funny – Page 15

A New Keyboard

I already own the best mouse in the world. Maybe it’s time for a new keyboard, too.

A few weeks ago, Adam blogged about his trip to London last year, and mentioned that, after trips out to Soho’s “G-A-Y” nightclub when he was younger, he’d often surprise himself the following morning to wake up in some quite distant travel zones of London. My favourite bit was when he mentioned that, on one ocassion, he’d…

…somehow managed to whore my way beyond the reach of the Underground.

Adam

I replied with a comment, stating, among other things:

You owe me a fresh herbal tea. Also a new keyboard, which might never recover from the nasal spraying of herbal tea that it’s just been exposed to.

Dan

(it’s not a particularly original comment, I know: Jimmy said something similar in a comment on this very blog, about four years ago)

A gift note from Mr. A Westwood: Hi Dan, As requested, one replacement keyboard. I do hope that it's a suitable replacement and that nobody's got their wires crossed. Happy tapping! Adam xx — This note went a little way to explaining the parcel.

In any case: the week before last I received a pair of unexpected parcels. I opened the first, an Amazon box, and pulled out a note. It was from Adam, and stated that the contents were “a replacement keyboard”, assuming that “nobody’s got their wires crossed.”

A musical keyboard: this one’s powered by air (I’d have never guessed that Stagg would have made such a thing!). The musician blows into a tube while they play the notes in order to elicit a tune. It doesn’t sound bad, actually, although I do feel that it could do with a MIDI port. And an air-driven dynamo to power that port. And then a battery-powered pump so that you don’t need to blow it at all.

The second parcel continued the theme:

A selection of herbal and fruit teas, from ~~Asda’s~~ Morrisons’ range. There was no note in this parcel, but it was pretty clear by now who the sender must be. I’d have been ever so confused if I’d have opened the second parcel one first.

So thank you, Adam, you crazy old fool, for making me laugh out loud yet again. I shall have to compose a song in your honour: and given the amount of air intake that’s needed to keep the keyboard playing, I shall call it, The Big Puff Song.

Fetch Quest

Commissioned, a webcomic I’ve been reading for many years now, recently made a couple of observations on the nature of “fetch quests” in contemporary computer role-playing games. And naturally – because my brain works that way – I ended up taking this thought way beyond its natural conclusion.

Today’s children are presumably being saturated with “fetch quests” in RPGs all across the spectrum from fantasy Skyrim-a-likes over to modern-day Grand Theft Auto clones and science fiction Mass Effect-style video games. And the little devil on my left shoulder asks me how this can be manipulated for fun and profit.

The traditional “fetch quest” goes as follows: I’ll give you what you need (the sword that can kill the monster, the job that you need to impress your gang, the name of the star that the invasion fleet are orbiting, or whatever), in exchange for you doing a delivery for me. Either I want you to take something somewhere, or I want you to pick something up, or – in the most overused and thankfully falling out of fashion example – I want you to bring me X number of Y object… 9 shards of triforce, 5 orc skulls, $10,000, or whatever. Needless to say, about 50% of the time there’ll be some kind of challenge along the way (you need to steal the item from a locked safe, you’ll be offered a bribe to “lose” the item, or perhaps you’ll just be mobbed by ninja robots as you ride along on your hypercycle), which is probably for the best because it’s the only thing that adds fun to role-playing a postman. I wonder if being attacked by mage princes is something that real-life couriers dream about?

This really doesn’t tally with normality. When you want something in the real world, you pay for it, or you don’t get it. But somehow in computer RPGs – even ones which allegedly try to model the real world – you’ll find yourself acting as an over-armed deliveryman every ten to fifteen minutes. And who wants to be a Level 38 Dark Elf Florist and Dog Walker?

So perhaps… just perhaps… this will begin to shape the future of our reality. If the children of today start to see the “fetch quest” as a perfectly normal way to introduce yourself to somebody, then maybe someday it will be socially acceptable.

