Octopodial Chrome

I just discovered this wonderful Who’s Who of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation and Robots series. Very good to have on hand if you, like me, discovered Asimov at an impressionable age and devoured every single thing you could get your hands on.

Jake Shimabukuro (one of the best uke players out there today) covers Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody:

Terrific version! I really do love covers in general.

This one’s been going around a bit.

The rules: Don’t take too long to think about it. Twelve videogames you’ve played that will always stick with you. List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes. Tag fifteen friends, including me, because I’m interested in seeing what games my friends choose.

Tunnels of Doom

We played this on our old TI-99/4A, the first computer I ever used. It supported four characters, and there were three of us brothers at the time—with our father, it was perfect. Then later there were four of us who could play (really, the baby sat and gurgled while we played for him…).

Dark Castle

Dad got us a copy of this game for our old Macintosh Plus and we played and played and played it, no doubt to his infinite chagrin. A few years back my brother Stephen spent Christmas vacation playing a reissue for modern Macs—it was very cool to hear the old noises again that we’d had imprinted on our brains nearly thirty years ago.

Gato

This was another black-and-white Mac game Dad got for us. You got to play a Second World War sub skipper in the Pacific, sinking Japs and trying not to get sunk by them—and not to sink your own ships. It was great fun!

Cap’n Magneto

This was an odd shareware game I could never win because of the nag screens and bugs. It taught me the virtues of free software and bugfixing.

Moria

This was the first inkling I had that games didn’t need flashy graphics; that a simple character-cell roguelike could be complex and tough. It began a quarter-century love/hate relationship with roguelikes: love because they’re fun; hate because I have never actually beaten one.

Bolo

This…this was a great game. Chris—my best friend in Virginia—and I would play this all day long. My brothers and I would play it. My cousins and I would play it. One could play it across the internet.

It rocked.

Crossfire

Ah, Crossfire, my old nemesis. It’s the first game (and really last) which majorly hurt my grades. It was just too addictive, too fun. It was massively multiplayer before the term had even been invented. It was full-color. It ran on Sun workstations. It was wonderful.

Doom

This was the first first-person-shooter I ever saw, and it blew me away. I spent many happy hours playing it in the engineering lab at DU.

Descent

And then there was Descent, which knocked Doom into a cocked hat. Doom was flat 2D; Descent was in full, glorious 3D. Doom aimed on one axis; Descent in all three. It was a revelation.

Command and Conquer

This was one that we played and played my freshman year of college. I didn’t have a Windows box, so I didn’t play it all that much—but it was still definitely the social high point of that year.

Marathon

And then there was Marathon, proving that Macs could out-do Windows once again. They had Doom; we had Marathon. Doom was a mindless shoot-em-up; Marathon had a plot, even a story. It didn’t have the full 3D maps of Descent, but it had more depth than Doom. And the graphics and gameplay were better.

Dragon Age: Origins

This was fun because it was basically first-person interactive fiction. That is, while it still had the fighting actual of a normal FPS, it also had some plot—and that plot was affected by the character’s actions. Also, I got to spend time with a good friend playing it.

An honorable mention goes to Pac-Man, which may have been the first video game I was ever aware of, but which wasn’t really a life-changing video game.

Cracked.com has a so-true-it-hurts comic illustrating the lifespan of a TV show. It is, as noted, so true that it hurts. Hear that Highlander? Battlestar Galactica? Scrubs?

This one has been floating around forever, but it’s as funny as ever.

