2006 November❮❮prevnext❯❯
2006.11.01
The thing is, Miller and I have a fundamental disagreement about candy: for me, there's a near absolute hierarchy: any Halloween candy with chocolate is more desirable than anything without. There might be an exception to this rule now and then, but in general it holds. Miller disagrees, claiming that chocolate can get squished and mushed and it really is more situation dependent than that.
Heretic!
But seriously, any one else want to weigh in?
Politics of the Moment
Jimminy Crickets, it's not bad enough Kerry lost the 2004 election, now he's trying to poison the democrat's mid-term chances, attracting attention in the most negative way possible, and away from the already fading interest in Republican scandals. The implication that American troops are undereducated ignoramus, that military life is the option once you haven't applied yourself in other fields, is the least politically correct thing I've heard any politician utter in recent memory. In the comments TSM points out the missing "us", but it was a dumb joke to begin with, and terribly delivered. More in the comments.
Image and Video of the Moment
A pelican eating a pigeon, via this cellar.org's Image of the Day. The youtube video was pretty amazing as well. And frankly, funny. It's a combination of that "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park" vibe along with the sheer comedy gold of a pelican's big wobbly underbeak. I wonder if the pelican is at risk for damage from a scratchy pecky pigeon. Or for coughing up feathers for the next week.2006.11.02
think what I need is two closets. One for "just washed" and other for "wearagainable".
While I'm at it, a pair of robot arms that did nothing but accept shirts handed to it, hanging them neatly up in the closet, would be one of the niftier uses of robot technology I can think of. Worlds more useful than those stupid "can bring you a soda, if someone on the kitchen puts one on its little tray" robots that so captivated me in the 80s.
"Erotica" of the Moment
She romped on top of Simolzak's huge frame, straddling him with her hands on his chest, her back arched and her breasts flailing wildly in the air. Her back was to him and her long hair swung from side to side as if accentuating the abandonment of her screams.Do you UNDERSTAND how much momentum you need to have breasts flailing wildly in the air? Man, that's EXUBERANCE!
Politics of the Moment
Republicans are absolutely raising the bar in being lying scumsucking pandering mudslinging misleading asshats this political advertising season.
2006.11.03
I've been tweaking kisrael.com's editing UI a bit, using iframe tags to embed my backlog of "of the Moment" material directly into the page. So I thought I'd clean out my textareas... especially the one that's meant to just be a "test" area so I can see how HTML looks without putting it on the front page.
Anyway, it was a total mess, and I'm not sure if everything here was even meant to be kisrael'd, some of it may have been for my future reference. But in the interest of giving myself a clean start, here goes...
- The English Version of Pravda suggests that some Russians are still thinking about the nuclear arms race.
- Geek Health Problems
- Unmaintanable Code Ahoy!
- Obscure and/or Japanese games I may never get around to trying out: Kururin Squash!, Cubivore, Naruto Gekito Ninja Taisen 4 ("better than Smash Bros")
- Srange Ad Parody but beautiful music.
- screaming walkmen on ziplines. Odd.
- "I'd say the same thing. Sometimes it looked all right. Other times it didn't. I thought our backs made some plays on their own, made some guys miss, picked up some yards when there were people that maybe had a shot at them. At times we opened some holes. Other times, we didn't do as well. I think we're going to be saying that about pretty much every position, every unit out there on the field tonight. There were some good things. There were some other things that weren't so good.: --from an old Bill Belichick press conference--I think I was awed at how little he could say after a preseason game.
- Edward Leedskalnin, who built the mysterious Coral Castle as a tribute to his jilted love of Agnes Scuffs.
- Customers Suck.
- Crazy Weather Guy... but his site us currently hacked.
- Single words other cultures have but we need more words to describe. (They Have A Word For It was a good book on that.)
2006.11.04
 |
| Via This Gone & Forgotten page -- you can get the T-Shirt! |
- Rock Paper Scissors ^ 25... I was tempted to make a tool to view all the combos.
- The Unqique Portugese word "Saudade"... nostalgia for a past that has just the faintest hope of repeating.
- PimpThatSnack via FoSO, who dug the ostrich egg.
- 10 Things I Hate About Commandments
- Game Innovation Database
- Early Vietnam, with a dose of the awfulness of WW2
- Mario meets Lenin meets Neo via Nick B... stick around for the end credits music, which is the first thing I've heard that sounds like it could have been in the SMB game, but wasn't....
- I Like Monkeys
- Odd Japanese Write Your Own LCD game on Palm program
- A snapshot of a certain kind of romance by Garrison Keillor that I find strangely compelling.
- For the record, the guy I look like in Raiders of the Lost Ark is "Major Toht".
