paka might get a giggle out of this short, "Tom and His Pals" that mycroftb found, on one guy and his D&D group. Not entirely worksafe. =:D

Here's an insight from a culinary perspective on what makes Ratatouille such a good movie. (One not-quite-spoiler within) "Last weekend Chef Pardus called me to say if I didn’t take my kids that very weekend to Ratatouille, I was a loser. This from the same guy who called me a wuss because I didn’t want to drive 30 miles through a blizzard to make a bechamel sauce."

Peter Davison's apparently set to take over the role of King Arthur in the West End production of Spamalot. ^_^ "It was written by former Python Eric Idle, who recently unveiled his next project - Not The Messiah (He's A Very Naughty Boy) at Toronto's Luminato festival."

Via metaquotes, Ten Quintessentially British Things the Rest of the World Will Never Understand. "You're allowed to drink legally in the UK at the age of 18 which means that most people are seasoned drinkers by the time they hit 16. However, due to immature taste buds and the need for near-constant sugary input, beer is rarely the beverage of choice. So it usually goes one of two ways - Lambrini for girls, White Lightning for boys. They're pretty interchangeable really, with both just tasting like a combination of Capri Sun and gasoline, but teenage boys can't be seen to drink something as feminine as Lambrini (which I believe is Italian for 'teen pregnancy ahoy'), so they stick with the cider."

Fearsomely pointless invention for the day: sliced bread. Not into slices, but to remove the crusts. It was inevitable, though, given the Anglophone world's obsession with fresh, crunchy breads, leading to over 700 dental accidents in 2005 alone.

Ghibli's latest, Tales from Earthsea, isn't one to hurry out for - but I'll note I'm not one for medieval fantasy. After forty minutes, I gave up on it, to resume some other day - as beautiful as any Ghibli production, very good score, but a wretchedly trite story with all the usual generic elements. Whether this is the fault of the original, or a poor adaptation, I can't say, not knowing the originals; I'd be disappointed either way, frankly. Anime News Network has a lengthier review here, which I'd essentially agree with.

A rather different film was Ga-ga Chwala Bohaterom ("Ga-ga: Glory to the Heroes"), a Polish tale of a future in which everyone's too contented to bother with aspiring to be astronauts, so prisoners are sent off to distant planets instead. Our hero arrives, but finds things are.. a little odd. Squalid, certainly, but it's the welcoming gifts the enthusiastic official gives him, including a garotte, automatic machine gun, and a bomb. ("Leave it on a bus, during rush hour. Always very popular!") Think of Mad Max and the dregs of Robocop, crafted with the sharp and bleak humor of Brazil.

Baccano! looks like it could be fun - action/adventure in a Prohibition-style gangland setting. With vampires. ^_^ Looks like it might make up for the loss of Darker than Black from the fansub scene.

Here's quite a neat thread on opening the iPhone, noting the progress that's being made. One easter egg of sorts: dial *3001#12345#* and call. It'll launch the FieldTest application, displaying all the cell towers it's seeing, and whose network they're affiliated to.

Time for some Thai, I thought. Not in the least authentic, but you get the drift. Boiling water, four finely sliced bird's eye peppers, a good dose of garlic granules, some basil, a sachet of chicken & mushroom instant soup, about eight thickly sliced mushrooms, three ground up anchovies, some smoked hot paprika, and two cubed pork chops with the fat trimmed off, all left to simmer gently for an hour or two. Then, once everything seemed to have made its peace with each other, the vegetables - plenty of baby corn, some mangetout, and some green beans, plus a small packet of large prawns, left to steam away at itself until the vegetables remained crunchy but the prawns didn't.

Most satisfactory. Not "burns twice", but more "heated seating option".

Tonight, though, I went in a simpler direction, with two parts to it all - vegetables, and meat. First, some baby corn, mangetout, and sweet pepper into the microwave to get steamed up, then into the wok with three teaspoons of a very pleasant sauce from the supermarket: cranberry, Seville orange, and port, tossed around with a little water to form something of a glaze. Out onto the plate, to make way for the teaspoon of chili oil, sprinking of garlic granules, and a bird's eye pepper, sliced finely. After that had had a chance to cook through, in with a nice pile of left-over chicken & stuffing, cubed up. Tosstosstosstosssoysaucetosstosswatertosstosstoss (and again). And then out to join the vegetables on the other side of the plate.

