The Big Think

Any Wii friends out there up for a game, our number is 3193 7016 2384 5914.

Drop us a line!

Fun little addictive Flash game.

Inside the Lego factory. More please!

The Secret Lego Vault. I loved this one.

Props for a spectacular ad… from 1998

Sweet!

MIT Students roll a giant 20 sided dice in memory of Gary Gygax, the creator of D&D, who died recently. You can see all the pictures here.

Check out this flight simulator.

In addition to looking awesomely cool, it can help you get your pilot’s license. The FAA has reportedly said that you can use it for up to 2.5 hours of actual stick time toward your license. Unfortunately, the $100/hour or so that you save is more than offset by the $17,250 pricetag of the simulator. When I was getting my license I bought a copy of MS Flight Sim and ran it on my roommate Patrick’s PC. I used the very basic keyboard and joystick controls to run pattern and landing procedures, and even simulated a couple of flights. I couldn’t log the time, but just practicing the procedures at home allowed me to easily save the $40 in flight time that the program cost me. A very good investment.

I think that I could easily build something like this, using just this picture. I’d have to use a preexisting computer (which I have), and buy some monitors and other gear, but I think it’d be easily possible to make this for under a couple grand.

Hmm.

Monitors: 3 Dell 22″ LCD’s $750
Computer: exising
Software: $50
Chair: $200?
Tubing and infrastructure: $200?
Instrumentation: Ooo.. this looks like it’d be the expensive part. Probably cost a couple grand to outfit a full suite of instrumentation. Luckily, most of it seems to be built on a standard interface protocol so it could plug into MS Flight Sim or X-Plane.

So for a “mere” $3500-$4000 outlay you could have a killer homemade flight sim- and ’save’ $12,000!

Okay, it’s not cheap, but what a fun project to undertake for someone. I’d bet you could easily sell it for more that the cost of parts (though not the time invested).

Hey, I can dream, can’t I?

*UPDATE* For a righteous Moon plug-in for your flight sim, check out Terrabuilder’s site. Their software allows you to change the Earth terrain maps to a lunar map, then fly around in their landers. Awesome screenshots.

Get scale weapons for you Lego figures!

I wonder how many of theseD Patrick has tucked away in his closet?

With People!

20 Nintendo Wii’s in the wild. I had the self control not to buy one, but asked the guy why there wasn’t a line yet. “They only just arrived and nobody knows they’re here yet.” Thirty minutes later while revisiting the store I asked him how many had been bought. About half. I saw online that you just cannot find a Wii for Xmas this year. We briefly thought of buying the whole stock and flipping them on eBay for $300 each for a tidy $1,000 profit. BB probably wouldn’t have let us buy them all. Ah well.

Check out this monster Lego model.

My friend, VO artist, actor, and professional example, Adam Creighton, has accepted a job on the east coast. He’ll be leaving shortly. You’ll be missed, Adam! Come back and say hi often.

Oh, this is addictive.

This game looks like fun. Kinda mind-blowing, actually.

A strange little community ritual.

Mumming traditionally took place in these villages during the 12 days after Christmas. A small group of mummers disguised themselves in costumes and went to a house at night. They rapped on the door with sticks and then entered, regardless of response from the hosts inside. Inside, they threatened the hosts with physical and sexual violence, while the hosts were expected to respond calmly and try to guess the identities of the mummers. If their identities were correctly identified within 10 to 15 minutes, the mummers removed their disguises and often sat down to a friendly drink with the hosts. If their identities were not guessed, the mummers left without disrobing.

I listed this under “games” because I didn’t want to create a new “busted-social-customs” category. Weird.

This guy builds a Master Chief bust (and some other pretty cool stuff) from Legos.

Jan lent me the PS2 game Valkyrie Profile 2 and, try as I might, I just couldn’t get into it. The main thing was the horrible battle system. Talk about half-baked! The difficulty is supposed to scale in these games to gradually teach you tactics. Unfortunately, the game throws a three minute battle system tutorial at the player and then immediately ramps the difficulty up. Sorry, Square-Enix, I don’t want to waste 40+ hours in frustration. I play to enjoy my games, not to be aggravated by dying every five minutes.

It feels like the developers had what they thought was a good battle system idea but then fell in love with it too early and let it out the door half-baked. I really wanted to like this game (V.P. 1 was apparently a knockout-great game). I’m always disappointed when a game fizzles for me. Ah well.

Maybe I’ll take a page from Katherine’s book and go play Civilization.