Flexanimous

The fair is amazing.

Thu, 16 Oct 2008 22:25:27 -0500

Highlights:
Something Not Even at the Fair:
Hour before I went, spent wandering around suburbia with a friend. We trampolined, talked, and watched people be bad at tennis. It was a public park though, I wouldn’t expect pros. Not even a linesman. And it wasn’t anything like Mario Tennis.
Foil Hats and Glowsticks:
We had them. Every stand we passed, the exchange went like this:
“Trying to protect yourselves from the Martians?”
“You’re so goddamned clever!” (NB: I was rude.)
Friend from the park ruined her hat on the swings. Seemed to freak her out. Infighting, a camel, a goat, and more infighting ruined a majority of the hats. That and the fact that they were made out of foil.
The Swingy Boat:
Intense. Got over the fright on the second or third time. Never the nausea.
The Food:
Had a turkey leg. It was about the size of a lamb shank. Tasted like something bizarre. A smoked ham, it was remarked.Had half a funnel cake with apples, split with the friend from the park. This was before we went on the swingy boat. Prices were exorbitant. Eight dollars for the turkey, six (went halvsies on it) for the funnel cake, three for a squirt the clown, two for a thing that freaked me out successfully (some spinning thing intended to fuck my reference frame; it succeeded wildly), and three for water. I have an unaccounted-for four dollars. This is distressing, but not really, because the fair is a money-trap I was all too happy to walk into.

Also, they had a goat and some sort of weird cancer yak. Check it out.

boredintheburbs: Truly epic.

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 17:43:31 -0500

boredintheburbs:

Truly epic.

I went to a lecture today.

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 22:46:00 -0500

~~It was interesting, to say the least. I took notes, and I’ll give you a more detailed description of the goings-on there tomorrow, when I’m not about to collapse of exhaustion and stress.~~

Let’s make that not tomorrow. I don’t feel like posting.

I'm ludicrously tired

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 20:02:53 -0500

But I have things to do yet.

By Friday, I must:
Complete 1/2 of a monstrous Calculus assignment. I feel safe calling it monstrous, there’s over 100 goddamn problems in the thing, but I can do these problems, which is a welcome change from last year’s Calculus experience.

And piece together a Power Point on American Realism, which is the movement Mark Twain and the Ashcan School and those dudes were totally a part of, man. Piecing this Power Point thing together, however, requires three other people to send me information.

By tomorrow I must:
Do like 5 problems in Physics involving vectors or something. Equations + interest = completion.

A pre-test in Biolology, and stuff involving a lab in an interactive notebook I’m doing a bad job of keeping up with.

A Review

Mon, 08 Sep 2008 22:02:13 -0500

I wrote a review for Moab is My Washpot, Stephen Fry’s autobiography, for the school newspaper. Here it is.

Moab is my Washpot has an article on Wikipedia, like a lot of other things that exist in the physical plane. However, unlike many of its companions, Wikipedians have decided to devote roughly a third of the article to the title. It is a strange title, one of the stranger ones I am liable to come across, since part of a verse in Psalms isn’t something I will come across, normally.

Now, the book is about Stephen Fry, who I am willing to bet you have not heard of. He exists in a strange level of stardom, being a good friend and frequent collaborator to Hugh Laurie, who plays Dr. House on a show of (roughly) the same name. They had a T.V. show together in the 90s and everything—called A Bit of Fry and Laurie. Extremely funny, and more or less available on YouTube, as luck would have it.

It was thanks to these snippets on YouTube actually drew me into Stephen Fry—they convinced me that he was interesting—the man in the sketches radiates funny and has a cut-glass accent, and for me, that merits investigation.
I was directed to his autobiography by Internet friends—the book covers the first half of his life at the time of writing, although 11 years have passed since publishing.

So, why would you read about this relatively obscure comedian?

Stephen Fry narrates it. That one fact should be compelling enough to get you to go to the bookstore and request it. I say this because Fry has an uncanny wit and a way with words that makes almost every new character and object a pleasure to read about.

This is not to say Stephen Fry is a morally excellent person. He does horrible things throughout the book, and by the end, most analyses would depict him as being a horrible person who got into a good college.

