Susskins Central Dispatch

There’s a gentleman named Scott Nesin, who runs a website called Games By Email.

The site does just what it sounds like; it facilitates the playing of games by email. You supply the friends, it supplies the mechanics. You can play a variety of games, including checkers, Reversi, backgammon, and the like. You can also play clones of Risk, Axis & Allies, etc. All free, all via email.

Mr. Nesin has used various online services for providing random dice rolls, and has run into the usual pitfalls of randomization. Mathematical randomization is tough. You can get pseudo-random numbers, but you’ll never get true random numbers. The numbers tend towards patterns. Some of the pseudorandoms are very good, but geeks tend not to trust them, and complain bitterly.

Scott decided to take his dice rolls into a new and interesting direction, one that would come as close to appeasing the players as possible. He begged donations, and built a massive dice-rolling machine called the Dice-O-Matic.

This thing is awesome. It’s beautiful in a Geek way, and also somewhat sinister. Seven feet tall, and capable of rolling nearly 1,500,000 dice in a single day. It runs a continuous spiral waterfall of dice, scooping them up with conveyor buckets at the bottom, and scanning them at the top just before they get dumped again. The connected computer reads the dice, and shoves the numbers into a massive online database. All dice rolls for the website pull from this database. When the database gets low, the Dice-O-Matic starts up again and refills it.

I love machines like this. Love ‘em. Scott, you did great.

If Aretha is the Red Queen, here’s the White Queen

I’m a big fan of Annie Lennox. She’s an amazing vocalist, and a performer who’s full of actual personality, as opposed to all the pop slags who think a performance consists of lip-syncing while they shake their asses like cheap hookers.

Not that shaking one’s ass like a cheap hooker is necessarily bad.

Annie has released a small group of albums since The Eurythmics broke up. Of those albums, my favorite by far is Diva. It has great songs and showcases her voice nicely. But she has other works that are damned good, and this is one of them.

Here’s Annie Lennox, singing Love is Blind from the album Songs of Mass Destruction.

Love Is Blind – Annie Lennox

Two big movie openings this weekend, and we went to them both.

First, Terminator: Salvation. We went on Sunday afternoon. It’s a Terminator movie, so there’s not much that needs to be said. If you’ve seen a Terminator movie, you’ve got the general gist.

Christian Bale shouting and firing weapons, Terminators and ships roaming the land, lots of explosions, messing about with timelines, and a couple of interesting twists, none of which are all that hard to figure out. Lots of fun. We liked it. The dialog was stupid in a couple of places, and there were a few things they did that made no sense. (If you’re hanging from a tower, and you’re close enough to get handed a knife to cut yourself down, then just swing over to the tower rather than drop to the ground, you idiot.)

Smartest movie of the year? No. Fun? Yes.

Second movie, attended this afternoon, was Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian. Again, if you’ve seen the first one, you’ve got the general gist of this one as well.

Silly and funny. Lots of great characters all interacting. And Hank Azaria was awesome as Kahmunrah, the main villain. Intellectual, slightly effete, with a bizarre speech impediment and a tendency to get off track. Made me laugh.

Smartest movie of the year? No. Fun? Yes.

So that’s four (I think) summer movies down, and several more to go. Next week, we go see Up, the latest Pixar feature. Sweet.

The Japanese are fucking insane

Honestly, there’s no other way to describe it. The Japanese, having been crammed on their little island for so long, have lost their collective minds. As a result, they have built a culture that fosters the most bizarre video games I’ve ever seen. Check this out; it’s called Muscle March. And it’s freakish beyond all measure.

I think I’ll start tucking the occasional song into this here blog thing. What the hell. Might as well do something, as I don’t particularly feel like writing long-winded screeds any more.

So here’s the inaugural song for Music That I Like. Mister Jonathan Coulton, and his wondrous song First of May. Gentle, romantic, joyful. And also NOT SAFE FOR WORK, OR AROUND SMALL CHILDREN OR OLD LADIES WITH DELICATE CONSTITUTIONS.

First of May – Jonathan Coulton

Not using the obvious joke for once

Good grief. I know that the world is full of oddities. Many clever people find many ways to do thoroughly unusual things. And yet, every now and then, I see something completely unexpected. (Warning: don’t click the link if you’re squeamish. You’ll freak out.)

Disturbing and cool at the same time.

Courtesy of a commenter over at Jonathan Coulton’s blog. (For the record, the comment was on a post about JoCo’s music career, and how it’s like a magical cow that is fed music and poops money.)

Stay out of there

Imagine having a little incident on your four-runner while messing around in the desert. Got that in mind? Good.

Now go look at this.

OW OW OW

Rick Berman can suck it

Fred and I went to see Star Trek yesterday afternoon. Thirteen dollars well spent. A fun movie. I’ve been a Star Trek fan since I was a kid, and I like origin stories so this was a good match for me.

Zachary Quinto was amazing as Spock. Nailed it. And the guy who played Kirk did a great job of swaggering about the place.

Poor old Leonard Nimoy, however, needs better dentures.

Bleah. Nose starting to go all gunky. What a great way to start the weekend.

Stupid rhinovirus.

One of the funniest people ever has passed away.

I LOVED Dom DeLuise. Loved him. A big, broad, wild comedic talent.

Here’s one of my favorite movie scenes. Dom versus Leo McKern, in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes Smarter Brother. (A tragically underrated movie, in my opinion.)

and she’s judging you harshly

Just a tip; if you’re stuck in traffic because of construction, screaming at the construction guys means you’re a gigantic asshole. Look into therapy.

Adamantium is in aisle 12 at the hardware store

Just got back from X-Men Origins: Wolverine. No point in going into detail; if you don’t know what an X-Men movie is, you’re not likely to enjoy it anyway.

Suffice to say it was violent, explody, sarcastic, and full of mutants. Fun, by my standards. And that’s all I ask of movies these days. A couple of hours of action and explosions. Keep your serious dramas to yourself. I’m here for helicopters launching missiles at mutants riding motorcycles.

The Summer Movie Run has begun. Next week: Star Trek.

This has me hypnotized.