Link of the Month:
Sin Titulo
Sin Titulo (”Without Title”) is a very absorbing and fascinating urban fantasy/horror webcomic by Cameron Stewart. Started in 1997, it is now over 100 pages long, and has still only scratched the surface of its central mystery. Don’t believe me that it’s worth reading? Well, it just won an incredibly prestigious Eisner Award for “Best Digital Comic 2010.” Read it from the beginning; it is very rewarding.

Album of the Month:
Locust Street Taxi – Mr. Brown
This latest release from Locust Street Taxi is by far their most polished album. The production values are fantastic but not in a way that draws attention to itself. Still at the forefront are the jazz/swing/pop/ska rhythms, the flashy brass, and the quirky and often funny lyrics though which Locust Street Taxi has garnered quite a bit of a following. Standout tracks on the album include (but are not limited to) “Stuff,” “Mango,” and “Get Back Home.”

DVD of the Month:
Look Around You: Season 1
My all-time favorite parody of late-1970s and early-1980s British educational films and school programs. It succeeds because it strikes the perfect balance of being extremely accurate to its influences (right down to the horrible synthesizer music and authentic-looking film stock) as well as being absolute nonsense. I absolutely adore it. This is parody done 100% correctly.

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.

Link of the Month:
Host-It Notes
You may know that Carrie & I, on the occasions that we do host shindigs, like to go the extra mile to really make ‘em something. Host-It Notes is a fantastic aggregator blog that links to all sorts of fantastic tips, tricks, and ideas for making your next gathering or hootenanny (just a little bit of hoot and a whole lotta nanny) be a little bit more memorable. Eat your heart out, Martha.

Album of the Month:
Bitter:Sweet – Drama
I’m really digging Bitter:Sweet. I don’t know exactly how to categorize this duo. Electro-lounge? Downbeat-jazz-groove? I dunno. I like it a lot because it sounds like it should be the soundtrack to an old-school spy movie, which, as you might know, is one of my favorite genres of both film and music. This 2008 album is chock-full of groovy, smoove, horn-driven, slinky, spy-sounding songs. I likes it.

DVD of the Month:
Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths
Probably my favorite of the post-JLU DC Animated films, Crisis on Two Earths is surprisingly well done and entertaining. It’s the story of an alternate-universe Earth where the analogues of the Justice League are members of the villainous Crime Syndicate. A good Lex Luthor finds his way to the Justice League’s Earth and recruits them to help free his universe from their tyrannical grip. I really appreciated the way the filmmakers just assume that if you’re watching this movie then you’re already familair with the main members of the Justice League, so there’s no need for lengthy “get-to-know” sequences for them. By far the highlight of the movie is James Woods as the completely absolutely nihilistic Batman analogue, Owlman.

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 )

Dinerwood

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!

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):

Axe Cop

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.

When I put on a shirt earlier in the day (as I am known to do), I unthinkingly put on my Angry Beef shirt, which ended up being kinda funny because when we were waiting outside Chop Suey, Three Ninjas and NHP came walking over with Open Mike Eagle, and I got to introduce myself as, “Chris, though you may know me as @angrybeef,” while pointing at my shirt. Mike Eagle seemed to get a kick outta that, and thanked me for tweeting and posting about the show.

There were a bunch of performers at the show. My favorites were Open Mike Eagle, Nocando, and Dumbfoundead. Dumbfoundead was really funny. For one, he was drunk off his rocker. Just smashed. But it just made him extra goofy; he could still perform excellently, he was just more prone to giggle. Very entertaining.

Open Mike Eagle did a great set, and during it two especially awesome things happened. Take a wook:

I know those guys! I’ve known one of them since kindergarten!

Nocando closed out the night with another excellent set. I must give “mad props” to DJ Zo (in the background of both of those videos), who worked the music for like four or five hours straight. He was very good.

Now I’m going to digress with some observations about Seattle Indie Hip-Hop crowds:

Seattle tends to be a little unusual in that often when Seattleites go to see a show, they go to watch the performers perform. That’s why they’re there, after all. I know this first hand from my 17 years as an improviser. If a performer asks too much of the audience, they’re going to get weary. If there are too many make-some-noises or too many put-your-hand-in-the-airs, the Seattle crowd is going to start thinking, “Why did I pay to come see this guy if they’re just going to have me do all of the work?”

