Another item I could have gotten if I had went to SDCC . . . aargh. Funko apparently only made a few hundred of these, so E-Bay’s your best option now (which is where I got this image from someone selling it for a $30 Buy It Now price).
One of the worst cliches is the claim, frequently though almost certainly incorrectly attributed to Albert Einstein, that “insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” This is, of course, false and trivially false at that.
Whenever I hear people say something along those lines, I wonder what they expect to happen if they flip a coin. Say, they flip a coin once and it comes up heads. Do these folks expect all future coin flips to come up heads until the end of time?
In fact there are so many counterexamples to this particular claim, that its hard to understand how it ever became popular cliche (unless the attribution to Einstein was sufficient).
Update – May 2009: This phrase seems to originate in a 1983 novel by Rita Mae Brown. If anyone knows of an instance of the phrase appearing in print prior to 1983, I’d to know about it.
OMG, this Tardis MAME console is the awes0me.
There’s a market for this? Seriously? Just in case you happen to be in the target market, this is a mere $69.95 over at Collectibles Today.
WordPress has a nice ability to set the post date on a blog entry to whatever the hell you want it to be. The only problem is, the default is that the timestamp field is hidden and the user has to click on a link to expand it. Which is a real pain in the ass if you use that feature a lot to schedule posts.
Mark Jaquith solves that problem with a one-line plugin that keeps the timestamp field open automatically.
TechCrunch writes about the increasingly small window companies have to make an impression with new product launches, citing the lousy launch of Google-wannabe Cuil.
The thing that boggles my mind about Cuil is still the three-column search results page. WTF? That just makes my eyes bleed and has me running back to Google to lay down my privacy in exchange for relevant results normal people can actually read.
The Toy Zone has 20 album covers recreated with Legos,
I’ve been looking for a way to customize the text shown on Tag pages. For some Tag pages, I’d like to include additional information related to the topic. For example, on the World of Warcraft tag page I might want to include information about my toons and links to the WoW Armory.
The official WordPress documentation, which is in general subpar, suggests creating a tag-[tag].php template for each tag you want to customize. So for my WoW example, I’d create a tag-world-of-warcraft.php template and include the custom changes there. And then do that for potentially hundreds of tags. And then edit each of those templates anytime something changes. No thanks.
A better solution is to use conditionals in the tag template in conjunction with a text substitution plugin such as AnyVar.
AnyVar lets you create text substitutions that can be placed anywhere within a site. For example, for my World of Warcraft example, I can compose a couple paragraphs about WoW and assign in to world-of-warcraft-var. Then, in the template, I just surround it in brackets like this: [world-of-warcraft-var], and AnyVar will handle inserting my text there. Anytime I want to update that text, I simply go in to AnyVar, change the text there, and it gets updated instantly.
Then it’s just a matter of inserting something like this into the tag.php template:
<?php /* If this is the World of Warcraft tag archive */ if( is_tag(world-of-warcraft)) { ?>
[world-of-warcraft-var]
<?php /* If this is a tag archive */ } elseif (is_tag()) { ?>
<h1><?php single_tag_title(); ?></h1>
Obviously you’ll need a separate if(is_tag(tag-name)) conditional for each tag that is going to have any customized content.
It’d be nice if there was a plugin that would do this automatically, but this is fairly straightforward and a lot easier than littering a site with dozens of different tag templates.
Marco Kaye has a hilarious imaginary letter over at McSweeney’s, Mom, Dad, I’m Into Steampunk:
If you want to label me retrofuturistic so I can fit into your compartmentalized worldview, that’s fine. But look past my airplane goggles. This is my lifestyle. While many of my kind doubt there’ll be a complete societal collapse in the future, a near-cataclysm is likely. In this scenario, I will be able to repair a generator, suture the wounded, and even train carrier pigeons. I’m learning valuable skills.
. . .
Is it too soon to invite you to a night of experimental performance and magic? My friends and I are hosting a postvaudevillian event at the VFW Hall. If you attend, I would appreciate if you called me by my new name, Alchemancer.
IToyNews.Com has some nice shots of this 1/6th scale Sgt. Rock that DC Direct is showing off at SDCC. I’ve just recently started grabbing all of the 1/6th scale DC figures, though the increase in oil prices is starting to send the cost of these figures to the $125 range.
