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American Ice Football - a German invention playing the game of USA football but on a hockey rink - but no skates.

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thinking abt that one quote that's like "you are a language i am no longer fluent in but still remember how to read" like how soul crushing is that... what the hell

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However sad and however frightening it may sound, I think that in our country a return to a certain period of totalitarian rule is possible. The danger is not to be found in the organs that provide order, the police or even the army. It is a danger at our summit, in the mentality of our people, our nation.

One of the few videos of "Groove is in the Heart" live that has the hip hop break live... often they just play the recording (at least for that part) and have a cardboard sign with Q-Tip's head. As always Lady Miss Kier's dancing is amazing.

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However long I live here I will never come to think that my liberty requires military hobbyists to have unfettered access to high-powered weaponry. If civilian gun ownership is supposed to be a protection against the power of an overmighty state, it's at best symbolic. If it's for protection against other citizens, it doesn't seem to be working. Sentimental fidelity to eighteenth century civic norms doesn't seem like a good trade-off for Sandy Hook.

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The word "honesty" is used as a kind of weapon in everyday conversation. When someone says "can I be honest with you?" you should always say "No".

There seems to be a constant visiting dynamic in all stages of life where it appears that we get only the girl, the guy, the work, the job, the sense of self, or a participation in wider creation that we actually feel we are worthy of. If we don't feel we deserve it, then, like a spendthrift heiress, throwing her patrimony to the winds, we do our best to sabotage and give away what we feel we did not deserve in the first place.

Interesting idea, especially in my own struggles with the supremacy of objective truth and my throttling of any nascent emotion that might be incompatible with it. (Of course for those times the "truth" I was protecting was "I'm an terribly smart child", the self-sabotage takes a different form, and I carefully curate what tasks I will throw myself into with full effort, lest a disappointing outcome challenge that "truth")

In the little world in which children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt, as injustice.

They have the greatest, most potent drug of all, *youth*--and they won't even realize it until it is gone.

The essence of this bliss was to walk by yourself in the black night, the slide shut, the topcoat buttoned, not a ray escaping . . . a mere pillar of darkness in the dark; and all the while, deep down in the privacy of your fool's heart, to know you had a bull's eye at your belt, and to exult and to sing over the knowledge.

Stevenson is writing about an odd game he and local boys played, hiding and revealing tin lanterns worn under the winter coat. The metaphors range from the subtle to the obvious.

Women'll throw you further'n gunpowder'll blow you.

In many ways, our to-do lists have become the postmodern equivalent of the priest's rosary, the lama's sutra or the old prayer book--keeping a larger, avalanching reality at bay. Above all, the to-do list keeps the evil of not-doing at bay, a list that many of us like to chant and cycle through religiously as we make our way to work through the commute.

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just-shower-thoughts:
For some reason were scared of looking into the abyss of the ocean when its only a few miles deep, but we're completly fine looking into the nearly infite abyss of space. In fact, most of us find is calming.

what-even-is-thiss:
Gravity doesn't drag me upwards into the unforgiving maw of the cosmos.

biggest-gaudiest-patronuses:
Not yet.

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On FB, with that last post my friend Matt M wrote

I've felt that vertigo, looking up

It reminded me of the electricsheepcomix webcomic Overheard at the Rave, specifically these two panels:




His The Guy I Almost Was and Revelation meets Pokemon Apocamon really stuck with me as well.

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Tweet thread on Life inside Hospitals in the Italian Hot Zone - just not enough respirators or even beds and too many hard decisions about who gets the too few resources. FlattenTheCurve is how we help. And it's weird, because like all curves, it's statistics, and having to try and help trim the forest of the pandemic with "inconsequential" trees of action in our day to day life is frustrating.

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Wonder if we'll finally be done talking about stuff "going viral". What's a good replacement? "gain critical mass"? Gah, that's horrific too. So is spreading like wildfire. Damn, what's a positive exponential thing?

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All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great deal more robust, sophisticated and well supported in logic and argument than others.

I don't accept the currently fashionable assertion that any view is automatically as worthy of respect as any equal and opposite view.

I'd far rather be happy than right any day.

Beethoven tells you what it's like to be Beethoven and Mozart tells you what it's like to be human. Bach tells you what it's like to be the universe.

All from this BBC page of 42 DNA quotes. Of course I worry that the third quote refutes the first, with help from the phenomenon the second quote is pointing to.