Fry seems to have noted that—this is the problem he tackles as narrator, presenting himself honestly without coming off as a horrible person—this is done in two ways. His first tool is charm. Charm is employed liberally, and well. The second is his honesty. He admits readily to his having done horrible things (at one point, I recall him having stolen an old woman’s pension check). He’s frank with himself—and this makes him a person, even when he’s at his worst, who you identify as being fundamentally decent—I am prepared to call that a great accomplishment.

This sounds very superlative, but really, Stephen Fry has earned my admiration, if only for this book, the rest of his career ignored. The book is really disarming in that way. It is friendly and conversational, and it has no qualms or issues defending any stance it takes, it is personal.

Really, that is this book’s greatest merit—it is extremely personal. It’s witty, it’s warm and you feel like you’re sharing a story with the man.

I do, however, have a complaint with the book—it doesn’t tell about his Cambridge days, it cuts off shortly after he’s admitted into college. He’s got his life back on track, and I assume (reasonably) that his life afterwards has led to his writing the book, unfortunately that isn’t covered.

With all of that said, I give this book:
5/5 Dark Magicians

BUBBLES

Mon, 08 Sep 2008 17:17:39 -0500

BUBBLES: Bubble tanks is endowed with win in many, many ways.

By Yann Tiersen, it’s called La Rade, which I am told...

Sat, 06 Sep 2008 16:58:00 -0500

By Yann Tiersen, it’s called La Rade, which I am told means the raid, unremarkably.

It’s a good song, although I can’t say much for the lyrics other than they make the song sound pretty. It’s from his On Tour album, which I assume was a recording from several live concerts, given the audience and who I think is Yann Tiersen talking to the audience in English(!), but occasionally he breaks into French.

Arachnophilia

Sat, 06 Sep 2008 16:48:11 -0500

Arachnophilia: It’s a pretty fun game, but I haven’t gotten to the Queen Bees yet. It’s pretty hard once the moths and fireflies appear to fuck you over. Still though, addictive.

The F-Stop's Here.

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 20:33:47 -0500

A (slightly edited) conversation I recently had about superheroism:

Me: I think you'd be a good superhero.
Andrew: Worth a shot.
Andrew: What is my power?
Andrew: Or theme, in the case of Batman.
Me: High quality, well-focused portraits of your foes.
Andrew: Ah.
Andrew: Great idea.
Me: Photography, I guess.
Andrew: I could be called...
Andrew: F-Stop.
Andrew: And the catchphrase...
Andrew: Well, you already know.
Andrew: I feel like saying it anyway, actually.
Me: Go ahead.
Andrew: "The F-Stop's Here!"

cubicle17: Is it a sword? Some metal bar attached to the wall?...

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 20:11:04 -0500

cubicle17:

Is it a sword? Some metal bar attached to the wall? Perhaps even a contemporary style clothes hook? Really, it could be anything except what it really is, a faucet.

Holy crap. That’s just plain cool.

Rapidly departing.

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 07:20:37 -0500

The storm is. Almost no rain. Such is a tropical weather event.

There's a depression hanging overhead.

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 19:54:23 -0500

Tropical Depression Gustav should be departing shortly. The storm somehow migrated north and decided to stall over our fair state, which is now soggier.

Much, much soggier, after two days of nonstop rain and high-speed winds (for here) which has put roughly 80000 people out of electricity, my own household having been included in this number.

So… Arkansas is not tropical depression prone. It is landlocked, and the major bodies of water in the state are a large lake, and three rivers, the Red, the Mississippi, and the Arkansas.

So, let’s not say that the Gulf of Mexico ends up throwing its shit over here with regularity. I always figured something like this could happen, but hey, it has, and now it sucks.

So… freaky weather. It really looked like a hurricane thing overhead on the radar. Bizarre happenings, kind of. I mean, two fronts conspiring against my home isn’t uncommon, but tropical weather events aren’t made to tango with them. I would say something like menage a trois, but I’m sure there’s a lot of accents I don’t want to type, and that implies that the air is having sex.

It’s not, I think. It probably can’t, they don’t have those things that let them do that.

