Richard Garriott’s Plan For An Army of Robot Clones Enters a New Phase

OK, the Geminoid robot is (probably) nothing to do with Richard Garriott, though it does look rather like him in my opinion!

What does fill me with terror is that robots have developed facial-hair technology. A fine moustache, as everybody knows, renders you almost unstoppable. Such realistic robots could be amongst us, even now.

In which the Animal Kwackers lurk within my subconcious, waiting patiently for this day.

I had forgotten them until this morning, when I decided to google exactly where a phrase I use often, “Rory! Rory! Tell us a story.”, came from. Google provided, and for the first time in thirty years I heard their theme tune, and it all came flooding back: The Animal Kwackers.

Made from 1975 to 1978, the Animal Kwackers show was an attempt by Yorkshire Television to replicate the success of the Banana Splits. It failed.

Animal Kwackers Rory

Oh gods!!! What is that thing!?!?

The Banana Splits were a four piece animal band consisting of Fleegle the dog, Bingo the gorilla, Drooper the lion, and Snorky the elephant.
The Animal Kwackers were a four piece animal band consisting of Bongo the dog, Twang the monkey, Rory the lion, and Boots the tiger.

That’s where the similarities ended.The Banana Splits were a lovable huggable bunch of fun, looked back upon fondly by most people of my age. In comparison, the Animal Kwackers were their daliesque mirror. The lucky ones have all but forgotten them, except for the strange blue lion with the broken jaw that haunts their nightmares, and the deep desire for people named Rory to tell us a Story.

I was three years old. How was I supposed to handle something like that? It’s a wonder I learned to count at all!

The Animal Kwackers. Just one more part of the 70’s children’s programming that made me what I am today.

Question: Is Notch the Zoology Dragon?

It’s an important question that just occurred to me while I was contemplating the universe in the bath. This song pre-dates Minecraft by several years, but there are a number of striking similarities. Most notably that both Notch, creator of Minecraft, and the Zoology Dragon invent animals THAT ARE MADE OF CUBES!!! They have even both worked on the Cubification of Cows.

Minecraft Cow Cube 550x419

Cow. Cube. Cowuube.

Perhaps it would be best if we take the Zoology Dragon’s warnings seriously, and pay attention to the surface tension as we interact with the many creatures within the World of Minecraft.

Anatomy of a Horse-boy

Panic is sweeping the streets north of the border, as the good folks of Aberdeen awake to a new threat. A creature with the head of a horse, and yet the body of a boy, stalks the streets fearlessly by day. Behind locked doors they whisper the name “Horse-boy”.

We’re no strangers to paranormal investigation here at Ark’s Ark. So it is that I can reveal, after painstaking research, that Horseboy does not in fact have the head of a horse. Also, we don’t think that he’s a boy. The truth is far more terrifying.

We can clearly see, in the picture taken at 6 Hardgate, that the Horse-boy entity is clutching a brown object in his hand. Whether it was recently removed from an actual demon-eyed horse or is just made of papier mache is unclear at this time, but over the next couple of pictures we see Horse-boy hurriedly place it over his own head. Cleverly he has tried to draw attention away from the real mystery. Observe, as we follow his actions on the Hardgate road as captured by the Google Street View car as it unsuspectingly drove towards him.

Arks Ark Anatomy Of A Horseboy

A Horseboy Driveby

Did he distract you too? Don’t feel bad if he did. Not everybody’s senses are as highly attuned to the supernatural as ours.

HE DOESN’T HAVE A FACE!!!!

Horseboy Has No Face

He really doesn't!!!

That’s right. It is clear to us that this.. this creature put the mask on so that we would not notice that his head is a featureless mass of flesh. But it is worse, much worse than that. Further research through Google Streetview records reveal that these faceless monstrosities are all around us. Perhaps, like certain other entities, they are invisible to the naked eye, or use strange mental powers to create the illusion of facefulness to those nearby. These powers would not work on someone viewing a photo, of course.

Sadly, Google have not yet released the data that would show if Horse-boy, and those like him, are natural wi-fi hotspots. We know this information was collected. If so, it is possible they could be harnessed for the good of humanity.

