muad'dib on the beeb

BBC science news ran a story today about this little fellow called a Jerboa. The article claims that this is the first time this little fellow has been caught on camera, but I think they mean video as a google search yields many photos.


And of course I'm by no means the first to liken this small critter to Paul Atreides' name sake, the "kangaroo mouse" of Arakkis, but after a visit with my dad this week I've got Dune on the brain. He's reading the Prelude to Dune series again during some extended traveling, which I've never gotten to. I've only ever read Franks Dune novels, having heard lukewarm responses to Brians contributions. However I've always had an interest in reading The Butlerian Jihad, which chronicles the war between the humans and "thinking machines" which results in the ban on intelligent devices found in the later novels and the subsequent development of Mentats, the human logicians trained to replace computers.

Mayhaps I'll continue my ongoing saga of simply assembling a list of books for Santa this year as opposed to the obligatory kitchen gadgets, socks, and blank media I've been avoiding buying all year.

moving pictures on the digiwebs

A couple weeks ago I pulled a flick called "The Man From Earth" off the newsgroups and gave it a watch. It was a low budget Sci-Fi picture with some vaguely familiar faces (Enterprise's Dr. Phlox) and an intriguing hook. A university professors going away party becomes an intellectual Q & A session when the departing prof confesses to his peers that he is over fourteen thousand years old and does not age.

The film does a great job of tackling many of the interesting angles from "immortal" classics like Highlander, and Interview With The Vampire and leaving the action and special effects for the blockbusters. The mechanics of living with immortality present engaging and unusual problems and The Man From Earth handles them deftly without pre-chewing the ideas before presentation. Its no hit, but it makes for smart storytelling and an entertaining intellectual exercise in history and human nature.

Sure I enjoyed the picture, and I certainly recommend it, but the really interesting bit cropped up on a few popular P2P news sites recently. When the DVD screener was ripped and released on the net it was featured in P2P review site Rlslog. It seems the popularity garnered on IMDB and other online movie review sites since the leak was attributed by the producer of the film to its circulation online. He even went out of his way to contact Rlslog and thank them and the community for helping to promote their labour of love.

The creators are of course business men, and not above soliciting a few digital alms from those who pilfered and enjoyed the show. As I have strong objections to paypal I think I'll wait till I can take it in at the theatre, but I applaud their stance. I'm hoping more small budget pictures will consider "pulling a Radiohead" to get their stories out to an audience beyond the Hollywood targets. So lets see a Canadian theatrical release boys, I'll grab friends and put asses in those seats.

hip hop speaks to me

Of course when I first heard Frontalot, the nerd in me lol'd. But I'm always pleased to run across a track that really speaks to me as a person.

a guitar hero karaoke bar

A while back I mentioned a strong desire for a combination of beers and guitar hero to present itself. As it happens about a month ago that happened. While scoping out a cheapdrunks bar called Bistro 422 I met a guy named Craig who told tales of such a place here in town. The rumor was that the Chelsea Room on Dundas W. had GH2 every Wednesday night as well as $3.50 drinks.

So naturally, we rallied the troops and hauled our asses down to check it out. Its definitely on at the Chelsea Room. Drinks are indeed cheap and the rock is projected onto a mighty large wall. Hump-day will never be the same again! I'm off tonight at 11, plan to be there with the Rock Sauce flowin by 11:30 :)

Obligatory Facebook group photos here.

Also on the topic of gaming, Interplay is talking Fallout MMO. OhPleaseOhPleaseOhPleaseOhPleaseOhPlease!

UPDATE (Jan 24/08): GH at the Chelsea Room will be coming to a close in about three weeks, with work being done to get a Rock Band night happening. See also some newer GH @ Chelsea stuff here and stay up to date on the facebook group.

feed on this

This weekend I setup a Google Reader account for my mother. I figure if she can use RSS, you can too. So checkout my sidebar for the feeds that I'm munchin.

Work on cheapdrunks is moving ahead well. I've booked next week off from ze cubicle for a last push to get things ready for a Sept 1st open beta. I've also moved from tracking work on a wiki to Basecamp. So far I like it. Dead easy to use and everything is where you'd expect it to be. I dunno jack from project management and I get the feeling this thing is gonna help a lot.