Dying Under Alien Stars

A bit late but…

Ted Dahlberg — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 16:00:47 +0000

Still a good one.

Cool biology is cool

Ted Dahlberg — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 08:29:41 +0000

If there’s anything you can depend on nature for, it’s to occasionally surprise you. Sometimes it’s a flash flood. Sometimes it’s an all white blackbird.

It is leucistic rather than an albino, which means that it does produce melanin but the melanin doesn’t reach its feathers. Apparently this has been an ongoing process over the years for this bird, until it is now entirely white. How cool is that?

I have a fondness for blackbirds since some tend to hang out in the trees outside my kitchen and bedroom windows, and a couple of years ago one nested on the ledge outside my kitchen window. I have an excellent picture of the mother feeding the chicks that I’m going to have to dig up and post. That one’s made all the better because I was only taking a picture of the chicks when the mother showed up just as I pressed the button.

Who ya gonna call?

Ted Dahlberg — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 09:20:39 +0000

Bill Cosby, apparently. This just made my day slightly weirder and better.

PIPA down out there

Ted Dahlberg — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 20:30:58 +0000

I need some sleep dammit! Go look at some interesting statistics instead of bothering me.

Hilarity

Ted Dahlberg — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 16:08:33 +0000

It made me laugh out loud, so I feel an obligation to share.

Cyanide & Happiness @ Explosm.net

Must be SO PAinful

Ted Dahlberg — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 11:31:45 +0000

We all know that you don’t mess with the Internet, or the Internet messes with you right back. Well, add another data point to that bit of folk wisdom. According to the BBC, eight alleged politicians have withdrawn their support of the proposed ~~anti-piracy~~ pro-censorship laws after the Great Internet Blackout of -12. Go Internet, this was one of those instances where you made me smile (rather than wince at the existence of smurf porn). It’s genuinely heartening to see that it’s possible to make a difference and take a stand against narrow business interests with deep pockets. Just read the whining comments from the MPAA spokesman in the BBC article and try to keep a smile from your face. Let’s hope this is enough for a win.

Of course I can’t escape the dreadful feeling that in the long run all this is, is hurriedly building a wall of sand to keep the tide out. But that’s just my cheery disposition peeking through.

Courage of their convictions

Ted Dahlberg — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 09:43:30 +0000

So Wikipedia is blacked out for the day in protest of SOPA (that article is still accessible). Which is a powerful gesture, or would be if it still wasn’t damn easy to bypass, as they themselves tell you how to do on the info page accessible from the blackout screen. It is true that I, along with most of the Internet I suspect, am too lazy to actually deactivate JavaScript to get at Wikipedia; I can wait a day. If the site had been truly inaccessible then I believe their point would have had much more force behind it. The world can go one day without Wikipedia. As Justicar points out Google is whimpering even more feebly in protest. Google actually shutting down for a day, now there would be a protest with impact. Because the world really couldn’t go a day without Google. Well it could, obviously, but it’d be a shock akin to a severe nicotine addict finding themselves marooned in Antarctica with nary a contraband dealing penguin in sight.

Intimidation Doesn’t Work

Ted Dahlberg — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 12:03:45 +0000

Probable fraud and definite legal bully Stanislaw Burzynski of the Burzynski Clinic in Texas, where he claims to successfully treat cancer, tried to threaten a bright young 17-year old blogger Named Rhys Morgan into silence through legal threats after Rhys criticised the treatments. They did this through a hired contractor called Marc Stephens, who among other things sent a picture from Google Maps of the blogger’s house in a threatening email to said blogger. Yep, that’s just as classy and above board as it sounds. I haven’t really got much to add beyond doing my little bit to spread Burzynski’s stupidity as far and wide as possible. Go read about it on Mr Morgan’s site instead.

3DS, some early impressions of

Ted Dahlberg — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 12:57:46 +0000

So… Nintendo were really evil and released a limited edition Zelda 3DS. You can guess what that made me do. Yeah. Previously I had about 7.5% interest in owning a 3DS. I was going to say zero percent, but that’s not entirely true. I was intrigued, especially after spending about a minute with one in a store just after it came out and thinking the 3D did look kind of neat. Certainly better than my only other 3D experience apart from real life, which was the latest Narnia film. But there weren’t really any games I was dying to play, and so I decided that I would get one in a year or two, whenever they put one out with improved battery life.
But then, of course, this:

It’s glorious. And yes, I am apparently that shallow. Only when it comes to Nintendo video game consoles so far, thankfully (I also own the limited edition red Wii, although I got that one mostly because it also came with New Super Mario Bros which I was buying anyway). But just look at that triforce emblem. How could anyone resist? At least anyone who beat The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past at least twice on the SNES back in the day. That’s made more impressive, by the way, by it being one of three games I can think of off the top of my head that I’ve actually beaten in my life. Pathetically sad but true. The other two are Super Mario World and Defender of the Crown, by the way. Super Mario World is also the only game I’ve beaten 100% if I may brag a little about my meager accomplishments.

All that waffling aside, what about the 3DS? It’s nice. The 3D works surprisingly well, though I’ve only spent a few minutes trying out Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time so far. Mostly I’ve been playing a few regular DS games, and I’m most excited about catching up with the loads of great games I’ve missed over the last decade or so. I briefly had a Gameboy Advance and played one of the Castlevania games for it, but other than that I’ve got a lot of catching up to do. And from what I can tell so far the 3DS is an excellent console to do it on. Everything works smoothly, the screens are nice and a happy medium in size between the DSi and DSi XL, and did I mention that the limited edition looks damn good? The limited battery life (3-5 hours when using 3D, longer when playing DS games) turns out to not be a problem for me personally partly because I play more DS games than 3DS ones, but mostly because I don’t have the bloody time to spend three hours at a time playing with it.

This lack of time actually makes the 3DS ideal for me. I’ve already got a Wii and an Xbox which see too little use for the money I’ve spent on them, but games for the (3)DS are made to be played on the go, and thus if you only have half an hour to play one night, that’s absolutely possible to do and enjoy in a way which stationary console games usually can’t provide.

So what’s the point I’m trying to make here? Probably that I bought yet another game system that I don’t strictly speaking need, and I’m trying to justify it to myself. But also that if you’ve been looking at the system but haven’t been entirely sure about if it’s worth it, I can say that it’s not a bad device by any stretch, and if you never got around to getting a DS it’s definitely worth it just for that wondrous backlog of unplayed games along with those yet unreleased.

Now if you’ll excuse me I’ve got to go back to resisting buying Mario Kart 7 before Christmas.

Oh no…

Ted Dahlberg — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 08:40:02 +0000

*looks around bleary-eyed* The world’s still here? Oh damn, I’m going to have to write something soon aren’t I?