2006.11.05
- handheld wifi is hecka fun
- whoever thought blue LED keypads (where just the letter or symbol lights up on an unlit surface) are cool should be beat over the head with a blunt PDA... it's impossible to focus on and difficult to read the letters
- not putting the angle brackets on the little keyboard makes it kind of a pain to do HTML. I guess the designers of this device wouldn't see that as a huge issue...
- Why Bad Habits Are Hard to Break... someone once put it "Bad habits are hard to break...especially when you like them."
- Analysis of the 'Left Behind' Series... the "Uncle Tom's Cabin" of our time?
- What's Your Dangerous Idea?
- I always thought stretching before exercise was a little over-emphasized.
- Videogames: Don't Try This at Home, but mostly because people will look at you funny.
- Uncovered: celebrating women in NYC (and also, the way they struck down the laws against toplessness.) I have to admit, I find the normalcy of it all very appealing. In a similar vein, Personal Breast, "12 essays on 12 pairs"
- Penn & Teller had an unreleased video game, Smoke and Mirrors, including Desert Bus, a real-time 8-hour drive across the desert.
- Did I link to 'Borrow a Bias'? The idea is a library that lets you "borrow" someone from a different walk of life so you can learn more about them.
- The Angry Nintendo Nerd
- In need to get some Super Mario War mojo working.
- Probably one of the biggest questions in my life I'm ignoring: Should I struggle to get my survivalist mojo working? Yeesh, what a paradise this life will seem like if something truly does go wrong.
2006.11.06
Heh, actually there's less to catch up than I thought... maybe at some point I'll post screenshots of my editing system but I'm not who besides TSM would find that interesting.
Anyway: the Pats-Colts game. Bleh. Some crazy-weird calls, like taunting on Troy Brown (Referee: "he taunted me by gently tossing me the ball when I wasn't ready and making me look bad!") My co-worker is convinced (and predicted it a few weeks ago) that Belichick would basically throw the game to keep his team angry. Given how it looked they could have just kept it on the ground for the whole game, I almost think he's on to something, but that's a heap of wishful thinking.
Quote of the Moment
I am the emperor, and I want dumplings.According to Bartlett's Anecdotes this is his "one recorded notable saying." It reminds me of Sarah and I riffing on a similar theme many years ago: Her was "I would that the minions bring me my biscuits" and mine was "Summon the waitstaff--I would have a scone." Hers has aged a bit better.
Image of the Moment
 | --A scenic pond my mom and I drove past in New Hampshire. It was chilly up there, I almost had to rethink my current idea of "wear sandals until I have to wear boots." |
Politics of the Moment
Iraq as the Ultimate Welfare State, and pointing out how Bush is kind of an anti-Reagan in that regard.
Link of the Moment
The Wikipedia Knowledge Dump, "Knowldge's Last Chance", picks up the best of what Wikipedia discards. (via BoingBoing)
2006.11.07
UNCLE BILL!
Quote of the Moment
I know the answer! The answer lies within the heart of all mankind! The answer is twelve? I think I'm in the wrong building.I guess that's an old Peppermint Patty routine?
Manuscripts of the Moment
The British Library's Turning the Pages is pretty cool! Zoomable original manuscripts, Da Vinci's notebook, Mozart's music, the Original "Alice in Wonderland", plus a host of others.
It's a Shockwave app. The "page turning" interface is neat-looking but finicky to use, but you can always use the slider underneath. (Actually this link was in that "backlog flush", but I thought it was cool enough to merit a bit more attention than that.
2006.11.08
So on the trip to New Hampshire my mom grabbed a Happy Meal. It still seems kind of funny to me that their now often more like "Happy Sacks", though I think I've seen the "traditional" box recently.So this Happy Meal sack was imprinted with Nintendo characters (and one frolicking Ronald,) one of the scarier cobrandings conceivable, even though the toy had nothing to do with either. But the text was more about the fun of and need for exercise and fitness than anything video-gameish. (Which, considering the sources, is either ironic or an exercise in avoiding lawsuits.)
Anyway, all this snarky buildup is just to support the observation that
Have a friend toss different sports balls in the air and catch them like Yoshi® would catch fruit.is a rather odd suggestion, given how Yoshi's MO for catching fruit is to lash out with his giant tongue and, more often than not, gulp the fruit whole.
Quote of the Moment
I have arthritis in my fingers, and picking my nose helps stretch the finger joints and keep them flexible. Oftentimes I switch fingers -- even hands -- mid-pick.I hate the Yankees but actually I don't mind Joe all that much.
Politics of the Moment
I was a bit surprised that all 3 state ballot questions failed. There was 1. should supermarkets (and convenience stores, as opponents were quick to point out) be able to sell wine, at the local community's discretion, issue 2 was an interesting idea to let people who were the candidate of multiple parties show up multiple times on the ballot, so that someone could vote for them as, say, "the Green party candidate" and send a message without splitting the vote (a solution that is a bit of a hack, bu apparently ballots are confusing enough for voters) and 3 was could independent in-home child care providers collectively bargain with the state.
