I mean, picking Hastur as VP? Seriously? There’s no way in R’lyeh that I’m voting for a Cthulu/Hastur ticket. If he wanted my support, He should have gone with Shub-Niggurath, the Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young.
I mean, hell, that’s an extra thousand votes right there… (Assuming, of course, that the spawn of Great Old Ones can vote. Not quite sure on that.)
Update: I love the internet: the GeoHack entry for R’lyeh!
Money quote:
“Every election then turns into a sort of nose-holding game, where we are faced with the choice of sacrificing one of our guiding principles for another, purely on the speculation of which candidate is just a little less dangerous to those principles at that moment. If I want the candidate who recognizes my right to self-defense and a larger portion of my own paycheck, I have to tolerate his flag-waving authoritarianism and his religious favoritism. If I want the candidate who will keep his hands out of my sock drawer and his holy book out of my public school, I have to contend with his opinion that someone else has a claim to my paycheck as well, and that I can’t be trusted with the means to defend myself.”
Seriously, go read the whole thing.
Okay, so I’ll cut to the chase: if you have a 360 and don’t yet have this game, then buy it immediately. Don’t even bother finishing this review, that would only delay your enjoyment.
Braid is a side-scrolling puzzle game, which is a genre which, for me, tends to have a “Time Until Thrown Controller” measured in seconds. The basic premise is that you have to go from world to world, collecting puzzle pieces by using your environment and manipulating the flow of time.
This is in the same way that two people play chess by shuffling little carved figurines around a checkerboard.
First of all, the presentation of the game is simply stunning. The music is not only rich and evocative, but well-suited to the game (it even responds to the player’s manipulation of time). The artwork is beautiful, with a water-color aesthetic which is fairly novel. The net result is that the game itself, absent of game play, is extremely sensually rewarding.
Combine with this the fact that the gameplay is addictively engaging and the game ends up firmly in “must play” territory. The puzzles are interesting and while it would seem that the whole “temporal manipulation” thing would make the game a one trick pony, the theme is played with enough over the course of the game that it never gets old. (E.g. some objects are immune to manipulation, others move back in forth in time as one’s character moves around in space, etc.) It’s a little more expensive than some other XBox Live Arcade offerings (about 15 bucks), but it’s well worth the money.
If you ever want to get new readers to your blog, make a mistake. The Internet Correction Principle states that someone will be along shortly to correct you. And likely insult you, your mother, or both.
Blogging’s been light. Blame work and thesis.
Also: Tropic Thunder wasn’t all that great. It had its moments, but overall it could have been better. Honestly, it would have been a LOT better without Jack Black or Tom Cruise.
So Tropic Thunder was kind of moderate fail, but here’s some epic win: You know that NanoSail-D project that was lost on board the SpaceX Falcon? There’s a spare! That’s brilliant news, since I’m just geek enough to think that alternate space propulsion systems is one of the most important projects going at the moment. And considering that projects like NanoSail are the leading edge of that project, it’s good to hear that the whole thing wasn’t lost. As Paul Gilster quotes from the movie Contact: “Why build one when you can build two for twice the price?”
So yeah, basically corporate-sector Astronautics and solar sails FTW!
And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to crash: turns out the 8:30am meeting I had to go to last week is going to be a weekly thing…
Okay, so I’m USUALLY more of a C&R kind of guy, but I kind of want one of these. Kind of, like, a lot. An AR-15 upper that runs 5.7×28mm and takes those cute little 50-round P-90 mags? Yes, please! And the spent brass just falls out the mag well, which is slick.
Of course, the upper is forged from pure Unobtainium with the working parts cast in Canthavenite, so they don’t even bother listing a price. Still, if these things are really for sale, then one is DEFINITELY on my list of shit to buy if I ever win the lotto.*
Sorry that blogging’s been light (read: non-existent) at both my online stomping grounds. Work was pretty intense all last week and then I had the first weekend to myself in ages. And as is often the case with such things, I had a chance to recreate for a few days, so I recreated the HELL out of the weekend. I spent about 9 hours all told on Saturday curled up on the couch with cat, beer, pizza, and Civilization: Revolution.
I also hit up the range with the lovely Becky Paul to put a couple of boxes of Bulgarian Military Surplus ammo through my Mosin-Nagant 91/30. It’s amazing that, after 70 years, it still shoots beautifully. With the regular iron sights I was able to reliably tag a 6 inch target at 50 yards (which is pretty good for me.) Becky did well with it, too, which didn’t surprise me in the slightest, but did cause a bit of shock on the part of the range officer. (”You’re not gonna let her shoot that big ol’ thing are you?” Answer: “Of course I am. She’s more hardcore than I am. I have a bum shoulder and whinge like a little wussy about what the mean ol’ boomstick does to it; I’m surprised SHE lets ME shoot it.”)
Oh, and I suppose I should formally introduce the blog to the latest addition of the household. My excuse: she didn’t have a name until yesterday, and one can’t well make introductions when one party lacks a moniker. So, without further ado:
Asterisk, this is the blog; blog this is Asterisk. (Sorry for the camera phone picture - I’ve once again mislaid the cord to my good camera.) She was apparently abandoned when her last family moved away and left her in the empty house. The realtor found her a few days later shut up in the house and called the humane society, who arranged for her to be put up for adoption at PetSmart, where we found her. Once she settled in, she took to Kenlyn and I pretty well. She’s also taken quite a fondness to a little stuffed hedgehog that I’ve had for ages. She carries it around in her mouth, bats it around the kitchen, chases it when it’s thrown/kicked, etc.
That’s all the news that’s fit to print, for now. Hopefully I’ll be able to blog a little more reliably in near future.
Looks like Earth-like planets may be the extreme exception to the rule after all, if new simulations of star system formation are to be believed.
I know that science is all about rational progress and embracing the best theory available to fit observed evidence, but man, I’m really hoping the Rare Earth Hypothesis is wrong. Both because aliens are cool and because if we can’t SOME day get off this rock to another habitable world, then our species is well-screwed.
On the plus side, the Tau Zero Foundation finally has their website up and it’s a swanky one. (Also: a .aero TLD? Who knew? I certainly didn’t…) So, you know, if we ever do find any places in the galaxy interesting enough for an up-close visit, there are some smart people already laying the groundwork for getting us there.
The past few days have been kind of depressing, with both the passing of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and the loss of the SpaceX Falcon booster. Being both a huge fan of Solzhenitsyn’s work (A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich for the win!) and a huge space-flight fanboy, I was quite saddened to hear about both losses.
On the plus side, my friends Trevor and Molly got married in a beautiful ceremony in sunny Helena, Montana over the weekend. I wish them much happiness in their new life together.
I’ll be off at a wedding in Helena, Montana until some time Sunday.
While I’m gone, you can occupy yourselves eradicating the human race with a deadly virus. Or, uh, you know, whatever else it is that you folks do when not reading my blog…