It's been almost a month since my last rant, so I think it's bloody-well time for another. A recent murder in Washington state has prompted people in the media who are afraid of change to once again try and convince us that the internet is evil. I don't know about you folks, but I'm pretty sick of it.

Posted at 12:00 AM

Welcome to the whiny Saturday weblog. Work is still busy and I'm still preparing to move out. I feel rather bad that I haven't had time to update the site for my small following of loyal fans who are still visiting regularly. I do hope that some of you have enjoyed the "Quest" game that I posted. Give me some feedback, people!I know you're out there, I can hear you breathing!

One of the other things consuming my time is a little project I'm doing to ressurect a dead PC. Allen was kind enough to give me the case and guts of an old Pentium MMX 200. Unfortunately, it has no drives and very little RAM to speak of. I've managed to borrow CD drives from work to install Windows 2000 on and old 4GB hard drive from my dead iMac. With 32MB of RAM though, it's barely usable. With some extra RAM and a few more drives, I'm hoping to turn it into a dedicated MP3 jukebox for our new place. If any of you have a dead PC hanging around in your basement. Let me know, Dr. Franken-Geek may be able to make use of it.

Fox has released a trailer for afilm adaptation of I, Robot. For those of you who don't know, I, Robot was a collection of short stories by Issac Asimov dealing with intelligent robots. The film, however, is the classic Sci-Fi story of "Human threatens robot, robot kills human, robot must prove right to defend itself in a court of law". The first half of the trailer is almost exclusively Will Smith making his typical wise cracks, which have steadily declined in their charm over the many years he has made his career by exploiting them. I smell a bomb, and I'm a bit miffed that the name of a brilliant sci-fi writer has been unfairly attached to it, especially when the story of the movie has little or nothing to do with the stories of the book. We'll see...

Posted at 12:00 AM

Yes, it's been a week since my last update. Yes, I suck. Yes, I'm sorry. It's getting pretty busy at work these days. This combined with the fact that I'm in the process of moving out for the first time makes it very difficult to find spare time these days. Things will probably be the same for another week or so while I stabilize my existence.

In the meantime, if you need something to amuse yourself, I have just the thing. Many I year ago, in my last year of high school. Me and a colleague of mine wrote an RPG program in Turbo Pascal as a final project for Computer Science 12 (for those of you who don't know, Pascal is the programming language which predated C++). The program was way more than we needed to do, and got us a great mark. Since the program operates in DOS graphics mode, we had to write our own text engine for inputing commands. The game supports saving and loading character files and has quite a few little secrets. Movement is accomplished with the arrow keys. It is titled, very simply, Quest.

Posted at 12:00 AM

You've probably gotten them by e-mail, or seen them posted in a chatroom. They're internet quizzes. You know, one of those multiple-choice thingies that tells you which Alice in Wonderland character you're most like, or which LOTR character is your best match. Every time a person makes one, someone else sees it and makes one even more lame and obvious than the last. Which I why I'm so happy to share with you a quiz that actually had some thought put into it. It's the Which Country Are You quiz.

Also, a little change from the usual, I'd like to present something from my more literary creative side. A tongue-in-cheek tribute to William Blake: The Spyder.

Posted at 12:00 AM

So this GeekMan's World thing has been around for a few months and I have a nice little readership going. So I ask you: why do none of you ever e-mail me? I've gotten virtually nothing. This next bit is sure to generate some feedback...

Yesterday, my friend Michelle sent me a link to a site known as The Brick Testament. Its goal is simple: to illustrate the entire bible using scenes made entirely of Lego. Well, that's probably far from simple, but the creator ("Reverend" Brendan Powell Smith) is well on his way to doing it. It was a hoot to see the whole Genesis story played out in bricks. But I didn't stop there, I wanted to see what else there was. So, for the first time, because of this ridiculous site, I started reading the bible.

I can't fully express my feelings here, because despite the severity of those feelings I still hope to maintain a veneer of religious tolerance in my life. Reading through the entire "Laws" section really helped open my eyes (and not in a good, "Salvation" sort of way). The same section of the bible that zealots are always quoting to prove that homosexuality is inherently wrong also tells us that when we make war on an enemy we should put the entire male population to death. Seriously. Moses specifically tells us not to modify these laws, and the penalty for disobeying any of them is a slow death by plague handed down to you by God himself. So why is it so important to condemn homosexuality and not to put every male in Iraq to death? Seriously, this really hastens my plan to sit down and read the entire bible. Everyone who quotes a verse from "Laws" at me again won't find me such a pushover the next time around.

Here's some choice illustrations from The Brick Testament:

Homosexuality
Newlyweds
Prisoners of War
When to Stone Your Offspring
Following Your Moral Compass

Posted at 12:00 AM

You know, the hyperlink is a frickin' amazing invention.

A few weeks ago, Penny Arcade announced that they had collaborated with Elf-Only Inn for a comic talent exchange known as Blind Date. Until then, I had never heard of Elf-Only Inn. But PA was kind enough to put a link up to Elf-Only on their website. Of course, since nearly every gamer-geek in the world visits Penny Arcade, there was a fair amount of visitor spillage over to Elf-Only (including me).

So about a week ago I e-mailed Josh Sortelli, the artist/writer of Elf-Only and sent him a favorites icon for use on his website. He thanked me nicely by placing a link to GeekMan's World on his main page. So, when I checked my site today, I found that about 120 people had visited my site in the past 24 hours (which is about a tenfold increase over a usual day, by the way). Looking at the stats, I can see that most of those people never made it past the first page, but you get the picture.

Everything on the web is connected to something else, through varying degrees of separation. You find this sort of thing in everyday life. After all, everyone's always talking about the "small world" effect (this weekend, Jeff, one of the two friends whom I am moving out with, discovered that our future landlady knows his father). On the internet those links are much more literal, and they can be traced by computers. But they also say something about how all our culture and interests link together.

More updates soon.

Posted at 12:00 AM