I’m going to try it. The next time that somebody significantly younger than me looks impatient in the queue for the self-service checkouts at Tesco, I’m going to offer to let them go in front of me… but only if they can bring me a tin of sweetcorn! “I can’t go myself, you see,” I’ll say, “Because I need to hold my place in the queue!” A tin of sweetcorn may not be as impressive-sounding as, say, the Staff of Fire Elemental Control, but it gets the job done. And it’s one of your five-a-day, too.

Or when somebody asks me for help fixing their broken website, I’ll say “Okay, I’ll help; but you have to do something for me. Bring me the bodies of five doughnuts, to prove yourself worthy of my assistance.”

It’s going to be a big thing, I promise.

Searching For A Virgin

You just can’t rely on GMail’s “contacts” search any more. Look what it came up with:

Not a result I'd commonly associate with the word "virgin".

With apologies to those of you who won’t “get” this: the person who came up in the search results is a name that is far, far away, in my mind, from the word “virgin”.

In not-completely-unrelated news, I use a program called SwiftKey X on my phone, which uses Markov chains (as I’ve described before) to intelligently suggest word completion and entire words and phrases based on the language I naturally use. I had the software thoroughly parse my text messages, emails, and even this blog to help it learn my language patterns. And recently, while writing a text message to my housemate Paul, it suggested the following sentence as the content of my message:

I am a beautiful person.

I have no idea where it got the idea that that’s something I’m liable to say with any regularity. Except now that it’s appeared on my blog, it will. It’s all gone a little recursive.

HDMI Virus, or How I Became An Old Person

So I saw this HDMI cable online:

Somehow, this triggered a transformation in me. You know how when Eric eats a banana, an amazing transformation occurs? A similar thing happened to me: this horrendously-worded advertisement turned me into an old person. I wanted to write a letter to them.

There were so many unanswered questions in my mind: what is a “virus noise” (is it a bit like the sound of somebody sneezing?)? How a polyester coating protects against them? And what kind of viruses are transmitted down video cables, anyway?

It took them five days but, fair play to them, they – despite Reddit’s expectations – wrote back.

Their explanation? The ‘Virus’ was transcribed from French terminology for interference. It’s not a computer virus or anything like that.

The world is full of examples of cables being over-sold, especially HDMI cables and things like “gold-plated optical cables” (do photons care about the conductivity of gold, now?).

Does anybody have enough of a familiarity with the French language to let me know if their explanation is believable?

The Tampon Gun

This picture’s been floating around the Internet lately. I’m sure that the guy in the picture thinks he’s original, but we totally beat him to it. Back in about 2003.

The difference is, though, that when some friends and I were messing around with about a thousand applicator tampons that had reached their use-by date, we went one step further. We sellotaped laser pointers to the barrels of our guns, and had a laser-guided tampon battle in the car park.

It turns out that laser sights don’t actually improve the accuracy of tampon blowguns. As a weapon, they’re worse than useless, of course – tampons have actually been used to save people from blood loss after a bullet wound. But still, it made for a more fun – if sillier – afternoon than would have been had by just throwing the damn things away, even if we did then have to spend quite a lot of time picking them all up and binning them anyway.

Every time I see this at work my heart skips a beat.

This link was originally posted to /r/funny. See more things from Dan's Reddit account.

The original link was: http://i.imgur.com/TBzQX.png

Wanted

Ah, Oxford. You are so eccentric. Click to embiggen.

Meat To Please You

There’s something that I just don’t understand about vegetarians. It’s something that I didn’t understand when I mercilessly teased them, and it’s something that I still don’t understand now that I am one:

What’s with the fake meat?

Quorn 'Roast Chicken Style Slices'. No chickens were harmed in the making of this chicken. — Quorn ‘Roast Chicken Style Slices’. No chickens were harmed in the making of this chicken.

You know the stuff I’m talking about: stuff made out of mycoprotein or TVP or soya that’s specifically designed to emulate real meat in flavour (sometimes effectively) and texture (rarely so). Browse the chilled and frozen aisles of your local supermarket for their “vegetarian” section and you’ll find meatfree (although rarely vegan) alternatives to chicken, turkey, beef and pork, presented here in descending order of how convincing they are as a substitute.

