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I'm not widely posting this because I don't want to be seen as defeatist, but...


JP Honk had one of its most prominent gigs ever closing the Harvard MayFair yesterday...

Someone on tumblr posted this musclebound sonic saying sweet somethings and it sort of stuck in my head. It's... well not quite classically NSFW, but definitely not SFW.

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You're a Jehova's Witness?
What's Jehova accused of?

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Quaker Oats has a Cocoa and Sea Salt variety that is basically molten Cocoa Krispies.

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But the truth is that bad information is everywhere. As foreign bureaus become a thing of the past, there are fewer reporters on the ground. Journalism is supposed to be a labor-intensive business, one that requires digging up facts. Today, there's a glut of information out there for free, but most of it has been put there for a reason.

I NEVER restore all old tabs. If I lose them in a restart, they're gone. It is a blessing to be set free from a prison of my own creation

Today I was reminded of George Beker's robot cartoons (as seen in Creative Computing's 1978 book 101 BASIC Computer Games.)



You can go to BekerBots.com and for $10 download "The Bot Folio", which is just the comics plus some director's commentary, and a few bonus drawings...



Cool stuff!

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You can't make an omelette without hurling eggs at full force into a metal pail placed 8 feet awa-- wait, how do you make omelettes again? "Crazy Kong" is Donkey Kong software running on Galaxian hardware. Foxes are cat software running on dog hardware. Humans are angel software running on meat hardware.

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Keytar Bear got injured on a motorcycle turn and is out for the summer Nuts!

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Keyless Cars Have Killed More Than 2 Dozen People Since 2006: Report
1. My ancient Scion beeps at me if I am in the driver seat with no seatbelt. Why is it so much smarter about "oh a driver is there!" than these systems?
2. Why don't cars have CO detectors on their interiors and exteriors?

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Awesome. Anti-Vaxers are keeping us from a lyme disease vaccine. F'in brilliant.

I attended a UUSS church that weathered or a horrible interpersonal storm that was very very likely affected by the mood-altering aspects of the disease. This sucks.

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Blender of Love what doesnt kill us make us stronger. except polio, maybe. but i don't think this fever is that.

At least I had half a good day :-/ On the visual design of SNL's opening over the years. Russia's Putin plays with NHL veterans, scoring 8 goals Life sounds like The Onion.

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An oldie, but a goodie. "YOU ARE A FIREMAN. YOUR JOB IS TO PUT OUT FIRES. ONE THING YOU DO *NOT* WANT TO DO IS THROW FIRE AT PEOPLE, AND SET THEM ON FIRE. "

is there anything more capitalist than a peanut with a top hat, cane, and monocle selling you other peanuts to eat

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Therefore abandon all thought of self. But since there are deeds and since deeds continue, be careful with your deeds.

It's a book about fitting in with the culture of Vietnam, and trying to win permanent allies there, emphasizing principles of common humanity- but it also covers a difference in outlook caused by an Eastern view of time as circular, with less need for hurry and less fear of missed, one-time-only opportunities. (I found the book when staying with Leonard and Sumana during my Zero-G minibreak -- they have a cool rotating stand for trade paperbacks, like you might see at a bookstore.)

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Just saw an electronic billboard for the new 2015 Audi- They know what year and month it is, right? Used the RunKeeper app for the first time, alongside C25K. Admit I'm a little bummed by my 14-minute-or-so miles (not even counting the warmup cooldown time). As a chubby high schooler I remember being relieved by cracking the 10 minute mark, though that was just for one mile, but I had a fantasy I was back to that kind of performance, despite being the slowest jogger on the path.

All well, lik Matthew says, no such thing as "jogging too slowly", right? (I'm glad the saying isn't "you can't jog too slow", because then that's not clear if it's a demand or a definition.)

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As lazy as you are, I guarantee you will not be doing nothing over the next 30 seconds...

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In my off time I've been working up this year's Advent calendar (see http://advent.alienbill.com/ for last year's). Last year only had one original piece, the rest of my effort was spent converting from Processing to Processing.js, doubling the size, and making things iPad friendly.

