Solving the Torchwood problem

I've got a nice little post in my head about Torchwood, what's right and wrong with it, etc etc. I like it, but it's deeply flawed and nowhere near as good as it should be. In the meantime, James Graham has a solution:

One suggestion just made to me is to make Lembit Opik a consultant for the show, given that he is an authority on Wales, intergalactic phenomena and sex with odd-looking aliens.

Nasty. True, but nasty.

Firefox, LJ, science, music, dice, aliens and games - linkspam time...

K, in no particular order...

• Scotland's interesting message to alien life


• Miss Freddie is talking about dice and music:

Been reading about indeterminacy (think John Cage), and I just had a thought. Dice Music. Assign each note to number on a D12(?). Roll. A lot. Assign lengths of notes, dynamics, other markings, to different dice. Even assign the choosing of instruments to the dice. Brass, Woodwind, Strings, Voices? Then Trumpets, Trombones etc...

What sort of dice can you get? D20s, D6... what else?

Interesting comments thread there, with some daft suggestions as to where to go next.

• wpts has launched a Does my web site suck checklist, the bulk of which I agree with wholeheartedly (and some of you will have read the draft of my forthcoming rant about flash sites and navigation already - Vincent agrees)


• dm_of_the_rings has the most recent episode upDwarven Diplomacy. If Gimli is to be comic relief, at least he can be cool comic relief. And yes, that feed address is just for the comic, the full feed is 20sidedtale, but I'm a little feeded out at the moment so I used my mighty Wordpress fu to just syndicate that category.
• On the other hand, just reading the comic feed means missing out on stuff like this review of the Fate Diablo II clone:

Fate is one game where I think the “clone” moniker is deserved. Fate is more or less a straight-up Diablo clone. It duplicates the mechanics and play style of Diablo II right down to having the same windows with the same information that are opened with the same hotkeys.

On the subject of Diablo: play_diablo, set up by theweaselking, I have every intention of joining in properly once I've gotten myself a decent connection speed.

• davidnm has decided to abandone pretence of being a serious scientists, and explains how we could be descended from alien colonists:

It goes like this. Suppose you want to colonise a planet, but you want to avoid either the War of the Worlds scenario (bumped off by native life) or the 'terraforming by accident' scenario (your intestinal flora or whatever outcompete everything else on the planet). Basically, you need to make your proposed colonists fit in with the local environment.

So, you find some local dominant species to use as a template.

OK, he's not being serious, but still...

• Some official communities are starting to show ads. I have nothing further to add to that statement, but isn't it great that they started doing so just before the annual State of the Goat on news?


• Was going to write this up properly but I doubt I'll ever get around to it so, lj_nifty: Using Firefox 2 to quickly add RSS feeds to your LJ account:

Firefox 2 has a nifty feature for easily subscribing to RSS feeds

Since discovering this feature hack, I've added over 50 new feeds to various filters. Hence me being a little feeded out; I keep meaning to cut down but, y'know, they're all so cool. I'm not sure if non-paid users can use it to discover new feeds, but if not, or if you want something set up, it's so easy to do I'm happy to oblige.

Phew, that was a longer one; question: Would people prefer I cut this sort of thing, or is having all the links there easily more preferable?