Alden Bates' Weblog

One of my many comment spammers keeps sending spams that I should share some of my bookmarks, so here's a few of the sites I've been visiting recently:

Steampunk Star Wars Actually I nicked this link off Boing Boing last night. It is very cool though. DM of the Rings Jamas and Peter (who doesn't have a blog) mentioned this in the pub one night, and I googled it when I got home. A very funny comic imagining Lord of the Rings if it were being played by D&D gamers. This installment has been one of my favourite so far, but do start reading from the beginning. The Transformers Wiki Which I end up spending hours reading every time Dave Willis at Short Packed links to it. I'm so sad. Bowmaster Prelude Pictured left, a shockwave flash game in which you defend your castle against hordes of oncoming enemy fighters. Which I appear to have just broken. Ooops. Warning: playing this game warps the space/time continuum. You will find after you've been playing for what seems like half an hour, three days have past!

From Geoff Wessel via the Rustyverse: CBC's archive of character designs for the never made animated Doctor Who series.

Alas, it's got funky Javascript navigation, so I can't link to particular pictures, but there's some interesting image of a TARDIS interior with a very techno-organic console, a hover-converted Bessie, and what appears to be a Cyber-converted supermodel.

On a somewhat lighter note, I love this cartoon. :)

A couple of LiveJournalers drew and posted picture of Batgirl, which lead to other artists on their friends lists drawing and posting pictures of Batgirl, which lead to over 200300 pieces of artwork of Batgirl, all in different styles. The Internets is awesome! :)

From The Sun: Sexterminate (NWS)

BEEB bosses have gone ballistic after discovering the Daleks are starring in a PORN FLICK ... Estate director Tim Hancock said: “The reason the Daleks are still the most sinister thing in the universe is because they do not make things like porn.

Hancock's forgetting the infamous shoot with Katy Manning posing naked with the Dalek, obviously

See also: The Register: BBC pulls plug on Dalek lesbian romp flick and the trailer! Also NWS.

I suspect that the Dalek voices used are soundbytes from the original series. The grey Dalek looks pretty authentic. There's a company which makes them at something like £4000 a go, which probably wouldn't be out of the price range... The red Dalek, however, looks sadly misproportioned.

The NZ National Party's latest political advert is very amusing and looks like it was done using Shockwave Flash. Most entertaining NZ political ad in recent time.

I'm still not voting for them though. :)

Doctor Who: The Long Game is on TV at the moment - it's actually better than I remember!

Lately I've been playing Popcap's latest game, Chuzzle. Chuzzle is not dissimilar to Bejeweled, in that you have to match up groups of critters of the same colour to eliminate them from the board. Rather than merely swapping adjacent critters, you move whole rows or columns to match them up.

Insidiously, once you get to higher levels the game begins to demand you make combos, else it starts putting locks on the critters to prevent you from moving a particular row and column.

WARNING: highly addictive game! Also, you will experience the disappearance of time. Do not be alarmed, this is normal.

As an additional side effect, I've found that after playing this game that the Windows GUI looks extremely square.

Edit: several people have asked what a "Bad Move" is. I believe this is when there was another move you could have made which would have eliminated more critters. I haven't played Chuzzle in a while now though...

Boing Boing: Pet pillows

Pet died? Make it into a pillow!

*eyes the cat*

Edit: the link on BoingBoing is dead, and I can't find anythign about the pet pillows on the site it links to... I suspect it was either a hoax, or they got complaints...

I see at long last Google has a Zeitgeist up for New Zealand. Possibly unsurprisingly, the top query is for a well known NZ auction site.

It's... not detailed, but it's something. :)

From JWZ:

"How will this software get my users laid" should be on the minds of anyone writing social software.

Also, Bruce Simpson tells us about the latest copy protection move from the movie industry and how it's likely to be as effective as the copy protection on CDs. Joy! (See also the BBC news story covering this)

Modern Drunkard Magazine presents this item on alcohol in Star Trek, particularly the original series, but also TNG...

Wesley: So you mean I'm drunk! I feel strange, but also good.
Picard: (huffily putting aside his knitting) Because you have lost the capacity for self-judgment. Alcohol does this, Wesley!

Kirk would have challenged the upstart whelp to a Romulan Ale drinking contest, then hooked him up with an Orion slave girl.

Nostalgia presents the best Stargate SG-1 StickFic ever!

*drums fingers while he waits for his PC to return*

Winter/Christmas themed entries I found while surfin' about on BE:

• Santa's reindeer are female
• Things not to do to a sleeping polar bear

Jeff pointed me to Ex Astris Scientia, a formidable Star Trek site. I spent hours reading the "Inconsistencies" section, which has some interesting discussions on TOS versus new-style Klingons, various scientific problems, etc, etc.

Bruce Simpson writes on making electronics less attractive, having been burgled on the weekend and most of his stuff taken. Bruce was previously bankrupted by the NZ government after he designed and built a do-it-yourself cruise missile.

As he points out, even passwords on PCs can be circumvented. I suspect any such measure on electronics such as DVD players is going to have similar problems... Besides which, you'd end up with hundreds of people locked out after a power cut because they can't remember the pass code for their microwave, all calling technical support. :)