Shelves shelves shelves

Spent a few hours today knocking these together. They don't look like much, but that's over 300 pounds of books.

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Halloween was bad on my teeth...

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The big whiteboard

After a year and a half in my garage, I finally got the 12' x 4' whiteboard hung up in the basement!

Waiting on Santa

Skeptics against H8.

Testing my new Treo 800.

Arkham Horror Halloween

Will this become a new tradition? Probably not. Need sleep too much...

Dead raccoon.

Well it is...

Totally sweet

Bigfoot?

I thought he was in my freezer?

ORLY?

Is this the best way to represent NM? What about Billy the Kid? Or Smokey?

How to speak like you're Welsh: Lesson 1

I was watching Fireman Sam on the PBS. And in this episode a little girl had a squirrel in her room, and it caused a fire. All through the episode she kept talking about her Squee-doo. I thought that was the name of the squirrel. But it isn't.

Lesson1: Squirrel = Squee-doo (Say it fast and put the accent on the second syllable.)

SteamPunk @ DC08

I noticed it too. Tons of people dressed as Victorian era adventurers, only armed with fantasticly improbable weaponry. And welding goggles. You can't forget those...

And women in corsets and dresses with what we used to call "Granny Boots" in highschool. And welding goggles.

Apparently in the Steam-Punk aesthetic there is no occasion in which it isn't appropriate to be prepared to do some welding. And who can blame them? In a world where giant robots and aliens from mars can attack your city while you're trying to hold your own in a game of billiards at the gentlemen's club - who's to say you won't need to pause and do some welding?

Weird Tales's website has an interesting article about the rising popularity of this genre/aesthetic.
Enjoy.

Spring is Near...

DragonCon is over, new friendships have been forged and as the calendar rolls on toward autumn, these maples begin to show red at their fringes. To a fly a year would be generations, to a tree it must seem a moment. Here's to a year like a tree...

Party on Groethe

That's a weak Wayne's World joke.

Randi looks amazing!

Derek and Randi loitering outside the 'future of skepticim' track.

Beneath the Hilton

That is no dead which doth game
And after strange aeons this poem's still lame.

Starcraft anyone?

Looks interesting, but I prefer the PC version.

Actually

1, 4, and 5. Dang it!

My guess

Without dowsing, my guess is 2, 5, and 8.

Can they do it?

LOL. The challenge is to find water in cans.

JREF million dollar challenge

Some kind of dowsing test? We shall see.

Where in the hell is Carmen SanDiego?

At DragonCon of course! Duh.

Petticoat Junction

LOL.

dragonCon foodcourt haiku

A sea of strangeness
Fairies and Jedi eating
Voices merged to song

At 2:27 nearly capacity

Neat. Ben Radford's talk on Psychic Defectives -er, I mean "detectives" is at near room capcity.

The debate is on - round 2

It begins HOT with Graham having to explain the comment he made last year where he said, "James Randi is a fraud." He retracted that to state he meant to say that the Million Dollar Challenge is a fraud. I don't think he backed it up too well - but obviously believed what he was saying.

Ben Radford vs. The Devil

The two designers of 'Playing Gods' face off.

Skeptical Podcasting Track

Dr. Novella, Derek Colanduno, Dr. Pamela Gay, D. J. Grothe, Richard Saunders, Ginger Cambell MD.

Skepticism 101

Wow! Close to 200 people in here!

Waiting for Randi's first panel

DragonCon 08 has begun.

Busy workers

Another "Separated at Birth?"

Well, it was time for another deep bout of Nostalgia. Just a week after watching the new Batman movie, I finally had the opportunity to sit back and start watching Manimal. Yeah. See when Manimal came on I was in the Band in high school. And we had games on Friday nights. So while the rest of America missed Manimal by choice, I missed it because we didn't have a VCR back then. (Not that my mother would have let me record it if we had...)

So I get about as far as the credits on the first episode when I see This Guy:

http://simon.helenheart.com/images/hello95_susan_simon-01.jpg
That's Simon MacCorkindale and his wife actress Susan George.


And I got really confused because Manimal stalked the airwaves back in 1983, and yet the host of the show looked so much like Harvey Dent that I had to do some research. Yeah. They favor.

http://www.thisisnottingham.co.uk/shared/contentbinaries/publish/2770455.jpg
That's actor Aaron Eckhart, the actor playing Harvey Dent in the new Batman movie.

Wow. Their age is far apart, but not their look...

The moon's full.

Very gotham. I'm stuck here for a while it seems.

No, seriously

Its 3 in the morning and the parking lot is totally full - and stagnant...

3:00 AM

The movie is over and all I can say is WOW!

Spoiler alert: Bruce Wayne is the Batman...

