John Borwick’s blog

I beat DiggKiller! My secret to beating the boss was to come in with the dugg mirror and use enough rose bombs that I could get the power-ups and find more rose bombs. Four rose bombs = win!

Lauren and I just finished watching the last episode of Arrested Development, which we’ve been watching these last few weeks from start to finish via Netflix.  Our favorite scenes were definitely the chicken dance scenes, which someone has helpfully collected into a Youtube video.

Gob is a much “bigger” version of Michael Scott in the Office; I don’t know whether I’ll think Michael Scott is as funny anymore.  Gob is like Michael Scott unleashed.

I can’t think of another show that has so many back-references; Monty Python certainly made lots of references within one episode but they didn’t have even an order of magnitude as many cross-episode recurring themes.

Lauren was on the (local, WXII 12) news: she was around #7 or 8 in line for an iPhone! She went to the AT&T store across from Thruway. For a little while, you can use WXII’s really poor web video interface to see her: select “news,” and then look for “iPhone a big hit in Triad.”

The iPhone does not work with OS 10.3.

Update 7/1: Lauren was also quoted in the Winston-Salem Journal:

Lauren Pressley, a librarian at Wake Forest University, said she was looking forward to trying out the iPhone, especially its ability to access the Internet.

“There’s potential for a real shift in how people find their information,” she said. “Plus, it also looks fun.”

I just beat Tower Blaster! Final score: 39869.

(I’m doing some scheduled maintenance on WFU’s DNS this morning, but my part’s over unless the other work goes horribly wrong. Thus I have time to review my del.icio.us flash game bookmarks.)

Well, I’m still not that organized with respects to wedding planning, but I did ascend in Kingdom of Loathing. My new (perhaps unattainable) goal is to re-ascend by this Sunday (or at least beat the council quests). I’m already on level 7, so at one level per day I’ll be at level 11 by Sunday!

I haven’t been doing much in the evenings, except stupidly playing Kingdom of Loathing. For some reason I am obsessed about beating the game and planning what I would do when I beat it.

I’ve read large parts of the KoL Wiki, I’ve got del.icio.us bookmarks for various tools, I’ve got a bunch of KoL greasemonkey scripts, and I’m about 75% through beating the game… the first time.

Some people have beaten the game dozens of times; some game items, for example, only appear after you’ve beaten the game 25 times.

I’ve been playing Kingdom of Loathing for about a week now, per Rob West’s recommendation. KoL is the kind of game that I get addicted to very quickly: it’s turn-based (so I can’t just keep playing until I win), it’s got some jokes, and there are quantifiable goals that are not easy but that are definitely possible without too much thinking.

With these kinds of games I try to figure out what the ideal strategy is. When I’ve proven to myself that I’ve figured out the ideal strategy, then I usually (hopefully) stop playing.

Tonight I happened across the TV program “One Ocean View,” on ABC. I didn’t watch much. Basically a bunch of young twenty- and maybe thirty-somethings live in a house together for a summer.

MTV’s “Real World” is the first reality TV show I can remember–and it has been essentially self-sustaining, continuing to run since the early 1990s. “One Ocean View” is ABC’s premiering show that has exactly the same premise.

I bet if ABC bought syndication rights to MTV’s “The Real World” season one they could show it and it would do as well.

I don’t know much about pool tricks or how to do them, but this youtube video of some pool tricks really impresses me. How do you get a ball to spin like that?!

I just got two Netflix movies in the mail: Soylent Green and Sweeny Todd.