I guess I tend to default to "Yes" on these kind of things, figuring if someone cares enough to muster up support, it might be worth considering (I still read and pondered the voter's guide) but I wonder if the default is "No" for many voters, if there's a fundamental conservative (in the original sense of the term) streak there.
This state, or at least the districts I've voted in, use optical vote readers (sort of like SAT-fill-in-the-bubble, but with Sharpie-like pens) which seem like a terrific blend of being easy to use, being easy to count electronically, and leaving a paper trail to make large scale fraud take much more work.
And now the Democrats get control of Congress, and maybe the Senate. I'm sure they don't have a brilliant plan for Iraq, but neither do the Republicans, and it was more their mess than the Dems. Between that and the corruption and utter smear tactics of the Republicans, I'm glad to see a bit of a shift.
2006.11.09
Of course, moderate-lefties are thinking "what TOOK you so long? Were you really that sanguine about Iraq back then?" And of course... "how the hell are the Democrats going to get out of the mess that's there now?" That's the downside for the Dems, now the cleanup is their responsibility.
Sometimes I wonder if having Iraq become three semi-autonomous regions, with careful oil profit-sharing, would be more tenable. Turkey would get pissed at this "Kurdistan-lite"... and there wouldn't be single foil against Iran, but that was kind of lost when we deposed Saddam anyway.
Video of the Moment
--The Tom and Jerry episode "Solid Serenade"! I've been thinking about this episode for YEARS, it's the one where Tom sings "Is You Is"... the Wikipedia page doesn't make it 100% clear if it's Louis Jordan singing or not, but I think it is.
I'm not much of a "furry", but wow, "Toodles" is pretty hot. And Jerry's apartment gets totally wrecked by the sheer power of that Bass. And it has that great "window on neck" gag. Overall it's a true classic of an episode.
Quote of the Moment
Ah, I love you. Ah, you set my soul on fire. It is not just a little spark. It is a flame... a big roaring flame. Ah, I can feel it now...It's my favorite bit of seduction-parody ever, a good bad French accent really makes it.
2006.11.10
I've taken pride in my music collection, (ironically, both for its selectiveness , and for its bulk) many many CDs currently residing in 4 massive black binders, even though it didn't really get started until college. I made some great mixtapes back in the day, if I do say so myself. And it all seemed to jive well with my band involvement, and singing a cappella w/ sQ, the whole idea of me being a "music person".
The first step was admitting to myself that I really don't like jazz and classical that much, even though I had been trying to force it since fifth grade or so. Like it says on my bio page, I've managed to distill my appreciation of music into 3 broad ideas: lyrics, rhythm, and clever hooks. Since jazz and classical generally miss out on the first of those, a work in either genre has to rely on 2 and 3 if it's going to capture my interest. I have little patience for slow classical or noodling jazz.
But then over the last decade, I really cut back on how much I listen to music. Judging by the increasing density of my CD binders I'm still purchasing CDs, but I' not going back to old CDs all that much. These days I largely treat music as background. Most of the music I listen to is the high energy, non-distracting "party mix" stuff I find immensely useful in aiding in focus as I work. (Recently I bumped up from a 1.5 hour party mix to a much longer 8.2 hour mix.)
Theoretically I'm open to a wider variety of music as I drive, but that's stunted by my forgetting to refresh the pile of CDs I have in the car, and then often preferring some variety of news, sports, or talk radio when I'm driving on my own. (I had an iPod for a short while, but I've come to the conclusion that it'd only be useful for me on a public transportation commute, and even then I'd rather have a good book.)
Another admission, and judging by the success of iTunes, I'm not alone in this, is that I usually only like a few songs per CD. Most of the rest feels like filler, though one man's filler is another's best song ever. Sometimes friends offer to share their entire MP3 collection with me, and...wow. It's almost tough to admit but I have so little urge to bring new music into my life in a wholesale kind of way. In general, I'll randomly hear a song (or see a movie with a good soundtrack), buy the CD, listen to it, and find maybe one or two other songs I like besides what I bought it for. So being shoved into a realm of thousands of new tunes just seems... overwhelming. A vast amount of someone else's coal to find a few potential diamonds.
I'm feeling the urge to try to make the canoncial distillation of my CD collection, MP3s of just the stuff I like (and wouldn't skip if it came up in a random selection) and skipping the filler. On the one hand, if I was succesful with a project like that, I'd be worried because the songs that didn't make the cut that day would be almost totally ignored. On the other hand, it's worlds better than the status quo, where only the songs that had made it onto my "party mixes" or into the smaller CD wallet for my car get regular attention.
