Saw this over on Wired and loved it.  It’s a short film by Bruce Branit.

Click here to view the embedded video.

"Give me the $@# money or I gut you like a Targ!"

WANTED FOR CRIMES
AGAINST THE UNITED FEDERATION OF CONVENIENCE STORES

Someone in Colorado Springs, Colorado robbed two 7-11 stores with a sharp object being portrayed in the media as a Klingon Bat’leth.  The Denver Channel had the first writeup of it that I’ve seen, and has some of the most hilarious blog comments.  As one reader in the blog pointed out it i’s not a Bat’leth but appears to be some sort of cheap knockoff.  

So I thought, what does a Bat’leth run these days.  I mean, if you were planning on robbing some 7-11′s, you would probably not want to do it with a lousy knockoff Bat’leth and be the laughing stock of the internet.

Well, I didn’t really find out the answer to that question, but I did find some cheap knockoffs.

The Sword of Kahless

 Here on the left is the Sword of Kahless (picture borrowed shamelessly from Memory-Alpha, who borrowed it shamelessly from Paramount) from the DS9 episode of the same name.  It’s made from the lava-doused hair of Kahless the Unforgettable, who slew the gods and forged the Klingon Empire.

Not Actually the Sword of Kahless

And, here on the right is a ‘Sword of Kahless’ that you can purchase on ebay for $59.95!  Unlike the marauder above, this fake Bat’leth is probably close the the actual size. “Huge 43″”.  A real Bat’leth is 116 centimeters, according to Memory-Alpha, and the one in the image above is clearly not a <4ft sword requiring two hands.  Also, the ebay item description states:

This is the version II of the Bat’leth, Sword of Kahless from the very famous Sci-Fi movie Star Trek. This sword has a lot of grave and elegance put into it. This Sword of Kahless has a very scimitar curve with four handholds which is wrapped in genuine leather to give you a strong hold. On two of the blade is a Celtic engravings. This sword is built to last for a long time with its full 440 stainless steel construction. The Bat’leth Series II has four blades which can even be sharpen more. Overall Length: 43”

If your Klingon weapon says that it has Celtic enscriptions on it, it’s probably a good sign that it’s not a very accurate replica.

$25 Sword of Honor

This next Star Trek Klingon Bat’leth & Plaque Overall Length: 24″ listing on ebay, not only fails to fall short of the 116 centimeter requirement, it also doesn’t even match the picture with the description. 

The bat’leth, or “sword of honor”, is a traditional Klingon blade weapon. Resembling a crescent-shaped, two-ended scimitar, the bat’leth is wielded using three handholds along the outside edge of the blade. It is widely considered the most popular weapon among Klingon warriors. 

So… wait… where’s the other two handholds?

Oh wait, you were just copy-pasting the entry from Memory-Alpha into your item writeup.  

Seriously guys, the one handhold is a dead giveaway.

Are they trying??

Something looks funny here...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In a slightly related thread, my problem with the fradulent Star Trek Voyager DVD set is all resolved.  I have gotten my money back from the original seller and purchased it directly from Amazon instead at the usual exhorbant retail price.  I’m still slowly binging my way through the first season.

Whoah whoah whoah, update!  

Armrha has pointed out that the “$25 Sword of Honor” picture looks a lot like the weapon of choice!  I put together this composite image, and it looks like a pretty good match.

I gotta make my $25 back...

Via an old (August08) Wired.com article about the Rock-afire Animatronic Band comes the most disturbing thing I’ve seen on YouTube all evening. 

Click here to view the embedded video.

It was only a matter of time before someone sucessfully paired the animatronic pizza bands of the 80s with contemporary R&B songs about… date rape?  

Personally I think the sun and moon do a great job on the backup vocals, ‘Aye!’.

I bought a Star Trek Voyager Season1-7 set off Amazon a few weeks back after wrapping up all my episodes of Enterprise.  I’ve been chomping at the bit for some sci-fi and it took me awhile to decide whether I was going to take the plunge on Voyager or go for Babylon5 instead.  

I thought I’d save some money off the exhorbantly priced DVD set by ordering one of the less expensive copies from an Amazon Marketplace seller.  It was $80 cheaper than the ‘full price’ set, so it was a good deal.  But not ‘too good’ of a deal that I had to worry about it.  Guess I was wrong.

