Listen. If you support Barack Obama for President of the United States, there’s only one thing for you to do. Go to your polling place and vote. Do not look at the numbers. Do not pay attention to the people in the magic talking box. Show up on November 4th [...]
Joss Whedon, giver of all good things, brings more awesome, this time in the form of Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. This thing slays. Neil Patrick Harris is Dr. Horrible, and on his video blog he lets us watch his application process to the Evil League of Evil, led by the Thoroughbred of Sin, Bad Horse. He hopes to impress the villains by completing his Freeze Ray, but he’s got a weakness for the socially-conscious girl at the laundromat (Felicia Day) and a nemesis in corporate tool Captain Hammer (Nathan Fillion).
Did I mention it’s a musical?
I mean, seriously, how much ass can one show be expected to kick?
EDIT: The episodes have been iTunes exclusive since July 20 . . . until now. I don’t know how long it will be there, but all three acts can be seen for free at Hulu. Go. Why are you still here? Go watch it.
EDIT the second: Oh, and there will be more Dr. Horrible. So says the Joss.
Last night was the first night of Perry Family Game Night. My daughter, the Tiny Dancer, has been planning for this for some time, and we finally decided to put things aside and block off one evening a week for it. For night one, we chose a time-honored classic. Risk: the Game of World Domination.
Tiny Dancer picked it out, and she put herself in a tough spot right from the start, and not only because my wife and I have been looking at maps for way longer than she has. There are dark secrets the Tiny Dancer doesn’t know about her parents. Her mother, for example, is competitive to a degree rarely seen in a cul de sac. This applies to any competition, but it applies doubly to Risk. Kathy does not lose at Risk. I’ve never seen it happen. Her father is even worse. Not only am I competitive, but I am also bad at Risk, so I am not above picking on a child.
The game began with the recitation of the rules and the random choice of cards for territories. Then came the child abuse. Kathy targetted Tiny Dancer’s forces in South America; I targeted them in Australia. Tiny Dancer was using the purple armies, so she couldn’t have expected any less. Plus, the sooner she was done, the better chance we had of getting her to bed on time. [Protip: Do not start a game of Risk at 8:00 p.m. on a Thursday.] But the kid is resilient. She can roll a pair of white dice like nobody’s business, and she held off army after army with her at-will sixes. Still, competitive parents can’t be held off forever, and once Kathy finally mopped up Tiny Dancer’s armies in the Americas, she looked up to see that her position was bad. She had South America and most of North America, but I had worked my way up from Australia and taken over Asia. I was going to beat her at last! This, of course, is when she got tired and decided to go to bed. I still haven’t seen anyone beat her at Risk, but I’m claiming victory because I had more armies on the board when she bailed out on me.
Next week, Kathy gets to pick the game. I expect to be humiliated.
Back in 2001, technically, I lived in Ohio, but I spent most of my time in Norrath. It’s been nearly six years since I’ve gone anywhere near it, but for about two years, you couldn’t drag me away from EverQuest. I played a wizard, and I was bad ass. Fireballs, ice comets, teleportation, levitation — you name it, I could do it. I stopped playing shortly after my daughter was born, partly — ok, mainly — because it was threatening to wreck my marriage. See, here’s the thing about Norrath. While Ohio was lovely, it couldn’t really compete in the “wandering creatures to destroy with super powers” department. The most exciting adventure Ohio offered me on a Saturday morning was mowing the lawn. Given the choice, I’d much rather head to Lower Guk and fry a few undead frogs.
Around 2003, I handed over my account to a friend to play. This was harder than I had imagined it would be (see how hard — make a list of everything you’ve done for two years, including all the friends you’ve made and stuff you’ve bought. Now give those friends and that stuff to a friend. Walk away whistling.), but it was important for me to move beyond the game and pay attention to my actual life. While I hadn’t played for about a year at that point, I still had the occassional itch, and all I had to do to scratch it was load the game back up and pay for a month — voila, instant crack pipe. Giving the whole account away took that option away. And it worked. I honestly hadn’t thought about the game at all for about four years.
