Haha… ha… uh… huh?

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Okay, so I’m out bombing around the net like I’m likely to do on a Tuesday night looking for something about a particular primary religious figure being a zombie, and I come across this photo

on a page with a bunch of other things scrolling and then my brain says “what’s STRETRODRUNIAL?” and so I Google some of the words (and here they are so Google robots will find ME wondering about THAT):

WINTER
8,685,000,000 GALAXIES
NBC:GRUTROGRONIAL BROADCASTS
STRETRODRUNIAL
ENDEAVORS DEVOTIONS
PHRITROCINIAL

, and find another photo of what appears to be the same dude, somewhere nearby

photo by mquinnsweeney

so then I start removing and/or correcting the words from the sign, and find this different-but-same sign

Photo by niallkennedy

Photo by niallkennedy

Yeah, that’s what it said:

Carlfield
8,645,000 Galaxies
CNN: Shogrofrenical Broadcasts
Lygrogrenial
Gestures Captions
Citrostrenikal

The caption/title on the last one says Frank Chu, so maybe this is who does these weird signs, but my brain is just whining at me “What *IS* is though?  What’s happening?  Is this a thing?  Is a thing happening?  Tell me!”

Do you figure if I threaten to send my brain to bed without any supper, it’ll stop whining?

So when you wonder what I’m doing at 11:30 at night, when I should really be sleeping, or making lunches for tomorrow or something?

This is it.

I’ll probably search a little more tonight, but hey, if anyone can point me in the right direction, by all means, let ‘er rip.

Posted on August 26th 2008 in Brainfarts, People, Places, randomness

I think I’m going to like working here…

1 Comment »


I got this apron from work.
…yeah… I know it’s a game company
…I don’t know what aprons have to do with video games either. Maybe we’re making an online cooking game, who knows? Nobody ever tells me anything. I mean, it’s kind of random, but it could be worse. They could have given us… like…. socks or something. What? You know, socks! With like, the company logo on them? Stop looking at me like that, it’s not THAT weird. At least socks are practical… This one time, at E.A? they gave us these metal chunks that kind of looked like the company logo… nobody had any clue what it was. I would have loved to have been at the meeting where that got approved… “Okay, we’re partnered with a junkyard to provide us with chunks of old Buicks that sort of resemble our logo… we can hand them out as presents to the employees!” …So weird. What was I talking about? Oh yeah…
How do you like your burger?

Thanks to Ripley for the modeling assist.

Oh, and just in case you’re thinking they don’t do “real” clothes, I can attest to the fact that at some point recently they made some of the nicest hoodies I’ve ever seen.  Like, better than my GapHoodie.

Okay, need to get the kids outside before all three of us lose it.

Posted on June 14th 2008 in General, Hey Cool, People, Places, Software

GTA4 – Can a toy be inherently evil?

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My mom asked me about the killing of prostitutes in Grand Theft Auto 4, as mentioned in this week’s New York Times. Here’s what I wrote back.

Edit: I refer below to “Hot Chocolate” when I mean, “Hot Coffee.”  Maybe I was hungry when I wrote this.

Can of worms, for sure, but it’s an old one (remember, ‘net years = dog years, so GTA3 came out 21 years ago)

Yeah, it’s not new, and part of the Mature rating the game has (at least, I think it’s Mature, if not higher), and while that’s something you *can* do, it’s not something that any part of the game directs you to do. Last year’s smash hit BIOShock had a component that involved killing the symbiotic counterpart of giant half-mechanized monsters who would happily ram your crushed body right through a wall if you got in their way.

The counterparts looked like evil little girls though. There was discussion in the gaming industry about how bad people felt killing little girls to get their strength back after fighting a “big daddy.” I’m not saying the topic was ever put to rest, or that everyone’s decided that “Bad Big Daddy = Bad Little Girl” but it was part of the game. It was something that gave a little more “oomph” to the emotional impact of an underwater city being taken over by some kind of virus that makes everyone go insane, including little girls and their deep-sea-diver killing machines (think the giant and the midget from Mad Max Thunderdome). You felt like this place is terrible, and you’re maybe part of what’s so terrible about it, and maybe we should just all buy a Wii and spend all day playing MarioKart Racing instead.

