2012 July❮❮prevnext❯❯

The NY Times had a brief article about Dona Bailey, who invented the video game Centipede.

By coincidence, Amber played Centipede at Asbury Park's Silver Ball Museum (mostly dedicated to pinball, but arcade games have made an incursion) and filled up the entire high score table.



The article touches on the male-dominated aspect of the video game industry then, which is something that persists to this day. Really a pity, too-- since making that dedicated home tabletop rig for Centipede for Amber, my appreciation for this game has greatly deepened... from color aesthetics to ramping up the difficulty to the balance of skill and chaos, this game really is pitch perfect.

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[On 'Why is there something rather than nothing?'] And if there were nothing? You'd still be complaining!

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'I have a to do list. And now, it is time to do.' #internlife

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Do not understand the appeal of Tab-Syncing. Guess I see tabs as short lived, and task-context-dependent

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Latest This is my Jam: Bonde Do Roll Out -- [explicit] fun mashup...

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I think premature abstraction might be more evil than premature optimization.

Today I heard of two interesting East/West cultural differences;

1. Asked an open ended question about journaling and photo-albums, many of the European say they'd journal to remember happy times but the central theme from the Asian students was avoiding repeating mistakes.

2. In visual identification test, there seems to be a cultural difference with the American subjects picking out the most central foreground object (and able to recognize it more quickly in different contexts) and Japanese subjects absorbing scenes more holistically, and having an easier time with questions about the aggregate whole. (And 9 months of living in the other country seemed to reverse the difference, which says really interesting things about neuroplasticity.)

You don't want to take too much out of such uncited tidbits, but still.

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Man, I forgot about Vigilante 8. That was a fun series... on N64, got into that instead of Twisted Metal. Monday evening, the full moon was crazy-beautiful over the Atlantic...


Because it was still almost daylight, I could really make out the details of the moon. I tried to fiddle with my camera to do likewise, but my best efforts made the surrounding sky really dark...

Man, that doesn't look much like a Man on the Moon. I think the French say it's a cat... I could kind of see that, curled around.

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A fetish is a story masquerading as an object.

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http://gigaom.com/2012/07/05/patent-troll-stalks-travel-site-hipmunk/ Software patents are just food for trolls. End them.

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The cloud? Son, I invented the cloud, but back then it was called uploading shit to your own webserver.

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For it would have been better if the dust itself had not been born, so that the mind might not have been made from it. But now the mind grows with us, and therefore we are tormented, because we perish and know it.

Made another rubber stamp... messed up though, forgot to carve it backwards, so I had to "fix that in post" as they say. Used it for the latest Love Blender...

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"How is fishing competitive? Man vs. fish?"
"No, man vs. man. The weighing, the measuring-- I respect anything that rewards you for silence."

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Lots of windows can distract you--but they can also let in a lot of light.

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The beauty of America is that every idiot gets to have their stupid, wrong-headed beliefs respected.

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July Blender of Love

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http://www.salon.com/2012/07/01/southern_values_revived/ - wow. Seeing the current conservative culture war as Revenge of the Plantation Owners, the Civil War Part Deux...
--via

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http://www.thisismyjam.com/kirkjerk/_2btilm6 - fun song, and the video is the most fun with censor bars ever
--via kottke, who points out "the fade out on the tiny Challenger square is surprisingly affecting."

What a bummer that no one has been out of low earth orbit for a loooong time.

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Google "The St. Petersburg Paradox" -- it seems to point out an issue with probability analysis.

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The show Portlandia inspired us to look at maps on iPad-- Amber discovered Portland OR boasts "NW East St". Nice! Somehow I ran into a blog entry about the pamphlet "Size Stick- the Shoeman's Manual" with this map of the leather bearing hide of a cow:


That outline looked vaguely familiar...


Or is it just me?

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Bogost's "Alien Phenomenology" reminds me what tech modern mirrors are- perfect reflection woulda seemed like awesome magic for most of history

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I'm always surprised when I remember English has an adjective order that I just know:
quantity or number
quality or opinion
size
age
shape
color
proper adjective (often nationality, other place of origin, or material)
purpose or qualifier

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Unlike redwoods and lichen and salamanders, computers don't carry the baggage of vivacity. They are plastic and metal corpses with voodoo powers.

