❮❮prevnext❯❯

---

(i mean a little overstated on both fronts but still)

---

---

---

★ ★ ★ ★	Beatbox The Joshuan Project	Short track with some great human beatbox. Via this tumblr post about cute bugs.
★ ★ ★ ★	Super Mario 3D Land Demo Underground Powerdown Nintendo	The classic Mario song with a fun slow to a halt, via this "small mario findings post, it's an unused track from Super Mario 3D Land.
	Shine On Harvest Moon Betty Carter	Slick torch song. Mentioned in Tom Stoppard's play "Jumpers"
	One More Second (Future Islands Remix) Matt Berninger	Indie Mood Song - really sorrowful breakup piece, I didn't think about the lyrics enough during the month it was playing it. I added it to my playlist "saddest". Mentioned by my friend Leigh on FB I think, by the main singer of The National.
	Let's Get It On INFINITE	Late-90s hip hop, smooth flow, the character select screen music for Street Fighter: 3rd Strike Mentioned on the podcast "How Did This Get Played" -- awesome podcast, having writers/improv people who love games talk about games makes this one the best.
	Technicolour Montaigne	Solid Eurovision song, love that shouty girl chorus stuff... Learned about Montaigne when she did the My Brother My Brother And Me podcast soundtrack, wanted to see if she did something I liked better.
	Destination Calabria Masove, Brendan Mills & Tess Burrstone	(content notice, video is a lot about T+A) Dance hall stuff with awesome fun sax. Some random tiktok.
★ ★ ★ ★	Want It All Back Mai Yamane	Awesome funky R+B song - I love the way it sounds like the singer is singing lower, out of her comfort range. from "Cowboy Bebop", the anime series with a legendary soundtrack, been watching a bit.
	Tokyo Drift (Fast & Furious soundtrack) Teriyaki Boyz	Hiphop, leans heavily into asian stereotypes I think. Mentioned on the hilarious video game podcast "How Did This Get Played", talking about songs from video games, and a few from movies.
	The Magic Bomb (Questions I Get Asked) [Trap Remix] Trap Remix Guys	Electronic/Trap. from a random Tik Tok, where it's considered a good track to dance to while FAQs and their answers appear onscreen.
	Stand By Me Florence + the Machine	Nice sweet cover of the old standby. I guess they used this in a Final Fantasy game soundtrack, via the funny videogame podcast "How Did This Get Played"
	Mannish Boy (Single Version) Muddy Waters	You know, I think this is like the Ur- blues song, that has the rhythm everyone would sing when they were clowning and singing a blues song in the 80s. via Apple news talking about a series of Levi Ads in the 90s with famously great music.

---

Amazon Is Helping Researchers Study How to Dim the Sun I feel like "dimming the sun" is a misleading term. Like we're not messing with that nuclear fusion mass' output... we're talking screening it a bit it as it hits the atmosphere...

Secondly, the Matrix "We don't know who struck first, us or them. But we do know it was us that scorched the sky. At the time, they were dependent on solar power. It was believed they would be unable to survive without an energy source as abundant as the sun." is not as close a reference as Snowpiercer's "CW-7 is being deployed into the upper layers of the atmosphere where it will bring down average global temperatures to the optimum levels of the last century. And we are witnessing it!"

---

So ya know, "TikTok" as an endless firehose of content doesn't interest me, but, like with Vine (RIP), I'm interested in as a thing, and sometimes there's a theme that really catches my eye.

This "Answer to Annoying and sometimes invasive FAQs" dance is intriguing (the music is one of the songs listed above)


Reminds me of Biff's Question Song by Tom Wilson who played Biff in Back to the Future.

---

---

---

Like Buddha said, you know we are all just here to fuck.

---

When I was 15, I spent a month working on an archaeological dig. I was talking to one of the archaeologists one day during our lunch break and he asked those kinds of "getting to know you" questions you ask young people: Do you play sports? What's your favorite subject? And I told him, no I don't play any sports. I do theatre, I'm in choir, I play the violin and piano, I used to take art classes.
And he went WOW, That's amazing! And I said, "Oh no, but I'm not any good at ANY of them."
And he said something then that I will never forget and which absolutely blew my mind because no one had ever said anything like it to me before: "I don't think being good at things is the point of doing them. I think you've got all these wonderful experiences with different skills, and that all teaches you things and makes you an interesting person, no matter how well you do them."
And that honestly changed my life. Because I went from a failure, someone who hadn't been talented enough at anything to excel, to someone who did things because I enjoyed them. I had been raised in such an achievement-oriented environment, so inundated with the myth of Talent, that I thought it was only worth doing things if you could "Win" at them.