1. Buy a dumpster, paint it gray inside and out, and live in it for six months.
1. Submariners: Black outside Pea Green inside
2. Run all the pipes and wires in your house exposed on the walls.
3. Repaint your entire house every month.
4. Renovate your bathroom. Build a wall across the middle of the bathtub and move the shower head to chest level. When you take showers, make sure you turn off the water while you soap down.
5. Put lube oil in your humidifier and set it on high.
6. Once a week, blow air up your chimney, with a leaf blower and let the wind carry the soot onto your neighbor’s house. Ignore his complaints.
7. Once a month, take all major appliances apart and reassemble them.
8. Raise the thresholds and lower the headers of your front and back doors so that you either trip or bang your head every time you pass through them.
9. Disassemble and inspect your lawnmower every week.
10. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, turn your water heater temperature up to 200 degrees. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, turn the water heater off. On Saturdays and Sundays tell your family they use too much water, so no bathing will be allowed.
11. Raise your bed to within 6 inches of the ceiling, so you can’t turn over without getting out and then getting back in.
12. Sleep on the shelf in your closet. Replace the closet door with a curtain. Have your spouse whip open the curtain about 3 hours after you go to sleep, shine a flashlight in your eyes, and say Sorry, wrong rack.
13. Make your family qualify to operate each appliance in your house - dishwasher operator, blender technician, etc. Re-qualify every 6 months.
14. Have your neighbor come over each day at 0500 , blow a whistle so loud Helen Keller could hear it, and shout Reveille, reveille, all hands heave out and trice up.
15. Have your mother-in-law write down everything she’s going to do the following day, then have her make you stand in your back yard at 0600 while she reads it to you.
16. Submit a request chit to your father-in-law requesting permission to leave your house before 1500…In triplicate.
17. Empty all the garbage bins in your house and sweep the driveway three times a day, whether it needs it or not. Now sweepers, sweepers, man your brooms, give the ship a clean sweep down fore and aft, empty all shit cans and butt kits!
18. Have your neighbor collect all your mail for a month, read your magazines, and randomly lose every 5th item before delivering the rest.
19. Watch no TV except for movies played in the middle of the night. Have your family vote on which movie to watch, then show a different one– the same one every night.
20. When your children are in bed, run into their room with a megaphone shouting Now general quarters, general quarters! All hands man your battle stations!
21. Make your family’s menu a week ahead of time without consulting the pantry or refrigerator.
22. Post a menu on the kitchen door informing your family that they are having steak for dinner. Then make them wait in line for an hour. When they finally get to the kitchen, tell them you are out of steak, but they can have dried ham or hot dogs. Repeat daily until they ignore the menu and just ask for hot dogs.
23. Bake a cake. Prop up one side of the pan so the cake bakes unevenly.
Spread icing real thick to level it off.
24. Get up every night around midnight and have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on stale bread. (mid rats)
25. Set your alarm clock to go off at random during the night. At the alarm, jump up and dress as fast as you can, making sure to button your top shirt button and tuck your pants into your socks. Run out into the backyard and uncoil the garden hose and put out a simulated fire.
26. Every week or so, throw your cat or dog into the pool and shout Man overboard, port side! Rate your family members on how fast they respond.
27. Put the headphones from your stereo on your head, but don’t plug them in. Hang a paper cup around your neck on a string. Stand in front of the stove, and speak into the paper cup, Stove manned and ready. After an hour or so, speak into the cup again Stove secured. Roll up the headphones and paper cup and stow them in a shoe box.
28. Make your family turn out all the lights and go to bed at 10 p.m. Now taps, taps! Lights out! Maintain silence throughout the ship!
1. Then immediately have an 18-wheeler crash into your house. (For aircraft carrier sailors.)
29. Build a fire in a trash can in your garage. Loudly announce to your family, This is a drill, this is a drill! Fire in hangar bay one!
30. Place a podium at the end of your driveway. Have your family stand in front of the podium for 4-hour intervals. (Best done when the weather is worst. January is a good time.)
31. Next time there’s a bad thunderstorm in your area, find the biggest horse you can, put a two-inch mattress on his back, strap yourself to it and turn him loose in a barn for six hours. Then get up and go to work.
32. For former engineers: bring your lawn mower into the living room, and run it all day long.
33. Make coffee using eighteen scoops of budget priced coffee grounds per pot, and let the pot simmer for 5 hours before drinking.
34. Have someone under the age of ten give you a haircut with sheep shears.
35. Sew the back pockets of your jeans onto the front.
36. Add 1/3 cup of diesel fuel to the laundry.
37. Take hourly readings on your electric and water meters.
38. Every couple of weeks, dress up in your best clothes and go to the scummiest part of town. Find the most run down, trashiest bar, and drink beer until you are hammered. Then walk all the way home.
39. Lock yourself and your family in the house for six weeks. Tell them that at the end of the 6th week you’ll take them to Disney World for liberty. At the end of the 6th week, inform them the trip to Disney World has been canceled because they need to get ready for an inspection, and it will be another week before they can leave the house.

Those who’ve heard tales of my childhood know that my old man actually did a bunch of these. If I never hear reveille again it’ll be too soon…wait a second…ಠ_ಠ

Cracked.com states that babies lie, racially discriminate, defy authority, get high off of masochism, steal and even murder in the womb. I think we should require registration of all babies and institute a mandatory one-week waiting period before procreation…

Chris Illuminati shares some notes his wife has left in his lunch. Very cool, and very sweet too.

In the style of Jeff Foxworthy’s hilarious You Might be a Redneck routine, here’s a list of questions to determine if you’re a straight-razor or safety-razor type of guye.