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"A song we played today... and also a food...."
"Lady!?"

School of Honk Password-like game called "Salad Bowl". (Probably the correct answer was "Green Onions".) I laughed a bit too long.

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This "spring the clocks forward one hour" thing would be so much more popular if it was done at 4 p.m. on a Friday.

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Here are 3 from a series of Bauhaus-based logo redesigns:




(via lost in mobile) It's kind of weird that "spinning around real fast and getting dizzy" is a safe, short lived, natural high available to pretty much anyone w/o major mobility issues, all the time. Has there ever been like an anti-dizzy league?

(Shout out to folks who have struggled with more serious vertigo issues, which can be truly debilitating)

There is a natural order in which to write an interactive graphics program. My habit is to write the display routines first, since their behavior can be tested by watching the screen. Second, I write input routines and use input from the joystick or computer keyboard to drive the display routines. From this early stage onward, the programmer can test much of his new code in the role of a player of the game, manipulating the joystick and checking that the response on the display is as expected. This is much faster and more satisfying than traditional debugging methods which involve peering at columns of numbers. Computer game programs have a nice property: all bugs are visible. If you can't see, it's not important.

Robinett is the developer of 2600 "Adventure" and the Apple II education game "Rocky's Boots"- this quote is from the unpublished manuscript Inventing Adventure. He touches on topics such as VR, procedurally generated content, and MMORPGs - not bad for 1983! Good reading before heading to Pax East and planning to see a panel on educational games.

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EB, I find this piece on a new, gentler authoritarianism and the idea "Daddy understands what Junior thinks and feels: namely slighted." with the 5-question-quiz questions "is it more important to teach a kid kindness or respect" and "could you--with his permission--slap your dad in the face for a comedy skit"

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Mind blown. Poured hot water sounds different than cold. The world is more complex than my physics high school class led me to believe. My question for you is- did you guess correctly, and was it easy? I overthunk it and got it wrong.

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I think that this is the kind of nuance my mind is not well attuned to (which then feeds into my face blindness (or at least myopia))

My mind skim wants to skim everything, and go back to the bits that are difficult. It means I'm a rather uneven learner, capable of taking in vast quantities but being oblivious to some of the detail.

(But even that isn't consistent. According to some folks sometimes I do get hung up on word selection and nuance. I'd like to think I pay attention to how things interact (and all a word is is an interaction) and not what they statically and intrinsically are, but I'm not sure if that's a good assessment.) TIL the tuned mass damper of skyscrape Taipai 101 is also the building's mascot!

More damper babies...

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I love how Short-Fingered Drumf's kneejerk reaction is the dodge. "Not renouncing the KKK? That ear piece I was using was terrible, I didn't hear!" or "Kids bullying in my name? First I heard of it Cokie Roberts!" Not to mention he leans on groups to only toss him softballs, like Anderson Cooper's recent round of slo-pitch with him. Short fingers, glass jaw.

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Amazon is down. If I was less lazy I might act on the fact that amazongeddon.com seems to be free? Good advice for better friendlier interactions with people. They like me! They really really li-- well, close enough.

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(Loved "striving for excellence like a moth beating itself to death on the side of a lightbulb" for a long time.)

'Driving' is a cool game to play because it requires you focus on it LITERALLY EVERY SECOND YOU'RE PLAYING, and even though a tiny mistake can kill you instantly, the game is so incredibly boring it can ACTUALLY LULL YOU INTO SLEEP.

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Man, I was so psyched for iOS 7.1, because I thought it was the return of the list view in the calendar (rather than having to go through the search icon, and keep up the blank search.) But I got the screenshots backwards; the new icon just lets you see what events are on the currently selected day in the month view, and you can't even do a "blank" search to get a continual list.

Basically, too many calendar programs cater to people whose schedules are always jampacked, and ignore people just want easy visual scanning of a more sparse set of things to remember.

I might go back to using Savvy App's "Agenda".

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Why am I seeing so may references to Kale this past 24 hours?

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George Zimmerman might be the first person to leverage killing an unarmed teenager into celebrity-autograph status http://pic.twitter.com/3fpA2SmJsL

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jQuery UI is the Ask Toolbar of jQuery.

Love me some DST. (Though I almost didn't realize it was going to happen, this morning would have been very confusing.)

