Mad Scientist Alphabet Blocks

These make me wish I had $40 to burn.

If you aren't familiar with World of Warcraft....

Here's a review of the newest expansion pack.

If you are new, skip straight to the comments to see what people get out of it:

That quest is one of the only humane in the game. Many of the quests are horrifying if it weren't cartoonish.

You get to torture a prisoner with electricity, throw molotov cocktails at starving trolls, poke young apes with a sharp stick to piss off its mother and many other disturbing things.

It's like they read a report from Amnesty International on Iraq and made quests with them!

And:

Loads of fun. You get to kill Nessingwary's people (that you used to pal around with) who are killing rhinos, and then down the road you end up having to kill the rhinos for Fizzcrank's quests!

It's all about the gold!

I miss it now...

Searching for "God"

StateStats:

...shows you how popular a Google search query is in each U.S. state, giving a ranking like the one you see in the left column. It then compares this ranking with other ways of ranking states, like average income or population density, using Spearman's rank correlation.

For instance, here are the states by popularity of searching for "God".


And here are the correlations:

Metric	Correlation with God
Obesity	0.84 (Positive, strong)
InfantMortality	0.65 (Positive, moderate)
EnergyConsumption	0.51 (Positive, moderate)
VotedForBush	0.47 (Positive, moderate)
Illiteracy	0.41 (Positive, moderate)
Rainfall	0.39 (Positive, weak)
ViolentCrime	0.33 (Positive, weak)
Unemployment	0.33 (Positive, weak)
Suicide	0.08 (Positive, very weak)
Area	0.07 (Positive, very weak)
PercentElderly	0.06 (Positive, very weak)
Density	0.04 (Positive, very weak)
Longitude	-0.02 (Negative, very weak)
Age	-0.21 (Negative, weak)
LifeExpectancy	-0.33 (Negative, weak)
SameSexCouples	-0.38 (Negative, weak)
Latitude	-0.45 (Negative, moderate)
Frost	-0.48 (Negative, moderate)
VotedForObama	-0.51 (Negative, moderate)
Income	-0.55 (Negative, moderate)
HighSchoolGrad	-0.67 (Negative, moderate)

Hmmm.

D&D Chart

Here's a chart showing some history of role-playing games up to the release of AD&D 2E.

Found at Adventures in Gaming via W Wheaton.

Monkeys and Gorillaz

So, my lovely wife has recently started a rather Sinocentric blog. She's already made a couple of good finds. Notably, this:




There's apparently an opera in London based on this Gorillaz meets The Monkey King concept. All I have to add is that there needs to be a feature length version of this on DVD. I'd watch the hell out of it.