Squidicus Leviticus stayed up too late looking at the clock one eyed when rather lurid he decided the clock was a plate. Then he slept, and while he did, all the roman numerals loosened and trickled Leviticus past, I, III, V, just about that fast. Till from his slumber he jarred eyed wide to stop his watch in a tear cried, "This plate is Death, for goodness sakes!"
I M L RON from ancient stars, now may I borrow your IRON for my new blue shirt, I am serious not IRON IC (SIC) for I dream from B-YOND B-WARE what the seer sees in false light, for the Solar System is Solar Powered.
With Dragon’s most recent post about eggs, I thought I would briefly plug a sort of “egg experiment” that I myself was involved in.
While I living in Essex, my friend Russ (Rebelli0n) told me about a feast he and his friends used to make called Egg Mountain. I was so utterly intrigued by the monstrosity that he described to me, I made him swear that he would show me the art of cooking it. One evening he did, and the now infamous Egg Mountain movie resulted. The video, if I recall correctly, was rather fittingly shot over Easter vacation. Russ’s girlfriend (Caroline) and our friend Tamara helped out with the cooking.
We’ve posted the video on our site in a small format, but it can also be download on Russ’s site, in a larger avi format. Regardless of where you download the video from, I encourage all to check out Russ’s site, Tactical Syntax, which always has insightful commentaries (most recently about the newest incarnations of Dr. Who and Capt. Scarlet) and features the many projects that Russ is involved with. Russ has indicated that he will soon be posting his movie Eldridge (2004), which when he does, I encourage anyone at all interested in independent movie productions and science fiction to watch. It is stellar in every sense of the word.
Finally, for those who watch Egg Mountain, pay close attention to the end of the video where a picture of Dick Van Dyke and a cartoon version of Van Dyke are featured. Russ explained to me that he did not place Dick Van Dyke into the video to be funny and campy. Nor is it a coincidence that both a real picture of Van Dyke and cartoon picture appear. Rather, Van Dyke, and what might be labeled as the meta-Van Dyke, are placed in the video to alert others to what might be Van Dyke’s more problematic connection to the advent of the DVD. At some point, I hope that Russ will elaborate more just what this connection is.
In other words, check his site regularly.
As per bear’s request, I checked out the possibility of converting NSFs to Midi format, specifically the Spelunker theme for his cell phone. After quick consulting with my Minibosses friends I found there is quite a nice app for that called nsf2midi that not only does a great job of aproximating the sound from the NSFs, but also lets you tweak everything from there. For example, when converting the Spelunker theme it set a closed high-hat or something instead of a snare, but I was able to just change all that with a drop-down menu. So, if anyone needs a conversion, it looks like I’m open for business.
For a long time now, probably since I got out of college, I’ve been cooking eggs occasionally. And, except for those already cracked before the package was opened, I have yet to find a bad egg no matter how old the container. Or at least I haven’t found one that actually had “the smell of rotten eggs”.
Over time this has spawned the Good Egg Hypothesis, which is something to the extent that: An unbroken, properly refrigerated egg never goes bad.
Today I did an experiment that put this hypothesis to the most extreme test I’ve ever administered it. I had a taste for hard boiled eggs and there were two left in the carton so I slipped them in to boil. In the past I’ve noticed eggs usually sink to the bottom of the pot, but these eggs floated right at the top. The one even floated nearly a quarter out of the water.
I figured this was probably a bad sign so I checked out the internet for info and found these instructions on how to hard boil eggs. Among other things the instructions say that older eggs almost float and are better, but that eggs which actually do float are too old and shouldn’t be used.
So generally I spend most of my free time messing around with pen-and-paper roleplaying games. Although I don’t know if “messing around” is exactly the right phrase to describe what I do. Maybe it would be more accurate to say “wallowing in them and obsessing over them like a junkie with his drug of choice”. There are a lot of people who suffer from this particular habit apparently and I usually get encouragement in my addiction from the good people over at rpg.net.
Some of these people do actually seem to be decent, well balanced folks. But when I say “good people” here I am of course using this phrase ironically or at least as flattery. I mean “good people” in the same sense that western Europeans of centuries past referred to the fairies as “the good people”. Basically in that many are wise or impressive, but also strange or unkenable and likely as not alien to the narrator’s cosmology and morality. The sort of creatures that should be referred to as “good” out of politeness lest they take a malign interest in the you and curdle your milk or worse.
These good people keep me engaged with their threads on roleplaying matters. But after awhile the really compelling threads stop coming so I’m forced to turn to my own devices and get back to the actual RPG design that I claim to be some kind of minor expert in.
After about 6 months of running protozoic.com, I decided to take a look at all the phrases that brought up our site in search engines. You see, when someone types in a phrase in search engine like Google and clicks on a result, the search phrase used to find the result is forwarded on to the site hosting the “result.” This phrase shows up in the server logs and various log analysis packages tally up the results.
So, looking through the search phrases that led people to our site show some expected and some unexpected results. Of course, obvious words like “protozoic” make sense (by far the most popular phrase), and it warms my heart that several people were obviously looking for us with phrases such as “mike tim gray spontaneous combustion protozoic” or “may i have some cake please video.”
Thanks to Tom, we have a wonderful selection of phrases originating from people searching for Committed ringtones for their cell phones. We can thank Brian for “infantryzone,” the “.475 wildey” phrases, and all the variations of “xtreme walking” and “parkour.” I have no idea why so many are interested in it, but it certainly seems popular. And of course, Fart Bomb is no doubt the target of “fart mp3,” “fart poetry,” “fart science projects,” “how do we fart,” and of course, just plain old “fart.” Wonder why people are so interested in farts?
All of these phrases that I’ve mentioned make sense. Of course, its interesting to see what exactly leads people to Protozoic, but still, the phrases do generally have something to do with the content. Its the others that confuse me:
I look forward to the next 6 months of search phrases to see what kind of stuff brings people to Protozoic.
When the mouse costume arrived today, the thrill of exhilaration that surged through me must have surely been equal to that of Ben Franklin’s when he discovered electricity after being zapped by a lightning bolt. At some point however, during my frenzied celebration of running, foaming, leaping and shouting, it dawned on me that the things which were giving me ecstatic glee were perhaps only doing so because I was, rather sadly, unemployed. It had only been five minutes earlier that I’d been amusing myself by belching into an empty milk glass and trying to waft the fumes into my face. Silently cursing the particularly pesky milk fumes that refused to come out from the bottom of the milk glass, I was certain that the belching-wafting entertainment was a symptom of my unemployedness. The question was though, was my jubilance over the mouse costume? When Tim got home, I got my answer. I hadn’t even gotten one word out of mouth before Tim was fully garbed in downy mousey attire and making series of arcane mouse-ing motions with his arms. It was then that I, like Franklin perhaps, was privy to my own little piece of the light, and knew unemployed, or employed, that the mouse costume was timeless.
Morty
the
Mortician
was a kind
of a beautician
who
slurred
his words
cause he needed of
a SpamSieve,
not a liver,
to filter the
whiskey rye,
and when grandfather
died,
my mother
was
absolutely
mortified
when old Morty said,
“No one gives
two hoots
about stuff like nutrition
when you go to the
palace in the sky”.
C roatia is smelly
U nless you like flowers
N ot that I’m prejudiced
T hat would be presumptuous
F uck Croatia anyways
A nd all their Croatian ways
R ed Bull and Red Politics
T hat’s all those fuckers got
