How I won a Big Hunk

Having returned from Illinois and a glorious concert-going weekend just in time to get my ass to work (only SLIGHTLY late), I now get to sit here in all my zonked-out, road-weary glory and reminisce about the wonders of nerd rock.

Hillary and I got to the DG in time for Battlestar, and enjoyed that along with some pizza. This was followed by Iron Man, which was surprisingly excellent. It avoided most of the superhero movie pitfalls, like a lack of characterization, excessive and egregious fight scenes, and frequent lame-ness. Not all of the recent bout of superhero movies have these, but many do, and Iron Man actually dodged them all. It's got some damn fine acting, excellent humor (with only a little slapstick), and a surprisingly tight storyline. And when they do break out the fight scenes, they do it quite well. Definitely worth a viewing, even if you don't know shit about Iron Man, pretty much like myself. And if that's not enough, you get to see Jeff Bridges being bald, intense, and evil. Which is pretty awesome after you remember that he was The Dude.

Saturday, after the ritual consumption of sushi, Hillary, Hans and I went downtown to see Jonathan Coulton. It was even better than I expected. The opening band, which opened with the song, "Opening Band", was Paul and Storm, a surprisingly energetic and versatile pair of weirdos who pandered brilliantly to the crowd with lolcat and pirate references, among others. They also tossed candy bars with suggestive names into the audience for random things, one of which I won for yelling out a pseudo-pun. It's hard to explain, but it got a laugh and I won a Big Hunk, which I just braved a Google image search for:


I actually haven't eaten the thing yet, and now that I've seen what it looks like, I may have to think twice about that. But, freaky snacks aside (at least I didn't get the Pink Snowballs), Paul and Storm were damn good and appropriately quirky in their own way. Which, as it turns out, shouldn't have been surprising: they were half of DaVinci's Notebook. They gave us the Enormous Penis song, and now they've given me a great opening act as well. And now that I've written that sentence, who knows what kind of spam comments this blog is going to get.

Jonathan Coulton himself was superb, and played everything from Shop Vac to Flickr to re: Your Brains, complete with an audience-participation zombie chorus. The rampant "Arrrr!"-ing of the audience, prompted by one of Paul and Storm's songs, continued and even caused him to lose his composure, such as it was, a couple times. The audience was really energetic and he played to us well, and it felt like a real show. Also, he Rick-rolled us. He had this weird mix/synth board for Mr. Fancy Pants, and, well, one of the buttons was linked to "Never Gonna Give You Up." Auditory shenanigans ensued.

Describing it, as with any concert or really most things that I'm trying to encapsulate into a blog post, is damn hard without the energy of actually being there (and 2nd row center, no less). Hillary got some video, which she may post at some point. In any case, this concert is my pick


of the week.

Inspired griefing

The real gems start up around 6 minutes in, when he starts using a door bug to trap people in their spawns until they can answer a trivia question.



I'll post something real one of these days.

...unless it's a farm

Just one of the many hilarious Valve promos that make me wish I was any good at TF2.

Fear-mongering

Apparently, Clinton's big into it these days (Hillary, not the good one). It's a pretty frightening article on some recent remarks and an oddly aggressive trend in her comments and campaign.

Loot waffle

So, not a terribly large amount of anything happening lately, hence my inactive blog. I recently played through the expansion to C&C3, which was fun, considering the lore it filled in. Aside from some annoying crash bugs, not a bad game. Also, I'm in the midst of re-playing Starcraft, and finally trying to beat it without cheats. I think I got as far as the second-to-last Zerg level when I first played it (when I was what...13?), and then stalled out and just cheated through that and Brood Wars to see how the story turned out. So now, it is my mission to legitimately beat those before the sequel comes out. Knowing Blizzard, I'll have plenty of time.

Today, though, I got a pleasant surprise at work. Several weeks ago, someone had left a nice bookbag with a few books in it at at the waffle shop. And today, since it had been there so long, they were getting rid of it, and instead of let it get tossed, I noticed that it had some good science fiction books in there (including one author I've been meaning to read) and ended up taking the whole shebang. So, free books and free bag! Pretty damn good for a few hours' work.

This week will hold TWO new Battlestars for me, since I missed last week's episode thanks to Quiz Bowl Nationals. Our Div II team did win their division, though. At least we got a national championship out of missing Battlestar! So, that was fun. The tournament was down in St. Louis, which was a long-ass drive and a fairly uninteresting city. Washington University was very pretty, though, and the Gateway Arch looked pretty cool from our hotel room. Of course, between the weather and cramped schedule I never actually got to visit the monument itself, but it's not like I would've gone up in it anyway. The very concept of an "inclined elevator" gives me the heebie-jeebies.

Here's an article about a song by a gay guy

NY Stadium Rickrolled. Also, they don't have internet memes in Britain - they have "daft crazes". I'm not sure which I like more.

Sonic charged with assault

Only in New Zealand.

Oh, Blizzard

Just in case anyone had forgotten to check, Blizzard's come out with another good crop of April Fool's postings on their website. There's the Atari classic Molten Core (with SOUND!), the new Bard Hero class (cue solo grinding joke; in retrospect it's like the game terminology was setup for one giant pun), and the brutal Tauren Marine. The last one actually has a full gameplay moovie, and it seems to have a full model and animation set, so maybe we'll get lucky and it'll show up as an easter egg in SC2. Or Blizzard could just have seen this as an opportunity to showcase their "bizarrely well-developed horticultural skills" and will leave it at that.

<3 Blizzard's puns.

Also, Muppets bloopers!