Tribes!

Tribes:Ascend is free, check it out.

Spoilers!

Alright, you froods. I'm gonna spoil this for all of the slightly undercultured among us and include links for the more obscure characters:

1. Simpsons (Did you know Matt Groening intended Marge to be a bunny from one of his older comic strips? Supposedly her hair is hiding her ears.)

2. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Currently being molested by Michael Bay)

3. South Park (OMG, they killed Kenny!)

4.Smurfs (The French/Belgian stuff kind of starts here)

5.Asterix and Obelix (aha!)

6.Bert and Ernie. (If you didn't at least know that, seek help immediately)

7.Donald Duck, Huey, Louie, and Dewey. (Tell me you got this?)

8.Lucky Luke and the Dalton Gang. (This one is the toughest)

Alright. So I got all of them pretty quick, save Asterix and Lucky Luke. Those took a little longer, because I'm not that familiar with Asterix (sad, I know, but though I've read pretty nearly all of the Tintin stuff, I've only got my hands on one Asterix), and I thought Lucky Luke was too obscure for it to show up in something like this. Also the Dalton gang hasn't had the marketing the Turtles have.

I did see both the animated and live-action productions of Lucky Luke, and they are pretty strange. Entertaining, but strange. Check them out. If you like the actor from The Artist and Lucky Luke, catch him at his best in the OSS 117 movies.

There you have it. I've spoiled it all for you.

Update: I should point out that Lucky Luke and Asterix are actually hugely popular in Europe. I think they are relatively obscure here in the USA, which is unfortunate.

Update 2: Asterix has a theme park in France! (http://www.parcasterix.fr/en/monde/la-gaule)

"Are you proud as a Gallic cock and not afraid of getting wet?"

Thingies of which are something

"Something worth writing," he said to himself as he poured a handful of coffee through the cracks in the floorboards. The hot coffee scalded his hand, but the eager mouth down below didn't notice.

Ronald pondered sporadically. The tree on which his house was built swayed in the warm breeze, and the koala underneath noisily lapped up the remains of Ronald's breakfast. When the tree creaked loudly, Ronald's pondering was interrupted by panic.

He had a lot of brilliant ideas, but none of them took shape. They were all rendered grotesque when they reached the ends of his fingers. Faced with his own prose, Ronald was disgusted. Faced with a 4 foot tall ant, he was terrified.

The ant moseyed around the tiny house, feeling its way carefully around the furnishings, searching for whatever an ant may lust.

Of course, the natural reaction of a human to an ant is less than cordial, but in this case, not knowing the capability of an ant of extraordinarily large size, Ronald considered politeness the best course of action. He could use the time to evaluate any weakness, his own odds of survival, and whether this monster had friends. Who knows? maybe the ant was friendly.

Koalas don't normally shower in hot coffee, and neither do they consume it. This koala was slightly unusual in that regard, and also in the regard that he wore pants and drove a golf cart.

Maybe the ant knew the koala, maybe it hitched a ride on the koala's cart. Or maybe it was a some sort of other-worldly ant from another dimension, here to steal all of Ronald's playing cards.

Ronald worked up enough courage to manage a muted "How do you do?", which appeared to have some effect, as the ant paused its aimless meandering for a moment.

"How do you do?" creaked the ant.

Seeing as how someone managed to stumble across my little (woefully neglected) corner of the Intergalactic Sub-etha Net, I suppose I ought to write something.

I haven't been in the greatest of moods lately, so instead of being creative, I've been destructive.

I will try to actually write something worth reading in the morning.

Who?

Awesomeshirts!

I needs one!

Awake

This show looks mindblowing:


I've had dreams a little like this, where I felt I knew something wasn't right, but could not communicate this concept to those who needed to know.

Of course, if it's really good, it'll be cancelled after 4 episodes.

Nylecargssim!

I've not updated in some time, and refuse to acknowledge this fact.

Instead, how are things with you?

Oh, all right.

