July 27, 2015

10 years of this crap


And I think we're done here...

It's been ten years and ten days since my first post, and I think it's time to draw the shutters closed and lock this place up.

I started this blog as a place to put down some of my thoughts and possibly connect with my students. I think I managed some success in both of those realms, and I was able to connect with a few other friends along the way as well.

I want to thank my many readers for the past decade, especially those who commented and challenged my missives. I hope that my 3599 posts have provided you a fair bit of entertainment over the decade.

Feel free to check my ongoing material science blog, Materials Witness.

Mr Tea is peeing in a cuppa

The Guardian's resident food equipment blogger, Rhik Samadder, has been suffering for our entertainment for a couple of months now, trying out all sorts of horrific kitchen gadgets and the food produced therefrom...

There's Mr Tea, quietly and horrifically peeing into your cup of brewed goodness...


There's Garlic Zoom, a stagecoach of garlic chopping fun...


And most horribly the Egg Master, creator of tubular eggs...


July 26, 2015

July 24, 2015

Update: Collectible Minifigs series...um...14?

MinifigPriceGuide.com has an image of collectible minifigure series 14, subtitled Monsters, confirming what we've already known about the series: that they're going to be Halloween-themed.


The image isn't in high resolution because it's a scan from a small image in a print catalog.

Of more interest, though, are the various figure prototype images on the same story, some of which we hadn't seen before.




July 23, 2015

Robert Downey, Jr's paycheck

Today I'm providing just a few facts about what Robert Downey, Jr is paid for the Marvel movies:
  • The Avengers - $50 million
  • Iron Man 3 - $75 million
  • Avengers: Age of Ultron - $80 million
  • Captain America; Civil War - $80 million
My source: Uproxx (whose sources are Forbes, IGN, CBM, and Variety)

Plus, he has the big, giant A from the side of the mythical Stark Tower in his house.

He really is Tony Stark, isn't he?


July 22, 2015

Freemium = 'not really'



I've been playing QuizUp, a freemium game, for a year and a half now. It's a free app, but it does allow in-app purchases of 'experience point' multipliers, a buck to double your experience points (or whatever the game calls them) for ten minutes, a couple more bucks to double the experience for half an hour or an hour. I have yet to pay a single penny through the game, but I know that freemium games are wildly profitable - Clash of Clans had more than $1.8 BILLION in revenue in 2014.

Thankfully, South Park laid it all out...



This last one, I warn you, is more than a little NSFW.