Shameless Nerd Gushing, Vol. 1

Too much geek stuff to justify multiple posts, so I've decided to cram it all together into one while it's all fresh in my mind. Today, I'm geeking out hardcore, and I figure it's not too bad an idea to share. After all, you all come back here and read, so part of my insignificant life must be somewhat interesting to you all, right? Well, here's a couple of tidbits.

BitTorrent Blah Blah + Wheaton Goodness = Postworthy

It's been a little over a month since I began seeding Wil's CactusCon performance on Mininova, and in that time, I've tossed up a ratio of 17.172 over 705MB. Not bad, not bad at all. A little over 17 copies worth of data came from me, and for that, I'm proud. I'd call that a successful torrent, since I've seen seeders and leechers come and go rather frequently. It's out there, and it's awesome to know that I had a wee tiny hand in spreading the good word that is Wil.

And speaking of Wil, if you missed it, you really need to check out his Keynote Address from last year's Penny Arcade Expo (PAX). Dare to compare: the man's good at what he does.

How Could You Not Want That?!?

Anime fans are a picky lot. We care about the art form, and if an American production company hacks and mangles a series too much in trying to Americanize it, we get a bit miffed. Such was the early doom of FUNimation, the production company behind the later release of Dragonball Z and, since, alot more series that show they learned from their early mistakes. Their first dub of Dragonball was an atrocity, and I have the DVDs to prove it.

But sometimes, hacking and mangling for the sake of an American audience can be a good thing, as is the case with FUNimation's recent redux of Crayon Shin-chan. Some of the more notable changes include:

• Shin's school has been changed into The Happy Funtime American School. This allows for name changes for the teachers, a complete heritage change for the principal, and the introduction of modern American humor to make up for the fact that Shin-chan is over 15 years old, series-wise.
• While the original show focused on Japanese social issues through the eyes of 5 year old Shin and those around him, the FUNimation dub scraps all that and goes for the testicles when it comes to outrageous humor. It's very, VERY adult oriented. Sex jokes, sexual orientation jokes, toilet humor, the whole nine yards.

While these and other changes are abound, it really doesn't matter, because this show is FUCKING FUNNY! FUNimation, in a surprise twist, hacked and mangled an Anime series into something that stands on its own as a hillarious adaptation. When I get time, I'll probably go deeper into it all, but this is a good start, and will jog my memory a bit when I finally get around to doing it.

Myth of the Prophyt

After some discussion amongst my inner circle of geeks and geek-stuff enthusiasts, I've decided to make an attempt at building a small side business in the tech sector. It's not the 2GPro that I've envisioned for the last two years, but it's a good start in the right direction, and should be relatively easy to get started. I've got the attention of the people I need to back me up, and I think we're about ready to roll. I'll try and make an announcement soon, but for now, I have to keep it in the realm of Myths.... Which, by the way, is your only clue as to what I'm going to try and accomplish...

Retune The World

I've been checking out alot of new Anime recently (beyond Shin-chan), and I've found quite a few new favorites in the mix. I highly recommend RahXephon if you can get your hands on it. Big robots, great music, and solid voice acting on both sides of the big pond. Another new favorite is Full Metal Panic! Funny stuff right there, and plenty more big robots for those that like such things.

Soon, I'll be starting Love Hina, a series I've put off checking out for far too long, as well as reacquainting myself with Vision of Escaflowne. Beyond that, I have so much more, but I don't really have the time to do so. Being a dad has its demands, after all...

Hope you all enjoyed my little geekout. See you tomorrow for Caturday, I promise!

Nuts

I know, it's been a quiet week for me, especially yesterday, when (for like the third time in a row) I missed Caturday and will have to make up for it. All told, it's been a slow week here in Prophyt Land.

I was extremely pleased to see Jericho make a return to TV this week. It's a great show, probably the first "Big Network" show I've watched in quite a long time. CBS was wrong to cancel such a killer show, and now that it's back, myself and alot of my friends are quite chipper. As of now, there are 7 episodes in the can, with one aired. Whether or not Jericho will survive after this truncated run remains to be seen, but if CBS is smart, they'll extend it for at least a season or two more.

