Alexx's Journal

Not very high quality, missing several numbers, and none of the Paul & Storm opening act, but hey, it's free:
http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=justinrussell&view=videos

EDIT: You can kestrell squealing during "The Future Soon", just after the bit "She'll look the same except for bionic eyes. She lost the real ones in the Robot Wars..." :-)

EDIT EDIT: Spent way too much time today watching JoCo on Youtube. In case you missed it when it went around earlier, here's JoCo in Manchester singing "Creepy Doll" with special guest creepiness from Neil Gaiman.

AWE. SOME.

EDIT: Some people on the net are claiming that this is too cool to be truly the work of demented fanboys, that it has to be a viral marketing thingummy. I'm undecided; either explanation is possible.

But even if it is a marketing tool, that only removes about 10% of the coolness factor, to my mind. It's *still* the work of demented fanboys, even if they were professionals who got paid for it.

My very own Random Quote Generator is now live! (Refresh the page for a different quote.)

Thanks to dsrtao for his kind help.

Hey, how often these days do you run across new Tom Lehrer material? Here's a piece I haven't seen before: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIpr0s52yVk

(Link courtesy of Mark Evanier.)

It occurs to me that there are probably a number of foodies who read my LJ who do not read londo's. Therefore, in signal amplification, I give you: Thirty Facts About... Alton Brown. Note the link to more at the bottom of the post.

I haven't had much time for WoW lately, between strawberry harvesting taking a chunk out of my day, new videogames, and many nights being Too Hot. But there's a few anecdotes from the past couple of months that I never got around to posting.

I spend a fair amount of my WoW time 'playing the Auction House', buying low and selling high. Most items that sell for a lot do so because they are useful for gameplay. Others sell because they are status symbols of one sort or another. Some of those are status symbols that sell because of how *useless* they are. Many of the magic items in WoW are semi-randomly generated, granting boosts to player stats that vary within a small, pre-determined range. Shortly after the release of the first expansion pack, something went wrong with this system, and many high-level items were created that granted "+0" to various statistics. The bug was quickly fixed, and no more such items are now generated. But the ones which had been created remained in existence. Unexpected side effect: all these buggy items are now rare collectors items, and fetch high prices at auction!

If you get a character to a high proficiency at Engineering, they can learn how to build "Ultra-Safe Transporters" that will instantly teleport them to various cities in the world. When Engineers (either goblin or gnomish) label something "Ultra-Safe", you have to expect some glitches. It always gets you where you're going... more or less. Sometimes it gets the X and Y coordinates right, but you materialize about 1000 feet up -- better hope you have a Slow Fall spell! Or you can get the Evil Twin debuff, which lasts for a few hours, and gives you a black goatee for the duration. Recently, I was subject to a 'Synchronization Error' debuff, which turned me into a kobold for five seconds, then a murloc for another five seconds before wearing off and restoring me to normal.

Someone on the Burning Crusade team was a big Firefly fan. I think I've mentioned before that there is a pretty gnomish Engineering trainer named K. Lee Smallfry, who professes a great fondness for strawberries. A while back, I was fishing in the same zone she hangs out in. While fishing a 'pile of debris', I hooked a 'Mysterious piece of debris' that started a quest. K. Lee wanted to see it, since it looked like it 'just fell out of the sky'. Now we know where the pieces that fall off of Serenity wind up!

Darths & Droids is a pretty funny webcomic, which recasts the Star Wars movies in terms of role-playing games. Today's strip is most notable, however, for the commentary about dice superstition:

Pete, being the highly logical, calculating person he is, rejects all of that as superstitious nonsense. He instead applies the scientific approach. Over the years, he's collected somewhere around a thousand twenty-sided dice. Every so often, he gathers them all together. He sits down at a table and carefully and individually rolls each of the thousand dice, once. Of course, roughly a twentieth of them will roll a one. He takes those fifty-odd dice and rolls them a second time. After about an hour of concentrated dice rolling, he'll end up with around two or three dice that have rolled two ones in a row. He takes those primed dice and places them in special custom-made padded containers where they can't roll around, and carries them to all the games he plays.

Then, when in the most dire circumstances, where a roll of one would be absolutely disastrous, he pulls out the prepared dice. He now has in his hand a die that has rolled two ones in a row. Pete knows the odds of a d20 rolling three ones in a row is a puny one in 8,000. He has effectively pre-rolled the ones out of the die, and can make his crucial roll with confidence. Furthermore, being scientific about it means he knows that it doesn't matter who rolls the die for the third time, so he has no qualms about sharing his primed dice with other players, if that's what it takes to avoid disaster.

ETA: This reminded me of another story. I knew a fellow once who believed in operant conditioning for his dice. He'd roll a whole bunch of them at once, and the ones which rolled critical failures, he would smash with a hammer, "in full view of the others".

Here, have a silly video by JoCo and Spiffworld :-) (NSFW in most workplaces)