Posted under Gaming & Critters & Gadgetology
It’s time for eight feet of adventure! Not meaning eight feet tall, mind you - just two little sets of four little fuzzy feet each getting into way more trouble than you’d really think them capable of. (Olivia just watched.) And just what kind of trouble did we find ourselves in? Tune in next time, true believers - same cat time, same cat station. Continue Reading »
Posted under Television & Movies & Cooking With Code
Okay…let’s see. This year’s Nebula noms (news item here) are Batman Begins, Howl’s Moving Castle, the boxing episode of Galactica, and the Madame de Pompadour episode of Doctor Who.
Ooooooookay. I have a feeling the Who episode that was nominated may have gotten in the door on the newfound name recognition of its writer, whose Doctor Who two-parter from the first season won the Hugo. But this was hardly a typical episode of Who, nor necessarily the strongest (hello, did anyone watch The Idiot’s Lantern?), and I’d certainly argue that the Galactica episode in question wasn’t its finest hour - or, at the very least, not the example I’d hold up from 2006 of a good SF concept in service of a story. Ah well. Maybe Miyazaki can finally win something for Howl’s this year.
By the way, in case I hadn’t mentioned it or you hadn’t noticed, there are download links in the Episode Guides section now, which will, for a nominal fee, chuck episodes of several series (and even some movies) onto your hard drive and/or iPod. File this one under “all proceeds keep the site online,” but I just thought it was kinda cool on its own merits. The most recent Stargate episodes are already available through this service, though of course some stuff (i.e. Galactica) is still iTunes-only. Give it a shot if you’re so inclined.
Posted under Funny Stuff
Quite by accident, with my wife as my witness, I pulled a slice of American cheese out of its wrapper tonight - and it’s in the shape of the state of Arkansas!
The bidding will start tonight on eBay at $50,000! Continue Reading »
Posted under Spamatozoa
So I answered the phone today and it was a voice-synthesized, pre-programmed message trying to sell me something.
Whoa, let me back up there a bit. I used to live in Wisconsin, where there were - at least at the time - some very strict laws about cold-calling someone for marketing purposes. I don’t recall ever getting a recorded/voice-synthesized sales call up there, ever. We need those laws in Arkansas. Urgently.
Anyway, I got this call today. The voice was female, maybe one or two steps up from the AT&T TTS demo voices, so maybe these were pre-recorded words and/or phrases spoken by a human and pieced together in the computer, with big gaps between each word - sort of like a Dalek, only slightly more soothing. (But only slightly.) And in listening to this slightly soothing message, I had a revelation: it would help if the person piecing the recorded words together knew, oh, maybe, what the hell they were doing. Continue Reading »
Posted under Serious Stuff & Home Base & ...And Baby Makes Three
I’ve been almost incommunicado this weekend because I’m about knee-deep in a little project that I’ve wanted to do for a while; having a baby on the way and some other recent things have brought it forward in the priority just a little bit. It’s time to clear some brush around the old family tree and take a look at it.
Using various online resources (the first of which is a page out of one of my previously mentioned “baby books,” filled out by my mother, without which I’d be dead in the water), I’ve accomplished what I think it a pretty impressive amount of work for having started a couple of days ago. One line, on my grandmother’s father’s side, I managed to get extraordinarily lucky on and trace all the way back to England in the 1300s with a fairly high degree of certainty thanks to someone else’s dazzlingly meticulous research. There’s some Scotland and Ireland in there too.
The sad thing is that there just isn’t very much solid information about the Green line. Either that, or it’s completely buried because, well, y’know, it’s such an uncommon and distinctive name, though I have managed to get as far as finding out that, unless I’m barking up the entirely wrong family tree, the Greens have been working-class and stuck in Arkansas for nearly 200 years, with allowances for minor excursions that always ended up back here within a given person’s lifetime. I’m really wanting to find out where that line comes from. Continue Reading »
Posted under Gaming
As a collector of old video games, some of which are already more than antiques by car standards (though part of me just automatically rejects the very notion of the phrase “antique video games” because it’s all happened in my lifetime), I pretty frequently wonder what happened to bring someone else’s holy grail into my collection. What on Earth made them get rid of this stuff? Tough times? Lack of interest? What about all those arcade marquees? Who played those machines? Where was the machine located, and does that place still exist in anything remotely resembling the same form? Was the cabinet converted into something else, or junked altogether?
But with some of these items, I know exactly where the game in question has been…because it’s still with its first owner. Continue Reading »
Posted under Television & Movies
JMS has posted a couple of new CGI renders from the FX sequences and main titles of Babylon 5: The Lost Tales here. (Am I the only one looking at the vaguely Fuji-esque series of streaks behind the B5 logo and thinking “Have you swilled Brevari and played Atari today?” 
) The second shot, despite the fact that the nebula in the background looks completely different from the way it’s been portrayed before, almost makes my heart sing. Actually, parts of my heart are already singing. I just heard the most ungodly noise from from one of the ventricles - trust me, you don’t wanna know.
This brings to mind my recent purchase of The Legend Of The Rangers on DVD. (Hey, I got it on special.) For those who don’t remember Legend, whose name coincidentally shortened to LOTR, it was the last attempt to bring B5 back to our screens, following a series of generally well-received TV movies on TNT and the sadly premature death of Crusade. LOTR premiered early in 2002, went up against an NFL championship game, and came out of that battle in much the same shape that most bugs come out of a pitched battle with the windshield of a fast-moving car. In other words, it pancaked, despite being overpromoted by Sci-Fi Channel, a network that seemed really hip to having a new B5 series on its air. Continue Reading »
Posted under Spamatozoa
Phosphor Dot Fossils: The DVD