They let us do yet another live show at Dragon*Con this year…can you believe that? Well, they did. We were lucky enough to have Clinton from Comedy4Cast, and Jonathan Strickland from How Stuff Works.com join us too. We had fun, the audience had fun, we laughed, we cried..blah blah blah.
Video possibly coming soon….
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It seems that George Lucas has changed the ending in Return of the Jedi and this is how he wants it (Shown first) with Vader yelling ‘Nooo!’. I guess it’s ok to cut down little padawan jedi kids and still object to your own being shocked to death…but I digress.
Since he is re-editing the movies still, we thought of some ways he might improve on it even further.
Kreg and I are are thrilled to have won the Parsec Award for comedy/parody podcast. Thank you to the committee, the other finalists, and all you listeners who make this podcast worth doing. It is a tremendous honor. We I’ll talk a bit more about it in the show. Until then, 1-0-1.
Coming up in this episode…
Listen below with the audio player or Click Here for complete show notes and video from the show.
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Whoever came up with CRWTHS is twisted, but it is still too easy to guess.
Review and Strategy Guide: Hanging With Friends
Advanced Strategy Guide: Hanging With Friends
There’s no structure to this guide this time, these are just a list of hints that will help you get a leg up on your opponent.
1. Always play with the sound on, even if it is just barely audible. There is a clue in the sound effects when you are solving puzzles. You will get a drum roll when you are one letter away from solving the puzzle. That does not that the drum roll happens when there is one blank tile left. So, if there are two tiles that happen to be the same letter, you will still get the drum roll. This may be the only way that you guys will ever figure out when I’m playing HEHS or POPS.
2. Building words that start with a vowel seems to be unpopular. It could just be a human foible, but I’d say that I only find about 1% of puzzles will start with a vowel. Maybe this is close to the real world usage of the English language, but it looks suspicious to me. I don’t know if this will help you build puzzles that people won’t expect, or if it will throw off your word guessing. But, there must be a way to exploit that oddity.
3. When solving puzzles, if you have narrowed down the letter possibilities enough, you may want to guess the more valuable letters over the cheapo ones. People tend to favor starting words with letters of high point values. For example, I’ve seen JOIST played 10x as often as FOIST, MOIST or HOIST. And if you see an empty tile next to the letter U, there is a pretty good chance that it is a Q. And if that empty tile is first letter of the word, the chances are 50-50 that it is a Q.
4. Sexual innuendos make great puzzles. I’d say about half of the time I play a dirty word, my opponent fails to solve it. I expect this ratio to decrease over time as I corrupt my opponents, but it may work to your advantage for a while. I promised to keep this blog PG-rated, but you know what kinds of words I mean. Now, I’ve already tried the 7 words you can’t say on TV and they aren’t acceptable. But, pretty much everything else is fair game.
Just for the record, opponents normally solve about 2/3rds to 3/4ths of the puzzles I make. And, I think I have about the same success rate in solving puzzles. I’ve never had a word solving streak greater than 7 puzzles long against the same opponent. The best opponent I’ve faced has solved fifteen in a row against me, and I’m just barely hanging on in that game.
Marv
Cowboys and Aliens
Now according to IMDB, Cowboys & Aliens is based on a graphic novel from 2006. The story is that aliens come to Earth and start terrorizing a down-on-their-luck mining town in the middle of nowhere. Daniel Craig plays Jason Bourne, er I mean Jake Lonergan, a cowboy who wakes up at the start of the movie with amnesia and a strange bracelet attached to his left arm. Amazingly, he is one kick-ass fighter and has a heroically, chivalrous conscience. I swear I’ve seen that somewhere before.
Then there is Harrison Ford who plays … himself maybe, while trying to avoid looking like Indiana Jones. But, everyone else calls him Colonel Dolarhyde. That’s not really fair, but it was one comparison that cannot be avoided. But, the thing is, I liked him as an Indiana Jones clone. The character was practically begging to be replaced with Indy and he carries the movie IMO.
From here on, there will be spoilers, but I’ll leave that for after the jump. It’s probably not a surprise, but I didn’t like Cowboys & Aliens all that much. I give it 3 out of 5 stars. And I had better remember to do a word search on this before I hit publish because I keep typing Cowboys vs. Aliens instead of Cowboys & Aliens. I think that name would have been better for some reason.
Quick review: Loved it.
I saw “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” Tuesday night at a New Jersey AMC dine-in theater with one of my project co-workers. I had never been to a dine-in theater. I found it an interesting new experience. One down side was that we had front row seats so the screen was rather “in your face”, but after 5-10 minutes I tend to forget about that. (I saw Avatar the same way.)
While “Apes” got good reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, I generally try to avoid getting something too hyped up. So here’s my quick breakdown on a scale of 1-10:
James Franco does a decent job as Will Rodman, the researcher in search of a drug that can help fight Alzheimer disease (among possible other brain disorders.) John Lithgow is Will’s suffering father who becomes the first human subject and shows positive signs – at first. Tom Felton (aka Draco Malfoy) does a convincing American accent and lands the Charlton Heston line at a great time. Andy Sirkis (aka Gollum) pulls off another great animated acting job as Caesar, the lead chimp who exhibits extraordinary skills passed on from his mother who is killed in a misunderstanding at the lab.
The special effects were generally well done with a whole host of simians generated in the computer. How many were motion captured like Caesar is unknown (without checking the credits), but I suspect most of the major ones were.
The movie left me with a feeling of “OK, this might actually be possible.” Which is a bit frightening.
Rating: 8.5/10.0
Well, well, well…looky what we have here. Looks like Technorama is a finalist in the
ParsecAwards! I don’t know what we did to deserve this (besides podcasting) but I know I speak for Chuck when I say this is a great honor and we are humbled to be included in the Parsecs, much less a finalist.
If you are not familiar with the Parsec Awards, it is an award to celebrate Speculative Fiction Podcasting.
Podcast shows are nominated by fans, and finalists are chosen by a yearly steering committee. Those finalists are then voted on by an independent panel of judges from outside of podcasting. Awards are given in several categories ranging from content to audio quality.
Here is the complete list of finalists and we encourage you to congratulate every one of them.
Oh! If you are at Dragon*Con and want to attend the Parsec Awards Ceremony here are the details.
We’re headed back to DragonCon. It’s going to be busier than ever. Improvements being made to the MIB costumes, Technorama live show, Gmail panel, Parsec awards, recording other podcasts, parade, and so much more! If you’re going to be there, let us know; we’d love to meet with you. Want more details? Give a listen to this short message…
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Working from home means I sometimes have to things most office workers take for granted. Here’s one of my recent favorites… used dryer sheets make great whiteboard erasers. FYI – they only work if you use a dry erase (whiteboard) marker!
OK, I don’t really have a whiteboard, I use the windows on the sliding doors of our sunroom. (There’s a LOT of window space and it somehow makes me feel more like a scientist!) When I first started drawing on the windows, I used tissues to erase tasks, diagrams, etc., but noticed it left behind a lot of dust. One day I spotted a used dryer sheet in the waste basket, pulled it out and tried it. The fibers on that thing were amazingly effective. What’s more, I can use a sheet several times before it’s all full of red marker dust. Since our family of four does quite a bit of laundry, I’ve got a never ending supply of “erasers”. In a strange way, I feel I’m recycling by using something one more time that would otherwise considered as garbage.
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