Author: grid

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The “Whirly-wind” explained

This weekend, while florence and I visited her (our) friends Sharon and Brad (and their lovely kids), I played around some with their Whirly-Wind. By the Whirly-Wind I mean the tube thing that you spin around and it makes that howling noise. I only call it a Whirly-Wind, because that’s what the Weakerthans call it in their liner notes.

Which brings me to the Weakerthans song that I mentioned to Brad at some point this weekend. It’s called “Elegy for Elsabit”, and is on their Left and Leaving album.

While searching online for what to call the “Whirly-Wind”, I discovered this lovely explanation for how the Whirly works. Enjoy!

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Prince Caspian life captions

I am re-reading Prince Caspian, (second in C.S. Lewis’ Narnia series), before the movie opens this weekend. (We actually have sneak-preview tickets for Thursday.)

This morning on the bus, a cute girl sitting next to me asked me if I was re-reading it before the movie, and I acknowledged that yes, I hadn’t read it since high school. We exchanged a few more words before she then got off the bus.

But it occurred to me after that I was almost embarrassed admitting that I was reading it. I actually thought the girl was cuter before she said “It’s so good.” because it immediately made me wonder if the girl was into the books because she’s some religious nutjob.

This is, oddly enough, my fifth time experiencing this book. It was read to me when I was a kid, before I could read, and also happens to be one of the first things I read on my own, around preschool, I believe. I read it again sometime around fifth or sixth grade, and again in high school (when I HATED it because I couldn’t look past all the christian allegories). I actually may have only read the first book that last time, which would make this only my fourth reading of Prince Caspian. I can’t quite remember.

Apparently Prince Caspian in the movie is played by Ben Barnes, who is or was in a boy band called Hyrise.

Here is an interesting review/explaination of the book Planet Narnia’s take on Prince Caspian. Planet Narnia is a book written with the premise that each of the narnia books is about a different planet in our solar system.

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art, poetry, podcasts and porn

Well, first of all, I’ve been meaning to link to this video of an interview with my brother john since it was posted (last saturday?) over at the walker’s teen website/blog. His site has been getting a lot of traffic this week as a result, although it looks like a lot of it is coming from this woostercollective.com post about it rather than the walker.

While I was trolling the wooster collective looking for the link to brokencrow.com, I found the art of one Zak Smith, who created this incredible painting called 100 Girls and 100 Octopuses back in 2005. (Note, that link is NSFW, though it is totally awesome, and you should click on it anyway. Further note that Zak Smith also goes by the monkier Zak Sabbath.)

This month’s poem-a-day hasn’t been going as prolifically as I’d planned, although I’ve definitely been writing (and reading) more poetry this last month than has been usual the last couple of years. I’ve been really having to force it out when inspiration just isn’t forthcoming. Yesterday, for example, I just riffed on my mindblurbs page (you’ll have to search for the date “4.22.8”, since mindblurbs don’t have permalinks) on each of the major topics in this fascinating youtube video I found of a talk by Marissa Mayer. She’s apparently a google high-mucky-muck of some sort.

Finally, yesterday also marks my first foray into the land of podcasting. Jason, Mike, Florence and I sat around for about an hour to create the first ReadComics.org podcast. If you do end up listening to it, I’d love to hear any feedback you might have about any aspect of this dubious operation.

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Fire Playlist

Our office building had a fire today. We’re all back in the office and fine now. Here’s the playlist:

Prodigy – Firestarteer
Prodigy – Fuel My Fire
The Doors – Light My Fire
Semisonic – Down In Flames
Jimi Hendrix – Fire
Ash – Burn Baby Burn
ARKARNA – House On Fire
Talking Heads – Burning Down The House
McLachlan, Sarah – Into The Fire
Nirvana – Lake of Fire
Social Distortion – Ring Of Fire
Talking Heads – Love: Building On Fire
The Clientele – House on Fire
U2 – The Unforgettable Fire
M83 – Don’t Save Us From the Flames
The Wiseguys – Face The Flames
Vast – Flames
Daft Punk – Burnin’
M83 – Let Men Burn Stars

Feel free to add your favorite fire songs in the comments!

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Tetrisphere soundtrack by Neil Voss

Last night I was reminded of my fruitless search (back in 2002, I think) for the Tetrisphere soundtrack. Tetrisphere was (and still remains) one of my favorite games of all time. It was released for the N64. Sound for the game was done by this guy Neil D. Voss, I learned at the time, but Nintendo never actually released an official sountrack, even though the game won a “best soundtrack” award from Nintendo Power. Conspicuously the wikipedia link above doesn’t really say what Voss has been up to since then.

Anyway, you can find mp3 rips of the Tetrisphere Soundtrack and The New Tetris (which he also worked on) available at this random Galbadia Hotel site.

Also interesting is this IGN interview with Voss on the making of the Tetrisphere soundtrack (via wikipedia).

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Game you the shirt off my back

So a while back I saw a blog post somewhere (seriously, I have no idea where) that there were tee shirts on sale at target with CDs and games attached to them. So when you buy the tee shirt, you are really buying the game. Since then, I’ve been meaning to get to target to see if I could find any of these.