Last time they tried to fuck with it, CBS ended up with 20+ tons of nuts on their doorstep.

One of the main reasons I haven't been posting is bandwidth clogging. When I'm running particular apps, they tend to suck up most of the available bandwidth, leaving my browsing (even with my beloved Firefox) to suffer some serious lag time. Took me five minutes to load a page from Boston.com this morning, for example.

Another problem has been my as-of-late poor health. Angel, Teddy and I have pretty much been circulating colds and other ailments amongst ourselves for the past two or three weeks, and it hasn't been fun. At first, my sinuses refused passage to anything, thereby making breathing a fun new Olympic sport. Then they dried up, albeit too much, and it felt like I was breathing through a steel tube for a while. Since then, I've been in "hacking up fun gelatinous gunk" mode, coughing up phlegm every so often.

At least I'm not alone, though, because Wil's been sick, too. He's had it much worse, though, requiring surgery to clear up his sinus troubles. Get well soon, Fearless Leader!

I'll make up for lost Caturday time later today, after I get a good chunk of my other stuff taken care of. One of these days, I'll get a blogging schedule happening. But for now, chaos is the order of the day...

On A Dark Desert Highway

Praise be unto Darwin, who, in his stuffed monkey wisdom and grace, has blessed us this day with teh goodness and hawesome. Ahhh, man.

And there was much rejoicing (yay).

The Audio from Wil's performance is up and live on teh Intarwebs (which is a series of tubes), and there are several ways for you to get your hands on it. I won't type anymore so you can get to downloadin':

• Directly from Pulp Gamer, who was kind enough to record, encode and release it (41.1 MB 128K MP3)
• As a backup, Wil has posted a copy available on WWdN:IX itself (41.1 MB 128K MP3)
• A Rapidshare Link, provided by WWdN:IX Reader Patrick G
• And two torrents: One on The Pirate Bay from WWdN:IX Reader Michael S
• And the other on Mininova courtesy of yours truly, The Lost Prophyt

I reccomend the last route, since I'm seeding that puppy as we speak, and will continue to do so as long as I have the uptime. That might be a bit shaky right now, though, given the fact that, six feet in front of me and through not much more than brick and glass, there's one hell of a high wind session going on.

The usually sullen and rather rare creaking of the sign for the office below us is now a batshit crazy pendulum of constant "hit me with some WD40" noise, and looking out the window reveals lines swinging like a double dutch rope.

Good times in Central PA...

Update: My update color is never the same, but that's not the update. The update is thus: I hope Lawyer Mama doesn't get too jealous, but for my torrent effort, I got name-checked over on WWdN:IX. I'm still seeding, and we're up to four total seeders now, with just one peer as of 2:20pm my time. On the bright side, I've tossed up enough for two copies, so my part is done :D

Don't Be A Dick

Those were the words spoken by one Richard William Wheaton III during his keynote speech at last year's Penny Arcade Expo. And soon, they could be on a t-shirt near you. Beware, the Monkeys are about to reveal themselves to the world...

Yep, Wil's considering a whole new batch of Wil-branded geekwear. There are all sorts of nifty ideas in the entry's comments section, and I'm sure any number of them will end up being used. Having designed some popular shirts myself (for the Avenue), I of course support the notion of a design contest, suggested by several Monkeys.

(By the way, for those of you not "in-the-know," Monkeys are what WWdN/:IX readers refer to themselves as. Darwin be praised.)

While I highly doubt that tiny pirate hats will be on the merch menu, I can't help but post this picture from last year's International Talk Like A Pirate Day (September 19th, me buccos!):

Don't be a dick, er ye can walk the plank! Arrrrr!

Slacker

I know, I know. I made a god damned resolution to blog more, and I spend two weeks with barely a peep. I wholeheartedly apologize, and to make up for it, here's a whole mess of recap for the last two weeks.

In Fearless Leader news, Wil recently made a set of five announcements (out of four, collect them all, bad math not included) with varying bits of awesome, including another story for the Star Trek Manga series, bringing Wesley Crusher (who was awesome, fuck the haters) back to life for Star Trek: The Tour, and an upcoming appearance at Phoenix ComicCon. For the Monkeys who read this stupid little blog, you already know all of this. For those who don't, go check out what Wil's got going on. It ain't just Trek we're all geeking out about over there...

