2013 August❮❮prevnext❯❯

The songs I added to my regular rotation, not many this month so I kept them in the order I added them. 4-stars marked in red, interesting videos with a "!".

• !Blurred Lines (WARNING: BOOBS) (Robin Thicke) I grabbed this before I realized how well known it was. Catchy tune, if (arguably) Date Rape-y. The Gender-swapped version made me think about femininity in general.)
  
• Fools Gold (The Stone Roses) Not sure if I dig this beyond the little drum beat or not.
  
• Somewhere Over the Rainbow (Israel Kamakawiwo'ole) I prefer this to the one that includes "Wonderful World"
  
• Niggun (J.A.) A "niggun" is a pleasant, stylized (often prayer-ish) song in the Jewish tradition.
• Wake (M.G.) ... a song made by for J.A., during a set of fraught and heart-tearing circumstances.
• Lollipop (MIKA) Switching gears, a catchy bit of summer fluff.
• Asshole (Denis Leary) Dumb comedy song but I like the yodeling. EB says he can't stand how Denis Leary ripped off Bill Hicks.
• Sailor's Hornpipe (Harvey Reid) Decided I needed a little popeye action. Surprised the version I liked was banjo-y.
• Easy - Dub Fx Cover | ft. CAde (Dub Fx)
  Cool cover. I really like the line "Easy like Sunday Morning".
• Under Pressure (Queen & David Bowie) A classic though I always think of the Vanilla Ice version. The vocal only version is interesting.
• It's Alright With Me (Frank Sinatra) More upbeat than the version I have... actually I'm surprised at what a happyface spin so many artists put on this kind of melancholy song.
• Barney Miller - Theme from the TV Series (feat. Dominik Hauser) (Jack Elliot & Allyn Ferguson) I always liked this one.
• !Map of Tasmania (feat. Amanda Palmer & Peaches) (The Young Punx) The best song about the Delta of Venus imaginable. I love its attitude. (The version I have has a decent rap break by Peaches.)
• !Please Mr. Brown (Pontus Winnberg of Miike Snow Remix) (Sarah Vaughan) Verve is still milking that "remix of our awesome back catalog" thing, but when it works it really works.
• Cups (Movie Version) (Anna Kendrick) Sweet little rhythmic song.
• Thank You (Dido) Maybe I know this from "Better Than Chocolate"?
• Back 2 Back - Digital Remakin' Track / Water Palace: Act 1 (SEGA / Hideki Naganuma) Kind of a funky take on Louie-Louie... I like it because it reminds me of the same artist's work on "Jet Grind Radio"

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Gas prices don't seem so bad once you realize you're buying explosive liquid dinosaurs

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New "prime the canvas" technique in art class.

--Another month, another Second Every Day. Still trying to think if it's better for me to make it personally significant (i.e. a reminder of what happened that day) or visually interesting. I think the latter.

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Blender of Love Digest http://kirkdev.blogspot.com/ - PoMan3D, a super simplistic 3D line drawing hack for processing.js

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The same people who decry handouts and social welfare are the ones who can't stop asking Me for free stuff.

I had forgotten what a superlative multiplayer game Super Monkey Ball 2 was; the quintessence of kart racing + sumo-ish fighting, and "Target" gliding was superb. (There was also a fun as hell dogfight game.) A shame it buries half of its multiplayer behind grinding the inexecrable single player mode.

Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz was a rushed-feeling Wii launch title with dozens of brave and brilliant controller experiments; about half failed though. I wonder if the "Motion Plus" feature would have helped, a lot of the minigames feel like they were based on what a designer thought the Wiimote should do before actually using one. (Holding the thing upright like a plane's control stick seems especially brilliant, and underused in flight games on the system.)

It also reminds me of how much I loved the first Mario Parties, and how later iterations lost their way, putting aside an emphasis on "retro-in-modern clothing" to focus on luck based board games. The first game had a stadium mode that understood the board game is useful to randomly select games and teams and give some meaning to someone playing well (as well as their being a little luck involved), the other games in the series I saw lost that, assuming letting players pick from a jukebox was about as much fun.

Anyway, playing with the old system with a young cousin reminds me how much I miss having quarterly-ish gaming get-togethers. I gotta come to terms with how the N64/GC era may be the zenith of my couch-gaming days.

For a wanna-be gamemaker, I don't usually have a good answer for "what's the dream game I'd like to make", but one thought is a framework for people to write their own Mario Party-like games would be awesome. (In practice, one big drawback is how difficult it can be to right good-but-not-great computer opponents for things.)

