loonyblog.

If you haven’t seen it, the best part of the Battlestar Galactica season 3 gag reel, aside from Edward James Olmos’ serious flatulence problem, is “I Wanna Frak,” the rap song that can be heard over the credits.

Details about this silly bit of frakiness (including the lyrics) can be read on the BSG Wiki, but I was surprised that the song itself wasn’t available anywhere, so I extracted it. You can listen to it below, or click here to go directly to the file.

You can also go watch the whole gag reel, but be warned, there are lots of spoilers for last season.

(And for the record, the best part about the image to the right here is the place I got it from. Well, that and the image itself, of course).

Apparently this Washington Post article was written by an author who had been laid off. As it was to be his last, there’s a hidden message in there…read the first letter of every paragraph. Pretty cool.

I particularly love the fact that the headline is a clue: “Updike Reads The Lines In American Art.”

Sorry for the lack of updates…I’ve been extremely busy this past couple of weeks wrapping up CivRev. I’ve been so busy in fact that I’ve yet to explore GTA IV, and I’ve even put aside Lost Odyssey for a while. Pretty much all I’ve played in the last week or two (other than my own game) has been World of Warcraft*.

Yes it’s true…I’ve become everything I hate — I’ve been playing World of Warcraft. Now, before you start with the questions I can’t answer, let me get this out of the way: I’m a human paladin, playing on some server with an unpronounceable/gibberish name, and I’ve been playing solo. I’m level 16 at this point, and still very much a n00b. Hell, I was level 8 or so before I had some coworkers laughing at me because I hadn’t figured out what my abilities actually did.

In any event, I’m enjoying it, to a point. I sort of peaked around level 12 – 15, and my interest has started waning already. But I think I get the appeal at least, and that was kind of the point. I mean, this is the biggest (PC/mulitplayer) game in the world right now, and here I am, steadfastly swearing that I Just Don’t Get It. Which would be fine if I made my living as an accountant or a chef or whatever it is normal people do for a living, but in my line of work, that’s not wise. So I’m playing WoW.

The quests so far have been not terribly original…they’ve been pretty much bog standard RPG faire, which has been disappointing. But frankly, I like bog standard RPG faire, so that hasn’t been a problem. Getting past the utter lack of a story has been a challenge, and it’s still the #1 problem I have with the game…it’s given me everything I enjoy about RPG gaming except for the story, which is, oddly enough, why I play those games in the first place. And that’s probably what will ultimately get me to stop. There’s nothing I’ve encountered so far that I can’t get by playing Morrowind, only in Morrowind, I get to be the Nerevarine, where in WoW, if I stick with it, I get to be one of those stuck up level 70 guys with their sweet, sweet rides.

For now though, I’m going to stick with it. This week things should be a little more normal than they have been the last two, so I’m hoping to either get back to Lost Odyssey or put that aside and get on with GTA IV already, but I’m not done with WoW just yet. I may have grasped the basic appeal, but I’m a long way from figuring out where the true addiction here is.

I will say this much…while I’ve been soloing, the few opportunities I’ve had to team up with other people have been pretty enjoyable. I’ve yet to do a raid or an instance or anything, but in my travels I’ve both helped out another player and been helped out myself, and that was pretty cool. In a few more levels maybe I’ll try my hand at something a little more ambitious. For now though, I’m sticking with the solo thing, as I know some very high level players who did it all 100% solo, and at the end of the day, I just don’t like playing with other people.

But hey, I’m playing WoW. That’s a big step for me. You gotta give me that.

*Ever notice how Blizzard spells Warcraft with a lowercase c and StarCraft with an uppercase C? What’s up with that? And why is it that they write it out with a lowercase c, but the logo is clearly uppercase? And why is the <title> tag on the official Warcraft III site spelled with the uppercase C, but nowhere else on the page? These are the things that keep me up at night.

I can’t imagine how long it took to put this together:

Really well done.

It’s especially impressive when you compare it to the actual video for this same song, which is your typical music video gibberish.

Woo…awesome news for movie nerds…according to The Digital Bits, Criterion is going Blu-ray! I’ve expressed my undying love for Criterion many times before (I’ve had three different posts expressing said love in the headline alone), but these days, I’m an HD-only guy. Yeah, the PS3 does a decent job upscaling standard def DVDs, but there’s just no comparison.

So it’s great to hear that Criterion, having wisely sat out the high-def war, has decided to embrace Blu-ray. And the first round of movies includes some of my all-time favorites, too: The Third Man, The 400 Blows, Gimme Shelter and Walkabout. All gems, and I can’t wait to see how they look in shimmering 1080 (here’s hoping Gimme Shelter has lossless audio, too!).

Great news indeed. Now I just need them to reissue some of the other gems in their collection like Brazil, the Kurosawa collection, the Croenenberg collection, The Last Temptation of Christ, Rififi, and just for me, Kicking and Screaming (not the Will Ferrel one). Plus some of the many other hundreds of amazing movies in their library.

Such great news. The only thing that could top it is news that the Kenneth Branagh Hamlet will come out in HD. It was supposed to (I even got all excited about it), but then it never materialized, and I haven’t been able to bring myself to watch it in low-def. For that one, I can keep waiting.

One of the annoying things about the PS3 (and to be fair, there are less and less of those as the system gets subsequent firmware upgrades) is its lack of an IR port. Sony says they didn’t need one, because they offer their Bluetooth remote, but for those of us committed to a one-remote lifestyle, this just doesn’t cut it.

That’s where the A/V nerd community comes in. I first was able to connect my PS3 to my Pronto using the PSone remote workaround. This was clunky, but it worked. Then Schmartz came out with a USB dongle device that was able to accomplish this with a simple plug. This was the same method, but a lot less cumbersome, and I was pretty happy for a while. Then Schmartz announced the PS3IR-PRO, a little device that not only replicates all the previous functions, but adds in everything else from Sony’s Bluetooth remote, like power and eject.

It accomplishes this feat because the box is just an IR to Bluetooth bridge. Your universal remote sends the IR signal, and it in turn sends the corresponding Bluetooth code to the PS3. Simple and effective.

My PS3IR-PRO arrived this evening, and I’m happy to report that it works like a charm. Getting it to sync was a little unwieldy, since my minimalist Pronto interface meant I had to specifically create temporary buttons to sync, but once I got that out of the way it worked great. I can now turn my PS3 on and off from my Pronto and eject DVDs/games/etc. w00p.

Ever since Sony added the ability to resume DVD playback automatically (please tell me why every DVD player in the world doesn’t do this?), my PS3 has been my default DVD player of choice. But not having all functions on the remote was a bit of a pain. Thankfully, that’s no longer an issue.

The one slight annoyance is that because the PS3 doesn’t keep its USB port powered on when the system is turned off, I need to leave the device plugged into something else. Thankfully my TiVo doesn’t have that problem (for one thing, it’s always on) so I just have it plugged in there. And if for some reason I decide that doesn’t work right, I can always plug it into my Wii.

Thank you Mike Muecke for correcting something that Sony should have done from day one. You’ve given my PS3 its dignity back.