drunk and I am seeing stars

There are a lot of big changes from Minecraft 1.2.3 to 1.2.4. Chief among them: various trees now give various colors of wood. I'm still not sure what the jungle trees are called: based on the spreading upper-canopy leaves, I've been saying baobabs; the people behind the Painterly Pack say mangrove; a friend of mine calls the wooden planks derived from jungle trees mahogany (though truthfully, if we're trying to match wood types to oak, pine, and birch, the existing trees, and it's jungle biome-based, it should be teak); and the folks behind the Minecraft wiki just cheat and call them jungle trees.

So the up side of having four different colors of wood: We can now make patterned-wood floors, walls and ceilings, and build with the tone of wood we most prefer. The down side? Four different colors/types of wood means that wood planks derived from them will no longer stack. Well, hell.

There's also apparently four colors of sand/sandstone, now. The "traditional" sand, which is a single block that can be dug out of deserts, and is affected by physics; crafted sandstone, which takes four cubes of regular sand to make; "smooth" sandstone, which is made from four cubes of 'regular' sandstone; and "hieroglyphic" sandstone (which is anything but, being a sand block with dots and dashes on it and a creeper face), which takes the crafting of two sand slabs, then piling those slabs one on top of the other in a crafting table, to make. Complete and utter fail, for me, but then I run under the Painterly textures, where I've had a crafted hieroglyphic sandstone block for over three years--with actual recognizeable heiroglyphics, thank you.

From the "Little Vampires" web comic, comes another handy information placard on things that should never be vampires. And it's true, chicken teeth are rare enough as it is, we don't need them pointed.

(There's a whole bunch of them on that site, if you just keep hitting previous. Prepare to be baffled, and/or giggle, a great deal.)

There's now a free universal adapter kit for construction toys--plans for 3D printers are available on their main site, which includes a definition of all parts used that can be manufactured commercially, or printed out on something like the MakerBot, f'rinstance. Ten different styles of connectors means you'll never face half a Legos set and half a TinkerToys set with a sense of abject failure again.

Nokia, meanwhile, has applied for a patent for a ferromagnetic fluid that can be injected like tattoo ink through the first few layers of human skin. It will then be able to pick up cellphone signals after being programmed (in some as-yet-unnamed fashion), so people will be able to feel the tattoo vibrating when calls or text messages come in.

So far, the universal reaction from my friends and family has been that this will be the worst tattoo advancement since the introduction of iron oxide inks in the first place--and any MRI given to someone who has one will likely pull it right out of their skin. Fairly sure they're not wrong, which is on the scary side. (Not that they're right; that pretty much you can have the Nokia tattoo, OR an MRI: but you can only pick one.)

And I'm still sorting through tons of pictures, so the next few posts may be simple picspam entries. Warning everyone now.