Rush Hour meets Star Wars

Read the rest!

20,000 hits

The counter has been temperamental about loading, but we passed 20,000 hits. Yay me.

That's like, what, the first 17 seconds that Dr. Horrible was online?

Read the rest!

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince trailer

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince - Teaser [VO]
by Sawyer17

Read the rest!

Watch Dr. Horrible now!

Read the rest!

Wolverine trailer from Comic-Con

X-Men Origins: Wolverine Movie Teaser Trailer
by quebec666

Hopefully they will let him cut loose more than in the X-Men movies. And hopefully we'll soon get a trailer that's not recorded on someone's cell phone.

Read the rest!

World of YarnCraft

For my fiber-inclined friends, check out this Sluggy Freelance.

Read the rest!

201 and 2 weeks left

Here we are again, 201. Last time was just before Christmas, and now I am again knocking on the door of 200. Could I get 199 by GenCon? It would be the first time my weight hasn't started with a 2 in years.

I have to thank Nicole and her Six Pound Challenge for shaking me out of my complacency and motivating me to exercise a little discipline.

Read the rest!

More Dr. Horrible

At a panel discussion at Comic-Con, Joss Whedon announced there would be more Dr. Horrible.

Stay tuned for details.

Read the rest!

Star Wars on bagpipes

OK, I was disappointed also... I was expecting a full blown rendition (and hoping for the Imperial March on bagpipes since Vader is there).

Read the rest!

Dr. Horrible: Act III is up

Watch it while you can... it ends (for free) at midnight on Sunday.

Read the rest!

Heroes: Villians trailer

It says it's a Season 4 trailer... did we skip Season 3?

Read the rest!

Watchmen Movie trailer

Gods... it has been so many years since I read this graphic novel I barely remember it. But maybe that is just as well... I'll have some familiarity without being able to nitpick.

Read the rest!

202: The Six Pound Challenge continues

I'm hoping I'm not jinxing myself by posting this going into the weekend. I just have to stay good (already did my penance at the gym today and made it through the grocery store with no munchies, goodies or other indulgences).

I hit 203 two days ago, so hopefully this momentum will carry me not only through the challenge but past the 200 pound barrier.

Read the rest!

Dr. Horrible: Act II

Yay! Act II is up and rocks! Yay! Firefox3 and Hulu play nice now! Yay! Captain Hammer t-shirt for GenCon!


Yay! Best line: "My penis is the hammer."

Wonder how many times it took him to get that line out with a straight face?

Read the rest!

Star Wars: Fate of the Duel

OK, I moved this video to behind the jump... I got tired of it always playing every time someone loaded the blog and I'm not sure of the commands used in the script access to make play on request only.



Who didn't see how this was going to end? Maybe light sabers need a warning, like claymores. Or maybe it's Jedi Darwinism.

Read the rest!

Terminator Salvation trailer

Holy alternate continuities, Batman! Looks like this is set in the "future" of the Terminator storyline, with Christian Bale as an adult John Connor, and that all of the tampering in the past seriously altered the future. Time to remember how to conjugate in the future-past-imperfect tense.

Read the rest!

Dr. Horrible starts today!

If you enjoyed the musical episode of Buffy, go now! This is classic Whedon.


I can empathize with Dr. Horrible. If Felicia Day went to my laundromat I would conveniently arrange my schedule to make sure my spin cycle matched hers. And yeah, I'd be too shy to talk to her also. :(

Read the rest!

Outlander trailer

I never heard of it before. It has vikings, it has aliens... what could go wrong.

Yeah, you're right... this movie could suck worse than being nailed to the Tree of Woe.

Read the rest!

Hellboy 2: The Golden Army

I really hope Guillermo del Toro doesn't tell his children bedtime stories, because if he does those kids are going to need therapy. Between this movie and Pan's Labyrinth, it's easy to see that del Toro is a twisted puppy.