Tesco 'vegetarian' hot dogs. There's actually a distinct possibility that these contain MORE meat than their non-vegetarian counterparts. — Tesco ‘vegetarian’ hot dogs. There’s actually a distinct possibility that these contain MORE meat than their non-vegetarian counterparts.

Let’s be clear here: it’s not that I don’t see the point in faux meat. It has a few clear benefits: for a start, it makes vegetarianism more-approachable to omnivores who are considering it for the first time. I’ve tried meat substitutes on a number of occasions over the last couple of decades, and they’ve really improved over that time: even a meat-lover like me can be (partially) placated by the selection of substitutes available.

And while I slightly buy-in to the argument that the existence of these fake meats “glorifies” meat-eating, perhaps even to the extent as to under-sell vegetarianism as a poor substitute for the “real thing”, I don’t think that this is in itself the biggest problem with the fake meat industry. There’s a far bigger issue in question:

Why are we stopping here?

If we’re really trying here to make “fake meats”, then why are we setting our targets in-line with the commonly-eaten “real meats”? Why stop at chicken and turkey when we might as well make dodo-flavoured nut roasts and Quorn slices? Sure, they’re extinct, so we’ll probably never have real dodo meat: but there’s no reason that the manufacturers of artificial meats can’t have a go. There are dozens of accounts of the preparation and consumption of dodos, so we’d surely be able to emulate their flavour at least as well as we do the meats that we already produce substitutes for.

A tin of unicorn meat: a good source of sparkles! Also cures poison, detects virgins, etc.

Why stop there? We might as well have tins of unicorn meat, too, a meal already familiar to those of us who’ve played more than our fair share of NetHack. How about dragons, or griffins, or the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary? If we’re going to make it up as we go along when we make artificial bacon, we might as well make it up as we go along when we make basilisk-burgers and salamander-sausages, too.

There’s a reason, of course, that we don’t see these more-imaginative meat substitutes. Many of the most loyal fake-meat customers are the kinds of people who don’t like to think about the connection between, for example, “chicken” (the foodstuff), and “chicken” (the clucking bird). To be fair, a lot of meat-eaters don’t like to think about this either, but I get the impression that it’s more-common among vegetarians.

But seriously, though: I think they’re missing a trick, here. Who wouldn’t love to eat artificial pegasus-pâté?

PromisQity

Never before have I come across a wine so obviously created for me as this one.

Bottles of white and red 'pro-mis-Q-ous' wine.

I haven’t tasted it, and I’ve never seen it for sale. But just look at the label: it’s called pro-mis-Q-ous, a deliberate mis-spelling of “promiscuous” that substitutes in and emphasises the letter Q (which, of course, is my surname). The label goes on to define promiscuity, and it – and their website, makes significant mention on nonmonogamy, which few will by surprised to hear is pretty close to my heart too.

What a great name. I wish I’d come up with it.

I went to an REM concert

Things are crazy busy again. No time to blog properly, so here’s a picture that I scribbled on.

Incidentally, I was actually at the concert where this photo was taken, back in 2005. But that’s not actually me in the corner. I was just inspired to make the joke by this comic.

Weird Music Only Paul Likes

I always wondered where Paul got all of the weirder parts of his music collection. Turns out Amazon just starts recommending it to you once you start looking in the right places:

Disaster Analysis

Scientists investigating this week’s catastrophic lunchquake in the Dan’s Lunchbox region have released a statement today about the techtonic causes of the disaster.

“The upheaval event, which reached 5.9 on the Tupperware Scale, was probably caused by overenthusiastic cycling,” explained Dr. Pepper, Professor of Lunchtime Beverages at Tetrapak University.

“The breadospheres ‘float’ on soft, viscous eggmayolayers. Usually these are stable, but sometimes a lateral shift can result in entire breadosphere plates being displaced underneath one another.”

This is what happened earlier this week, when a breadospheric shift resulted in catastrophic sinkage in the left-side-of-lunchbox area, eggmayolayer “vents”, and an increase in the height of Apple Mountain.

No lives were lost during the disaster. However, two jammie dodgers were completely ruined.