---

RIP George H.W. Bush. Two thoughts on him:
1. He was wise enough not to decimate and overthrow Iraq - maybe even recognizing that a counterweight to Iran was useful in that region. Similarly, he seems to be the last actual fiscally conservative Republican president we've had.
2. I suspect Bill Clinton benefited from Perot running in 1992 more than Bush did. Without Perot's run, Clinton's win, it's a different landscape - Gingrich's "Contract with America" was a brilliant piece of political blah blah blah that resulted from that, and maybe in this alternate scenario the drive behind stuff like The Tea Party movement never has the focus, and maybe things aren't as stupidly polarized as they are now.

---

jendziura twitter thread making the rounds, thoughtful stuff on the "first principles" thinking of conservatives and libertarians vs "what are the outcomes" thinking of liberals. It's still pretty compatible with the "moral foundations" theory of Jonathan Haidt - liberals are very concerned about harm and unfairness, conservatives mix those concerns with other concepts of proper authority and what not. And also with the idea that authoritarian-leanig folks are more concerned about not letting "cheaters" and outsiders benefit unfairly without pulling their weight.

---

"That was my shot. It's a funny language, German. For one thing, everybody shouts it. All those very long words: the literalism, the tinkertoy accumulation. It sounds pushy, beginning every sentence with a verb like that. And take the first person singular: ich. "Ich." Not a masterpiece of reassurance, is it? I sounds nobly erect. Je has a certain strength and intimacy. Eo's okay. Yo I can really relate to. Yo! But ich? It's like the sound a child makes when it confronts its own ... Perhaps that's part of the point. No doubt all will come clear as soon as my German gets better."

(And with possible apologies to my German friends!) Fascinating book, thanks for the recommendation Dave Adams. The concept (and this is only a spoiler for the first few pages) is of a homunculus riding along in a doctor's head, except the homunculus experiences everything in reverse - so starting with death and moving onto being merely infirm, gradually regaining mobility then vitality, and so on. Much of the book is reframing the ordinary and seeing what still kind of works in reverse (much small talk, for instance) and what become an abomination (to quote Wikipedia, "Blows heal injuries, doctors cause them. Theft becomes donation, and vice versa. In a passage about prostitutes, doctors harm them while pimps give them money and heal them. ") Besides the pleasure of that, it's intriguing to compare the narrator (feeling the doctor's feelings but not privy to his thoughts, or able to exert any control) to our own subconscious minds. September, October, November, all of Fall in 1:30 (or so) - pretty good one. If the format drives you nuts or bores you, skip to the end for Melissa's take on getting ready for the holidays... lots of protests, band (as always), and a fair chunk of halloween...

---

Oof guess Friday isn't much better for MacOS Calendar:

---

The amount of horseshit being crammed into this "tax bill" is fucking amazing. Scribbled notes on the margin? Sure why not. Want to put in a definition of unborn child? Yeah that's fucking relevant!
Like, maybe you didn't like the ACA? Maybe even that there was some unseemly political games to let it squeak by? But at least it was what it was, and political capital was spent to let it happen. This absolute fucking nonsense of "oh politics says this big ass bill will pass, we'll gone shove it through (even past the republicans who give a damn about deficits and the fact we can't even wait for the numbers from the CBO which are gonna show what a craptastic notion is) so since we're gonna make it happen by christmas, lets give ourselves all the christmas presents we can!"
Garbage. Shame on you Republicans, you're so damn gerrymandered that half of you can only lose to tea party nutjobs in the primaries, so any hope of making politics mean any kind of finding common ground is lost.

advent day 1

---

advent2016.alienbill.com Once again, I made a virtual advent calendar! An original little digital toy for each day leading up to Christmas. You can comeback daily to see what's unlocked.

---

advent day 1 Growing up, "Ed Emberley's Drawing Book of Animals" was very important to me and my dad. It teaches kids that they can make animals of all types just by drawing letters and symbols that they already know how to make.