Hellboy delves into quasi-Celtic themes in the story behind this movie. He uses pinches of Celtic myth to create a beautiful but eerie world that is supposed to exist just outside of the view of ours. And while Hellboy 2 is a good enough popcorn muncher and visually gorgeous, there are a couple of big flaws.

One is his use of Celtic myth as an inspiration. If you are going to do this, get the names and archetypes right. He has Balor as the noble one-armed elf-king, and Nuada as the blood-thirsty renegade prince. Nuada is the actual one-armed king of lore, not Balor. Of course, this kind of thing is only going to be noticed by a few people, but since this is my review and it bothered me through out the film... pblllt!

The other one was that the plot was so obvious. Early in the movie I had the final conflict already scripted out in my head and I was dead on. I don't know if the Golden Army was an actual comic story, but as soon as they gave the the fore-shadowing I was thinking "that means he's going to do X", "that means Y will happen", and "this looks cool but it is pointless because of Z".

A little subtlety and fact-checking could have made this a 4.5 monkey movie. Instead, because it is still fun and visually rich, I rate it 3.5 cigar-smoking kitten-hugging flying monkeys.

Read the rest!

204: 3 is half of 6

The first part of any weight loss endeavor is always the easiest. I knocked out most of the indulgences that had crept into my routine, scaled back portions a bit where I could and kept to my gym goal.

That's not to say I was a dietary saint... I had popcorn when I went to the movie and I still eat more fast food than I should, but I am eating less of all the above. And I know if I go on some sort of deprivation, soon I will crack and binge and all of my work will be undone.

I'm sure the fact that I haven't had any beer doesn't hurt either. I've had a six-pack sitting in my fridge since before the Barfleet party, back it just hasn't sounded appealing. And when I do finally crack open a bottle, it's Michelob Ultra, so not as bad as many other beers. I don't think I want to know how many calorie a McEwan's Scotch Ale has in it.

Read the rest!

Jedi Gym

Just go and watch this.

Read the rest!

FCC recommends sanctions against Comcast

Evidently Comcast has pissed off enough people by throttling their bandwidth when downloading peer-to-peer files that the FCC Chairman has actually listened. Now I wouldn't place a bet on anything coming of this, though if nothing else it might make Comcast knock off some of their throttling antics. Check out the story here.


Since I use peer-to-peer for legitimate patch downloads for Lord of the Rings Online and I pay a crapload of money to Comcast, I think it's pretty shitty of them to hamper my download speed, especially since I don't do it all that often. We'll see what happens.

Read the rest!

207: The Six Pound Challenge

My friend Nicole set a goal of losing 6 pounds by GenCon and challenged me to do the same. Give that my weight loss had ceased and even reversed a little, I needed something to prod me out of my complacent state.

After deciding that making a food bet would be counter-productive, we decided just to throw down the weight gauntlet in our blogs. Nothing like the public eye to make your self-conscious about stopping by Culver's for a caramel cashew sundae or hitting the gym even though you'd rather go home and loaf.

So my official weigh in for the start of our challenge is 207. If I succeed, odds are good I'll hit my long term goal of getting under 200, as I tend to lose a couple of pounds over GenCon (no snacking and lots of walking).

Read the rest!

Mad Scientists Party

I don't think this is what Nicole meant when she said that she wanted a shot.:)

Barfleet hosted a Mad Scientist Party at InConjunction. I had a lot of fun, at least what I can remember (shots = evil).

Read the rest!

d20 UTH: 4e Healing Happy

On one side, the mechanics of 4e from a combat perspective is very well balanced. So far I've found the fights pretty easy to run, though it does help to actually get the opponent info together ahead of time so I can make sure to utilize any nifty abilities.

On the other side, the designers seem to treat everything that happens between the fights as flavor text. Down time isn't fun, after all, so why worry about what happens when characters get hurt. Have them heal and move on to the next encounter. It is not difficult for a character to heal 2 - 3 times their hit point total over a day, and everything heals overnight.

