Just for Fun
voltagegate | June 9, 2008Wayne found a neat little site the other day and was kind enough to share it with us. Curiosities of Biological Nomenclature is a site of the strange and notable names given to organisms over the years. It's definitely worth a look.
voltagegate | May 16, 2008This weekend, should I visit:
Panola Mountain or Sweetwater Creek?
I want to do some hiking/photography.
voltagegate | December 20, 2007Damn snow is good for something I guess.
With Oscar around I wonder if my frozen friend will have any arms when I get home.
voltagegate | November 9, 2007I had to do it. With the red panda (Ailurus fulgens) at the top of my favorite animals list, I had to know exactly how many folks share enough interest in the firefox to name their toon after its genus name.
So how many Ailuruses are there out there? Seven on the North American servers and three on the European; appropriately, six of them are druids (cat/bear forms). The highest level (and she's leveled in the past few days, so is active) is a 68 feral druid who must have just recently snagged her Staff of Beasts from the Ring of Blood quest series in Nagrand.
If you've kept up with TVG,…
voltagegate | November 1, 2007Today we'll start this little experiment with one of the toons that gave me the idea (the other is a secret as of yet!), Empidonax from Ravencrest. Emp is spec'd holy with almost two dozen points discipline as well, presumably for mana sustainability in raids like Karazhan.
There are only two Empidonax's on all 200 of WoW's North American servers, none on the European servers. The other Empidonax is a level 10 Druid on Arathor.
IRL (in real life) the genus Empidonax, meaning "mosquito king" in Latin, collects a group of "tyrant flycatchers" from the family Tyrannidae. Our representative of…
voltagegate | September 28, 2007I've been tagged!
It's cool, it's about animals and I've only got an hour to blog this morning before work, so let's do it.
An interesting animal I had
All of the animals I've made friends with over the years have been a bit weird in their own way, I suppose. When you get the chance to get to know something with such a different brain, you're bound to be surprised by its behavior.
About five years ago, I took my friend's tarantula under my care since he had been "joking" about letting it go in his suburban backyard. Tarantella is a Chilean rose-haired tarantula, fairly commonplace as far as…
voltagegate | September 26, 2007WWF is running their latest holiday animal adoption campaign, and have some interesting critters up for adoption just in time for Halloween, including the hellbender, octopus and of course, the vampire bat. Cute idea, and I love the teasers, but... THERE'S NO CANDY IN THE BAG???
Guess I'll have to stuff that little orange bag full of Endangered Species Chocolate myself.
voltagegate | July 11, 2007I'm jealous. Look at him crush that Homer donut.
He's posted a video slideshow of his trip just to rub it in.
voltagegate | July 9, 2007
I've been playing a relatively obscure SNES Squaresoft title for the past few days, Bahamut Lagoon. The art is reminiscent of FF6, but it plays like a hybrid of FF Tactics and Shining Force (two of my all time favs), where you have units on a battlefield who can cast spells on enemy units from a distance, or enter one on one battle where the gameplay resembles a traditional RPG. Each unit is equipped with a [mostly] computer controlled dragon that fights alongside you, each of whom can be fed different items to boost stats. They even change into different forms, Pokemon style.
The story…
voltagegate | June 28, 2007It's been slow around here this week, and it's all his fault.
Heather and I have been talking about getting a dog for some time now. I caught her on Petfinder every now and then, perusing the local shelters for dogs. I finally broke down the other day. We applied for a bull terrier mix named Lexie, spent an hour at the shelter that's an hour away, only to come home and find out that someone was "better suited" for her. So, we switched the name on the application for that cute little mutt.
He checked out at the vet the other day. At 16 weeks, he's 17.5 pounds, so we're thinking he'll reach 60…
voltagegate | June 22, 2007I've been brutally tagged by Brian, who seeks to infect my mind with a blog meme that demands eight random facts as an offering to the blog gods:
1. Players start with 8 random facts about themselves.
2. Those who are tagged should post these rules and their 8 random facts.
3. Players should tag 8 other people and notify them they have been tagged.
Egotism and irrelevancy below the fold.
