❮❮prevnext❯❯

Whoa. I feel like I know the Bible pretty well, but somehow I missed or forgot the physical comedy of Absalom getting his hair stuck in an oak tree as his Donkey walked on, and so being slain by the commander of David's troops (2 Samuel 18)

Here is a summary from the excellent funny yet fairly comprehensive retelling of the whole Bible, Mark Russell's "God Is Disappointed In You":

Leading an army, with the throne of Israel on the line, David returned in force, and creamed Absalom's army. While fleeing the battle, Absalom got his long, beautiful hair caught on a tree branch which pulled him off his horse and left him dangling helplessly from a tree. When his pursuers found him hanging there like a piñata, they couldn't help but whack at him with their swords and spears. Unfortunately, no candy came pouring out of Absalom, just blood and organs.

---

(Guess I missed this last year) Arguing second amendment crap with gun lovers, I sometimes talk about how America worships the Great God Gun, and we just accept that we have to sacrifice kids and others to Him from time to time.

MAGA folks replacing American Flag lapel pins with AR-15 pins seems to reinforce this interpretation....

---

---

The Prince and the Coachline Painter oh man maybe i could hire this dude to put a coachline on my '04 Scion xA??

---

The Prince and the Coachline Painter oh man maybe i could hire this dude to put a coachline on my '04 Scion xA? (He'd have to work around the dented wheel well fender, so it should be a good test for his expertise.)

---

Sophie proposed a small hike today - I either didn't know or forgot about Cascade Falls in the fells - rocks with water are so much more interesting than just rocks with trees. The Gods of Shuffle graced me with The Mountain Goats' No Children, I found this interview with these two quotes I'm finding kind of moving at the moment...

I suffer from anxiety, and one of the most helpful things I've learned is that if you fight anxiety, if you start to feel yourself going into a panic attack and you try to stop it, that makes it worse. ['No Children'] is a song that says, 'No, I just want to stay in this painful moment. I just want to feel this painful moment, and take joy in how dark we can make this moment.'

---

Love these kids as hard as you can, because a lot of them haven't had that.

But in the end, stories are about one person saying to another: This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I'm saying? Does it feel this way to you?

---

excellent video of things being snipped. CONTENT WARNING EATING MANAGEMENT

Trying to figure out if I'm actually hungerier in winter, or if my inner self has just started mixing up momentary transitory craving - just thinking of a tasty food - with actual hunger.

I've always been a "grazer" but it's a little worse now.

That said I'm not doing too badly, there are a lot of solid emotional and circumstantial reasons why many people are weighing more than they'd like during quarantine, and no one should beat themselves up too much no matter where they are with that.

It's all weird emotion - last Spring I started feeling a bit food insecure - every trip to the grocery was an uknown risk that I've now grown acclimated to - and my body started being less hungry, in an anxious kind of way. I lost 15 pounds, but I've gained 5 back, and its taken a lot of diligence to stay there.

---

I was young and love to me was a fuse that was lit, not a garden that was grown.

Read by my UU Anti-Racism reading and discussion group. Very good magical realism tale of a young black man discovering how he can be of use to the Underground Railroad. I admit, I don't think this was my best month for still photos...

Maturity is realising how many things don't require your opinion.

---

And not only don't require an expression of an opinion, but don't even require the formulation of an opinion.

I remember when my youngest kid was asked by a guest, "And what is your favorite color?" He looked puzzled, and then answered, "But I like them all for different things. Do I have to pick a favorite?" No, son, you don't.

---

There is a weirdly large amount of super bowl ads w/ robots. And all the robots kinda look like the same design, (usually) white plastic surface with some geary bits visible.

---

Go Pats, and Red Sox...
Celtics and Bruins gotta quit slackin'.

---

Finally, kind of weird that it's the lowest scoring Super Bowl AND the Patriot's largest margin in a Super Bowl game. Uh, good on the defense, I guess... A Mortal Thought: so many of us long for immortality. To live forever, for infinity - time enough to get everything we can imagine doing done.

