Verily, I have returned to the Inter-webs!

Prithee, forgive my long and no doubt arduous truancy in furnishing mine blog with new articles for your purveyance! Good Sir Spudler anticipated my ambitions by a matter of hours and, in response, I hereby purvey to you, my kind audience, this next installment of this most humble serial. First, a moving picture!



And now, some actual content. I moved into my apartment in Northfield, MN about a week ago, and have been settling in. It's a bit weird to be finally entirely on my own, but I think I'm handling it pretty well, if a bit belatedly. I'm neither starving nor covered in my own filth, and scurvy is held at bay by fruits. I'm pretty sure bananas and grapes help stave that off, right? Anyway. The apartment is nice, if a bit slanty, and I've managed to procure a good internet connection. I got the entire 1.8gig Bioshock demo in under and hour. It was awesome.

I have, perhaps regrettably, been bitten by the WoW bug again and have gone back to playing. It's fun; Bronn the orc warrior is a satisfying character. Also, Reckless Ascension, our guild, is full of awesome people. We also do PVP raids on the Alliance capitals sometimes, and I took it upon myself to be an incredibly nerdy photojournalist at some of these raids.

The first was a spontaneous raid on Stormwind in response to a couple Alliance guys trying to bust into Orgrimmar: To Stormwind!

The second was a world tour on RA's first anniversary. We killed most of the Alliance towns in the world, a couple of them twice, and ended up actually killing both of the leaders in Darnassus. Sweet zombie jesus, I'm a nerd!

So a few night ago my old roommates (sans Cary, who is sadly in NY) and John and Hillary all came over and we watched the new TMNT movie. It was ok; they did a good job of developing the Leonardo/Raphael conflict, but did so at the expense of, well, anything interesting involving Michaelangelo or Donatello. The CG was cool, and it was fun enough, but it wasn't great.

What WAS wonderful was that after the movie, we managed to track down a lot of cartoons from when we were young. Full episodes! Online! What will the internet think of next? So we watched some Transformers, Battletech (in which the CG looked worse than MechWarrior 2, good lord), SwatKats, and most importantly, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

I had no idea how deeply this show was ingrained into my memory. I still knew all the voices subconsciously, somewhere, to the point that I felt like I'd heard each of them in other shows since then. For a couple of the voice actors that's almost certainly the case (I think one's in SwatKats, actually), but the deja-vu was uncanny. So we watched a couple episodes of that, got all nostalgic, drank some spiced mead (thank you, Brandon!) and then headed to bed. It was a grand night.

NEXT TIME, PROBABLY: That beer-tasting I went to about two months ago and meant to blog about!

Too much time on their hands

Daft Hands:


This song rules, and whoever's doing the hands thing is pretty damn amazing.

Some day, maybe I'll make a substantive post. Oh, and C&C 3 rules.

My computer's on fire

...or at least, it looks like it is.

The Most Amazing Physics Demo yet

I couldn't figure out a way to embed them, but the fire one's at the bottom. The others are all astounding as well; I have no idea how far off we are from these being implemented in real-time games, but I'm looking forward to it.

And to having to pay for a specific physics chip to make it function, but hey, them's the breaks.

Carleton's Biggest Nerd

So, this term my college has been running a radio contest called "Carleton's Biggest Nerd." It's been a lot of fun, and I even got to do a battle rap! If you're reading my blog, then odds are you guys know how funny of a concept this is. The battle rap is towards the end of this podcast.

But, more importantly, we're down to the final round of the contest, and I'm one of the finalists! So, if any of you guys are bored/want to support me in a nerdly venture/wants to humor me, please go to this site and vote for me (Peter Berry/Optimist Rhyme)! You can vote once per hour, per computer. Voting ends this Friday the 1st at 10pm. Whoever's in the lead then wins!

Also, most of the episodes of Carleton's Biggest Nerd are pretty funny, and they should be archived on the KRLX site. Let me know if you want individual links to the nerdiness.

At the moment I'm engaged in a gritty back-and-forth battle with Jason Pipkin, who, though a ffine and upstanding guy, didn't know the name of Lord Zedd. That's about the worst I can say about him. So, spread the word to forums, to friends, to anyone you can annoy/amuse with this!

For encouragement, here's me as a Magic card:

/end publicity begging

Flight of the Conchords

So, these are all shamelessly lifted from Hillary's blog, but they're pretty amazing, so I'm going to put it up here as well. First, a song aimed at the human-killing robot demographic:

And, though it's not as ridiculous as my nerdcore rap (towards the end of this podcast), here is a gangsta folk song by the same guys:

I have to say that Hiphopopotamus and Rhymenoceros are pretty much the best names ever, arguable better than Optimus Rhyme.

I've been more and more intrigued by the nerdcore genre ever since my recent brush with rapping. I found some free tracks over at Rhymetorrents, and while some aren't that good, some are pretty awesome, like "RPG (Rhymes of Phatness and Greatness)" and "Fuck the MPAA". There's a fair amount of mediocre stuff to weed through, but there's some fun stuff in the genre.

Also, the finals for Carleton's Biggest Nerd are tomorrow, I'll post info and links for that then!

SC2 Gameplay Demo

Looks like the Protoss have some interesting new units - and it sounds like the whole game is getting more balanced - not that the first game wasn't balanced. Now it just looks like armor type vs. damage type will make a lot more of a difference, rather than just being able to mass Carriers or Hydras and roll all over everything. Basically it looks like most units will have some sort of a counter-unit in each of the other races - even against Siege Tanks! That's pretty damn exciting.

Also, with the new terrain-jumping features, turtling should be harder, and the whole thing should just be a lot faster-paced.

Also, the Mothership: This thing is ridiculous. First, it basically has a mobile, multi-barrel ion cannon. Then, the "time bomb" - it does bullet-time for any nearby enemy unit or for incoming fire; everything just stops short of hitting it. And then:

Yes, that's a black hole. 'Nuff said.

Heroes season finale

Don't worry, no real spoilers here. I mostly just wanted to say that I was alternately disappointed and relieved at how non-cataclysmic it was. Also, was it me or was the dialogue even more ham-tastic than normal? Not that that's really a bad thing; Heroes is great at being ridiculously stylized and comic-y while still being amazing.

Anyway, mostly I just want to start a discussion in the comments area so as not to have any spoilers out here on the front page again.

It's About Time

Hans beat me to it, but...yeah. It needs to be trumpeted.