A hand-animated Paper Mario.
on February 13, 2019 at 3:51 AMPosted In: Mystery Clip Theater, Video Gaming
Here’s a short cutout-n-animated tribute to Super Mario Bros done on notebook paper:
Sorry, Luigi.
Comment
Apropos of nothing, I have the 7-11 app installed on my phone because I tend to use my refill mug often enough to make it worthwhile. I’ve been accumulating points towards some rewards, should I choose to cash them in, and I noticed something about two items on the 2,000 point level:
I’m not sure if that says something about how awesome that energy drink is or how unhealthy that pizza is.
Anyway:
• As I find my Steam library filling up with more indie games, this list of finalists for the 21st Independent Games Festival awards ceremony has some interesting titles to keep an eye on for the next game sale.
• In an unrelated search for Star Trek information, I ran across the CoverMe website with Five Good Covers of the Star Trek Theme Song.
• More evidence that perhaps Bethesda should make their next Fallout game in conjunction with LEGO in the form of BrickCon 2018 footage of a multi-level Fallout-themed vault and city.
• Arthurian completionists might want to check out a fragment of a Merlin tale found (rediscovered?) in an archive in Bristol. Merlin uses the spell “Banner Fire Breath” to make a dragon on a flag spit flames… like you do.
• British comedian Jeremy Hardy passed away recently, and the BBC Radio 4 show, “The News Quiz” will never be the same. I always loved it when he made former host Sandi Toksvig laugh uncontrollably as he did in this clip about “bright” children.
• I’m a sucker for video games with word puzzles, so here’s Elimination. Remove as few letters as possible to create a word for points. Use rarer letters for a higher score. Impress friends and win over lexicographers!
The following is for archival purposes and probably won’t make sense to many reading it, including me.
on January 29, 2019 at 5:00 PM
My mother-in-law was recently going through a bunch of old papers and found one from her second husband’s time as a computer programmer-technician-guy for AT&T several decades ago. It appears to be an attempt at levity regarding computer terminology of a bygone age. I couldn’t find any trace of it on the internet, so I thought it was my duty to preserve this bit of geek heritage, hoping it might have some value to someone, somewhere, someday.
From what I gather, the word “AbEnd” refers to the term Abnormal End where a computer program unexpectedly terminates or crashes. I think these are either jokes or ways to remember what a given AbEnd’s cause is. Maybe. Anyway, here it is (spellings, capitalization and punctuation left intact):
ABEND JINGLES
Lets see, an 804
means you need more core.
And a D37, for your information,
means you need more secondary allocation.
While a B37, in the same vein and tradition,
means you need more primary allocation.
For an 806 the program is contrary;
You just need a steplib to the right library.
Also, a U0004 on LF356
just means the table needs to be fixed.
And then there’s always BB454
where a bad order causes an OC4.
Well an OC1 is really quite dumb;
It means a DD’s missing for someone.
And a 137, 237, 337, or 437
means your trailers aren’t going to heaven.
To ignore an 813 abend is insane
since header and DSN are not the same.
When a program with an OC7 goes kaputt
it means your really have bad input.
On TTRAN an abend of a U0031
means you must scratch data sets from MN0001.
When the job with a 213 has gone wrong,
it could mean a data set’s gone, gone, gone.
When the job with an 013 meets its demise,
you might check closely with the LRECL and BLKSIZE.
And thus a bit of computer advice in the form of kinda-sorta poetry is preserved for the ages. I have no clue about what any of these things specifically mean, and I wonder if I’m not feeling what others do when we rattle off trivia about game rules (including THAC0) to non-players. I think I still prefer the song “S100” by Frank Hayes, even though I don’t know anything about that, either.
I never did finish off my episode-by-episode review of Star Trek Discovery season 1, but the short version is: Had problems, watched anyway, still hopeful.
That said, the first episode of the second season irked me in a new and special way: It pretty much gave up all pretense of caring about whether or not the ship itself makes sense. Maybe this is just a little gripe, but I have a hard time thinking this was done by anyone who likes at least trying to make things semi-plausible for this show as opposed to hyper-exaggerating things via special effects just because they can.
A little background: Back in the old days of Star Trek, the turbolift was a future-elevator that could travel through tubes in different directions, changing from up-down to sideways as the ship’s plan allows. Here’s how it looked in one of the old tech manuals:
The lines in red mark where turboshafts were, roughly (I think one went to the shuttle bay, but we’ll let that slide). Anyway, you could see they were pretty straightforward, allowing transit in multiple directions to accommodate the layout of the ship. On the first episode of season two of Discovery, this is how the inner workings of the turbolifts looked:
I’d love to see how all that fits in the ship’s schematics. It’s literally a roller-coaster setup with the cars moving along those neon-colored minecart rails. It’s as if someone decided a roller coaster was integral to the vessel’s design, leaving next to no room for anything else.
And don’t get me started on Star Trek Beyond‘s Yorktown starbase, or I’ll have to be even more of a nerd curmudgeon. 🙂
Until December 22nd, if you sign up for their newsletter, you can get LEGO Lord of the Rings for free from Humble Bundle.
Just remember: One does not simply walk into Mordor without stepping on a stray brick.
Comments Off on Another free game!
For the next 44 hours or so (as of this posting), GOG.com is offering the classic LucasArts point-n-click adventure Full Throttle Remastered for free.
Presumably they fixed all the bugs that made it nigh impossible to finish back in the day. I recall giving up in a scene where you had to outwit a junkyard dog…
Comments Off on Free games are cool.