But here's the thing about infinity: it's not as "everything" as you might expect. Take the simple counting numbers... 1, 2, 3... there's an infinite number of them! They go on forever. Everything you could possibly dream of, right?

Well, no. There are more infinities lurking. Now think about how many numbers fractions are between 0 and 1... 1/2, 1/4, 3/4, 1/8... 311/782, 612131/981141, etc etc etc... there's an infinite number... all lurking between 0 and 1. And the same number must be lurking between 1 and 2, 2 and 3, etc. (And don't even get me started on the decimals... there's an even bigger infinity of them than the fractions, it's a long story)

So even if you had an infinite number of days to work with, there'd be things you couldn't get done - possible paintings you couldn't make, potential books you couldn't write, fabulous romances you couldn't pursue. The space of the possible blossoms and expands far further than our linear selves, even if our linear selves were going to last forever.

I find that reassuring. Sure I'll be missing out on whatever happens after I die, and I'd love to have quite a bit more say in when that happens. But even if by some miracle I managed to live forever without getting bored out of my skull (see the final chapter of Julian Barnes' "A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters" for an exploration of that theme) there would still never be time to do EVERYTHING...

---

(In response to a response to the above)

One thing I didn't get into - I know my life is influenced by Objective Shoulds - that "objectively" it would be better to accomplish this, learn that, achieve the other. But I find it useful to remember that I don't actually believe there's any external authority determining that... so I don't have to worry about what potential goals I don't make nearly as much as I do.

I'm imagining that if your goals are more self-realized, that there are things you'd want to get done because YOU would want to, and not how other people or "objectively reality" will judge you - well, I guess this outlook is less help... the commitments you have to do and the choices of things you prioritized might well be blocking other things/classes/places/connections/reconnections you'd like to do, and so the best we can do is look for silver linings, try to prioritize and push and make a little time for that secondary but rewarding stuff...

Too bad I've had to move all my comments back and forth to FB. New drink: the Cold Kirkaccino.

You'll need:
* one pint glass
* one can seltzer
* strong cold coffee (preferably on tap at your weirdly dot-com'ish employer)

Empty most of one can of plain seltzer into a pint glass. Drink the rest. Add iced coffee. Enjoy the caffeine and carbonation! Ok month for music to start the year. You GOTTA watch the alternate video for TOO MANY ZOOZ.

• Spocktopus (TOO MANY ZOOZ) This is the 3-musician version of this mind blowing sax-dance video. A real inspiration to my tuba dancing
• Last Night in Texas (The Maverick Mikel Knight) The guys got some fascinating (if sketchy) bootstrap business practices, but this is one catchy bit of hick-hop.
• Extended Funky Chimes (Sesame Street) JP Honk is putting together a cover of "Sesame Street", and two of the members were super-psyched to make an ending for it based on this great bit of bumper music.
• Genghis Khan (Miike Snow) Good example of a modern indie rock vibe, with a really fun video.
• All You Fascists Bound to Lose (Nina Hagen) I couldn't find Woody Guthrie doing his own songs, so I have a (different) version of this German actress.
• La La La (Brazil 2014) (Shakira/Carlinhos Brown) Theme for the recent world cup. I like the percussion.
• Caramel (Suzanne Vega) This song was languishing with 2 starts 'til I randomly heard it at the end of a trailer for the movie "Closer"
• I Like It Like That (Pete Rodriguez) A classic.
• Sad (Bo Burnham) Funny- at least watch the first 15 seconds. His book of poetry is good too, very Shel Silverstein-y...
• Mercy, Mercy, Mercy (The Buckinghams) I'm surprised I didn't find this version when i was looking for covers, when JP Honk added it to their repertoire.
• Hey Na Na (Galactic) Funky!
• Jessie’s Girl (Mary Lambert) Very sweet cover.
• Superbad (Top Dogz) Love how those horns come in!

the perfect video game 'feel' requires the ever-increasing imaginative and physical involvement of the player to stop somewhere short of full bodily immersion. After all, a sense of pleasurable control implies some modicum of separation: you are apart from what you are controlling.

