It's cool that there's no confirmed head of the FAA because Trump wanted to give the job to his personal pilot and senators told him no so then he just lost interest in the subject.

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God brought them out of Egypt; he hath as it were the strength of an unicorn.

"you cannot kill me in a way that matters" is so raw and powerful but it comes from an incomprehensible shitpost about mushrooms

To attract the moths, [the Bolas Spider] Nancy emits a chemical cocktail that resembles the pheromones that female moths gives off when they are ready to mate. Chemical mimicry and common sense: If you want to catch a chicken, smell like a horny chicken. If you want to catch me, smell like doritos and a nap.

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Omg I just realized how cute it is that pirates call their friends their hearties 😍

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Sometimes I think how the universe was pulled into existence through the smallest hole in nothingness, and other times I think how cool it is that sticks look like swords.

In 2008 I got to visit Japan and I made a photolog of the 2 weeks I was there. At the end I put a baker's dozen of the best photos in a single gallery on flickr, but I no longer trust third party sites, so I'm mirroring them here, today.

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Sweet, real time snuff films by alt-righters on murderous rampages. Yay, technology.

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Watching "Catastrophe" on Amazon Prime - glad Melissa found it, and concerned I almost missed it! - I've recommended the Sharon Horgan's "Pulling" (which she also co-wrote and starred in) to a lot of folks, a BBC Comedy that deserves more attention (love how it has a bit of the sex in the city vibe, and the main characters aren't just kind of horrible people but also bad at their careers, which is sort of rarity in tv land)

I myself once learned 380 digits of π, when I was a crazy high-school kid. My never-attained ambition was to reach the spot, 762 digits out in the decimal expansion, where it goes "999999", so that I could recite it out loud, come to those six 9's, and then impishly say, "and so on!"

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A quantum experiment suggests there's no such thing as objective reality Hooboy.

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Takin' my todo list and inbox tasks head on like

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Developer proposes turning 3rd floor of Cambridgeside Galleria into office space
I've heard the Galleria is doing ok. Having seen the malls of my teenage years all turn into wreck and ruin, I'm kind of uptight about these things...malls are fun and it's a bummer when they can't survive. This is a note I wrote to the group Boston Tech Poetics (formerly Boston Creative Coders)

Thanks to Adam and everyone who helped set up some great talks the other week!

I was so glad I shook off an urge to lose myself in my kindle until the "real" talks began - we have a nugget of this great little community doing really cool work here, and I'd love to see more - both what people are doing (like in the other thread) and also stuff, obscure or well-known, old or recent, that they think other Tech Poets should be aware of.

Zach Lieberman's work reminded me of two other artists I wish more people knew of: Some of his overhead projector / shadow stuff reminded me of Myron Krueger - he was working on amazing interactive stuff, most often w/ realtime silhouette / shadow data, and he started doing that when, like, "Pong" was the new hotness - but with a fervent dedication to keeping things real time. You can see a decent overview of some of his stuff here:

(Zach showing us Chris Sugrue's "Delicate Boundaries" was such a lovely extension of some of those ideas)

I like to see where ideas like these, either descendents or parallel thoughts, get commercialized. Way back in the PS2 era, "EyeToy" had some elements of that, of using simple webcam data to let you, say, fight off a big group of tiny ninjas leaping on you Maybe too this is all on my mind because I just got one of those PS4 VR setups, and some of the mini worlds play with some similar ideas...

At some point Zach was showing clips from software where people would draw something in a space, and that drawing would take on some kind of life - this reminded me of Takeo Igarashi's work.
He came up with this concept he called T.E.D.D.Y for making 2D sculptures by extrapolating from simple 2D doodles -

This got put into AMAZING commercial life with a game called "Magic Pengel". This was a PS2 joint project with Studio Ghibli (!!) and you didn't just draw static things, but fighting critters - as you drew, you indicated if this was a leg, or a wing, or a tail, or what, and then some super clever code animated what you drew and put it dancing and weaving in 3D space. Quite amazing! Unfortunately, the combat was just Pokemon-like Rock/Scissors/Papers turn-based battles. (A sequel, "Graffiti Kingdom", tried to make the creation system less loose and more engineer-y, I don't think it was an improvement.) Here is a Lets Play:

And while that video has loose, clay-lump drawings, apparently the sky was the limit in the hands of a skillful, determined artist:

I'm just blown away by this stuff. Going back to 2D, there was that "Crayon Physics" type games, and I see some more recent "2D physics from doodles" - but this 3D stuff was totally next level, and I'd love to see it in more applications - T.E.D.D.Y really bridged a gap from 2D inputs to 3D sculpture, and I don't even know what kind of black magic and animation genius about joints and physics Magic Pengel employed - I'd love to see a "Smash Bros" type physical combat with this idea (but I'm nowhere near smart enough to make it)

So what have you seen, either in the artists studio or gallery or on the store shelf (virtual or otherwise) that inspires you? What stuff based on Ollllld technology still inspires that "damn, how'd they do THAT?" And where would you like to try and put it in your own work?