This story is one of the funniest things I’ve seen in at least the last hour or two.
By the way, we aren’t dead in case you were wondering. I’ve got a couple of longish posts I’m working on. One is a book review and then other is an elucidating rant. What about Andrew you ask? Well, he just started classes (chortle), so his proliferousness may be greatly diminished (sucker).
I think this is how John Paul Jones died.
World of Warcraft is going pretty well. I just picked up a spiffy looking basilisk scale shield which I like mostly because it looks like I’m strapping the body panels of a John Deere riding lawnmower to my forearm when I venture forth.
Anyway, if you’re ever wandering around on Lothar and happen to see some idiot riding around on the bowsprit of the Menethil-Auberdine Express, it’s probably me.
EDIT (9/21/05): I frickin’ fell off the bowsprit of the Rachet-Booty Bay ship-of-the-line while trying to position myself to sleep on it. Don’t try that at home. Had to wait for the next damn boat…
The Che Guevara of input devices.
When I saw the first pictures of the Nintendo Revolution Controller, my first thought was, “Are you shitting me?” It looks like the love child of an ipod and a smallish television controller. How is anyone supposed to play games with that? But than I watched the video over at IGN. Now I want to be part of the revolution.
The video makes it apparent that you don’t so much use the buttons on the controller as wave it around in the air in a way that interacts with the revolution. Maybe even leads the occasional revolutionary movement.
Nintendo would like us to believe that the revolution will allow gamers, (and grandmothers and attractive Japanese women), to use the controller like a sword, or device for chopping virtual sushi, or a conductor’s baton, or a pulse blaster. I badly want to believe Nintendo.
The strongest cause for disbelief that I found within the revolution video was the gentlemen who seemed to be hiding behind his couch so as to avoid some sort of gunfire. Does the Revolution know that his couch is there, or was he simply so overwhelmed by the realism of the game that he left that logical part of his brain behind and decided to take refuge in the physical world to avoid the forces of evil portrayed by the Revolution, (likely in this case embodied by Bowser).
Shit, I don’t care. Lead on Nintendo. We’ll overthrow the powers that be.
Editors Note: This is a repost of content that appeared on Edgefactor 2.0; it was originally published on April 12, 2004.
Digital Fortress, one of Dan Brown’s earlier works, caught my eye in an airport bookstore on a recent trip. I knew Brown was reasonably adept at spinning a good yarn so I figured it might be a good way to pass the time on the plane. It did serve that purpose fairly well, but Brown’s apparent lack of knowledge on the subject matter he chose to write about prevented me from really enjoying this book.
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Editors Note: This is a repost of content that appeared on Edgefactor 2.0; it was originally published on August 23, 2004.
Founded in 1119, The Knights of the Temple of Solomon was an order of mystical warriors capable of miraculously appearing as central plot elements throughout modern fiction. Or so I thought. It turns out that the Templars were much more mundane than everyone since King Philip IV of France has made them out to be. Mix this stark revelation in with about 150 pages touching on the crusades and you’ve got a reasonably good history book. That is to say, this book is terribly boring but it’s not really the author’s fault.
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Our infrastructure depends on your spunky
Recently, some people in my part of the country have been advocating the removal of the four Lower Snake River hydroelectric dams all in the “interests” of improving salmon passage. Whenever I press these people about how we are going to replace the approximately 3000 megawatts of electricity generated by these four dams they become deliberately circumspect and evasive. Recently, they have been proffering the theory that the power could be made up by harnessing the potential energy of the Mesocricetus auratus, that is…the common hamster.
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It's even mini'er than I imagined
After visiting with the Turbine folks on Sunday, we wandered over to the Nintendo booth to check those peeps. We found a guy wearing a Nintendo shirt and looking fairly exhausted and asked him if they had any Micros we could see. The guy paused for a second as if he was processing what we had asked him. Then, without warning, he exploded like a giant pinata filled with confetti.
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I updated the settings so that you don’t have to register to comment now. Hopefully the WP-Hashcash will hold back the tides of neverending comment spam.
PS: Welcome everyone who’s following Andrew’s link RE: PAX05. Most of the posts are still here on the front page so you can just scroll down to read them.
He can smell it
On Sunday afternoon at PAX we stopped by the Turbine booth to take a look at the upcoming LOTR MMORPG.
First, I should note that I badly want any Lord of the Rings game to be spectacular. I have read the saga upwards of four times in its entirety, and love to immerse myself in middle-earth. I would love to take my World of Warcraft style experience and drop myself next to Aaragorn while manfully fighting back the tides of darkness. I went in to the demo firmly hoping to find evidence of an immersive experience.
I left the demo a bit worried. First, the middle-earth which I saw displayed on screen doesn’t look like either the middle-earth I’ve always envisioned, or the middle-earth that Peter Jackson portrayed. Turbine’s middle-earth looks more generic, more bland than it should. Old Man Willow isn’t too terrifying, the shire is only marginally quaint and happy, and even areas filled with giant spider web’s lack the necessary aura of evil.
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Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, this completely pointless post is being made from the middle of the Puget Sound aboard a Washington State Ferry equipped with free WiFi.
Unfortunately, the Mobilisa system seems to hate my one-year-old iBook’s wireless or something, because I get about half of the Mobilisa login page downloaded and then it just hangs. But Andrew’s two-month-old iBook works just fine. Go figure.
Anyway, the moral of the story is that this free WiFi business is a good idea, but I’m displeased at the fact that it doesn’t work on my computer. I’ve got important things to be doing on the internets during this 20-minute ride. You know…..online things, interactive things, let me just reiterate….important things.
Also, Fry’s is selling World of Warcraft today for $36.99. Lucky Andrew and I didn’t buy it for $50 when we were down there yesterday.
EDIT (like 10 seconds later): Apparently with some Tiger systems, you have to turn down your MTU size to 1200 on the wireless interface to make it work. Did that and now it works fine and dandy!