Yes, sadly, there’s prostitution within the game (which amounts to “pay the lady, and you get into a car, which bounces”), and it HAS been in the last two versions of the game (GTA3 and now GTA4). If I recall correctly, having sex (with a prostitute or a “love interest,” and there are some non-player-characters in the game you can go on “dates” with) will give you some health back. That’s the only thing I could see someone saying the game invites you to do. Killing doesn’t do anything for you.

But it’s not *just* prostitutes you *can* run over, it’s everything, and everyone. GTA3 was the first game to have this sort of “open world” where anything that was possible within the realm of (game) physics was possible to do. If you could jump your car off the top of the building into that police helicopter, killing yourself, the pilot, and forty bystanders, it would let you do that. In GTA4, you can have your (real) friends jump into a car that you’re driving, which (I’m told) usually turns into a Keystone Cops moment of friends running their friends over many times before finally saying “Okay, I’m stopping the car for real this time.”

It was never a mission within the game though. The game doesn’t *make* you do it. It’s not a mini-game, or some sort of unlockable. It’s a thing you *can* do, if you want to, but you need to go out of your way to do it. The game increases your danger for killing people you haven’t been giving a mission to kill. The ‘hood will come after you, (as will the cops) for killing *anyone*, including random little old ladies, sweaty dudes with baseball bats, and other gangsta wanna-bes like yourself.

Saying that GTA4 “invites” the killing of a particular group of people is taking a pretty narrow view of what an open world is. When Halo came out, folks spent MONTHS trying to get piles of grenades to make jeeps fly through the air, killing people, and monsters, and the law of gravity as efficiently as possible. People get married in World of Warcraft, get divorced in TheSims Online, and cause huge swarms of flying penises to interrupt live CNN interviews in Second Life (no, really, that happened).

They are all things to do in-game, things that the game engine allows, and you’ve got to wonder why people fixate on it in a game (or why there needed to be prostitutes in GTA at all), but there’s nothing stopping you from doing it. While we’re at it, can someone please explain why there’s always the “stripclub scene” in every cop movie up until about 93? At least GTA is full of mafia, so they could claim that the sex, drugs, violence and swearing are all due to The Sopranos being the #1 show on HBO for five years (or maybe it was Six Feet Under, for exactly the same reasons).

More damning than the prostikilling in GTA3 was the “Hot Chocolate” mission, which was an ACTUAL mission in the game. The mission demanded that you went through an insanely elaborate bunch of milestones in a certain amount of time (and I think it had to be in a certain order) and then you unlocked the OPTION of blocky-animated moderately-graphic sex between consenting adults.

Remember the Adventure64 game, when you’d die if you moved in the dark without a lamp for more than three moves because you’d “fall and break your neck”? Remember what I did to get past that part? Yeah, I removed the RETURN in the subroutine, so I could still SEE for long enough to get through the cave to where there was light again. Yes, I cheated, and that’s what a small group within the PC-gaming community did when they figured out there was this mission called “Hot Chocolate” in GTA3 that they couldn’t seem to figure out how to unlock, or what it was about (whenever a new GTA game comes out, the community collectively starts pulling it apart in any way they can using decoding, HexEditors, and DiskInspection, to see what’s in it, what the cheat codes are, and how to make their car into a semi-transparent tank that belches blue smurfs out the exhaust and fires spaghetti out the front).

{Okay, so that one’s not real, but you get the idea}.

Hot Chocolate was something that was written by (probably) one or two people, tucked away in some deep dark scary place in the code, and after MANY MANY interviews with the developers and their parent-companies, found to be something that no normal human being would EVER find, even if they were TRYING to. EVEN if you WERE a gamer…

BUT a bunch of game crackers figured out how to trick the game into thinking that this crazy impossible mission had actually been completed, and would show you sex that was slightly more obvious than trying to watch scrambled satellite signals of “9 1/2 Weeks.”

