T w e n t y S i d e d
Wow. Here is someone who hand-knit an iPhone. It looks great, but I bet the reception is fuzzy. (Boo.)
Perfect for the Nameless Extra in Your Life
Think Geek always has great shirts, but Wil Wheaton points to one which is particularly funny.
Which reminds me:
In talking about shows and movies which are ripe for the DM of the Rings treatment, I think the richest target out there is Star Trek: TNG. It has all the ingredients that make DMotR work:
- Like LOTR, the material is popular, widely recognized, and filled with familiar tropes. Even people who didn’t watch the show are likely familiar with the idea of Holodeck Mishaps and Expendable Extras.
- It has a huge supply of material to work with, even larger than LOTR. (The show ran for seven years and 178 episodes. Chances are if you need a shot of character X talking to Y with expression Z, it will be in there somewhere without the need for lots of tedious photoshopping.) The sets and costumes didn’t change much from one episode to the next, which means the screenshots would be nicely interchangeable. The only things you’d have to watch for are Wil Wheaton growing up and Jonathan Frakes growing the beard.
- Like LOTR, the show takes itself pretty seriously, which makes the jokes and dialog easier.
- Like LOTR, the show borrows from other works of fiction, and in turn is used as a source for later works. Thus an ST:TNG parody would have a reach well beyond the show itself. (This would be less true for something like Firefly, for example.)
I don’t know how good it would be as a source for roleplaying jokes. I’m betting there’s a Trek RPG out there somewhere, but if there is it isn’t nearly as popular as D20 Star Wars. I think using it to parody sci-fi in general would work much better.
Picture Picard as a touchy-feely pacifist politically correct diplomat, Riker as an intergalactic manwhore, and Wesley as a sarcastic potty-mouth teen. The jokes pretty much write themselves. You could do ten pages with just those three characters. It’s a goldmine.
DM of the Rings CXXIV:
Medic!
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “DM of the Rings CXXIV:
Medic!”
Sins of a Solar Empire
I’m a big fan of Stardock. I loved Galactic Civilizations. I loved the sequel even more. Even aside from the quality of the games, I like how they do their thing: Their games have no anti-piracy hassle. They continue to update and enhance the core game for free for many months after release. I’m not taking about the usual bug-fixery, I’m talking about making the game deeper and more robust based on feedback from the user base.
Now I find out they have a new game in the works: Sins of a Solar Empire. I visited the page, read the synopsis, and thought Hey – Homeworld clone. That’s nice. I guess. But a closer look reveals this to be more than a remix of an earlier hit. It looks like they’re trying to take the Masters of Orion / Galactic Civilizations gameplay and… make it realtime? Really? You can do that? How does that work, exactly?
I guess we’ll find out. The game is in beta now. I’ll be watching this one.
Akismet vs. Two Billion Spam
Akismet, the anti-spam WordPress plugin, has been around since November 2005. In that time, the software has dealt with 2 billion spam messages. What’s really alarming is the shape of the curve. To be fair, some of the curve is the result of more and more people using WordPress, and more of those people getting Akismet, but still.
Such a mammoth waste of everyone’s time and energy for just a tiny bit of money for a miniscule number of people.
The spam solution I’m using is still going strong. It’s been 2 weeks since the last time I saw a spam. It’s been over a month since one slipped by that I had to delete manually. Given the sheer volume of spam I was getting five months ago, and given the fact that this site is several times larger now, I’m very grateful for how well the CAPTCHA is working.
If you look at the problem from the POV of the spam programmer, there are many ways to make his job harder and more annoying. You can’t make it impossible, of course, but the appeal of spam has always been the fact that it is “free” for the spammer. Making it less free might go a long way to making less of it. Given the normal level of lazyness and stupidity of the average spammer, I think that even CAPTCHA are probably overkill.
Most spam scripts go right for the wordpress comment-posting script. Just having this script to have a configuarable name would probably be just as effective as the CAPTCHA solution I’m using now.
Another technique would be to simply insist that comment POSTS are the result of an honest-to-goodness page load. Embed a secret number (which changes automatically) into the form as a hidden field, and make sure incoming form submissions contain the number. The advantage of this would be that it would be seamless and transparent to normal users – they wouldn’t even need to enter a CAPTCHA. The only downside would be if a user loaded the page, and then did something else for a couple of hours, and then came back and left a comment on the open page without reloading it first, then their number would have expired and the system would eat their comment. The disadvantage for the spammer is that they will have to parse all that HTML on the page if they want their comment to get through.
DM of the Rings CXXIII:
You Go, Girl
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “DM of the Rings CXXIII:
You Go, Girl”
BioShock: Upgrade Fatigue
I’ve been waiting for this game since I first heard about it, way back in February of 2006. At long last, they have released the minimum system requirements. Let’s have a look:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “BioShock: Upgrade Fatigue”
From The Archives:
D&D Campaign
WAY back in 2005, I wrote about a D&D campaign I was running. The campaign is still there, in the bottom-most strata of the archives.
The Best of 2017
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2017.
The Best of 2012
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2012.
Silent Hill Turbo HD II
I was trying to make fun of how Silent Hill had lost its way but I ended up making fun of fighting games. Whatever.
The Best of 2014
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2014.
Autoblography
The story of me. If you're looking for a picture of what it was like growing up in the seventies, then this is for you.
What is Vulkan?
What is this Vulkan stuff? A graphics engine? A game engine? A new flavor of breakfast cereal? And how is it supposed to make PC games better?
Internet News is All Wrong
Why is internet news so bad, why do people prefer celebrity fluff, and how could it be made better?
Mass Effect 3 Ending Deconstruction
Did you dislike the ending to the Mass Effect trilogy? Here's my list of where it failed logically, thematically, and tonally.
Steam Summer Blues
This mess of dross, confusion, and terrible UI design is the storefront the big publishers couldn't beat? Amazing.