So I'm been trying to brainstorm Christmas/Winter/Holiday/Maybe Just Toys/Childhood in general themes. Looking over what I've done so far, including 5 ones this year:
Santa (3), Gifts (5), Christmas Tree (6), Reindeer (3), Candy Cane (3), Snowman (4), Wreath (3), Fairies (2), Snow flakes (2), Snow Activities (4: -blowing, -sledding, -angels, -forts) Wordart (2), Religious/Other Holiday (menorah, dreidel, kwanzaa, festivus poll, wisemen scene, new year's ball drop), Videogame parodies (Centipede w/ Snowman, Adventure w/ Tree, Asteroids w/ Tree) and then 11 more random things (English Christmas Cracker, Gingerbread, Stocking, Rocking horse, TV w/ Broadcast Fireplace, Penguin, Holiday Lights, Snow globe, Snow scene, Icycles and Iceberg.)

Other ideas I've not yet made include a nutcracker and maybe a toy train.

Any thoughts, suggestions, requests?

slashmaze - source
(click to redraw) Our marketing director Gerard LaFond pointed me to an upcoming book by his co-collaborator (and Serious Games superstar) Ian Bogost... the books is called 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 and that happens to be a working program for the Commodore 64 that generates a pattern very much like you see here.

I'm looking forward to the book! Should be a good read.

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http://imgur.com/pOXX1 - creepiest patent image ever? (via ranjit)

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Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is -- brilliant metaphor... living la vida "straight white male" is the easy mode in the game of life.

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The reason for your complaint, it seems to me, is the constraint which your intellect imposes upon your imagination...you reject too soon and too severely.

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So the man who falls in love with beauty is quite different than the man who loves a girl and feels she is beautiful and can see what is beautiful about her.

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The Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion

Man, what you learn reading Lamebook sometimes! We slept in way later than we have before, like 1PM... must be a bit of jet lag... then we headed to the Modern and Contemporary collections at Centre Pompidou...

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RIP Jim Henson, September 24, 1936 - May 16, 1990

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Why, IMO, OSX sucks: no Irfanview. Think about installing ImageMagick. Installer for that requires Xcode. WTF. I just don't jive with Macs.

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half the shit in my Netflix queue could be listed as:
Things A Better Version Of Me Would Actually Sit Through

(The other half of mine tends to be "might contain boobies") Amber and I went for a long overdue trip to the MFA the other day. Walking back to the car, we saw this liberally decorated mailbox:


Closeups:



I really like the Dali. I guess that's what the neighborhood gets for being right across the street from Mass Art...

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omg a Massachusetts Gulf gas station where they didn't disable the freakin' handle clip, so you can let go of the damn thing. Living on the edge!

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Amber has a new theory that the almost complete lack of "70s Classic Rock" in my collection might be a manisfestation of an indifference to string instruments in general.

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loveblender!

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Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.

(also this month's quote for http://loveblender.com/)
--OK, this passed the test of making me laugh, hard... especially OK since I don't think anyone got really hurt. But man, I could just imagine the debriefing... YOU ARE A FIREMAN. YOUR JOB IS TO PUT OUT FIRES. ONE THING YOU DO *NOT* WANT TO DO IS THROW FIRE AT PEOPLE, AND SET THEM ON FIRE.

Of course it brings to mind Steve Martin's great monologue from Roxanne:

I have a dream. It's not a big dream, it's just a little dream. My dream - and I hope you don't find this too crazy - is that I would like the people of this community to feel that if, God forbid, there were a fire, calling the fire department would actually be a wise thing to do. You can't have people, if their houses are burning down, saying, "Whatever you do, don't call the fire department!" That would be bad.

I love that "I have a dream, a little dream" construction, which is why I echoed it when kvetching about Java projects and the way each project makes you learn a new dumb toolkit, and that maybe someday I'd join a project with a toolkit I was familar with.

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Life is a fortuitous event...and when it's over, you're dead.

So, people who come back here on a regular basis, how do you keep track of your regular links? Like do you just tend to type in the name or do you have a pile of bookmarks in the browser or elsewhere?

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Quote of the Moment

Debt is your future self sending you money back in time. So the question is, are you and your future self both happy with the deal?

He's talking on NPR in part how as a student economist, he over-scrimped and saved, and kind of wishes he could undo that.

As I've previously mentioned, I like the idea of a distinct "future self", related but not quite the same as who I am now.

