20 Minute Blog

Here’s a really cool video of the stone CNC machining process. You get to see a single block of stone transformed into a complete statue via high speed cnc machining. I really want one of these (and a magical fairy to program it for me).

Just think of all the cool statues you could make — a new one every evening. Dragons and castles or — ooh — make a bunch of ninja statues out of whatever stone is cheapest and hide them all over the yard. Yeah, I could live with that. Screw garden gnomes, I want garden ninjas.

When I was doing market research on the dice market for Awesome Dice, one of the really fascinating things I learned was the popularity of pink dice. More people are searching online for pink dice than any other single color.

Not to be sure part of this is very likely that it’s much harder to find pink dice at your typical gaming stores, online or otherwise. If you want black dice, anyplace that carries dice is going to be able to take care of you. But if you’re on the lookout for pint dice you’re going to be a little SOL at the majority of game or dice shops.

It’s still a little curious to me that there are that many gamers who are determined to buy pink dice — most gamers tend more toward the direction of looking at all the dice on the shelf and then picking whichever they think is coolest.

Back in the day when my gaming group gamed a lot more often, my sister once bought me a set of pink dice as a fake gift for some occasion or the other. This dice set got way more use than she ever imagined. We kept the pink dice set on hand in the gaming room, and any time a gamer forgot their dice (which happened fairly often) and needed to borrow dice, they had to use the pink dice. This was sufficiently shameful that it actually radically reduced how often people forgot their dice.

Not that there’s anything wrong with pink dice, regardless of the gender of the player, and I think the surprisingly large search volume of people wanting to buy pink dice goes to show that plenty of people want to play with pink dice. But at least in my experience, the pink dice are useful even if you don’t want to play with them. Perhaps especially then.

Like most people, I’ve often spent some time planning imaginary vacations. There are a lot of places in the US that I still want to see, but when we talk about outside of the US, Europe is interestingly low on my list. I want to go visit Africa, Antartica, and of course China. China in particular is filled with about a zillion places I want to visit.

I’m reminded of this when I was looking at the Wendy Wu Tours website, which offers tour packages of China. I was flipping through looking at the different options (but very definitely not looking at the pricing) and trying to decide if I was going to take a Wendy Wu China tour, which one would I want?

Clearly right off the bat we can ignore any of the value (ie: cheaper) options. This is a fantasy vacation after all — I want it all.

Wendy Wu Tour Packages

There are a handful of things that I’d really want to see if I visited China. The Great Wall is on the top of the list. Slightly lower are things like giant pandas (adorable!), the Forbidden City (though I feel it might be a bit touristy), the Terocotta Army, and of course I’d also want to see plenty of little shrines and cool traditional architecture. I don’t really have any interest in the big cities of China, except that they tend to have zoos with giant pandas, and Beijing is near a good section of the Great Wall.

So given that, let’s take a look at what Wendy Wu has to offer:

• A China Experience: big cities are hit, which is not of interest. But there is the Forbidden City, the Great Wall, and the teracotta army. Also a historic canal town of some kind. Not bad, but I have a hunch it’s too much time spent in modern cities.
• Glories of China: staying in a small down with rice fields and limestone hills sounds cool and picturesque, but nothing else on my list. This is a clear pass — onto bigger and better things that Wendy Wu has to offer.
• Majestic Yangtze: two weeks, with a four-night cruise on the Yangtze River — that actually sounds pretty awesome. Also a visit to a famous panda reserve — also awesome. But alas none of the other things on the list.
• Wonders of China: two weeks and includes the Great Wall, Teracotta army, and giant pandas. Sounds awesome and includes almost everything. I could live without seeing the Forbidden City. But now I kinda want a cruise on the Yangtze…
• Magnificent China: Oooh, the Grand Buddha in Leshan is included, which sounds cool. Giant pandas included, but nothing else on the list.
• Grand Tour of China: The Wendy Wu tours site seems a little vague on exactly what’s included in this one. It definitely includes the Great Wall and the teracotta army and also includes the cruise on the Yangtze, but clearly there’s a lot more — does it include the Forbidden City? Giant pandas? Hrmmm… I want to know more darnit.

I was watching an old episode of How I Met Your Mother with the girlfriend recently. I’ve seen most of the older seasons, and she has only seen sporadic bits here and there. She was laughing at Ted and groaning as he obsessed and over-thought relationship stuff.

Then I realized the secret to writing the character of Ted Mosby: he is a stereotypical desperate neurotic woman.

Honestly, if you were going to write a sitcom and have one character be the horrible female stereotype of a single woman desperate to get married and have kids, and make her neurotic and crazy to boot, you would be writing Ted Mosby.

It is, perhaps, funnier coming from a guy, but I can tell you this: if the character of Ted was a woman, women everywhere would hate and despise the stereotyping. Happily making fun of guys to any extent and with any stereotype is perfectly acceptable. That’s what we get for centuries of oppression I guess.

I’ve been watching more of the first season of the BBC’s new Sherlock series, and I just continue to like it more and more the more I watch it. For those unaware, Sherlock is a reimagining of Sherlock Holmes in a modern day London setting. As suspicious as that sounds to die-hard Sherlock Holmes fans, I can tell you it’s fantastic.

I’m a huge fan of the Sherlock Holmes books by Conan Doyle and despite that fact that the new Sherlock series is modern day and by force has to make some changes to adapt to, for example, the constant presence of cell phones and video (something that would have foiled a great many of Holmes’ villains) the show is still incredibly true to the original Sherlock Holmes novels and stories.

In fact, this modern-day adaptation of original Sherlock Holmes stories is far more faithful to the spirit of Doyle’s work than the new Sherlock Holmes movies (which as a fan, I found somewhat disappointing — they had missed the spirit of Sherlock Holmes).

Rather than attempting to recreate each Holmes mystery or case in modern day, the BBC’s Sherlock instead invents new ones, but uses components from many different Sherlock Holmes stories to fill out each 90 minute episode. So, for example, the first episode is called “A Study in Pink” and details how Watson and Holmes meet and end up sharing a flat, and includes a strange string of murders (that has nothing to do with A Study in Scarlet) but does include someone scratching the name Rache at the scene of a murder. But in A Study in Pink Holmes quickly dismisses the thought that it could be German for revenge and instead deduces that the dying woman was writing Rachel.

Watson himself is wonderfully written in the new show. He is, indeed, a former soldier in Afghanistan and is suffering from post traumatic shock. His therapist suggests that he write a blog, which is where his recording of Sherlock Holme’s adventures happens. Further, in an incredibly clever twist, the writers point out that his limp is actually psychosomatic, and later Watson tells Holmes that he was shot, but not in the leg — in the shoulder instead. Of course in the Sherlock Holmes stories Watson claimed to have been shot in the leg — but in later stories said he was shot in the shoulder.

This is just one example of the loving detail and fun the show Sherlock explores the world of Sherlock Holmes — they take a discrepency of Doyle’s and turn it into a meaningful character development point.

Sherlock is a show that is true to the Sherlock Holmes stories. Whether it’s the late 1800s or the early 2000s, the “feel” of Sherlock Holmes is captured perfectly. I recommend it to all Sherlock Holmes fans.