Welcome to the Information Superhighway! A land of beauty! A land of science! Philosophy! Architecture! Fan fiction! Everything you see, from the water to the leaves are made from sweet free flowing information. See if you can catch some information on your tongue! Of course . . . the whole place was abandoned years ago. This must be all that's left.

FWIW, I also made a few notes about the book in my devblog...

Oh, no, no, no. No, no, no, no, no. No, no, no.

---

http://boingboing.net/2014/02/03/stereographic-music-video.html - "magic eye" music video, if you can see the usual magic eye puzzles, and you get the window to be a good size, it works really well!

---

Love this New Yorker cover:

---

Anything beautiful is worth getting hurt for.

Janury was a relatively light month for finding music, but contiuned the kizmet of melancholy songs for me with two astounding covers... 4 or more star songs in red, exclamation points mark more visually compelling videos.

Amazing and Melancholy Covers

• Something About You (Cary Brothers feat. Laura Jansen) -- the lyrics are have a perfect complexity, and the treatment here is just perfection. 5 stars.
• One (Damien Rice) I'm not crazy about the lyric flip he does, but the sweetness is amazing

Sexy

• Je t'aime moi non plus (Serge Gainsbourg & Jane Birkin) - wikipedia's explanation of this piece, including the heavy breathing and the Dali joke that inspired it, is kinda neat.
• Light You Up (Radio Edit) (Shawn Mullins) Kind a Santana vibe to this one.
• Bread & Butter (Hugo) Big percussion and sexed up lyrics....

Katamari -- songs from the video game.

• A Crimson Rose and a Gin Tonic (Asuka Sakai, Ado Mizumori) The 50s vibe of this song is so fun.
• Sasasan Katamari (Yu Miyake, Yuusama) Gets the extra star because it's charming and short, but...
• Katamari on the Rock ~ Main Theme (Yu Miyake, Masayuki Tanaka) ...I kind of like the Orchestra in this one better.

Novelty:

• !We Are the Champions (The Busters) Ska cover.
• !!@$$ on the Internet (Dormtainment) -- warning, that is one Booty Shakin' video.

Misc

• !!19-2000 (Soul Child Remix) (Gorillaz) I picked a slightly more upbeat mix than played here, but that is a fun video.
• Don't Say Nothing (The Heavy) Great big percussion.
• The Neon Light of the Saints (Shawn Colvin) Nice blend of softness and drums.
• Voodoo (Red Callender Sextette)
• Oh My God (Jay-Z) from the "Gangster Squad" soundtrack, oddly enough. Big horns and funk.

---

New Saucony sneakers to help me and my flat as hell feet pound across the frozen tundra this Superbowl morning.

---

Apparently some people are living my dream, the one where I'm kind of soaring and flying:

---

Valentine's Blender of Love

---

GOOD THING ALL THOSE DINOSAURS DIED HELLA LONG AGO SO WE CAN SIT IN THESE CHAIRS MOVING 80 MILES PER HOUR ACROSS THIS DESOLATE WASTELAND

---

As an ex-Clevelander I have very ambivalent feelings about the Ravens. But my rules is, if I don't have a dog in the fight, root for the team in a city that seems less pleasant to live in. So, yay Baltimore Ravens! A while back I mighta referenced this parody Nutrigrain ad:


I got interested in the music behind it. Someone online claimed it was Ananda Shankar's Dancing Drums but I think it was actually Streets Of Calcutta. Both are pretty good, I need to get the MP3s.

---

Beli-chic -- could Bill Belichick be the best dressed coach in the NFL?

---

More like FUNrequited love.