Once I had that "best of" collection, I'd further need to winnow it down to "party/work", "potentially sensual", and "other". And that would be it. I worry about the amount of effort it would take though... I'd have to trust in my ability to quickly judge a song by just hearing the begining and maybe a chunk in the middle. Which is actually pretty reliable, though I'm sure a few good songs would slip through the cracks. The BIG problem comes from the songs that are luke-warm, neither hot nor cold...
Toy of the Moment
Speaking of all things musical, or at least audio, the Whitney Music Box is a cool (if somewhat repetitive) series of toys exploring the relationship between sound and spiral space. Very Space Age!
Video of the Moment
OK, this is a video of someone doing very well at the "Home Run Contest" in Super Smash Brothers Melee, where a character has to beat up a "heavy bag" and then use a power move to send it flying for distance:
But it's probably the most concise video showing for showing something that drives me NUTS about the game... in the final "5, 4, 3, 2, 1" countdown, I swear that the announcer's pronunciation of "five" sounds more like "three" than it does "five". Can people weigh in? Is it just an aural quirk of mine, or is it spoken kind of oddly? (Another odd thing is I don't remember noticing it for the first few years I owned the game, but now it grabs my attention every time.)
2006.11.11
It sounds like there's a website and clues being dropped by email, so it's not as random as all that.
Still, as the Daily Dump puts it:
The brilliance of this is manifold. First, it would be HILARIOUS to see someone rushing through a crowded subway station or a restaurant offering everyone who coughed a Ricola. What are the chances that someone gets beat up doing this? 10:1? 5:1? Hilarious. Second, I want TWO people in the same place rushing around offering everyone a Ricola, shoving each other out of the way to be the first one to offer the lozenge. Third, I want to see someone run up to a Spanish person who just coughed and offer them a Ricola, only to have the Spanish person make a gesture that they don't understand and have the person FLIP OUT screaming, "How do you say, 'Would you like a Ricola?' in Spanish. HOW DO YOU SAY IT!" My head is spinning over this.Personally, I'm thinking of the pathetic loser who doesn't even realize hints are being dropped, but who could really use the money, pathetically and desperately reprogramming themselves to offer a Ricola coughdrop to anyone they encounter coughing for the rest of their life.
On that Daily Dump site, I liked The Bourbon Samurai's comment:
Other cough drop companies should create competing mysery coughers...you would never know which to offer..."Halls? Ricola? Sucrets? Glass of Robitussin? Dammit! WHICH ONE ARE YOU!!!"
Quote of the Moment
Television reporter: "This November will be your 104th birthday. What is your secret for longevity?"
Elderly man: "Huh?"
2006.11.12
Comic Analysis of the Moment
 | --The Silent Penultimate Panel Watch keeps track of use and abuse of that old comic standby, the silent frame before the punchline. Is it THAT wrong? |
2006.11.13
Also I made an issue of the Blender of Love and did a little statistical analysis on what were the most popular categories for works. The feature page goes into more detail about each one, but here's a sorted summary:
| Something Else | 13411 |
| Love Lost | 1349 |
| Love Found | 948 |
| It's Never Simple | 892 |
| Other Factors Interfere | 437 |
| Just Plain Admiring | 408 |
| 'I Will Survive!' | 396 |
| A Metaphor | 354 |
| Confused | 337 |
| Lonely | 318 |
| Really, Really happy | 285 |
| Live for Today | 283 |
| Between Friendship and Romance | 280 |
| Still Life | 253 |
| Admiring From Afar | 244 |
| Love On The Net | 113 |
| Love Taking Away Freedom | 103 |
| Lonely But Happy. | 101 |
| Life as Second Fiddle | 51 |
Oh and Happy Birthday Ksenia!
Diplomacy of the Moment
The other week BoingBoing linked to this list of International Faux Pas, a topic that I've always found interesting, though the list wasn't quite as juicy as I had hoped. A bit later then BoingBoing linked to stories of American Soldiers making similar kind of cultural mistakes, even when they mean well. That last link is part of a Oral History of Reporting Iraq by the Columbia Journalism Review... they're still doling out the various chapters but it's some good stuff.
Book Review of the Moment
"How I Became Stupid" is a bad book. And I'm not the only person to think so. Note to self, don't fall for burbs like "A harmonious & surprising mixture of optimism and nihilism" again. Especially if the author is French.
2006.11.14
Amélie's father, Raphaël Poulain doesn't like
- peeing next to somebody else.
- noticing people laughing at his sandals .
- coming out of the water with his swimming suit sticking to his body
- to tear big pieces of wallpaper off the walls
- to line up his shoes and polish them with great care
- to empty his toolbox, clean it thoroughly, and, finally, put everything away carefully.
- to have her fingers all wrinkled by hot water.
- when somebody she doesn't like touches her,
- to have the marks of the sheets on her cheek in the morning.
