majiksznak

Penny Arcade ComicCon Sketches. "Oh God oh God!"

How does missile guidance work? I don't know either.

More Japanese insanity. This time, it's a game show where when you screw up, you get a shot to the berries.

There was a new coworker in my chair this morning. Thus ended the mystery of TSA's comment about a blow-up doll.

Nice work, guys.

Also of note is that I just stashed it behind the coat rack by the door to my office. Before I had a chance to deflate and dispose of it, The Boss came to my office. As fortune would have it, he wanted to talk to another coworker first, and didn't come into the office. :)

Hello Vader (from here).

2CV vs. jet engine.

Battle of the Signs.

The 50 greatest movie endings of all time.

Back to nerd stuff.

It's actually surprising I'm able to make this post at all. I got home from my 9 day vacation to hear a gurgling sound from my computer. The water reservoir had only a tiny bit of water left in it, and the aquarium pump whose survival is directly tied to the survival of my computer was pumping a mix of hot water and air bubbles into the CPU's cooling block. Bad.

I didn't check to see if the computer was actually functioning and instead turned it off right away. Now I'm curious whether it was still going. A few days back, I stopped getting my security camera emails and suspected the software had crashed. Now I'm not sure if it did or if the computer locked up due to heat. Athlon XP processors don't throttle down when the temperature goes up: they just burn.

I refilled the tank and it seems to be running just fine, though there may be a chance that it is brain damaged. I haven't inspected the guts of the computer to see if there were any visible adverse heat-related effects, but it seems to run fine. Close call...

I'm back from my trip to Vancouver / Penticton. The weather was great the whole time, and the gf and I had a great time. I found out I don't like most B.C. wines, but also that what I tend to like in a red wine is "oakiness". Here are the pictures.

Here are the points of interest we hit in Vancouver:

VanDusen Botanical Gardens

Beautiful gardens: I recommend visiting if you're into that sort of thing. The first pictures in the gallery are from the VanDusen gardens

Chinatown

Do you like dried skins of things on sticks? Well mister, you're in luck!

Capilano Suspension Bridge

It's neat to see, but they charge you through the nose for admission and have turned the experience into more of a theme park type thing. If "it's a really long suspension bridge" makes you want to go and "acting community hopefuls recite sketches in period-wear" doesn't make you want to avoid it, then get your $26 ready. What's that? Oh: you'd rather go to a nice restaurant instead? I won't hold it against you. Buy a postcard or see my pictures.

Granville Island

Granville Island is sort of neat, but it's gotten really touristy. What I mean by that made-up word is that you walk around feeling like it's just people waiting to leech money from you, and that takes away from the experience.

H.R. MacMillan Space Center

There's a bunch of... space stuff, a motion simulator ride that features remarkably bad science for such a venue, shows about space science, and a planetarium. The planetarium show reinforced my opinion that science education has gone to crap. They try to make things "hip" for "kids these days" and end up adding ridiculous fluff that nobody (including kids) finds entertaining. The planetarium show was called "Extreme Environments" and covered places like the Antarctic, the deep sea, and various planetary and lunar environments in the Solar System. When they got around to actually talking about those things, it was interesting, and I learned a few things (I'd managed to miss the news in the past years about a lake under the surface of Antarctica that hadn't been exposed to the outside world in 3 million years that may have wacky new life). This was all presented as a game show complete with a grating host. I believe the end result is that the kids who are actually interested in science get only small tidbits of interesting info and the other kids are still bored. Plus, it makes it painful for parents to watch. Come on, science education: pick it up.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Park

Stanley Park is awesome. There are sweet beaches, lots of things to do, the Vancouver Aquarium, lots of great scenery, and free shuttle buses. Highly recommended.

In Penticton, we visited a bunch of wineries (where much wine was tasted). I drove around to a bunch of them, but we also went on a tour with Top Cat Tours. Our driver / guide, Dennis, was friendly and informative. The wineries covered by the tour were in the Naramata area of the Okanagan. The only winery we were truly impressed with was Hillside Estates, where I picked up some nice red wine. They have a fantastic Reisling (white wine), and many other worthwhile wines. To boot, the restaurant there was amazing. We were lucky enough to go there for dinner and then for lunch on the day of the tour (lunch at this amazing restaurant was included in the price of the tour from Top Cat). The chef there really knows how to impress. Nothing tasted ordinary. If you are in the area, I urge you to eat at the Hillside Estate Winery Restaurant. I also urge the Hillside Estate Winery to fix its website, which appears to be broken right now. The beach on the North end of Penticton (on Lake Okanagan) is great, and is close to a few other good restaurants. There's a Mexican restaurant (forgot the name) that wasn't bad, and is right next to a restaurant that was recommended to us by quite a few people: Salty's. It is a seafood restaurant with a pirate theme. No doubt TSA has been there. Sadly, we didn't have a chance to go, but since so many people have told us it was awesome, I'm dying to get a chance to visit again. There's also a really nice Greek restaurant called Theo's. If you go, try the fried cheese appetizer (I forgot the name). They bring you cheese in a pan, and it's on fire.