On an unrelated note... I had a weird dream the other night, where my romantic interest (I'm not sure who it was in the dream) convinced me to plan to commit suicide. (!) After the dream I woke up just enough to write down what I could remember of my suicide note:

i was here and soon i won't be

i wish i had loved better and more loudly in every sense of the word

i wish i had written more and better game games and toys. i wish love blender and kisrael had been more successful.

no matter. i was here and life was cool to see and now it's ending

i love you
kirk

I'm a little perturbed I didn't mention http://mortals.be/ , because of all the things I do I hope can live on after me, that's it...

"I believe in a president whose views on religion are his own private affair, neither imposed by him upon the nation or imposed by the nation upon him as a condition to holding that office. I would not look with favor upon a president working to subvert the First Amendment's guarantees of religious liberty. Nor would our system of checks and balances permit him to do so. And neither do I look with favor upon those who would work to subvert Article VI of the Constitution by requiring a religious test--even by indirection--for it. If they disagree with that safeguard, they should be out openly working to repeal it."

Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason. I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God's will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.

From Slate's piece on Santorum's Vomitous reaction to this kind of thinking.

"It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason" is such an important idea, and so well expressed. --via

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Doctors say Sheen's (captivating) grandiosity might be a symptom of ("7 gram rocks") withdrawal; Rick James says (on Chappelle show reruns) "cocaine is a hell of a drug"
beetimetrials - source - built with processing
OK, at first glance it looks like I already posted this - BUT - if you do a lap, you'll notice that you now have an opponent: you get to play against the ghostly recording of your best lap. It makes it a much more fun game, and kind of with the psychological/learning aid of my previous try, I ended up to get well under 10 seconds...

Made for THE 371-IN-1 KLIK & PLAY PIRATE KART II: KLIK HARDER.

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http://www.slate.com/id/2246107/ - liked this piece on the big red EXIT vs. the international running man, esp. the Japanese vs. Russian variants.

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http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/58280 - sigh, the dot com bubble. Heh, they mention Palm - guess I'm glad I didn't go w/ "invest in what you know + like" idea.

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Finally got the hypersensitive "tap to click" disabled on work laptop by installing Dell utils... incidental thumb brushes were turning into rough equivalent of butt dialing.

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Happy to see Nomar Garciaparra retiring with the Red Sox if only because "NOMAHH!" is insanely fun to say in a townie accent.
Not our video or anything, but that's how JZ and I spent a few hours last night, launching cars and humvees via Grand Theft Auto IV's "swingset" glitch. (I also downloaded the MP3 used in that video, but it's not quite as cool on its own.)

JZ probably had the single most beautiful shot, launching a car that was ON FIRE -- like the closer for the video, but on fire the whole time, streams of flame pouring from the wheel wells making comet tails.

It's kind of weird, because we had just downloaded the PS3 game Pain, which in some ways is a whole small game based around the same idea, except you're launching just people from a slingshot, with a bit more aiming. I think in a lot of ways the swingset was more fun.

For what it's worth, I really like my line about the laundry below.

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Laundry: a ritual of cleansing, rebirth, renewal; but the lint in the filter reminds us of our slow decay and final end. Sic Transit Gloria Laundry.

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Why did I ever consider changing to the spare on my own? The guy from AAA was the model of macho-ish efficiency with power tools and all!

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I was suspecting there's a DOW floor around 6,000, but then I realized that's just because of where it was when I started looking at the DOW on a regular basis.

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Hit the terrific board game selection at Compleat Strategist, now on Comm Ave. Man, geek culture is both the same and different since I found out about the place two decades ago.

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Bleh, two "no thanks" todays... funny it took them both 2 weeks +/- 1 day. I'm only bummed about 1, really, and they said it was very close, I just don't have a professional game title under my belt. But, another recruiter contacted me out of the blue based on my 2006 search, and I'm still in good shape all around.

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GAH missed Boston PostMortem talk on iPhone game dev. Though with 15K apps and http://tinyurl.com/b2sg7z - seems more hobby-able than job Seriously, giving us more Daylight Savings Time is like my favorite act of Congress this past decade.

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Invention of the Moment
Horeseradish-based fire alarm, designed for the hearing impaired. Brilliant idea! I wonder how they sound the "all-clear" to get rid of the smell, though. (via bb)

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Video of the Moment

A classic. Check out the older muppet versions in the related links selection... actually this came from a bb post with the new machinima "ROFLMAO" version.

