Link found over at BookLust:

My Peculiar Aristocratic Title is: Reverend Countess Heather the Larger of Burton-le-Coggles Get your Peculiar Aristocratic Title

One of my more recent blog finds has been Melmoth’s Inferno. I can’t resist it, thanks to such engrossing posts as An undead berry is a Lichee? (which suddenly reminds me that I have a delectable can of lichee nuts in my kitchen, hmm… You know, they actually do kind of look like undead berries):

Considering the sheer variety and culinary diversity that exists in MMOs these days and seeing as adventuring folk spend so much of their time masticating, why not making eating into a mini-game? Yeah, you could make it such that combining foods into ‘courses’ will enable bigger and better buffs as well as healing and replenishing mana. If you have a small soup starter and manage to follow it up with the lamb shanks and roasted vegetables, you’re allowed to try for the power combo finishing desert item! But only if you ate all of your brussels sprouts and you used the correct spoon for the soup. Otherwise the buff fails, and you go straight to bed without getting to fight Bregnip the Merciless.

Does it make me a bad person that I think this actually sounds hysterically fun? But then I’m one of those loons who totally enjoys the farming and cooking crafts in LotRO.

Anyhow, eating a pork pie and suddenly being able to bench press an elephant, or eating cheese and suddenly being more intelligent but only for thirty minutes! is totally bizarre. And what if you melt cheese on a pork pie and eat that, does that count? What happens then? Are you suddenly able to bench press an elephant with your brain? Can your pectoral muscles calculate pi to four hundred places? Food would become dangerous, you wouldn’t know whether to put mustard on your pie in case it combined in some weird way that gave your nipples the power to whistle dixie every time you’re struck in combat. For thirty minutes only.

Go on, read the whole post. I’ve barely scratched the surface of it. Make sure to always read the comments on his posts as well, because they’re frequently just as hilarious. Next in my list of new favorite reads is his entry, You don’t learn to hold your own in the world by standing on guard, which brings us the adventures (such as they are) of Timothy and Trevor, two troll guards sent to find out What’s Going On around the troll encampment:

Timothy: “You’re a peon at work. Good. Good. And you’re another peon, well done. Ok”

Trevor: “You’re a guard, that’s fine. And here’s a priest, lovely. Lovely.”

Timothy: “And here we have the corpse of Tony, who appears to have been smashed to a pulp with a large blunt instrument of war. Ok, good, good.”

Trevor: “Well I think that’s everything, shall we head back to base, Tim?”

Mark my words, someday this blogger will be getting his books published, if he isn’t already. If the rest of us are lucky, that is.

Lawful Stupid

Time to pass on a fun link: Wil Wheaton’s Sci-Fi Guilty Pleasures of the 80s. I love Wil’s writing, and since I grew up in the 80s I remember each and every one of these movies with, yes, that sense of guilty pleasure. Scanners is my favorite on that list, and of course I can’t help being disappointed that The Last Starfighter only got an honorable mention. However, Wil says if there’s a good response he’ll do more of these, so read & respond! I want more.

Edit: Apologies to folks waiting for return emails from me. I think the Medrol did the steroid thing of supressing my immune system enough that I developed an infection, so I feel pretty cruddy and have a doctors’ appt. tomorrow, and really am not accomplishing much. Hopefully they can make it all better, with as few antibiotic side effects as possible. Yes, this is an appt. with a new doctor, not that crappy old one.

I have a feeling everyone else has already seen this. But just in case, here’s a link for you today: A Gamers’ Manifesto. It’s the most hysterical AND accurate screed I’ve ever seen about the state of computer gaming. I have a lot of favorite quotes from it, so it’s hard to choose just one, but here you go:

And this is years after analysts told developers that women would happily play games if they didn’t feel so objectified by them, and several decades past the point where they should have even needed to be told that. Have you guys ever met a woman? Then why don’t you try making just a few games that don’t play off of a 14 year-old male’s idea of womanhood on the apparent hope that he’ll play the game one-handed?

Anyway, that’s pretty much it for today. I need to do some straightening up so my mother doesn’t drop dead of horror (I almost said shock, but that would be the result if the place were spotless) when she visits for the weekend, and I have some more review-book-reading to do.

Edit: Whoops! I almost forgot to proudly pimp my husband’s new article: Case Study in Stealing from History, an article on world-building for roleplaying games. Go read it! I may be biased, but it’s hands-down the best starting-from-scratch world-building article I’ve ever read.

Welcome to my ignore list

Folks constantly say that grammar doesn’t matter. This rings pretty hollow, of course, when someone in World of Warcraft or Lord of the Rings Online is asking for help with a quest, and their grammar is so poor that I realize they could be asking any of three valid questions regarding that quest, and I can’t for the life of me tell which one. Apparently neither can other folks, since often they’ll get conflicting answers that answer different versions of the question. Spelling is a similar matter; sometimes you can tell what someone means, but sometimes you can’t. Homonyms (words that sound alike but are spelled differently, like there and their) make spelling particularly important. Capitalization might seem like the last bastion of “it doesn’t matter,” and yet it can make a huge difference as well. I saw someone post the following example on a WoW chat channel once, so I can’t properly attribute it; yes, it’s crude, but that makes it memorable:

Capitalization is the difference between “I helped my Uncle Jack off a horse” and “I helped my uncle jack off a horse.”

