Posts by Petrea Mitchell

Zork: Nemesis

Scariest thing I've ever played.

Not so much for actual chills produced by the game, but for the shock horror of what they were doing to the Zork series.

Flicker of interest

I confess to a moment of real interest at seeing the James May science listing-- oh, but that's not real content, it turns out, just something they might have someday.

Right then, I'll just go back to watching my legal online anime simulcasts until Google gets this whole future thing sorted out...

Glasses-wearing geek because that's the closest approximation to an urban hipster available in the icons.

"[O]ur systems were not able to recognize them as Australian"

How does that happen? Unclear accents or something?

The conspiracy theorists are right!

Now we have ironclad PROOF that there is a TECHNOLOGICALLY ADVANCED civilization operating on Mars!

I give up

An Unexpected Journey was the one film I was really looking forward to this year, and I was willing to live with having to wait 'til next year for the second half, but if it's going to take THREE consecutive years to get the whole story out, then just let me know when I can watch the whole thing from start to finish.

There's nothing inherently wrong with making a miniseries adaptation of a book... just make it an honest miniseries and release the whole thing as one season.

Making it work

Andrew says:

" [...] I quickly discovered how much people love the peculiarities that anchor something in a local context, and give it a specific flavour. Blackout is made-for-export, but has all the British quirks written out."

Indeed, just look at how well Downton Abbey was treated by the Emmys this year.

I'm an anime fan, which means I like watching animated Japanese shows which are frequently produced on a shoestring budget and with no consideration for an export market at all. And yet online distribution is starting to work: most of the anime that airs in Japan is now available within a week, subitled in English, on legal streaming sites where you have the option of either watching for free with ads or with a paid membership and no ads. (And not just in North America-- the most prolific site, Crunchyroll, frequently gets rights to "air" shows to most of the English-speaking world plus some, and there are services only available to other regions.) I look at this and it drives me nuts that the BBC apparently sends new episodes of Top Gear to the US via carrier pigeon, from how long it takes them to air over here.

The only downside is that now that so much of it is accessible, one does get reminded on a regular basis that Sturgeon's Law holds true for everything. But it's worth it to find the good stuff.

Street cred time!

Anyone in the US who's already gotten a Galaxy Tab 10.1 can now proudly strut around showing off their highly exclusive product that cannot be legally obtained by any of their nearby friends.

Is anything working over there?

Major bank can't take money, massive broadband outages-- is anything computer-related actually functioning in the UK right now?

And as long as we're pointing fingers...

...I'd just like to express my annoyance at the term "geek girl". If someone wants to fight the tide of sexism and get more men to take me seriously as a 10+-year IT veteran with all the multifacted knowledge of my craft, it would help a lot more if they could start with a term that suggests I am an adult.

FREE-CLIMBING?!?!?!

That's the sort of thing OSHA should be shutting companies down over if it can be proved that it's their customary way of doing things. (Yes, I understand the difficulties involved in proving it.)

As someone whose employer operates in a similarly dangerous industrial sector but has a superb safety record, I... words fail me. I'm surprised there haven't been civil lawsuits over any of these deaths.

"Double delete"?

I'd sure like to know what this magic wand they thought they had to make e-mails completely vanish was. Even though it clearly didn't work, since the feds still found the evidence.

Once again, it's not the crime so much as the coverup...

Not new information

He's been saying it's the one in Oregon for at least a couple years now. OTOH, the comment about Portlanders being in denial about how much it rains here is new. Not sure what he means by that-- I mean, it's not raining right now, and when I say it's not raining right now, I really mean it's not raining right now, and it's even been not raining for the last several minutes. So there!

Responsibility claimed for 8-bit maps

Reportedly, Square Enix is claiming the Google Maps change is due to Dragonlord Alefgard conquering it.

http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/interest/2012-04-01/japan-anime-manga-game-creators-celebrate-april-fool-day

Shaky start...

Call me a suspicious old hag who doesn't understand today's hipsters, but if you have to set fire to a guy to get him to pay attention to you, this might be a sign that the relationship is not working out quite as well as you may have thought.