So here are some pictures of what showed up.  There are 6 more sets pretty much exactly like this, shrink wrapped and packed loose into a shipping box.  The packaging is fairly convincing, until you start looking closely.

The other two DVD sets that I had purchased through Amazon (DS9 and Enterprise) both came with the season boxes wrapped together, with a cardboard base.  The fact that the individual seasons were physically seperated was a surprise.  The boxes looked pretty legitimate, but when I opened the first season at work, what I found was a dvd set that was packaged like a piece of $20 software.  I know Paramount hasn’t won any fans with their packaging, but this was good step down from what I was used to so far.  Inside the brown cardboard was a plastic cd ‘folio’ like what MSDN disks used to come in.  Inside that were the disks, and they were out of order.  The left side of the thin plastic ‘disc book’ was all crumpled up from being held in a space where it couldn’t lie flat.  The inset inside the cardboard holder was only wide enough for the disks.

There was no booklet or episode list, which was what really got my suspicion going.

After installing some video codecs and media player classic on my work computer, I loaded up the first disc and the intro screen looked correct compared to stills of voyager.  Disc 5 seemed to have special features on it, so that all checked out.  I mentioned my suspicion to my coworker Armrha, and he noticed that the interior ring of the DVDs indicated that they were pressed just for Star Trek Voyager and were not just burned by a computer.

So then I started checking the ISBN number on the back, and doing some reading.

Here’s what the DVD packaging looks like on Memory Alpha: http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/VOY_Season_1_DVD

Region 1 is ‘US’, Region 2 is Europe, UK and the Middle East.  You’ll notice the texture on the case is all wrong, and the front is missing those weird circle things that look like reflective plastic.  That’s because the Voyager DVD Season1 case is supposted to be a plastic slip cover with a orange jewel case inside it, not a glossy paper box.

Here’s a bunch of pictures what it’s supposted to look like: http://voy.trekcore.com/gallery/thumbnails.php?album=239

If your voyager DVDs don’t look like this, you are either a european, or they’re a bootleg.

Really guys, is it that hard?

Why does my disk 5 say ‘A-0026′ on the bottom?   It’s also missing the episode listing on each disk in a horrible swirling pattern that is completely unreadable.

Here’s what else I’ve learned.  There are no Paramount licensed “import editions” of Star Trek Voyager.  DVDs are supposedly not issued ISBN numbers if they are an entertainment product, however the DVD card for the trekcore gallery above shows some for each season.

The back of the season1 package I recieved says ISBN 0-1832-1623-1   The sham season2 is labelled 0-1832-1623-2, and so on, with the number incrementing by one with each season.  You’ll notice in the pictures above the second number in a 12 digit UPC code format.  It’s almost the same as the ISBN, but they added an extra 1 in the middle: 0-18321-16231-4

The proper version of Star Trek Voyager, Season1 is ISBN 0-7921-7747-9, UPC (actually it’s a UCC-12) 0-9736-15683-48.  If you do some UPC code searching you’ll notice that the first set of UPC numbers on a lot of Paramount products start with 0-973.  This is because they are typically issued in blocks to a publisher.  Compare the search results for the valid product code with the fake upc code.  You’ll notice that the real code comes up in a lot of product results and the fake one comes up only on a few reskins of a single  ’barcodepedia’ website.

In summary, it really looks like bootlegging is pretty rampant out there if you just scratch the surface.  All of the customer upload pictures in the Amazon.com gallery for the complete seasons 1-7 voyager are bootlegs.  Anything from the chosen collection are also blatent bootlegs.    Apparently Amazon also allows Amazon Marketplace sellers to create their own product pages for new products, and these are supposedly rife with bootlegs.  I notice my seller is now selling a handful of used books and a ‘used’ copy of the ‘import’ version of Star Trek Voyager, which of course, has a bunch of pictures of bootleg editions.   I wonder if this is a willfull fraud that has been perpetrated or if it’s someone who purchased a product from an untrustworthy distributor, not knowing that they are selling bootlegs.   According to Amazon policy, I need to give them 3 days to respond to my return request before I get Amazon involved.  From what I read, they will not be kind to the seller when that happens.

SHAMEFULL BOOTLEGS OF SHAME

Looks pretty legit packaging right?  Here’s what one person had to say about it in the amazon forum linked above.

