Terminally Incoherent

I noticed that some blogs I read routinely close comments on old posts, supposedly to avoid spam. There is even a Wordpress plugin that does this for you. I find that practice silly. I keep spam at bay via filtering, bot detection and captchas - and it seems to be working just fine for me. I’d hate to close old blog posts because a lot of them still get comments today. There are two ways people find interesting blogs - via links on other blogs, and via search engines.

Especially the some of my more technical posts sometimes don’t get much play up until weeks or months after being published. People who comment on them usually found them via Google and either found them useful or want to correct my mistakes or miss-assumptions - which is great. Even silly shit often gets hits long after I forgot about it. Case in point the silly Magic the Gathering joke I posted last year. Someone posted a comment there requesting a pussy version of the card.

Well, your wish is my command:

While I was at it I decided to create a PG-13 version of the original card to show that I do think of the children and all that shit. Or perhaps this makes the joke more subtle? Or more stupid? I don’t know, you decide:

This is all I have for today. Enjoy your Memorial Day weekend! For those of you who live outside the US of A, this just means we get the Monday off. There will be a Monday post though, unless I’m especially lazy this weekend.

My brother Ark owns bunch of Nerf guns that we occasionally use for an all out nerf war. His arsenal includes several Mavericks, a Longshot and a funky crossbow that I can’t find anywhere online. Since we are both Warhammer 40k nuts we always joke around how the Mavericks look a bit like Bolt Pistols. I mean look at them:

The longshot in its short retracted state looks a little bit like a regular bolter. We even talked about painting them up to make them look like the authentic things. All you would really need to give it a nice paint job and then attach the distinctive curved magazine clips to them. Ark actually wanted to use them as part of some elaborate Halloween costume but that never happened. Imagine my surprise when I found that we were not the first people to come up with this idea. Apparently, there is some guy who paints Nerf guns and sells them on ebay and his work seems to be heavily influenced by 40k artwork. Just check out his Maverick:

It really does look like a bolt pistol. It’s just missing the magazine. Also check out the Longshot:

I’d be afraid to use these as it would probably ruin the paint job real quick. But this just shows that this sort of thing is possible given enough time and patience. Ark will probably be furious that someone has beat him to the punch and made these.

Anyway, if you don’t know what Warhammer 40k is, and you don’t find Nerf guns fun, just ignore this post. We will resume posting the regular content that you came to expect from this place tomorrow.

Anyone around here is into RPG? How about tabletop battle games? Collectible Card Games? If you are, check out the Nearby Gamers site. If you are not, you can still check it out for yet another cool use of the Google Maps API.

The site doesn’t look like much yet, but it combines two Web 2.0-ish concepts: maps and tagging. You simply create a profile, specify your location, and then type out all the games you play as a comma separated list. This list is used as a set of tags that can be searched. One feature I really like is tag redirection. For example, if you type in “Warhammer RPG”, “Warhammer Role Playing” or “WFRP” your tag will automatically be associated with the correct concept “Warhammer RPG”. I was quite impressed, especially since the engine was able to dissasociate it from concepts such as “Warhammer WFB” or “Warhammer 40k”. This prevents one of the biggest problem of tagging systems - fracturing of the tag-space caused by small differences in spelling.

I think this is a really cool way of finding gaming groups nearby. Of course we really need more people to sign up before it becomes actually useful. For example, I could not find any users in my immediate area. I had to hit the “zoom out” button 3 or 4 times to actually see any other map markers (closest were Jersey City and NYC).

You might have seen this image in /dev/random feed (btw, there is a link to it in thesidebar now):

img found @ knuttz.net

This is actually a sculpture by an artist who goes by Pierre Matter. Pierre doesn’t seem to have a website of his own which is kinda lame. But Opera Gallery has some info on him and a pretty good samples of his work.

I’m showing you this to illustrate a point. Normal person will look at this and think about how this sculpture juxtaposes the organic, and technological elements. Perhaps find some sort of angelic figure rising out of dark and twisted bowels of machinery. Maybe they will find this to be a statement about technology in general? Or perhaps they will just see it as a cool, sci-fi sculpture.

But when I look at it, I instantly go “ZOMG! It’s a fucking C’Tan!”

I don’t know how big that sculpture is, but I would shrink it to about 6″ in size, and plop it on the battlefield in seconds. Yes ladies and gentlemen. Once you get the Warhammer bug, there is no going back. Your mind will be irreversibly warped by the sheer awesomeness of that game.

And yes, I do think that the C’Tan background is a wee bit lame, but they are part of the 40K cannon now so I guess we just need to get used to them.

I never really collected it for real (and by for real, I mean hard core addict style), but I used to hang out a lot with MTG junkies so the game lore totally rubbed off on me. Anyways, you probably won’t get this if you haven’t played the game at least once:

original source unknown; found @ myconfinedspace

Let’s see how many Magic players read this blog. Sound off in comments if you find it funny.