What is to be done? Well, we have not ascertained as to whether Horse-boy and his friends are any real threat, though their numbers are disturbing. Perhaps they have always been here. They’re almost certainly less annoying than the Owlman, and less terrifying than the Creepy Gnome, so for now, we suggest caution and further study.

The “Creepy Gnome” is unmasked!

This is an old post from a couple of years ago, but I thought it might provide some small entertainment to newer readers.




There have been a number of incidents recently, in Argentina, involving a being known as a “Duende”. This has been badly translated for English media as “The Creepy Gnome”. In a number of appearances, including two caught on film, he has created hysteria wherever he goes. While he has yet to cause any physical injury, merely the sight of him is enough to force the taking of a SAN check, and not everyone has rolled well, with several people being hospitalised from fright.

Here it is in full menacing action.

It should be clear to any player of Warhammer Online that this is not a gnome at all.

Firstly, those young people were filled with terror, and gnomes, whilst being completely awesome in every way, are not known for their causing of terror, and they like it that way.

Secondly, no real gnome would be seen in a hat like that. It’s not a stereotype they want to reinforce.

No, I’m afraid it was clearly a Night Goblin, as I shall demonstrate in this painstakingly crafted side by side comparison:

The Creepy Gnome Is A Warhammer Night Goblin

Those young people should consider themselves lucky it was an unarmed night goblin with the urge to dance that came upon them, and not a witch elf, or a chaos chosen. Nevertheless, even a single night goblin can be dangerous to the untrained, so they were wise to flee.

Beware! Beware the Creepy Goblin!!!!

Johnny Depp is not dead.

Part 2 of a series wherein my friends inform me someone is dead, and I tell them that they are not. This time they actually had posts on semi-legitimate media to point at. But nevertheless, he is not dead.

That the alleged CNN report that everyone keeps sending me (and that I won’t link to) is hosted on an Angelfire server might have been a bit of a clue. It’s no wonder phishers do so well.

Johnny Depp Is Not Dead

The Best Way to Raise your Alexa Ranking. A Most Ingenious Paradox!

The Alexa Ranking theoretically determines how popular your website is, out of all the websites in the world. It does this by extrapolating from the behaviour of users who have the Alexa plug-in installed to their browsers. For instance, this humble stop along the internet superhighway is currently the 520,865th most popular by Alexa’s rating, though it fluctuates fairly wildly. That sounds pretty awful, but there are a heck of a lot of websites out there, so it actually ain’t bad. Because I am something of a numbers geek, I watch it leap about, seemingly independent of how many visitors I actually get, and have watched the ranking of some other sites I frequent, and I’ve reached a startling conclusion. Well, not literally startling. I just said that to make this sound more interesting. Alexa ratings aren’t exactly the sort of things that startle anyone, unless perhaps you are the sort of person that is shocked when a rather large yet unimportant number gets a little larger or smaller. I am not such a person, and I’ll wager neither are you.

It turns out that the best way to raise your Alexa ranking is simply to make a post telling people how to raise their Alexa ranking, and then thousands of people come in from the search engines to find out how. Because they all have the Alexa widget installed to raise their own page ranking, it also raises yours. (If you really want to go for broke, make a website all about SEO, Alexa, and Adsense. You’ll be in the top 10,000 before teatime.)

Now, some might suggest that this is a fatal flaw in how Alexa rankings are worked out. It means that the websites frequented most by people who care about such silly things as Alexa rating have inflated figures, rendering the ranking system mostly meaningless. In particular, websites dedicated to Search Engine Optimisation and such things frequently have ridiculously high rankings.

Some might even say that anyone who used such a method to raise their Alexa rank would be a terrible person. Or a very silly one, considering how little meaning the Alexa Rank actually has to 99.9% of web users. Possibly even both terrible AND silly. Some might also declare that it is good that I have warned of this danger, so that we might all be alert for such outrageous scampery.

Myself, I choose to break into a chorus of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “A Paradox”!

Let’s sing along! There are pirates in it too! Pirates make everything better.

Alright, it’s not really a paradox. It’s more an out of control positive feedback loop, but I don’t know any songs about that.