A friend challenged all of his friends to post the first fifteen movies we can think of that will stick with ’us. Well, I prefer twelve to fifteen any day, so here’s my selection:

1. Top Gun
2. Young Frankenstein
3. The Lighthorsemen
4. Breaker Morant
5. Die Fledermaus
6. Last of the Mohicans
7. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
8. 12 Monkeys
9. 90° South
10. Hors de Prix
11. Master and Commander
12. Animal House

Take it for whatever it’s worth…

So I was watching the video for Jefferson Starship’s Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now and had an idea: a cheesy 80s film night. This isn’t for the true classics like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off; it’s for the guilty pleasures like Top Gun, Adventures in Babysitting or Mannequin. Probably Weird Science, Real Genius and Revenge of the Nerds. Maybe License to Drive or Blind Date. I wonder what others would qualify? I’ve never seen Footloose, but it sounds like a likely candidate. Ditto on both counts for Dirty Dancing.

Anyone else have thoughts? There are probably too many for a single night, but a whole series of Cheesy 80s Film Nights sounds fun to me.

Behold the fundamental building blocks of awesome. It’s all there, from the basis of all awesome—bacon—through beer, to sausage, to ninjas, Chuck Norris, grenades and trilobites (my favourite fossil).

Me, I think if we can get our top scientists working on combining whiskey (distilled beer), aliens, a catapult, three motorcycles and Samuel L. Jackson with a mohawk then we might possibly transcend the awesome continuum and usher in the Age of Awesomosity. Or something.

A popular note going around Facebook requests that one list…

…[fifteen] albums that had such a profound effect on you they changed your life or the way you looked at it. They sucked you in and took you over for days, weeks, months, years. These are the albums that you can use to identify time, places, people, emotions. These are the albums that no matter what they were thought of musically shaped your world.

Well, I don’t know if I’ll reach fifteen, but here are my picks:

Nevermind (Nirvana)

If you were alive in 1991, you know what I mean. With one album—really, one song—what I thought I knew about music was turned completely on its head. It was revolutionary, and it was well-done, unlike so much of the grunge which would follow (Pearl Jam, I’m looking at you).

Use Your Illusion I & II (Guns N’ Roses)

I didn’t really know a lot about GnR at the time, but I understood from the news that Use Your Illusion was a highly-anticipated release. My buddies and I could watch video for November Rain over and over and over (due in no small part to Axl Rose’s then-girlfriend Stephanie Seymour’s role therein) and loved that great guitar solo (it still gives me goosebumps), and I remember spending hours trying to hold the final note of Don’t Cry for as long as possible.

Cooleyhighharmony (Boyz II Men)

Another album that came out in 1991 (I was thirteen then—see a pattern?), the absurdly long-titled It’s So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday seemed very meaningful at the time. I’ve grown up since, but those were good times then.

Top Gun, the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack

I’ve written about Top Gun before; suffice it to say that it’s one of my all-time favourite films. The soundtrack itself is magnificent: from Kenny Loggins’s Danger Zone to Berlin’s Take My Breath Away to the Top Gun Anthem, it’s superb. There are only a few lame tracks, but the vast majority are grand. If you don’t like Top Gun you’re a commie, and if you don’t like the soundtrack you’re deaf. It’s that simple.

Different Class (Pulp)

This one came out before I entered college, but I didn’t discover it until after I’d graduated. I was still fairly young, living in my first apartment and used to visit a CD store within walking distance every few weeks. I found Different Class one day and played it near-constantly. Had it been vinyl, I’m sure I would have worn the grooves thin. As it was, I managed to discover Britpop nearly a decade late. Better late than never!

slowdrown (Dim Reflection)

This was the first album I bought that featured friends or acquaintances of mine. Now known as The Farstar, Dim Reflection were a pretty damned good band that my buddy Shannon put together in college.

Are You with Me? (Cowboy Mouth)

My junior year of college I decided not to go home for spring break and instead spent it hanging out with my buddy Phil and his girlfriend Jess. We played golf, ate out, went shooting, bought canes and bowler hats, got hit by a car on a freeway exit—and through it all, this tape was playing in the cassette player. It became the soundtrack for one of the best weeks I’d had up until that point. To this all I need is to hear the first few notes of Jenny Says and I’m in vacation mode.

The ’80s Hit(s) Back!)

I’m not certain, but I believe this is the first CD I ever bought in college. It was a simple compilation, but I played it and played it my freshman year. Good stuff and good times.