Until Monday. Monday I read that, in an effort to suck back the poor fools who had escaped, EverQuest was offering a free download of the game and free gameplay for two months to anyone with an inactive account. Somehow, I remembered my passwords and looked at the account history. Turns out my friend hadn’t changed the password after all, and he hadn’t played since around 2005. I got a little itchy. I downloaded the game. I waited patiently as it patched and updated. Finally, I logged in. There was my wizard, bad ass as ever. I found myself in a zone that hadn’t existed when I played, and I noticed quickly that my friend had changed my wizard’s last name from Stormbringer to Flameydeath. Of course, I was offended by this, so I changed it back. That problem solved, being the master of teleportation that I was, I popped myself into Greater Faydark, home of the elves. I spent hours once upon a time staring at the wizard spires that jutted up from the middle of that forest, and I caught myself getting nostalgic. I hung around a while, feeling my fingers remember exactly how to check my menus, open my spellbook, sit, stand, run . . . it was like riding a bicycle, if bicycles could hover and came with giant, magic-powered cannons. My wife was indulgent. She smiled when I shouted at familiar things, or when I remembered what some spell or other did, or when I turned a passing fairy into a smoldering pile of wings (actually, I think she genuinely enjoyed that), but I could see the pain behind it. This game had been a major battleground in our marriage, and while it wasn’t to blame for our problems, it was where I went to get away from them, and from her.
Lots of the specs have been updated on EverQuest since I last played it, and while my computer has been, too, there are always little quirks you need to work around when you load up a game that wants lots of resources. So whenever I changed zones, the game crashed. It was a minor annoyance, and I put up with it long enough to take a tour of my favorite places, but it wouldn’t do to play that way for a month. So I uninstalled EverQuest about two hours after I logged back on. My wizard is sleeping again, probably never to fry another frog or fairy, and that’s fine. But I can’t help admitting a little sadness at leaving Norrath again, even after such a short return. Familiarity probably fuels all sorts of addictions — when my computer crashed during zone changes, I felt that same little tug that I remember feeling day after day, hour after hour, six years ago, and I wasn’t strong enough to walk away back then until it was almost too late. Maybe I’ve grown up, or maybe technology conspired to make me seem as if I have, but I’ll take whatever little victories I can get. When I was done wandering down memory-pixelated lane, I went into the living room. My daughter had painted me a very pretty picture, and my wife had made dinner.
Until now, Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine only existed on paper. But now, an absolutely gorgeous actual real live version has been built, and I am just giddy watching all those gears and cranks do their thing.
Watch it in action here.
Hotels.com really needs to get its money back from MSNBC for this ad. Nothing brings people running to your site like promises of amazing deals and credit card fraud.
The American Family Association, whose OneNewsNow site has a tab marked Persecution alongside Culture, Education, and Business, has a strict policy of automatically replacing the word “gay” with the word “homosexual” in all AP stories it posts. This logical, well-thought-out policy, one that could never backfire or have any strange, unintended consequences, somehow caused this AP story –
Tyson Gay was a blur in blue, sprinting 100 meters faster than anyone ever has.
His time of 9.68 seconds at the U.S. Olympic trials Sunday doesn’t count as a world record, because it was run with the help of a too-strong tailwind. Here’s what does matter: Gay qualified for his first Summer Games team and served notice he’s certainly someone to watch in Beijing.
“It means a lot to me,” the 25-year-old Gay said. “I’m glad my body could do it, because now I know I have it in me.”
to become this story –
Tyson Homosexual was a blur in blue, sprinting 100 meters faster than anyone ever has.His time of 9.68 seconds at the U.S. Olympic trials Sunday doesn’t count as a world record, because it was run with the help of a too-strong tailwind. Here’s what does matter: Homosexual qualified for his first Summer Games team and served notice he’s certainly someone to watch in Beijing.
“It means a lot to me,” the 25-year-old Homosexual said. “I’m glad my body could do it, because now I know I have it in me.”
This used to be a nice area. That all changed when the Satinists moved in. Now, we live in constant fear of having our houses vandalized because these reprobates want to show allegiance to their glossy cloth overlord. Night after night, bands of roving, deliciously comfortable hooligans skulk through our neighborhoods, discussing warp-dominated weaving techniques and weft yarn. It’s getting so you hardly dare to mention your love of cotton anymore — you could wake up with a burning cross-stitch kit on your front lawn like these poor bastards.
Ever have trouble getting those lousy living employees to get off Facebook and get to work? Well, worry no more. Zombinc has the mindless drones you need to fill all the desks in your office without all those inconvenient brainsssssss.
Find out what happens when a zombie staffing service takes over a web design company. Check out Mur Lafferty’s The Takeover.
Somewhere, there is a use for a man with an equal love of science fiction, caffeine, and early 19th-century American literature. When that use is found, I will probably be playing video games, and I will miss out.
Dave on July 17th, 2008
Sliced bread’s got nothing on this.
Back in 2001, technically, I lived in Ohio, but I spent most of my time in 