This year, I decided to make an Advent Calendar for the Days of December, 25 in all. Each day has an animal that Ed Emberley taught me to draw and that I taught a computer how to make- but each is also a little puppet that bobs and weaves or interacts with the mouse some other way.

http://advent.kirk.is/
A new animal puppet is unlocked every day!

---

"All the hip kids are streaming music. They'll be like 'I'm not going to carry around a hard drive full of music, like a caveman!' 'But it's all on solid state memory now' 'I'm not going to carry around an SD card full of music, like a caveman'"

---

Q: It's about white people adjusting to a new reality?

A: Owning their actions. Not even their actions. The actions of your dad. Yeah, it's unfair that you can get judged by something you didn't do, but it's also unfair that you can inherit money that you didn't work for.

advent day 1

---

It's pretty much a rule that when you are straightening up and come across a hat, you have to wear it for awhile, right? Otherwise I'm wearing this courtesy yarmulke for no reason.
advent day 1

---

mary the turtle

---

My new housemate Miller, mastermind behind the miniquiche party: varieties include fajita, pepperoni pizza, cheeseburger, mashed potato, and breakfast sausage...

So like in 2009 I've decided to turn this site into a big Java Advent Calendar for the run up to Christmas! Every day you'll get a small Java toy or game, a little interactive amuse-bouch.

I've also made a bookmarkable Javadvent Calendar page if you prefer. My site will continue its usual twitter-ish collection of quotes and links and random observations though...

---

Give a man a gun and he can rob a bank.

Give a man a bank and he can rob the world.

---

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHLSiIVxjUs -- probably my favorite Christmas Hiphop song, edging out "Christmas in Hollis". Love the off-kilter machinery beat.

---

Am I imagining things or is the new Apple Store where the climax of "The Untouchables" took place?

---

At times like this I regret not having had more meaningless sex. And by "times like this" I mean "weekdays".

---

The human brain is perhaps the only example of evolution providing a species with an organ it does not know how to use.

---

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8G4q52EsCc Looking for Dirty Dozen Brass Band's "When I'm Walking" I found this jam w/ Gov't Mule of "Chameleon"

---

There's an obscure school of programming that says every function should have one normal exit point. I don't do that, but it makes a kind of sense to me.
--via gifanime (sadly hasn't been updated in a while)

So this year I've decided to turn this site into a big Java Advent Calendar for the run up to Christmas! Every day you'll get a small Java toy or game, a little interactive amuse-bouch.

I've also made a bookmarkable Javadvent Calendar page if you prefer. My site will continue it's usual twitter-ish collection of quotes and links and random observations though...

This project is kind of inspired by the Advent Calendars I had growing up, the one Lego puts out (I'm doing one this year) and the Perl Advent Calendar project. Also by this Game-A-Day project and the little toys you got with Warioware Twisted.

---

(How do you make homophobia even more wrong-headed and harmful? By trying to use homophobia to suppress action against climate change. Colson stands by his "principles" come Hell or high water because, apparently, Hell and high water are his principles.)

Really odd dream, I was in some kind of Arcade game or Pinball competition, 3 rounds. I don't remember much about the first round except squeaking out a win... for round two my opponent was Warner Bros. animator Tex Avery, except he was a youngish Indian guy with braces. (In retrospect, this might be because of an Indian guy I knew in college with the sarcastic nickname "Tex") We were taking turns getting prizes out of some clunky old prize machine (Hmm, EBB's was looking at a educational toys catalog, one of the things was a home version of those old claw machines - this machine lacked the claw but did have the same little balls as EBB's Fischer Price Roll-a-Rounds.) It was pretty random, some of the balls were winner and some weren't, and it was luck of the draw, which I lost.

---

Video of the Moment

--Randomly following Youtube related links I found this bit of Commercial Bollywood Advertising. I just love the vibrant goofiness. (2019 UPDATE: not sure what 371jYBD3wGE was, but it may have been a Pepsi ad here)

---

Kirk's Observation of Corporate Office Upgrades: By the time the company actually gets to move in, the economy will have tanked.

---

Well-kempt genius that I am I managed to cut my forehead with a thumbnail while sleeping. Looks like I started a homebrew Harry Potter scar.

---

Unhappy with how I skip over my "overdue" ToDo list and get to "Today" which tends to be more real + pressing LOL IM DOIN IT WRONG

---

Hey Wall Street -- there's a recession! SURPRISE!

