Yes, that’s right, 100 years ago, to the day, Alan Turing came into this world in good ol’ Blighty. He would grow up to become a British superstar of mathematics and cryptography, breaking German code during WWII. And as many cryptography machines basically were mechanical computers, Turing would turn that expertise towards impacts in the computing world as well.

Alan Turing’s work in designing a machine with a set of built-in rules that was capable of processing and manipulating data stored on a piece of tape, a device he called a “Logical Computing Machine” was a great innovation to computers. Little did he know at the time that his work on these devices would become so integral and famous that they would come to be called “Turing Machines”.

A modern homage to Turing’s machine can be found constructed from a Lego Mindstorms Nxt kit.

Unfortunately, for Alan Turing, for us all, the United Kingdom still had laws against acts of homosexuality, and so Alan Turing was arrested, found guilty of criminal acts, and forced into accepting chemical castration through treatments with female hormones as an alternative to going to prison. But the harassment combined with the forced hormonal imbalance was too much for this computing genius and war hero to take, and sadly, he took his own life by cyanide, leaving our cruel world just days before his birthday on the 7th of June, 1954.

LEGOs, long have we loved them.  And many a video game has been based on them, from racing to movie remakes.  They’re always entertaining.  But the mother of all LEGO games, LEGO Universe, a LEGO MMO, is still waiting to be unleashed.

LEGO Universe, a LEGO MMO

Originally slated for release in mid 2008, then delated to November 2008, and then 2009, and now 2010, LEGO Universe is exactly the kind of thing that would make a good MMO.  Like Second Life on blockish steroids, LEGO Universe has every potential to entertain and make loads of money doing it.  That is, if we ever get to actually see it!

LEGO Universe looks like it will be full of action.

The basic premise (besides being LEGO of course) is that Darklings are trying to take over the world, yada yada, blah blah blah.  Like we really care what the lame storyline is?  No one is going to want to play Lego Universe for its story.  It’s LEGO.  That’s all that has to be said.  Ad campaigns could simply be that.  “It’s LEGO.”  Just do that and it’d sell like hotcakes.  Throwing in neat MMO action scenes like the above is actually quite gratuitous.  Still, it looks awesome.

But it’s not just all about battling.  After all, it is LEGO.  So there’s also building stuff out of bricks, of course!

And, being an MMO, there is (most unfortunately) interaction with the rest of the world.  Sigh.  Oh, I know, that’s supposed to be the good thing about MMOs.  Unfortunately, interaction with people around the world is also the bad thing about MMOs.  Because, let’s face it, not all people are brilliant.  Not all people are even remotely in your age group, in reality or in spirit.  And not all people take the game as lightly or as seriously as you do.  The world is full of all sorts of people, and games that especially go out of their way to force you to interact with this morass of gamers, is doing nothing more than digging the cesspool even deeper before throwing you in.  So let us hope that LEGO Universe doesn’t force group interaction, or else it may be shooting itself in the foot.

Still…

Even if LEGO Universe is one of the worst written MMOs of all time (and one must wonder just what is keeping NetDevil from releasing it) it will still sell like mad, because it’s LEGO.

And so, there’s really only one concern: WHEN WILL IT FINALLY BE RELEASED?!?!?! When you see advertisements saying “coming soon“, don’t believe them.  This is one game that’s been delayed time and time again, and with its track record, even a 2010 release is looking a little iffy for LEGO Universe.

So last night on the Sci-Fi channel was BloodRayne II: Deliverance.

DON’T WATCH THIS MOVIE!!!

There. You’ve been warned. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. It’s quite clear, right there, don’t watch this movie. Trust me.

Okay, so the first movie of BloodRayne was dull as sin … which is actually a strange statement for people to make since I’ve often found sin to be quite enjoyable, where as BloodRayne wasn’t. You have a half vampire … that generally tries not to be a vampire … but seems to have no real qualms with sucking blood when it suits her purpose. In medieval times. I suppose she’s meant to be hot. At least in the temperature sense, since she’s always running around scantily clothed while everyone else dresses sanely. Which no one seems to notice or mind. And instead of vamping people, she runs around with something kind of like bladed tonfa (or a pair of somethings that are a cross between swords and police batons if you prefer) and chops off the heads of vampires with them. Or, well, more often just slits their throats. It’s a strange vampire lore when that kills vampires left and right, but whatever.

So that’s the first movie.

The second movie? Same thing. Only she also carries some six shooters, because now it’s the wild west period instead of medieval.

If anything, the pace with which the movie moves (or in this case, doesn’t move) is just as slow and boring. The storyline just as dull. The acting just as bad. And the period accuracy just as inaccurate. Yippee ki-yay!

Oh, wait, it gets better. The “bad guy” this time isn’t just a vampire. He’s Billy The Kid. In vampire form. With a bad European accent. (Because there’s no such thing as an American master vampire I guess.) And he’s come to the town of Deliverance to steal people’s kids and turn himself an army of vampires. Why? Because. Just … because.

And even though in the first movie pretty much anything could kill a vampire, in this one … supposedly … only silver bullets sprinkled with holy water and rubbed in garlic can kill vampires. Normal bullets just piss them off. Except that, having laid that rule down in the beginning of the movie, by the end the plot seems to have forgotten details like that.

Frankly, I just don’t get it. Now, I haven’t played the BloodRayne video games. Maybe there’s actually something to enjoy there. But certainly not in the movies. And of the two, most definitely not in the second movie. At all. Not even a little.

So please, for the sake of Pete, do not make an effort to see BloodRayne II: Deliverance. If you watch this movie, you will regret it. I give it a rating of zero, yes, zero European Vampire Billy The Kids out of five … or … well … any number, because no matter how you slice it zero is zero is zero in any fraction. It could be zero out of a million European Vampire Billy The Kids for all I care. It’s still zero. The movie still sucks just as badly.

Frankly, they could have done a Lego freeze-frame animation of little Lego wild west vampires being killed by a little Lego BloodRayne with little Lego bladed tonfas and sixshooters and it’d have at least made me chuckle. Where as BloodRayne II: Deliverance just made me groan and yawn the whole way through. I think I even napped for a bit without managing to miss a single thing. How bad is that?