---

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cyk7utV_D2I My goodness. GloZell and the Cinnamon Challenge might be the funniest video of 2012 thus far. kudos for her posting it! (You get the idea by 1:45)

---

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/destructive-austerity-usa/ Krugman on Destructive Austerity. After reading some Illuminanti trilogy , I think the GOP might be Illuminanti tools. (I mean duh, who isn't really BUT STILL)
--by E Dubya at b3ta

---

Reading on Zen, thinking about the toys that clutter my workspace. To clear them out, give up their somethingness for nothingness; are nothings distinct, or just Nothing?

---

---

--from Cracked's Study of Cartoon Violence

---

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=100209015 -- What Went Wrong On The Day Music Died?

---

The end of a M+M's commercial clearly showed cococut M+Ms. For some reason this got me really excited, something about chocolate-coated but small coconut bits sounds great. Alas, stores just have regular, peanut, dark chocolate, peanut butter, and almond. The almond's ok I guess.

--Scariest Melon Carving Ever. Some other carvings, though none as visceral. via BB

---

Every man I meet is in some way my superior, and I can learn from him

I think that I've internalized this stance.

---

http://www.slate.com/id/2209166/ - Slate on the unappreciated vulture... they're nature's clever janitor! Get OVER that you're made of meat

---

You know, if your calendar starts on Sunday, this is one of the few months that only needs 4 rows for all the days. Plus, Friday the 13th.

---

http://tinyurl.com/abc63q - awesome timelapse of a nation twittering the superbowl

---

Work on web projects? Clean + declutter the apartment? Focus on job hunt correspondence? Tackle my usual Todo list (up to 19, now...) YARG!

---

Man, today's snow is more slippery than some of the ice we've seen. It's like Reagan meets Iran/Contra! (ZING!)

---

masukomi Well shucks and back at ya, Kate

---

It's a coincidence that my first week of not-in-office also has zero evening plans, but the empty iPhone datebook still looks bleak!

---

Man. I wish I had a show I liked to watch weeknights at 7PM, 'cause I'd be all like "Oh boy! Time to go watch that show I like!" right now. Hey, I heard there's some kind of football game on today.

---

Factoid of the Moment

The most striking thing about our atmosphere is that there isn't very much of it. It extends upward for about 120 miles, which might seem reasonably bounteous when viewed from ground level, but if you shrank the Earth to the size of a standard desktop globe it would only be about the thickness of a couple of coats of varnish.

35-odd hours into the new Legend of Zelda game for the Wii, and maybe only 2/3 or 3/4 done. On the one hand, that is a large chunk of time for a trivial pursuit. On the other hand, it's a work week. The game has largely been enjoyable, with a few annoying bits, and then the occasional "tell me why I'm playing this again?" I'm looking forward to when I can finally say it's done, and do a better job of thinking about other things.

I don't play all that many "big" games all the way through. But I've found puzzle-ish games like this one are fun with a co-pilot to givadvice, and sometimes drive, partially because it restores the social nature of gaming, which is really a big raw for me, and partially because I'm not all that clever with puzzles. I'm using a help guide when I'm on my own, but I try to use it for reference to keep me from getting stuck (and burning more time) instead of following it step by step.

Anyway, I was getting a bit burnt out on Zelda 'til I got to <SPOILER instructions="(highlight to read)">the Temple of Time, and this magic wand that lets you control your character as he controls a statue/robot with a big ol' stone hammer...very satisfying. </SPOILER.> That was nice.

The other nice part is the use of the word "twilit" as an adjective meaning "of or possessed by the Twilight Realm".

---

Quote of the Moment

I always get people gifts that I would want. Therefore, this year, you're getting a gun.

the about page mentions it's all the funnier because he has a great French-Canadian accent. Golly, I'm feeling pretty stressed these days.

I have to wonder if I miscalculated with my new job, or if it maybe it's some kind of growing pains. Originally I liked the idea of travelling to clients, it seemed like a way of checking out different parts of the country, and generally a good skillset to have career toolbox. But...ugh, something about it isn't right for me. It's kind of like the pressure of a new job repeated in a more condensed form, all the unknown expectectations lurking in the corners again and again. Clients can be painfully aware of what they're being charged for your services in an hourly kind of way, and so unless you're really an expert in the task at hand, you have to fake it. And I'm not terrific at faking it, the geek sin of preferring directness over spin coming to haunt me.

