Atomic Playboy

Reading this Wired article about the dirty side of Hollywood (is there any other side?) makes me realize that the concept would make an excellent Shadowrun or Transhuman Space adventure.

Quoth Slate:

Thursday morning, President Bush greeted the people of Iraq on their TV screens. “You are a good and gifted people,” he told them as Arabic script appeared below his face. I don’t know Arabic, but I’m sure the translation didn’t convey what Bush means by “gifted.” He doesn’t mean exceptional. He means ethnic.

If you’re black, Hispanic, or a member of some other group often stereotyped as incompetent, you may be familiar with this kind of condescension. It’s the way polite white people express their surprise that you aren’t stupid. They marvel at how “bright” and “articulate” you are. Instead of treating you the way they’d treat an equally competent white person — say, by ignoring you — they fuss over your every accomplishment.

• Sony wants to trademark the term “shock and awe” for a video game. The greed and will to exploit suffering never ceases to awe shock amaze me. Next step: corporate sponsorship of bombs. “This cluster bomb was brought to you by Coca Cola!”
• Apple has released the update to 10.2.5 via software update; also available on CD. I’ve already updated. Dunno if there’s any difference.
• I preordered Zelda: The Wind Waker and I’m will lock myself up with ample supplies of Coca Cola on May 2nd. Feel free to drop by and watch me play, but don’t expect me to reply to communication attempts.
• The Matrix Reloaded trailer kicks buttocks. Will most likely see at cinema.
• Ditto Terminator 3 trailer.
• People who make floppy disk RAID drives have too much free time.

Re: Redesign. I’ve decided to go back to an older layout, namely the one currently used in the archive. I really liked it, so back it goes.

I’m not in this world to live up to your expectations and you’re not in this world to live up to mine.
– Bruce Lee

Sorry. Haven’t found anything to write about lately. There’s not much I have to say that is already elsewhere in the blogosphere.

I’m thinking about redesigning the site. After all, I never did complete the current one. No navigation stuff at all. I’ll incorporate the redesign in a school project — I’m “learning HTML,” meaning sitting at school and SSHing to the home network while the teacher drones on about font tags (evil!) and bgcolor (evil!) and states that no site can use layouts that don’t use table tags (evil!), almost making me laugh out loud.

Well, it is an introductory class, and I’m there for the grades, not the knowledge — I’ve been speaking HTML in my sleep for the past seven-eight years, thankyouverymuch.

My Gamecube is my friend.

• China Miéville, “The Scar”
• Dan Simmons, “The fall of Hyperion”
• Dan Simmons, “Endymion”
• Dan Simmons, “The rise of Endymion”
• Red Dwarf season 1

OK, I keep my DVDs in the bookshelf.

I would really like to try some roleplaying in China Miéville’s world. If we take GURPS Basic, throw in Steampunk, Steam-Tech, Rogues, Bio-Tech, Low-Tech and Magic and we should have something like New Crobuzon and Armada. Of course, of these I merely own GURPS Basic at the moment. Well, it’s not like they’re really needed, the wonderful thing with GURPS is that it’s easy as pie to throw your own stuff into the mix.

Rendezvous (aka Zeroconf) is indeed a cool technology that Microsoft probably wish they thought of first. However, there’s not much to do with Rendezvous if there’s just one Rendezvous-enabled computer in the network.

Yay, now it’s even easier to fool myself into buying an iBook.

Here is a list of various cool Rendezvous apps.

Tradition are evil. They sold a Gamecube + Metroid Prime for 1999 SEK. The voices in my head forced me to buy it!

It took me 17 hours to complete the game. Wasn’t too hard — the only times I actually died were in a few boss fights, and never more than once per boss.

I’ve been a big fan of the Metroid series ever since I played the first Metroid for the good old NES somewhere back in the late 80’s. Around 1992 I sold my NES and bought a SNES instead, and toward the end of 1993 Super Metroid was released. I consider it the best SNES game ever. I still play it via emulator every now and then.

I finished Super Metroid in 13 hours and 21 minutes the first time — and still remember the numbers. Then I shaved it down to five hours the second time. Now I’m replaying Prime on hard mode, and it’s still just as fun as the first time.

For those uninformed heathens who have never heard of the Metroid games, here’s a brief history of the games, if you want to spoil the story completely.

The Gamecube is a rather amazing piece of hardware. The graphics in Metroid Prime are absolutely amazing. And I’ll probably pre-order Zelda: Wind Waker while I’m at it. The Zelda series also rank high on my list.

Update: Here is a d20 conversion of Samus, Mother Brain, Kraid, Ridley and Alpha Metroids, using the Star Wars d20 rules. Is that perverse or what?