A lot of times this attitude really throws out-of-towners for a loop. They often expect that if the crowd is just there to have a good time. Well, yes and no. The crowd is there to watch you perform your music or (if they don’t know who you are) to see if they like your stuff. If you want a Seattle crowd to get involved, you’re going to have to earn it by putting on an entertaining and stimulating show. They’ll give you all the noise and participation you want once they know that you’re worth it, but if you try to force it out of them then they’re going to feel put-upon and badgered and retreat into their shells.

If you come out guns blazin’ and you’re not getting the response you expected, back off and gauge the crowd. They might really be enjoying your show, just in a non-participatory way. Warm them up by being entertaining and engaging and (this is very important to a Seattle crowd) funny. Once they see that you’re a good guy, they’ll be much more willing to participate. Or, y’know, don’t even worry about the audience participation. Just put on a great show and they’ll like you.

Seattleites also don’t believe in bravado. You can’t just come out and say that you’re the best, ’cause a Seattle crowd will just cross its arms and say, “Oh, yeah? Prove it.” Attitude don’t mean shit to Seattleites. They’ll like you for your skills.

But anyway. I’m back from my digression. I picked up Three Ninjas’, Nocando’s and Dumbfoundead’s CDs (I already had Open Mike Eagle’s), and got home around 2:00 in the AM. I got to chat a little with Open Mike Eagle, and he’s a really nice guy. I’ll definitely try to catch him when he comes ’round again. I played his CD for my wife while we were driving around yesterday, and she really enjoyed it and said she might like to catch him next time as well.

I think that’s a splendid idea. I think everyone should catch Mike next time he’s in town. He’s definitely worth it.

To tide yourselves over, please indulge in Super Mario Crossover, a version of Super Mario Bros. where you can play as Mario, Link, Simon Belmont, Bill (from Contra), Samus Aran, and Mega Man. Yes, it is actually as awesome as it sounds. Just click the image:

(via Newgrounds)

Just a couple weeks ago a high-ranking Iranian cleric gave a dire warning that linked immodestly-dressed women with earthquakes:

“Many women who do not dress modestly … lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which (consequently) increases earthquakes.” (source)

Basically, if women show off their cleavage, there’s a-gonna be some earth a-quakin’.

Well, a certain Jennifer McCreight (pronounced Crite not Crate), a well-respected skeptic blogger (her blog is Blag Hag), thought that sounded a little fishy, and decided that maybe there should be some scientific testing done to see whether or not boobs equaled earthquakes.

“On Monday, April 26th, I will wear the most cleavage-showing shirt I own. Yes, the one usually reserved for a night on the town. I encourage other female skeptics to join me and embrace the supposed supernatural power of their breasts. Or short shorts, if that’s your preferred form of immodesty.” (source)

That’s right. She tried to see if she could cause a BOOBQUAKE.

The post on her website was done mostly in jest to point out just how ridiculous the idea of causation between method of dress and natural disasters was. But it took off like wildfire. The idea of trying to cause a Boobquake tore through the blogosphere, through Twitter, and through Facebook. Soon regular media started to pick up on it. CNN, WGN Morning News, BBC, Canada AM, and more. The idea of showing off some skin in the name of science turned out to be incredibly popular.

So Monday the 26th arrived, and as promised Ms. McCreight wore what she jokingly called a “horribly scandalous” outfit (source):

So did quite a lot of other people, if Twitter is any indication. Just look at the Boobquake hashtag. McCreight even got interviewed on CNN about it. It was covered on BBC, CBC, FOX… but most excitedly for her, a humorous segment appeared on The Colbert Report:

But what of the results? Well, McCreight spent all of Boobquake Day gathering as much data on earthquakes as possible, and in the end it turned out there wasn’t any statistically significant deviation in worldwide earthquake activity on Monday the 26th.

Even though there were several problems with the scientificity of the experiment (control group, quantitative properties of “immodesty,” length of study, etc.), it appears that boobs don’t cause earthquakes. They can get you on The Colbert Report, though!

As an epilogue, I feel somewhat tangentially connected to Ms. McCreight because once she rode in @jeffthefish’s car. So good for her! You go, girl!