Cyanide & Happiness @ Explosm.net
Tags: humour
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Serenity sells
According to Michael and Evo’s Slice of SciFi DVD Sales have pushed Serenity over the top and into the black.
All DVD reports up to January 31st are in and it looks like over 2 million DVD’s have been sold and VideoBusiness.com, an organization that tracks video rental information, announced that Serenity has made $9 million in DVD rentals alone.
It hasn’t even been released on DVD worldwide yet, it gets released in the UK in a few days and I for one shall be buying a copy. So this makes up for the poor box-office that it received but I wouldn’t count my chickens just yet.
The fact that Serenity has taken Universal out of the red and into the black is great news, but don’t cheer too early. According to Universal execs it still may not be enough for them to wager on a costly sequel, even though Whedon brought this one in at $1 million under its original projected cost of $40 million.
Like practically every other Firefly fan on the planet I just can’t get enough of the crew of Serenity and would welcome further adventures but what I really would like is another season of the television series.
Failing that then perhaps I can settle for a set of Lego Serenity crew members.
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Berkeley lectures as podcasts
Almost as good as actually attending Berkeley…?
I wholeheartedly approve of programmes like this bringing the best education in the world albeit in a reduced form to those that cannot afford it.
Tags: Digg
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One Billion Mazes
This site contains one billion mazes in high-quality printable PDF format. You may view, print and solve these mazes… and yes, there are exactly one billion mazes!
That’s one hell of a lot of mazes and so they must surely be dynamically created as clearly even if they were computer generated it would require massive storage on a webserver. Talking about Terabytes of data.
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BAFTA
Congratulations to the ‘Gay Shepherd’ movie and to the new Fellow of the British Academy David Puttnam. I agree that the movie-making business is enjoying a resurgence in terms of quality and that it has been proved that movies can be both entertaining and informing, we had great examples of both of those qualities being in abundance amongst the five nominations for Best Picture. But it was Brokeback Mountain that took it.
Tags: movies
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Storycode
I stumbled across the website Storycode yesterday and it may prove to be an excellent source of recommendations for my future reading.
StoryCode.co.uk is a unique source of inspiring book recommendations and a great way to find the next book to read. And its power comes from the collaborative passion of readers.
Users of the site are asked to code the books by answering several questions using a sliding scale system i.e. is this book humorous or serious or somewhere in between. Then a profile of the book is built and can be compared to theirs in the database to find similar books.
So by looking at The Confusion by Neal Stephenson I saw that the book Some Danger Involved by Will Thomas was similar and liked what I read about it.
Modeled after the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, but with a verve all its own, this debut mystery introduces a likable pair of sleuths and explores the Jewish quarter of Victorian London.
And promptly purchased it from Amazon.co.uk
We’ll have to see how this works out once I’ve read the novel, but I’m intrigued by the idea of Storycode.
Tags: books, Neal Stephenson
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Old school gaming
Cubefield feels very much like the kind of videogames that you might have played in the 80s. Graphically very simply, very easy to understand how to play but also very addictive.
Old school gaming at it’s best.
Talking of old school, Cuban Boy’s Old Skool for Scoundrels is simply fantastic.
Tags: games
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Dave Gorman balances rocks
Amongst his many talents comedian Dave Gorman, namesake of Dave Gorman the Site Director of Modblog, can balance rocks as demonstrated by his photos at Flickr.com.
I love discovering people I know use Flickr and discovering that people I don’t know but know of and have seen on the telly use Flickr is almost as exciting. So I imagine that if my excitement level went up to eleven like Nigel Tufnel’s amp it would probably have gone from about a 4 to a fraction under 5 when I found Dave Gorman’s Flickr photostream.
Tags: photography
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The politics of terror
The BBC news website has a good piece of analysis of the glorification of terror law by Nick Assinder titled The politics of terror laws.
The obvious fact that Blair is playing politics with such an important issue just sickens me. Sickens me more that it has me siding with the Conservative party on the issue.
BBC News: MPs back ban on glorifying terror
MPs voted 315 to 277 to reinstate the plan for a new law to stop the glorifying of terrorism into the Terror Bill after last month in which the House of Lords voted to remove the measure form the bill.
Prime Minister Tony Blair said
Weakening our law on terrorism at this time from what is proposed will send the wrong signal out to the outside world and will do no service to those people in our police and law enforcement who are anxious to get on with the job of prosecuting people.
Since when has it been the role of government to send signals when creating legislation? Also in what way is not putting the glorifying terrorism measure into a bill weakening our law on terrorism? Maybe I’m just arguing semantics on this point but until the bill is made law the law on terrorism is unaffected by whatever happens to the bill in it’s passage through parliament.
Mr Blair earlier said the new law was “vital” to defend the UK against people like jailed cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri.
Okay so again Abu Hamza is mentioned by the Prime Minister even though he was convicted under existing laws.
We don’t need new laws we need better facility for prosecuting people under the existing laws. Allowing phone tap evidence to be used in court would be an excellent start. Perhaps now Abu Hamza has been imprisoned there will be less fodder for such knee-jerk reactions by the government to tabloid newspaper hysteria.