Apparently, it's Kansas 2: Electric Boogaloo in Texas, as a fundie-riddled school board is set to take over, thereby ruining the education of thousands of Texas' children. Instead of being taught the rational, sane practice of Science, they'll be taught that Dinosaurs and Man walked together, that the Earth was created in seven literal days, and all kinds of other Mother Goose horse shit. Way to go, Texas. Grouse in the Fark Thread if you'd like...

I've tried (not very heard, it's actually pretty easy) to resist commenting on the Train Wreck bullshit that is Britney Spears and her younger, unwed teenage mother-to-be sister Jamie Lynn. The Lost Prophyt blog is above such superficial, useless celebrity bullshit, and for people to be so enthralled with this crap is just a sad, sad commentary on the state of American (and even World) society. Why the hell do people hang on every moment of this crap? More importantly, who the fuck cares?!?

That being said, what could my comment possibly be? Well, it's a sick, sorry world we live in when Kevin Fucking Federline is a better parent than somebody and actually wins full custody of two kids. That is all.

Sadly, tonight, one of the greatest cartoons of the modern animation era is coming to an end. At 7pm, Cartoon Network will broadcast the final episode of Codename: Kids Next Door. I remember when this series won the Big Pick Weekend, and saw the premiere of the original short, "No P.in the OOL" Originally, KND were to be side characters in another Tom Warburton show, Kenny and the Chimp. While one K/C short has been run on Cartoon Network (along with the original KND short and the first KND "episode"), the only thing left of it is Professor XXXL. I guess you just can't let a good Frank Welker character go, can you...

Anyway, there's a 12 hour marathon on right now, so catch it while it's hot.

On the homefront, it looks like I might be going back to work for Aftershock Entertainment, which will be cool. I'll be doing alot more than I did last time, and making a bit more money at it as well. Won't that be nice, eh? Just means I'll be an even busier boy than I am now, but oh well. Gotta make those ends...

My Empire is growing...

I've been beating my brain to death trying to win the single player, multi-AI campaign in FreeCiv. From what I hear, the online servers are full of smallpox, so the home version is all I can do. And for some fucking reason, I can't seem to get that right at all...

Paradise Lost

Wil's first post of the year is up and live on WWdN:IX, and while it hints at work he's doing that's currently in Non-Disclosure Land, it also points to a nifty photo-essay on Mental_Floss about an abandoned suburb in south Florida. A modern day ghost town of homes in different stages of construction, empty streets with fading signs, and property once thought valuable reclaimed by the Florida wildlife. Neat!

And When The Band You're In...

Wil has a new post up, and it pretty much sums up how our generation (and certainly I) feels about what's going on in Washington right now. The madness has to stop, and it has to stop sometime. Go check out his letter to Chris Dodd, and take time out to notice that - hey - some people in Congress are willing to do what we elected them to do.

Scalzi Talks Up Fearless Leader

Writer John Scalzi has his "A Month of Writers" series sights set on Wil today, and what preceeds Blue Light Special is an interesting side story for those of us who follow Wil's work. It's a wonderful piece that really touches on the central theme of both Wil and his writing. For those interested, there's also a Fark Thread under the Geek Tab.

What got me, though, was the comments section, where a few folks have just discovered Wil through John's post, and ordered books based on his entry alone. Kudos to Wil on that windfall! New readers via word of mouth (word of blog?) are often the best readers of all, and it ain't shameful to admit that it's because the advertising is free.

It also works both ways, as I'll be adding John's blog to my list of reads. Man, my RSS folder is getting rather chubby...

Update 12/13: Oh, you knew that there was going to be a post over on WWdN:IX about it. Come on, like that wasn't going to happen...

Learn Me A Book

Because I'm bored, and because I'm sure some of what I say confuses the ever-loving bejeebus out of some of you, here's a handy list of some of the "Internet Slang" I use, and their meanings. Yeah, I'm really, really bored...