Turns out Tim Harford also runs an interesting Undercover Economist blog with this bit of career advice:

Economist Andrew Oswald believes we work too hard and under-invest in friendships. So if my career advice is depressing, ignore it and talk to your friends instead.

We gotta watch out for that!

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Doodle of the Moment

I was happy with my heart cellphone for May's edition of the Blender of Love -- this is the full size version.

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Popcorn is a miracle, a little pebble waiting to burst into a blossom of carb... Quote and Presentation of the Moment

"Whether we like it or not," Hopper wrote, "we are all bound to the earth with our experience of life and the reactions of the mind, heart, and eye, and our sensations, by no means, consist entirely of form, color, and design." This was meant as a swipe at the Abstract Expressionists...

In my interesting as axiomatic good subjective morality, art about "stuff" will usually be more compelling than expressions that just use shape or color, so I see where he was coming from with that comment. The idea of hindsight being 20/20 is blatantly wishful thinking. We view the past through various lenses, not always of our own choosing; sometimes through rose-colored glasses, other times through the wrong end of a telescope, but most often through a kind of subjective kaleidoscope where various fragments slide momentarily view, reflected and amplified until they seem to form some kind of cohesive whole.

I'm a perpetual nostalgic, no bones about it. But if I were to only value some combination of the present moment and the unknowable future at the expense of my own past, I could only get poorer as time plunges inexorably forward, finally dying penniless. Nostalgia is a kind of accountancy, but also a method of mining, extracting value from the dark chambers of my own history and providing raw material for the frame of the future that I'd like to build.

Sometimes this nostalgia has taxed the indulgence of current or even former romantic interests. Perhaps that is the undying allure of first romance: the one relationship that never had to compete with any form of an idealized past...

Quote and Thought of the Moment

[On being told "Oh, you're a Renaissance hack!"] "It was a genial insult, and I had a good laugh. Actually I like the idea of being a Renaissance hack. If tombstones were still in style, I would want to have the two words chiseled right under my name. In an age of specialization people are proud to be able to do one thing well, but if that is all they know about, they are missing out on much else life has to offer."

(From a tribute in that magazine after his recent death.)

An interesting thought. And the tribute is directly across from an article about Richard Feynman's van (covered with Feynman diagrams of quantum electrodynamics...the article praises the diagrams of being exactly what Edward R. Tufte ("the da Vinci of data", according to the New York Times) liked, except I've started to think Tufte is a little over-rated. Anyway.) and if you read some of Feynamn's autobiographical stuff (or just check out the micro-tribute I made in 2001) you see he was truly a Renaissance Hack of the finest degree.

Something I've been becoming aware of lately...I don't know if this is an actual change in the Zeitgeist, the mood of my co-workers, or even just a shift in my own outlook, but it seems like the concept of "geek" is losing the admiration it seem to have during and after the dot-com-boom and regaining some of the stigma it has traditionally had.

For me, a "geek" is someone with an intense interest and expertise in a particular subject...the trouble is that sometimes that interest comes at the expense of other pursuits, especially "normal" social interactions. Geeks (and I know I can be one of 'em) had their cultural moment in the sun when they were making money hand over fist via the crazy tech economy, and I think that pushed to a wider acceptance of other associated memes, Japanese animation, cyberpunk, that kind of thing. But I think maybe now people understand the need to be more well-rounded, and the recognition that we are social beings, and sometimes geeks are just tremendous pains-in-the-ass to be around. (But of course, in a world this complex, sometimes doing interesting things requires just that amount of specialized focus.)

Of course "hack" is another loaded word...there's also the "clever trick or elaborate gag" meaning of that word, where the computer term "hacker" comes from--and famously, that's currently more often refering to people who illegaly break into systems to cause mischief, rather than the friendlier, more exploratory earlier meaning. And of course both of those meanings are differently nuanced than the usage in the original quote, where it's a classic "jack of all trades, master of none" kind of thing.

Thoughts? Writing kisrael entries from bed...how decadent! It's nice to be of the tyranny of the desk in my study...

In other news, I was going to mention this yesterday but wasn't sure if it was allowed to be made public yet...my mom is moving back from London after her 3 year stay there...to Boston! That's really cool, my Aunt and I are really looking forward to it. This wil be the first time since I was in high school, when we were (obviously) in the same house that we've lived anywhere near each other. Of course, some aspects might be a little weird...except for a brief stint with the UU I haven't gone to church in the interim. And I wouldn't mind going with her sometimes except for the usual "oh, so where are you going to church now" questions.

