| beeracer time trials |
 0 comments
|
|
beeracer TT - source - built with processing Made for THE 371-IN-1 KLIK & PLAY PIRATE KART II: KLIK HARDER. |
||
|
| sic transit gloria laundry |
0 comments
|
|
--Not our video or anything, but that's how JZ and I spent a few hours last night, launching cars and humvees via Grand Theft Auto IV's "swingset" glitch. (I also downloaded the MP3 used in that video, but it's not quite as cool on its own.) JZ probably had the single most beautiful shot, launching a car that was ON FIRE -- like the closer for the video, but on fire the whole time, streams of flame pouring from the wheel wells making comet tails. It's kind of weird, because we had just downloaded the PS3 game Pain, which in some ways is a whole small game based around the same idea, except you're launching just people from a slingshot, with a bit more aiming. I think in a lot of ways the swingset was more fun. For what it's worth, I really like my line about the laundry below. |
||
|
| hour of power |
10 comments
|
|
Seriously, giving us more Daylight Savings Time is like my favorite act of Congress this past decade.
Invention of the Moment Horeseradish-based fire alarm, designed for the hearing impaired. Brilliant idea! I wonder how they sound the "all-clear" to get rid of the smell, though. (via bb) Video of the Moment --A classic. Check out the older muppet versions in the related links selection... actually this came from a bb post with the new machinima "ROFLMAO" version. I never quite realized that "Mahna Mahna" is two identical words, since the usual emphasis scheme makes it sound more like pheNOMena. Wikipedia says that backup singers are the "snowths". Random geek culture wise, they remind me an awful lot of Birdo, arguably videogaming's first transsexual character. |
| millions served |
6 comments
|
|
Sometimes, like when I start observing my fellow passengers on the subway, it hits me that there are way more people around than I can realistically cope with in my head, and that this probably leads to poor understanding of things like economies and group forming in general.
There's Dunbar's Number, 150, a "cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships." (A few years ago I posted about the "monkeysphere" concept, a cute way of thinking about what happens to people outside of that limit.) So I have to figure, the understanding of numbers bigger than, say, a few thousand will tend to be academic for most people. I remember that book my sixth grade teacher had, a million dots (with some important or interesting numbers labeled), a thousand pages of a thousand dots each. It seemed to go on forever. There are over four million people in the Greater Boston Area (admittedly a big space geographically) and that leads me to suspect that I have no idea how a society that size can actually function, how an economy sustains itself, how relationships are formed, what public opinion really means. And there must also be a conflict with people's need to stand out from the crowd, to really live that American sense of "rugged individualism". Hell, I'm surprised there aren't more people doing Really Stupid Things to try and get on Fox News. Quote of the Moment During evolution there was great selection pressure for immediate action: crucial to our survival is the instant distinction of predator from prey and kin from foe, and the recognition of a potential mate. We cannot afford the delay of conscious thought or debate in the committees of the mind. We must compute the imperatives of recognition at the fastest speed and, therefore, in the earliest-evolved and unconscious recesses of the mind. This is why we all know intuitively what life is. It is edible, lovable, or lethal. --James Lovelock, "The Ages of Gaia" Article of the Moment Wired had an article on these new cooling gloves from Darpa. The idea is you can radically change someone's core temperature by using a vacuum to pull blood to the surface of their hand and cooling or heating it before it goes back and makes the round. (There's a new model of muscles, that they tire as they get overheated, not by running out of stored sugars which was the previous thinking.) Anyway, I remember years ago my friend Dave telling me that there was an old farmer's trick of dunking your forearms in a barrel of rainwater they had. So in a way, the new tech echoes the old folk wisdom. Presumably the gloves are a bit more portable. |
| chicken! fight like a robot! |
1 comment
|
|
Video Game Art of the Moment One biggish influence on my childhood drawing was the manual to the Atari game Berzerk... I think I was studied enough to catch the Da Vinci reference in this diagram: 
And this "internal view" seemed like one of the coolest things ever... 
After that I loved drawing big, chunky robots, often in a skeletal half-built or half-demolished form. Typo of the Moment Don't think tonight will work but Night Watch is pretty kickin'-- it's in Russian but with some of the best use of subtitles I've ever seen. It's (I'm guessing) probably par for the curse in terms of modern high energy vampire flicks, but it has some cool "epic" elements as well. --Response to Miller et al. about a possible trip to the movies...I didn't realize I had written "par for the curse" until someone pointed it out...wish my typos were that clever all the time. |
| swimming in the afternoon |
5 comments
|
|
Poem of the Moment YOU'RE NOT THE FIRST YOU'RE NOT THE LAST ANOTHER DAY ANOTHER CRASH --Graffiti poem from the old laundry room of my Aunt and Uncle's house (now a kitchenette) This poem was there along with all these phone numbers, ballpoint-pen'd on a wall. That room was remodeled years ago, I thought of the second half of this poem last week but couldn't recall the first two lines until last night. 
