disalarming

Remember when I rediscovered my Gameboy Color and said I wouldn’t get a Nintendo DS because I couldn’t justify the cost for the console or games? Yeah, I do too. I also am now in the possession of a shiny blue Nintendo DS Lite.

How did this happen, when I was so adamant about the fact that a DS would be a waste of money, seeing as I had a Gameby Color? And the fact that I just really wanted to play Pokemon Silver on the Color (which I already had), even though the DS had the remake, SoulSilver? And I’m not employed this summer, so how did I magically justify the expense of a new DS lite?

There were a lot of reasons. I wanted to play the new DS games, SoulSilver is cooler than Silver, I am going to be doing a lot of flying and traveling in the next month so I need something to entertain myself with during the long hauls (which, to me, justified the expense – turns out boredom is pricey). However, what it really came down to was the technology: Gameboy Color has no backlight. Nintendo DS does. Either my eyes are crappier than they were when I first played my Gameboy Color ten years ago, or in those ten years my eyes have been spoiled by the wonders of backlight technology. No matter which, I wanted something where my eyes didn’t have to strain after fifteen minutes of game time… thus, I got a DS.

I know there are lots of DS fans out there, so anyone want to recommend some awesome DS games?

Cross-posted from breakthesky.net. Please leave any comments there.

Meg posted her bracket in the March Madness Cake vs Pie Tournament, so of course I wanted to fill out a bracket too.

It was a lot easier to decide the cake half of the bracket than the pie, which probably means that I enjoy eating more kinds of pie than I do cake. Wedding and birthday cake confused me because there are so many kinds; in the end I interpreted wedding to be white cake and birthday to be yellow. I had a very hard time picking between pound and bundt and went with pound in the end only because I’ve eaten it more than I have bundt.

In the pie side of things, it was difficult because my favorite pies were pitted against my all-time favorite: apple. Lemon meringue is my second favorite kind, so it was very sad to see it go down against apple. I would have liked to put blueberry and cherry against each other, but cheesecake beat out cherry. As much as I love cherry pie, it can be kind of a hit-or-miss depending on the cherries used.

I am very pleased with my Final Four and the results of my bracket. Obviously apple and red velvet would face each other in the end (anyone who knows my dessert eating habits well would have known that from the start). As much as I love apple, there’s just something about red velvet that gives it a little edge over apple. It’s probably because I’ve never had a bad slice of red velvet in my life, whereas I have encountered some mediocre apple pie before.

Go team Red Velvet!

Cross-posted from breakthesky.net. Please leave any comments there.

Sarah Palin’s kids have pretty unusual names. Trig, Willow, Bristol, Piper, Track… they’re not exactly your run-of-the-mill names. The Sarah Palin Baby Name Generator can “translate” your name into a name that Palin would use to name you!

Since I was Sarah Palin last year for Halloween, I was curious as to what my name would be. (That and the fact that I wanted to see what types of names the generator came up with anyway.) I typed “Manda” into the name generator and my name was Filter Skate Palin.

Huh. Filter Skate. Somehow, I still prefer the name Manda ;)

Cross-posted from breakthesky.net. Please leave any comments there.

I hate netspeak. You know, that internet phenomenon where people TYPA LIEK THES N 4GET EVERY GRMMAR N SP3LNG RULA IN EXISTANCE. It’s irritating to read, takes more effort to type than “regular” speak, and generally makes the user look dumber than a dead gnat. Yet, as much as netspeak annoys me, it kind of holds this strange mystifying element for me. Kids insist on using it – but why? Where do you even learn to speak netspeak? I’ve never been a “netspeaker,” I used proper spelling and grammar (took me a while to use proper capitalization though, I’ll admit!) and never became fluent in netspeak.

Maybe the AOLer Translator is what kids use to learn netspeak. It’s a generator that “translates” the regular text you input and outputs the translated netspeak version. It’s pretty cool and accurate (although netspeak is a foreign language to me!). The only thing missing is a netspeak to regular speak translator – that would be much more useful than regular speak to netspeak!

