Drawn a few years ago, it looks like placholduhr is starting to spread.

(Third column, fourth down)

_Lasar++

Steampunk. Star Wars.

src = bda.

Today's Jerkcity has Pants singing Public Image Limited. Even better, it's the same song that's extensively abused in Mark 13 : Hardware.

Verily, I am amused.

Plasmapong is easily the best combination of techno and fluid dynamics, ever. And it will continue to be the best until Steve Taylor or his successor takes on Warlords or Asteroids. While either would be awesome, a plasmawarlords would make for a fantastic party game.

And Apple needs to talk to these guys about implementing their Photosynth technology in place of whatever it is that makes graphics handling in OS X (and iPhoto etc) so blazingly not-fast. I can't decide which is sweeter - the technology itself or just how damned fast the demo is. (src=adam)

Yes, there's the Military Industrial Complex and all the fun that's brought us. But there's also the Medical Industrial Complex. It's the same basic concept as the other MIC, only vastly more subtle, insidious, and - ultimately - profitable.

Turns out Donald Rumsfeld has done quite a lot to advance the monetary aims of both. (src=bda)

Brain cancer and politics? File under "match made in heaven."

You "Just one calorie!" idiots are drinking wood alcohol. Fucking hilarious, that. You want a diet drink? Stick with filtered water. Everything else is going to kill you. Somehow.

Think of the children, etc.

They're where the money is!

Turns out an older piece of mine was blogged about by one of those Serious Types awhile back.

Nifty.

From Breitbart.com:

At least four Palestinians drowned in a tsunami of raw sewage on Tuesday when a water treatment reservoir burst, flooding a village in the northern Gaza Strip.

The deluge, triggered by the collapse of a septic system aid organisations had long warned was dangerously overburdened, submerged dozens of homes in the Bedouin farming village of Umm al-Nasr beneath a cesspool of foul-smelling effluent.

See also the BBC followup.

11:35 < mdxi> i advise no one to click this link, ever. it is extremely NWS and NMS. it is dudes cutting off their own junk with kitchen knives and hatchets.
11:35 < mdxi> http://www.uselessjunk.com/article_full.php?id=12689
11:35 < mdxi> i'm not even kidding. just stow this away for the next time someone is grossed out by goatse or tubgirl.

Disclaimer : I haven't looked at it. Nor do I intend to.

FFV Spirit : one of the better Final Fantasy 5 walkthroughs I've stumbled across, and one of the least confusing in terms of keeping gba/playstation name and class differences from interferring with the walkthrough itself.

Found it by freak chance at home and was unable to refind it at work. Hence the post. :P

Since I'll eventually lose 'em otherwise. Nintendo DS review after I get a chance to play with all of the hardware features - so far the GBA compatability is the thing I'm getting the most mileage out of.

Jobs list (with dependencies) - Wikipedia.
Extremely detailed Jobs list. (GameFaqs)
Walkthrough FAQ by Dark Vortex. (GameFaqs)
Gamefaqs guide list.
Netjak review.

the_argon nails it in this Appletalk Australia post.

And the slot-loading iMacs have this weird little rubber boot/glove on their hard drives. o_o

(Olyntho Tahara)++

The Wikipedia entries regarding B5 eventually lead to The Lurker's Guide To Babylon 5, which kicks all of the ass, ever.

Only downside to B5? Byron's a total fucking goober.

Christopher™ (during a discussion in which he brought up the Batcave) pointed me at Pete Scathe's "A History Of Goth."

Very much to the point, and it very much (thankfully) leaves out synthpop.

As usual, just about everything non-shitty comes from England.

It seems to be a WTF day across the board. Turns out there's a Bollywood "Remake" of Fight Club (check those promos out), and a sequel to - of all the things that never needed one - Bambi.

While I prefer Shannon Sullivan's Doctor Who site, The Doctor Who Ratings Guide is loaded with viewer opinion - amusing that for every negative review of an episode, there's almost always a positive. This ain't Star Trek, folks.

For everything else, there's the Wikipedia portal and Outpost Gallifrey.