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Cartoon of the Moment

--Cartoon by George Beker for Creative Computing's 1978 book 101 BASIC Computer Games. The robot illustrations in that book were a huge influence on me as a kid...I was just knocked out at implausibly-specialized yet believably-drawn robots, they seemed so cool. The book has recently been scanned and published by the fine folks at AtariArchives.org.

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Footage of the Moment
Here's a clip of a house getting eaten by a tornado. (Heh, boingboing say it's a 26.6 Meg link, but my new 802.11g linksys router thingy let me download and watch it in realtime on my laptop...neat.)

I was thinking that tornadoes must've even scarier when people didn't have a car that could probably outrun it if need be...you would just see this wrath-of-god funnelcloud coming down on you, and all you could do is hunker down and hope.

Oddly, just the other day Peterman and I invented a...I'm not sure what the game is, "metagame" isn't right, "alternative play mode" is correct but an ugly phrase...involving tornadoes inside of Mario Kart Double Dash. On the Dry Dry Desert level there's a tornado that winds it's way around the track opposite the direction of travel of the players, and I had previously thought about an "alternagame" of just being a "storm chaser", just following the tornado and seeing how it made it's way through. But then we got into playing chicken, seeing who could get their kart closest without being sucked in, with the added fun of trying to push the other player in when they were closest. It would make a great minigame, points awarded if you were closest, but a penalty for being sucked into the funnel.

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Self Indulgent Thought of the Moment
You know, maybe this is just "observer effect", but it seems like a lot of stuff happened in the spring of 1974, around when I was being born. Honestly, more than I would have expected taking into account that I'm more likely to have my eyes open for that particular year. Like, according to this Tornado FAQ, there was a "super-outbreak" of tornadoes a few days after my birth. Watergate was coming to a head and Nixon would resign 4 or 5 months hence. And I think I read that streaking was the big national fad. What a time!

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Query of the Moment
Mo used to handle the bills and all that crap, so of course now I have to get back into doing that. Just out of curiosity, what kind of schedule do people use for handling that? Every day? Every couple of days? Every week? Every two weeks?

It's an enormous pain in the butt. Especially since my "Spam" detectors are still a little weak when it comes to snailmail, and so I have to open a lot of semi-official looking envelopes.

But I do have a shredder, and that's always fun. And we already know how I feel about letter openers. Passage of the Moment

The Cathars were fighting a losing battle, but the interesting thing was that they were fighting at all. It is not unusual to take up a sword and die for a belief. It is unusual to take up a sword to die for the belief that swords do not exist.

It's talking about a real life catholic sect who more or less believed that this world was a Matrix-like situation.

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Funny of the Moment
I bought the Esquire that came out with this David Sedaris tribute (or something) to his brother, You Can't Kill the Rooster.

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Political Potshot of the Moment
Making the rounds, Bush's Résumé.

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Rant of the Moment

Curse these repetitive block-rockin beats! Grr! Can't you play something with guitars and actual people singing? This music feels like getting felt up by a darn cell phone!

Link of the Moment
Ranjit was one of the central collaborators on FLUID, a really interesting interactive toy/game/morality fable. You can see a picture of their hardware setup at NEWSgrist. Ideally, FLUID is interacted with using a touch sensitive screen, but it's still cool and kinetic with a mouse (and full size mode looks pretty amazing on that new monitor that I won't shut up about).

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Quote of the Moment

A good way to judge the distance to a star would be to keep watching it until you see it explode, and then count the seconds till you hear the bang.

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News of the Moment
So, the Segway had it's first reported accident..."The officer, whose name was not released, injured his knee going up a driveway onto the sidewalk". I dunno, it's seem weird to read that, because there's been so much play about how stable these things are...it's kind of like the Titanic..."God himself couldn't trip that scooter!" Link of the Moment
Kind of a neat history and overview of @. Culturally, we're really unimaginative in what we call it, all these other cultures come up with a cute animal name for it... the funny thing is, each comes up with a different animal name for it.

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Quote of the Moment

1. everything that's already in the world when you're born is just normal;
2. anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;
3. anything that gets invented after you're thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it's been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.