Month: February 2011

If Jupiter was where the Moon is…

Jason Thibeault

This is what you’d see. It’s not the whole night sky, but it’s 62 degrees of it.

Scale from Brad Goodspeed on Vimeo.

This solar system is freaking huge. And it’s such a tiny tiny part of our galaxy. I think if anything, it should tell us how small and insignificant humankind is in the grand scale of things. And yet we’re here to observe it, and figure as much of it out as we can before we annihilate ourselves. Ain’t life grand?

Hat tip to BradBlogSpeed and James Carey who passed the link along via Facebook. Cheers!

If Jupiter was where the Moon is…
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Afraid for your immortal soul? There’s an app for that!

Jason Thibeault2 Comments

Via The Beeb:

The Catholic Church has approved an iPhone app that helps guide worshippers through confession.

The Confession program has gone on sale through iTunes for £1.19 ($1.99).
[…]
The app takes users through the sacrament – in which Catholics admit their wrongdoings – and allows them to keep track of their sins.

It also allows them to examine their conscience based on personalised factors such as age, sex and marital status – but it is not intended to replace traditional confession entirely.

Why is it that one must commune with God and seek His forgiveness to be absolved of your sins, and yet one must, in actuality, receive absolution from a priest instead? I’m guessing it’s not about making yourself right with God, in these chuckleheads’ philosophy — it’s about priests getting all the skinny on who’s tainted, and how. Putting all your sins in your iPhone in database format just makes it all the easier to catalogue them, so I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a separate app for those priests you’re recommended to visit, where they get to snag a copy of those sins for later spiritual blackmail use.

Afraid for your immortal soul? There’s an app for that!

“Why would the Devil punish you? You’re one of his boys!”

Jason Thibeault1 Comment

Here’s a guy that minces no words. Another guy whose comedy style is essentially George Carlin’s — tell the truth, don’t sugar coat it, and people will laugh.

Sure, he’s not terribly conciliatory, and he’s a bit rude to the prevailing religion of the nation he’s in, but nobody said ideas deserved respect, only the people who adhere to them.

“Why would the Devil punish you? You’re one of his boys!”

Tiny blue goblin, big freaking sword.

Jason Thibeault3 Comments

If you haven’t already tried 3D Dot Game Heroes for the PS3, and have ever played the original Zelda, you really ought to pick this game up post-haste. Not only is it replete with in-jokes that you’ll only get if you’ve been a gamer since at least the NES days, but it is HARD, like how games used to be in those same days of yore. The game harks back to when games were Serious Business(tm). It is, in Atlus’ words, “the ultimate love letter to retro gamers”. Its graphics are pixelly despite being “3D”, its music is “chiptune” or 8-bit, and its gameplay can be absolutely brutal at times if you’re not used to managing half a dozen ogres bearing down on your hero, each of which take a dozen or so hits before they fall,

And one of the best features? You can make your own hero in its 3D pixel editor.

So, since the copy I got my hands on came from none other than Kelly McCullough, author of the Webmage series, I knew exactly who I had to make first.


Behold Melchior, tiny blue magical webgoblin, wielding the gigantic Holy Sword of Dotnia.

To install Melchior, download this file. Find a USB drive, formatted FAT32 (ugh, I know), and extract the zip to the root of that drive. It should create a PS3 folder (if there isn’t already one you tend to use), with all the appropriate files and folders under it. Insert it into your PS3, go to Game > Saved Data Utility (PS3) > USB Device, then find the yellow Edit data with the tiny blue goblin on the left. Hit Triangle, choose Copy, then you can load up the game and when prompted to choose a character, you can select Edit Data and choose Melchior from the list. If you have multiple edited characters, you’ll have to find his tiny blue arse manually, as it doesn’t seem to sort in any way I can tell.

Tiny blue goblin, big freaking sword.

RCimT: Some stuff I missed while I was down and out

Jason Thibeault, ,

In the wake of Scio11, I was sick. Very sick. Two different kinds of sicknesses with different incubation periods and symptoms. My immune system is shot all to hell, and I strongly suspect I’m becoming allergic to my cats, which would explain my sinus problems for the past year and a half, and my sudden downturn in ability to fend off any sniggering little monocellular malcontent that happens by. Got an allergy test eventually – at least, that’s what the doctor tells me, though I’ve not yet heard from the local allergist to actually make an appointment. Meanwhile, work’s been pretty much insane, so I haven’t had nearly as much time to blog as I’d like. So, I had a hell of a lot of tabs in my to-blog-about queue, and now’s as good a time to dump and run as any.

Apparently there’s 1023 protests going on this weekend all over Canada. Given my current state of health, maybe going out in public and overdosing on homeopathic remedies to protest the fact that they’re selling sugar and water is a good idea. I could drink homeopathic echinacea or something.

This is nothing short of awesome. A Dreamworks storyboard artist blogs some of his storyboard brainstorms, and in his latest, he turned Carl Sagan and his Spaceship of the Imagination into something like an interstellar woo Star Destroyer.

The Onion covers the recent Republican repeal of the bill to destroy an asteroid that’s going to hit Earth, sending a strong message of rebuke to Obama and his administration’s big spending ways.

Gawker publishes a handy guide to all the right-wing nonsense that’s being spouted by the usual suspects lately. Great if you need to catch up on your conspiracy theories and you don’t have Fox News.

There’s a row going on right now between Canadian consumers and ISPs — the ISPs have been pushing to move to usage-based billing (to squeeze more blood from a stone, and simultaneously kill competitor Netflix in the video streaming market), and a grassroots effort called OpenMedia.ca has gained enough momentum that politicians are actually forced to overturn at least one decision by the CRTC that would prevent small competitors from offering unlimited usage plans. I may have more to blog about this later. You should probably sign the petition, and visit the website, if you haven’t already.

I hate Ayn Rand and her self-centered, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps (regardless of your lot in life) philosophies. Just saying. So I had to smile when I found out she received Medicare benefits — under an assumed name no less.

I also missed more and better proof that Ratzinger covered up pedophilic abuse. Wow. Seriously.

Reuters reports US government officials admitting privately that the Wikileaks leaks aren’t actually that damaging. Yet they keep beating the wardrum for Assange’s hide, even though lawyers pretty much admit Wikileaks broke no US laws.

The Tea Party is apparently demanding sanitized history, asking that textbooks cover up slavery and the extermination of the natives, because they “make past leaders look like hypocrites”. No… shit.

And finally, this past CES had two pieces of exciting news that add up to one very important and excellent piece of news. That one very important and excellent piece of news is that Microsoft’s computer hegemony is cracking. Significantly.

RCimT: Some stuff I missed while I was down and out