"Can You Get Me Off The Hook, Tom? For Old Times' Sake?"

 
If Abe Vigoda can pass away, what is next?  The universe?

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World of Warships: High Score

Due to gentle proddings from friend Ben over at Midnight Tease, the hooligans over at Bo Time! Gaming, and my innate interest in a naval combat game similar in style to War Thunder, I downloaded the free-to-play game World of Warships a couple of weeks ago.  I'm trying to catch up with Ben so we can squad up... that seems to be the best way to play in head-to-head... but the game has a fairly robust player vs bot play too.  The bots can and will kill you dead if you give them half a chance.  After nearly 100 matches against bots, I decided to try my hand at head-to-head earlier today.  The results surprised me:

The short version was that most of my team went east, while myself, another cruiser and a destroyer went west.  I was lagging behind the other two (they were in Tier IV and V ships, while I was in a stock Tier III St Louis) when they rounded the islands at that end of the map... and discovered that almost all of the enemy team also went west.  Meanwhile, the rest of my team discovered to the east that the bad guys had left three battleships to bottle up that side of the map.  Effectively, as it turned out.  When I saw the approaching red horde on my side of the map, knowing that all I could do to help my two teammates was get myself killed, I reversed course... and headed for the center capture point.  The bad guys got the west point, we got the east... and a couple of minutes later, I captured the center.  I did, however, take an aerial torpedo in the bows, the result of a desultory air attack that I couldn't quite dodge, and a stock St Louis has an Anti-Aircraft rating of "zero."  As they flew away, I noticed that they were disappearing from view after descending about 10 km away... almost like they were landing.  As the only enemy in sight was both a long ways away and something I had no desire at all to engage, I decided to see if I couldn't cause a slowdown in enemy flight operations.  Sure enough, both enemy carriers were sailing together, less than a half-kilometer apart... and on the near side of a decent sized island.  I told my Chief Engineer to disable the engine room's safety features and give me all ahead full as I closed in on two helpless Langley-class flattops.

Well, "helpless" is a relative term.  As I charged in, they both began flinging torpedo planes at me as fast as they could.  At one point, they even managed an absolutely textbook "hammer-and-anvil" attack on me that if I hadn't seen it coming would have killed me deader than disco.  As it was, I ate two torps that took my health down to below half... anything with guns could have taken me easily.  But Langleys, like most carriers, are armed with slingshots and spitballs.  Soon enough I was giving the lead carrier full broadsides.  It rolled over and sank in a couple of minutes.  The other carrier was frantically trying to reverse course back towards the Myoko, which would have had me for lunch even if I'd been at full health.  It never completed the turn: my first volley disabled both his engines and his steering.  The third set him afire.  I didn't need many more past that.

Meanwhile, my team's carriers, given control of the air, did bad things to the Red Team's fleet; they still had the western cap point, but they never even came close to getting anything else.  We won a resounding victory; I was second on the scoreboard but I rightfully feel like I won the game for us.

World of Warships isn't anywhere near perfect.  It's very arcadey, destroyers are incredibly overpowered (the guy above me on the scoresheet was in a DD that sank three enemy ships), and the next time someone calls it "realistic" will be the first time.  But it's pretty fun, and really, that's all I need. 

Posted by: Wonderduck at 11:59 PM | Comments (32) | Add Comment
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Interstellar: The Ten Word Review

I will never look at dust the same way again.

Oh, you want more?

more...

Posted by: Wonderduck at 11:50 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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What? In WINTER??? Is That Even Possible?

I have to admit something to y'all... I'm sick. 

No, no, not that type of sick... I mean the illness type of sick.  A couple of weeks ago, I took a day off from work as a sort of mental health (shaddap you!) day; I was feeling somewhat stressed by life.  The holidays have never been my favorite time of the year, and with some stuff happening at work, I needed to hide away for a while.  So I did... and that Saturday night my chest started to feel a little tight.  I woke up Sunday morning with an abrasive cough.  By Monday morning, the cough was joined by a headache and indications that this was going to be ugly... but I had a more pressing issue: I was in training for claims processing on a new state.  I couldn't miss any of that... it was scheduled for three or four half-days, mornings.  So I gritted my teeth and made it through the entirety of Monday.  I wasn't swell, but I could work through it easily enough.  Or so I thought.

Monday night, all hell broke loose.  I'll spare you the details because this isn't that sort of blog, but it wasn't pretty, it kept me awake for hours longer than I should have been, and thankfully I always have an emergency pack of toilet paper stored in a closet.

And the cough had gotten worse to boot.  It had gone from a rasping thing to the biological equivalent of running piece of luon through a table-mounted router: loud, messy, and totally, epically, pointless. Tuesday's training was misery, both for myself and my fellow trainees.  Once it ended, I walked back to my desk, collected my stuff, talked briefly to my boss, and went home for the day.  I managed to make it through Wednesday and Thursday, finishing the training and working full days, though "death warmed over" makes it sound like there was a positive to be found in my condition somewhere.  And then came Friday.

I got up, got dressed, drove to work, and told my boss I was realistically too sick to be there.  When she (quite reasonably) asked why I didn't just call in, I didn't really have an answer except "I don't like to do that."  So I drove back home, crawled back into bed and slept until Sunday.  The cough changed from agonizing to productive, the headache wound down to tolerable levels, and all is right with the world.

