Linky Dinks: Marathon and Mordor

One: Here is a deleted scene from Fellowship of the Ring that somehow didn't make it onto even the extended DVDs. Vital scene! Why oh why would PJ leave it off? Silly PJ.

(Relatedly, if you have the extended RotK DVDs and haven't yet found the easter eggs, do so. The one on the first disc had me crying from laughing. Select the last chapter on disc 1, then press down to highlight a little icon, then press enter.)

Two: Bungie has made the Marathon trilogy available for free download. Marathon was one of the first first-person shooters for the Mac, and is still one of my favorites. You're a...space marine? Let's say space marine for now. You're a space marine on a ship that's attacked by aliens, and have to clear them out, which is pretty straightforward stuff—but something is going on with the three AIs that control your fleet, and you only learn what it is in bits and pieces as you find new computer terminals. There's a great deal of text-based backstory, and they do intriguing things with page layouts and alien alphabets and AI poetry. And the game itself is more cerebral than, say, Doom; you do blow things up, but there are a lot of clever puzzles and variable physics environments and so on. It's worth looking at if you have a Mac and enjoy FPSs at all.

Bushisms

On his "Bring it on!" quote: "I don't know if you'd call it a regret, but it certainly is a lesson that a president must be mindful of, that the words that you sometimes say. ... I speak plainly sometimes, but you've got to be mindful of the consequences of the words. So put that down. I don't know if you'd call that a confession, a regret, something." (link)

On his second term: "We got to get moving and get some things done before—before people kind of write me off." (link)

On his lavish inauguration festivities: "You can be equally concerned about our troops in Iraq and those who suffered at the tsunamis with celebrating democracy." (same link)

(K. thought that last was a spammer's Markov-chain when I first read it to her.)