- the outfits of the ice-skaters on TV.
- to shine the flooring.
- to empty her handbag, clean it thoroughly, and, finally, putting everything away carefully.
She doesn't like it when a man is humiliated in front of his kid.
The tobacconist is Georgette, the hypochondriac. She doesn't like to hear "le fruit de vos entrailles est béni."
Gina, Amélie's colleague, granddaughter of a healer likes to crack her fingers.
Hipolito, the not-successful writer, likes is to see a bullfighter getting gored.
The only thing Joseph, Gina's jealous ex-lover likes is to pop the bubbles of plastic wrappings.
She likes the sound of Philomène's cat's bowl with water on the floor.
As for the cat, he likes to listen to children's stories.
Amélie likes:
- to turn around in the dark movie theater to see the faces of the people around.
- to spot the little detail nobody will ever see
- putting her hand in a bag of seeds,
- piercing the crust of crème brûlée with the tip of a spoon.
- Play at ducks and drakes on the Saint-Martin-canal.
- when the driver in the movie doesn't watch the road.
Kirk dislikes:
- books where the book title and the author name are repeated at the top of every page rather than the chapter or story title
- The feel of sitting on a toilet seat when one's backside is still wet from the shower
- when television actors have subtly changed their postures between consecutive shots
- reclining in the car in silence at night after arriving home and turning off the car and the radio
- the smell inside freezers at the supermarket
- peeling off band-aids
I suppose those weren't as "character-revealing" as the originals... more frank and useful ones would be something along the lines of "likes women wearing stretchy tanktops" "likes writing small perl scripts and macros to automate repetitive tasks" "dislikes PC laptops that won't wake up from suspend for like a solid minute so you press the damn power button and it ends up going right back into hibernate as soon as it wakes up" "dislikes traffic jams".
But still, it's a nice exercise, and tougher than it might seem. Anyone want to give it a try, at least two gripes, two small pleasures?
2006.11.15
So last night Ksenia wanted help looking for some symbol/logo type stuff for an art project... specifically for a symbol for "art" in general. Poking around the "webdings" font, I found this neat thing, character code 173, which "normal" fonts display as a little dash character:
After beating my head against the wall, and even doing some research online, I found out that Character Code 173 is a "soft hyphen" and is involved in a giant, retarded, overly-anal-standards moronic mess that means browsers elect not to show it, because maybe it's supposed to not be a character, but some kind of weird-ass hint about where to break a word (but, maybe not, so the browsers really should be showing it, even if the whole idea of providing a hint about where to break a word wasn't totally antithetical to HTML in general.) So, I had a 1-in-256 chance (more or less) of running into this issue on the character I wanted, and the universe being what it is, of course that is what happened.
UPDATE: somehow inspired by Lex's comments, I made up a 8.5 x 11 version of the graphic, suitable for printing and maybe even framing. I love how it's an 8 megapixel image that's only 58K.
Funny of the Moment
Straight from the "Why Didn't I Think of That???" Department: Wikipedia Brown and the Case of the Captured Koala. Brilliant! I remember these books and the story captures the detail perfectly. (via felisdemens)
2006.11.16
Video of the Moment
--Winsor McCay of Little Nemo fame in a 1911 movie... the live action stuff is pretty forgettable, but seeing the guy at work, and then the resulting animation, is fantastic.
Quote of the Moment
My life has no purpose, no direction, no aim, no meaning, and yet I'm happy. I can't figure it out. What am I doing right?Funny to compare that with
I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive.
2006.11.17
Quotes of the Moment
And I'm not saying that television is vulgar and dumb because the people who compose Audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people trend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.
Self-mocking irony is always 'Sincerity, with a motive'
A second Celebrity crowd-control lady has a megaphone and repeats over and over not to worry about our luggage, that it will follow us later, which I am apparently alone in finding chilling in its unwitting echo of Auschwitz-embarkation scene in Schindler's List...all about his time on a luxury cruise. Man, that WOULD be pretty spooky.
As you can gather, I'd highly recommend David Foster Wallace. So frickin' smart! Not the lightest reads, but worth it.
Link of the Moment
Fantasy League Congress is a bit amusing how it quantifies the "political achievements" of our congresscritters. Right now, Republicans lead the heavy hitters, I wonder if that will change with the next session, given all the committee switcheroo that will be happening.
2006.11.18
Quick observations: Russians are a lot more likely to use, say, Nescafé for coffee, and I gotta say, I don't see why "Instant" has such a bad reputation in this country. You can make a really rich coffee, and I think it tastes great, it takes much less time, and it sees much more difficult to do badly than making it in a regular coffee machine. Admittedly I'm not good at playing coffee snob, but still.
Quote of the Moment
Q: Doesn't God look down on missionary dating and tells us to not be "yoked with unbelievers"?