Today, I found myself in target and bought a couple of these tee shirts. They were on the clearance rack, for $9.99, and not under the sign that said “Wear it & play it.”, which is (I think, maybe?) the name of the game company, but was definitely about the shirts. (I even asked an unhelpful employee, who had no idea what I was talking about when I asked her about shirts with CDs attached to them.)

Anyway, then just a bit ago I was surfing around while writing a blog post about the new Transhuman comic book over at readcomics.org and found myself at expertologist.net (because Chris Lamb had also written a blog post about Transhuman), and he linked to this Gamasutra article about rapid prototyping written by… you guessed it, some of the folks behind the tee shirts. The article is incredibly interesting and well worth a read.

As a side note, I have downloaded and am trying out PMOG (the Passively Multiplayer Online Game)… it’s interesting so far… I’m tempted to turn this blog post into my first “Mission”.

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I <3 last.fm

I’ve been using last.fm since it was audioscrobbler, and they just keep making it better. I really feel like this kind of open API driven data collection is the future of all consumer industries… not just the music industry.

Last.fm just launched http://build.last.fm/, a sweet-ass showcase of all the awesome stuff that can be done with last.fm’s data. Just browsing for a few minutes, I found a script that will generate my personal cloud of musical recommendations. Here’s mine:

Air Andrew Bird Azure Ray Boards of Canada Bright Eyes Broadcast Broken Social Scene Built to Spill Cat Power Death Cab for Cutie Dntel Efterklang Elliott Smith Eluvium Emiliana Torrini Erlend Øye Explosions in the Sky Feist Flunk Fridge Frou Frou Goldfrapp Groove Armada ISAN Junior Boys Lamb M. Ward Manitoba Mogwai Ms. John Soda Múm Okkervil River Orbital Pinback Stereolab Sufjan Stevens Telefon Tel Aviv The Album Leaf The Appleseed Cast The Books The Boy Least Likely To The Fiery Furnaces The Mountain Goats The Octopus Project The Unicorns Thievery Corporation Ugly Casanova Wilco Zero 7 of Montreal

I think this list is split about 50/50 artists I’ve heard of (and in many cases already own and listen to — I have all of AIR’s albums, for instance), and artists I’ve never heard of… maybe I’ll do a more in-depth analysis later if I have time.

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Poetry month… day two

Who knows if this will last, but I’ve decided to try and read and write at least a poem a day this month. This has given me an excuse to finally dig into The Making of a Poem, which I have had sitting on the bottom of a stack of books on my nightside stand. I plowed through the first poem in bleary-eyed sleepiness, mistakenly attributing it to Mark Strand before realizing it was actually by just the beginning of his essay “On Becoming a Poet”, and was actually by Archibald MacLeish. Anyway, I have a feeling this book will help me find some great poetry quotes for my collection. Like this one, from the end of Strand’s essay:

A poem is a place where the conditions of beyondness and withinness are made palpable, where to imagine is to feel what it is like to be. It allows us to have the life we are denied because we are too busy living. Even more paradoxically, a poem permits us to live in ourselves as if we were just out of reach of ourselves.

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Today is…

…the 2 year anniversary of the day that florence and I met.
…the first day of national poetry month.
…April Fools day.
…the day I upgraded to livingtech.net to WordPress 2.5.
…the first day… of the rest of my life.
…nothing special.
…the most special day EVER.
…getting old already.
…more than half over.
…a clusterfuck of ellipses.
…just another word that means time has passed and our lives are ceaselessly marching into the future regardless of hesitation or observation or introspection.
…beautiful.

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Why Postel’s Law is awesome

Caveat: Web standards are good. Everyone knows this. Without standards we’d have anarchy, or anyway we’d be stuck in the late 90s, trying to implement as many versions of our webpages as there are browsers. In my opinion, this does not at all mean that Postel’s law is wrong.

Be conservative in what you send, liberal in what you accept.

Lets start by taking a step back. What made the internet into the thing it is today? What makes it so appealing for so many people, all over the world? I’m willing to venture some of these things had something to do with it: free content, diversity of content, breadth or scope of content, and ease of access to that content. The internet is SO amazing because it is so diverse, and so immense, and so incredibly huge.

Sure, technology is cool. I personally find all the latest trends in programming to be really cool. But the technology that runs the internet is just one very narrow slice of content. It’s no lie: Content is king.

Now why is the internet so huge? How come there is so much content? Well, the answer to that is Postel’s law. Or rather, the answer to that is that early browser developers adopted Postel’s law. Because they made it easy enough to put stuff on the internet that pretty much anybody can do it. And they did do it! And that’s why the internet is so fucking awesome!

Can you imagine how much more frustrating web content creation would be if you saw errors every time you fucked up some html? Yes, for those of us who are web development professionals, it can occasionally be frustrating when the browser doesn’t tell you what you’re doing wrong… but this is an argument for better debugging tools, not for stricter html. I mean, do you really think debugging should be turned on by default? Hell fucking no!!! I know I laugh whenever I see backend error messages on a webpage. Fucking amateurs!

So IMHO it’s only fitting that each new version of a browser, or each new version of a web standard brings with it new pains and frustrations for those of us in the web development profession. After all, it’s our job to make sure this stuff works… We get paid the big bucks for those pixel perfect designs!

But if the browser developers are doing their jobs right (and damn straight the standards people better be doing their jobs right), content creation should only ever get easier. After all, it’s what makes the interweb such an amazingly awesome thing.