I never quite realized that "Mahna Mahna" is two identical words, since the usual emphasis scheme makes it sound more like pheNOMena.

Wikipedia says that backup singers are the "snowths". Random geek culture wise, they remind me an awful lot of Birdo, arguably videogaming's first transsexual character.

Sometimes, like when I start observing my fellow passengers on the subway, it hits me that there are way more people around than I can realistically cope with in my head, and that this probably leads to poor understanding of things like economies and group forming in general.

There's Dunbar's Number, 150, a "cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships." (A few years ago I posted about the "monkeysphere" concept, a cute way of thinking about what happens to people outside of that limit.)

So I have to figure, the understanding of numbers bigger than, say, a few thousand will tend to be academic for most people. I remember that book my sixth grade teacher had, a million dots (with some important or interesting numbers labeled), a thousand pages of a thousand dots each. It seemed to go on forever.

There are over four million people in the Greater Boston Area (admittedly a big space geographically) and that leads me to suspect that I have no idea how a society that size can actually function, how an economy sustains itself, how relationships are formed, what public opinion really means. And there must also be a conflict with people's need to stand out from the crowd, to really live that American sense of "rugged individualism". Hell, I'm surprised there aren't more people doing Really Stupid Things to try and get on Fox News.

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Quote of the Moment

During evolution there was great selection pressure for immediate action: crucial to our survival is the instant distinction of predator from prey and kin from foe, and the recognition of a potential mate. We cannot afford the delay of conscious thought or debate in the committees of the mind. We must compute the imperatives of recognition at the fastest speed and, therefore, in the earliest-evolved and unconscious recesses of the mind. This is why we all know intuitively what life is. It is edible, lovable, or lethal.

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Article of the Moment
Wired had an article on these new cooling gloves from Darpa. The idea is you can radically change someone's core temperature by using a vacuum to pull blood to the surface of their hand and cooling or heating it before it goes back and makes the round. (There's a new model of muscles, that they tire as they get overheated, not by running out of stored sugars which was the previous thinking.)

Anyway, I remember years ago my friend Dave telling me that there was an old farmer's trick of dunking your forearms in a barrel of rainwater they had. So in a way, the new tech echoes the old folk wisdom. Presumably the gloves are a bit more portable.

Video Game Art of the Moment
One biggish influence on my childhood drawing was the manual to the Atari game Berzerk... I think I was studied enough to catch the Da Vinci reference in this diagram:


And this "internal view" seemed like one of the coolest things ever...


After that I loved drawing big, chunky robots, often in a skeletal half-built or half-demolished form.

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Typo of the Moment

Don't think tonight will work but Night Watch is pretty kickin'-- it's in Russian but with some of the best use of subtitles I've ever seen. It's (I'm guessing) probably par for the curse in terms of modern high energy vampire flicks, but it has some cool "epic" elements as well.

...I didn't realize I had written "par for the curse" until someone pointed it out...wish my typos were that clever all the time. Poem of the Moment

YOU'RE NOT THE FIRST
YOU'RE NOT THE LAST
ANOTHER DAY
ANOTHER CRASH

This poem was there along with all these phone numbers, ballpoint-pen'd on a wall. That room was remodeled years ago, I thought of the second half of this poem last week but couldn't recall the first two lines until last night.

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Diary Entry and Art Study of the Moment

Swimming in the afternoon

This was a footnote in a some cool Slate Dali coverage -- I guess there's a new show of his work, NPR had some coverage of it. So I got an iPod yesterday. It's a bit on the excessively trendy side, but you know. "Consumer Electronics are the balm for my divorce stricken soul." I'm counting it as an early birthday gift to myself, since one thing I'd like to do is use it for my birthday party. I got the car kit as well, since I have high hopes it might finally be able to solve my music-in-the-car problems, that old CD juggling act.

Being able to put my entire CD collection in such a tiny little box...it's pretty amazing. But besides the road music and trendy group identification, I'm hoping it will bring me back to my music collection in a way I've lost. I just haven't been listening to CDs that much lately. Of course, it won't be like the old days anyway; I'm not much of a music purist, but it seems like the iPod encourages people to treat songs as free floating atoms, not as part of larger album molecules.

