office gathering dust since I left Decipher has found a good home – it’s in the possession of Starr’s youngest sister. She’ll probably want to give it an external FireWire HD and/or a memory upgrade before long, it’s only got a 10GB drive and 256MB of memory. But it’ll do Word and Photoshop and play DVDs, and she seems thrilled with it, so happiness all around. I need to find some old games to pass along that don’t involve serious mayhem.
Speaking of productivity, I am attempting to do something personally productive at least once a day. Either spend at least an hour on a personal project, or sit and write something with some thought in it (thus the recent outbreak of philosophising every week or so in my LJ). It doesn’t come easy: I am a slacker and procrastinator. But time moves with or without me, and I’m not going to be left behind.
Music of the Spheres
The British Broadcasting Corporation puts on yearly classical music concerts known as The Proms. This year, they’ve added a Doctor Who Prom to the lineup, and you can hear it online at the BBC iPlayer site until August 3rd.
The concerts are audio broadcasts presented by Freema Agyeman (Martha Jones), and include performances of soundtrack music from the new series as well as classical music that “you might find on the Doctor’s MP3 player”. There will also be a special short TV episode on the BBC website called “Music of the Spheres” which, if it’s like the other online trailers and specials, can technically only be watched from computers in Great Britain. (I’m quite sure that my fellow Whovian geeks are working on that as I type this.)
There’s a program online listing the included compositions. If you’re interested in orchestral music, enjoy!
EDIT: Aaaaand the online player just locked up on me. I am having a day of Internet servers crashing repeatedly. With luck, they’ll get it fixed.
EDIT 2: ‘Tis back. Clearly, the server couldn’t handle the Doctor spamming Moonfire.
The Soul For Getting Down
meiran posted this. It’s silly, it’s fanservice… and it’s joyously wonderful.
There’s a Bun in the Toaster
Just so no one accuses me of never having anything good to say about the new Galactica, this 8-minute “What the Frak Is Up With BSG?” video from the SciFi Channel is awesome. I hope it’s the brainchild of the production team, and not the SciFi Channel marketing department.
And the BSG cast doing a Letterman Top 10 List:
Thank goodness for a franchise with a sense of humor!
Must – Control – Jaws – of Death…
The cat wishes everyone to know that he was highly paid for this television appearance. The hamster… would like some more carrot bits please.
Game blogger Tobold suggests that WoW players would reach endgame with far better raiding skills if there were quests where you had to practice raiding with sets of NPCs. Aside from the time pressures, one reason I don’t do instances is that I’m not very good at them, and I think this is a fine idea. When I do have to hit an instance dungeon for a quest, I usually end up in the company of several far-higher-levelled guild mates, and my presence becomes a bit unnecessary. This idea would mitigate the problem a bit.
rhaps and shrewlet are coming down this weekend, which is a good thing because my Technicon experience was extremely rushed. I envy Rhaps’ new iMac, which is the same model as my Mom’s. But I’ll have my Mac Pro soon enough.
Paying bills, finishing paperwork, getting all sorts of ducks in a row this week. (They were sitting out front again this morning, enjoying the humid weather.) It all feels good. Also: new blender yay 🙂
Molten Muppet Pollen Prediction
See, this is how you “rickroll” someone. Rather than just posting random stupid misdirected link, post YouTube video claiming to be Muppet bloopers which even a savvy person will want to click just in case; then, play skillfully re-edited video of Beaker and the Electric Mayhem singing “Never Gonna Give You Up”.
The funny thing about Blizzard’s “Molten Core” joke is that you can still find people writing games for the Atari 2600, though they’re almost always played on emulators. It’s quite the programming challenge to get a fun game tucked into less storage space than my LJ user icon requires.
Two days of warm weather have produced an explosion of plant sex here. My car’s turned an unhealthy yellow-green, the streets have pale stains, and there are drifts of powdered lemonade in the gutters. We’ll see if I can breathe by the end of the day!
This weekend, I found out what the “Age of Aquarius” actually means. The Earth’s axis wobbles a tiny bit (but does not fall down). Some astrologers define a “Great Year” as the time it takes the axis to perform a complete wobble, approximately 26,000 years. A Great Year is divided into 12 Ages. Astrology being the exact science that it is, the Age of Aquarius is to begin sometime between 2062 and 2680. Or maybe it began in 2000, though any way it’s supposed to take a while to get up to speed. But now I know! (Yeah, I like that song. It’s happy.)
Gonna try to finish Technicon posts today.
Sorry, Katemonster…
While I’m working on Saturday’s report, I forgot to post this little nugget from Friday’s dance: “The Internet Is For: PORN”
(For those who’ve never seen this: probably not work safe. Quite possibly in bad taste. If you think it’s silly watching World of Warcraft characters sing this, keep in mind that it’s originally sung by puppets in an award-winning Broadway show.)
EDIT: And, by a weird coincidence, tonight’s DVR’d “Ace of Cakes” showcased an Avenue Q cake. Huh.
Killing the Radio Star
Okay, I think I’m totally turning into a Daft Punk fan. I saw this video on someone’s blog, and now the tune is firmly lodged in my head.
Start Me Up
Sometimes, people post things on the Internet that just plain make me feel glad to be living in a world where someone spent the time to make them up.
The “Lions In Kenya” and “Shirley Bassey Getting the Party Started” videos are two examples. Here’s another:
I successfully stayed up all night on Saturday night. We decided that our level 56-ers needed to hit 58 This Weekend, which we reached about 6 am. It was nice to know that I can still do that… a year of 10pm bedtimes had left me doubtful. Still, I had to down several Tums, as one of the tricks my body uses to try to get me to go to bed is surges of stomach acid. Also, I was kind of out of it the next day; so, I’ve learned from this that I can do it, but not easily.
Found a website that generates an automatically updated stat block I can use for my characters, like so…
Too bad that the servers are now far too overloaded with requests to actually function properly. (This one won’t update, it’s static.)
Local TV re-ran the Special Edition “Trouble With Tribbles” this weekend, so last night I dug out the “Trials And Tribble-ations” DS9 episode for Starr, who’d never seen it. Great fun! And then it hit me… there’s no way in heck that J.J. Abrams’ Lt. Uhura will be running around in that red minidress. Not in a 2008 feature film. I weep.