Punctuation has a similar argument going for it that capitalization does, and in fact punctuation could also greatly clear up that last sentence: “I helped my uncle, Jack, off a horse.”

I don’t tend to berate folks for their spelling or grammar the way some people do; I don’t see the point. It doesn’t accomplish anything except to make people angry, and it would be pretty hypocritical since I know my grammar isn’t perfect either. I only have a few circumstances under which I’ll say something:

• Someone makes a really obvious mistake of their own while they’re pompously correcting someone else’s grammar or spelling. I mean, come on. Don’t go around correcting everyone else when you can’t even do it right yourself; that’s truly obnoxious. (I’m mostly likely to do this if someone’s obviously correcting someone else in order to be a jerk.)
• Someone makes a mistake that creates an unintentionally funny statement. What can I say; I love word-play and unintentional humor. Even when I see that I don’t correct their grammar or spelling, however; I just can’t help pointing out the humor in what they’re saying.
• I hit the boiling point, usually due to an unusually large number of people making really stupid mistakes and being very snotty about it.

Right now I’m mostly posting this because I must pass on my current favorite example of why such things matter:

(”Don’t kill your wife with work! Let electricity do it!”)

If you can’t see the humor in this sign then trust me, you really really need to improve your grammar.

Speaking of which, our latest review is of Lara M. Robbins’s Grammar & Style at Your Fingertips. Oddly enough, that actually is a coincidence.

Now, like I said, I know my grammar isn’t perfect, and I decided to take a little online meme quiz in that area:

Your English Skills:

Punctuation: 100% Vocabulary: 100% Grammar: 80% Spelling: 80%

It uses a pretty small cross-section of examples to test you, of course, so it’s of dubious accuracy. The only part that bugs me is that I used to be MUCH better at spelling. I’m also much better at spelling a word when you ask me to spell it cold rather than showing me two different possible spellings; something about the latter situation makes it much harder for me to judge. I start second-guessing myself.

I just have to pass on this list of useful military warnings. I think this approach to things is great–a little dry humor is certainly going to make such reading memorable, eh? Here are a couple of my favorites:

“A slipping gear could let your M203 grenade launcher fire when you least expect it. That would make you quite unpopular in what’s left of your unit.”
- Army’s magazine of preventive maintenance.

Understatement is a great tool of communication–except when you’re dealing with extremely literal-minded people.

“It is generally inadvisable to eject directly over the area you just bombed.”
- U.S. Air Force Manual

This is one of those where you just know the dry tone is because the person writing it is thinking, “it’s ridiculous that I even have to SAY this, and yet…”

and,

“When the pin is pulled, Mr. Grenade is not our friend.”
- U.S. Army

This one gives me an image of a grenade with a face painted on it.

Usually when I talk about food- and cooking-related things I like them to be on the yummy and/or healthy side. Today I thought I’d delve into so-bad-it’s-awesome territory and link you on over to Craptails: the 10 worst drink concepts of all time. The “VIP Sangria” is fairly mundane, with its mix of crappy soda and expensive wine, but things swiftly become bizarre with such ingredients as used socks (to moderate the foul odor of durian fruit), a power drill, raw bacon, Spam, a whole salmon, and a fried quail egg.

Oh, not all in the same recipe. Sorry for the confusion.

My only sadness is that the post doesn’t include photos for each and every one of these dubious masterpieces:

Oh, and it while it would have been even more cool if these had been real drinks someone came up with (I still remember the Galactica special in which the actress who plays Sharon made her “Cylon Shooter”, which actually looked kinda good, if lethal), it’s still entertaining to have someone craft themed disaster drinks.

In personal blah-blah-ing, I think I’m over one week with a sore throat. I was hoping not to have to go back to the doctor until after I found a new one. And in other oddness, I decided to take the which Heroes character are you? quiz just for fun. There has to be something fairly screwed up about scoring a tie between the series’s most innocent character (Hiro) and its most twisted (Sylar)–yet apparently that’s me. Innocently twisted? Twistedly innocent? Is that a good thing or bad? [Cue melodramatic voice-over:] YOU decide!

46%
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Hmm, not so good there. Guess I’d better get in shape and stockpile the non-perishables and improvised weapons!

I’ve used a lot of kitchen gadgets in my time–some amazing, some great conversation pieces, some entirely too single-use to justify the space they took up, and some terrible. But never have I seen one this hysterical. It’s a stoneware egg separator. I happen to think egg separators are pretty silly in the first place; as long as you crack your egg on a flat surface instead of the edge of something (the latter is more likely to drive a shard of shell into the yolk) separating an egg is not all that difficult. Even I’d be tempted, however, by an egg separator that drained off the egg white in the way this one does:

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Wow. What else can I add? Too funny and fun. I absolutely loved “The 300″ and saw it in the theater twice, which I haven’t done with a movie in years; I’m getting a kick out of the few take-off videos that are actually really good. This one, IMO, is perfect!

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