Reading Ian Bogost's "Alien Phenomenology"-- he quotes this passage of Roland Barthes' autobiography:

J'aime, je n'aime pas ~ I like, I don't like

I like: salad, cinnamon, cheese, pimento, marzipan, the smell of new-cut hay (why doesn't someone with a "nose" make such a perfume), roses, peonies, lavender, champagne, loosely held political convictions, Glenn Gould, too-cold beer, flat pillows, toast, Havana cigars, Handel, slow walks, pears, whie peaches, cherries, colors, watches, all kinds of writing pens, desserts, unrefined salt, realistic novels, the piano, coffee, Pollock, Twombly, all romantic music, Sartre, Brecht, Verne, Fourier, Eisenstein, trains, Médoc wine, having change, Bouvard and Pécuchet, walking in sandals on the lanes of southwest France, the bend of the Adour seen from Doctor L.'s house, the Marx Brothers, the mountains at seven in the morning leaving Salamanca, etc.

I don't like: white Pomeranians, women in slacks, geraniums, strawberries, the harpsichord, Miró, tautologies, animated cartoons, Arthur Rubinstein, villas, the afternoon, Satie, Bartók, Vivaldi, telephoning, children's choruses, Chopin's concertos, Burgundian branles and Renaissance dances, the organ, Marc-Antoine Charpentier, his trumpets and kettledrums, the politico-sexual, scenes, initiatives, fidelity, spontaneity, evenings with people I don't know, etc.

Half a decade ago I wrote about the likes/dislikes in the French movie Amélie, I wonder if this is where they got the idea from.

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There's a saying about English-speakers. We say "Go fuck yourself," when we really mean "I like you," and we say "I like you," when we really mean "Go fuck yourself."

From a Daily Mail piece on how Dinos "did it"... on twitter, ExciteMike said it best:

I want to hi-five the artist responsible for these T. Rex grins:

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Often when monologuing, like outlining what my team did for scrum, I find it helpful to shut my eyes to compose the sentence.

Is it just me?

After reading a book on Neuroplasticity, and how different parts of the brain overlap in function (and how one part can take over different functions in cases of brain damage) it makes me wonder about if visual and verbal parts of my brain are weirdly sharing circuits.

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Jeezie petes, when Amazon gets "kozmo.com" like same-day service it's gonna eat the damn world.

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On The Fat Boys. They kinda were a novelty act, but their human beatbox was the template for thousands of amateur fans

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Before disillusionment comes illusionment.

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Unit Tests are the hope that the reductionist art of making code can be repeated in seeing code run, which is a more holistic thing.
Miller tweeted me this article about the tumblr rrrrrrrrrroll-- they have a theme and they're stickin' with it!

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http://www.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeedpolitics/what-your-social-web-use-says-about-your-politics - Politics and the Social Web

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But we don't worry much about the ethics of the spark plug, the piston, the fuel injector, or the gasoline. Does the engine have a moral imperative to explode distilled hydrocarbons? Does it do violence on them? Does it instead express ardor, the loving heat of friendship or passion?

Having finally figured out electronics recycling in Arlington, I'm getting rid of old devices, including this laptop:


I liked the post-it I had written about some time ago-- apparently my past-self knew my future self all too well...

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Something's wrong
When you regret
Things that haven't happened yet.

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Conducting a book winnowing, my first in my e-reader era. Is that why I'm being surprisingly picky? Still, it's tough to keep my ego out of it -- shaking the idea of the multiplicity of bookshelves as the outward manifestation of being a smart guy. I might kinda hedge by scanning all the books I ditch, right before I ditch them.

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http://www.thisismyjam.com/kirkjerk -- Covered this as my farewell solo in my a cappella group - I still dig the driving intensity of it. from Gregory Benford's "Matter's End" :

To be awakened by a soft breeze. A brushing presence, sliding cloth... He sensed her sari as a luminous fog. Moonlight streaming through a lopsided window cast shimmering auras through the cloth as she loomed above him. Reached for him. Lightly flung away his sticky bedclothes.

