Friday, December 28, 2007

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.



Wednesday, December 26, 2007

Happy Belated Wookie Life Day

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

Tuesday, December 25, 2007

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

Thursday, December 13, 2007

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.

Tuesday, December 11, 2007

challenge!



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

Saturday, December 8, 2007

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.

Friday, December 7, 2007

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?

Monday, November 26, 2007

Saturday, November 24, 2007

Desktop Tower Defense

Guys, guys; you know there's this, right? Play it here, record your high score with the name "piecesofthings". Let's have a contest where the winner wins!

Friday, November 23, 2007

Where I got my "Strong Moral Center"


I was over at my parents' home for Thanksgiving, and was trying to get my son Turbo to take a nap. I took him up to my old room, which was up in the attic (it has since been converted into an actual attic). There, looking for a story to read him (a book on UFOs, or Ann Nocenti and John Romita, Jr.'s sweet run on Daredevil, maybe) I stumbled upon my old Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar disks. This game taught me a lot, brothers and sisters. In the game, you're not fighting to kill some fat evil boss or anything like that. Instead, you're trying to reach this weird state of moral perfection, by behaving 'properly' in all of eight virtues: Honesty, Valor, Justice, Honor, Spirituality, Compassion, Sacrifice, and Humility (of those, I had to look up Sacrifice and Humility). Reach a certain level in one virtue, and you get the equivalent of a trivial pursuit pie wedge for that virtue. You lose the wedge if you blow it later on, like if you lie to get out of getting beaten up or something, your honesty points go down, and your wedge goes pop.

There's more to the game than this. It's a bad world, and dudes are always trying to beat you up, so you fight a lot, and gain experience and weapons and gold, all of which make you stronger and huger. This might be a flaw in the central message of the game, actually, since it's really a whole lot easier to be a centered person guided by morality when you're really freaking powerful.

All that notwithstanding, I consider this game to be one of my formative experiences, up there with Benjamin Parker's power and responsibility thing and Paul Atreides' "A storm is coming" speech. Astute readers will notice that I played with a pirated copy of the game.

Oh, apparently, you can download Ultima IV here.

Star Wars Risk, Game One of Ten Thousand

Guys, I'm with you. I felt that even the four hours we took to learn the game (while drinking ourselves under the table with Ferucio's savory mohitos and V.'s doomScotch) was ever so slightly epic, if I do say so myself. And while the tacking-on-of-licenses-to-existing-classic-board-games is getting pretty tiresome, I think we'll all agree that this one was written by a true, true, ridiculous fan; someone who's read everything from Han Solo at Star's End to Tag and Bink are Dead, and considers it all pretty much canon--the kind of dude we can all get behind. I'll bet the guy (or lady) has been to a good number of risk parties, too. The kind with sandwiches, maybe.

What I really liked was the dramatic structure of the thing--how the game opens with the Empire (Fugu and V.) completely raping the Rebellion (galspanic and myself). We really had to scratch our way to a place where we could even make a dent in their totally superior forces. I think it's set up so that we (the Rebel Alliance) feel cool playing the game for the same reason Mon Mothma feels cool when planning a raid on an Imperial outpost. Pretty sure I saw a gleam in Fugu's eye similar to the one Grand Moff Tarkin gets when fucking telling the fucking Death Star what planet to fucking destroy.

As long-time players of Regular Risk will note, however, being at a tactical disadvantage does not necessarily put you at a general disadvantage--it merely reduces your choices, which has its own strategic benefits. Risk-players also note: Star Wars Risk has no Australia equivalent, and the cards have stuff on them that can make things happen. Wild, change-your-life stuff. You don't just sit there, when you're playing this.

I'm not sure if I've played enough of this to give it all three thumbs up, but the thing shows promise. The rules are pretty tricky, but if any of you off-worlders are planning a visit, let me know ahead of time and I'll send you scans of the rules so you can take the 5+hour plane ride to maybe skim them. Next time, we have to play with Active Hutts. And we should probably make sure no one has to work in the morning, and anyone new, like I said, gets the rules to study in advance.

