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Star Wars Dance-Off
I found this via Twenty Sided, which also asks: On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being “severe” and 10 being “horrifying and permanent”, how badly did this video damage your childhood memories? “Seven thousand” isn’t on the scale. But it should be.
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A Different Kind of Campaign
This will be particularly amusing to those of us who have ever run a D&D campaign. I think that somehedgehog’s reimagining of the presidential hopefuls as RPG players has captured everybody’s personalities pretty neatly. OBAMA: Well, maybe some people got tired of the grim and squinty “Matterhorn, son of Marathon” shtick you keep doing. Dude,…
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Turing Test Near-Miss
I got all excited when I first saw this BBC article about a recent Turing Test involving five chatbots. One, Elbot, came close to passing. Then I read further and saw that the test requires that the ‘bot fool only 30% of the human audience. Elbot fooled 25% of the human testers. I think this…
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Geeky Wedding Rings
The ThinkGeek guys have done a roundup of geeky rings, entitled My Big NTFS Geek Wedding. I’m particularly taken with the armillary sphere. A few that they don’t list are this Double Helix ring, this nut and bolt set, the Remember Ring (which I think I may have blogged about before, but looking it up…
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How is the Weather Up There?
Most of the 300 extrasolar planets so far discovered are too distant to discern much about them, but we can infer temperature changes on a few of them by looking at the way their brightness varies. Some of the weather is officially described as “weird,” with unusually high nighttime temperatures suggesting an unknown heat-transport mechanism…
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Star Trek Meets 80s TV
What is it about Star Trek that makes it so ripe for parody? YouTube user Huckbone mated the original series with The A Team to produce this: And then followed it up with a Love Boat/TNG remix: This makes me awfully happy.
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How to Cook an Alien
Remember what I’ve said before, about Websites that make you go, “Wait…what?” Here’s another one. Greys are, naturally grey in colour, though they are as tall as blues. It is thought that they come from a colder planet than the blues. Their meat is generally tougher than blues, and also higher in cholesterol. Good for…
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A Brief History of the 21st Century
Esquire has predicted the next 100 years for us. A few of these sound rather uncomfortably plausible. JUNE 11, 2041: In a matter of weeks, the entire Internet is replaced by “news blow,” a granular microbe that allows information to be snorted, injected, or smoked. Data can now be synthesized into a water-soluble powder and…
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Even Lamer Than Princess Python
The International Society of Supervillains blog (whose authors include King Oblivion, Ph.D., MW’s Head on a Robot Body, and Doktor Maxwell von Puppykicker the Third) have plumbed the depths of comics fandom to bring you the very worst supervillains of all time. Ten-Eyed Man History: Philip Reardon, a Vietnam vet who was partially blinded when…
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Haldeman News
Oooooooh! From Haldeman’s LiveJournal: Ridley Scott to make The Forever War Today’s Variety: Fox 2000 has acquired rights to Joe Haldeman’s 1974 novel “The Forever War,” and Ridley Scott is planning to make it into his first science fiction film since he delivered back-to-back classics with “Blade Runner” and “Alien.” “Whoop,” Mr. Haldeman is quoted…