A: I looked up yoked, and the dictionary says it's a "A crossbar with two U-shaped pieces that encircle the necks of a pair of oxen or other draft animals working together." I would never encourage anybody to do this on a date...
2006.11.19
I thought it was amusing. And in my heart of hearts, I think cirque-de-soleil-style bungee trapeze porno drama sounds pretty cool, actually.
Music of the Moment
I got to thinking about bugles yesterday... specifically what what the relationship between its notes were (the same as a trumpet when you don't press any valves.) The most common notes (on the C scale) are C,F,A, and the C above that. Research indicates they're all integer multiples of a base frequency of the horn, which makes sense to me now.
I'm not sure the Boy Scouts would appreciate being placed on the same page with a reference to "cirque-de-soleil-style bungee trapeze porno drama", but I found their page of bugle calls with sheet music and sound clips. I remember about half of the calls from my days at Salvation Army music camp. (You haven't lived 'til you've heard "To The Colors" played on tuba. Well, actually, maybe you have.)
Chance of the Moment
Wow. Ohio State Buckeyes beat their rival Michigan 42-39, and guess what the "Pick 4" comes up with that night? Reminds me of Euclid High School billing ourselves "God's Favorite Marching Band" (as exemplified by a performance of "Carmina Burana's O Fortuna" on a rainy night where the heavens opened up with the opening cymbal crash and the downpour stopped before the song's end)... come to think of it our fight song was Ohio State's as well.
2006.11.20
The other thing I appreciated was that it has two settings: on and off, with a "pulse" function. High-end blenders are the same thing, on, off, with a pulse function. I find it appealing that high-endish equipment is so elegant and to the point while the middle-brow stuff throws in like 7 or 8 in between buttons.
Machine of the Moment
 | 2 years ago I posted about this giant excavator...turns out this gigundous machine has developed a taste for bulldozers. Mmm-mmm good! (via trunkbutt) |
2006.11.21
Link of a Moment
A while back LAN3 emailed me with this:
http://www.janegalt.net/archives/009523.html
The blogger writes for the Economist and appears to be visiting the home office in London instead of her home in NYC. The conversation drifts slightly, but it's not merely about how foreigners misperceive America (as we do them, of course) but how so many of them are so confident of their knowledge of the US that they will reject any contradiction by a native. E.g. Canadians insisting that there are 52 US states now that we have Alaska and Hawaii....Plus the usual stuff about Europeans thinking they'll take an afternoon drive out of New York to visit the Grand Canyon.
2006.11.22
Scary, Scary Video of the Moment
Google Video has The War Game, a BBC production from the 60s that wasn't broadcast until the 80s about how awful a nuclear war would be... it's in a scary pseudo-documentary style, and takes you through a lot of what would occur. WARNING: that is some scary, scary stuff. Nightmarish, in both the strongest literal and figurative senses of the term. What a truly horrific threat we lived under for so long.
It reminded me of that The Day After miniseries (or maybe it was a one-off.) My folks wouldn't let me watch it. For years I assumed that not watching it made it loom larger in my mind than watching it would hav, but after reading the Wikipedia article on it I'm not so sure.
2006.11.23
I started doing this with my work laptop. Like a lot of new laptops, its screen is in "widescreen" format. It turns out this screen is nearly as wide as my desktop's, but about 3/4 the height. Since my documents are longer than they are wide, and I usually don't do much side-by-side windowing, this makes things feel a bit cramped... making the taskbar a sidebar is a big improvement. Other benefits:
- You can fit a lot more buttons there (yes, I've been teased for how many windows I tend to have open at once)
- "Group Similar Taskbar Buttons" tends to (usefully) sort rather than (annoyingly, IMO) combine multiple windows into one button
- If you do want to see the full title of your windows, just drag and make the bar wider...an effect you can't easily duplicate with the taskbar in its usual position, since Windows tends to limit the width of each button even if you give the bar lots of real estate.
The biggest downside, then, is the Start button... the annoying thing is that the little arrows indicating a lurking submenu are always pointing to the right, even when its obvious the submenu is going to have to pop up on the left...
2006.11.24
Ok, so, I'll get too things out of my backlog. Today's theme is things that are NSFW, Not Safe For Work... I figure a day when most of my audience is on vacation should be good for that.
"MOM"-Filter Warning... all of today's entry can possibly be given a miss by the conservative-minded...
Overall, the tenor of today's entry might be billed as "Adolescent".
Passage of the Moment
"My name's Prag Titmouse," I say, "and my poem is called 'what the hell is wrong with lesbians, because cock is awesome.' I hope you like it." I pause, and clear my throat. Michelle is there at the edge of the stage, the only face that's laughing. I smile at her. "What the hell is wrong with lesbians?" I say. "Because cock is awesome. The end."It's been a while since I've read it... I remember it being a bit nihilistic, my note on it is "indy generbenderiffic mayhem and fun"
I jump off the stage and grab Richard's hand. Michelle is right there, and says something that I can't hear. I grab her hand too. Richard's eyes are wide, but he's smiling as he runs beside me. We all take a path that lands us some kicks and punches from the girls we pass, but which takes us to the door and avoids the bouncers.