Does GTA invite killing prostitutes? Does it invite bad driving? Does it invite not showering, sleeping, or going to work/school? Does it invite showing up to pick up a date in a stolen semi-trailer that’s plastered with dead bodies and phonebooths because you “had leetle trouble” finding the street your girlfriend lives on?

To be honest, I don’t know.

It’s an environment. It’s a physics engine. It’s a very nice physics engine in a brutal and dangerous environment.

It doesn’t invite anything more horrifying than 90% of the movies in theatres around Hallowe’en.

It simply invites.

What you DO with that invitation is up to you, but the game isn’t smart enough to stop you from being an asshat.

At this point, if you have questions, it’s worth talking to your 15yo son about what he’s DOING in the game. Who is his character? What sorta “robbing a bank for medicine for your dying daughter” missions has he accepted? Which ones has he turned down? Is it fun? Scary? Sexy? Dangerous? Tough? Cool? Pretty? Evil?

It’s a toy. A freakishly elaborate toy. But a toy.

…but it’s absolutely your job to call “Bullshit!” when people start saying “Oh well, boys will be boys.”

Thoughts? I’m okay with comments and discussion, but will delete troll posts. It’s my blog – my rules. Go argue on the NYTimes if you want to play slapsies online with strangers.

Posted on May 28th 2008 in People, Places, Software

Show 14 – April Randomness

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As usual, metric schwackloads of swearing (if you’re shocked by this, I guess you haven’t heard our show before), so watch out.

Here’s April’s show. Right-click to SaveAs… instead of streaming it from your browser.

01 – Talkybit 1
02 – Broad Daylight – Gabriel Rios
03 – New Violence – White Williams
04 – You Are Never Alone – Socalled
05 – Talkybit 2
06 – Hustler – Simian Mobile Disco
07 – Can You Dig It (Bullet Proof Dirty Dub) – Journey Man DJ
08 – I Go Hard, I Go Home – The Presets
09 – Talkybit 3
10 – Certified Air Raid Material – edIT
11 – Ready For The Floor – Hot Chip
12 – Burial – Archangel
13 – Talkybit 4
14 – Istanbul – The Breeders
15 – Wata (Water) F. Mutabaruka – Beat Pharmacy
16 – A&E – Goldfrapp
17 – Talkybit 5
18 – Message FromOur Sponsor – Jello Biafra
19 – Anyone Else But you – The Moldy Peaches
20 – Testy

Posted on April 14th 2008 in Friends, Music, People, Podcast

JanC passes away – Area code 604’s Dr. Device is offline.

15 Comments »

I’m trying to write this before the shock wears off, so apologies now for rambling or moebius story-telling.

So, today I got some news from a succession of people at my old job that the guy I spent the last year and a half sitting next to passed away at his home some time after Monday evening. He’d gone home Monday morning complaining of trouble breathing. Maybe his heart gave out, I dunno. He was a big guy, sizewise, but he always was during the five years I worked there, so it’s not like he suddenly took a downturn in his health. Who knows? Maybe when he went to doctors, he was told to lose weight, instead of actually looking at what was going on? That response from hospitals almost killed my mom last summer. But I digress.

I was laid off from that job three weeks back, and the first thing both my wife and my mom said when I told them was (verbatim) “But you loved that job!” It was true, too. I liked the work, mostly, and enjoyed working for the largest studio of the largest gaming company in the world. Mostly though? It was the people. The people I worked with were the best thing about the job, and for the last 18 months, I’d been working a Nerf-dart’s throw from the sort of techie who would spend an hour figuring out how to mess with another tech’s machine and not get caught. Not for snooping purposes, not for bragging rights, but because it was funny.

