My most recent finds

Someday, perhaps, I'll have more of my original material to post here (aside from my ramblings and Pirate Raid reviews, that is), but until then it's a good a venue as any for some of my recent Worthy Internet Specimens.

First is fullyramblomatic.com, a blog much like mine only funnier, filled with more content, and slightly cluttered with ads by Google. Also, it's written by an irate British man, which I only wish I could claim to be. From what I can tell his reviews are pretty dead-on: I haven't played all the games he's reviewed, though I still need to get to that Bioshock demo I have. They're all hilarious, though, and the one about Peggle at least is pretty much dead-on. Hillary and I played that for about three hours without really realizing it, and that was the DEMO. "Insincerely cute" is also the perfect descriptor for that game - it tries to hard to be plush and doe-eyed that it rounds the bend into boring plasticity.

My other find, brought to be me thanks to Hannah, is Brandon Bird. He's the creator of the famed Law and Order Coloring Book and that ever so amazing painting of Christopher Walken building Optimus Prime. All the nerd culture juxtaposed with classical allusions are only made better by the fact that he's actually pretty damn, good, and able to mimic several different classical and foreign styles. Plus, he has a drawing of Harrison Ford playing a Black Lotus. Win.

As we near the ends of Buffy and Angel, Hillary and I are running into more and more spoilers - extremely annoying spoilers. I also just read an article (while finding the above picture of Spike) that claims that he ruins Season 7 and is symptomatic of the bastardization of the show's entire unpopular-kids-as-heroes motif. I hope it's wrong. I also hope that most of the spoilers I read are wrong, but then they wouldn't be spoilers, would they.

And I don't normally talk about personal stuff on here but I think I will mention that Hillary and my one-year anniversary is coming up in a few days, because I'm just so damned happy about it! So there, take that my self-imposed blog-content limitations! Eat a happy anniversary, to us!

Nerd TV

Nerds do seem to be becoming more and more mainstream. I'll just assume that my Carleton's Biggest Nerd win was the herald of a bright and new era of widespread nerdlery and move on.

Watched the first episode of the new Heroes season, and before that I was pleasantly surprised by Chuck, which is conveniently aired right before it. The premise is nothing super-original, but the execution of the nerd-becomes-pivotal-government-operative plot is actually pretty darn good. The supporting cast is also quite funny, and, more importantly, has Adam Baldwin. That's right. The main character is a nerd with a spy sort-of-girlfriend played by a Russian supermodel, and gets into a car chase with Jayne from Firefly. What more could you ask for?

The Heroes season opener was good - not terrifically exciting, but good and definitely a solid setup to some new stuff. Aside from some obvious Nissan product placement, I'm definitely looking forward to more superpowered actions. There are at least two new characters, Mexican it would seem. I have my theories about them, but I'll keep those to myself until everyone's seen it.

The space game I mentioned before progresses; I think the different cultures/empires and ships are the next step.

Apparently both Adam Baldwin and Nathan Fillion are in Halo 3? Wackiness. Still, nothing trumps Command and Conquer 3's cast.

Work, pirate raid, and a few projects

Greetings from the library, where I sit at my desk and manage my multitude of matriculated minions. Actually there are only two of them, but at least I have minions. Being an Evening Supervisor is pretty relaxed, which is good; the only downside is that three times a night I have to go around the entire building and count the number of people, divvied up by various areas. It's for "usage statistics" or something frivolous and corporate like that. My theory is it's to keep me from doing nothing but sit at my desk and surf the intarwebs for six straight hours, so it might actually do me a favor. It's a decent amount of walking.

The search for a second job is still a big fat zilcho, though as usual I still have a few leads left to explore. I am taking it at a kind of leisurely pace, because let's face it - getting rejected 8+ times in a week would be kind of bad for the ego, even if it's just because most places don't seem to be hiring at the moment. I blame the economy, or something.

More shenanigans have been borne of WoW: one of our buddies was quitting for Tabula Rasa (which looks more interesting than it has any right to, from an I-can't-afford-it standpoint), so we gave him a farewell Pirate Raid. I think my writeup came out pretty well. There are even Pokémon jokes at the end, and overall it's at least marginally accessible to people who don't fritter their time away online excessively. It actually made one of my guildmates ask if I did this kind of a thing for a living. Nerd commentary? Please, be a real profession someday. Soon.

Another guildmate and I are in the early stages of designing a browser-based space strategy game. Think the Fleet Game, only with less nobody-wants-to-play-it-itude. And computer-based, like it would have needed to be. We're looking at a pretty standard planetary expansion model, with technology and ships and whatnot - nothing revolutionary, but a chance to take our own stab at the genre and for him to learn a new programming language (Ruby Rails, I think? Maybe just Ruby). I'm not going near that end of things. We're in the early design stages, but I'm pretty excited, so perhaps expect more about it in the future!

No beer reviews because my booklet from the event is at home. Maybe that'll be impetus to post again before another three weeks go by.

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!