The Ziggurat of Doom

Carbon Dioxide. They call it pollution, we call it life. (direct link to .wmv)

(hat tip to my sister, I know not where she found it)

Just a quick heads up. If you are thinking about spending money on X3, you may want to take a day or two and rethink it. I don’t want to get into a fullblown review, so I’ll link to one that mirrors what I think. Unfortunantly for everyone but the QoS, the best review (Justin Chang, Variety) I can find goes from review to spoiler with no warning. I’ll repost the non spoilery parts below the fold.
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From the News You Can’t Make Up Department: Man who thinks he’s a vampire protests new White Castle garlic cheese sandwich.

Apparently its mere existence has ‘angered the undead’, a Cincinatti man claims.

More reasons to love science: invisibility cloaks!

I have a tendency to smack my keyboard on occasion, usually when playing City of Heroes. Yesterday, I accidentally hit out a string that included this emote:

:E

And thus is born the “Hungry Elder God” emoticon. There is no plain “Elder God” emoticon, because there is no such thing as an Elder God who isn’t hungry.

Farmers Only, the online dating service for farmers, ranchers, cowboys, cowgirls and country dwellers.

Folks, these jokes write themselves!

Interactive Comic Standing on Time Warner

For the first time, a cable operator will offer interactive trivia and polling in partnership with a broadcast series, NBC’s Last Comic Standing.

Time Warner Cable will use Navic Networks’ interactive-television application to allow subscribers in select markets to respond to trivia questions during the broadcast.

Cool, like playing Lingo on my wife’s laptop while I watch Chuck mac on the British chick?

Viewers will also use their remote controls to voice opinions about the comedians participating in the show. Set-top boxes will generate the pop-ups on-screen. The Navic technology will register the answers and report polling back to the market on a real-time basis.

Oh, wow, this is dumb. What is this, 1994? We have laptops. We have the internet. We don’t need your box.

Just another in a long line of students getting punished in school for using the interwebosphere outside of school for its intended purpose, being mean to people you don’t know or don’t like.
Free speech fight hits Kirkwood High

They never brought the list to school, but by early March, it was circulating around campus. When two junior girls brought it to administrators’ attention, all five boys received 10-day suspensions.

Monitor Duty’s got 2 big Cthulhu posts up worth checking out.
First is a round up of important Cthulhu links, including a new to me link to Neil Gaiman’s Cthulhu short story.
Second is Jack Chick vs. Cthulhu post that will make you chuckle the way only an ancient, subterranean, slimy, sanity eating, evil pox on all life can. Cthulhu is kind of silly too.

Community rumblings over at Cinerati:

I received an exciting email a couple of days ago. It appears that with the new design format, The Truth Laid Bear has created a submission form for the creation of blog communities. As you know I have desired to create a community of exceptional magnitude for some time and I am hopeful that my request will be recognized. So far, I have include The Shelf, Pererro, Shouting Into The Wind, The Ziggurat of Doom, Cinerati, and Hungry Ghost as examples of blogs I desire to be a part of the online community.

Obviously, I won’t limit membership to those sites, but those were the ones whose “users” I have contacted in the past about a community. I have used the tentative name “Pop, Pop, Pop Culture” as the name of the community.

Here’s to wishing us luck.

There currently is a PPPC (as I’ll be calling it) community, but it looks like no one has joined it yet. I’ll see what I have to do to join ZoD to the community.

That, or we could start the pirate club, and meet in a battle in which there can be no winners.

In one of the odder malware incidents ever, lately there’s been an IM (specifically, Yahoo! Instant Messenger) worm that installs its own browser. The name of this browser? Ironically, the Safety Browser. And apparently, it plays obnoxious music for you, too! (Well, if you’re a Windows user who hasn’t upgraded to SP2.)

Recap: Machinima refers to the technique of making videos or movies using low-end realtime CGI engines - often game engines, specifically. An excellent example is the hilarious Red Vs. Blue, using Halo.

World of Warcraft is also a popular choice. One short film in particular, Return, is widely regarded as Quite Excellent.

Anyway, the news: The trailor for the sequel to the abovementioned Return is available. Apparently the full film is going to run 30 minutes, and if the trailor is representative, includes some very professional editing. It’s frankly, extremely neat. An interesting example of an emergent phenomenon.

And they want all you boys to serve them tea.

I’m going to be even lower-traffic than I’ve been lately for the next week or so - combination of games and being out of town part of next week. In case anyone was wondering.

YouTube - 10 Things I Hate About Commandments

A second life for Uru Live - Joystiq

I will, I’m sad to say, never be as pimp as Evgeni Plushenko (I guess this could be nsfw)

-tip: WeaselKing

Following a brief conversation, and because it’s 2:30 in the morning, I offer the following terms and definitions, to be added to your jargon for discussing stories of all kinds (though they are most directly applicable to television, as that’s what I was watching when I came up with them).

Lostanoia: The nagging feeling that the story you’re watching is not the story they’re making, and you’re just waiting for the other shoe to drop. Source: 2:30 in the morning, and too much Veronica Mars in one night.

Goddamned Polar Bear: Shows up to tell you that the other shoe has dropped. Source: See above.

Elevator Scene: Repetative set piece wherein characters say cryptic things for the primary purpose of being cryptic. Source: Utena.

Power of Dios: The hand of the writer reaching down to gift the protagonist with victory they deserve only by virtue of being the protagonist. See also: Honor Harrington Syndrome. Source: Utena.

The Jordan Factor: The mysterious force that keeps the entire cast of a large story from EVER TALKING TO EACH OTHER. Leads to Jordan Plots, plots that would collapse on themselves if anyone started actually sharing information. Source: The Wheel of Time series; yeesh.

Ladies, gentleman, miscellaneous: the best thing since duct tape.