"The Chosen Collection"

There is no such thing as AUTHORIZED import. All BS crap spewed by the sellers. Paramount has NEVER granted anybody rights in China, Taiwan, HK or ANY countries outside North America to re-produce StarTrek series in different regions, let alone Region 0. All StarTrek imports are NOT the official packaging considered to be BOOTLEGs at this time. All ‘The Chosen Collection 1,2,3,4,5′ are all confirmed BOOTLEGS – in low quality DVD5 (4.3) GB only with bad subtitles, no commentary, no extras. Some has blur video, and skips! Buyers beware.

Unlicensed “import”

Why is there chinese writing on these DVD cases?

Good thing they added those glossy stickers to the covers below, it really adds a sense of legitimacy.  Except, for the box not being made out of glossy plastic and everything..

From a dropshipping wholesalers website...

YOU CAN’T FOOL SENATOR VREENAK!

Click here to view the embedded video.

The sad thing is, I don’t really remember this show being all that great, but I really need a star trek fix right now.  But damn if I’m going to pay money for a pirated copy.  No hollywood studio making the money, no interest in science fiction, no new sci-fi being made.

It’s been awhile since I’ve seen a movie trailer that makes me want to see a movie.  Hit the youtube below if you’re lazy, otherwise head over to the link below for a better resolution awesome version. http://www.apple.com/trailers/focus_features/9/large.html

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here’s the movie description from the apple site:

A new era in animated storytelling begins on 9.9.09. Visionary filmmakers Tim Burton (The Corpse Bride, Charlie and The Chocolate Factory) and Timur Bekmambetov (Wanted, Nightwatch) join forces to produce wunderkind director Shane Acker’s distinctively original and thrilling tale. 9 stars Elijah Wood, John C. Reilly, Jennifer Connelly, Martin Landau, Christopher Plummer and Crispin Glover and features the music of Danny Elfman. When 9 (The Lord of the Ring’s Elijah Wood) first comes to life, he finds himself in a post-apocalyptic world. All humans are gone, and it is only by chance that he discovers a small community of others like him taking refuge from fearsome machines that roam the earth intent on their extinction. Despite being the neophyte of the group, 9 convinces the others that hiding will do them no good. They must take the offensive if they are to survive, and they must discover why the machines want to destroy them in the first place. As they’ll soon come to learn, the very future of civilization may depend on them.

There’s some more stuff, stills and clips over on director Shane Acker’s website.

So, today Blizzard added advertising to the forums.worldofwarcraft.com webpages.  Normally I don’t mind dealing with ad revenue on websites, but I’m already paying them $15 a month for their game.   Over four years of WoW subscription, three convention tickets, and two copies of the game and two expansions means  well over $1000 that they have collected from me in the past four years.  And now this.  This… is simply beyond complete shameless greed.

The WoW forum moderators are already quick at work stiffling the forum outrage, by locking topics and moving them.  It’s ridiculous.

Here is how to not just block the advertising, but completely hide it so that the forums look like they used to.

1) First, you’ll need to install Privoxy.

Privoxy is a free open-source web proxy that will do the filtering for us.  You can get it here:

http://www.privoxy.org/

Click on ‘download recent releases’, find your OS version and install.

2) Set chrome to use privoxy as your proxy server.

• Click on the wrench icon, select options.
• Click on ‘under the hood‘ tab.
• Scroll down, and press the ‘Change Proxy Settings‘ button.

This will bring up your windows Internet Properties control panel.

• On the ‘Connections’ tab, click the LAN Settings button.
• Checkmark ‘Use a proxy server…‘
• Put 127.0.0.1 into the Address field.
• Put 8118 into the Port field.
• Hit Ok, and then Ok to close the Internet Properties window.

Chrome will now be using Privoxy to block ads.

3) Create a user.filter file in your Privoxy home install directory.

Next, in your install directory (mine is: C:\Program Files (x86)\Privoxy) create a new file called user.filter and insert this in it:

FILTER: wowforums Blizzard is GREEDY

FILTER: wowforums Blizzard is GREEDY
# Crass merchandizing at it's best.
s/<div id="ad_(\d*)x(\d*)"/<div id="blizzard_is_greedy" style="display:none;"/g
s/<td width="130px" valign="top" align="center">/<td align="center" width="0" valign="top" style="display:none;">/g
s/<div style="width:160px; height:600px; padding:1px; margin:0 0 0 3px" class="advertise-horz"/<div style="display:none;"/g
s/<td width="130" valign="top" align="center">/<td width="0">/g
s/<div class="hp_w_ad">/<div class="hp_w_ad" style="display:none;">/g
s/<div class="hp_t_ad">/<div class="hp_t_ad" style="display:none;">/g
s/<div class="hp_ad_cont">/<div class="hp_ad_cont" style="display:none;">/g

This will do the ‘rewriting’ of the ad tags.  It renames all the ad tags so the ad-insertion script can’t find it, and it blocks off the 130px skyscraper space on the right side.