So this one time, Greg and Periwinkle St. Flammisham were kite-boarding off the coast of St. Tropez when a huge gust of of wind snatched them both up and carried them far away.

They slept on fluffy clouds, sipped the morning dew, and supped on sweat meats brought to them by the birds. The world was far below, and at night shined like a thousand lightning bugs in a summer's wood.

Zephyr strummed his aeolian harp, and they drifted off to sleep.

In the morning, they awoke to find themselves upon a mountaintop. Warm furs were laid out for their clothes, and a breakfast of fried cakes and wine was set before them.

They feasted in wonder at their surroundings, and spoke excitedly to each other.

"Holy balls!" Greg said. "What happened? Where are we?"

"I don't know." Periwinkle replied. "But you are eating bugs."

Greg glanced around. The world slowly fell apart.

When things settled down, Greg was sitting on a rock on the coast of St. Tropez. His mouth was full of bugs and he was covered in blood and bruises.

"That was a hell of a dream." He choked, before passing out once again.

Premakes!

How amazing is this?

All credit, of course, to the genius creator.

Story Title.

"So, anyway," quoth the slithy Bringe, "Everything was on fire, except the oven, so we hid in there until the ship was done crashing into the planet."

Once again, the Bringe was exaggerating at length to an intoxicated audience of space slugs and derelicts in Goe's Space Tavern. This time, he was recounting the time the Good Millennium Blump bloopered into the atmosphere of Boogoo 9.

The much traveled Bringe had stowed away on everything from freighters to race ships, and being locked up in solitude for vast amounts of time bottled everything up inside, and like a fizzy drink, his thoughts exploded all over innocent bystanders as soon as he had a chance to open up.

The actual events as they occurred, became all mixed up and amplified inside his pink little brain, and so the adventures became colored by his imagination to the point where they appeared impossibly unlikely, though hugely entertaining.

As a result, he commanded large audiences of enthralled space refuse in various hotspots across the galaxy with his outrageous tales of adventure and derring do.

This particular story was one of his favorites, he had read it off the back of a cereal box packed in a crate, and memorized it over the several years it took to travel the length of Perseus 6.5.

Judicious application of spirits prompted the appropriate embellishments, and soon, the entire Tavern was hanging on his every word.

Fallout Themed, I guess.

My mind is completely blown away by the art and writing of the following web 'comic', though perhaps web 'graphic would be a better term.

Romantically Apocalyptic

Have fun, it's a quality trip.

Ideal pad setup for hip cats, you dig?

EDIT: The amazingly hoopy froods at reddit or whomever did this built a webapp that runs everything together for you. Try http://www.comfytube.com/watch?v=aEj-mrwwaxo for example. It allows you to select from several fires, adjust volumes of each video separately, and it's mindbogglingly comfy.

I can't claim to have discovered this, but it's pretty awesome.

1. Open 3 tabs, this one: http://www.rainymood.com/ is good for many reasons.

2. Start awesome music, like so: http://endlessvideo.com/watch?v=HMnrl0tmd3k

3. Fullscreen this: http://endlessvideo.com/watch?v=DIx3aMRDUL4

4. Relax.

Also, if you have recommendations for more smooth cool jazz, let me know.

Masterpiece of ADD Editing

This year in film

Simply amazing.

Abracadabra, a title!

Wheee!

I don't really have any reason to go "Wheee!", but that's likely the best reason to do so, I've decided.

Now that my hand is nicely cramped from writing with a pencil, I shall turn to the keyboard for relief.

So this one time, not so long ago--probably further back than you can remember--lived a small chameleon and his friend, the magician Timothy the Timid.

The chameleon lived an uneventful life, eating whatever he wanted, mostly comfortable in his cozy little home, and only being pulled out of a hat on those rare occasions when Timothy could get a job performing magic for children's parties or corporate retreats*.

The chameleon enjoyed the production quite a bit; once he was out of the hat and his eyes had adjusted to the bright lights, the world became a fantastic place, filled with silk, velvet, smiling faces, and thunderous applause.

