Just another nerd.
Chessex sells these novelty Cheat Dice. They’re not actually loaded, but rather they are creatively labeled,
Cheat Die set contains:
- 1 d20 numbered with two “20”s and no “1”
- 1 d10 numbered with two “0”s and no “1”
- 1 d6 numbered with two “6”s and no “1”
- 1 d6 numbered with two “1”s and no “6”
- 1 standard d20
- 1 standard d10
- 1 standard d6
Nice. Papa needs a critical hit.
So I was checking out the clearance toy bin at the local Wal-Mart-style chain store and ran across what has to be not only the worst Dark Knight tie-in, but possibly the lamest Batman toy ever. I give you, the Dark Knight Interactive Bat,
According to Mattel’s promotional material,
Batman Dark Knight Interactive Bat makes the Batcave playroom complete. From deep within the mysteries of the Batcave comes the Attack Bat. It perches silently. Wake up the bat by pressing a button and the eyes will glow and the bat makes chittering noises. Press a button on the perch, the bat releases itself and begins to take flight, surely scaring anyone nearby.
Uh, yeah, every kid’s dream to have a creepy f—ing bat toy.
Offworld Designs sells this amazing Horton Hears Cthulhu! t-shirt.
Innsmouth Escape is a board game from Twilight Creations where one side plays a human being trying to escape from Innsmouth and the other players take on the role of Deep Ones trying to kill him.
Hmm . . . Super Mario Chess set.
Jason Kottke decides to start a meme and Cory Doctorow can’t help but jump on the bandwagon about the WhiteHouse.gov robots.txt file which went from 2,400 lines to 2. Of course there must be some nefarious purpose there or lesson about the closed nature of the Bush administration vs. the new open Obama administration.
Kottke tells us the difference represents “a small and nerdy measure of the huge change in the executive branch of the US government today” and Doctorow tags his post with CIVLIB just to let us know this is not just some technical issue.
Which, of course, it is. You can view the entire robots.txt file here. For every /directory/ on the Whitehouse.gov site, the Bush administration created a text-only /directory/text/ subdirectory. The robots.txt file tells Google not to index the text-only version so that the complete page remains canonical for Google. In fact, this is exactly what Google suggests doing for sites that have large amounts of duplicated content (on this site, for example, most pages have a print-only option and the robots.txt file instructs Google not to index any URLs that contain /print/).
I wonder if this sort of nonsense is what Teresa Nielsen Hayden meant by “dumb-and-resentful” political commentators.