Found a little app (shareware – save disabled demo) called Toribash, on Wired if memory serves. It’s a turn-by-turn stickfigure martial arts simulator, and there is a whole subculture around gory/flashy decapitations of Uke (who just stands there and takes it) by Tori (under your control).

Once you’ve coughed up $20, there are mods which allow things like jousting, sumo, judo or sword fights, you can save moves/fights and output them to render in POVray… oh, and one-on-one fights against humans of course. I’m not quite convinced it’s worth that much, but I’ve had fun with the demo…

Here is my Tori grabbing Uke’s head, spinning around behind him to knee his head off, and then land in a handstand:

I also have a nastier one where Tori just rips Uke’s head off. It’s more gruesome and less… artistic.

If you want to try it yourself, here is how to “configure” Tori at the start to initiate that spinning jump:

UPDATE: There’s never too much of a good thing, so here is another decapitation, with a side order of dismemberment and kinetic throws…

Hurray for interesting podcasts, couldn’t possibly stay on the machine that long without them. Started adding some light crunches and pushups to the wind-down routine… abs hurt now!

Sorry guys, looks like I set my Spamment filters a little high, and they’ve been eating some legitimate comments, whether from new readers or even from my very own brother!

I’ve eased back on the settings and resigned myself to a higher load of manual spam management. If it’s still eating your comments, or not even letting you leave one, please email or gTalk me at syvwlch + gmail dot com.

That would be, hopefully, five minutes actually burning fat (probably 5 grams of it, but it’s the principle of the thing).

My hoster’s server was down most of yesterday… my apologies to those of you who were inconvenienced and my thanks to those who pointed it out. Not that I didn’t know, but it’s always nice to see some of you care!

Hopefully that won’t happen again for a while, and it made me feel all virtuous to have backed the site up last week.