Bzzzt! Not in OzWorld!


While it's no fun to have your character laid up for prolonged periods, the new system removes consequences and risks. As long as it's not a TPK, everything will probably be fine. Everyone can heal up and jump into the next fray.

Under the official system, you can heal 25% of your hit points every encounter by taking a Second Wind to burn a healing surge. Plus, there are a multitude of powers that allow you to use a healing surge or trigger someone else's healing surge. And in between fights while resting you can burn additional healing surges, each one healing 25%. A character will have around 6 - 12 of these surges each day.

In my campaign, it is rare for players to run into more than a couple of encounters in a given day. My world is lacking in random underground trap-filled complexes inhabited by menageries of monsters waiting for hapless adventurers. My world is much more organic and my players are forced to fight less often.

So I'm making a couple of changes:
1) Healing surges are just surges. I have seen uses for them besides healing and will be coming up with more.
2) Second Wind is once per day instead of encounter.
3) Other uses of surges to heal via powers, skills and such will use a different formula. It will be Hit Points gained per level plus Constitution modifier (which is CON bonus plus 1/2 level). So if your character gains 5 hp every time he levels, is 6th level and has a 16 CON he would heal 11 hp per surge.
4) You may only use one surge to heal while resting, and then only during an extended rest.
5) Introducing a Wounded condition. If you take damage > your Fortitude Defense, you are Wounded, taking a -2 to your Strength, Dexterity and Constitution modifiers until the condition is removed.

I'll go into more details in the actual home-brew rules I'll post on my website once Firefox 3 and the file manager for my host decide they are talking to each other again.

Read the rest!

Movie review: Hancock

Reviews for this movie have been all over the board, and while I liked it the biggest complaint is a legitimate one, in that the second act didn't live up to the first. Didn't they say the last thing about Will Smith's last movie, I am Legend? Though to be fair, this schizophrenia is due to the writers, not the actors.

The first half is great, with Will Smith establishing Hancock as a very flawed superhero, who seems to almost want to be hated but taking exception when people make it personal. But if Hancock was really as bad as people make him out to be, he wouldn't save people.

Where the movie weakens is when we get into the back story. It's hard not to go into any details on this without spoiling, and in fact the big plot twist would have been much more effective if it hadn't been spoiled by trailers and reviews. There are really two problems with the second act. One is that not enough was set up in the first half, so it all feels very sudden. The second is that it feels inconsistent, that the rules are changed at the writers' whims to fit the scene.

I've seen some other reviews harping on Smith's performance, but here I'll disagree. I think that he did a good job at portraying Hancock and is the reason why the first act is so good.

Like the writing, the score is also inconsistent. This isn't the first time this year I went to a movie and thought that the score used in the trailer was better than the actual film.

Overall, my rating is 3.5 booze-drinking self-loathing flying monkeys.

Read the rest!

More Dr. Horrible

Check out the official site for a much better quality trailer and to read The Master Plan (info on when it will be available).

Read the rest!

Yet another Dark Knight trailer

Mmmmm... IMAX. Since the last Batman movie, to new IMAX theaters have opened up in town, greatly increasing the odds (and convenience) of seeing this Batman on the IMAX as well.

Everything I've seen so far points to Ledger being an awesome Joker, which really makes this a bit bittersweet. I really wonder if they kill off the Joker like they did in the first movie, if they originally planned to but changed their mind because of Ledger's death, or if they originally planned to have the Joker live but decided to off him since no one else would be able to do Ledger's Joker justice?

Read the rest!

Quantum of Solace trailer

James Bond 007 : Quantum of Solace - Trailer
by flogoo

Okay, how many times is Bond going to go "rogue"? This seems to become a standard for every other Bond movie. The trailer really doesn't give me a whole lot, but I'm hoping that the quality of Casino Royale carries over to this one.

Read the rest!