---

Thinking about what folks told me when I was Y2K fretting. Who said "whatever happens we're all in this together"? Rejected it then-but now- EB's daughter Catherine, almost 1 1/2 now, is at an intriguing stage where she bables often but you can see bits of words sticking through, and she has much of the rhythm and tone of language down.

On the one hand, it's frustrating, because it always seems on the verge of "real" communication, and then I'll be able to tell her about the world and see things from her perspective. On the other hand, I'm kind of worried about coping with how narrowly focused her life agenda probably is. (Even when you go for a faux-Buddhist "child's mild", an adult is probably only to get a limited amount of intellectual or aesthetic satisfaction from taking tupperware bowls out of the drawer. And putting them back in. And taking them out again. And stacking the bowls. And putting them back in the drawer.)

---

Quote of the Moment

Fools rush in where fools have been before.

Hey, it's December already! Full tilt into the Holiday season. Back in high school I'd spend a lot of this month "standing kettles" for The Salvation Army... playing carols on tuba for 4-8 hour shifts... (I always thought that the tuba's mellowness made it easier to listen to for long stretches than, say, the trumpet.) I usually didn't take many breaks, a little bit out of teenage machismo, but mostly I just hated the empty stand just standing there, and having to find a place to stash my horn and the kettle. Nothing felt better than climbing into the big van after and having a styrofoam cup of McDonald's hot chocolate, and finally sitting... my teeth would feel a bit looser after a full shift of tuba-ing.

So the red kettles are still out there in front of the stores, but they've also gone virtual... longtime friend and sometimes-sidebar-poster Beau sent out requests to help fill his online Virtual Kettle... (Heh, actually a few times Beau and I were part of Kettle bass quartets, though that was the exception more than the rule.) I figure I've been pretty generous with myself lately (*cough* *cough* *Nintendo Wii* *cough*) but not so charitable for others, so I figured I was overdue for making a donation of a similar order of magnitude.

The Salvation Army is a great charity...I remember when I was doing kettles, getting to hear stories of appreciation about when the 'Army was there for folks when they were having a rough patch, but now they were able to throw in a couple bucks. My favorite were the old WW2 guys... I guess during the war The Salvation Army generated a lot of good will with its support for the troops, giving away some stuff like stationary and donuts that other organizations would nickel and dime them for.

Anyway, I encourage other folks to throw something into Beau's kettle to kick off the Winter season... even in Boston where it's like... yeesh, 64?


self-portrait of back in the day...

Potential Travesty of the Moment
Recently recovered from a slashdotting, the stories of the Superman movies that never were are almost scary in how little they care for the traditional story of Superman...the most telling quote is they wanted something "sans the tights and more Matrix-like." I've read some of the comics, and there's so much potential in talking about how this outsider with godlike powers deal with it and his relationships with mere mortals...and he's so iconic...those descriptions are just weird. And a bit longwinded. Same with the "detail analysis" of those other movies, they're really blow by blow descriptions of terrible movies...funny, but long.

---

Moving On of the Moment
Today was my last day at Taxware. I'm a bit sadder than I expected.

At the risk of sounding creepy, I assembled a list of coworkers I could think of by name, and it was larger than I thought. Plus I did memory-aiding "personal descriptions"...there were more "really sharp"s than I expected. I don't know if I chronically tend to underestimate the compentence around me, or have a low self image that makes everyone else seem better, or if it was just that good of a place to work.

Three and a half years....7/8 as long as either high school or college! But of course those feel much longer, the general speeding up effect. Though if perceived passing of time is coorelated to the emotional impact of that time...well, maybe in some weird way I should be grateful to Mo and the divorce for slowing some of that down for me.

Of course it's all mixed up in how Taxware is changing its office space at the same time. It's just very unsettling all around.

Feh. Traffic court was so-so; the mediator guy knocked off half because of my complaint about the confusing signage, but I imagine I'll still be feeling some insurance repercussions.

It's funny gauging my own response to the little mediator room, sitting across from a state trooper who was acting as the State Police lawyer (or something like that), how uptight and nervous I was. Maybe it's just some authority issues I have, or maybe it's something deeper. It made me think, I do believe these guys are pretty much the good guys, looking out for people's safety, and that there's a strong tradition of justice in this nation that really means something. Could you imagine how scary a similar setting would be in a nation that didn't have our history of civil rights, being brought in for a little chat about some posted opinion or suspicous activity? It's a sobering thought.