The pictures are taking forever to upload, but eventually all 73 will be up there. I took many more, but these are the best ones.

So: the GF and I are going on a road trip to B.C. (Vancouver, Penticton). No more hilarious Japanese nonsense videos from the Sznak for a while, I'm afraid. If I have anything of value to say during the next 10 days, I'll put it up on my mobile weblog.

Want to see a manatee doing something cute?

It it me how old I was yet again. I was in a line-up and saw a young kid (maybe 5 years old: I really have no idea) standing with her mom. The kid was drawing in a sketch book. I recalled with whimsy some of the more tender moments of growing up, then got wrenched back into adulthood as soon as I saw what the kid was drawing.

It was a cell phone.

Kevin Smith vs. The Reviewer.

Bloopers from the tv show Firefly.

Human Space Invaders. So awesome!

Star Wars Origami. Really, how can I comment?

From this site. Creepy. I guess she had a promising career in the short-lived and ill-advised X-Ray movie period.

Creepy music video: Sheena is a Parasite by The Horrors.

Portal FPS gaming concept. I can sum it up for you: so awesome.

You can use a special gun to create "wormholes" on surfaces. Apart from getting to difficult-to-reach places, it lest you do something like shoot one entry point of the portal at a wall, the other entry point at the floor underneath something / someone, and they'll fall through the hole in the ground and out the wall...

Sweet tablet-based synth. I'd love one of these.

More Japanese awesomeness: trained bugs. What is with the constant screaming in the background of these Japanese TV shows?

God is a robot.

Repost? Awesome biathlon.

Dolphin-boy uses echo location to see.

Wireless dog crate. It's a crate to put your dog in, but without the unsightly walls. Instead, if the dog tries to leave its spot, it gets zapped into submission. Brilliant! It combines the best in physical torture and psychological torture. Now, all I'd have to do is mount it about a quarter the way up the wall...

Surreal Japanese video. How to handle getting mugged, I guess... I think the main message is that white guys don't know how to put on a friggin' bandana. Also, Japan is weird.

Odd flavour choice...

Strange statues around the world. Warning: sculpted nudity. Pictured: I totally thought "Katamari" when I saw this one.

Barry Manilow does for Australian car enthusiasts what Slim Whitman did to the aliens in Mars Attacks. Thanks, Chris.

An extremely well executed prank. This guy's room was turned upside-down.

This guy is really good at tapping (the guitar playing method). Warning: the ads on the site are questionably safe for work.

Here's a 20 minute video of Kevin Smith talking about the Superman Lives script he wrote in the late 90s. I am sad that the Hollywood types he talks about are allowed to live.

So I guess I have a pet spider at work. The little guy was there last week. I guess he's set up shop.

Nothing like a nice cool breeze to cool you off at the beach.

If you're like me, you like gaming but don't really have time to spend on a time-consuming RPG. Progress Quest to the rescue! This game's interaction begins and ends with character creation. Then it's more of a process of... watching.

I've completed the Deliver this axle and Deliver this carrot quests and am apparently working on the Deliver this cookie quest. My current weapon is a Broken Bottle, and I've managed to collect a mini giant pompadour and a zombie forehead. There's a sprite can in my inventory too.

Be sure to join Jesse's guild. Oh I wish I was in Jesse's guild. Da-nana-na, na. Where can I find a guild like that?

Maybe I just don't get it, but this anti-DRM children's book seems retarded. If this book's goal is to actually teach kids about DRM (or to poke fun at DRM), then it seems like a failure. I just see a lot of nonsense. Did I just not get it? I like the pictures, though.

In case anybody ever sees this who doesn't know me, I should say that I am very heavily against DRM.

1.

(It's a game)

Slate Article: Revenge of the Language Nerds.

Using what people actually say and write to determine appropriate English usage is, [David Foster Wallace] says, like writing an ethics textbook based on what people actually do.

Malaysia is tough on language crime. I agree. Do you screw up pluralization by bringing apostrophes into the equation? You deserve a caning.

Sir Cheston von Caterpillar: Master and Lord of the Unibrow. link

Video game mashup: Street Fighter / Duck Hunt.

Awwwwwww! Panda Kindergarten. (Thanks, Heather)

A pamphlet to print out and stuff into business reply mail.

According to this article, I may be a neophiliac.

Drummer and Synth. Neat.

An Onion article by a lobster: Just Wait 'Till I Get These Fucking Rubber Bands Off.