• teh funnay - The Funny, humor, telling jokes or funny anecdotes to people. The is often misspelled anytime it's used, not just this bit of jargon, as you'll see later...
  
• Intarwebs - Play on the name Internet, as if an illiterate hillbilly were saying it.
• Intertubes - Same as above, though less redneck-ish.
• (which is a series of tubes) - I think someone once compared the Internet to a series of tubes, maybe it was that freak job Jack Thompson, I don't know. I tried to Google it, but all I got was a ton of people using it, and I just don't have the time to find out the origin. Perhaps Wil could help me out on that one...
• ROTFLLMMFAO - ROTFL is obviously Rolling on the Floor Laughing, LMMFAO is Laughing My Mother Fucking Ass Off. Yes, I like to be long winded, even with my Intarwebs acronyms.
  
• ghey - Gay. Also teh ghey.
  
• Micro$oft and M$ - Self-explanitory, illustrating their greed for cash while giving us crap operating systems and other products in the process. No-good DRM Evildoers.
• LOLCat and Caturday - What started with the O RLY? Owl has exploded, and now the most common form of captioned picture is the LOLCat (a combination of Laugh Out Loud and Cat, but "cat" can be replaced with any sort of animal/person/object). Caturday is Saturday, when the inevitable cat-related post will appear on Fark, and folks will either post LOLCats or pictures of their own cats for others to caption. The source of my Saturday Post material. Here's an article, including an interview with Fark's own Drew Curtis, about the LOL craze and Caturday (Fark Thread).
• Farked, Fark'd or Slashdotted - This is what happens when an article on a low-traffic website gets linked to by a larger news site like Fark or Slashdot.

Hopefully, I'll have some time a little later for a bit of a longer rant, and to make up for last week's missed "This Week on the JMP" post. Sorry, John!

Fearless Leader Reviews The Rock

Wil's at it again, and this time his Geek In Review (at Suicide Girls, so it might be NSFW at times) comes out rocking hard: With reviews of Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock, and the new kid on the rock block, Rock Band.

I'ma have to wait til Christmas to play GH3, but that's all good with me. What has me salivating is the fact that Tom Morello (ex Rage Against the Machine, current Audioslave) is a playable character once you beat his boss battle. AWESOME! And the encore after that is Bulls on Parade, which will freakin' rock the house!

Yeah, I can't wait. But I have to, so Wil's review is all I get for now. Maybe I'll post my own in a few months, once I get to the point where I'm actually somewhat OK at playing the game. I missed out (for the most part) on the other Guitar Hero games, mostly due to my lack of desire to own an next-gen console other than the Wii. But, with a loaner PS2, I can now officially get by...

Sunday Fark-Up, Snowed In Edition

It's Sunday. It's snowing like a motherfucker outside. It's going to turn to freezing rain a little later on, followed by a whole bunch more snow. The plow just drove past the house, making it's rounds on it's futile quest to keep the roads clear. No, they'll still be, at the very least, slushy and slow-moving by the time I have to leave for work.

If I have to go, that is. We'll find that out later. In the meantime, here's some links to hold you over, all found on Fark. There's some big news hidden in here, so read carefully. The rest is just filler, which is what most news is these days anyway. Drew said so (Thread). Alright then, off we go:

