So, when I was in Forbidden Planet yesterday buying Infinite Crisis 5 (and tremendous it was too) I noticed the second volume of “Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files”.

Being an old 2000AD fan from way back I picked it up and had a quick look. It looks like the intention is that ALL the Dredd strips from the second issue of 2000AD onwards are being reprinted in chronological order.

Sweet!

So I picked up the first volume. And it’s great.

I have to say, though, that it looks really dated compared with today’s standards. But then these stories were originally printed in 1977 (?) and it’s great to finally see all that wealth of material seeing light of day in a decent collection.

One to keep an eye out for methinks.

JudgeAl

Way back when I was a teenager I was quite into Warhammer 40,000 and Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (amongst other Games Workshop stuff) and when I went to college/uni I moved onto other role-playing games (Call of Cthulhu, Paranoia and MechWarrior mostly) and some collectable card games (Star Wars mainly, with occasional forays elsewhere).

Nowadays I’m not much of a gamer. I still buy the Call of Cthulhu RPG and card stuff and that’s about it. If there’s a game that catches my attention then I may buy it just for the background and the game mechanics. These days I seem to be more into the structure of a good game than the playing of it.

Which leads me nicely to the Serenity RPG. What appeals to me (based on my enjoyment of the Firefly series) is the good storytelling involved. Sure, we have spaceships and fighting and exciting locations but we also have the sympathetic characters and the DAMN GOOD STORIES. For me that’s the kind of thing that draws me to a roleplaying game, storytelling rather than “bash the monsters”, although that can be good fun too.

So, after watching and enjoying both the series and the film, and on the basis of reviews like this, anyone want a game of Serenity?

BigAl

Sadly, YubNub.org has been down all day, which kind of makes my last post a bit pointless

mrBen

Someone puts two sets of candy teeth on the palm of their hand and you think “Hey cool, Y’Golonac!”

BigAl

Actually, 2 useful things.

First up, the useful discovery that, in Wordpress, if you edit the Post Timestamp of your post (one of the options on the RHS when you write a post) and set it to a time in the future, WP won’t publish it until that time. Fairly common in CMSs, but I hadn’t realised it was available in WP, and I think it will prove very useful during my 40 lent posts, as I can write when I’m not busy, and hopefully build up enough of a buffer to cover weekends and the like Hopefully that’s not cheating.

The other useful thing I have discovered is YubNub. YubNub (taken from the Ewok cry in RotJ) is a weird cross between a search engine and a command prompt. Simply put, you can combine all of your regularly used search engines and sites, and combine it into a single search option. And that’s just the beginning.

Let’s take a look at a couple of examples.

There are some sites I search a lot. Google for other sites, Wikipedia for general information, IMDB for movie information, ebay for stuff to buy, amazon for more stuff to buy. Yubnub puts those into a single place - g mysearch for google (guk for the UK site), wp mysearch, imdb mysearch, ebuk mysearch (UK site), amuk mysearch (UK again).

But wait - there’s more. Not only are there searches (and there are loads of searches), but there are some other features. The Golden Eggs page has some of the best. autorefresh http://www.mywebsite.com will autorefresh the given site for you. pay ben.thorp@jedimoose.org will pay me some money through paypal. bark will play an MP3 of a dog barking at you. sudoku will generate a soduku puzzle for you to do. And so on.

You can even create your own commands, by providing them with appropriate details. You can get a bit advanced and throw in proper If…Then conditions. For instance, I set up a moose command. If you type it in on it’s own, then you get to the main ‘Moose page, but if you type anything else in, it does a search for it instead. The command was http://www.jedimoose.org{ifThen -value1 %s -value2 -test NOTEQUAL -then /index.php?s=%s} and you can try it now on YubNub! (Shameless stolen from NewsForge - definitely worth reading the article).

Anyway - I’ve installed the Firefox search engine plugin, and YubNub now sits proudly in my search box. Hope you find it helpful too.

mrBen