Diary Entry and Art Study of the Moment"Swimming in the afternoon" --Sole entry in Kafka's journal, on learning of the outbreak of WWI in 1914. This was a footnote in a some cool Slate Dali coverage -- I guess there's a new show of his work, NPR had some coverage of it. |
| ipod upod we all pod for ipod |
22 comments
|
So I got an iPod yesterday. It's a bit on the excessively trendy side, but you know. "Consumer Electronics are the balm for my divorce stricken soul." I'm counting it as an early birthday gift to myself, since one thing I'd like to do is use it for my birthday party. I got the car kit as well, since I have high hopes it might finally be able to solve my music-in-the-car problems, that old CD juggling act. 
Being able to put my entire CD collection in such a tiny little box...it's pretty amazing. But besides the road music and trendy group identification, I'm hoping it will bring me back to my music collection in a way I've lost. I just haven't been listening to CDs that much lately. Of course, it won't be like the old days anyway; I'm not much of a music purist, but it seems like the iPod encourages people to treat songs as free floating atoms, not as part of larger album molecules.You know, it's been years and years since I've regularly used a personal stereo. There are definite issues of "I'm in my own space here" when you do, but mostly, it's odd to be bopping down the hallway jiving to my old tunes. It makes me think I don't have enough music in my life right now. Slate.com had an article on the iPod ads (the same ones I imitate above with an old favorite picture of me.) Though the article points out the use of shadows risks making the product more important than the people, I think it misses how what's cool about those ads is how great those people are dancing, something the diamond ads were missing. Oh, by the way, Apple Stores are kind of weird, such an odd try at a mass-market boutique. (Which was also strongly reflected in the packaging of the iPod, kind of like origami. Even the shopping bags are high end, strong plastic, with drawstrings looping all the way through, top and bottom, I guess you could use it as a backpack.) Part of me realized that the Apple Store is really the place to go if you have a strong urge to be sold a computer by a cute gay person. Quote of the Moment "We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." --Carl Sagan. Of course, it feels a little goofy having such a majestic quote after a big article about my new toy...what was my question and answer yesterday? "Would I like an iPod?" "Heck yeah!" Link of the Moment Bill pointed out a group livejournal dedicated to making fun of bad fanfiction. Fan fiction, such an odd phenomenon... |
| get yer bark on |
1 comment
|
|
Folk Saying of the Moment "An eagle could land on his mustache." --saying in Iraq, where mustache thickness is believed to be directly proportional to masculinity, according to this Slate.com article. "I swear upon my mustache"...heh. My dearly departed dad had a mustache, though I'm not sure if he felt quite that strongly about it. March Monograph of the Moment "This month derives her pedigree from the Danish verb 'Whizz,' which means to blow, to wheeze, to snort, to pitch in endways, and crossways, to shake winder blinds, to smash barn doors, to skare pigs, to brake clothes lines, to make men sware, and wimmin balky. March iz principally immense for wind, but whare it all cums from, and whare it all goes to, are prize conumdrums which I kant untangle. Dogs kreated this month invariably have the bark on." --Josh Billings, "Old Probability", 1879. Via my "How To Draw a Radish" daily calendar. That "have the bark on" seems very homeboy modern for being written in 1879... News of the Moment Iraq placing explosives at the Kirkuk oil fields. First off, I feel vageuly flattered by the name "Kirkuk". Second, why do I get the feeling President Junior is going to start talking about "Saddam's weapons of mass destruction against oil"? "Won't somebody think of the oil? That poor, innocent, defenseless oil?" |
| makes one wonder |
1 comment
|
|
Bushism of the Moment Here's a vignette we're dying to see on the ABC broadcast of Sunday's Ford's Theatre Presidential Gala: When Stevie Wonder sat down at the keyboard center stage, President Bush in the front row got very excited. He smiled and started waving at Wonder, who understandably did not respond. After a moment Bush realized his mistake and slowly dropped the errant hand back to his lap. "I know I shouldn't have," a witness told us yesterday, "but I started laughing." --The Washington Post, via rec.humor.funny Online Toy of the Moment The Glass Engine is an index over 60 Phillip Glass works (I think more than that if you count different tracks seperately.) It has all the pieces organized by Work (Name), Year, Length, and then four other less tangible factors: Joy, Sorrow, Intensity, and Density. The interface takes a second to get used to (especially how you're working with the individual tracks of a single work if you grab the lines on top, or all tracks if you grab on bottom, and how it's all drag, not point and click) but after that it's very fun to explore. |
| influence |
0 comments
|
|
Wow. I have nothing to say today. I'm having too much fun playing videogames with my friends last night and my cousins today.
|
It's funny thinking how I influence Ivan and Kayla. We're not biologically related, but we might as well be. They're both in middle school, and we often get together for Nintendo fests. I try to be a good influence on them, teach them how to be sarcastic and witty, make sure they don't grow up irony deficient, and how to trash talk with a certain amount of
grace. What's funny is how months later they'll quote good lines back at me, like "You put the UCK back into suck" and
(when their friend Hannah was having trouble manuevering her character's airplane in