Inside of the hat wasn't quite as nice, but chameleons are much more difficult to spot while hiding in hats than rabbits, and he did his job quite well. Besides being produced from the hat at the end of the act, the chameleon sorted through decks of cards looking for the one a volunteer selected earlier in the show**.

One day the chameleon noticed how timid Timothy really was. So he then decided to convince an experienced magic rabbit to take his place in an effort to instill some confidence into our magician Timothy, but the rabbit was a bit sneaky. He stole some magic secrets and sold them to a competing magician down the street with a huge following and a bigger ego.

This started a magicians war which lasted for months, but the upshot was Timothy discovered he had a violent temper and he locked it in a jar because it scared him. The competing magician got locked in an Orb of Everlasting Tedium and Cable TV, but that was on the orders of the magicians guild which Timothy started with his chameleon.

* Timothy the Timid was quite good at exchanging one set of books for another, almost identical, set of books, but with different numbers inside. A trick which doesn't impress at children's parties very much.

** The Queen of Hearts. Timothy was a romantic.

Music Extravaganza!

I suppose not all of you are as wildly entertained by my insipid prose and nonsense as I, and perhaps would rather enjoy some lovely tunes.

To that end I post the following:

Lauren Pritchard on Conan O'Brien

Frontier Psychiatrist (Avalanches)

Since I Left You (Avalanches)

I found these enjoyable.

In other news, it's fairly cold out, being December and all.

Veritable Thingie

It has been remarkably easy for me to sit back, relax, and forget the refulgent myrmidons and their uncouth ilk which make a pretense of enjoying my dingy corner of the digital world.

My dingy little corner

This is arguably unfortunate, but leaves me, quite often, creatively unfulfilled, and with copious amounts, of commas. These, I now foist upon you, my unwitting victims of uncommonly comatose prose.

Ah. To finally unleash the many words I've had rattling about my rotten noggin!

Back to business. Have you ever had the (mis)fortune to tend to the collective egg nursery of the local penguin population? I did, last night. Penguins are apparently avian otters, and quite playful. They enjoy mucking about in the water for hours on end, and may allow you (as they did me) to tend to their giant nest.

Awesome Picture of a Penguin

You see, these particular penguins built one large nest, as they had a slight egg production problem which caused an unusual number of eggs to be produced, and their little cup verily it runneth over. So instead of littering their little corner of the world with eggs, they consolidated to a single egg nursery.

These eggs also had the unique ability to develop a sort of armor. They started a pale robin-egg blue, but if healthy, turned a sort of fuzzy green, like a pea-pod, or a tortoise-shell. This enabled me to sit upon the pile without crushing any eggs.

As I sat upon these eggs, watching the playful penguins cavort and frolic in the foamy sea or rippling creek that floweth therein, several eggs began to turn a deep shade of blue, and their surface changed from an armored vegetable to a glass filled with deep blue liquid.

The glass shattered, and the blue liquid flowed out, forming an unnaturally blue sea upon the ground which flowed away, carrying away oddly shaped beings within which I assumed were baby penguins, but were so far away from resembling their progenitors as to cause me to doubt this assumption.

I stared for a moment at this uncanny vision, before running way to draw the attention of the penguins to this event. When I returned with the excited birds, I realized I was correct in my assumption that these oddly shaped beings were indeed young penguins, as they were now covered in feathers and running around wildly.

However, one of the parents apparently was a large mountain lion, and she was a bit upset that her child had imprinted on me, and thought I was his mommy. I tried to cheer her up, as she was getting angry, and I feared for my very life, but I suspected she'd be content to just tear off an arm. I carefully handed her baby to her, and moseyed the hell away.

Freud once said something and wrote it down, and it might apply to this scenario, but I believe it was a grocery list, and I struggle to comprehend why he brought it up at this juncture. It might have had something to do with eggs or penguins, but he didn't have long to explain it before I sent him on his way.

Neato

The 600 Years from the macula on Vimeo.

