The Stars Are Right!

This is least as plausible as any of those Chick tracts. Well, Dark Dungeons was totally real, anyhow.

I should print this up and keep them with me for the next time someone implies that I wasn't born okay the first time.

In detroit, return trip also going smoothly. Should be home soon.

Everything good so far; in minneapolis now, connecting flight leaves in just over an hour - on time, amazing.

Words fail me.

One of the more amusing movies to get lambasted on MST3K was the infamous Hobgoblins. Fairly amusing on its own, this movie was outright absurd and seemed to be a cheap imitation of the more popular Gremlins franchise. Over the top acting, poor sets, weak plot and an unpleasant 80s stink make this an instant classic in the world of bad movies.

Jokes about a sequel have been around for a while, and much to my surprise, one came out last year in June. I think I'll have to rent this and become dangerously intoxicated in the process.

Hobgoblins 2 trailer

Wolfram Alpha

After months of hearing about Wolfram|Alpha from the usual sources, I thought it might be interesting; instead of a normal search engine, it's supposed to assemble data and put it together for you in a cohesive manner. For example, if you enter "Long Island, NY" you get a map of the United States, a little red dot indicating where Long Island is, the population, and the area.

That's all well and good, I guess. But this isn't anything more than Wikipedia already does (with varying degrees of accuracy.) It does a few other neat things involving mathematical formulas and such, but I can't seem to convince the damn thing to do much that's actually useful. Even as a web site, it's damaged to begin with; you can't run a query without javascript turned on. It's one thing to enhance your page with the language, it's another to require it to function. As it stands, this is pretty brain-damaged web design.

But, when it comes to actually doing anything, Wolfram|Alpha is fairly useless. I've found that all queries fall into four categories:

1. Trivial: Something you could have just as easily gotten from another source or that you just threw in there to see what would happen.
   
2. Bad Input: Queries that aren't trivial are often too complicated for the site to parse, leading to the site asking you for something simpler.
   
3. Too hard: When you actually make a request that's simple enough to be understood, but detailed enough to be useful, the site complains that it can't handle the request because of limitations of the server. Awesome.
   
4. Jokes: A subset of "trivial" queries. You'll be pleased to know that asking it for the answer to life, the universe and everything is 42. You may also note that I was able to tell you this on a static page with no amazing software behind it.
   

If their ability to parse requests improves and the server capacity issues die down after people find it useless, it might become a useful tool. Right now though, it seems like a bad punchline to a poor joke.

Koyaanisqatsi on YouTube

Just like the title says.

This is a film I really enjoyed, and even have the soundtrack on my Mp3 player. The audio and video quality on YouTube is fairly good for the format, but I still strongly recommend finding a copy of the DVD and befriending someone with a projector.

Anyhow, my hat is off to MGM for posting the movie.

I need to find a better way to bounce SMS messages than is offered by the fail whale.

Some Topical Fun

Time for some fun with Google and current events:

1. Type "do I have swine flu?" into Google.
   
2. Press "I'm Feeling Lucky"
   
3. PANIC!
   

Fedora 10 wont even boot from a live CD. Color me unimpressed. :(

Lizard Luncheon

I've finally had some opportunities to test a deck that I've been working on and the initial results are quite promising. Right now, it has won eleven of twelve games I've played with it, which is certainly a good sign. Consequently, I'm more seriously considering going to the local Friday Night Magic tournaments to see if it really holds up against actual players. Here's the deck list:

Creatures (32):
4x Birds of Paradise
4x Tukatongue Thallid
4x Elvish Visionary
4x Sprouting Thrinax
4x Nantuko Husk
4x Scarland Thrinax
4x Hissing Igunar
4x Algae Gharial

Spells (4):
4x Grave Pact

Land (24):
4x Llanowar Wastes
4x Karplusan Forest
2x Savage Lands
5x Forest
3x Mountain
6x Swamp

This deck was inspired by a post on mtg.com by an author who was quite excited about the Scarland Thrinax acting as a second Nantuko Husk in a Grave Pact deck he had been playing. Without looking closely at the deck list, I wound up with an early version of this deck and quickly brought it to the revision above. Even a couple control decks had problems keeping up -- not to mention the prevalence of cards which read "counter target non creature spell" wind up leaving their owner up the proverbial river.

The addition of the Hissing Igunar was because of how much it reminded me of the Disciple of the Vault that caused so much trouble several years ago. When it hits the table, I get another way to deal damage to an opponent that they can only do so much about. When combined with Grave Pact, each creature that dies on your own side is worth a point of damage to your opponent. Even worse, it makes dropping a board-clearing Wrath of God a painful proposition. Frequently, two of them on the table would be enough to make my opponent scoop right on the spot. Other creatures in the deck prove to be formidable as well; between the Gharial's shroud and the actual threats in the deck having a tendency to get very large, it's often difficult to get rid of any valuable material.

I've considered a few changes; one that was pointed out to me was the addition of some Sulfurous Springs to the deck to make it easier to hit the important three black mana mark for casting the Grave Pact. While the Elvish Visionary doesn't directly fit the theme, it does make the deck a touch smaller and does serve as food for the other critters. The birds are starting to seem superfluous at this point as the mana acceleration has been less important than mana fixing. Manamorphose is looking like a good option; it's a quick mana fix and it replaces itself in your hand. Another thought is the seemingly omnipresent Kitchen Finks. A little life gain plus a two for one deal when feeding my critters certainly isn't bad.

One other addition that sounds promising is Cauldron Haze. Handing out persist to my creatures just before a Wrath wound certainly be nice, not to mention it would serve the purpose of making some creatures edible a second time around -- notably the Sprouting Thrinax. It would even help get another use out of the lowly Tukatongue Thallid as it would come to play just long enough to die and sprout another saproling.

Anyway, I'm glad that I've managed to make something in standard and have it fare pretty well at the college. We'll see where it goes from here.

Spellchecking blog posts about Linux and about Magic is always a fun activity; there's so many nonsense words involved!