4) Next, edit config.txt file in the Privoxy folder.

Open config.txt and find the filterfile line. (Under section 2.5)

Uncomment the entry with user.filter in it, so that it looks like this:

filterfile default.filter

filterfile user.filter      # User customizations

This will tell Privoxy where to find our custom filter that we created in step 3.

5) Edit the user.action file in the Privoxy folder.

Finally, edit the user.action file and add this:

{ +filter{wowforums} }
.worldofwarcraft.com

This will tell Privoxy to activate our custom filter for the forums.worldofwarcraft.com website.  If you followed all the steps (and saved afterwards) you should be able to control+refresh the forums and have everything back to mostly normal.  Pass this along to your friends & guildmates!

A couple weekends ago, we had an inter-dojo Taikai tournament for a friendly competition between Portland area kendo clubs, with a few people who travelled all the way from Idaho and Washington.  Less than half of the turnout was from Obukan, so we had a lot of guests and a lot of fun.   The only downside was we only had half the gym, so there was a lot of noise from the open courts on the other side of the divider curtain.

Here’s a match (#8) where I almost hold my ground against Dan Combs from Obukan.  I don’t have the strength to hold him back, but I lasted a lot longer than I expected.  He scores one hit to my kote, and like a n00b I thought the match was over.  It really was, but at least I didn’t let him score two points.  I’m the guy with the white ribbon tied to my back.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In match #10, I was up against a visitor in white.  I don’t know her name, but she stepped out of bounds twice with very little encouragement from me.  Aside from a clean hit to her men at 1:39, I don’t think my Kendo was as good as it was in the other match.  Despite all that, this is the first (and only) tournament match I’ve won to date. 

http://vimeo.com/2188490 – Match #8 – I’m in white, dad is sitting in seiza.
http://vimeo.com/2188651 – Match #10 – I’m in red, dad is under the basketball hoop

Here’s the two matches that my dad was in:
http://vimeo.com/2188234 – Match #2 – Dad in white.
http://vimeo.com/2188351 – Match #4 – Dad in white.

Circus Circus

Since midnight of the 13th most of my non-sleeping, non-working hours have gone into playing ‘Wrath of the Lich King’.  On last thursday, my impression of the game was somewhat nonplussed, mainly because the quest grind brings out a jealous competition in everyone.  Everyone is racing each other for that quest kill, or trying to pick up scraps of metal as they spawn before each other.  When you’re in an area and there are more players than monsters it’s hard to feel like a hero.  In addition to the annoyance that causes, there have been some ugly server queues on Uther the first three nights of the expansion.  I would come home from work and find that I am player #600 in line to log in, with an expected wait time of around 35 minutes.  Having to sit through that and then race a million night elf hunters for the tag on a quest objective was not very fun.

Howling Fjords

That all said, once everyone is done racing through the levels the world will feel fairly population sparce outside of the capital cities and the new city of Dalaran.  It takes about 7 minutes to fly across the southern tip of Northrend.  The environment is gorgeous.  I was not that excited for the Howling Fjords starting area during beta due to low framerate problems on my older computer, but now that that is solved it is a much nicer place to start out than the somewhat bland-in-comparisson Borean Tundra.  The Howling Fjords have a very ‘braveheart’ feeling to them, with sweeping hillsides that remind me of the Midgard side of the ‘Shrouded Isles’ expansion, but to simply write them off as a the ‘viking’ area does a disservice to the massive amount of content and story packed into this zone.  On the north side of the zone dark iron dwarves enscribe stone giants with runic commands and send them northwest into the wilderness; their purpose not yet revealed to me. (But I imagine it involves going to Storm Peaks.)   On the west side of the zone the forsaken plot and scheme as usual, but this time there is something more sinister about it all.   The architecture has shifted from being a co-op of the skull-festooned ‘castle and tomb’ style of the Nerubians to a full-on Frankenstein style mad-scientist/gothic architecture.   Along the west side of the fjord, an ancient norse-looking lift ferries you down out to an island where you run through the usual ‘kill animals, collect meat’ quests for the Tuskarr.  They send you over to meet up with a goblin and two guys floating on a ridiculous looking pirate raft, where an enthusiastic cabin boy paddles you over to pirate outpost for some more quests.  Eventually the circuit of quests involves dispatching a giant killer whale and returning with it’s fat to be used to swab some decks.  When you get back to the Tuskarr, they are outraged that ‘Big Roy’ is dead and the remaining killer whales are not mating.  They were thankfully unaware that I was actually the agent of said butchering.  I quickly buried my inner shame at slaughtering yet another magnificent beast and rode the giant sea turtle over to their other town.  What happened to Big Roy wasn’t as brutal as what happened to that poor earth colossus with the cannon on that ghostly pirate ship.

