So that’s what those blisters are!
You learn something every day…
Month: January 2014
They can *all* read my thoughts!
I had occasion to play the Firefly board game with Paula and Bek yesterday. It was a lot of fun – although we actually played it a bit wrong – but I am kind of miffed because the whole thing is quite obviously stolen from the Firefly card game that I started to develop some years back – Plyin’ the Black.
Now, obviously I kid. I do not actually think Gale Force Nine are stealing my thoughts. The fact that a good 75% of the mechanics and ideas in the board game are the same as in my card game is a fascinating example of congruent evolution, and clearly the result of people experienced with a large range of existing games working from the same source material. It’s just downheartening to realise that the time and effort I put into my system has been wasted, because even were I to dig it out and finish development Plyin’ the Black would forever look like blatant plagiarism.
But hey, the board game is really well done and I’ll be buying a copy as soon as I have collected the requisite funds. And the master Plyin’ the Black rulebook is signed by Jewel Staite and Summer Glau, so let’s see Gale Force Nine match that! 😉
Later: Hmmm, maybe I could create a mashup of both games and create a boardless version. Something to think about…
Hottest and Warmest 100 Round Up
Well, I didn’t do a complete, song-by-song analysis of the Hottest 100 this year, but I did tally up the results, compare them to the Warmest 100 and worked out some numbers – mostly because I’m a terrible nerd and can’t help myself.
OK, so there were 15 songs that the Warmest 100 predicted to get into the countdown, but didn’t. The highest numbered failed prediction was Red Light Green Light by Dune Rats, which was predicted for number 70, but actually turned up at 133, 63 places lower.
This was the second worst prediction of the Warmest 100. The worst was No Waves by Fidlar, which was predicted for 81 and actually came in at 113 places lower at 194. Wow. Now that’s what you call a statistical anomaly!
The worst performance of a song that ended up in the countdown was Without You by Dillon Francis which was predicted for 37 and came in at 99, 62 places lower.
Of the 15 songs that weren’t predicted to come in, but did, the highest rated was Lanterns by Birds of Tokyo which ended up at position 22.
The average difference between predicted position and actual position was 18.32 places. If the songs that fell outside of the top 100 are excluded, this falls to 14.59. For the top twenty the average was 8.4 places, for the top ten 4.8 places, and the top five 4.4 places.
The song that most exceeded its prediction was Southern Son by Boy and Bear. Predicted for 92 it came in at 41, a full 51 places ahead.
Four songs came in exactly where predicted. White Noise by Disclosure (69), Arabella by the Arctic Monkeys (18), Strong by London Grammar (10) and Riptide by Vance Joy – taking out the countdown at number 1.
The songs I voted for came in as follows…
* Hey Geronimo – Lazer Gun Show – Failed to Show
* Major Lazer – Jessica – 74
* Touch Sensitive – Pizza Guy – 38
* Chvrches – Gun – 37
* The Wombats – Your Body is a Weapon – 25
* Birds of Tokyo – Lanterns – 22
* Lorde – Tennis Court – 12
* Haim – The Wire – 11
* Lana Del Rey – Young and Beautiful – 7
* Daft Punk – Get Lucky – 3
Overall pretty good, and the Arctic Monkeys didn’t take out the top spot, so even better! 😀
Warmest 100 – 2013
Tomorrow is of course Hottest 100 day. As happened last year some clever souls have – despite the best efforts of Triple J to stop their fun – scraped the net for vote data and compiled a list of predictions, which can be viewed here.
Last year’s predictions were pretty accurate, as shown by my overly obsessive analysis. I have stuff to do this weekend, so I doubt I’ll be live blogging/live calculating as I did last year, but I’ll certainly be keeping an ear out for how well they do. I am mildly surprised that they have Royals by Lorde at number 8, I thought it was a good contender for number 1, but statistics don’t lie. Riptide by Vance Joy (whatever the hell that is) is the predicted number 1, so we’ll just have to see.
Concerning my own votes, three songs don’t make it into the prediction. I’m particularly surprised about Birds of Tokyo, but then it did come out early in the year and people have short memories these days…
Lanterns – Birds of Tokyo
Jessica – Major Lazer
Lazer Gun Show – Hey Geronimo
As for the rest of my choices they’re clustered around the 20’s, which is pretty damn good!
31: Your Body is a Weapon – The Wombats
29: Tennis Courts – Lorde
25: Gun – Chvrches
24: Young and Beautiful – Lana Del Rey
22: The Wire – Haim
19: Pizza Guy – Touch Sensitive
15: Get Lucky – Daft Punk
Roll on the countdown!
PS: Oh, so this is Riptide. Yeah, that’s not bad.
The Silmarillion Project
I’m sure I’ve mentioned Aaron Diaz’s Silmarillion illustrations at some point, but he’s now put them all in one convenient place, with more to come!
As we have come to expect from Mr Diaz the art is fantastic – I particularly like his kickarse version of young Galadriel (she mellowed out a lot over the next 8,000 or so years).
Well worth a look!
Musical Tuesdays – The Inner Life of the Gay Computer, circa 1987
Well, it’s been a while, what with the Christmas Season and interstate holidays and server problems, but Musical Tuesdays is back!
To make up for the break, I’m presenting not two, not three, but four videos this week! Amazing! And the theme? The Pet Shop Boys.
The Pet Shop Boys formed in London in the early 1980s after a chance meeting in an electronics store. They developed a distinctive style of electropop and went on to become the most successful duo in British music history, selling over 50 million albums. In 1987 they also made a rather strange movie, which was really just an extended series of video clips, including the one I’m featuring for their version of Always on My Mind.
Some background – our heroes have just been warned via the radio of a murderous hitchiker who has already slaughtered three people who gave him lifts. They pull over to pick up a young woman, but end up with a very strange man instead…
With the massive success of the Pet Shop Boys it’s inevitable that they’d attract imitators. For example, the KLF who attempted to follow up the ridiculously massive success of their novelty hit Doctorin’ the Tardis with 1989’s Kylie Said to Jason.
It sank without a trace. Probably just as well.
Imitation of course is the close relative of parody, and we close today with two comparatively recent pastiches, one from New Zealand and one American.
So that’s it. Maybe next week I’ll have enough energy to actually write something interesting…
Oh, and credit to John Allison for the title.
Updates
I haven’t been making any posts this week as I thought it’d be better to wait until I got everything transferred to the new server, but as is usually the case this is taking longer than anticipated. I now hope to get it sorted early to mid next week.
In the meantime, the video card on my home PC has given up the ghost, which means I’ll have to put it into the shop all weekend. No internet access for an entire weekend – especially one with temperatures tipped to get close to 40° – may well drive me mad, so when the Wyrmlog comes back up please don’t be surprised if it resembles Sixth World Problems.
On the subject of numerical world problems, please take a look at how much fun I had this week pretending to be a 14th century peasant who stumbled over an iMac and mistook everyone on Reddit for spirits and demons.
OK, that’s it. See you in the funny pages.
Don’t Panic!
I went to Canberra, had a good time, came back, and in the meantime the Wyrmlog got shut down as a precaution to do with some server security issues. You win some, you lose some I guess.
I’ve turned it back on so I can back it up and then make the switch to a brand new, up-to-date and altogether awesomer Wyrmlog on a more secure server. This means it may be down for a little longer, and it may take a while for the styling to get back up to its current standard. But hey, you come here for the content, right?
So bear with me for the next couple of weeks…
Did I Mention I’m Going to Canberra?
Flying out this morning, coming back later this week. How about that?