You'll notice I haven't mentioned the BBC site. That's because it's a Rich Media Monstrosity, lacking even the base useability of the Star Trek web site. It's pretty, but if you're looking for modem-friendly, well-organized, easy-to-access information on Doctor Who - especially the older Doctors.

11:50 < vai> fagbot: band names 6 is also Tenesmus
11:50 < fagbot> okay, vai.
11:50 < solios_> ?
11:50 < vai> painful spasm of the anal sphincter along with an urgent desire to defecate without the significant production of feces

Lasar found a nifty perl script that builds .dmg files on the command line - totally essential if you need a crontab and resource forks. One of the #215 cats noticed that intramuscular injections using standard length needles don't work on a nation of lardasses, today's NN2S links to a rant that {in}directly points out why Emo sucks, Penny Arcade's RSS feed is still fucked, and there's a site devoted entirely to Princess Leia's metal bikini.

Fancy that.

The Jawa Report : Iraq Gun Porn : What's being used in-theater and what the soldiers think of the stuff (src=xeno). That the M-16 still sucks isn't news at all (too many moving parts that are too small - compare to the AK-47), though I'll admit that the resurgence of the M-14 is something of a surprise- that gun is oldskool.

A recent Defensetech post supports the Jawa Report with regards to the M-14, and mentions that the Marines are going back to M-151 jeeps for mortar (hey look they fit on the fucking Osprey), and loads of money is being dumped into updates of the Huey and Cobra helicopters.

So Iraq is now fueled on Vietnam-era technology, with better night vision and the occasional laser-guided bomb. If it ain't broke, etc.

Joel Trussell's video for Jason Forrest's "War Photographer."

Quicktime, around 28 megs, and the sweetest music video I've seen since Money For Nothing.

(src=captadhoc)

Side note : We're up to 10.4.3 and the Quicktime plugin save dialogue is still hardwired to / and is still limited to 32 character filenames. Go Apple.

I'm totally going to be placing an order with modbuttons as soon as I can scrape up the dough. Mostly because I've wanted 1" buttons for ATC and DCR since ever, but also because they provided a link to the Dookyweb Avatar Creator. I've seen the avatars around forever, but never thought to figure out where they came from.

Now I know, and knowing is half the battle. Yo, Joe!

The only thing cooler than the return of jeffk is modbuttons. Custom 1" buttons at extremely reasonable prices.

ATC shwag, ahoy!

Courtesy of bda's Superman research : Alan Kistler's guide to Crisis On Infinite Earths. A HUGE, positively EPIC summary of DC's year-long attempt to get their house in order in the mid 80s. Of particular interest to me was the bit about the relationship of Watchmen to Crisis, but that's really just the tip of the iceberg here. Anyone with an interest in the steaming trainwreck that is superhero comics continuity definitely needs to check this one out, take copious notes, and hope that their own projects and aspirations never require this degree of straightening out.

I thought brewing my own multi-generational, multi-incarnation epic was complicated. But I'm one man, with one epic and a day job. Crisis was a day job for several people for quite some time, and Alan does a commendable job of boiling one of the more confusing bits of DC history down into something that can be read over the course of a few lunch breaks.

The Tactiva Tactapad. It looks like a cracked-out U-Force, the demo movie is mind-blowing, and it's currently not in production. :| (src=bda)

Digging up the U-Force link lead to Jeff Hoefs, who's rewired the things into a MIDI controller. Awesome.

Through apod : rollout of a Soyuz-tipped R7 rocket.

Gorgeous. Unlike the hangover I purchased last night, which is kicking around my skull like an Acidbath tune-up.

Said hey to John for the first time in something like four or five years, thanked Matt profusely for playing Big Black, fanboid at nurse Allison and was subjected to some guy who sounds like a slightly smoothed-out Jim.

Polecat Aerospace built a 1/16 scale model of a Soviet N1 rocket. The N1 was a wonky Doctor Whoish design that was intended to put cosmonauts on the moon. For whatever reason the Soviets never pumped enough dough into the program for thorough testing (much like the Buran, so the Polecat page is about as close as you're going to get to seeing a modern flight of the N1.