Definitely worthwhile. I could've maybe used two or three peppers, given they've been in the fridge for a fortnight, so they're not as potent as when fresh, but that well-rounded heat played very well with the stuffing, which in turn went along with the delicately sweetened corn and mangetout.

And as a bonus, the fumes ensured I was left alone in the kitchen. =:D

According to a quick wc LJ*, I've written about 115,600 words in this journal. Still some way to go until I top a million.. well, no time like the present. =:)

A new, very furry music video: Wintersleep - Jaws of Life. Where else will you get to see a bunny driving a car that's transformed into a mechadeer? (Band's site here)

The other clip you should see this week has to be one person's description (FLV) of March of the Emperor, the original French title for March of the Penguins. =:)

Bruce Campbell is inherently cool (FLV), even in a commercial.

Kawaii Not comes up with another gem. =:) On the genuinely cute (and bizarre) front, though, this fruity entry from CuteOverload really needs to be seen. Who knew you could do that with a banana? (And as for rats..) Here's a superb way to waste an afternoon: a Warcraft-inspired Flash game, noticed by patch_bunny. Lay down a choice of towers with their differing capabilities, upgrade or install new ones as you're able, and see how many levels you can annihilate. ^_^; And if someone at the con's reading this: "Are any of you guys that are headed to FC going to be coming through Colorado on your way back? If so, can you accomodate a small animal carrier with 2-4 baby rats in it? Will trade MULTIPLE full color commissions in exchange for transport help."

ysengrin may want to see the trailer for the forthcoming New Zealand film Black Sheep, as shadowolf noticed.

Sounds like a fascinating documentary: American Eunuchs.

Consider, if you please, the lives of dogs and cats. (Thanks to momentrabbit and dagoski!)

As for the iPhone - drop-dead gorgeous, but it's the UI that fascinates me. It pretty much goes without saying that screen will be coming to the other iPods soon enough. If you've not seen it in action, here's a quick demo that'll give you a good idea of just how much work's been put into the device.. so beautifully refined. Or, if you'd prefer to watch the full-blown demo, the keynote and just the introduction can be seen here, or, for best quality, go to the iTunes Store, search on "keynote", and click "Subscribe" on the Macworld Keynote Address. It'll load in the background - 1.2GB in all.

Speaking of which, this Ars thread explores some of the future possibilities of multitouch UIs - it also covers that demo you may have seen, by Jeff Han of MIT. (And if you haven't, watch it now!)

Apparently, its version of OS X - which does indeed appear to be the real deal, simply optimised and relieved of portions irrelevant to the device - weighs in at "considerably less" than 512MB of flash. I wonder if World of Warcraft could run on it.. =:) (Yes, joking, but still.. only trouble is that the critter appears to be Xscale-based, and furtherance of its design seems to've largely stalled in recent years. Perhaps the iPhone might be where the PowerPC makes its return to Apple - there are some quite attractively low power, high performance PPCs around)

Deservedly, comment of the week on The Comics Curmudgeon, speaks of this Curtis strip, "Why the hell aren't glowing telepathic otters the most publicized aspect of Kwanzaa? Its presence in Curtis has single-handedly legitimized this holiday in my mind." "A mother and son accused of stealing a snake from a pet store were arrested when they returned to the store and asked for books on how to care for the animal, police said. Store clerks recognized the suspects from surveillance video taken during the theft and stalled them until police arrived." The question posed in this quiz show is "which of these orbits the Earth?", with the choices being the Moon, the Sun, Mars, and Venus. The pain, the pain..

Parallels Workstation is nifty stuff. Have a look at these screenshots showing OS X and XP applications side-by-side on the same desktop, like any other apps, each running natively within their own OS, no emulation involved.

Could be interesting: a memorial to Carl Sagan in SL, opened by his son.

balor has nobly been researching what may, indeed, be the world's worst book. Don't say you weren't warned. (An excerpt is included. Oh, how you'll wish there weren't.. and no, this is not intentionally bad, and even has a glowing New Yorker review)

I wonder what kind of climate and soil durians can manage in, outside their native areas..

