Posts categorized “Links”.

Here are some interesting things I’ve found around teh intarwebs in the past few weeks that never made it into my blog here… until now (I’m pretty sure most of ‘em made it onto Facebook or Twitter, though).

OCTOCAM

If you ever, ever want to know what an octopus is doing right this very second, Oregon State University’s Hatfield Marine Science Center has installed a camera in the tank of their resident 40-pound Pacific octopus, Deriq.

It is for some reason very enjoyable and relaxing to watch Deriq meander around in his tank.

ALT/1977: WE ARE NOT TIME-TRAVELERS

Artist Alex Varanese has imagined what it would look like if someone from today went back in time and re-created today’s modern electronics—cell phone, laptop, hand-held video game system, mp3 player—using the design aesthetics of 1977.

The results are absolutely fan-frikkin’-tastic.

I was born in 1977, so I completely remember this style of design. Y’all have no idea how much I miss high technology that had a faux-woodgrain finish. Glorious.

EDWARD CULLEN TAMPON CASE

Etsy crafter and all-around awexome human being Taisha McGee made the one piece of merchandise that no Twilight fan should be without.

The product description speaks for itself:

Bella’s most useful accessory. Case is 5.5″ by 2″ and holds two average sized tampons. Edward’s face is sparkly. Tampons not included.

RIVER TAM AND THE FIREFLIES

Holy eff but that is so freakin’ adorable. This is an actual album sleeve that artist Joebot made for a gallery show (happens on July 9th).

But the really cool thing is that you can purchase a print of this picture at his Etsy shop as a gift to send to me! Joebot has some other really cool prints as well, like ones of the Nintendo princesses (and Samus).

AT-AT DAY AFTERNOON

An absolutely adorable short film with seamless special effects animation. Very well done.

THE WORLD’S ONLY NEWSPAPER

This is a fascinating collection of still frames and clips of people reading newspapers in dozens of films and television shows. The exact same newspaper each time. Going back decades. It looks like this:

It’s actually kind of astonishing how wide-spread this newspaper really is.

AQUATIC VIDEOS

Here are a couple of videos of aquatic awesomeness:

WATERMELON TURTLE

This extravagantly cute melon bowl is from my link-of-the month, Host-It Notes.

There are all sorts of other darling little foodstuffs at Host-It Notes, like sheep cupcakes, mushroom radishes, and frosting bees!

That’s about it for now.

I like twitter for interactions like these. You see, Wil Wheaton’s basically-fully-grown son Ryan has an amusing habit of sneaking his own tweets into Wil’s account when Wil isn’t paying attention. As Wil explains:

We play this game where he tries to hijack my Twitter account when he comes home … which he is currently winning by a VERY wide margin. ¹

So a few weeks ago during a rather regular day of tweeting from Wil, we suddenly get this:

Hey Ryan is the best!
6:29 PM May 31st via Twitter for Android²

Me: DAMMIT!
Ryan (slowly, is if to a child): What did we learn?
Me: rassum frassum rassa…
6:38 PM May 31st via Twitter for Android³

And then, a few minutes later…

Seriously Wil…. Ryan is amazing.
6:52 PM May 31st via Twitter for iPhone⁴

SON OF A!
6:57 PM May 31st via Twitter for Android⁵

And then again just last week:

Ryan sure is awesome. Yes he is.
Sun Jun 13 2010 19:06:16 (Pacific Daylight Time) via web⁶

@wilw DAMMIT RYAN! I’m out at the barbecue, making *YOUR* dinner! rassum frassum sassum …
Sun Jun 13 2010 19:15:56 (Pacific Daylight Time) via web⁷

I always look forward to these Ryan hijackings. And besides which, Wil Wheaton is one of the more entertaining celebrity tweeters out there, so follow him if’n ye ain’t already (though ye probably already are).

(sources: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 )

Link of the Month:
Dinerwood
A review blog for all of the Los Angeles area’s best and worst diners, breakfast joints and coffee shops. Established May 2007. Written by my pal Mike T., this blog is frequently funny and always honest. Mike has a real love of good diners and good coffee, and this is always an entertaining (and informative if you’re ever in the outskirts of L.A.) blog to read.

Album of the Month:
Three Ninjas is Smarter Than a Lettuce
The 2nd full-length album from nerdcore maestro Three Ninjas shows remarkable technical mastery. Three Ninjas’s sampledelica style is very original and unexpected, as is his vocal style which hovers between spoken-word (Red Underwears) and rhythmically-dynamic hip-hop (Five Finger Discount). There are some problems with inconsistent mixing—the vocals in some songs are mixed too low to be easily deciphered, which is a shame when the nerdcore lyrics are so good, and the overall volume changes from song to song making it so that you have to manually adjust it to keep them all at the same level—making it seem more like a song collection than a coherent album. But the songs cover a huge range, from intensely personal hip-hop songs to fully-sung love songs to incredibly fun and silly songs (hello, Some Li’l Dude). Highly recommended.

DVD of the Month:
Farscape: The Complete Series
This was an easy choice for my DVD of the month considering that it has consumed basically ALL OF MY FREE TIME since I got the DVD set for my birfday. I devoured all 88 episodes in less than a month. This late, great Sci-Fi series about a test pilot/scientist who gets shot through a wormhole to a distant part of the galaxy succeeds, like most great shows, on the strength of its core characters. It is not without its problems—there were far too many episodes about some something-or-other damaging the ship and threatening to kill them all (especially in the final season, where they seemed really out of place)—but it is an incredibly compelling, dramatic, and wrlyly funny TV show. Don’t forget to watch the movie that serves as the series finale!

