On The 13th Day Of PlinXmas!

Yeah, ok. You got me. I missed yesterday. It just totally slipped my mind. I suddenly realised at a few minutes to midnight while I was in bed that I hadn't done the advent calendar and I am nowhere near a dedicated enough blogger to get up and post something in a hurry.



HOWEVER, you are about to forgive me, or at least forget that I ever transgressed against you. I am about to send you on an emotional rollercoaster, you see.

First, watch this video and feel your heart leap up into your mouth, as you see a procession of tiny, fluffy, baby ducks come face to face with a most fearsome predator... the WIND!



There isn't a word to describe what you're feeling right now. It's simultaneously sad AND awesome. As with most situations though... T-Rex Has Your Back.

AND THAT'S NOT ALL!

While you're still reeling from that, prepare to have your feelings get the equivalent of a vicious nipple tweak in the form of a pixelly flash game.

It's called As I Lay Dying, and it starts with the death of the protagonist's spouse. You decide you can't very well leave his corpse to be pecked to bits by the crows so you pick him up and begin your journey back home.

Along the way, you will have to use the decomposing remains of your beloved to solve puzzles, activating switches and the like. All the while, you'll be fending off the aforementioned crows. Anyway, it's grim and hilarious all at the same time. If pressed, I imagine that T-Rex would label it 'grimlarious'.

Anyway, I hope I am absolved and that you haven't had the Christmas spirit violently shaken out of you. Either way, see you tomorrow!

How many chimneys does Santa go down?

Stacks!

It Means 'Cave Explorer'.

I like the word 'spelunker'. It's not exactly in common usage but it crops up sometimes and I usually get to tell this story.

See, a while back, I was watching 'Who Wants To Be A Millionaire' and the question for £125,000 came up thus:

"What does a 'Spelunker' do?". I don't recall the possible answers but one of them was 'explores caves' and I knew that was it. The reason why I knew this was correct is due to the South Park movie, in which one charaxter is referred to as an 'ass-spelunker' and, well the other options available didn't make sense in that context!

So yeah, South Park knowledge can be worth many thousands of pounds. They should show it in primary schools.

ANYWAY, the reason I bring it up is due to a game called Specter Spelunker Shrinks and (despite being more of a demonstration of a neat concept than a fully fledged game) it features a nifty growing and shrinking character dynamic and some awesome alliteration, also!

So go play it. Although there's a chance you'll need to download something called the 'Unity Web Plug-in' which is totally legit so don't worry!

Today's Word Is... Sesquipedalian.

Back after a few days off. I've been traipsing about the midlands visiting various friends. Apart from losing a bag containing some of my favourite t-shirts (anyone who knows me knows how important those are), it's been great fun.

Anyways, I need to get back on the plinxwagon. So here goes:

My First Dictionary is a blog parody of the 'learn to read' style books that kids have. Each entry has a picture with a caption that defines a word. Normally these would say such things as 'House - We all live in a house' or something equally asinine. These, however, are an entirely different kettle of fish. Obsoive:


Brr, they're all in that vein and make me chuckle somewhat guiltily. Check 'em out.

Gobble A Duke.

This isn't a sentence you're likely to hear too often. But darnit, the internet just makes too much sense!

Every so often, I'd rather have an unhinged stream of incomprehensible gibberish. Because sometimes, I see a page full of well thought out parables and it fills me with rage. Occasionally, what I want is disorder, chaos, dizzying madness.

Imagine if there was an application that took all the text from a website and bit off the ends of the words and replaced them with the ends of other words. Anarchy would ensue. Every simple idea would become a dense, symbolist poem.

But truth be told. I'd just like it if the words all looked funny. Hurr hurr hurr.

Anyway, we're in luck. Someone has done just that.

It's called The Eater Of Meaning and it's good for some rough chuckles.

See what it does to This Very Blog.
or to My Twitter Feed.

Tee-hee!

Famous Last Words.

Just a quick one, I wasn't planning on giving you anything today but this is just too good to ignore. It's Wordle: a simple premise executed brilliantly. Essentially, bung in a load of words (song lyrics, passages from a favourite film, a recipe for spaghetti bolognese. whatever) and it'll spit out a "beautiful word cloud". Then you can fanny about with various settings until it looks perfect and then admire it. Or you can do what I did and make it your desktop wallpaper by 'alt+printscreen'ing it and pasting it into MS Paint. So now, when I boot up the faithful old lappy, I see This. Try it yourself, it looks great. Now, for kicks, here's the front page of this here blog in word-cloud form. Shazam!