We used to joke that we had to sit together in our department, because we would drive anyone else crazy if we were placed elsewhere. We were like the kids’ table at your Grandma’s Thanksgiving dinner: throwing food, making funny faces, quoting Monty Python and Little Britain at each other. In short, we were two big geeks who would often be amazed that we were paid to do what we loved. Even when we didn’t love it, we could commiserate about how much we hated it, and get the poison out of our system before getting back down into our mental trenches and reconfiguring the Retro Encabulators.

He always had a big stainless steel coffee-can full of jelly beans, and while he might have moaned about having to refill it so often, it gave people an excuse to come talk to him, and see what he was doing, without necessarily feeling like they were interrupting. He also had a big red spinning light, like you’d find above the radiation room, referred to as “The F-O Light.” If it was on, it meant he was busy, so “F-O.”

When we weren’t talking shop, we would mostly talk about comedians and comedy. Things we found funny, and things funny people found funny. We could spend ten minutes trying to remember where we’d heard a joke, or the first time we heard a Bill Cosby record, or just randomly saying “Yeah, I know” in Little Britain accents to each other without breaking our different trains of thought. You know how old married couples can finish sentences? We would speak in half-conscious nerdese: deeply obscure IRC and BBS terminology would get bounced back and forth between us, like a pair of HAL9000s talking in their sleep.

I haven’t worked with anyone who so deeply “got” me as a technician. He understood and could help with what made me livid with rage at the injustices of the job (even if he was arguing the other side, and had already resolved to just get it done), and he also joined in the celebrations and Zulu war-dances of finding solutions that were the vastly dangerous shortcuts and time-crunches we were hired to create. The self-taught techs we were? He had done it all, too, and knew how hard it was to put something down when there was still a problem to be fixed.

There are 2,500+ staff at that location, and damn near 3,000 computers running, and if they were running Windows, he was at least partly responsible for each of those machines running as well as they did. I know how hard his job was, ’cause part of my job description was to be his backup when he was away, and brother, that was one hell of a huge ship to try to captain when he was away.

The day after I was laid off, I started to write an email to the department, as my goodbye. It didn’t go anywhere really, so I put it aside, and tried to write a goodbye just to him first, thinking once I got over the barrier of saying goodbye to the guy I could sit next to for eight hours a day (without wanting to yell “Would you shut UP!” even once at), the rest would be easy.

In writing that letter, I got as far as “It was” before I burst into tears.

I know Han Solo, and I’m no Han Solo, but I sure feel like Chewbacca’s gone.

This past weekend, when I was in Bellingham with the kids getting stamps for Arwen, there was a giant bag of Jelly Belly beans for cheap, so I grabbed ’em, thinking “I’ll bring these with me next time I go out there, or send ’em via courier” or something equally nerdy.  While frowned upon, sending food in the interoffice mail system was also one of the things that made us giggle like idiots, and I thought he would know it meant I was still thinking about him, and would make him smile.

He was active in the BBS/modem scene way back when, before most of you fair readers knew what a computer was.  Before a few of you were even alive.  Before we talked about the Internet, and LONG before the World Wide Web.  It’ll take me a while to figure out where his online haunts were, but www.b3ta.com won’t have him making obscurely funny animated graphics.  He won’t be overly harsh with the helpdesk guys any more, ’cause sometimes he would forget that not everybody was seeing the system from his satellite view.

There was one woman he loved, that I know of, and he had wanted to marry her, but she was betrothed to a needle long before he came onto the scene.  Being young and naive, he didn’t see the signs until it was too late, and didn’t get a chance to pull out of the emotional dive before reality came up fast to meet him.  When he spoke of her, which was rarely, he always seemed to miss who he thought she was.  Perhaps he can finally meet that woman again, and this time, they’ll have a chance at something good together.

He was a huge nerd, a good friend, a great technician, and will be missed.

Goodbye Jan, you magnificent bastard.

Posted on April 3rd 2008 in Friends, People, Sad

I got nothin’ and I’m talking aaaaall about it.

2 Comments »

Eep Omnibus Pablum.
(Translation: I got nothin’.)