"I--"

A soft hand covered his mouth, bringing a heady savor of ripe earth. His senses ran out of him and into the surrounding dark, coiling in air as he took her weight. She was surprisingly light, though thick-waisted, her breasts like teacups compared to the full curves of her hips. His hands slid and pressed, finding a delightful slithering moisture all over her, a sheen of vibrancy. Her sari evaporated , The high planes of her face caught vagrant blades of moonlight, and he saw a curious tentative, expectant expression there as she wrapped him in soft pressures. Her mouth did not so much kiss his as enclose it, formulating an argument of sweet rivulets that trickled into his porous self. She slipped into place atop him, a slick clasp that melted him up into her, a perfect fit, slick with dark insistence. He closed his eyes, but the glow diffused through his eyelids, and he could see her hair fanning through the air like motion underwater, her luxuriant weight bucking, trembling as her nails scratched his shoulders, musk rising smoky from them both. A silky muscle milked him at each heart-thump. Her velvet mass orbited around their fulcrum, bearing down with feathery demands, and he remembered brass icons, gaudy Indian posters, and felt above him Kali strumming in fevered darkness. She locked legs around him, squeezing him up into her surprisingly hard muscles, grinding, drawing forth, pushing back. She cried out with great heaves and lungfuls of the thickening air, mouth going slack beneath hooded eyes, and he shot sharply up into her, a convulsion that poured out all the knotted aches in him, delivering them into the tumbled steamy earth--

Going through my book collection I found the scifi collection of short stories "Full Spectrum 3" ... I don't remember much about them, but this sex scene has stuck with me since I read it in 1994 or so-- especially the line about the teacups, though I had misremembered it as "her teacup hips".

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lensman_series - man, Scientology's secret backstory woulda been so much more if it was E. E. "Doc" Smith and not L. Ron Hubbard.

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http://devastatingexplosions.com/ A good site for all your explode-y needs.

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Amber's Corn Find: Microwave 3-4 minutes in husk. Chop off cm from wide end, grab+squeeze thin end. Husk+silk slides right off. Delicious! Like Richard @photonstorm Davey ‏says:

Koalas are cute, aren't they? NOT WHEN THEY'RE WET. THEY'RE TERRIFYING AND SCARY

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Our life is the creation of our mind.

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Mercy is for the weak. Which is everybody.

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Tonight I am no longer afraid of heights.

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Wonder is broken knowledge.

My city got smacked, albeit in a very localized fashion, with what they're saying was a microburst. Many, many trees down. Our power was restored late at night, though oddly neighboring blocks seemed to never lose power...
--Mr. Wizard's a Dick reminds me of that old "Mr. Wizard and Timmy" shtick.via bb

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http://www.aimlessdirection.com/2008/17-tips-to-make-your-life-easier/ Random Bits of Household Hints

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English is essentially Pictish that was attacked out of nowhere by Angles cohabiting with Teutons who were done in by a drunk bunch of Vikings masquerading as Frenchmen who insisted they spoke Latin and Greek but lacked the Arabic in which to convey that.

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Once again I find a consistent lunch of Wendy's Baja Salad (w/ chili+guac, sans chips+dressing) the most reliable way to lose weight.

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I guess Beans+Meat+Guac on Greens is a satiating combo (I have replaced "Atomic Fireball" candies w/ Extra Dessert Delights' oddball flavors of gum -- Mint Chocolate chip, Apple Pie, Key Lime Pie, Strawberry Shortcake, Orange Creamsicle... I have a stockpile on hand at work to deal with my sweet tooth, and share with my coworkers. click to play:

aRSTeroids So for Klik of the Month #61 I made game that combines some of the elements of Asteroids with a "RTS" style of gameplay (Starcraft is one of the most famous examples of that kind of game.)

Drag with the mouse to create select boxes of ships, then click to send them where you want them. "S" adds more ships, "R" resets the game, sort of.

You can play the Processing.js/HTML5 rendition or original Java version.

