Another book read

Review coming soon. Magician: Apprentice was damn good.

Oh my god dude, what?

Remember kids, just say no to crack.

The real mindfuck? This actually happened. This is from Our Valued Customers, a webcomic based on actual things the creator, Tim Chamberlain sees and hears at the comic book store that he works at. So yeah, some girl actually had her ears surgically altered to look like elf ears. There is but one response to this kind of fuckery: the double facepalm.

Roll a die for him, Happy Gary Gygax Day!

Going by the plethora of posts I've been seeing, today is a geek holiday marking what would have been the 74th birthday of Gary Gygax, creator of D&D and father of roleplaying games in general. While I've never played Dungeons and really, only ever played a pen and paper RPG once in my entire life, I am a fan of RPG video games and because of that, I raise my glass in solemn and heartfelt thanks to him. Without him, there probably would not be a Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, Star Ocean, Mass Effect, or Dragon Age series.

Thanks Gary!

Picture via Futurama Wiki. Oh, and hat tip to Eli Arndt, since I stole his idea of using a picture from the episode of Futurama that Gygax was in.

Cirith Ungol

xkcd.

The alt text is worth reading:

My all-time favorite example of syntactic ambiguity comes from Wikipedia: 'Charlotte's Web is a children's novel by American author E. B. White, about a pig named Wilbur who is saved from being slaughtered by an intelligent spider named Charlotte.'

It took me a minute to grasp the meaning, but once I did, it was worth a snicker. The joke is that it sounds like Wilbur had to be saved from Charlotte, rather than Charlotte saving him from being slaughtered. The strip and title themselves are references to Cirith Ungol, the pass that Gollum led Frodo and Sam through on the way to Mordor. The pass led to Torech Ungol, home of that big old spider, Shelob. Basically, Randall Munroe managed to make a reference to both LOTR and Charlotte's Web in one comic. Gotta love xkcd.

Yet another book to read: Magician: Apprentice by Raymond E. Feist

Dual reading is fun. I didn't intend to add this book to the mix, but I took it off the shelf at ye old librarium and figured "what the hell." Actually, I took it and two other Feist books: Shadow of a Dark Queen because I wasn't sure if it or Magician was the first book of his Riftverse, and Talon of the Silver Hawk because I thought it was an unrelated series. Well, Magician is the first and Silver Hawk is related to the series, so I guess those two are out of consideration at the moment. Here's the summary, then hit the jump for more.

To the forest on the shore of the Kingdom of the Isles, the orphan Pug came to study with the master magician Kulgan. But though his courage won him a place at court and the heart of a lovely Princess, he was ill at ease with the normal ways of wizardry. Yet Pug's strange sort of magic would one day change forever the fates of two worlds. For dark beings from another world had opened a rift in the fabric of spacetime to being again the age-old battle between the forces of Order and Chaos.

And The Hobbit duology might become a trilogy

So much for our wallets, lol. Apparently Peter Jackson and the Studios are mulling it over and if they do it, Jackson will somehow create a third movie using Tolkien's own notes. Cripes.

I have to post this: RPG Lady Armor

Click to embiggen.

(via Dorkly)

Food for the journey

Clearly, the Elf that created Lembas never met Hobbits.

Ahoy there! Navies in Warcraft II

Elven Destroyer.

One of my favorite things about Warcraft II - the ships! One of the things that disappointed me about Warcraft III - the lack of ships! It was fun as hell to build up a small squadron of ships and send them out on the prowl for defenseless transports or oils tankers, or taking an enemy squadron by surprise. In the game, ships also had the ability to fire on air units, as well as shore bombardment. I always imagined how fun it would be to wage a battle while destroyers and battleships provide artillery support. Then there were the subs: Gnomish submarine for the Alliance and Giant Turtle for the Horde. Nothing quite like sneaking up on an enemy ship and let the torpedoes rip!

Horde Juggernaut.

Warcraft III did have ships, but they unfortunately, you couldn't use them like in WC2, so it was pretty disappointing, especially since the graphics were 3D.

I wouldn't mind seeing a Warcraft naval wargame or really, a Warcraft wargame period. Hint, hint, Blizzard. HINT HINT.

Charge of the Rohirrim

DEATH!!!

There's no accounting for dumb luck

Real Life Comics by Greg Dean.

Currently reading: Sourcery by Terry Pratchett

Because I've waited long enough to return to Discworld. Almost a year, in fact. I stopped reading the books because I could never get a hole of Sourcery. You see, my local library has a collection of the books and that's what I was drawing from. Unfortunately, someone kept checking out Sourcery and rather than skip over it, I decided just to wait for it to become available. Then I stopped going to the library for many, many months, because they never seemed to have anything of interest. Even after I started going back, I didn't feel the itch to dive back into Discworld until the other day, when I checked it and Wyrd Sisters out. Now that I've finished A Game of Thrones, it's high time I get to reading some Discworld. It shouldn't take more than two or three days to finish it, then I'll move on to something else before laying into Wyrd Sisters.

Picture via The Annotated Pratchett File.

In a game of thrones, you either finish the book or you die

Literacy can be very dangerous. Seeing as how I'm not dead, we can safely assume that I finished A Game of Thrones. Only a few hours ago, actually. I'm not going to write a review, I both suck at them and it took me well over a year to finish the book. When I first started reading it, I don't even think Game of Thrones was even announced and when it was, I decided to finish AGoT before the first season aired. That didn't happen, as I overdid it and burned myself out on the book. After that, I read the book off and on until recently, when I decided to finally finish the thing.

Anyway, I liked the books, especially where it differed with the TV series. AGoT has much more depth than the show, but I like them both about the same, with the former edging out the latter. As a result of the show, however, I kept picturing the characters in the book as their TV equivalent, but I'm not complaining. I didn't really have a mental image for any of them, save for Tyrion, and what he looked like in my mind was vastly inferior to Peter Dinklage. If I had to give A Game of Thrones a rating, I'd like 9.75/10. The length was a bit wearing and it's not even the longest book. Oh boy.

This Discworld cake is definitely not a lie

Via Geeks Are Sexy. h/t Tor.com.

Damn wizards and their wind spells

So, I managed to survive Stormageddon 2012, despite the best efforts of wizards and Phaulkon. Rather not repeat it, though. Those winds were pretty damn intense, apparently clocking up to 90 miles per hour! It's pretty damn impressive and a bit frightening when you see a tree that's been uprooted by wind. Anyway, my parents and I were among the two million who lost power Friday night and it wasn't restored for us until six this morning. That was a rough weekend for everybody because were also in the midst of a heatwave and trust me, you never want to have to deal with 100 degree (up to 105 in some areas) weather during a blackout.

I did do a good deed this weekend, however. We're neighbors with an old couple and Saturday afternoon the lady came over and asked my dad for help: her husband, who's been in declining health, had fallen on the floor and she needed help getting him up. I was dozing at the time, but woke up and as soon as he told me what had happened, I was fully awake, out the door, and hauling ass over there before he had even gotten to his shoes. Her husband was fine, the heat just got to him; poor guy was covered in sweat. My dad told them that if he had to, he would park his minivan in front of their house and use it to power a fan (via an adapter he just bought) to help them beat the heat. Fortunately, her husband's niece came by to check on them everyday and brought them bags of ice.

She thanked us both profusely, but I was just obeying my alignment. :)