Borean Tundra

On the other side of the island is the formentioned Borean Tundra, it’s a set of rolling brown hills with very little vegitation.  There are some decent quests along the coastline, and a tongue in cheek poke at the environmental movement with the D.E.H.T.A. encampment (druids for the ethical and humane treatment of animals).  Most of the D.E.H.T.A. quests involve killing trappers, killing clam divers, springing baby mammoths out of traps and other sorts of heroic things.  At the center of the druid encampment is a statue of Nessingwary, the same ‘big game hunter’ that players have been helping kill massive amounts of animals in both Stranglethorn Vale and Nagrand over the past few years.  There’s also a massive fire surrounding him, pouring toxic-looking smoke into the air.  

The worst part of Borean for me was the quests for the Taunka, a refit of the Tauren race with a new bison head tacked onto them.  The female of the species did not get the same treatment, so apparently the male Taunka mate with what appears to be normal Tauren females.  There are some steamy hot-springs which are probably the most bland looking part of the expansion so far.  The quest line here mostly deals with the Taunka fleeing before the undead scourge, and investigating an outpost of mechanized gnomes which tie into the ‘titan lore’ problem.  

The best part of Borean Tundra, is the War of the Dragonflights storyline, which involves you riding a giant badass red dragon over to what appears to be ground zero of the ‘problem with blue dragon and magic’ storyline.  There’s also some moral dilemnas to be chewed on.  One of the quests for the Dalaran magi has you capture an enemy mage, then haul him (in chains) back for questioning.  Once you get back there, they have you head to the tower with some sort of ‘mental needler’ to extract information from him.  That’s right.  The game asks you to engage in extrordinary rendition.  The Dalaran apparently have a code of ethics preventing them from torturing people, but not a code of ethics preventing them from paying people like you to torture people for information.  You are handed a magically restrained guy in heavy gothic facepaint and told to shock him with the mind needle until he tells you where the hostage red dragon/lady is.  ”It’s extremely painful, but causes no permanent damage.”  

I paused, thinking things through.   What would my character think about this?  Vulture is a orc rogue, more specifically one who has the majority of his talent points specialized into Assassination.  He’s a brute and a killer, but not a mindless sadist.  I think he probably wouldn’t have too many qualms about ‘doing what has to be done’.  There is money and experience points involved here as well…  It’s also just a game… and computers can’t feel pain (yet)…

I shock the restrained mage, and his gloating defiance slowly melts away into pleading for mercy until he tells me what I want to hear.  I hand in the needler, collect my money and leave quickly.  I am not proud of what I did in that tower overlooking the Borean Tundra.

Frostmourn Keychain

To my surprise, I apparently booked a room at the ‘Marriott SUITES Anaheim’, not the ‘Marriott Anaheim’. The suites are like a mile south of the convention center. The room is nice enough, and I met up with Thar from the Stonecutters, along with his brother. We were met by the other rogue in our guild Ikilu, and headed over to ‘The Block’ for some late dinner. I already forgot the name of the place we ate at, but at 11pm nobody is serving dinner. Shrimp and tortilla chips for dinner. Don’t have any convention hall pictures, as I’m nowhere near the convention right now. Here’s some Photos of the Swagbag, however.

BlizzCon 2008 Swagbag Pictures are up: http://picasaweb.google.com/rtfmkthx/BlizzCon2008#

And, below (without helpful captions)

I’m on my way to Anaheim, California for BlizzCon 2008! Still sitting in the PDX airport at the moment.

Loose pictures will be uploaded to http://picasaweb.google.com/rtfmkthx