Forecast: Partstorms

Mr. Pony and I were texting each other giddily regarding the new Indiana Jones Lego sets out there, and naturally the discussion fell upon the parts per set ratio. We are both of the school of many smaller parts versus a few larger molded parts. I personally feel that the large molded parts for the most part get in the way of the philosophy of Lego. I think Mr. Pony probably agrees here.
But upon ruminating about this, I came upon a question; "what if the molded parts are smaller, and really cool?" Sure they take the place of five or six individual parts, but what if they fit not only within my design scheme, but aesthetic principles?
Case in point: The new Indiana Jones Lego set I bought yesterday has a basically two-piece motorcycle chassis. I haven't really set aside the time to experiment with it, and will probably have to do that before making any sort of final judgement about the usefulness of the parts, but the parts themselves look hella cool. There's also these single mold skull reliefs for the Mayan Temple set I noticed while looking at the box at Toys-R-Us. Pretty much unusable for much other than a skull relief sculpture, but hey! That's a freaking skull relief sculpture we're talking about!
Discuss!
and now, some pics.
The first pic here is from the recent Exo-Force line, which utilizes the anime stylization to capture the 10-14 demographic quite effectively. I sample this pic because it is a veritable partstorm, and I think despite the tired bugrobot concept has promise. (note the swords being used as rotor blades. interesting) The other two pics are clearly reference to my post.

Happy Belated Wookie Life Day

Human Christmas makes me think of this, obviously. Learn more here, for some reason.

Just over 10 months until our lives end for the next 10 years..

At least, that's what Electronics Boutique would have us believe. I, for one am looking forward to AIBU-9 killing me in the first 30 seconds, and/or Fugu killing me slowly but steadily over the course of a three-hour match.

In this picture, I am the Protoss thing-a-ma-bob. Fugu is the Terrans.

Here's another question: Is there an online multiplayer game with a bunch of different but concurrent modes? Where some dudes play a turn-based or real-time strategy game, essentially giving orders who dudes playing a more tactical combat game? And where this whole scenario provides plot for a third group of dudes playing an FPS? And somewhere in there there's a guy playing a game of minesweeper with really huge consequences for a lot of people?

challenge response 2

Challenge Response

Why Europe Rules.

Happy Fucking Holidays!

Samuel

hi. this is samuel. nice to meet you. he is blue. there is a house and there is grass and there is a sun and there is birds and there is birds who is upside down. samuel likes birds. i like birds too and one day samuel was walking on the beach. i like dogs.

one day samuel dumped a lot of sand on top of a beach and said, "oh no i have dropped sand on this beach and i can not find the sand that i dropped." samuel called his friends. his freinds are sue and terry and doug and penelope. his friends came to his house. samuel left the beach and he went to his house. his house is red. sam is short for samuel and he picked up his friends and went to the beach to look for his sand. sam was at the beach before he went to his house and he dropped his sand there. he needed his friends to get the sand so that is why he went to his house and the sun is yellow.

they found his sand on the beach. samuel was happy with all of his friends and they played with the sprinkler that my mom gave us. the end.

challenge!

I submit to you this image from a card sent to me. Alter it to your tastes and repost!
due date December 21st!

If Do Right, No Can Defense.

this is what i meant to post....when is it coming out?

The Machine Girl

Um, holy fuck.

I feel fantastic and I'm still alive.

So here's what's sweet about Portal. The first time your portal gun becomes fully operational, and you're able to create both sides of the wormhole, it takes you a little while to adjust mentally to this new ability, and rightly so--it's patently ridiculous (or at least outside of our brain's evolutionary history). The truly truly weird thing about it is how quickly you do get used to being able to tear holes in space, and how quickly you start to be able to make the logical leaps necessary to solve some of the seemingly trickier puzzles. Maybe it's all because I played it in one sitting (okay, one LONG sitting), but Fugu says the same thing. Of course, Fugu is better at games than me by a factor of about four, so maybe he's not the best sample. Anyway, it's pretty neat.

But the SAD thing; the DEPRESSING thing, is when you stop playing. You can't make the portals anymore, ladies and gentlemen. Stuff that was off limits is now still off limits. You have to walk up stairs. You sometimes have to go through rooms you don't need to be in to get to rooms that you do. And you have to actually cross these rooms.

It's sort of like after the first time you played GTA 3 at a friends house for seven hours straight, and then drove home. The car feels different. You feel different. More things are possible. (The analogy might be a bad one because while in real life, you can theoretically kill hookers to get your money back (which I'm not advocating; don't kill hookers, brothers and sisters) you probably won't be holding a working Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device any time soon. You get my point, though.)

The game pretty much hacks your brain to make think you can do things you can't. There are few games like this, at least that I've played. Psi-Ops is a notable example. You dudes ever play this? It had it's tedious moments, but it makes you feel you have real fucking psychic brain powers. Spider-Man 2 also wasn't bad in this respect, as long as you stick to just kind of screwing around, and avoid using any "special" moves, or trying to advance the plot.

I like games like this. Maybe it's not so important that Joust make you feel like you're flying a bird, or that Galaga make you feel like a mass murderer. Still, if you dudes know of any other games that do this to your head, I'd like to hear about them.

On a related note, I can't stop listening to the closing theme. Fugo posted it in the Second Universe, but I avoided it because of spoilers contained therein. Spoiler alert, btw.

No good, godless, antichristian goodness this weekend?

I was going to go tonight, but will be stuck in the hospital. Any of you hawaii peoplez want to hit it this weekend sometime?