Thursday, December 31, 2009

Don't Stop

A small follow-up on my previous post, focusing on a subset.



Why is Fleetwood Mac so underrepresented?

New Years Weight

It's the end of December, the end of the year. Let's talk about how fat I am. :-P

Last year at this time, I weighed 244 pounds. This morning, I weighed 201 pounds.

I have ~17% less mass than I did a year ago.

Yay, me? ^_^

I still have the rest of the day to lose that pesky last pound to get under 200. Anyone know which appendages can safely be removed from the human body? Preferably something I don't use very often.

UPDATE:
Hooray, I made my weight goal! Also, penises grow back, right?

Saturday, December 26, 2009

Axial Tilt Is The Reason For The Season



Follow me on this one, it gets twisty.

So, Kris Straub (you know Kris, he makes Starslip) retweeted Brian Denham's "Only 364 shopping days until Christmas." tweet. I don't know Brian, but I glanced at his feed and saw that he had retweeted a Richard Dawkins post about "7 Reasons for Atheists to Celebrate the Holidays".

Now, in that article, in reason #3 was the line "Axial tilt is the reason for the season!" I just love this line! A quick google search found a 2007 post on Bad Astronomy, and that points to a 2006 post by Lore Sjöberg (he who used to write Table of Malcontents for Wired), which is where the image on this page comes from. (Sidenote, I wonder if this product is affiliated, or a rip-off? It's clearly the same artwork.)

It's like... it's like all the people I follow on the Internet all know each other.

Anyway, the OLDEST post I could find for the line was way back in 2005, in the Pagan Prattle. I'm just hearing it now for the first time‽

Friday, December 25, 2009

Merry Christmas!


(via)

You guys! This is my favorite Warehouse comic.

Thursday, December 24, 2009

Don't

I saw this image today, but I thought it could be better. It's not ordered by size, there's no correlation between order of the legend and order of the slices (important for those of us that are colorblind). Also, what do the sizes mean? Just random?

So I made my own, basing the sizes off of the number of hits on a Google Video search for each.

Saturday, December 12, 2009

December 12th

Today is December 12th, or as it is known in America, the 12th of December.

Seriously, it's another non-holiday. And why not? It's the last xth day of xth month of the year!

It's also just a couple weeks before Christmas. Last Minute Panic Day? Hmm.

Suggestions?

Sunday, December 06, 2009

Mars Needs Moms!

A while back, I found this Berkeley Breathed book at Auntie's.



Disney is making a movie version of the book now, which if you know Berkeley and Disney, is incredible.

You can find a bit more of the story here (along with more history between Berkeley and Disney), but basically it's this:

Milo (the son) doesn't much care for the way his mom treats him (making him do chores and eat his vegetables), but when Martians kidnap her, well he has to do something, right? So he stows away on the alien ship to try and rescue her.

Now, for those of you in the bookstore with me at the time, you might remember my reaction to the book's ending. But if you really don't want it spoiled, I'll hide it. Show/Hide
...although it's not much of a spoiler, considering how much of it is on THE COVER!

Milo (on Mars) trips and falls and breaks the helmet of his spacesuit. The air escapes and he passes out, right as his mom finds him. Seriously, it's ALL ON THE COVER. Anyway, next page is double-spoilered. Show/Hide
Milo wakes up to find he is wearing an unbroken helmet.



Yeah. His mom took off her own helmet to save him. Milo finally understands the depth of his mother's love for him.


Overall, a pretty good book, if a bit abrupt at that one point. I'm curious how they plan to stretch this tiny story over a full-length movie though.

Semi-relatedly, here's an article Berkeley wrote about modern movies.

Friday, December 04, 2009

Swarley

So, I saw this video on The Daily What. It's a mashup of Frosty The Snowman and Barney Stinson. Show/Hide



I love it. I love Barney. I want to change my name to Swarley. Which brings me to the main point of today's post.

I google'd Swarley because I wasn't sure of the spelling (-y/-ey?). One of the results was a wikipedia page that talks about all the tie-ins.

There are websites for Marshall and Lily's wedding (a bit ruined by the show plug in the top right corner), a Pro-Swarley-name site.

And then we get to TedMosbyIsAJerk.com. W...ow.

Yes, that *IS* a 20-minute song about what a jerk Ted Mosby is. It also ends with a reverse easter egg.

Wendy the Waitress is the MOTHER! (of the goat)

(also, random BSG reference at ~13:30 made me laugh)

Good Morning

Dear T-Mobile,

Thanks for texting me at 4 in the morning to let me know the balance on my account. Also, thanks for texting twice, in case I accidentally slept through the first one.

Stay super.

Sincerely,

A very grumpy tired Phoenix

Wednesday, December 02, 2009

Starslip

I recently ran through the Starslip archives. Totally worth a read. Often funny, but sometimes very touching. I'll show you a taste with bits of the Jovia storyline.

Spoilers ahoy.

Memnon Vanderbeam is in love with Jovia, daughter of the King of Jupiter. He saved them from an assassination attempt.


Later, a critical flaw is discovered in Starslip technology.


Eventually the flaw catches up with them.


Memnon starts the ships computer processing a Starslip path back to a timeline where Jovia lives, a process that will take many years. In the meantime, the storyline moves along. But every once in a great while, you'll get episodes like this:


Much later, the ship's computer tells Memnon that they can use the partially-computed Jovia path to end a war. Jovia would still have died, but the war would be over (or avoided). This would mean starting the calculations over from the beginning. Memnon refuses.

But later, when Deep Time sets a bomb to go off that will eliminate the entire timeline...


Like I said, worth a read.