You know, it's been years and years since I've regularly used a personal stereo. There are definite issues of "I'm in my own space here" when you do, but mostly, it's odd to be bopping down the hallway jiving to my old tunes. It makes me think I don't have enough music in my life right now.

Slate.com had an article on the iPod ads (the same ones I imitate above with an old favorite picture of me.) Though the article points out the use of shadows risks making the product more important than the people, I think it misses how what's cool about those ads is how great those people are dancing, something the diamond ads were missing.

Oh, by the way, Apple Stores are kind of weird, such an odd try at a mass-market boutique. (Which was also strongly reflected in the packaging of the iPod, kind of like origami. Even the shopping bags are high end, strong plastic, with drawstrings looping all the way through, top and bottom, I guess you could use it as a backpack.) Part of me realized that the Apple Store is really the place to go if you have a strong urge to be sold a computer by a cute gay person.

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Quote of the Moment

"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers."

Of course, it feels a little goofy having such a majestic quote after a big article about my new toy...what was my question and answer yesterday? "Would I like an iPod?" "Heck yeah!"

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Link of the Moment
Bill pointed out a group livejournal dedicated to making fun of bad fanfiction. Fan fiction, such an odd phenomenon... Folk Saying of the Moment

An eagle could land on his mustache.

In Iraq mustache thickness is believed to be directly proportional to masculinity, according to this Slate.com article. "I swear upon my mustache"...heh. My dearly departed dad had a mustache, though I'm not sure if he felt quite that strongly about it.

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March Monograph of the Moment

This month derives her pedigree from the Danish verb 'Whizz,' which means to blow, to wheeze, to snort, to pitch in endways, and crossways, to shake winder blinds, to smash barn doors, to skare pigs, to brake clothes lines, to make men sware, and wimmin balky. March iz principally immense for wind, but whare it all cums from, and whare it all goes to, are prize conumdrums which I kant untangle. Dogs kreated this month invariably have the bark on.

Via my "How To Draw a Radish" daily calendar. That "have the bark on" seems very homeboy modern for being written in 1879...

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News of the Moment
Iraq placing explosives at the Kirkuk oil fields. First off, I feel vageuly flattered by the name "Kirkuk". Second, why do I get the feeling President Junior is going to start talking about "Saddam's weapons of mass destruction against oil"?

"Won't somebody think of the oil? That poor, innocent, defenseless oil?" Bushism of the Moment

Here's a vignette we're dying to see on the ABC broadcast of Sunday's Ford's Theatre Presidential Gala: When Stevie Wonder sat down at the keyboard center stage, President Bush in the front row got very excited. He smiled and started waving at Wonder, who understandably did not respond. After a moment Bush realized his mistake and slowly dropped the errant hand back to his lap. "I know I shouldn't have," a witness told us yesterday, "but I started laughing."

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Online Toy of the Moment
The Glass Engine is an index over 60 Phillip Glass works (I think more than that if you count different tracks seperately.) It has all the pieces organized by Work (Name), Year, Length, and then four other less tangible factors: Joy, Sorrow, Intensity, and Density. The interface takes a second to get used to (especially how you're working with the individual tracks of a single work if you grab the lines on top, or all tracks if you grab on bottom, and how it's all drag, not point and click) but after that it's very fun to explore.

Wow. I have nothing to say today. I'm having too much fun playing videogames with my friends last night and my cousins today.

It's funny thinking how I influence Ivan and Kayla. We're not biologically related, but we might as well be. They're both in middle school, and we often get together for Nintendo fests. I try to be a good influence on them, teach them how to be sarcastic and witty, make sure they don't grow up irony deficient, and how to trash talk with a certain amount of grace. What's funny is how months later they'll quote good lines back at me, like "You put the UCK back into suck" and (when their friend Hannah was having trouble manuevering her character's airplane in Diddy Kong Racing) "Fly Air Hannah-- you'll get there... Someday."

Maybe I'm a little harsh sometimes... I'm trying to get them so they're interesting to talk with and be around, so sometimes I'll use the line (misquoted from Dirty Rotten Scoundrels) that was used on me when I went into a rambling story-- "here's an idea... next time you tell a story, have a point. Stories are meant to be funny or interesting. The stories you tell are neither of these things." They fear this line now! But, they do tell better stories.