Forget Harry Potter

Midnight. 16 theatres. All sold out. Holy mega-boxoffice, batman! They may make their loot back tonight!!!

Gasoline - twas cheaper before.

I remember when I could drive my escort home on $2. That wouldn't do much today...

Escape Claws

Well here's a bit of followup on the parking lot incident. First of all, one of my alert readers went out to the google maps and got an arial photo of the site. Turns out there's a pond just out of sight past a little fence and some kudzu & grass.

Then I got to looking for info on crawfish migration - and found this article describing a mass migration across a highway in Louisiana.



And here's a link to an article about catching crawfish which includes a paragraph about their migratory behavior. (And also indicates that if you get a good mix of small & large that it indicates a healthy population - which is what I saw here.) LINK TO ARTICLE

All that stuff indicates that they do leave the water to migrate, there was a large freshwater supply nearby (with elevated water levels due to large quantities of rain) and that they can at least walk the distance between two sides of a highway if people leave them alone... so it is plausible that they could have come out of that pond to wander the parking lot at 2:00 am.

I think I'll still followup with an expert...

Attack of the Crawfish!

A woman's scream filled the movie theatre parking lot and I bounded over to help. She and her date were confounded by an enormous bug - which turned out to be a huge crawfish. It rained a lot these past two days - but I think 'twas sexual displays I was seeing out there as the crawfish snipped at each other. (Or at least some kind of territorial display...)

I easily picked up five lively specimens and saw many more squished throughout the parking lot.

I must do some research on this... I've never seen so many crawfish out of water before. The other obvious solution to this is that someone had a bucket of crawfish in their truck and they either crawled out during the movie, or the person dumped them out in the parking lot. But the distribution of the crawfish was over the entire length of the parking lot - which makes me think it was a natural display, not a result of human action.

Want to Write Like Lovecraft?

Now you can with these awesome fonts based on his own handwriting.

http://www.cthulhulives.org/toybox/PROPDOCS/PropFonts.html

And who doesn't want to write like HPL?

See you later, John Phillip Law

Oh, there goes another one. John Phillip Law - the angel from Barbarella, Sinbad from the Golden Voyage and of course Diabolik from the last episode of MST3K. His stunning physique, piercing eyes and imposing presence have not been equaled on screen. (And that sounded kind of gay, but I'm just saying the man was born to play Hermes and never got to...)

Oh, well. We all die - but few of us get to be remembered as icons of 70's cinema. (Yeah, his career didn't end in the 70's - I'm just saying...)

Oh boy. Filled up with gas...

Can't wait for summer!

Expelled was boring...

....and full of lies. Check www.expelledexposed.com For more details...

Evolution?

There is a hilarious new movie coming out called "Expelled" where Ben Stein plays this creationist who tries to prove that there is a massive atheist conspiracy to push something called "Darwinism" into schools despite the fact that "Big Science" knows that evolution isn't real.

What's that? Huh? It's not a comedy?

Seriously? Ben Stein thinks that there is an atheist conspiracy to promote evolution?

He doesn't think fossil evidence, molecular evidence, the fact that every animal on earth is related by DNA, the obvious mutation and change observed in microorganisms, and the thousands and thousands of biologists who not only work based on evolution but also study nuances and mechanisms in ways that directly demonstrate its effects mean anything?

Oh my goodness. That's sad.

I recommend going to www.expelledexposed.com and finding out what is up with this strange and misguided film.

And if you want to see an amusing example of what kind of folks the Expelled filmmakers are, check out this link: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/03/expelled.php

Dundjinni - Finally some progress?

I love the mapping program Dundjinni. It is probably the easiest to use mapping software for D&D (or other) RPGs. The newest patch, version 1.07, comes with some great fixes and terrific news. They've updated their EULA and now you can use Dundjinni to make commercial products! Of course there are rules, but according to the announcement they want a credit in the product.

If I ever get around to making such products I certainly would credit them. I need to read the EULA, but in the mean time here is the announcement from their site:

NEW PATCH + NEW EULA AT DUNDJINNI!

Helping a customer.

Arthur C. Clarke - I can feel my mind going.

Well, once again I tried to catch up on the classics only to see it all end in despair. -SIGH- I got my TV working using HiDef finally after 3 years of having a big-screen without a tuner to drive the signal.

So after getting the DirecTV HD receiver (with the dvr - it's no TiVo sadly) I started cruising the channels looking for stuff to see with HD resolution. And what should I find but 2001: A Space Odyssey.

"Hmmm, 2001. I haven't seen that since I was just a kid," I thought to myself. "I bet that would look sweet on HD." So I recorded it and watched about 20 minutes of it on Sunday and then sat down last night and finished it over some popcorn.