Okay, no.  I'm still sick.  I still cough occasionally, I'm tired as hell, and while I feel okay to start the day, by the time work is done I'm miserable.  So, yeah, still sick.  The weather ain't helpin' none, neither.  The temperature is jumping up and down like a pogo stick, highs in the negatives one day, then highs in the 30s the next.  It's like my immune system tried as hard as it could, threw its metaphorical hands in the air and said "we're moving to someplace warm... like Hell.... as fast as possible."  So why am I telling you all of this? 

Gotta tell somebody, I guess.

Posted by: Wonderduck at 11:30 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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Firefoxy, Yootoob, And Thou (Updated) (Updated again)

Earlier tonight, Firefoxy and Yootoob appeared to have a sort of snitfit with each other.  All of Yootoob's formatting went out the window, down a dozen stories and straight into the dumpster.  The dumpster was then set on fire by a guy named Sal using a half-dozen old tires, a jerrican of gasoline, a butane torch, and a hairdryer.  All the while, Firefoxy laughed and laughed and laughed, illuminated by the glow of the flames.

Even worse, the same thing happened on websites that embedded yootoob viddies.  Like, for example, Wonderduck's Pond and this post.  All was horror and trouble and everything had a toothache and dogs and cats living together.  But it was only yootoob, and it was only in Firefoxy.  Different browsers had no problem, different video sites played fine.  Updating Firefoxy didn't help, nor did the usual cache and cookie cleansing.  So what in tarnation was going on?

Some digging around hither and yon seemed to suggest that it wasn't, in fact, a problem with yootoob or Firefoxy at all, but with the AdBlockPlus add-on.  I was resigned to turning it off for yootoob and going through the hell of their ads once again... which would probably drive me back to smokin' and drinkin' and carryin' on.  Knowing how close the world was to a horrible fate, a couple of users over at reddit came up with a solution.  If you're having this problem, open ABP, go to exceptions, and add the following lines:

@@||s.ytimg.com/yts/cssbin/$stylesheet
@@||s.ytimg.com/yts/imgbin/

Voila!  Everything solved, even embeded videos play now!  Apparently, the problem extended into other browsers using ABP as well, so it should work with Opera, Chrome, etc, too.  So there.  That's fixed.  Everybody back on your heads!

UPDATE Friday 947am: A rep from ABP showed up in that reddit thread and says the culprit is the "Malware Domains filter".  If you disable that, yootoob is fixed.  As most people have multiple filters running, this shouldn't be a problem.  I turned off the two exceptions and the filter and everything is back to normal; indeed, it's a better fix than the two exceptions provided.  I've inquired as to what sort of timeframe we're looking at for the filter to be fixed... I'll let you know when I find out.

UPDATE Friday 402pm: As of right now, you need to actually press the "update" button on the Malware Domains filter.  Once you do that, the problem is fixed and you can reactivate the filter!

Posted by: Wonderduck at 11:59 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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I Might Start Following Soccer

The Bundesliga is Germany's top-level soccer league... their version of the better known English Premiere League, I suppose.  However, they are the only league anywhere of any sort that have an official rubber duck race.  The 2015 season was the first, and the

Qualifying round from the Aquadome of Destiny.  That frog really shouldn't have been included... it's called the BunDucksLiga for a reason, after all.

The Duck Speedway also hosted the Final Round, which was a more exciting race than anything F1's given us in recent years.

I love how totally serious the announcer was, and the camerawork / on-screen graphics quality is top-notch.  Obviously the parent broadcaster must have been involved.  Mindblowing.

But wait, there's more... the next season was just announced, with a new twist!

I can't wait.

Posted by: Wonderduck at 11:08 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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That Was A Laugh I Needed Badly

The job has been kicking my asterisk something fierce of late.

I haven't been feeling all that swell, thanks to the weather we've been having.  I've got a nagging ache in my right index finger from when I slipped in the bathtub and jammed it into a broken towel rack trying (successfully) to keep myself from wiping out... the middle knuckle just hurts after a short time on the computer, which in my line of work is something of a Very Bad Thing. 

And then when I came home tonight, I managed to get the Duckmobile stuck in what looked like a perfectly clear parking space here at Pond Central.  Perfectly clear... except for the patch of ice that was located directly under where the front tires ended up.  Did I mention that the Duckmobile is front-wheel drive?  Needed a neighbor to give me a shove, but only after a half-hour of scraping and shoveling ALL the residual snow and ice from the spot and getting (literally) nowhere.

So what I'm saying is that I was in a murderous sort of mood when I got home.  After doing all the usual stuff I do when I first get home, I hopped online to see if there was anything funny out there.  After a while spent getting pissed off because there wasn't, I somehow stumbled across this clip.

That's some impressive vocaling right there, particularly since, y'know, t'ree a 'em ain't singin' whutall they's use'ta singin'.  And yes, the humor isn't exactly "Steve Martin in the '70s" level, but what the hell, it made me laugh.

Maybe it'll do for you, too.

Posted by: Wonderduck at 08:06 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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The Alhazred & Miskatonic Railroad

"In his station at R'lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits for passengers."

Posted by: Wonderduck at 09:13 PM | Comments (14) | Add Comment
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So. 2016, Huh?

Thus far, I'm not overly impressed.  It's cold, it's windy, the food hasn't been very good and my finger hurts.  On the other hand, I went in to work today to make up some hours and there was literally nobody else in my office, and only three or four people from all offices total.  Which allowed me to sing along with my music if I so chose.  And lo, thus I chose to do!

On the gripping hand, anybody walking past my office is undoubtedly having a substantially worse 2016.

You all good?

Posted by: Wonderduck at 12:21 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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