It's a challenging role. While I think I'm a smart guy, and I'm getting to know our product well, I'm also asked to achieve results quickly in platforms that are new to me, and I guess I've always been a guy preferring to do things from scratch in a language I know inside and out than apply another new toolkit.

Some of it might be a particularly pushy and demanding client my first time out... this trip to Washington DC is with a much better known quantity to my company, a long relationship with friendly people. Still, I'm almost wondering what I'm going to be doing there for a full damn week...I mean I assume some of that is just getting started on work that could theoretically be done back at the home office, because I think afew days is going to exhaust what I'm bringing to the table. (Luckily there will be a veteran from my company there for the first two days, just like Texas was with two other guys.)

Heh, I remember back in 2000, there was this consultant from the big Java company BEA...call him Joe. Joe knew about EJB, and could show us that (even though it was probably too late in the project for us to switch to that technology (thank goodness, but that's a different story)) but seemed to be kind of fumbling in most other things. I'm really worried about coming across as another Joe.

And that worry...I'm getting a fair-sized stress reaction, "stomach" upset, tightness in my lower back, some sleeplesness. I don't know at what point I should be worried for my health with this...I'm half tempted to go buy a blood pressure monitor just to make sure I'm not doing too badly in that department. My family noticed darker rings under my eyes...

...and it's tough to know what part of that stress reaction is justified, and how much is just circular logic. I think there are logical reasons to feel more confidence than I generally do in many of these cases (but not all! Which makes it tougher.) I almost wish I could find courage in some kind of convenient pill form. Prozac Nation or what not. But then there's a part of my that rails against that kind of thinking, that good old will-power and/or logic and/or some sort of environment change can get me out of this funk.

Some aspect of it too seems to be the Winter, S.A.D.-lite. In a way I hadn't observed in myself before, I generally just want to sleep. It's hard to tell how much of that is seasonal, how much is from some stress-y nights of less sleep, or what. It's starting to irritate Ksenia though.

I have no idea if it's even an option, but Mr. Ibis (I think) once mentioned his company is hiring, down in Florida. I get weird fantasies of moving down there and having a "perfect" sunny life for a while, even though it's not like he's not working hard at his job there too. (I've worked at companies with him before, he's a lot of fun.) I know this outlook is just escapism, a total denial about how stressful a big move would be, completely missing the point of how many people I'd be leaving behind, especially my family, Ksenia, old school friends...in exchange for being in close proximity with two or maybe three close buddies. And the sunlight. In a cultural...well, maybe not a wasteland, but it ain't Boston either.

So it's a learning time for me. Maybe I'm learning I like bigger companies that don't ratchet up the pressure quite so much. On the other hand I know at those companies I can start to drift and not get enough work done. (On the other other hand... we only get one life, if you can mitigate a 9-5 job by pursuing slackish asides...maybe that's a bit of a blessing. Albeit one you don't want to rely on too much.)

Oy.

Observations and even advice welcome.

---

News of the Moment
So there's that big flap over some cartoons depicting Mohammed in Europe. I know I'm at risk of being culturally insensitive here, but it just seems so odd... They say that for some sects, any likeness is forbidden, though it would be disenguous to say that the pointed satirical nature of the cartoon isn't adding a lot of fuel to the fire. I mean it's not like there's anyway it could actually look like the prophet, given that it's forbidden to reproduce his image for so long. (Which would indicate that a stickfigure with an arrow saying "this is him" might be problematic.) Theoretically the taboo arises from the need to prevent idolatry, though in practice it doesn't sound like the masked gunmen are really concerned the faithful will begin worshipping a cartoon.