So yeah; so yes, I'll play again.

We Want More




Shall we have at it? My mentally ill friend here and I would like a try at that Risk thing again.

Plus, happy AfterThanksgiving.

Plus, this place has been awfully quiet recently.

And Hey! Good luck with the football game tonight!!!! Go Fucking Bows and all that shit!

Friday, November 16, 2007

My Beloved Wife


I adore Mrs. Pony, and here is proof.

I know this is accurate in my heart, but also because this love meter was fairly accurate on some other points.

Wednesday, November 14, 2007

A reason to watch footbawl

N E R D S ! ! !

The Results of a Poll

Okay, dudes, the results of the poll are in, and the results is this! You guys miss the smileys. I miss them too. I miss combining them most of all. There was that thing you could do where you could blow your own brains out in a cloud of blood. That totally surprised me when I first saw it, and I never got tired of it. Okay. I will see what the hell I can do about this.

Also more team members. I thought I'd invite you guys first, because the tone of the Old Forum rules because of you guys. Tone is important, probably. Other important team members to follow. God, this is all so important. Again, I will see what the hell I can do about this.

Other: You guys have admin powers. Please feel free to mess with this blong. Add widgets, if you like. There are some neat freaking widgets out there. There's a chat thing I added. Scroll down. As long as you're moving us in the right direction, no one will mind. When Fugu was all "I moved the thing up because I didn't know it was there," I was all "YESS!!" That's the spirit. Add links to the Links thing. Use labels in your posts. Tell stories.

Or, you know; don't. You are all my brothers. I will love you forever if you do exactly none of these things.

Monday, November 12, 2007

Vote Your Mouth in the Poll

Guys, there's like only 2 hours left to vote in the poll. I can't begin to tell you how important making your voice heard in the poll is. Because it's not.

Sunday, November 11, 2007

Wendows

Guys i'm in wendows. I installd wendows on my computr, which is an mac. I dont like it here. I can see the dots that make up the wrds. why is it showing me all these things? I don't care what wendows has to say. it's like wendows is trying to take credit for all it's doing for me by showing me what a hard time it's having of it all. I feel bad for my computr, for the first time. it's hard to make text, apparently. Rilly rilly hard. yow.

one thing, though--when you're on internet, and internet is trying to install things on you, wendows is like; hey, I'll do that for you. here, I'm going to make an upgrade a program. Through a WEB PAGE. Whaddah ya think of that? That's kinda cool. I kinda feel like there might be some security issues, but at my age, who the fucking cares!! I'm 35!

Namaste, gents.

Saturday, November 10, 2007

Star Wars Risk

All right, so we never got around to playing Middle Earth Risk, and I think Demon was involved in the Risk 2184 fiasco, where the whole energon cube thing nearly drove us insane. but here's something. Star Wars Risk looks promising. It's full of real places like Ord Mantel and Nar Shaddaa, and it's fully OT, focusing overmuch on the Death Star and undermuch on Gungans and Jango Fett.

I ran into Kelly S. at the zoo. We decided that we all should do something as nerdy as seeing Transformers opening night again, like; after we've put the kids to bed. This might qualify! I mean, until Starcraft 2 comes out.

Seems like this has a bunch of those confusing new shoehorned-in rules that are the hallmark of Parker Brothers' license-driven mods (the box includes a couple of eight-sided dice that you get to use when you've deployed Star Destroyers in the system), but hey, those can be fun; as long as we don't drink too much.

On the other hand, drinking too much and taking the wheel of the Death Star might be just the thing to chase the blues away!

Thursday, November 8, 2007

Uniqlock


Our friend Demon Curry (who has a standing invitation to join this blong as an author) sent me this. I could watch it all day. I think I will watch it all day.