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They say Time exists to stop everything from happening all at once. I'm not sure it's working.

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Off to Alaska!

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So it'll be Sales Tax Free weekend in MA? Does it count for that bullshit tax on software services? GET YOUR CODING IN THEN!!!

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[Kirk has] an estimated 3.0% Neanderthal DNA, which puts [him] in the 92nd percentile among European 23andMe members.

bye, alaska

You will displace about 2 buckets of water, regardless (of how dense you think you are)

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Japanese Robots in space: Great Thing, the Greatest Thing, or a Scary Astroboy from Your Worst Nightmares?

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Every person is beautiful until proven otherwise. Then they are still beautiful; I just can't be around them.

NEWSFLASH moving: still sucks. "There is no god & murphy is his prophet" & that's why my back seizes up on moving day. I should have figured out how to my my damn old place.

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Flexeril is my new old wonder drug. I was a little fuzzed but functional (i.e. not paralyzed in pain) all day! Made it through the day without more flexeril! But I had it on hand...

You can do anything, but not everything.

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all the awkward ladies / all the awkward ladies / put your hands up / no... both hands / yes I meant now / nvm the moments ruined

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http://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ An explanation as to why decades of gains in productivity hasn't led to the 20 hour work week. I realized I was a bit remiss in not posting photos during my Alaska vacation, so I will be posting them in serialized form, one day per day over the next week. 2 weeks late but making good time!

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Ah, moving's peculiar existential silver lining... Life may be short, but (with Amber's help, maybe) there was certainly time enough to accumulate all this stuff I am taking to Goodwill.

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Vine is an underrated medium:

(seems like it was some kind of best vines of 2013, found a replacement) This day we took a boat tour of Glacier Bay on the Good Ship St. Phillip (A "Jet Powered Catamaran", technically.) None of the wildlife photos really came out, but there were sea lions, eagles, mountain goats, whales, and lots of interesting birds including puffins.

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Scalia is a disgusting troll, a "strict originalist" only when it's convenient to him and people like him. Disgraceful. (Another good view on this kind of strict constructionism )

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Fun Quora about common knowledge at your place, astonishing everywhere else The Software Engineering one wasn't 100% right, but wasn't too far off. It was the only overcast and rainy day I had in Alaska-- most years, that would be atypical, but it has been a sunny summer there. Perfect for kayaking Glacier Bay since we were going to be wet anyway.

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The only thing can stop a bad guy with a gun is... Antoinette Tuff is amazing.

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My Halloween costume is gonna be Slutty Howard Taft. Oooo, ooo, someone help, I'm stuck in this hot, wet, sudsy bathtub, ooo

A day with a bit of hiking and biking in Gustavus before heading back to Juneau

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Disheartening things about directing movers alone for big stuff, then spending day on dregs: 1. aloneness 2. too much big stuff 3. too many dregs. I'm so far removed from a minimal kind of way I( think I)'d prefer to be. Mt. Roberts is a mountain directly behinf Juneau's downtown area. It has a steep tramway you can ride to a decent visitor's center 1800 feet up -- but taking the tram up would have been too easy and insufficiently nature-y...

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Am digging unwinding from moving with Saints Row 4. GTA meets Hulk Ultimate Destruction via Crackdown and Bioshock. We hitchhiked for the first time in my life to and from the glacier (shh don't tell mom -- but it feels much safer to do so there than most places, in part because the roads of Juneau aren't connected to any larger highway system.) Saw the glacier, admired the falls, touched some icebergs, and saw salmon there to spawn and (from the viewing platform) a bears that was snacking on them.

A more chilled day, taking in some museums.

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With EB and his two daughters yesterday-- we followed the fine Rockport tradition of going down to the waterfront and sketching and painting. I'm not sure if I've ever tried to do a landscape before... moderately pleased with the results.

Photo of the same scene:

For the final day, we decided to do a little ziplining in the morning, then Riana went on one of her vertical hikes and I took on a spot of touristy kayaking with a bunch of people from the cruise ships.

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We're basically the descendants of nervous monkeys.

from a Wired article on the popularity of meditation and mindfulness in Silicon Valley.

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As the crickets' soft autumn hum
is to us
so are we to the trees
as are they
to the rocks and the hills.

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My hand is able to touch things only because my hand is itself a touchable thing.