Not that I have a Linux-capable router (or maybe I do? It's a 3Com 3CRWDR100A-72), but if I had one and put one of the router distros on it, is it possible to rig the firewall rules such that traffic coming in unencrypted would only be able to see the internet, not the LAN, and anything using WPA2 would have full access? (Some bandwidth throttling mightn't be a bad idea either, just to be sure no casual visitor on the street wound up slurping all my bandwidth)

Quote for the day from Tycho: "E3 wasn't so much work as it was... It's hard to say what it was, which I suppose is another reason to dismantle it. It was more like our Moose Lodge, a masculine retreat minus the bongos and face paint." (The comic, though, leaves me puzzled, given I was flying intercontinental before I could walk =:)

For OS X geeks, Google's now released an implementation of the Linux FUSE mechanism, permitting the (theoretically =:) easy addition of a range of filesystems. "Examples of file systems that work have been tested (to varying degrees) include sshfs, ntfs-3g (read/write NTFS), ftpfs (read/write FTP), wdfs (WebDAV), cryptofs, encfs, bindfs, unionfs, beaglefs (yes, including the entire Beagle paraphernalia), and so on."

Streamburst has a novel approach to DRM - don't use it. Just add a few seconds at the start saying who downloaded that copy, and embed a small off-screen "watermark" confirming that. Buy an episode of, say, Long Way Round for £1.35, and you get a 752x416 H.264 version for DVD-grade playback, 320x176 H.264 for iPods and suchlike, and 208x112 MPEG-4 for phones. An excellent idea, though spoiled a little by remaining only level with the cost of the DVD purchase - in this case, £13 for all ten episodes on 3 DVDs.

Just so neat.. a foil boat floating on a sea of sodium hexafluoride, a colorless gas. A superb quote regarding not actually lapine shoes, but so very nearly. =:) Arashi no Yoru ni isn't just an anime.. ^_^ Interesting take on personal net.radio: Musicovery. Requires Flash, unfortunately, so it's strictly a browser-bound affair, and may or may not be open to non-OS X/Windows folks. Still, it's a novel approach. marko_the_rat might like to peek at some forthcoming Ratatouille books.

Album title for the day: Tim Koch's "Please don't tell me that's your Volvo".

One of the more daffy memes I've seen, so naturally it appealed: on your LJ user info, you'll see your ID number next to your name. Look that up in the US Patent Office's listings, and see what you're registered as. ^_^ I'm just a boring "air inlet device for internal combustion engines", from 1922. Whee, I suck!

Supposedly, Sony will not allow porn on Blu-Ray. As the brief article notes, "It does not matter how you stand to porn. It is here and it is a massive business. It is also an industry that is an early adopter for new media technology. VHS might not have won with out the adult film industry adopting it." That said, does the future of HD porn lie on either format - and there are others in the background as well - or with downloads? An hour of good quality 720p video using H.264 can fit into around 1GB - and whilst that might sound like a lot, with a low-end DSL connection of 2Mbps, that's about 90 mins to download. Scale up to a more usual 8Mbps, or a good cable connection, and that's all possible now, without any additional equipment required.

Torchwood season 1 finale: oh, gods, what bottomless pit of eternal hackery spewed forth such writing? A few good plot points - particularly the ending, and not just because it brought this to a close - but so much sheer wretchedness everywhere else. Was this some fanfic stinker that managed to slip into the script pile? (Ah, I see the writer was also reponsible for the execrable Cyberwoman, and the nearly-as-stinky second episode. Also Countrycide, which wasn't too bad) Still.. there was that rather delightful endcap to the season.

So, another chapter in SGI's history wraps up, with the last of their Mountain View offices closed; they're now all safely tucked away in Sunnyvale. I only managed to visit a couple times, including one occasion where I visited FurToonia's new home, having handed it over (with almost no downtime, yay!) from tbyte to the paws of another wizard who was working at SGI at the time, deep in their network bowels.

I'm impressed by the level of detail exhibited in Wikipedia's entry on "porn".

Rather a cool photo: a man with 800 acupuncture needles applied to his head.

Enjoying a little relaxation in the spa built within the massive ribcage of a long-expired creature.