I input the first two paragraphs of this entry in the translator, and this is what it generated:

Read the rest of this entry »

Cross-posted from breakthesky.net. Please leave any comments there.

While procrastinating instead of studying for my final exams, I came across the Textorizer, a nifty vector generator that vectorizes images with text. You can customize the amount of strokes used in the vector, the stroke threshold, and the height and width of the generated Textorizer image. You can also choose what text is used to sketch the image. The overall look is very nifty, and Textorizing images is incredibly addictive!

I chose to Textorize a photo of the Queen of Hearts from Disney’s Alice in Wonderland. Here is the result!

Queen of Hearts

Cross-posted from breakthesky.net. Please leave any comments there.

Way back in the day when I had a PC desktop, I broke my mouse. Well, the mouse itself wasn’t broken, but I could no longer left-click on anything since I had broken the clicker¹. While keyboard shortcuts are useful, they can’t replace every function that is available with the click of a mouse, and so I had to go into the computer store and get a new mouse so I could happily click away at my computer.

Don’t Click It is a website that has an entirely click-free interface. It’s set up to explore the concept of having to click to get to a new page on a website, and instead of clicking on a link, you only need to hover your mouse over the link to be taken to the new link. There is some nifty stuff abut the history of clicking online, as well as site statistics² about visitors that click on Don’t Click It.

If I had known that Don’t Click It had existed when my mouse died, then I could have browsed at least one website with my dead mouse clicker!

1. I am sure there are more technical terms for my story of the broken mouse clicker, but I’ve no idea what they are! [↩]
2. After a few minutes of surfing at Don’t Click It, a box appears asking you whether or not you miss the clicking interface [↩]

Cross-posted from breakthesky.net. Please leave any comments there.

I make no secret about the fact that I am a huge Alice in Wonderland fan. I run the fanlisting for the Queen of Hearts, and over at my TCG trading post for So Magical I am currently collecting all the Alice in Wonderland-related decks. So imagine my excitement when I discovered Alice in Wonderland: An Interactive Adventure!

The majority of the games available on the site are simple Javascript games such as Memory, Tic Tac Toe, Wordsearch, etc. They are all Alice in Wonderland-themed though, which makes for a nice touch, and the names used for each game are Wonderland-themed (Curiouser and Curiouser, Pool of Tears, and Paint the Roses Red, for instance). Since the games themselves aren’t unique, I don’t really see myself returning to Alice in Wonderland: An Interactive Adventure, but I did want to share what I wrote after playing A Long and Sad Tale, which is rather similar to the post generator for lazy bloggers.

There was once a beamish boy named Walter, whose best friend was a mock tutle named Xenophanes. Xenophanes came from through the looking glass where all the doors were green with mold, and everyone ate frog legs and horseradish. When Xenophanes was all alone, he liked to bathe with his chest set. When he was with his friends, he liked to cook a pot of soup. Xenophanes was terribly weird.

One c-c-c-old day, Xenophanes was very itchy and thought he was sinking in quicksand, so he put all of his eggs into a clothes hamper. He looked high and low for his friends. It turned out, however, that they were robbing a bank. Imagine how hysterical he was! Sometimes days are not what they seem.

The end.

A long and sad tale indeed! Now I want to reread Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass…

Cross-posted from breakthesky.net. Please leave any comments there.

I’ve always been a fan of geography and history lessons, and I’ve always been really good with the names of countries and their location in the world. I guess it comes with my love of languages and travel, but it’s just something that has always really interested me.

I stumbled across this game the other day: How Many Countries Can You Name in 5 Minutes? It tests how many countries you can name out of the 195 listed sovereign nations in 5 minutes. Countries like England and Scotland don’t count as they are not sovereign nations – the first time I tried playing it, I misread the explanation about sovereign nations and then spent the first minute or so repeatedly typing in “England” and not understanding why the game said my answer was wrong!

The first time I played this game, I got a score of 94/195. If you play this game (it only takes 5 minutes ;D), what’s your score?

Cross-posted from breakthesky.net. Please leave any comments there.