Yeah, no, I got nothing. This past weekend was good, partly ’cause I deliberately didn’t get into anything from work ’cause I knew this was going to be “hell week,” due to some stuff that’s coming up fast for a Friday deadline. Today, I felt like I was battling all day to stay on target, which was made worse when I suddenly ground my gears to switch tracks entirely for something that’s due tomorrow, instead of something that was due last Friday.

Heh. Ooopsh.

On the upside, I spoke to someone on the phone today who talks even faster than I do. It was awesome. I didn’t necessarily feel confident that he could do what he said he was going to do, but omigod did he ever BELIEVE he could do it. It was one of those rare moments when I found myself thinking “You might be full of it, but I hope you manage to pull it off.”

I wonder how often people think the same about me at work?

So what have I been doing lately? Just for fun, ’cause I’m crazy like that, I installed VMWare, and created a virtual Ubuntu Server. I just wanted to see what it could do out of the box, and found that there was a step with a “do you want fries with that?” checkbox screen, and two of the items were web server and mail server. The very same two things that don’t really work very well on my current server rig right now. So I fired ’em up just to see how scary they were, and they just. Plain. WORKED.

I didn’t install an FTP server (oops), so I couldn’t just start hauling stuff from my currently IIS server into the virtual Apache, but I was pleasantly surprised once again by Ubuntu.

The server version isn’t as exciting as some of the vertigo-inducing effects you can find with the Compiz stuff under Ubuntu workstation, but hey, who needs all those windows doing the hokeypokey like that?

(/me waves hands back and forth, going “Oooh! Ooh!”)

I’m becoming a zealot, aren’t I? Shoot.

If I keep this up, I’m going to end up being the guy running around in shorts, suspenders, and a backpack, telling people “He got Linnixth running on his watch! On his watch he runs it!” I don’t think I’ll ever be as uber as Mister Aardvark, but I’m happy to claim to have been there when he was still a guy working in a bagel place and thinking maybe he should learn about this Linux stuff after he finishes his first album.

Arwen and I went to Deb’s birthday on Saturday night, just like when we didn’t have kids. Rip and I went out yesterday to the park, and there’s some fun pictures up on Flickr (of both events).

On the way home, we hit the bargain bin at London Drugs and bought Super Monkey Ball Adventure, which is a little over Ripley’s head, but sorta slap-happy fun anyway. Two hours of fun for $9.00, not too bad.

OH! I might be going on a business trip soon. Probably. Most likely. We’ll see. Second time in my career I’ve been paid to go somewhere. Last time was when Service Pack 2 for Windows XP came out, and I spent more time going through customs than I did in the air.

This time, I’m gonna have to travel on a Sunday, and come back on the following Saturday (I think, we’ll see). S’gonna be fun (I think, we’ll see). Arwen keeps saying I said I was going to Daytona, but I *know* I didn’t (I think, we’ll see).

For the record (hah!) I bought CDs last weekend, and forgot to tell the world. Despite what groups like the RIAA might have us believe, FREE streaming of music pointed me to music I’d never heard of before, but I like, and then that led me to BUY some for SOMEONE ELSE, ’cause I thought they would like it too…

She just turned 19 (happy birthday last week!), and I’m happy to say she’s my cousin, from that freaky-music-over-talented wing of the family. Somewhere on Youtube I’ve got my uncle John playing a badly tuned piano. I seem to have got the funny gene, but not the musician gene.

Okay, enough nothing from me. ‘nite yall.

Oh, and this song makes me want to do a new style of dancing Mr. Mills and I spoke about in one of our podcasts, and I’m a call it “grumping.” A little moody, and little blue, but funky. Think DeeeLite, but bummed. But diggin’ it. Y’know?
(probably only shows up at http://www.geckotemple.com/blog).

Posted on January 22nd 2008 in Friends, General, Hardware, Hey Cool, Music, People, Software

Been a while, and there’s been lots goin’ on.

3 Comments »

So, uh hi.