---

Passage of the Moment

However, there are certain things that are so wonderful in American life that I can hardly stand it myself. Chief among these, without any doubt, is the garbage disposal. A garbage disposal is everything a labor-saving device should be and so seldom is -- noisy, fun, extremely hazardous, and so dazzingly good at what it does that you cannot imagine how you ever managed without one. If you had asked me eighteen months ago what the prospects were that shortly my chief amusement would be placing assorted objects down a hole in the kitchen sink, I believe I would have laughed in your face, but in fact it is so.

---

Bad News of the Moment
Just to scare the bejeebers out of everyone..in the US media there's been an amazing lack of coverage about this whole Bird Flu Thing...Tens of millions, 100 million? A billion if it happened to mutate in a few especially nasty ways?

And of course, I'm sick with something today. My skin hurts, I had the worst night of sleeping...I thought it was either because of the post-court nap I had, or because of a wee-hours-of-the-morning power outage (which led to all sorts of half-awake musings that maybe I'm such a technogeek that I was sensing whatever happened to my electronic and electric goodies, or that they were getting some of my illness...)

Bleh.

At the risk of getting a big old pile of LAN3's scorn, I decided to check out the metafilter discussion on this. One of the last posts made an interesting point, that so many of these epidemics are "zoonotic", because we shove too many animals too close to each other and to our selves, largely for the purpose of lunch.

---

Game of the Moment
On a lighter, fiddling-while-Rome-sneezes note, thanks Andy for sending along this Altoids-advertising rip off of "WarioWare" 2 Fast + 2 Curious. Lots of goofy little microgames. It lacks some of the pizazz of the original (I think because of a lack of sound effects, just a soundtrack) but it's not bad. Quickies of the Moment
I was amused by this article saying the latest Harry Potter is the new 'Atlas Shrugged', just because Mo is such a fan of both books. But isn't particularly libertarian. (Though I found out she skips over the long long John Galt speech.) I found it interesting to read through a list of lawsuits in the PDA industry. It's really stupid, so many of the recent ones (Involving Research in Motion) involve ideas that are totally obvious once you have handheld devices about. And finally there's this woman who makes cuddly stuffed (non-reunctional) replicas of various video game systems...everybody's got to have a hobby I guess!

---

Quote of the Moment

What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.

• Flash Video: Weee!!!
• Are you insane? Here's a simple and amusing test that was making the rounds a while back.

• What's worth succeeding in is worth failing in.

• Interesting Salon interview with a guy who thinks our sexual fetishes spring from our childhood experiences. It's an interesting concept, like all those British men who grew up with mother and her friends in gas masks and ended up with rubber/latex fetishes...
• 
  --from this Super-Fan-Pack Comix by Ruben Bolling.
• I can't believe how long I've had Welcome To America in my backlog. I think the only thing I like 3 "No/Yes/Also Acceptable" 3 part illustration in the middle of the page.
• Speaking of obsolete links -- the Patriots won the Superbowl! And this cartoon explains how cool that season was. We'll see how this one winds up.
• Brooke likes the webcomic Friendbear and I'm not sure I see all the appeal. But some of it.
• I remember hearing about the gay penguins in New York. Cass is the butch, Wendell is the sissy, or so they say.
• Some of the other stuff in this update was kind of funny, but the audio clip Buttplugs was the most laugh out loud thing I'd heard on the Internet in a long while.

Oy, 543 poems to read for the loveblender this weekend...

---

Quote of the Moment

"Sometimes you get the elevator...
             ...sometimes you get the shaft."

---

Videogamers of the Moment
Man, and some of my friends thought I was bad with my videogame collection... pretty impressive. I feel so inadequate.

---

Joke of the Moment

A rancher needs a bull to service his cows but needs to borrow the money from the bank. The banker who lent the money comes by a week later to see how his investment is doing. The farmer complains that the bull just eats grass and wont even look at the cows. The banker suggests that a veterinarian have a look at the bull.

The next week the banker returns to see if the vet helped. The farmer looks very pleased: "The bull has serviced all my cows, broke through the fence, and has serviced all my neighbor's cows."

"Wow," says the banker, "What did the vet do to that bull?"

"Just gave him some pills," replied the farmer.

"What kind of pills?" asked the banker.

"I don't know," says the farmer, "but they sort of taste like chocolate."