The Best of Bond…James Bond

In the fall of 2002 I returned to London for a weeklong vacation; on the way over and back British Airways had this CD playing on one its channels. The trip itself was a bit of a washout—I discovered that it’s always better to travel with people—but as soon as I got home I bought the CD and I’ve never looked back. As a small boy I imagined that I looked like James Bond whenever I wore a bow tie (my mother says I looked more like Barney Fife) and rather expected that I’d spend my adult life wearing tuxedos, drinking martinis, driving fast cars, playing with cool gadgets and chasing exotic double-entendre–spouting women. Those dreams might have been disappointed, but this CD never lets me down.

Get a Grip (Ærosmith)

Ærosmith is one of those bands whose lives are pitiable, but whose music is just spectacular. Ironically, I’ve never owned Get a Grip, but Cryin’ (which launched Alicia Silverstone’s brief career) and Crazy were huge favourites in my early teens in Virginia, while Amazing was constantly on the jukebox while I was at an engineering program shortly after moving to Denver. Steven Tyler, Joe Perry and the rest have done a lot of things they should be ashamed of, but they sure did make some great rock & roll.

Well, that’s nine, and I honestly can’t think of any more so I’ll stop here. Besides, nine is so much more pleasant a number than fifteen anyway.

Here’s some cool trivia about The Princess Bride, one of my favourite films of all time. I mean, it has swords, monsters, freaks and a hot babe—how could it get any better?

Reason has another great feature: a documentary about Hollywood’s sick love affair with Che Guevara. Guevara was a murderer who opposed the very sort of artists and musicians who now idolise him.

It’s considered cute and trendy to celebrate Communists like Guevara, Mao and Lenin—and yet they were responsible for more death and history than the deservedly-condemned Hitler!

A few months ago I bought a T-shirt with Che Guevara's image atop the legend Communism killed 100 million people and all I got was this lousy t-shirt. Heh heh heh.

The Virtual Ranger has a great comparison of National Geographic and BBC nature specials. The National Geographic version is staged, hyper-active, short-attention-span-oriented, not terribly interesting and only marginally educational. The BBC version is thought-provoking and designed to encourage the viewer to think in a methodical fashion.

We need less of the former and more of the latter.

Here’s a nice takedown of the BOSE Acoustimass system. The short version: save your money and spend less on a better product from a reputable company.

Desmond Warzel applies the Wikipedian ethos to time travel. Hilarious if you’ve ever worked with Wikipedia much; I suspect it’s utterly unintelligible otherwise.

Here’s a cute little webcomic with a deeper message. If you’re gonna go down anyway, you might as well go down fighting…

I was watching Song of the Thing Man and found this great little bit of dialogue:

Nick

Darling, let’s go home.

Nora

Why, what’s at home?

Nick

You, my pipe, my slippers…

Nora

Nicky, I think you’re slipping!

Nick

Give me my pipe, my slippers and a beautiful woman…and you can have my pipe and slippers!

Heh heh.

Cluster ballooning is tying oneself to large numbers of helium balloons and flying therewith. This looks so fun.

From the Joy of Tech, Christmas past and present.

Well, I finally got around to seeing 2004’s Meet the Fockers, a sequel to the amusing Meet the Parents. My verdict? Absolutely atrocious.

What’s right with this film? Certainly not the Mr. & Doctor Focker played by Hoffman & Streisand: they are abominable people. Not Stiller’s Gaylord Focker: he’s a brainless twit, a simpleton along for the ride. Not Teri Polo’s nonentity of a fiancée (so forgettable I cannot remember her character’s name). There’s something wrong when De Niro’s paranoid, controlling CIA retiree is the most fully-realised and sympathetic character in the movie.

I think that we’re meant to like the Fockers—but they’re unlikable. Bernie Focker is a moron who has a shrine consisting of his son’s ninth- and tenth-place ribbons; he’s the sort of annoying putz who desperately needs to be punched in the face for at least half an hour. Roz Focker is, frankly, a disaster. She, along with her husband, has no concept of appropriateness, nor of boundaries, nor of discretion, nor of decorum, nor indeed of anything befitting civilisation whatsoever. They live in the present, ignoring the past and pretending there’s no future. The two of them have no wit, no learning; indeed, the only thing separating them from voiceless beasts is their incessant speaking. My world would have been a better place had I never been introduced to them.

Indeed, I would have been a happier man had I never seen this film. If it were possible to induce amnesia, I would. I am poorer and dumber for having seen it. May God have mercy upon my soul.

Mil Millington (of the profoundly popular Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About) has released his forty-fourth web vignette. Reading his stuff makes me rather glad to be single—and when you read it, you’ll see why. The green? They don’t sell them in green.

…or have one hell of a personality.