Then again, "sacredness" is not a concept that I generally have a strong intuitive feel for, so maybe I should leave the topic alone.

Bought a more recent version of the "Dance Dance Revolution" software. Maybe someday I'll upgrade the pad too, if I manage to actually get into a minimum-half-hour routine.

Oh, also there's a new candidate for my "holy grail" food, something that tastes terrific, isn't too bad nutrionally, and if I eat eat a ton of it one day won't hurt that much: Quaker/Cracker Jack "Butter Toffee" rice cakes. 60 calories each, which is only like 15 more than a regular rice cake. So combining that with my other favorite of rice cakes plus mustard, I have the salty and sweet cravings met.

---

Commentary of the Moment
William Saletan on the flipflops in Bush's Address.

---

Toy of the Moment
Another fun boingboing find, thumbnails matching your color wheel selection. Neat stuff.

---

Geek Note of the Moment
(Incredibly geeky...maybe 3 people who read my site will have any idea what I'm talking about.) So on my current project, we tend to slap new versions of single java classes into pre-existing jars rather than doing full builds. Before yesterday the technique was to copy the built classfile from its location to a hierarchy starting at C:\ (e.g. C:\com\kisrael\foo.class), open up the jar in WinZip, locate and delete the old version of the class, drag the file onto WinZip making sure to select "preserve path info"...quite a pain. I poked around the "jar" command line options and found a much easier way:
jar -uf JARFILE -C CLASS_ROOT CLASS_FULLPATH
So if the class was "com.kisrael.foo" and the jarfile was "c:\dist\app.jar" and my editor put the classfiles in "c:\proj\classes" then the command would be
jar -uf c:\dist\app.jar -C c:\proj\classes com\kisrael\foo.class
This kind of process improvement is something I seem much better at than most of my peers, from getting really good at making macros and what not in editors, to writing quick little perl apps, to finding commandline options, to using my online database app to do knowledge tracking. I wish I knew a way to capitalize on this, make it closer to a fulltime activity, because I really enjoy it.

Geekery of the Moment
So, this is really pretty geeky, even by my high standards. A lot of Atari 2600 coders on the Stella list thought that my ongoing JoustPong game could benefit mightily from "fractional movement", meaning the game keeps track of object speed and position in smaller-than-pixel detail. So I finally got up the guts to give the 16-bit-math it requires a try, and the results so far are very promising.

But I've had to reacquaint myself with a bit of semi-hardcore computery known as "Two's Complement Notation". It's a way of letting computers easily work with negative numbers, very cool in a mathy-geeky-philisophical way. But it's kind of a pain in the butt to convert a negatic number into binary this way by hand: you have to convert to binary, flip the bits, and then add 1. So I wanted an automated tool to do it for me, as I experiment with different values for Gravity and Flap Power in JoustPong.

Two's-Complement-O-Matic
decimal value:
number of bytes:
result: break on bytes high bytes first

I'm sure someone's already made this kind of tool, but I couldn't find it, and it was kind of fun to do by hand. I'm sure I did it the most difficult way possible, one binary digit at a time in javascript...still, I couldn't think of any other way to make it work with specific number of bytes.

---

Cartoon of the Moment

Harharhar, get it?

Highlight the following text for the explanation (or hit Ctrl-A), but think about it for a bit first:

---

It's a two...saying something nice...a compliment in fact...two's compliment...look at the rest of the page...get it now? Look, I didn't say it was very good. The "harharhar" was sarcastic.

---

---

Article of the Moment
More fodder for my neuroses, The Pentagon's Weather Nightmare, strategizing about what to do if Climate Change et al. brings us to the brink of a Mad Max-esque scenario...

---

Quick Link of the Moment
Fun with state shapes. News Thoughts and Link of the Moment
First off, I gotta say I was probably a little harsh yesterday, re: the news coverage of the Shuttle disaster. After all, it was only the second day after such a horrific event, and there was at least some small news that emerged, the temperature readings that pointed to something involving the wheelwell.

