Puzzle From Hell

Someone gave us this puzzle for Christmas. Now, before you read any further, follow that link. Looks like a perfectly ordinary puzzle, apart from the funky shape, right?

Here's what makes this particular puzzle a form of torture:

• There is no indication whatsoever on the box that it is a shaped puzzle. Looking at the packaging, it appears to be an ordinary rectangular puzzle. It's hard to start by finding the edge pieces when the box art lies to you about what shape the edge actually is.
  
• The pieces fit together very loosely. We semi-jokingly said that the easiest way to tell if two pieces were a fit was if they fell apart when you touched them. When it's all done, there is a full inch of play across the entire puzzle - you can squeeze the pieces together and stretch them apart by a full inch. I measured.
  
• The title, "Snowy Trees", is a misnomer. It should be called "Snowy Tree", because whoever created the picture only bothered to paint one tree, and then used Photoshop to copy and paste that tree everywhere else. Oh, sure, he transformed some of them a little: One of them is squished down really squat and wide, another is stretched out tall and skinny; one is flipped to a mirror image of the rest of them. But it's the same goddamned tree, over and over.
  

We didn't let it beat us, though:

Well, That Didn't Take Long

Her name, we think, is Binky:


I say "we think", because when we got her at the Milwaukee Humane Society, they said her name was "Monty", but since rabbits tend to be difficult to sex when they're young, we suspect someone probably told her original owners she was male. So she needs a new name, and she's been shy about letting us know what it should be, but "Binky" seems to be the one that's sticking most.

She and Buster seemed to hit it off pretty well when we took him to the Humane Society to meet her, but there have been some altercations since we got her home. They're currently in separate (but adjacent) cages, and we're taking it slow with supervised play dates.

Oh, and this guy was there, too. His name is Babyface Joe, apparently:


Well, we had been watching Verminators, and it kept making me want another pet rat to keep in my computer room, so he can sit on my shoulder while I'm up here. Yeah, I'm a little strange.

RIP, Suzi

She passed away some time last Sunday night.

New Bunny Cage

I've added some pictures of the new bunny cage we just built to the Flickr album.

Snow Pictures

New Flickr album up - pictures of the pile of snow in our front yard.

Awwwww...

Yes, I did it - I broke down and submitted a picture to icanhascheezburger.com:


moar funny pictures
That's Suzi, my very own bunny.

And then I saw this, and couldn't resist captioning it. No, that's not my very own llama:

moar funny pictures

Xmas Pics - My New House Edition

I just put up a Flickr album of a few pictures of my new house, decked out for Christmas. Pics later of the big celebration at my folks' house.

Look on my stapler, ye mighty, and despair!

My birthday present this year:

Milton Waddams: [talking on the phone] "And I said, I don't care if they lay me off either, because I told, I told Bill that if they move my desk one more time, then, then I'm, I'm quitting, I'm going to quit. And, and I told Don too, because they've moved my desk four times already this year, and I used to be over by the window, and I could see the squirrels, and they were married, but then, they switched from the Swingline to the Boston stapler, but I kept my Swingline stapler because it didn't bind up as much, and I kept the staples for the Swingline stapler and it's not okay because if they take my stapler then I'll set the building on fire..."

Catching Up

As predicted, here's a pic of my Halloween costume from this year:


Also: Our pumpkin carving:

Discworld Map

Just for fun: Although it has been years since I've done any RPG-ing, I do still maintain a copy of the latest version of Campaign Cartographer, just because I love maps. Using the tools/instructions from an installment of their "Cartographer's Annual", I threw together this map of Terry Pratchett's Discworld, in a style inspired by the 16th century maps of Gerard Mercator (click for full-size):

Note, if you're familiar with the official published Discworld Mapp, you'll see a few differences, based on the ostensible reason that the map was created by a cartographer in Ankh-Morpork. Therefore, Ankh-Morpork is near the top of the map (rather than toward the bottom, as in the official map), and the further away from Ankh-Morpork and the Circle Sea region you get, the less detailed and more inaccurate the map becomes. So most of the Circle Sea area is pretty close to "reality", other parts of the continent are fairly accurate (but not very detailed), the Counterweight Continent is pretty much right, but with a few errors, and the least-explored areas - XXXX and the Lost Continent of Ku - are wildly inaccurate.

Here's also a close-up of the Circle Sea region:

More House Pics

Here's a Flickr album with all the pictures I have of my new home. Note that I haven't moved in yet, so the furniture in the pics is not mine...

Now that the NDA has been lifted...

Here you can see a man of Gondor looking over the town of Combe (described in Robert Foster's Complete Guide to Middle-Earth as a "village in a valley in the eastern Bree-land.")

This is, of course, a screenshot from the beta test of Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar. So far, I'm generally pleased. There are some Tolkien purists who object to the liberties being taken*, but so far I haven't seen anything that completely breaks it for me. I may change my mind if the "Lore-master" character class starts tossing explosive fireballs around at higher levels.

Much (ok, all) of the gameplay is virtually identical to World of Warcraft. Many people are disappointed by this. I'm not sure I am - WoW does so much right that just lifting essentially the same gameplay out of the generic-fantasy setting of WoW and plonking it down into Middle-Earth, with a less cartoonish graphic style... I can't complain very hard about that.