Link of the Moment
Annie Sprinkle's Bosom Ballet... I think I first saw a reference to this in A History of the Breast. Reading that description, her Ballet has really gotten around...
Small Gif Cinema of the Moment
 baringmore |
2006.11.25
Ad of the Moment
I know this Gamespot army ad is "not for my demographic", but I still think it's odd that the slogan could be used for antiperspirant merely by substituting the product name for "Army". Also, the whole pixilated trend in camouflage still looks odd to me, as if the armd forces where deliberately trying to echo the "War as Videogame" theme you hear about every now and then.
Music of the Moment
So I am plowing through my entire CD collection, ripping stuff to MP3.
You make some weird discoveries-- stuff that entered your life in long-forgotten ways, like maybe the bargain bin at Disc Diggers back in the day, or picked up from old housemates, and has never received much listening...
I don't know if I like the music of "The Best Kissers in the World", but they have one of the best bandnames ever, and with track names like "She won't get under me till I get over you", "Bitch can't Sing", "Letter From You", and "You love sleepin'"... maybe there's something to them.
2006.11.26
I've made fairly decent use of it, catching up on some correspondence, having various get-togethers with friends, ripping CDs, watching movies, improving kisrael's "backend" systems, spending time with Ksenia, playing with the Nintendo Wii, but still... it's never quite enough time..
Anecdote of the Moment
An author was boring Howells with his efforts to extract a compliment from him. "I don't seem to write as well as I used to," said the man fretfully. "Oh, yes, you do," said Howells reassuringly. "You write as well as ever you did. But your taste is improving."Sometimes I think I'm pretty much in that author's place.
Technology Gripe of the Moment
This is an ATM we have at my office building. You insert your card magnetic stripe down, as the picture indicates, but every time I use the machine I have to stop and think about it. I finally realized why: it's a matter of perspective. From where I'm standing, I can't see the damn stripe on the actual card as it is being properly inserted, but the drawing is from a toddler's-eye perspective in order to show the stripe directly.
I have a similar problem with the parking receipt reader at Porter Exchange. There they have a bit of homebrew workaround, some helpful person taped a spare ticket up and drew some arrows.
It's not easy to design hardware that implicitly suggests where the stripe goes, though on some swipe machines the side with the embedded reader is much lumpier than the other. (Not that I think people are likely to construct that kind of physical model in their head.) So the onus is on the people making the diagrams, and I think they should always try to match the perspective of the person using the machine (Err, ok, of people in the middle 90% of the height bellcurve,) even if it means having to fake a picture of the front of the card (heh... too bad XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX and ####-####-####-### both have total symmetry!) rather than the conceptually more important and visually stronger magnetic stripe.
(Tangent: does my difficulty realizing I need to change perspective mean I'm less of a 3D/Visual thinker? And does my atrocious spelling mean I'm more or less of a "audio" thinker? It's odd to me that I'm not sure what the implications of certain cognitive difficulties are.)
2006.11.27
Quote of the Moment
It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than 'Try to be a little kinder.'Random admission: for years I thought Aldous Huxley was black, and embarrassed to admit I don't know if I was influenced more by his name following the pattern (in my own idiosyncratic vocabulary of pseudo-homonyms) of "Langston Hughes", or of Bill Cosby's character "Heathcliff Huxtable".
From my years of quote gathering, besides the kindness idea, I think the other bit of universal advice might be "try not to worry so much".
Link Roundup of the Moment
Time on how we're bad at choosing what to worry about, and a Slate piece that manages to quantify immediate gratification... it claims that we multiply the benefit or cost of something by about one and a half times if it's today, a figure that seems to jive with my introspection.
Also, Slate on the end of a conservative era. The 4 possibilities outlined, "A New Progressivism", "Clintonism Continued", "The Muddled Middle", "Bushism Without Bush" all seem like true possible paths, along with the article's conclusion that some big unforeseen event could make all the speculation worthless.
2006.11.28
(UPDATE: I called the landlord, the fellow in question moved out, and back in with his wife, so that sounds like good news. Thanks for the encouragement to stick my nose in other people's business!)
Quote of the Moment
When he come up I looked him in the eye, and I saw shoot, and there wasn't any shoot in nary other eye in the crowd; and so I says to myself, says I, hoss, it's about time to sing small, and so I did.I love the language in that quote, I wonder how accurate the original transcription was.
