Home of the Soul Cookie

“Maybe Mr. T is pretty handy with computers. Had that occurred to you, Mr. Condescending Director?”

Video @ GameVideos.com, via Wired’s Game | Life. Author Susan Arendt describes this as “the single greatest videogame advertisement ever created.” I can only agree.

YouTube vid: Super Mario Brothers Theme played on a Solid State Musical Tesla Coil

Web 2.0 in less than five minutes. Pretty damn cool.

via Boing Boing « Wonderland

OMFGIWANTTHISSOMUCH

Mark Frauenfelder has a capsule review of the new Nintendo Wii up at Boing Boing. Sounds like a cool concept done well.

Anybody reading this planning to get a Wii?

How about a Playstation 3, with its freaky-ass toy baby commercial?

• Busted my ass today to complete a fairly big project that got assigned to me on Monday.
• Stayed several hours late at work; got several thorny programming algorithms worked out in the process.
• Came home; had dinner.
• Logged back on and wrote up an extensive HOWTO on the new project. Answered a micromanagerial email in the middle.
• Swapped out some code on our publishing platform to point to the new project-ness.
• And… voila. Sat back and sighed contentedly.
• …’cause I’m on vacation for over a week!

This is a list of the 50 most significant science fiction/fantasy novels, 1953-2002, according to the Science Fiction Book Club. Bold the ones you’ve read, strike-out the ones you hated, italicize those you started but never finished and put an asterisk beside the ones you loved.

1. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
2. The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov
3. Dune, Frank Herbert *
4. Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
5. A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin
6. Neuromancer, William Gibson
7. Childhood’s End, Arthur C. Clarke
8. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
9. The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
10. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
11. The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
12. A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.
13. The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov
14. Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras
15. Cities in Flight, James Blish
16. The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett
17. Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison
18. Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison
19. The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester
20. Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany
21. Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey
22. Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card *
23. The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Stephen R. Donaldson
24. The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
25. Gateway, Frederik Pohl
26. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, J.K. Rowling *
27. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams *
28. I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
29. Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
30. The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
31. Little, Big, John Crowley
32. Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
33. The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
34. Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement
35. More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon
36. The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith
37. On the Beach, Nevil Shute
38. Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
39. Ringworld, Larry Niven
40. Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys
41. The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien
42. Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut *
43. Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
44. Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner
45. The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester
46. Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
47. Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock
48. The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks
49. Timescape, Gregory Benford
50. To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer

[via John Wick]

Vox is a new blogging environment from SixApart, who also own and operate LiveJournal, Movable Type and TypePad. After I heard about it from a friend who worked on it, I signed up.

I haven’t done much of anything with my account, but one of the really neat things Vox has done to promote regular participation is develop a Question of the Day.

Today’s is, “What’s on your Top 5 video games list?”

In no particular order:

• The Legend of Zelda (NES)
• Sid Meier’s Civilization II (PC)
• Tron (arcade)
• Gyruss (arcade)
  (just beats out Galaga in my book, but good luck finding it around any more…)
• Doom (PC)

Somebody asked me about my “geek pedigree” a couple of weeks ago. I spouted something about being a “multidisciplinary geek” at the time, but it got me thinking: How could you go about describing or cataloguing something like that?

Well, once upon a time, we could have relied on the Geek Code, but most of its categories have, sadly, grown quite stale. Nonetheless, here’s mine:

—–BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK—–
Version: 3.1
GAT d-(++) s+:++>+: a C++$ UBL$>++ P+>+++$ L+$>++ W+++$ N w+$>++ !O M>+$ PS++ PE Y+>++ !PGP>+++ t(++)@ 5+++>$ R+++()>$ tv+>$ b++>$ DI++++ D+ G e>+++ h r y+*>++*
——END GEEK CODE BLOCK——
(Decode it here.)

I’m stuck, though, wondering how to detail my “geeky merit badges” without it becoming just a laundry list of random minutiae.

Any thoughts from the studio audience?