So wrong, yet so right

So have you been reading Cyanide and Happiness? I keep forgetting to regularly go there, and I only started reading relatively recently so there's a huge backlog to get through. It's so funny... but it's oh so wrong. You can get a taste in the video below (yes they even have animated shorts, but not many). Be prepared to lose a lot of time just hitting random comics...

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Batman: Leob/Sale style

Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale have made quite a name for themselves crafting Batman stories. Typically, they focus on early Batman, and do tell quite the good tale.

Haunted Knight kicks things off with three tales, all set at (different) Halloweens. Halloween is a key time for them. The first two are quite good, but the third... they're better than that. (Not sure how this version is different, aside from a few pounds dearer.)

Long Halloween is the big epic they are known for. It's a long spanning story that covers a year, and retells the Harvey Dent story as well as bringing in many a known villain. Many people would say this is an essential collection to get, and I agree. (The set I link to comes with two really fantastic figures of Joker and Batman. However, the book itself was a bit of a let down, in that it was missing something vital, namely glue. The cover pulled away at the spine, and the first set of pages separated.)

Dark Victory is the follow-up to that, which brings in Robin as well as continues the story. To be honest, I liked this story better than Long Halloween, with the developing story line and the more interesting villain.

In more recent continuity, Jeph Loeb penned Hush, which was illustrated by Jim Lee, not Tim Sale. It still references the early years of Batman, although fails to be set at Halloween. Still has plenty of twists to the tale. (Here's another version.) There is a 'Return' story as well, but haven't read that, and it isn't written by Loeb.

(The site I linked to, Book Depository, is a great site. Although overseas, it generally has cheaper prices than anything local, and even from other sites, eg. Amazon. Especially when you take shipping into account. As in... it doesn't have any! Even if the straight book price isn't cheaper than Amazon, Amazon+shipping is usually higher.)

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Thanks for the info, Microsoft!

Microsoft aren't known for producing the best applications ever, but they at least usually have some indication of how they are going.

I'm trying to defragment my drive, and all I see is:

Fine, it is a 280 Gb drive, but... it's been running for five hours so far! "It make take a few hours" indeed, but I have no idea if it is defragging my drive, if it is five minutes away from completion, or another ten hours... or even if it's just sitting contemplating its own naval while thinking about maybe considering looking at the drive and then perhaps actually doing anything at all!

Not even a progress bar? Or a percentage count? Or even a badly judged time to go? Just another brilliant aid of Microsoft products...

Update: At least the command line version gives an analysis report to say how fragged your drive is!

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This would be a "Hard Combo" in Rock Band

Where do you go from treadmills? Into a full scale Rube Goldberg machine!

One minor criticism: I can't understand a word they are singing. Anyway, check out the makings of as well!

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War on Scales 6

We entered the final cavern under the monastery, and it was definitely the last room as the passageway out, that previously let in the orcs, was collapsed. This clearly annoyed the orcs that were present, and they were taking it out on the dwarf they had captured.

There was a brief talk amongst us of trying to do something other than just charge in, but charging in won out. Shame really. The assassin failed to kill a particularly irritating opponent early on... and we couldn't stand up to the force before us. Out next plan: "Leg it!" We hid out, let them pass us, then moved back in. The dwarf had been knocked out, so we were able to rescue him slightly more than before, then we all moved out to find the orcs heading out before us to become a random encounter for some other adventurers. Not our finest moment all up.

We filled Kalad (the dwarf) in on what had transpired, and we determined the next course of action was to head to the Vents, which was likely more guarded than suspected. Going in ourselves, we found the caves to be a series of mazes that taxed us (and some more than others). Getting through those, we found an advance force of orcs (yes, more orcs) that we managed to kick the ass of more easily that our previous encounter. However, the bombardier set off the trap before he died.

The assassin was able to point out the activating plates, so we could avoid them, but he did activate the iron dogs and arcane ballister that was waiting further down. Made a nice change from orcs.

The key point about 'advance force' is that there is a 'main force' not that far behind. We think it's just beyond that door...

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A kind of fun...

BidFun is a site where you can bid on goods. Wow. That's different.

Actually, it is. Instead of bidding an amount, you simply up the current price by $0.02 and add twenty seconds to the time to expire. All for the price of a credit.

But what sort of thing does one bid on? How about... a Nintendo DSi Console? That's, what, $260, yeah? Would you believe someone got it for $15? How about a Western Digital 320gb drive worth $170? Picked up for just under $10. $500 Wii Console for under $5. iPod Touch 32gb worth $450... gone for just over $50.

How can they do this? Consider the last item. At 2c per bid, that's over 2,500 bids! Credits cost different depending on how many you get at a time, but between $1 per to 80c, so that's between $2000 to $2500 spent on that auction alone. Yeah, I can see how they can cover that.

On the other say, from the person's point of view, worse case is they pay $1 per bid and if they were every other bid... you can see how while it seems cheap, it isn't. This is what occurred to me when I started getting in there and thinking "I might need some more credits... wait a minute!"
Not that you'd have one person being every other bid, it gets too crazy when the auction nears the end for that, it can extend hours waiting for that last minute to tick by...

That said, that Wii Console, $5 means 250 bids, so at worst someone paid $130 for the console... now that's a steal!

That's a neat site I want some items from... but go in with eyes open... and get a hell of a bargain!

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CCC

That's right, I'm up to date me, and have finally seen that movie that creamed everyone's panties back in 2006. In short... really?

Let's get the obvious out of the way: there is no plot. There's an extended fight scene, which goes on and on, at various speeds. Has anyone worked out how quick the movie would be if it was all at proper speed? I'm guessing 30 minutes less at least.

And considering continual gore fest didn't inspire me, that didn't leave a lot of movie left. I'm not worried about the historical inaccuracy, we are talking Hollywood after all, but I am surprised they didn't have the Spartans kill everyone, including Xerxes, in one go! Certainly they hardly had any issues to begin with, and were even so well trained they had good dental and manicure and pedicure work!

Gerald Butler plays a fine Brian Blessed, and Rodrigo Santoro is enjoyable as a person twice the height of Leonidas and only half the width. As for the rest of them, they were all too heavily CGId to really tell who was whom.

It's too late for me to comment on going to see this, but I can offer one piece of advice. See it this way. That's how I got through it...

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