Say, is that supposed to be me on your bib? It better fucking not be. I've never worn a fruity mustache or a fucking chef's hat in my life. Or rubber bands, either.

This kitten is soooo sleepy.

Awww. Now I want a Red Panda. They should rename that one Zidane.

The LCARS Standards Development Board. LCARS is the user interface from the Star Trek shows (starting with TNG). These people want to standardize it.

Ask a Japanese person. I've got a question... Why is that one girl covering her eyes like that?

I don't think you're happy enough. *Happy...*

Commercial for Pole Position. The graphics were bad enough at the time that they couldn't devote a lot of time to showing the game, but rather what they were trying to portray in the game...

Funny car takes off in super slow motion.

The way Asians see things. This is the most awesome collection of Asian stereotypes I've ever seen. Thanks, Artoo's Asian friend!

Is anybody interested in a Technics turntable? I'd only need 1 of these 2.

If you saw the World Cup final on the weekend, you probably saw Zindeine Zidane head-butting Materazzi in the chest. Mais pourquoi? Mais pourquoi?!

What a way to go. I guess he doesn't ever want to be asked to do celebrity endorsements or something. Weak.

Hoff, no! Jump In My Car by David Hasselhoff.

It's not generally something you think about, but it really doesn't take a vehicle like the space shuttle very long to get into space. Sure, it's marginally worse on gas than a Hummer, but I think it's worth it.

The booster separation at the end is pretty sweet.

Thanks, Martin.

Article on the push to simplify spelling. Reading the annoying phonetic paragraphs in this article was interesting. It made me think about how different accents could lead to different phonetic spellings. I can easily see how Canadians and Americans might have trouble reading each others' simplified written English. I found the phonetic spelling in the article hard to read because I was applying the rules of pronounciation that I learned to the misspelled words.

There are many interesting points made. For instance, phonetically spelled languages are easier for children to learn, but words get meaning from their prefixes, suffixes, and roots.

The Slashdot article that the link came from has a few other interesting links to articles related to the subject as well as some very interesting comments.

The lost Mac ads. Heh... Have you ever heard of uShut?

So, the red paperclip guy succeeded. His goal was to trade a red paperclip for a house by gradually trading for bigger and better things. Basically, the plan involved getting other people to pay him for being clever, like the Save Toby people (who have also succeeded in their goal).

Ring-shaped water bubbles.

I've posted about Wicked Lasers before, I think, but Chris pointed out the site to me again just now, and I noticed a really pathetic quote on this page:

I have popped balloons and cut tape. It is the future in your hand.

If you think your future consists of popping balloons and cutting tape with a laser, you probably need to get a date.

That's true. That is one fine looking horse. The bushy tail... The curve of the antennae...

The American Tourist's World Cup Phrasebook. In here, you'll learn to say phrases such as:

Ich bin nie nach Deutschland vor gewesen, aber ich habe einige Filme auf dem Internet gesehen, das Leute hatte, auf einander auszupumpen.

Which translates to

I've never been to Germany before, but I have seen several films on the internet that had people pooping on each other.

Dodging punishment is like winning a prize!

Here's a trailer for Daft Punk's latest movie, "Electroma". I wonder if it has anything to do with this...

Are you a WWII soldier in need of help telling the difference between Chinese and Japanese men? Well, here you go

Are you a whore who likes to party in a way that will incriminate you in future life? Then you need these "black censorship bar" sunglasses.

Do you like to dance? Well, you're going to Hell! That's right: it's not just Kevin Bacon.

Having a bad day? Let Hypnotoad cheer you up. You have no choice. BWAAAAOOOOOOOWWWWRRRRRRR.

This building totally looks like a spaceship.

Bwaa ha ha! Some LARPers doing their thing. It's no "Lightning Bolt", but it's still a funny video. I love how they manage to combine a total lack of exertion with a display of immense effort.

The top 10 video game weapons of all time. They list the Mario Kart red shells above the BFG? I don't know about that.

An interview with Billy West (the guy who voices Fry and a bunch of other Futurama characters, Ren & Stimpy, and lots more).

Alternative game controllers as envisioned by Lore Sjoberg. This is the type of humour that made the now defunct Brunching Shuttlecocks website so awesome.

Forget goldfish: get me one of these instead.

HA HA HA HA HA!

K-Fed claims his shit-tastic rap song was bad on purpose. He makes a really convincing argument, too.

Bwaaaaaaaaaaaaa ha ha!

Is it disturbing that the most realistic impression of Queen Elizabeth II is performed by Scott Thompson?

If you are a dick to Woody Harrelson, Woody Harrelson will kick your ass. Honestly, sometimes I feel sorry for celebrities. Then Paris Hilton does something retarded and the feeling goes away.

The beagle probe never crashed. It was a cover-up. Um... Nevermind that this news is available as a video on the Transformers Movie website...