Egypt tycoon held for Tamim death

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 20:10:09 -0500

Egypt tycoon held for Tamim death:

Life shouldn’t sound like the plot synopsis for an episode of Monk.

But hey, it does! Crazy.

Hey look it's Chrome.

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 19:37:51 -0500

Yes! Google has a browser, answering a need I had no idea I had. It’s pretty neat, although it doesn’t have AdBlock, and I have no idea how they’ll handle add-ons and such, and it’s rendering this text box strangely, the one I’m posting in, ignoring a large swath of text on the far left until I move the cursor over it with the whole arrow key thing. So, aside from my having no idea how to improve the experience, and the fact that I can’t customize the cool new tab thing manually, it’s pretty awesome. Like Opera and Safari had a baby, and then it got open sourced and removed of the bloat in Opera and the uselessness for everything but text and RSS reading that was Safari. Apparently it treats the tabs and the elements in the tabs as separate processes or something, which lets it crash one tab at a time if things fuck up. All sorts of technical sorcelations were involved, and there was a comic that explains all this drawn by one Scott McCloud, who apparently is into this whole comics on the ‘net thing.

So I give it five out of… seven Googles, since I can’t get the add-ons yet, I don’t know where they’ll be or how to get them either. This is a problem, worth two Googles. Granted, it’s incredibly new, but at least you could hint at how I’m getting these things, whether this thing is actually modular or whatever. I have no clue.

And it doesn’t have an integrated RSS reader! This is madness, where I come from at least (not Sparta, shut up).

The user interface is sleek too, so that’s at least a few Googles, and it’s really crazy fast, so there’s a few more.

Also! It came out today! This is breaking news, from Flexanimous, your one-stop shop for whatever the hell I feel like delivering whenever I feel like it.

Links to sate your curiosity, which must be burning a hole in you:
http://www.google.com/chrome/
http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/index.html

The last link is a McCloud’s comic which basically hurls the browser at you in a form that is almost insultingly easy to get. It’s presented in a way that makes you suspect it, but then again, you were suspecting it from the beginning, I’m sure.

Internet Wasteland

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 13:02:28 -0500

theandrewwest:

I spend a great deal of time on the computer. Less than some unfortunate folks, but it’s surely over the daily quota for the typical sociable human being. I don’t do anything particularly productive online, mostly browsing news portals and niche blogs, but I have grown uncomfortably familiar with the so-called Internet subculture. As much as I consciously avoid the absurd mashups and cut-and-paste jokes, I’ve somehow amassed a metaphorical file cabinet of memes.

This is Internet culture. This is what real time, uncensored, unfiltered communication has wrought; memes and Internet celebrity. It is disappointing that the majority of netizens (to borrow the boardroom-friendly portmanteau) are so concerned with such frivolity.

To illustrate this, I’ll use Tumblr as an example. It’s a fantastic service to be sure, but the “reblog” feature seems to encourage group think to a mind numbing degree. Someone posts a remotely humorous infographic detailing the hierarchy of office politics. It is reblogged. Again. Again. Again. And again. Nothing new is added. After twenty people have posted the same thing, only one of them has said something. This is the equivalent to someone telling a joke at a party, then immediately after, everyone within earshot retelling the same joke, verbatim.

It’s not just the prevalence of recycled content that frustrates me. It’s the overall lack of original thinking. Every other form of mass communication has begun to grow stale; television, radio, glossy magazines. We’re relying on a future of truly democratic media, but if Youtube is any indication of what’s in store…no thnx.

Reblogged for the… irony? For the lulz? Something like that.

electricgecko: Inspired by early dot-matrix printers, the ZUSE...

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 23:22:00 -0500

electricgecko:

Inspired by early dot-matrix printers, the ZUSE concept toaster burns images into toast using a 12×12 grid. Via matthewb.

My thoughts: These guys are awesome. Check out the site, it’s got a movie for the Zuse and other products. They’ve got some fell kitchen daemon and a soldier table. These guys are brilliant.

I should be posting more.

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 01:14:11 -0500

I promise to neglect all of my practically burgeoning readership a bit less.

I recently acquired Modest Mouse’s “We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank”. It’s an album. You might remember them for writing Float On, and performing it, and owning the copyright on it. They did that.