Goodbye.

Tuesday, November 6, 2007

you know...

For the krillions of things Family guy doesn't do well, I thought this was sorta good:

Sunday, November 4, 2007

Earth 617


Dudes, there is a very terrifying blong in the slot right next to ours.

Pukele Stream Overruns its Banks

Okay, that may have been ill-advised. I keep forgetting that my "backyard" completely reconfigures itself every twenty-four hours, and that moon or no, it's raining hard and dark, dark, dark. When I got to the bottom (my backyard has a bottom) the lightning helped me not fall in the stream, so that was cool. Thanks, world.

Anyway, it was like I was on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, but I had fallen off the boat and climbed ashore, and the ride itself was broken, and leaking. It was also like there was another Pirates of the Caribbean ride on top of the one I was in, like on the second floor, and that one was also broken and leaking. And maybe it was raining, too. That's what it was like, guys.

All in all, this is pretty sweet. I find I love living in the 'Lolo.

Friday, November 2, 2007

Attention: Hung Won is Not Closing

There was this really old greasy little take-out-only dim sum place on the main commercial street in the neighborhood we live in called Kwong On. You could get these little pork hash dumplings there for 40 cents, U.S. and baked manapua and turnip cake with little shrimps in it and other dumplings with green and gray stuff in them, for some equally appallingly low price. You could get enough food to kill you for three dollars, basically. So they announced that they were closing, and for weeks there was a line out the door. That happens here, for some reason. I don't know why they were closing. Maybe they weren't charging enough. Maybe they were breaking the law by selling something for 40 cents. I mean, it has to be illegal to pass that kind of savings onto the customer!

So they closed.

Also, there is a full sit-down Chinese Restaurant on the same street, called Hung Won. I heard that they were closing also. This, I felt, was too bad, because more restaurants and fewer auto parts stores is always a good thing. Walking by Hung Won, I stepped inside and asked when they were closing.

The Chinese lady at the counter got real mad and threw her hands up in the air. "We're not closing!" she said, in a Chinese accent I will not attempt to transcribe here. "Everybody thinks we are closing! We are not closing!"

"Oh, good," I said. "More restaurants and fewer auto parts--"

"It is KWONG ON! They are the ones that are closing! They have closed already! KWONG ON!"

"I'll spread the word. I'm sure--

"HUNG WON!" she screamed. "KWONG ON! You see; they are different! Quite different! HUNG... WON! KWONG... ON!"

"I--"

"People do not LISTEN!" Howling, she tore her shirt off. She climbed up onto the counter, and slammed her head against the overhanging shelf. Put her foot in a tray of cake noodles, which was inside one of those short cardboard boxes they ship cans of soda in. "PEOPLE ARE DEAF!" Still stooping, she reached up and brought the entire shelf down, releasing a torrent of three or four phone books, followed by a swarm of dozens and dozens of beetles the size of Hot Wheels. They crawled over her bare chest and down her legs and dove into the food, chittering and squeaking with beetle delight. She screamed again, sounding like a cross between a playground whistle and a tugboat. The windows shattered, and three burning men flailed out of the kitchen and tripped over each other trying to get outside. They were screaming. I was screaming. Hot oil spilled out of the kitchen and across the floor. The men fell, igniting the oil.

Anyway, we're going tomorrow night, with my sister and her husband. You guys wanna go? They said it was good.

Wedge=aeronaught=furry

So Garrick Hagon? The guy who plays Wedge? He's the voice of Lee Scoresby in the Golden Compass audio series. I figured this is noteworthy.

Edit: yeah ok, I FAIL. It's friggin Biggs. How did I not recognize that mustache?!? 



And this: Ferucio, dude, just come out already. We're ok with it.

Edit: Ferucio is the guy in the bull outfit.