Long time, no see, eh?

What have I been doing?  Let’s see.

Family:

  • We’re good, all things considered.  Xmas was stressy and rough, but only due to external circumstances (see Housing, below).  Considering what we were up against, I think Arwen and I did extremely well.  Nobody got hurt, and the kids once again have toys that keep them busy without making us insane.
  • My mom’s on the mend.  We went up to visit, and she’s doing much better.  Thanks to everyone who asked when they felt it was appropriate, and didn’t when they didn’t.
  • My wife developed a thing for socks before either of us knew what hit her.  One day, she showed me something, we both sat there for a minute, and then I said “Yeah, actually, that’s hot.”  Who knew?  $17 for a pair of socks can be a good deal, if they’re the RIGHT socks.


Work
:

  • I’ve been busy with work, which has been going really well, now that I’m finally getting the hang of not being an all-day techie, but instead getting used to the idea of putting together training and documentation FOR techies (and end-users).  There’s a high-impact, but (we hope) low workload project in the very near future, thanks in large part to all the hard work already being done by the guy that works next to me all day.  He knew this stuff was coming, so he did all the technical tough stuff, so now it’s just a question of all the stuff we didn’t expect, and rolling out what’s coming without freaking out our userbase.  The next week or two should be fun*, and a nice way to come back from our winter break.

Housing:

  • I’ve also been kept very busy with being a new board member at home, and trying to figure out how to bridge what I’ve been hearing and seeing vs. what can (and can’t) be changed/corrected.  We got something rather, shall we say, alarming *right* before Christmas, which really put a dent in our holiday time, but in the end, I think it was bombastic enough that it meant I went to bat and started swinging.  Is everything goodness and light now?  No.  Is it the end of the world?  Also no.  There’s hope now, at least, which is something I couldn’t say 8 days ago.  Or even two.

Facebook:

  • Yes, I’ve been booking many hours on there.  Not really *doing* anything, just having a lovely OCD time and hammering that refresh button to see what’s happening NOW with everyone I know.  I feel like those rats you hear about, who’ll push the “get food” bar constantly, even if there’s no food coming, simply because food comes sometimes when you push it.  Karlababble has asked for a Intervention from Facebook, but I think that’s just ’cause she wants to get into fisticuffs with the older guy who shows up on there once in a while.  On Intervention, that is, not Facebook.  Wait.  Dude.  What?

Music:

  • I’ve been listening to a fair amount of new stuff, thanks to a large number of excellent new/free music blogs, and streaming sites.
  • Damien Rice hit my radar late one night a few weeks back, and I was instantly transformed into a slackjawed slushpile of overwrought emotional goo.  I was sitting there feeling grief & loss for something that I had NOTHING to do with.  I wasn’t just sad because the songs hit me, I was sad because those song existed.  I’m not sure when the last time that happened was, but hooboy.  If it was a seasonal thing, it’s good I wasn’t in the Hallmark store at the time, ’cause I would’ve started bawling right there.
  • Johnny Vancouver and I did a podcast two MONTHS ago, and I haven’t had time to re-encode some of the songs that got squished by the process to post the whole show.  Soon, baby.  He and Warren have also been doing a Video Podcast that I’ll have to link to in the near future, so you can see that it’s not HIS fault we’re not doing shows, it’s all me.

Geekin‘:

  • So, Vista came out around this time last year, and I’ve been using it at work in all its 64-bit glory (and bleeding edge stupidity).  At home, I’ve been afraid to try to fix the Win2k3 server I’ve got running this site, (it’s currently completely unresponsive on the console, and Exchange 2003 isn’t talking to the outside world, but the webserver works, so I’m not touching anything), so we’re moving to 3rd party hosting in the very near future.
  • I’ve also been fooling around with more flavours of Linux than you can shake a memory stick at.  Ubuntu (and Kubuntu/Xubuntu) have all passed my “diddit goe?” test with flying colours under all sorts of weird hardware, and I’ve been happily using it as my “main machine” at home for doing everything I need to do in an evening.  The October (7.10) version just plain works, including wifi.
  • I’ve once again found new respect for Knoppix LiveCD, with it’s utterly awesome ability to ignore that a drive or partition are all screwed up, and just copy stuff anyway.  My friend at Vancouver Film School can attest to the power of Knoppix when it comes to restoring data from drives that have been declared “dead.”
  • Trinity Rescue Kit also made my day more than once this year.  It’s nice to be able to pull a “dead” machine from under a user’s desk, and have their data shared back to them via Windows (Samba) networking shares in under 5 minutes.
  • I tried messing with my iPod’s head, and installing RockBox, but eventually found it too annoying to USE, even though I like the idea.  I’ll stick with the portable and multi-platform Floola to get my music onto my ‘pod without having to use iTunes (or stay married to a single workstation for music, for that matter).
  • I also found out that old iPods can have their harddrives replaced using the odd little drives found in Toshiba R100 laptops.  Also, a new (and bigger) battery for an iPod can be purchased online for less than $35 (incl. shipping of the battery).
  • Digital Picture Frames purchased at ToysRUs for under $80 don’t necessarily suck.  Way less work and heartbreak than trying to build them myself out of Frankensteined Laptops.

New Year’s Eve:

  • This year was small, and time well-wasted playing Guitar Hero (I finally got over my stupid “but I’ll suck at it” stagefright to try it.  I don’t know what I thought was going to happen, but I’m told I’m doing pretty well for someone who picked up a plastic axe less than a week ago.  Totally Rick and Elissa’s fault if I even end up in front of the Movie-Theatre-sized screen at work, rocking out to Flock Of Seagulls’ “I Ran” in the next six months.
  • I have a slight headache NOW that is, I think, the hangover from going to bed last night at 3am, and getting up at Noon.  Possibly held at bay by taking the kids to the park in single-digit weather.

I’m not making any promises or resolutions this year, but I do *hope* to post a decent-length thing at least once a week.  No more two-month hiatus (hiati?) for me.

What else am I looking at lately?  Check here from time to time to see what I thought I’d want to look at later.

* Not really, I’ll probably be muttering a swearing to myself by middle of next week.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Posted on January 1st 2008 in General, Music, People, Software

Two things, ’cause my mind’s goin’, and Google’s not helping much.

4 Comments »

I’m wondering if anyone remembers either of the following documentaries:

1) Man with 15-minute memory (not the name, but what I’m calling it).
I saw this while I was in Cambridge with mom & Roger, and don’t remember the name of the guy. He had a *total* memory of about 15 minutes. He could play piano, but didn’t know he could until he started. He didn’t remember anyone or anything that had happened more than 15 minutes ago, and would spend most of the documentary in this seemingly endless mantra of “I’ve never seen anything before, never touched anything before, never existed before this moment…” etc. It was heartbreaking, but not because of the man (he’d had an accident of some sort, or perhaps a disease, and lost his ability to recall anything, or to create new memories. What broke my heart was his wife.

She would leave the room for a few minutes to go do something, laundry, whatever, and when she came back, he would burst into tears, and throw his arm around her, sobbing that he was so happy to see her. When she was gone, he wouldn’t mention her, or anyone else, but when she came back, it was like the arrivals gate at the airport. Every ten minutes or so. Guh.

I seem to recall that it was part of a much larger documentary about people who had no discernable brain matter. Like, literally. Nothing in their heads, and yet most of them were normal (or gifted) even though they didn’t show up on a standard MRI as having anything upstairs but some connective tissue.

Wow, huh? This is why I wanna see it again. To see if my 13-yo brain was just making stuff up.

2) The guy who was looking for the piece of land for himself & his wife, and once he found it, went about defying the bejeesus out of all known laws of architecture and physics.