In other news, Autodesk bought Alias, putting Maya and whatever else Alias makes (do they make anything else?) firmly into the hands of a company hellbent on subscription application licensing*. Technically this is probably a good thing, as I've never heard anything good said about the 3dsMAX NURBS implementation. Politically, this is probably worse than the Macrodobe merger (whatever happened with that?), in that it continues to propagate the Highlanderish attitude that There Can Be Only One... and in business, The One is the company with the most money - not the most skill or the best product.

* That's the thing where you pay a shitload of money per seat per year rather they release a new version or not. The loose "upside" to this is that 3d modelling and rendering is so stupidly complex that Autodesk is able to release as regularly as your morning bowel movement - jamming in the fixes and the updates and the features and charging you out the ass for them. It's a situation where there's actually some upgrade incentive... unlike, say, Photoshop.

Firefox users, rejoice! Finally, someone has done something about all that annoying flash crap on the internets! Hallelujah!

(src=ejp)

Today's Penny Arcade and the conclusion of the current Something Positive story arc are both zingers.

SP vastly more so in my opinion, but it's so rare that PA Goes There with the serious that it bears mention.

I'm going to shut up before DCR turns into websnark. Back to waiting for Appleseed Volume Five and for 4chan's /d/ board to not be down, dammit.

A breakdown of Red Cross spending - makes United Way's strongarm tactics look positively honest.

Makes me glad I contributed to relief efforts my way.

Obsessive Compulsive Development : Taboo (src = eric) : A small Safari degayer which injects a warning dialogue when closing windows full of tabs or quitting the application (useful, missing since 1.0, go Apple). Paste a line from the site into the command line and Safari suddenly stops whining like a kid about to piss his pants about software downloads.

13:26 < solios> anyone know of a way to disable that goddamned $THING MAY CONTAIN AN APPLICATION!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11111111111111 (bounce bounce bounce like a fucking five year old about to wet themselves)!!!!!111 bullshit that safari does?
13:26 <@ejp> don't download applications
13:27 < solios> ...
13:29 <@ejp> solios: http://www.ocdev.com/
13:29 <@ejp> google it yourself next time, bitch.

Seriously, folks - missing OS 9's much less slappable methods of drawing user attention to misbehaving apps here (crashing, mostly).

Mike runs a blog about music.

I've just now noticed this. Somehow failed to see the "related" links for quite some time.

But then, I'm the guy who asked him "Who's Bob Ross, and should I care?" in the middle of an otherwise dead-quiet class, as, at the age of 19, I was completely clueless and felt I should know.

I - an artist - didn't know who Bob Fucking ROSS was.

Just imagine what other sorts of cultural "common sense" I'd missed out on.

Mike's the first guy I ever met who actually listened to neat stuff - whatever it was, it wasn't the shit pouring out of popular radio and it wasn't the Metal/Industrial (Fear Factory, Die Krupps, KMFDM) I was into at the time. During our stint as roommates, his taste and ready ability to discuss music had a formative impact on my otherwise nearly-blank aural palette. Mike got me curious about music at an "early"* age, and his blog is doing it all over again. The bastard.

Go read. J. Whitehouse and a lot of the DCR subtext wouldn't be what it is without him.

* For me. Life As I Know It having started roughly 8 years ago.

Shannon Sullivan's Doctor Who Episode Guide. Covers 1963 through present - all 26 original seasons, information on the "new series", and all of the specials. Staggering amounts of production detail and light on the spoilers. Awesome.

Pittsburgh Radio and Television : more thorough coverage of the media spectrum than I could possibly assemble myself.

Randomly stumbled over this interview with Harlan Ellison while looking for a quote of his for use with something vaguely DCR-related.

Excerpt (read the interview for the required context):

I don't give a shit for morality. What I have in my stories is ethics. Ethics and morality are very different cups of tea. I adhere to a very strict rigor of personal ethics and I demand it of those around me as well. Which is not to say that I am not flawed, that I don't make mistakes, that I don't out of either ignorance or misguidedness do something that is not as ethical as I would wish it to be. But when I learn of my mistakes, I am prepared to take the bone for them.