Wednesday, October 31, 2007

R.I.P. Major Spoilers


There was this comic blog called Major Spoilers that I somehow had begun to read every day... Great reviews and previews of everything to interesting small-press stuff to the big-two system-wide crossover engines, and highly readable and reasonably obsessed. They also featured (and I'm kicking myself for not telling you about this, Ferucio) some seriously comprehensive bios of the members of the Legion of Super Heroes, chronicling histories across relaunches and through reboots. I learned many neat things about Matter-Eater Lad.

Here is a little of what was.

So anyway, this site is gone now, for whatever reason, and I never shared it with any of you, my Brothers and Sisters. This fills me with a staggering level of shame. it's all gone now, even the bios. I mean, if I had shared it with you, say, a week ago, you probably wouldn't have had the time to get into it before it closed its doors, but still. The message and the lesson here is true. Share share share, before it's too late. Like, well before. So there is time to enjoy. Share and Enjoy. When it's gone, it's too late. Also, a week before a thing is gone is too late (see above).

Saturday, October 27, 2007

My motherfucking Empire

Dudes. I have a motherfucking space empire. Sometimes, I will tell you about it, and then I'll show you pictures of my godamned empire.

Here, I am flying in my Boron Skate over a planet in Parka's Ravine. I like it there. It's peaceful. My empire was relatively new when I took this photo.
This is an Orbital Weapons Platform in the sector Hila's Joy. It's not my weapons platform (they're roughly 167 thousand credits), but I watched this firefight anyway. There were two Xenon ships passing by, and this giant fucking thing has a habit of launching plasma at anything it detirmines as an enemy. Hila's Joy belongs to the Boron, whom I am on good terms with, so it didn't fire shit at me.

This is the Goner Temple in sector Cloud Base South West. I find the architecture here wondrous to behold.

This is my Argon Cerberus M1 class. It's a fucking carrier. That means it can hang ships. When I get deep into the shit, I can call on this bitch to jump to me and launch all fighters. This particular model holds 20 ships. There's about 12 other models, I believe, all with various shielding, weapon loadout, cargo space, manoeuvrability, etc. I chose this one because it's the middle of the line. At the time I could onyl afford to outfit 20 Pericles M4 class fighters to hang there. Currently, it still hangs those 20 Pericless M4 ships, but I've had to replace several of them. Shit got hairy a few days ago.

There's no ships in this shot, but it's my view when I'm parked in my favourite sector, Vetibule of Creation. It's owned by the Goner somewhere in central space (about 20 or so jumps from Argon Prime, and I only mention that because those Argon pricks think Argon Prime is the center of the fucking Universe). Anyway, I might be changing home sectors.
I have war shots too. I'll do this later!

Friday, October 26, 2007

Fugu...

I may have a solution to your costume problem.

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Leopard


Hey, so who wants to put on costumes and stand in line at the Kahala Mall Apple Store for the release of Leopard on Friday? I hear they are attaching Stickies to Mail. How crazy is that? Apple is crazy.

Tuesday, October 23, 2007

This is yours, and for you.

Also, in case it's not blisteringly clear, you fellows should feel free to post anything you like here, as if it were the old forum. This one doesn't creak when you put something on top of it, like the old forum did. I'm finding this fact a little intimidating. We were clearly smarter than the software that made the last forum tick. That's not so apparent here. This Bloggar creature seems like it might soon be smarter than us, if it's not already. It's a little like the first time you use a chainsaw. Except we all have admin privileges. Which I sure could have used the first time I used a chainsaw.

Sunday, October 21, 2007

The Beginning of Something Awesome


I don't want to overstate this point, but I, Mr. Pony, believe that this is the beginning of something awesome. The start of something truly great. The wonderful first day of a wonderful and nonspecific period of time that is wonderful.

Another cool thing--this is the end of exactly nothing. Not a single drop of anything good was spilled in the creation of this new thing. No old thing fell before the new. No way had to be made. What was, is. And what is, brothers and sisters, is something quite awesome, probably.

Your pal,
Mr. Pony