Sorry for the run-on name of this one, but that’s the fastest way I can think of to describe it. This drifter wanders into a smallish town somewhere in the States, and does odd jobs for folks to make money/food/shelter and would spend part of each day wandering around looking for “the right piece of land.” One day, he comes back to wherever it is he’s staying, and is freaking out that he found “the spot” and that he needs to buy it so he can start building. The folks in town help put together a collection or whatever, and he buys the land. Empty, and then starts building fencing around it. High fencing, like 8′ kinda stuff.

Folks from time to time would drop by to see if they could help (and what he was up to back there, and he would chase them off in a friendly way, and go back to his work. He disappeared at some point, and when the folks went to check up on him, he was gone. What was cool though, was that they were looking around his house, and there was all this totally weird furniture and stuff in there that he’d made from solid stone, but they couldn’t figure out how he’d done it with the tools they knew he had access to (or how he would’ve moved the stuff he’d made once he’d carved it). Notebooks were found, and they contained math that seemed like gibberish, but the results were right there in front of them. Furniture they couldn’t reassemble once taken apart, and odd things like stairways that went up into nowhere (or into walls).

Now, maybe I’m making some of that last bit up, but I seem to recall weirdness beyond the standard “and then one day he was gone,” variety.

Anyone?

Hullo?

Posted on October 14th 2007 in People

Unknown Origins – The Covers Show

3 Comments »

Another show?  In LESS than 45 days?  What up with THAT?

Duncan was nice enough to join us for another one, and we were a little more wired (read: we’ve had a few) this time around.

Covers show.  Check it.

Via this link right here.
{Or put our RSS feed address into iTunes, and let it download automatically for ya. }

1 – Talkybit 1

2 – Toxic – Mark Ronson F. Tiggers

3 – Three Is A Magic Number – Blind Melon

4 – Love For Sale – Fine Young Cannibals

5 – Talkybit 2

6 – Heartbeats – Jose Gonzalez

7 – Hallelujah – Jeff Buckley

8 – Don’t Fear The Reaper – Jenny Pinkertone And The Bluetones

9 – Talkybit 3

10 – Happiness Is A Warm Gun – Breeders

11 – I Will Survive – Cake

12 – Love Will Tear Us Apart – Mainsqueeze Accordion Orchestra

13 – Talkybit 4

14 – Rhinestone Cowboy – Radiohead

15 – Crazy – A Random Find On Seeqpod

16 – Stairway To Heaven – Dread Zeppelin

17 – Talkybit 5

18 – Human Behaviour – Decemberists

19 – Kiss – Age Of Chance

20 – Mission Impossible Theme – The Meatmen

Posted on September 26th 2007 in Friends, Music, People, Podcast

Unknown Origins Podcast Episode 11

2 Comments »

Here ya go.

 

1 – Meet Me – Nora Smith-Hisler

2 – Talkybit 1

3 – Oh My God – Mark Ronson F. Lily Allen

4 – California – Marlena Shaw

5 – Track 24 Off Duncan’s Cousins Hip Hop Compilation – Guy of the Hip Hop Genre

6 – Talkybit 2

7 – Ultimate – Gogol Bordello

8 – Purple – King Kooba Meets DJ P-Trix

9 – Can’t Stop Talking – Betty Hutton

10 – Talkybit 3

11 – Nature Of The Experiment – Tokyo Police Club

12 – Goldrush – Yello

13 – Track 4 Off Duncans Cousins Hip Hop Compilation – A Series of Samples from Other Songs That Have Been Strung Together to Make One Song in It’s Own Right

14 – Talkybit 4

15 – Kinetic Stereo Kids – Barefoot In The Rain

16 – How You Sell Soul to A Soulless People Who Sold Their Soul – Public Enemy

17 – Fantastic Plastic Machine – Theme Of Luxury

18 – PiAno – Richard T. Hatch Says Round Evry Corner

19 – Talkybit 5

20 – Dead from the Waist Down – Catatonia

21 – Strma A Uzka – Susuma Yokota

22 – Once in a Lifetime – Wolfsheim

Posted on September 20th 2007 in Friends, General, Music, People, Podcast
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