My birfday was on Thursday, and for a present my ever-loving wife gave me a ticket to w00stock 2.0 at the Moore Theatre in downtown Seattle. Not coincidentally, it was @SphinxAkashaa’s birfday last month, and his ever-loving wife also gave him a ticket to w00tstock 2.0 at the Moore Theatre in downtown Seattle. So the two of us (our wives had to work and stay home with a baby, respectively) went and saw the show last night.

It was lots of good.

Let me just try to do a quick run-down of the many, many things that happened at the show. This probably won’t be in order at all, but oh well:

The show was run from a Macbook, and the desktop was visible on a giant screen in the background throughout basically the entire show (unless they were showing something else on the screen). You would actually see the mouse cursor double-click on the next section of the show to start it in Quicktime, which would then go fullscreen. The background of the desktop was Ceiling Cat:

Paul & Storm did their “Opening Band” song.

Canadian sketch comedy troupe LoadingReadyRun did a humorous time-travel reading, then showed two sketches on the big screen. One was only okay—about superheroes who all have similar emblems so get confused as to whom the signal in the sky is summoning. The other one—about a guy who obsessively installs Linux in EVERYTHING—was really very funny.

Molly Lewis performed four songs: the three-movement one about the assassination of Lincoln, a brand-new one that didn’t have complete lyrics about wanting to have Stephen Fry’s baby, the one about breaking up with Wikipedia, and then a “Two Girls, One Uke” version of “Conjunction Junction” with Presidents of the United States of America drummer Jason Finn backing them up, and a special surprise to perform the spoken-word segment of the song. Don’t take my word for it, though; I recorded it:

Xbox Live banhammer Stephen “Stepto” Toulouse gave a humorous reading about the process of banning people from the Xbox Live service. He gave it in the style of a pious religious reading, with Paul & Storm backing him up as chanting monks.

Two guys from Loan Shark Games are making a sequential puzzle video, and they’re showing a different piece of it during each of the next few w00tstocks, starting with this one. It was a funny video that involved one guy juggling some very specific objects. Then they did a live plate spinning trick. The climax of the trick was a hand holding a stick on top of which was a spinning tray, on top of which was a really long pole (probably four or five feet), on top of which was a spinning plate. Very impressive.

Wil Wheaton gave a reading from his book, The Happiest Days of Our Lives, about the first time he went and saw the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Interesting side-fact: I’ve never seen it, and have absolutely no desire ever to do so. It sounds like a dreadful time to me. But it was a well-written and well-performed reading, with again Paul & Storm backing him up with snippets of songs where appropriate.

MC Frontalot did a set. It was really hard to understand his lyrics; I think a combination of mic volume and speaker placement made it so that where I was sitting was just not the best place acoustically. But man, what energy! Very entertaining.

Hank Green performed a couple of his nerdy songs, about particle physics and evolutionary biology. And one about Star Trek: TNG, which he said he never imagined he’d be performing in front of one of the cast members.

Adam Savage of Mythbusters fame gave a very funny talk that started with revealing his geek street cred about how he got his first kiss from a girl he met playing Dungeons & Dragons at the public library. He then told funny behind-the-scenes stories about Mythbusters, and show lots of in-depth clips from an upcoming episode. He was very funny and engaging.

Paul & Storm closed out the show with a set. There wasn’t anything new in it, and I’ve (strangely enough) now seen them three times within the last nine months or so, but they’re still very entertaining. They brought Wil, Adam, and Jason out to do the “Pirate’s Wife’s Lament” with all the Arrrs.

There were a series of running audio and video gags throughout the show between performers. One of them was “A Moment with Wil,” wherein We’d spend a few minutes watching Wil do something, like wear a necktie or drink a Guinness or eat a pizza. A funny gag in those series of videos was that the episode numbers quickly jumped from three to seven to fourteen. Then there were a series of audio clips of George Takei singing various songs that would end whenever he said, “Fire,” which would be followed by phaser and explosion sound effects. Really hilarious stuff. They also showed the Academy Award Winning Film trailer and did a funny bit with the Trololololo song when they came back from intermission.

I bought the official w00tstock 2.0 t-shirt and it came with a free matching poster! Looks like this:

The whole show lasted just a few minutes over four hours (including intermission). Good times. I only took five photos during the whole show, and here they are (click for larger):

Link of the Month:
Axe Cop
A remarkable collaboration: This webcomic is illustrated by professional comic book artist Ethan Nicolle. It is written, however, by his 5-year-old brother Malachai. As such, the stories have all the coherence and logic you would expect from a 5-year-old, but with excellently-drawn illustrations, which just makes the story seem even stranger and absolutely 100% fall-down hilarious. Must be experienced to be believed.

Album of the Month:
Open Mike Eagle: Unapologetic Art Rap
I’ve never done this before: This album is so good, I’m making it my Album of the Month before it’s even been officially released (I got an advance copy a couple weeks ago) on 5/11. The lyrics of this album are intelligent, witty, funny, and about actually interesting subjects. Mike is not afraid to sound smart. He has a fantastic flow, which is easy and relaxed without sounding at all lazy. It’s almost conversational, like you’re having fascinating discussions with a good friend who really knows what he’s talking about without sounding haughty or snooty about it. And above all that, it’s damnably catchy. An incredibly confident and high-quality debut album. Take a look & listen:

Book of the Month:
Memories of the Future Volume 1 by Wil Wheaton
Wil Wheaton takes an irreverent and hilariously snarky look back at the firsty half of the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation with amusingly embellished synopses, behind-the-scene recollections, and very honest reviews of what was, honestly, not a very good season of television. Not a tell-all book at all, the results are more like sitting around watching the episodes with Wil with him shaking his head and saying, “I can’t believe they wrote that,” or getting excited and going, “That was actually pretty cool!” It’s a funny and fun read—I just wish it could have been the whole season instead of just the first half.