I have filled just about every position one can have in the restaurant biz, from prep to line to waiter to FOH and bakery manager. Hospitality was a career choice out of need; science writing is a choice…
voltagegate | June 3, 2007It's the last day of Red Panda Week, and I know you're wondering: What would it be like to live with red pandas?
Have a look:
voltagegate | May 18, 2007Dave asked the scienceblogging community to show off our coffee mugs in order to reveal personality quirks, stir up a story or two, or uncover plans for world domination.
More specifically:
1. Can you show us your coffee cup?
2. Can you comment on it? Do you think it reflects on your personality?
3. Do you have any interesting anecdotes resulting from coffee cup commentary?
3. Can you try to get others to comment on it?
I'll try. The divine is difficult to articulate.
I'm a morning writer when school/work is in, and coffee is absolutely essential to my routine. It's something to look…
voltagegate | May 15, 2007I can't wait to see these guys again. Freakin' amazing guitar work and just sloppy enough to avoid pretension. They're touring with the Deftones this summer.
Me and my ex-music editor (*sniffle*), Steph saw them last July at the Ottobar in Baltimore. Tom Erak, the lead singer is a very cool guy. She got to chat with him after the show.
Steph has caught the blogging bug too, and started a punk news blog as an extension of her stuff at TBL. She goes to way more shows than she can cover in the paper, so Typing for Miles provides an outlet for her insatiable, relentless music writing.
voltagegate | May 10, 2007The final issue of The Bottom Line came out yesterday, the last one with my name under "editor in chief" on the tombstone.
This past weekend, I got a phone call from Jared, one of our own choose-your-adventure style serial fiction writers (Q.U.E.S.T. - don't ask me what it stands for...) at TBL. I have made a couple of appearances in their story so far, and he was wondering how I should meet my end: Should they rush in to save me from pain and death or should I meet my end at the hands of their nemesis as they rush in to save me?
"Oh, I would much rather die in the last issue," I said.
"…
voltagegate | May 7, 2007As part of a school project, these students took the chapter on biomes in their biology text and produced a series of videos about biomes, but not just any biomes. These students chose to present the biomes of the Lord of the Rings.
Join Gandalf and Frodo below the fold as they revisit a not-so-perilous Middle Earth, where wargs, oliphaunts and huorns are just functional groups in an ecosystem.
Intro
Tundra
Taiga
You can find the rest of the series on YouTube.
voltagegate | April 25, 2007Man, this game sucks. They show you what amounts to be an extra depressing trailer of An Inconvenient Truth and then unleashes you on the world - to stop emitting so much CO2.
Usually when a game is set in a post-apocalyptic world, you at least get a gun or a blade (or a gunblade) and have to undermine the oppressive, corrupt regime that has risen in the absence of order. In Planet Green Game, in the face of utter destruction, you take your car in for an oil change.
Everyone knows that the only good educational game ever made was Oregon Trail. Sure, my oxen always drowned while pulling a…
voltagegate | April 17, 2007The scientists are at it again, conducting horrible experiments on the cutest, sweetest Easter treat: Peeps.
What happens when you put a Peep in a vacuum? How does a Peep react to microwave radiation and temperature extremes? These quacks even justify their research by claiming that Peeps have no hearts.
Have they no souls?
Tip: Jen, Shelley
voltagegate | April 12, 2007Our video game columnist has picked up the blogging bug again and is posting like mad at The AT Wire. I've always been a fan of the column as a guy who was playing when the NES was new, and still plays to this day. Gaming culture needs a serious analyst who isn't 13 years old or 25 and acts like they're 13 on G4.
At Derek's request, I will actually be writing a guest post at The AT Wire within the next week about my first couple of weeks playing my first MMO. More details on that later.
It's also Derek's birthday. Go over and check out the digs.