Anyway, Slate.com has a good William Saletan article, God on our Side?, that reflects some of the discomfort I've felt about Bush being so free with all the God talk. (Heck, I guess we should just be grateful he stuck to the Old Testament this time, given that whole Israel association...) You can't have it both ways, assuming we have God's protection without then asking what's gone wrong in a divine sense in cases like these. (In a way, Falwell pointing the finger of blame at "pagans, abortionists, feminists, homosexuals, the ACLU" etc is at least a more consistent viewpoint than Bush's statement that God is on our side, even after events that would seem to indicate He isn't.)

It's parallel to the whole Christian athletes thing. "First off, I'd like to thank God for this victory..." but never say "dang heavenly beings tripped me up right before the goal line! The other side musta been praying harder." (I mean, I guess it's reasonable to thank God in general, but not for the specific victory.)

---

Political Quote of the Moment

There's something profoundly immoral about financing tax breaks for today's wealthiest Americans by borrowing money from the unborn.

Heh, no wonder the administration so concerned about "the rights of the unborn"...that's what they see as their future cash cow!

Anyway, the article (what's an "Op Ad" anyway?) talks how the administration is not conservative in the traditional sense of the word, though I think he's glossing over the whole "social conservatism" (which they have in spades) vs. "fiscal conservatism" (which is more troublesome) gap, and the uneasy alliance between the two that makes up the USA's modern Right.

---

Movie of the Moment
Someone wants to know: How much money would it take for you to kill a puppy with your bare hands? And would it matter if it was an oversized novelty check? Kind of lighthearted and disturbing at the same time. (It ends in a disclaimer, no puppies were harmed in the making of this sketch.) Man, I haven't heard the song "Dead Puppies (Aren't Much Fun)" for the longest time... Link of a Past Moment
Continuing through the backlog, on August 12 I grabbed this link to a salon.com piece, "Life from the terrorist point-of-view." Both sides in that area, they really know how to run a country! As time goes on, they seem to deserve each other more and more.

---

Video Games of a Past Moment
Last week, images from the Atari Art Collection on safestuff.com were getting some publicity on slashdot and the like. They were pictures of Atari's image for the future of arcades. Many were on target, though there were a disproportionately high number of women. (like this curvaceous lady to the left) What I found more interesting than the image collection was the Atari Document Library. A lot of behind-the-scenes information about Battle Zone and the beloved Star Wars the Arcade Game. I thought the coolest part was summary of a February 1980 Brainstorm Session (two parts). It's interesting to think of what might've been: (especially in terms of early 80s technology.) "13) 1st Person Cockroach - like wack-a-mole, but using feet", "25) Green Peace - player manuevers between hunters and whales" and "27) Water surface skipping bomb - attempt to 'skip' bomb into hole across link" are some of the more "out there" ones. Others made it into full videogamehood: I think "5)1st person Space Invaders" eventually became Tempest, for instance. 604 love poems to read for The Love Blender this weekend. It's going to be the Valentine's issue, so I'm pressured to do a good job, maybe keep some of the extra audience we always get this time of year.

---

Moving
My company finally changed offices. Finally the move Mo and I made to Watertown last summer pays off, since I'll be less than a mile from work. One thing I won't miss is the parking lot I had to use for the past couple weeks. Not only was it dark and scary at night, but it got incredibly icy. And then it got a little warmer, with rain, making the entire thing look like the ice fields that got the Titanic. Jamie Soohoo took the above photo, and also showed me how by using the parking brake you can make some really exciting sliding turns on the ice.

---

"For Lovers Only"
Informative Salon article on sexual lubricants.

"I just don't understand how people can think they're having good sex without using a lubricant."

---

Quote of the Moment

I, Hatchet Jack, being of sound mind and broke legs, do leaveth my rifle to the next thing who finds it, Lord hope he be a white man. It is a good rifle, and killeth the bear that killeth me. Anyway, I am dead. Sincerley, Hatchet Jack.