Personal

I’ve finally fixed the template. I didn’t realise that the damn thing was switching background images depending on whether this was a single post or not (I added the sidebar to all pages you see).

Quite old by now but still amazing to see: a reasonably long blog post in which every single word links to a different blog. Quite an achievement. Jeff Blanco

It’s about time I mentioned Star Wreck.

It’s an amazing spoof of Star Trek. Quite how amazing has to be seen to be believed. Some of the special effects are actually better than the real thing. Go to the site and at least download the trailer now (I’m on dialup and managed - it’s only 18Mb).

There is one catch however, it’s in Finnish…

How dare they!

In 2004 they released original cast (near enough) dramatisations of the third, fourth and fifth Hitchhikers book without telling me! I always thought the book version had the better (and more developed) story and hoped (in vain I thought) they’d make an film/TV/radio/anything version of it. Well they did!

They’ve also given them interesting titles.

Tertiary Phase - Makes sense since “tertiary” comes after “secondary” Quandary Phase - Annoyed me at first since “quaternary” comes after “tertiary”. All is forgiven since they weren’t being serious, see below for the Quintessential Phase

http://cgi.ebay.com/New-60-inch-Sony-Plasma-Tv-gmail-com-L-K-NR_W0QQitemZ5815875671QQcategoryZ116205QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem Anyone who bids that much on something without reading deserves everything they get…

Unfortunately I doubt eBay will force payment.

I rarely mention other blog posts, but this one caught my attention:

Just Ideas.

The quote that I specifically liked was: “A kid that dies from a bad case of diarrhea in the third world would pleasure 60 year-olds with heart disease for the chance to become a 60 year-old with heart disease getting pleasured by a young boy.”

I went with Julia to Aberystwyth to university on Saturday. Six hour train journey. Aberystwyth is nice except for the one hill the university sits on top of.

There was an bit on the news today about UFC. Apparently brutal cage fights are being banned in various states in America because they’re too dangerous. At the end the reporter said that even where it is banned, you can buy DVDs via mail order and the internet with footage of the action. He then held up the “WWE Bloodbath - The Most Incredible Cage Matches”.

WWE!? I’m sure that WWE would be offended to be accused of the brutality of UFC and UFC would be annoyed about being compared with fake pro wrestling. Not only that but the DVD contains matches from 1975 to 2002. Early WWE (or WWF as it was) was even sillier in the past.

Unrelated to almost anything I’ve written, I just thought I’d suggest anyone remotely interested in god-games to buy Sims 2 now. It has managed the same thing as the Grand Theft Auto series. There is a reasonably structured game in there now to guide you in your actions, but the game is still wide open if you want to do something else entirely.

Most of this structure revolves around the new wants and desires your sims have. They’re tasks or events that reward or penalise you and are decided by your Sim’s aspiration. The funniest is the “romance” aspiration which has wants such as “Have 2 loves at once” or “Make out with 3 different Sims”…

Ever heard of the board game Risk? If you haven’t then unfortunately I’m not going to be the one to tell you about it so go away now :).

If you have heard it, this post is going to mention a quick variation on the original rules I tend to play with friends. There may be more in the future.

The modification we play most of the time is to Risk cards themselves. We found suddenly receiving 8 or 10 troops in a country of your choice too powerful (how anybody plays with the progressive-risk-card-reinforcement rule I don’t know). So we decided that you only got the two reinforcements in the country on the card. The alteration is that it applies even the country is an oponent (we call it the Paratrooper rule). If you have paratroopers they just attack that country like normal.