There are some clever and surprising touches, as well. For example, like other MMORPGs, this has a "newbie" area for new players/characters to get their feet wet without facing anything too deadly. For men and hobbits, this transitions seamlessly into the main game, but for elves and dwarves, those newbie quests take place years earlier. Actually, in the case of elves, I think it may be centuries earlier. As a dwarf, you get to start out in the Blue Mountains just as Thorin and Company are preparing to set out on their quest to the Lonely Mountain. Elves are present during an attack on the elven Refuge of Edhelion (not listed in Foster, unfortunately) by a group of corrupted dwarves, and then "return" to its ruins centuries later for the main game.

Basically, I like it well enough that I've already pre-ordered it. I'm contemplating whether I want to go all out and pay the $199 for a "lifetime membership", instead of the monthly fee - if I stay on it for 2 years, it'd be worth it, and I think I may do that. If you're interested (and have a fairly hefty computer...), they're doing an open stress test next weekend that you can sign up for at Gamespot.

And boy, it sure is pretty, ain't it?

* A particularly obtuse example: A group of characters working together in this game is, naturally, labeled a "Fellowship" (in WoW, they're called a Party. It's just "flavor" text). In this post, someone actually says, "I still am wondering why in Eru’s name a Fellowship does not consist of nine players". In other words, because the "Fellowship of the Ring" consisted of nine people, he believes that all "Fellowships" should always and exclusively consist of exactly nine people. Gaaah.

Weird Picture

In the Onion's review of the movie Ultraviolet, they display this still from the film:

What's weird is that this picture looks almost like a 3D rendering to me, except that I can't think of any good reason why they would CGI a character standing calmly doing nothing. I think it's the shadows - for some reason, the picture looks like a sample render designed to demonstrate ambient occlusion shadowing. For those who don't know what I mean, here's a quickie example I whipped up in Poser 6:

Because of the way ambient occlusion is calculated, it tends to over-emphasize certain small details like the belly-button. I left mine with the flat look Poser 6 gives with the default IBL/AO lighting (it lacks specular highlights), just to emphasize what I'm talking about. If I spent more time on it, matching lighting and so on, I suspect I could come up with something that looks even closer to the other pic. You can see some of the kind of "show-off the ambient occlusion" sample renders I'm talking about at this gallery page on e-frontier's Poser pages.

I don't think the Ultraviolet image is actually CGI, but I wonder if they've deliberately lit the scene in some way to make the live-action shots look as much like CGI as possible, in order to better match the CGI special-effects shots. And if so, I wonder how they did it.

I also think it's impressive that consumer/hobbyist-level software like Poser is now capable of producing output like that. Poser up through version 4 (and even 5 to some extent) was a whole lot less realistic than it is now.

Happy Holidays

Yes, we're a little insane. By my estimate, we had a total of about 300 presents under that tree. It took us six hours to open everything. Here we all are preparing to start opening:

Here is my leftist/commie brother Mike playing with the talking Ronald Reagan doll Brenda & I gave him:

Not quite as perfect as the talking Ann Coulter doll he got last year, but that's tough to top.

Here's my other brother David and his wife Diane opening stuff:

Here's David's daughter Julia. She tried, seriously, to watch the entire 24-hour A Christmas Story marathon last year, so we had to get her this shirt:

This is David's son Byron watching my mom open something:

Here's my dad proudly displaying a cookbook we got him:

And this is Byron again wearing the Coolest Christmas Present Ever:

Yes, I did buy myself a Voice-Changing Darth Vader Helmet at the same time I got the one for my nephew. What of it?

As for my own haul, I got one of these. It's probably going to take me a while to fill that 20 GB drive, although I may just be able to do it without buying any more music than I already own.

Between Brenda & I, we also got:
All three of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle books (now I need to finish Cryptonomicon...)
A vacuum food-sealer
A deli slicer
The From the Earth to the Moon DVD box set
The Hanzo the Razor DVD box set
An obscure nunsploitation movie.
A whole bunch of rabbit-related books and calendars
And, let's be honest, a whole lot of other stuff

Sengoku Jedi

I have a new picture up in my Renderosity gallery, but since Hello makes it so easy, I'll let you see it here, too:
 

As noted in my gallery post, the title comes from an old review of the "Shogun: Total War" computer game, in which the reviewer accidentally referred to the sengoku jidai period of Japanese history as "Sengoku Jedi". I wanted to pay tribute to some of George Lucas's inspiration for the jedi.

Approaching Nerdvana

It's just possible my obsession with technology is getting slightly out of control. Here, you can see my new dual-monitor setup peeking out from behind the color laser printer: 

Well, I upgraded my video card recently, and the new one can drive multiple displays, and I had an old monitor just laying around collecting dust in the basement. What would you have done?

New cat. I'm stopping by the vet's office to pick her up on my way home from work. Brenda took this pic with her phone to let me know she was there. 

Bunnyblogging

Well, I've run all the tests I can run on the software I'm testing right now, until they fix the broken stuff, so here are some cute bunny pictures.

This is Suzi, who we've had for a while (there's another cute picture of her up in my Renderosity gallery, see the link in the sidebar):


And here is the new baby, Buster, who Suzi helped us pick out last Saturday: