Daily Dose

So, without planning to, I've managed to post every day this month. ^_^

(Yeah, this one is kind of a cop-out; what are you gonna do about it?)

Hey Phoenix (Part II)

Hey Phoenix! How is your project coming along?
Fantastic! You know how I was trying to get the Tomoe kanji handwriting recognizer to work on the iPhone? It was totally a dead-end! I got to START ALL OVER with Zinnia! Yay, more programming!

Wait, weren't you working on Tomoe for like, months?
Yup! All wasted effort!

Sweet!
Super sweet!

Hey Phoenix!

Hey Phoenix, did you get any sleep?
Even better! You know that fence they used to have around my apartment complex? They changed it! So, instead of sleeping I got to listen to the jackhammer all day!

Awesome!

Tron It

I'm just going to assume that we've all seen the trailer for the new Tron movie, AND knows about the Wizard of Oz + Dark Side of the Moon mashup and jump right in.

And I know a lot of the 'coincidences of timing' we spot in these things are a product of A) our own pattern-matching brains and B) the fact that a lot of entertainment follows certain rhythms. BUT, in the words of a Slashdot poster:

Somebody already mashed this trailer up with Michael Jackson's "Beat It" - it works disturbingly well.
--Ryv

Without further ado: Show/Hide

Experimental Gameplay

This is about a Windows game. If you don't have Windows, you can probably skip this (or it might work in Crossover...?)

So, there's a group of Experimental Gameplay guys. They've actually been around for a number of years; they got together at CMU and pitched the project in 2005. The goal was to discover and rapidly prototype as many new forms of gameplay as possible. A team of four grad students, they locked themselves in a room for a semester with three rules:

• Each game must be made in less than seven days,
• Each game must be made by exactly one person,
• Each game must be based around a common theme i.e. gravity, vegetation, swarms, etc.

The games themselves were hit and miss (as expected) but there were a few gems. One guy, Kyle Gabler, turned his 4-day prototype Tower of Goo into indie darling World of Goo. Unfortunately, I can't find any of the old games online anymore, so you can't see them for yourselves. Hopefully they'll get put back up sometime soon.

The experiment lead to the Gamasutra feature How to Prototype a Game in Under 7 Day (an interesting read on its own).

ANYway, they guys recently got back together, revamped the ExperimentalGameplay.com site, and restarted the old competitions. One of the recent games is Bunny Blaster.

It's difficult to say why this is such a fun game. You shoot the bunnies to help them multiply (none of them die from being shot). The goal is to get to 1000 bunnies (at which point the game stops). It's crazy addictive.

I even managed to break 2000 (bombs already set will still go off after the game ends), and in less than 50 seconds. UNBEATABLE!



The creator, Shalin Shodhan, says he's working on an updated version to fix some annoyances with the prototype and add features (maybe an ENDLESS mode?). Of course, since the original took less than a week, the update may even be done before this posts (I'm writing this on the 14^th).

I Can Read Movies

So, there's this guy, and he makes retro book covers for modern movies (and some not-so-modern).

They're pretty good. This one was my favorite. ^_^

Yoga?

(via)

New Rule

Hollywood has a new rule:
All characters with substance-abuse problems must be played by Robert Downey Jr.

How did I miss a new Sherlock Holmes movie coming out?

The Great Loss

Recently, I had occasion to rebuild my PS2 hard drive, in part because I found a PS2 in the rubbish bin that worked fine except the laser wouldn't read discs. Anyway, plugged the drive into my computer, re-formatted for the PS2, re-added my game discs, etc.

When I went to disconnect the drive from the computer, I noticed something... curious. For some reason, it was telling me that there were TWO PS2-formatted drives plugged in. Isn't that funny? Haha.

A quick investigation told me that indeed, there WERE two PS2-formatted drives connected. And one of them looked just like my old PS2 drive. The one I had just reformatted.

Or....?

Here's an interesting bit of trivia for you: you know what OTHER drive has EXACTLY the same size as my PS2 drive?

The drive containing my "Gentleman's Videos" collection.

Or more accurately, the drive that USED TO contain my "Gentleman's Videos" collection.

I am without "Gentleman's Entertainment" for the first time since my stepfather discarded my "Gentleman's Magazines" when I was 17.

I'll survive this (I do have an Internet connection, after all), but it is momentarily disheartening. I had amassed a library of classics that will be difficult to find these days.

It's nearly enough to drive one back to dating.

Watch Your Back

Yeah, I don't know how I find this stuff either. :-/

(via)

Deadgirl

So I ran across this: Show/Hide


What did I just watch? A trailer for the indie film Deadgirl from last year. Reviews are decidedly mixed. People love it or hate it. I'm probably in the latter category.

Why wouldn't I like it? Is it the gore? Well, I'm not a fan of blood, but no. Is it that it portrays all males to be dicks? No, that's pretty accurate so how can I take offense?

So then why?

Because it looks like a shitty film.

Here's a clip. Watch as one boy lovingly rubs dark lipstick all over his undead girl's lips, because who wants to spend their days raping a zombie if she looks all tired? (NSFW?) Show/Hide
I couldn't find an embeddable online version, so you have to make due with Blogger's meh video hosting.

(via)


Watch that and tell me you think it's quality. The acting is atrocious, the dialog .. man and don't even get me started on the effects. The acting is the worst though. AND THIS IS THE CLIP THEY PUT OUT THERE! The people that made this film looked at this clip and thought "Yeah, that's what we want to show people. That's some of our best work right there." Ridiculous.

UPDATE:
Found a better trailer: Show/Hide


BTW, the official site is such crappy flash. LAME.

Sneak Sneak

He's coming to getcha!

I have no explanation for this picture.

Why I Exercise

Because I don't want to be this guy.

Great gym advert.

The Language of Swearing

I ran across this quite interesting talk by Steven Pinker regarding swearing. Here are two ~10 minute snippets:

Part 1: Show/Hide


Part 2: Show/Hide


Full hour-long talk available here.

Bathroom Prank

"Oh god!"
Show/Hide

(Yes, it's entirely probable that this is fake. So?)

(via)

Contagious Laughter

Why do we laugh? Sometimes, I have to think that it works like yawning. A person will yawn if they see someone else yawn; it's a group reflex (triggering a change of state, from passive to active or vice versa).

So anyway, I saw this video, and I laughed. I don't understand the language (German). Show/Hide

Sour Video

SOUR (flash warning) is a clever Japanese band. They put this video together with the help of 64 fans from around the world. Show/Hide

3 PSAs

...from the FUTURE! Show/Hide


(third one could have been better)

Party Cat

If by some accident, I haven't made you read this yet:

Here is a page with the rest.

Pepsi Logo

I didn't like the new logo anyway.

Destructoid Review: Mad Dog McCree Gunslinger Pack

Here is a review for a Wii game that makes the best use of annotations YouTube has ever seen. Show/Hide

Happy Birthday Tesla!

Today (July 10^th) is the birthday of Nikola Tesla.

The Forgotten Wizard: Show/Hide

May we see his like again.

Shirt Suggestion

A friend of mine sent me a link to this shirt.

(source)

Train Story

Watch the video first. (Skip to about a minute in to get to the good stuff)
Show/Hide

Then go to YouTube and read the details.

Tanabata

source
Today is July 7^th, also known as Tanabata in Japan.

Orihime, the daughter of the Tentei (Sky King) wove beautiful clothes by the bank of the Amanogawa River(Milky Way). Her father loved the cloth that she wove and so she worked very hard every day to weave it. However, she was sad that because of her hard work she could never meet and fall in love with anyone.

Concerned about his daughter, Tentei arranged for her to meet Hikoboshi who lived and worked on the other side of the Amanogawa. When the two met, they fell instantly in love with each other and were shortly married. However, once married, Orihime no longer would weave cloth for Tentei and Hikoboshi allowed his cows to stray all over Heaven.

In anger, Tentei separated the two lovers across the Amanogawa and forbade them to meet. Orihime became despondent at the loss of her husband and asked her father to let them meet again. Tentei was moved by his daughter’s tears and allowed the two to meet on the 7th day of the 7th month if Orihime worked hard and finished her weaving.

The first time they tried to meet, however, they found that they could not cross the river because there was no bridge. Orihime cried so much that a flock of magpies came and promised to make a bridge with their wings so that she could cross the river. If it rains, the magpies cannot come and the two lovers must wait till next year.*

*An analog of our Groundhog Day festival?

Love Poetry

Blogger's new tinier "Large" image size strikes again. DUMB! Click for bigger.


UPDATE: If you go to the Picassa share itself (where Blogger stores uploaded images), there are versions up to 800px wide/tall! Why don't they let you use this size from Blogger? Voila, reshared larger:

"Every day I hope to see a moving truck pull in. Or an ambulance."
(via)

Japanese Lesson

I ran across this comment recently, regarding mokume-gane.

Mokume-gane should be spelled moku-megane. Moku-megane comes from 2 Japanese words, moku meaning wood, lumber, timber etc. and megane meaning eyeglasses. The literal translation would be "wood eyeglasses", however the most popular translation is "wood eye".

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. ^_^

Mokumegane is three Japanese kanji, 木目金. The commenter recognized two Japanese words there, 'moku'=wood and 'megane'=eyeglasses, but that isn't the meaning here. 'Megane' (eyeglasses) is two kanji, 眼鏡, literally "eyeball mirror". These are DIFFERENT from the kanji used in mokume-gane where 'me'=目 (eye), 'gane'=金 (metal), even IF the two kanji were part of the same word, which they aren't.

'Me' is part of mokume, literally, wood-eye. BUT, it does not mean an eye made of wood, it refers to (for example) the way a knot in a plank of wood resembles an eye. A better translation would be wood-grain.

Mokume-gane, wood-grain in metal.

Here's a picture of a mokume-gane ring. See how it resembles wood-grain?

(via)

Amusingly (to me), I did a google search for the term mokume-gane, and the vast majority of non-Japanese sites incorrectly broke the term down by kanji. Wood-eye-metal. Yeah, that's the same meaning as metal wood-grain. Way to go, western world.

A Famous Person Has Died

I meant to post this earlier, but the queue filled up.

via
(btw, Pictures for Sad Children is really good)

A Challenger Appears

Gosh there are a lot of videos of cute kids on the Internet. Thomas already mentioned Capucine, and now there's Nina: Show/Hide

I like how he is speaking to her in English, and she is responding in Japanese. ^_^ Kawaii!

FOTC, LOTR. Wait, WHAT?

So, remember that episode of Flight of the Conchords where they reference New Zealand's most famous film trilogy?

No? Maybe this will jog your memory: Show/Hide



Ha ha, everyone in New Zealand has something to do with LOTR. Ha ha. Then I saw THIS: Show/Hide

BRET was actually IN Lord of the Rings?


Here is the actual scene in question (sorry for the uploader's aspect-ratio fail): Show/Hide

Elephant-sized post

For no reason, here's a picture of elephants painted like pandas.