NaNuPoMo

[Zeke]

November 13

Bisqwit is an interesting guy. I know him best as the founder of TASvideos.org, home of the tool-assisted speedrun. (I won't go into the difference between tool-assisted speedruns and the regular kind, but ask me sometime and I'll write you a short thesis on the subject.) He's also an expert programmer and general videogame hobbyist. Today's link is to a particularly interesting video of his.

On YouTube, one popular genre of gaming video is the "blind" playthrough, where the player is trying the game for the first time. Bisqwit recently tried a blind playthrough of his own... but a very different kind. He literally played a game with his eyes closed. To have half a chance, he chose the first test chamber of Portal, a very simple level that he knows inside out. He calls the resulting video boring, but I disagree -- with his commentary to explain what he was thinking at each point, it's one of the most interesting gameplay videos I've ever seen. Check it out.

[Zeke]

November 14

(see thread)

[Zeke]

November 15

Smallish but important update today. With the (ahem) long silences this site is prone to, I've been meaning for some time to create an RSS feed people can follow so they know when we have something new. (We used to have something similar, a mailing list, but handling it manually was a nuisance. RSS is basically how mailing lists are done now anyway.)

The other day I realized I don't need to make a feed, because we already have one! A surprisingly obscure feature of LiveJournal is that every account has an RSS feed; it's not linked by default for some reason, but you can find it by adding /data/rss to the URL. I update our LJ studiously with each newspost, so that feed might as well be coming directly from here. I dub it The Five-Minute RSS, and I encourage you all to follow it.

Follow it! Follow it.

[Zeke]

November 16

Today, some interesting sci-fi news for those who haven't already heard. A new BSG prequel movie has been made with the impressively generic title of Battlestar Galactica: Blood and Chrome. For some reason, instead of airing on TV, it's first being serialized on YouTube in 12-minute segments. It's set in the first Cylon war and has a character we actually care about (Adama in his Viper pilot days), so there's more reason to watch this one than Caprica. Ron Moore isn't involved, but several other BSG staffers and fellow Trek veterans are, most notably Michael Taylor.

Should be worth checking out. It's nice at least to get something new from one of the big sci-fi franchises. A lot of them are lying fallow at the moment. I still can't believe they didn't capitalize on the success of Abrams' Trek reboot with a TV show -- that should've been a no-brainer.

[Zeke]

November 17

(see thread)

[Zeke]

November 18

Here's a goofy link to round out the week. The US and Canada have their share of sensationalist papers (USA Today, various Suns), but none that quite compare to the UK's Daily Mail. One Paul Battley has helpfully compiled a list of everything the Mail has identified over the years as either causing or preventing cancer... and yes, there's overlap. Check it out. Just don't do it over wi-fi.

[Zeke]

November 19

Party hats! This is the tenth update of NaNuPoMo 2012, which means I've officially done better than last year (when I vanished after the ninth one). Time to take a step back.

So what did happen last year, anyway? You may recall that I was being taken over by Samara from The Ring (and I'm tempted to just say she killed me for a year or something). This was meant to build up to the long-delayed publication of Five-Minute The Ring 2, which I've been trying to do for Hallowe'en every year since '05. But I just couldn't seem to finish the damn thing, and once again I'd newsposted myself into a corner. I'm not yet immune to being embarrassed about backing out of an event, but there are only so many times I can interrupt a newspost with [kssh], so I stopped, intending to come back spectacularly with the fiver done. Guess how that went!

Anyway, we're back to normal now. Several of the regular forumgoers have shown up, so hopefully we can get some interesting discussions going. (We also have an RSS feed now, if you missed that update.) I've got plenty of good updates in progress -- schoolwork permitting, as always.

And I've almost stopped seeing Samara's reflection in stuff and coughing up electric centipedes. Turns out the Ring Virus is much less dangerous if you stay away from video cassettes. It's been hard, but somehow I've managed...