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"It was as though after the demise of the ancestral, pagan gods, Western civilization's burnt offerings had become ever more constant, more extravagant, more acrid--as though we were petitioning some unknown and slumbering power, trying to stir some vast dragon, striving to invoke some unknown or long-forgotten power that, awakening, might call us back into relation with something other than ourselves and our own designs."

1. While global warming means many coastal areas have to worry about the encroaching sea, Alaska generally has the opposite problem: relieved from some of the massive weight of glaciers, that part of the world is rising, and sometimes at a surprising clip.
2. I say "I'm worried that..." way too much, and worry too much.
3. In the town of Gustavus, almost universally drivers and pedestrians do a little finger wave in passing.
4. I am much, much, much, much less of an athlete than Riana. She bikes everywhere including work and swims every chance she can get, I ... don't. But she was taking on big sloped hikes and even when I joined her, what was a stroll to her was leaving me sucking wind.
5. Juneau has a streetcleaner running at around 4:30-5am that sounds like a banshee.
6. I start a lot of sentences with "Man...", or at least I do around Riana, who started pointing it out by saying "M, A, N!" when I did so. But it's a useful phrase for expressing wonder or irritation.
7. Southeast Alaksa is clear skies and warm 7 days out of 8! (This is probably not a safe bit of knowledge to walk away with, but it's rather more true this summer than most years.)

This trip to Alaska was an experiment for Riana and me, sort of a more concentrated version of what dating is trying to figure out in general, or if she needed someone with a more profound need to be in nature, and similarly for me if we were pop-culture compatible.

Like any good scientists, we had to acknowledge when the experimental results didn't match our hoped-for hypothesis, and so-- we're not dating any longer, but it's very friendly. She needs a full on partner in driving to get out there and hike and camp, and I need someone who, like once a week or so, would be with me to chill and unwind with some movie or video or something on a screen, and that's just not her. Put another way, she's too much of an outdoor cat and I'm too much of an indoor cat.

(Which isn't to say I had an amazing time in Alaska... EB's mom pointed out how animated I was bringing her through the photos.)

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Syria. Jeez-loweez. There's so much hubris here, in terms of, humanitarian and WMD-use concerns or no, if we thought Syria could really strike back at us in our homeland, there is NO WAY we'd attack.

We're playing policeman for the world, but we're kind of corrupt. http://www.theonion.com/articles/so-whats-it-going-to-be,33662/ The Onion nails it: Editorial by Bashar Al-Assad. No satire in it besides the setup.

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more info For a few days there's been an older man sitting on the benches around the Kendall Square globe fountain, panhandling, holding his sign with some tremor. This morning there was a second sign offering a camera "with disk" for sale, saying they got it for $90, would like $60. (I think maybe even saying something about 3 payments of 20?) Anyway somehow that detail broke my heart.

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(Went back to give him a bit more money... wasn't 3 payments, but it was something about helping paying for PT)

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Notes by HP Lovecraft...

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"To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time, And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing."

"Sorry, I don't really follow American hip hop."

"It's a quote from Macbeth."

"Sorry, I don't really follow Scottish hip hop."

Just finished it. What a game... if Saints Row the Third was GTA dialed up to 11, this is GTA dialed up to 14 or 15.

I THINK WE SHOULD JUST GET RID OF COMMENTS AND BRING BACK GUESTBOOKS

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Now, two weeks after my friends helped move all my small stuff (allowing me to move in) and a week after the movers wrangled "the big stuff" into my apartment, I feel like my desire to live in a stable environment is trumping my moral compunction that "nothing gets put away unless I know I really want it in my life".

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[On FB Elio suggests Craigslist Free stuff] Yeah, I put 2 media stands and a recumbent exercise bike on it... in theory I might have been leaving money on the table with some of that, but probably not as much as I think, and the combination of karma and convenience makes up for it. The problem is more these little, fiddling things; books or small gadgets or just misc supplies that aren't likely to be worth anyone's time to come get, are iffy for being in a good will bundle, I have liberal guilt about putting in a landfill, aren't necessarily recyclable, etc. Sometimes too there's an element of "I want to get to that", like old video tapes (video yearbooks etc) I's like to transfer and not just chuck.

Also so much is literally unreplaceable -- which isn't the same as I need it or want it, but if I got rid of it and changed my mind I'd be hard pressed to get it back (though sometimes that's tempered by foreknowledge of "out of sight, out of mind": there' sa good chance I'll just forget about it. Which is sad for me in its own way, too.

2013 August❮❮prevnext❯❯