Again with the updates

Scored a bottle of Samuel Smith Oatmeal Stout, and am looking forward to enjoying it tonight whilst watching Chuck.

This is of course, the sort of inane 'news' which constitutes a great deal of our modern internet, and which I typically despise and parody. But in this case, it's delightfully snobby* and at the same time, lowbrow, so I think the contrast is fitting for this site, which is at times, horrendously pretentious, and at others**, just stupid and also absurd.

At this point, I will comment on the weather, since it's changing. "Hey, the weather is changing."

And now to leave you all with this little story:

"Greek participles are annoying, especially when you paid no attention to English ones." This was spoken by no other than Cerebron, who you may recall is currently pedaling his way through Chaos in an ornithopter after he fell through the diabolical portal through which the evil Dr. Professor intended to travel in order to beg a favor of the devil.

But you probably already knew that. About participles I mean. Because you paid attention in school and know all about those, don't you, smarty pants.

~~

* If you bought that, you'll buy anything

** Read: All the time

Because you are bored?

Thanks to all you crazy mumzies out there who screamed in deafening tones inaudible to human ears, but really quite piercing and annoying to both muskrats and centipedes—several of which subsequently contacted one of our many famously drunken field agents—I will now regale my personal slice of internet void with another Totally True Tale, stolen once more from other, more qualified and experienced plumbers, each with an English Major.

~~

Yesterday, several events transpired which were barely notable, but which, at this point, serve to do little more than act as a setup to a stupid joke, which I will bury here for you to find.*(Hint: It's in pretty much every single thing I ever wrote.)

~~

So, last time Dan Harbaugh ate a tea cup, it was on account of the fascinating crunch the porcelain made as it shattered with every bite. Little pieces crumbled and flaked to the floor. It wasn't easy to chew, so he tried to make every bite small enough to swallow with as little chewing as possible.

This time, the tea cup was made of an edible sugar-based enamel, and not only tasted better, but lacked the satisfying crunch he found so fascinating. Also, it melted pretty fast, resulting in the handle breaking off and dumping the steaming hot tea all over both Dan and the floor.

The linoleum floor was scarred with age, and curled up in reaction to the hot tea. It was now sticky and stained, which was just about normal for linoleum.

At this point, Dan realized his dream of marketing edible tea cups crumbled with his prototype.

Speaking of dreams, some random girl across the galaxy was recounting one which she had dreamt the previous evening, and the poor sap whose ear she had assaulted with her monotonous droning for the better part of an hour was lulled off into one of his own.

In this dream the girl was recounting, she had met Dan Harbough, tea cup eating genius, and his giant collection of little robots he had purchased with the proceeds of his hugely successful edible tea cup fortune.

His robots were brilliantly coloured and clicked around merrily, and were completely oblivious to the fact that they each had an exactly opposite evil cousin somewhere. They went about their silly little tasks: stacking blocks, posting on internet forums, and an spreading cheese on crackers while Dan watched football and consumed tea cups filled with beer.

Meanwhile, their evil brothers, not quite as brilliant, and not quite as silly, constructed dreams in a giant dirty factory, with smoke billowing from the tops of twisted little smoke stacks.

These dreams were packaged up neatly, and then shot out of a huge cannon in a pretty parabolic arc into the heads of little children while they slept. This, not surprisingly, was designed to make them want to purchase sub-par toys constructed by the world's worst toy company, the Kakos Corporation. All the toys made by this toy company were not only incredibly cheap, but were mostly broken before they even left the factory.

The aforementioned girl, heretofore and thusly etc. shall henceforth be known as "Lottie", after much deliberation, contacted Dan, and discovered that he did not yet have a successful business constructing and selling edible tea cups, and his robot collection was minuscule. Her dream did not reflect reality as it was currently known.

Excepting that those evil robots were actually really busy at work constructing dreams, but that's another story.

~~

* You won't find it down here.

All things go

Someone mashed together some Sufjan Stevens with Coldplay, and the results are quite good.

All credit to the original frood.