Below the cut is my entry for this (I doubt I will win anything but a few laughs, but that was fun!):

( Lambas, the Fellowship, and Everything )

I've managed to collect a number of soundtracks lately that come from action/thriller/suspense movies and T.V. shows.

And I've got them on shuffle while I work.

And something I've noticed is that while the Venture Brothers soundtrack is way over the top in this regard, the Burn After Reading soundtrack beats them all. I think the fact that it is slightly less frenetic makes it more dramatic. That, and it was designed to turn the scene of a man going for an afternoon jog into an act of dire national intrigue.

I've finally figured out how to create and export maps from MegaMek. I had a lot of fun playing on these two maps (they go together) and thought that some of my friends might enjoy them.

Printing them may be tricky, but it's worth it!

( geeky images under the cut )

I'm getting pushy.

In MegaMek, the computer's AI is just good enough that I lose on occasion, particularly since I often give it the advantage in order to push myself. Battletech is one of those games where I don't mind if I lose regularly, as long as the road to getting there was really scrappy and interesting. My friend and battlefield tyrant Nick Scholtz taught me well. However, the AI has a weakness and I've started taking advantage of it.

Occasionally it'll walk one of its mechs up to a cliff overlooking some water, or up to the map edge. If you knock a mech off the map edge, it's out of the game (though there is a setting toggle to prevent that). And if a mech falls into the water, especially from a great height, there is a reasonable chance that it'll suffer a hull breach and be severely crippled if not destroyed.

And if you charge or push a mech, it gets moved one hex forward, enough to send it off the map or into the water. It's worth a little charging damage to take a whole mech out.

So, night before last, I had the opportunity to push a Shadow Hawk into the water, even though one of my other mechs was right where it was going to fall. The slope was shallow enough, however, that it just pushed my other mech out of the way rather than land on it.

The Shadow Hawk wasn't so lucky. It hit its head, cracked the cockpit and drowned the pilot.

Even though the pilot is just a record of two numbers, piloting skill and gunnery, I still feel kind of guilty about it. And giddy.

It was really funny at the time. Like a prank at a poolside party that ultimately results in the arrival of Gil Grissom and Nick Stokes.

As we know from the famous conflict between Alexander Hamilton and AAWAN BUUUUGH, dueling was once seen as the penultimate method of honorably settling a disputer (into the ground).

What, then, is the ultimate method?

The secrets are locked within the comments of this thread.

Ben Franklin, according to the observation noted there, is clearly the father of the internet.

I thoroughly convinced that this pleases me to no end:



My wife, however, is nonplussed by it. She likes the kilt, mind you, quite a bit. That's not the issue with her.

Some shameless part of me suspects that this video might be funny to watch.

Edit: And here's the start to the animation!

Boy, I would like this shirt:

http://www.cafepress.com/electrophonic.416933887

Last Battletech post for a while, I swear. One of my neighbors has this on their car:




And this is the website of the company that makes that bumper sticker.

I found this cool Battletech engine that runs on the Mac called MekWar MegaMek.

So, I was doing a little game, piloting a classic 3025 Scorpion against a Wolfman Hybrid. I though it would be a fair battle, but it wasn't. The Wolfman stripped my armor, blew one of my legs off and crippled a second, leaving my four legged mech with only two good legs, and then disabled both my weapons, all before I scored any critical hits against him. -- correction -- I scored a lucky engine crit with an SRM before that was taken out.

So I decided to charge him at five hexes:

( And this is what happened )

note: also, this is handy but this is even handier.

I started work on the Furies. They're gonna be awesome!

Also, finishing another Dragon today.* And maybe I'll draw a good Screw.

As one of my favorite T.V. characters once said, "Work, work, work!"


* Edit: Nope, got distracted by job hunting...

Occasionally... Occasionally! Hugh still posts something worthwhile at gapingvoidtext:

http://syndicated.livejournal.com/gapingvoidtest/1005790.html

It's still a truism, but well done!

Google has a huge library of pre-made objects to put into sketchup. I've only just scratched the surface today:



Also, 7:18 in the morning, and there is a real bus!

On the way out the door of echodaniels' apartment last night, Julie and I spotted a lone Snickers bar sitting in a bowl outside his next door neighbor's door. It was clearly left there for passing trick-or-treators to pick up without having the knock. I wanted it, but felt too old to pick it up.

Julie didn't have that problem. She simply pulled out the three banana flavored Tootsie Pops that were in the bag of candy echodaniels had handed us on the way out the door, and swapped them for the Snickers bar.

Then we giggled all the way to the car, imagining the neighbors' faces upon seeing the candy.

Apparently, it drove them mad, though.

Well, I'm sure the candy had nothing to do with it. If I had found banana flavored anything in place of a snickers bar, I'd go off the deep end, waving my arms in the air and ranting about random acts of violence, but we've already established that I'm not a normal human being.

Anyway, we woke up this morning to a text from Echo. At 1AM the neighbors had come home and, realizing that they had somehow locked themselves out of their apartment, instead of calling the emergency line decided instead to break their own window.

Thing is, you can't lock yourself out of those apartments. You have to have the key to lock the door. Either they were too drunk to realize that the key was on the chain and with them the whole time, or they lost their keys somewhere.

Edit: echodaniels has some corrections to the story in the comments below. For one, it was a different set of neighbors who broke their window.

Thanks to echodaniels, this is on my front porch right now!

If you add a red pear to a yellow pear, do you get four?*


















* This is the long awaited, unauthorized sequel to crazitalk's ponderance about how you get green tea.

My costume will look something like this:

Classic Foglio!


ETA: Also, Dave Willis' series of photos of Batman punching every six inch figure he has is pretty good in general, but this one is simply iconic.

So, I was in the middle of having orc coffee when my wife called... Let me explain.

I have this ringtone I assigned to my phone. It's an MP3 of track 19 from Frank Zappa's Yellow Shark. Up until today, I haven't really known what it's called. When it goes off, it gets reactions from people, and I've generally been amused by it every time. I'm an evil person.

Anyway, today I've been reading Return of the King by Tolkein, and I'd just finished the scene where Sam saves Frodo from the orc tower and finds that almost all the orcs had killed themselves over Frodo's mithril shirt. And I closed the book and took a nap, and promptly held an orc coffee party.

Apparently, orc coffee consists of each individual meeting at the designated space with a chair and his own cafe table. You know, the little one to two person square tables made of hardwood and iron that you find at most independent coffee shops? The one's with the single big thick leg that's good for stopping an orc blade? Those tables.

Then, you sit around, tables between you and the orcs, and yell at each other, pounding the tops of the tables. And you keep doing that until one of you picks up your table and swings it at another.

We were all in the middle of swinging our tables at each other when this went off:



That's the first time I've seen that video, by the way (not in my dream, but in real life). Anyway...

When you're having orc coffee, you don't politely excuse yourself from the conversation when your phone goes off. What you do is wake up and reach for the cacophony hoping that you don't get bludgeoned in the process.

Julie is lucky I'm still alive!