Exasperated Calculator

An alien probe starts to alter the ship, and Commander Data, to recreate its old culture.

This felt a lot like a throwback to the style of the original series. The premise is deeply silly, and despite the best attempts of the actors to make it work. While it’s good to have a non-technobabble solution to the problem of the episode, this felt like the ‘anthropology and myth’ version of technobabble.

A lot rests on Brent Spiner playing multiple characters, but they all seem so broad and overplayed that it just comes across as a silly voices exercise. I know that was kind of the point, but it still undermines the result.

313 down, 424 to go.

A jet powered van.

I have a few suggestions for jets and 4WDs too. A little bit different to this one…

Teller (of Penn & fame) and the Las Vegas zombie rising.

Really fantastic production values for only 36 hours from start to finish.

An Ektch-A-Sketch converted into a digital clock.

Makes me wonder what a creative mind could do with a spirograph.

The candidates as AD&D monsters.

A little bit too balanced, actually. I rather suspect these would work well to play…

Steven Levy loses his new laptop:

As humiliating as it sounds, let me repeat: the MacBook Air is so thin that it got tossed out with the newspapers.

Given the usual state of my home office, this doesn’t actually make me more likely to buy one…

The story of one of the greatest heists of all time.

I love a good heist movie, and this one looks like it has some fun conspiracy theory stuff added on over the top of it all.

The latest take-off from the makers of Scary Movie and The Naked Gun.

If you have any thought that it’s possible for these people to be funny, watch the trailer. It’s one of the most horrible things I have ever seen.

A table with built in marble runs.

Please buy me one of these, work. I promise I won’t be completely distracted by shiny marbles all day long.

How different cultures around the world count money.

Someone once demonstrated that differences in the way people rolled cigarettes were driven by tax policy. It’s probably the same here.