Month: November 2007

The Forbidden Kingdom

China, the Middle Kingdom, gets the Middle Earth treatment. I remember Crouching Tiger, HIdden Dragon was disappointing in that it seemed to lack that epic quality in terms of plot; it was built on imagery alone. This seems to have a lot more substance, and pairing Jet Li with Jackie Chan gives it immediate gravitas. I am looking forward to this.

EEE 2.0

Ars has a gigantic review of the EEE. It is as comprehensive as you can imaging, delving into everything from design build to hacking the OS.

In other news, Asus has revealed the specs on the next generation EEE: double the flash storage to 8 GB, and a larger 10″ LCD screen. Assuming they bump the resolution to 1024×768 or thereabouts on that larger screen, it would pretty much answer Ars’ main complaint.

The only other thing to complain about with the EEE is the cramped keyboard; but we have seen a solution for that before…

the otaku dream girl

There’s a story arc in progress at XKCD (part 1, part 2, part 3) which reminded me of Steven’s post from last week. In a nutshell, the stay at home mom next door is actually a super hacker. Thus she combines the archetypes of otaku dream girl (ODG) and MILF1 into one. Her daughter was trained like Samurai Jack in the sacred arts at teh feet of all the masters and has become the greatest hacker of our generation. Here’s a panel from Part 2:

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The funny thing about the ODG is that no analogue exists on the opposite side of the gender aisle. Is there an ODB (boy), of whom all otaku girls dream? In my experience, most of my even moderately geeky women friends preferred men completely outside their archetype. Otaku women tend to reserve otaku men for friends, not mates. There are of course exceptions to this rule, but the trend seems (anecdotally) solid.

the other random observation I have is that the general geek category has its own sub-taxonomy. XKCD is clearly a “hacker” comic, whereas Haibane.info is more solidly in the “otaku” camp. I’d classify Shamus as a Gamer, and there are also the Fantasy and Scifi camps (each with their own subgenres). But we are all united by the ur-label “geek”, and all of us dabble in the other genres. Maybe XKCD will notice this post linkback and do a comic on it.

[1]No linky. If you dunno what this is, google it. Haibane.info is a kawaii-safe zone. Unrelated, anyone know a sexy plugin for footnotes? Now I’ve got Drupal envy.

registration captcha

I mentioned earlier that I was using Peter’s Anti-spam Math plugin to allow for freer commenting (after inspiration from Shamus). I was also using the WP-Deadbolt plugin to add a blacklist to the blog registration page. However, I left a comment at Peter’s asking if he could add the same captcha functionality to the registration page as well. He responded almost immediately and sent me a link to the new beta of his plugin, which adds the captcha to the registration page as desired and which also implements a domain-based blacklist for registration email addresses to boot! I just installed it and am really impressed. If you have a WP blog and allow users to register, give this a whirl and let Peter know if you come across any bugs.

Trek 2.0 casting roundup

The holy triumvirate of Kirk, Spock and Bones is fully cast – with Bones being played by Karl Urban (Eomer from LOTR), which IMHO is all kinds of awesome. Bones needs to have that badass vibe. Another inspired bit of casting is Winona Ryder as Spock’s mom; about time she played someone all responsible-like. And Sulu is being played by Harold of Harold and Kumar fame (Kirk’s policy on piloting the Enterprise while stoned remains unknown). I’m looking forward to this!