• Google is getting into the Wireless Business (Thread). Do you know how AWESOME this is? Google is a central cog in my Intarwebs (which is a series of tubes) experience, including playing parent company to this very blog's host. Hell, 'google' has been made an official verb in the English language! How can you NOT love the idea of an all-in-one GooglePhone? And the fact that Google fought to make sure the owner of the coveted "C-Block" (snicker) of the bandwidth spectrum up for bids comes with guaranteed consumer rights built in makes it even more teh hawsome...
• Rolling Stone is running a piece on the blazingly obvious: The "War on Drugs" is an utter failure (Thread). Um, duh! It's about as big a failure as the "War on Terror," only not as overtly costly (that we know of, yet.) I suppose you could call it the lesser of two evils, but it's no less an example of the collective idiocy of the United States Government. Boy, those fuckers sure know how to blow other people's money, don't they...
• Penny Arcade's Child's Play Charity is auctioning off two tickets for dinner with Fearless Leader in Seattle (Thread, WWdN:IX Post). AWESOME! 100% of the proceeds go to PA's wonderful children's charity, so if you're in the Seattle area (and I KNOW I have readers up there, you guys are stopping by at least once a week) and have over $1K laying around doing nothing, cough it up for the kids! Bidding ends around midnight tonight, so you'd best hurry, too. This could be your one and only chance to be able to recommend the New York Strip to Ensign Crusher...
• With the release of "Bender's Big Score" this week, Futurama is officially back! I've seen it, and it is teh hawsome! Even better, IGN has an interview (Thread) producer David X. Cohen about the three remaining Futurama movies, including basic plot details and the fact that, yes, the next one will pick up where BBS leaves off. Apparently, the movies will be carved up into four episode mini-arcs, all to be aired as a pseudo-sixth season on Comedy Central. Oh well, at least it's new Futurama, right? Right!

Verizon's having issues tonight, no doubt weather-related, so I think I'ma pop in a movie and try to get back to sleep. I'm not entirely sure if I have to go to work or not, but I wouldn't be surprised if I did. Fun fun fun, living in Central PA this time of year...

How My Poor Heart Aches

So, really. Where do you draw the line between fandom and stalking? And is there any chance that, in place of a line, there could be some sort of grey area where you're teetering on the razor's edge of that line, but not quite falling over to the other side?

I suppose Lawyer Mama is trying to answer that question for us all.

LM is a fan of Wil's, much like myself and thousands of others. Let's face it: man can spin a yarn, and spin it well. And oh yeah, there's that whole actor thing, Star Trek, something or other, I don't know. In a nutshell, yes, he's quite worthy of having good, loyal fans.

Poor LM, though, she's in the grey area. While the rest of us revel in Wil's blog posts and the occasional reply to an email with a question about the site or whatever (I myself got one once, which was cool), LM took the step into the not-black-but-not-white-either are of fandom and is now attempting a small feat of stalkery: Trying to get Wil to pop one comment on her blog.

Yeah, you'll want to scroll to the bottom of that post for the Wheaton info, unless you're up on the topic of breastfeeding in America. I just wanted to link to her most recent post...

Yep, grey area. I don't see where this is harmful. After all, she's not at his house or off tailing Wil's oldest at college, and she's not really all that obsessed the way you'd think your garden-variety stalker would be. She's just a fan who'd like that one moment of semi-contact. Kindof like meeting your favorite actor or writer at a convention: That 30 seconds of time can mean the world to someone.

For LM, her 30 seconds would be Wil posting a quick comment on her blog. And honestly, I think it'd be a bit of alright if he did. I'm not saying he absolutely should, mind you, just saying that it'd be cool of him. And what's halfway decent is, Wil is, within certain boundaries, a "celebrity" who's fairly accessible to his fanbase.

So, I'm going to wish Lawyer Mama the best of luck. As a blogger who's had that 30 seconds with Wil and several other "famous" folk over the years, I can attest to the joy you get when you meet/communicate with those you admire for one reason or another. So, to inspire her on her quest, here's a picture of me with one of my all time favorite musicians, Sascha K. of KMFDM, from back in October, 2004.


Good luck, Mama!

Rejoice: Wheaton On NUMB3RS Tomorrow!

Happy Thanksgiving to you all. Nothing like celebrating 500 years of theft, deception, and really bad Karma. Fuck the Pilgrims, fuck Christianity making it out to be a lie of friendship and co-operation. You people should be ashamed of yourselves. Now, go eat your fucking turkey...

Now that the negative stuff is out of the way, it's time for some GOOD news: Wil's guest shot on NUMB3RS will air tomorrow night, according to this WWdN:IX post. ROCK!

Rare is it that I watch network TV shows. Most of the time, they're crap. But a few years ago, I was sucked in when Wil did his guest spot as Walter on CSI. Tomorrow night will be no different, as I'll be glued to my TV watching our fearless leader transform from blogging cool guy into douchebag comic book guy.

At least the WGA Strike didn't put the kibash on this one...