Just today our ‘office’ made an order at Geeky Clean for their Zom-B-Gone soap. Apparently this soap will help repel zombies and we think that that is awesome. We, of course, want to make sure that this claims actually hold up. Once the soap arrives I’ll be using it everyday for a week to test the soap’s ability to repel zombies.

Continue reading Upcoming post – Zombie Repellent Soap Roadtest

There are some stereotypical characteristics of the “nerd” which are commonly believed. (Perhaps because there’s a grain of truth in there…) Now, there’s a range of these, but today we’re only interested in 2.

1. Nerds are antisocial, don’t do well at parties and sometimes their personal grooming habits are not as well developed as might be desired.

2. Nerds don’t like sport.

Well, thanks to the good people at Critical Miss (an on-line magazine for dysfunctional roleplayers), we can disprove the latter item by using the former. Their invention is Body Language Rugby. The full rules can be accessed from their latest edition – unfortunately now over 2 years old. The game is suitable for any large and boring gathering, such as a wedding reception, work function or soirée (Ho there, Soirée! No answer? I charge!) The players are split into two teams. An unwitting member of the crowd is “the ball.” “End zones” are nominated at either side of the room. Using nothing but body language, each side attempts to steer “the ball” into the opposing end zone. Points are tallied, and the side which has the highest points at the end of the night is declared the winner.

The field of play. Note the goal posts at the far end.

Huzzah for the guys at Critical Miss! Their magazine is filled with items like this, plus GMing tips for the acutely lazy GM, how to railroad your players, broken and inadvisable scenarios and other entertaining and educational games such as Nuke the Crap out of Europe.

Go forth and enjoy.

Of all the wonderful things you can do in Dwarf Fortress, one of the glaring omissions is the lack of a multi-player mode. Fortunately, the rabid Dwarf Fortress community has thought of a great way around this – the Succession Game! For those of you unfamiliar with Dwarf Fortress, check out this post. The game is a real-time simulation of a Dwarven colony. So each player takes over the running of the fortress for a single year, handing over the reigns to a new player, who must deal with the situation left behind as best they can.

One of the most well-known and best loved succession games tells the story of Boatmurdered. This town was beset by numerous problems, including a never-ending feud between the Dwarfs and the seemingly endless supply of rampaging killer elephants, a population of useless and lazy nobles, miasma, floods and criminals. The whole story can be read here. The game was played right the way through from embarkation until the fortress was finally abandoned by its 2 sole survivors, the mass murderer Guerilla Burialgears and a child, Dodok Sabrefrenzies. The tale is extremely funny, and even those completely unfamiliar with Dwarf Fortress should find it amusing.

“Welcome to F@#%ing Boatmurdered!”

No really…

Most Australians probably don’t need much of an introduction to the band Tripod, three guys and one guitar who sing funny songs about being, well, three guys with one guitar. They are a regular staple on the comedy circuit and are, despite being very funny, excellent musicians as well.

Well, I will get to the point… I just, out of curiosity just checked out their official website. For anyone who played D&D back in the day (think AD&D 1, 2) their website is going to have you in stitches… I don’t want to ruin the surprise – go check it out here:

Official Tripod Website

For those of you who want a taste of what is to come, here is a sample song on YouTube…

Update: found this too… bloody funny…

Nerds love Monty Python, right? I mean, there’s even a programming language named after the group… Well, in another case of “there’s nothing new under the sun” it seems that Monty Python’s “Dead Parrot Sketch” is perhaps a little bit older than previously thought. A scholar of Ancient Greece by the name of William Berg has translated a joke book written in the 4th Century CE containing 265 jokes by the comedians Hierocles and Philagrius. This comedy pair compiled a list of jokes called “Philogelos: The Laugh Addict”.

In Monty Pythons sketch, a man attempts to return a dead Norwegian Blue Parrot to a particularly difficult shopkeep. In the ancient Greek version, it’s a dead slave. Obviously, times have changed, but the joke is surprisingly similar. Other jokes, it seems, have also withstood the test of time, appearing in modernised versions around the world also.

From the Telegraph’s article:

Jokes about wives, it seems, have always been fair game.

One joke goes: “A man tells a well-known wit: ‘I had your wife, without paying a penny’. The husband replies: “It’s my duty as a husband to couple with such a monstrosity. What made you do it?”

Brilliant… who would have thought that the roots of British humour were so old?

You can see Monty Python’s sketch on Youtube here:

The original joke can be found here in electronic book format.

Many of us grew up with Sesame Street. A lot of us still remember our favourite songs and animations, and we certainly have a little giggle (privately) over the characters that we loved as a kid. And while the vast majority of us grew out of watching Sesame Street, some of us I am sure still harken back to the good old days. Well, maybe Sesame Street grew up too.

So today kiddies, I’m going to teach you a little lesson about the Internets. The internet is a wonderful invention, and it’s so great to have technology at our fingertips. Here is a little song (which is quite possibly nsfw).

They are called Avenue Q and they do a stage show that is quite funny.

[thanks Miss T]

I seriously can’t say enough good things about this movie. I love it to death. A group of nerdly college guys get together to play a session of (thinly veiled) D&D; the camera moves between the players and the characters. It makes fun of all the usual fantasy gaming tropes and points out some of the absurdities of the genre. The story is typical high fantasy schtick: a group of adventurers are given a quest to save the princess from “The Shadow”; on the way, the Thief manages to steal someone’s pants, someone gets backstabbed by siege artillery and the frustrated girl down the hall keeps on bursting and complaining about all the noise. I have so lived this before. Biting satire on the hobby we all love.

The production is by the immensely talented guys at Dead Gentlemen Productions. Check out the website for more of their work.

Apparently, The Gamers found a distributor and is doing quite well. So much so that there’s now a sequel, The Gamers 2: Dorkness Rising, now featuring a decent production quality.

Go check it out.

I know this is coming pretty late to the party, but this is probably as close as Dungeons & Dragons will get to a theme song… And I know that a lot of the sentiments exhibited in this song relate only to players of 1st Edition D&D (some women have discovered the game subsequently…). Anyway, old and stale jokes aside, here is the song by Stephen Lynch.

The new video from the Microsoft campaign featuring Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld is aout. I have to say, this is a lot better. The free willingness that these two guys have to make fun of themselves is just incredible (“You have  a huge house hovering over Seattle like some mothership, and I have so many cars I get caught in my own traffic…”). Its starting to become a little more apparent where they are going with these, but I’ll let you make up your own minds…

With the launching of the Large Hadron Collider there is a lot of speculation about Mini Black Holes emitting Hawking radiation and destroying the entire planet and maybe even the entire universe (that’s right – take that God, we created you, we can destroy you… oh wait…). The scientific community however is in consensus that nothing will probably go wrong. And if something could go wrong, its like a 1 in 50 million chance that it will.

Anyway, if you want to look at a live webcam of them testing the setup you can watch here (look for the red lights flashing, it means they are sending protons around)…

Also check out xkcd’s take on it…