Link of the Moment
Wii-owners, be warned: WiiHaveAProblem. Specifically, if you're hurling hard enough to let the controller fly out of your hand, there's a chance that the thing bit holding on the wriststrap might not save your big expensive television...
Products of the Moment
A friend pointed out girliepants.com with
amusing tanks and undies for gals. I hadn't realized the "Tune In Tokyo" meme extended beyond Tufts, but it seems that it has. Live and learn!
2006.11.29
He argues that playing to win every time is the best path, and that people who don't are "scrubs" who don't know what they're missing and who will be forever limited by their own choices. He presents some compelling arguments, and is worth the read, but I had a few objections I'd like to bounce off of people here:
First off, Play to Win exhibits great faith in game designers, that in "99.9%" of the situations, there isn't a simple strategy that wins over all others, or that the community will serve to eliminate those games that do fall to a simple pattern. So therefore, any arbitrary restrictions by "scrubs" are largely pointless and out of the true spirit of gaming. But Sirlin himself points out some exceptions to this, cases where the "Pros" agree it is justified. Essay 1 talks about Akuma:
But the first version of Street Fighter to ever have a secret character was Super Turbo Street Fighter with its untouchably good Akuma. Most characters in that game cannot beat Akuma. I don't mean it's a tough match--I mean they cannot ever, ever, ever, ever win.[...] the community as a whole has unanimously decided to make the rule: "don't play Akuma in serious matches."Also from the mailbag
Roll canceling is a bug requiring difficult timing that allows a player to have many invulnerable moves that the game designers never intended. [...]Should roll canceling be banned? I'm pretty sure it meets the standard of "warranted" since I'm satisfied that under serious tournament conditions, the game completely fell apart into a jokeSo, there at least some cases where restrictions are acceptable... therefore, the question is just one of degree.
Then, in describing his own feats he talks about his moves of doing a defensive move until his opponent finally does something stupid:
For example, an opponent faced with my "jumping straight up and down Zangief" could simply decide to back off and wait. What he might not realize is that I have unlimited patience. Since my brick wall in this case is keeping me even (I'm not falling behind) I'm happy to do it forever, which is probably much longer than he's willing to avoid the battle. Most opponents lack the will to avoid battle forever, and will eventually enter into it at a disadvantage out of impatience.I assume the game would time out if both players took this kind of tactic, and it would end in a tie (correct me if I'm wrong) So Sirlin is relying on the other player having slightly more devotion to the game not being utterly pointless, while all he will ever care about is winning.
He makes a bigger philosophical defense of the pursuit of the truly optimal strategies
Imagine a majestic mountain nirvana of gaming. At its peak are fulfillment, "fun", and even transcendence. Most people could care less about this mountain peak, because they have other life issues that are more important to them, and other peaks to pursue. There are few, though, who are not at this peak, but who would be very happy there.I think his assumption of it being the "happiest" peak is unfounded (in fact, elsewhere he argues that amateur chess players have more fun than the pros) but at least he also points out the possibilities of other peaks. (Also, there's an interesting dependency, then, on being surrounded by similar caliber players, and possibly even doing research out of the game, like online...)
He puts forward some thought-provoking ideas, and I've even put his book on my Amazon wishlist but if taken too seriously, he can be almost Nietchian or Ayn-Randian in outlook. It's a short hop from him applying this kind of gamesmanship to the show "Survivor" to thinking about how the ideas might be applied to real life. And that leads to some profound questions, what's really worth pursuing in life? and how do you tell if you succeed?
There are some "obvious" possible metrics, like money. So maybe everyone should work to maximize their money. And some people do. But that leads to smack into a fundamental issue with the outlook, the "Tragedy of the Commons". Case in point: Spam. Spam, to some large degree, is effective, and people following this kind of "screw everything else I'm gettin' mine" outlook make life a bit more miserable for everyone, filling inboxes to overflowing and turning innocent folk's PCs into spam-spewing Zombies. Clearly, this isn't the path to the best balance in life.
(In practice of course, some of this all comes down to me being total crap at the type of fighter games he's so good at. In fact, a lot of what he describes requires an ability to emulate and even visually observe that I'm not sure that I have. The first mountain for the newbie player to climb is recognizing what the opponent is doing and how, and that's actually pretty tough in and of itself.)
2006.11.30
Anecdote of the Moment
Tu Mu relates a strategem of Chu-ko Liang, who in 149 B.C., when occupying Yang-ping and about to be attacked by Ssu-ma, suddenly struck his colors, stopped the beating of the drums, and flung open the city gates, showing only a few men engaged in sweeping and sprinkling the ground. This unexpected proceeding had the intended effect; for Ssu-ma I, suspecting an ambush, actually drew off his army and retreated.Such a fantastic image! You can practically here the crickets chirp.
Politics of the Moment
Contra as seen on Nintendo in 1988 |
Contra as seen by the Media in 2006 |