And somewhere on the other side of the world Arthur C. Clarke, age 90, picked up his list of people who had not seen his movie in HD, put a tick by my name, and died content that he'd given my eyes something to do while my mouth chewed puffed corn.

What can I seriously say about Clarke and his work? A few things:

1) I have only read one of his short stories, but I remember liking it.
2) I enjoyed 2001 and despite the psychedelic ending think it is still one of the best hard sci-fi movies ever made.
3) I absolutely adored Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World and Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious Universe.

The quote from Clarke (possibly) that I always hear is that "sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." That's good. Not sure if he originated it, but I like it.

He also said of UFOs: "They tell us absolutely nothing about intelligence elsewhere in the universe, but they do prove how rare it is on Earth." Amusing.

The coincidence of my having just finished watching 2001 only to discover that he died less than 24 hours later is disappointing. I was thinking of writing him, and hear that he did answer e-mails regularly. Not so now, I suppose. Not so now.

X-Ray Delta One, end transmission. Over and out.

Spring?

It certainly isn't officially Spring yet, but this buds for you.

The love between a monkey and a bear

Why do these toys do this stuff? Don't they know this crap is destroying America?

Gary Gygax - Rest in Peace

Role-Playing Games. Not some lumbering beast, but a thousand thousand variants on a theme. Evolution. From strategic miniature simulations came the idea of playing a Tolkien world, developing characters and doing more than dealing with raw numbers.

The man who in most people's minds brought that whole world to the light of day and spawned an entire industry (which in turn spawned the computer gaming industry to a great degree) was E. Gary Gygax.

Last night he failed his saving throw and passed away.

Sadly, no healing potions will aid him now. No party member will be carting him off to the nearest temple for resurrection. He's gone.

But in his wake what a vista!

His game (his and Dave Arneson's) was Dungeons and Dragons. Here's just one kind of spin-off.

A guy named Richard Garriott played D&D and decided to make a version of that on his Apple computer. That game was Akalabeth, which evolved into Ultima. Ultima begat many sequels, and Garriott eventually created Ultima Online.

This was really the first successful MMORPG with a mainstream draw (not to demean all the MUD players out there - I feel ya playhuzzzz).

Effectively Garriot had evolved D&D type play into a fees-per-month monetized Internet-based community driven extravaganza.

Which really drove folks like Blizzard to make World-of-Warcraft. And if you've paused from playing WOW long enough to read this entry, then you should say a kind word in memory of E. Gary Gygax - a man who helped entertain millions even if he didn't make that much money doing it.

Diary of the Dead

Lots of zombie goodness. This is classic. I liked this much more than "Land of the Dead," and I didn't hate that one. Some of the acting is a little "stiff" in the beginning. I don't know what order Romero shot in, but as the characters start out they seemed too much like they were acting and not like they were "real" people. But as soon as the s-hit the fan, they started feeling more like real folks.

Real stupid folks.

But real folks. I guess here's this one meta-complaint about zombie films. In every zombie film (except Sean of the Dead) it seems like even though we can assume everyone knows zombies aren't a natural part of the environment in their "world" - it is not reasonable to assume that their world has no zombie films or fiction. So how is it that none of the heroes know what to do when the zombie apocalypse starts? Sad.

I want to see the zombie film where the disaffected geeks and survivalists are the ones who make it. I'd like to see how their culture of extreme geek and paranoid military protectionist policies play out in a world where the dead get up and eat the living.

Yep.

I'll just sit here by the theatre door and wait....

Finally seated...

Not started yet, but so far so good. :)

An unfortunate theatre worker...

So many casualties.

Diary of the Dead

Me and the wife watch the folks makeup as zombies for the premiere of George Romero's new zombie flick.

A book a month?

Mrs. Smith has resolved to read a book a month. So far, so good... But what was she pointing at?

Clowns Protest Claims that they're "Scary"

Flash! Clowns Ain't Scary! (At least according to this article:) LONDON (Reuters) - Unhappy clowns from around the world say a study that reported that children didn't like them has wiped the big smile from their faces, and have been falling over their large shoes to put their case. A poll by researchers looking at what decor to put in hospital children's wards found that youngsters do not like clowns on the walls and even older ones think they are scary.READ MORE

Hmmmm. I wonder why people thought they were scary? It just doesn't make much sense...

Oh, it's probably a matter for the sociologists and psychologists. I can't for the life of me think of any social cues that might lend credence to the idea that clowns even could be scary. Can you?

Unless you count Gacy, but he's just one example - right? I mean just because one clown is a raving psycho doesn't mean they all are... But I can see where the clowns might be offended. A bit.

We certainly don't want to see clowns out protesting. Can you imagine how disturbing that would be to see a carload of angry protesting clowns? Sure it looks like a canary-yellow Cooper Mini, but I assure you it is chock-full of White Grease-paint and the scent of meringue.