Recent emissions in the ring of fire area is unrelated to this recent lunchquake, and are instead believed to be associated with excessive consumption of spicy food at lunchtimes.

Every Full Moon

This is what happens when you let geeks write your billing software:

From the website of Andrews & Arnold ISP.

Beware: Necrophiliac Paramedics!

A conversation I had this morning with JTA, via text message:

I sent:

Boiler update: this is getting silly. The probability-weighted Markov-chain based predictive text system I’m using this morning saw me type “boi” and suggested “Boiler update:”? /sighs/
On the upside, I’ve successfully arranged for the new distributor valve to be installed on Friday, when I’ll be around.

To give a little background, we’re having trouble with the boiler on Earth. You may have observed that it broke last year, and then again this year: well – it’s still broken, really. Nowadays it’ll only produce a little hot water at a time, and makes a noise like that scene in Titanic where the ship begins to tear in two. You know – a bad noise for a boiler to make. Over the last two or three weeks we’ve repeatedly fought to get it repaired, but it’s been challenging: more on that in a different blog post, if JTA doesn’t get there first.

JTA replied:

On the plus side, at least this saga is overriding your phone’s memory of your previous life as a male prostitute. :-)

I was once mistaken for a gay prostitute, actually – by a gay prostitute – but that’s another story, I guess. In any case, I responded:

Until now! you’ve just mentioned that again, which means it’ll be the “last message received” when the paramedics go through my phone if I’m killed on the way to work this morning. And they’ll say, “yeah; I’d pay to have sex with him.”

Quickly followed by:

And his mate will say:
“Now he’s dead, you don’t HAVE to pay.”
If my corpse is raped by a paramedic, I’m blaming you.

To which JTA said:

You’re talking about people who drive blacked out vans full of drugs. I’m pretty sure they never pay.

From prostitution to necrophilia to date rape over the course of only a handful of text messages. What a great start to a Wednesday morning. I do like the image of an ambulance as “a blacked out van full of drugs,” though…

Best April Fools Pranks 2011

Ah, it’s that time of year again. Here’s a quick round-up of some of my favourite pranks on the web this April Fools’ Day:

ThinkGeek can always be relied upon for a good April Fools’, and this year is no exception. Of their prank products, my favourite is clearly the Anti-3D glasses, which completely filter out the left channel from 3D movies, allowing you to watch them in 2D.
Geocachers amongst you might be pleased by the Nano Alarm container, which sounds a high-pitched alarm when a human body comes near it, making it easier to find. Actually, I’d have found it a more-amusing prank if they’d claimed it detects interference in GPS signals caused by a nearby GPS receiver.
An article on IPv4.5 claims that we ran out of IPv4 addresses completely this morning and, with IPv6 still far from fully-deployed, we’re having to implement IPv4.5 as an emergency measure. IPv4.5 shares IP adddresses between people at opposite sides of the globe, giving priority to those on the “day” side, so there’s a slight risk that some traffic might be mis-directed… but it’ll only be by nocturnal websurfers who are probably just on Facebook or Twitter anyway.
EddEgg launches The Secret of the Isle of Monkey, (a parody of The Secret of Monkey Island) and it’s fabulous: far too much work went into this little April Fools’.
I’ve found Gay Monopoly on BoardGameGeek, and I’m not sure if it’s a joke or not… BoardGameGeek’s already an April Fools in which they become search engine “Geekdo” (try searching for “Catan”… or any other board game… on it). The photos of Gay Monopoly look remarkably believable, but it’s hard to take anything seriously today.
The Pirate Bay has become The Pirat eBay, and has released a blog post claiming that they bought the rights to eBay on eBay and have since re-branded.
Google are well known for their April Fools’ Day pranks, and there are a good number of fantastic ones this year, but my favourite is GMail Motion, motion-sensitive controls based on body movements by which you can interact with your email. Well-worth a look.

Have a great April Fools Day! Play a prank on somebody for me. And, if you don’t want to get caught out yourself, why not install the Do Not Fool add-on for Firefox, which passes a Do-Not-Fool header to every web site you visit, requesting that the site does not display to you any prank content but only genuine pages.