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Best sentence that would have made no sense 10 years ago: "Galaxy Nexus: Android Ice Cream Sandwich Guinea Pig" (via reddit)

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I've said this before but I'll say it again: Why do bad things happen to good people? To even out the good things that happen to bad people.

6 years ago I gathered up all the old personal weight data that I could and made a program to graph it... this is the updated version.

Since my last weight loss in 2010, my weight has been surprising stable (it looks extra jagged here because I have more data points to plug in)

I had kind of forgotten that I had been as low as 180 as recently as 2001. That's both encouraging and discouraging... encouraging that it's not the super-distant-past (though I was younger then), discouraging that it puts my recent loss in perspective, and without a coherent exercise plan it's kind of a dicey proposition.

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http://kirkdev.blogspot.com/2012/07/the-alleyoop-ignite-hackathon.html My company Alleyoop's "Hackathon", and the fun search engine me and my team came up with!
--via

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http://gizmodo.com/5928072/the-most-spectacular-night-view-of-earth-ever-captured-by-nasa video from the ISS... worth fullscreen and HD like they suggest

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"Tyler?"
"Yeah?"
"You are my trailer park."
"And you, Anna-Louise, are my tornado."

This is from a page of work done on fake UIs for the Avengers movie:
The whole site is pretty awesome, actually. Such a cool concept, making awesome but not 100% implausible UIs...

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Slate on The GOP: the party of the postfacts future. Yeesh.
another great clip, with George Jefferson teaching his neighbor Tom how to be black...

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Why is this thus? What is the reason for this thusness?

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I like taking things and people at face value, because I'm most interested in how things relate and interact, which is utterly dependent on their surface levels and presentation.

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We confess our little faults to persuade people that we have no large ones.

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http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/3832 -- Some 'Wreckers have made a bit of art out of my Asteroids/RTS mashup game....
--from a page of JoshWMC's Disney Princesses in their battle forms.

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It's too bad the Pneumatic Diversity Vents got dropped from Portal 2, because identifying but not judging seems like a good idea.

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A life oriented to leisure is in the end a life oriented to death-- the greatest leisure of all.

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http://pica-pic.com/#/search_light/ -- from the "I remember that!" dept: a great LCD game I owned as a kid, "Search Light"-- like a linear "time management" game

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Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance that he himself has spun.

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Every person takes the limits of their own field of vision for the limits of the world.

A Montblanc 1 second film competition:


And a "1" minute vacation in Asia:


Short video clips can be such a powerful format! I've been following WW2 Tweets from 1940, following WW2 events in "real time but tape-delayed" by 62 years. (There's a related Facebook Page) Today they republished some survey results that were in Life magazine. They summarized it as "56% think Germany will win the war - against 24% for Allies. 70% for immediate draft." but the question I liked best was the final one: That seems like a lot of optimism to me, considering! But we muddled through.

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I liked how the London Olympics opening had a tribute to the National Health, but I wondered if they were showing off to the Americans

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Boobs aren't fat! They're filled with mens hopes and dreams!!

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Finally getting to playing "Just Cause 2" on Xbox 360. It has fewer vehicles than Mercenaries (despite the fun Bionic Commando Arm /'Chute combo) but still is fun, and so beautiful in parts, pretty sunsets and the moon reflected on water. Enjoying it even more after I realized the main character sounds just like Triumph the Insult Comic Dog.

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Research in 2008 showed nostalgia to be a feature common to the most resilient people. Coping with adversity and life's stresses seems to be effectively treated by a spot of wistfulness.

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You should understand that white people, for whatever reason, are generally inclined to like or force themselves to like anything that angry, intelligent, old white men enjoy: sweaters, jazz, things made from wood, books, records, and complaining about how everything is terrible now.

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http://gizmodo.com/5930450/all-the-american-flags-on-the-moon-are-now-white The USA flags on the moon are now UV bleached white. Which makes poetic sense, seeing as how we gave up on the moon

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Almost weirded out by my "Wendy's Baja Salad + Sugarless Gum" diet-- at work cupcakes, pastries, fries... nothing is even that tempting! This is just not like me, and the way I'm usually attracted to food (just wanting the flavor and/or texture)

2012 July❮❮prevnext❯❯