Either way! It’s good. The first song, Dashboard, or March Into the Sea, or whatever it is, is good. It’s the song that is catchy and goes on about how things could have been really worse. I enjoyed that tune quite a bit.

In dork related news, Clannad’s other bonus episode came out with the DVD, and it condenses the arc of the Tomoyo After game, which was more to the likings of the H-game crowd that Clannad didn’t really sate, I think. Maybe she was naked in it? I don’t really know, since I never actually played either game. I’m going on hearsay, by assuming that Clannad, a harem show had no nudity. The show itself came close, but gym outfits tend to. It had less suggestiveness than a more robot-oriented show like Code Geass, so I don’t know where it stands on the perversion scale. I’m hoping the consensus is that it’s more on the heartwarming romance end, since that’s what I got from it, and it made me feel fuzzy inside.

The second season is coming soon, I believe. Which will be good news, I guess.

I am afeared in many many ways of Utah now.

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 22:25:06 -0500

This is amazing.

I mean it. They’ve got this really awesome quote in there, it goes:

Police who have been doing stings in Internet chat rooms for years now are going undercover to catch predators playing interactive games, ranging from Grand Theft Auto to old-fashioned chess and checkers. They’re making arrests.

Which means, sans bullshit, that a bunch of cops are being paid to play GTA and Uno on Live. Sign me up, I want that job. Oh, pretend like I want to meet the random people I play with? Sure. I mean, with a job like that, I would be in a good enough mood to make some friendships posing as a person only slightly younger than I am right now (I’m 16, which is still a molestable age, but not the target age, I think). I would love playing GTA and enforcing the law to be the same things, for once. And occasionally, I get to tell people to go arrest some pedophiles. I can’t be bothered to do it, in this awesome universe, because I am playing GTA, or Uno, or something. Maybe I’m playing Mass Effect or something. And if I join now, I don’t have to spend ages in IRC or some shit pretending to be a little girl or boy. Now I can play pretend (for the enticing/catching thing) and play another, more graphics-intensive game of pretend (because that’s the new pedophile hangout), which I enjoy more.

Maybe it’s like a promotion or something though, maybe Officer Bob spent 5 years catching guys in IRC and cultivating his status on MySpace as a molestable young girl, and long story short, Bob needed a promotion something fierce.

You may be wondering where in the budget these rigs are:

Farnsworth says her office has seized many Xbox machines for investigation and has received training from the maker, Microsoft, on how to extract text messages and other information from them.

From my reading, they’re taking Xboxes, getting the information they’re looking for, and then, presumably, harnessing the fell powers of said Xbox 360s to catch other predators. It’s a self-replicating cycle, and as far as I can tell, Microsoft heartily endorses this cycle. If I can get in on this, then I too shall endorse their tactics. Vigorously.

And another choice quote:

In another case, Kish says, a 10-year-old boy playing the Halo Xbox game got a video message from a man that showed the adult engaged in a sex act.

Which (an unrelated aside: note the phrasing of “the Halo Xbox game” because that is too cool) means that an asshole sent him some fucked up video to a person on his friends list. I mean, that’s pretty awful, but it’s still capable of being played for laughs. There are assholes on Xbox Live, but according to this article, they’re based in Utah. There’s no indication otherwise, so if you live in Utah, watch out. Strange things are happening near the Great Salt Lake.

You know.

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 23:32:04 -0500

Hayate No Gotoku is like Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors, except it’s not. On second thought, that was a stupid thought. And a stupid sentence.

It’s really rather unlike it. There is comedy stemming from errors in this show, but I can’t presume to say it’s like Shakespeare. I mean, the show has robots and talking anthropomorphic tigers, and improbable hair and it also has people playing PSPs. They didn’t have those in the Bard’s time. Crisis Core wasn’t even a thought back then.

I must admit, this show makes anthropomorphism a very flexible concept, as the tiger willfully assumes it depending on the situation—you know, if he needs to maul someone or if he needs to make a joke about how paws make it difficult to press things. And they do make it difficult. Very difficult.

It’s nice to see anthropomorphism portrayed as being as silly as it actually is in a context where it is apparently a reality.

There is a new theme.

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 23:15:28 -0500

And I am excited.