Posts tagged “Google”

Video Game of the Month:

Google Maps Pac-Man
Wha-what!? Starting yesterday, if you’re in Google Maps and you zoom in to a certain magnification, a little box appears next to the “Google Earth” box. It’s very important that you click that box. When you do, the streets you’re viewing will suddenly become overlayed with dots… ghosts will appear… and you’ll be able to play Pac-Man on those streets!

Pac-Man on Capitol Hill!

Album of the Month:

Three Ninjas: The Sadness Will Last Forever
Three Ninjas releases his second full-length old-school country album, and it’s even better than the first (Alcohol & Isolation)! It’s old-timey depressing country songs about drinking and lost loves and horrible lives. There are a couple of cover songs mixed in amongst the originals, but Three Ninjas’s songwriting skills in this genre are so honed that I’d bet you wouldn’t be able to tell me which ones they are (unless you happened to have heard of them already). The music craft has been even more finely-tuned from his previous outings. I don’t wanna call it “polished” because that implies a certain slickness and dullness whereas this album has a very skillful rawness. A “realness” I guess I should say. Listen; it’s good.

TV Show of the Month:

Yo Gabba Gabba!
This is my 17-month-old daughter’s favorite TV show. Sure, it’s a very-little-kids’ show, but Yo Gabba Gabba has a pedigree and a spirit that is sorely lacking from most very-little-kids’ shows. What other show in this genre has musical performances from the likes of Weezer, The Flaming Lips, Erykah Badu, Cornelius, The Shins, and The Roots (just to name a very few), most of which perform original songs written just for this show! Yo Gabba Gabba also has a wry self-awareness of its own ridiculousness that I especially appreciate, particularly with the over-the-top cheerfulness of the host, DJ Lance Rock. Watch (if you can find it) the episode co-starring Jack Black and tell me that I’m wrong. And then watch the “DJ Lance’s Super Music & Toy Room” episode and just marvel at the epic awesomeness that keeps pouring from the screen. TRUST ME.

Today’s Google Doodle is pretty durned awexome:

Google’s Red Doodle

See, it’s the 200th anniversary of the publishing of the 1st edition of the Grimm brothers’ collection of Fairy tales. Which included Little Red Riding Hood.

Anyway, if you haven’t already, click here and enjoy the story of Little Red Riding Hood told entirely with pictures and no dialogue, done in an art style that I absolutely adore (does anyone know how to find the artist credits for these Google Doodles?).

On Monday Google did one of my favorite of recent Google Doodles, this one based on Little Nemo, the old-timey comic strip created by Windsor McCay. You should click this image and enjoy, then come back here for more info:

If you don’t know about Little Nemo, you really should take it upon yourself to get some educamation about him. Here’s some primers:

The Comic Strip:
Little Nemo began as a comic strip at the turn of the 20th century, in which Nemo has a series of short adventures in Slumberland that always end with him waking up in his bed. You can read a whole bunch of these amazingly-drawn strips at the Comic Strip Library here. Here’s an example of one, the famous “Walking Bed” sequence:

Little Nemo: The Walking Bed, 1908

The Animé:
In 1989 there was an animé version of the charachter, Little Nemo Adventures in Slumberland. It unfortunately is not exactly stellar entertainment. There’s some excellent animation, but the screenplay went through too many hands. Eventually the screenplay was co-credited to Chris Columbus, of The Goonies, Home Alone, and Harry Potter fame. The whole movie is actually on YouTube right now, but due to the dubious legality of it, you might not be able to watch it for long:

The Video Game
There was also an excellent and quite difficult NES video game that was released around the time of the movie, called “Little Nemo: The Dream Master.” In it you throw candy into various animals and then climb into them and wear them like pajamas, each one giving you a different ability (frog lets you jump high, mole lets you dig, bee lets you fly, etc.). It’s really a classic of the NES, and you can play it online at NESCafe (again, of dubious legality) right here.

The Songs:
The “Little Nemo: The Dream Master” video game, of course, inspired the opening line of The Crazy Boy Floyds song “Scrambled TV Super.” Wot’s that? You ain’t never heard that song? Well, take a listen:

Yes, that’s right: “Sometimes you crawl into a frog, and wear it like pajamas as you hop along your log.” Pretty sweet, I know.*

And then, of course, rapper Mega Ran wrote a song about the video game that samples the 8-bit music from the game! Take a listen:

It all just keeps going! Little Nemo forevah!

*Full disclosure: I wrote the music for the “Scrambled TV Super” song, so I might be a bit biased.

A while back I started running some Google Adwords ads on my website. Specifically two types: the tall tower ads and the biggest box ads that they offer, and only in visual format (no text-only ads).

I didn’t do this to make money. I have no illusions on that. I’m pretty sure I couldn’t make more than $5 or $6 a year running ads on thisischris.com. No, I did it as an experiment…
More… »

Perhaps the coolest thing Google has ever done:

So you may have noticed (unless you’re reading this via a feed reader) that there are two gigantic ads on this website now. Like this one:

Don’t be alarmed; earlier today I went to a Google Adwords seminar and learned all about the crazy/cool algorithms that Google uses to read a website and then match it up with appropriate ads.

That got me thinking: What the heck would Google think of my website? What ads would it match to my content?

So I decided to carve out two spaces on my website to show Google ads. I’m going to be taking periodic, random screenshots of the ads that are running there, and in a few weeks I’d like to write an Article about what Google thinks of me. I think this will be a fun experiment.

So don’t worry; I haven’t sold out or anything. But I won’t complain if someone clicks on an ad and sends a couple of cents my way.

Well, only four years after I wrote the first version of the article, I’ve finally finished it: a chronicle of how Samus Aran looks without her power suit in the endings of all of the Metroid video games.

This article is also what gets me about 80% of my hits.  Somehow, and I have no idea how, when you type “Samus Aran” into Google, my article is the 2nd link listed, right after her Wikipedia entry but before her entry in the Metroid wiki.

Don’t believe me?  TRY IT.

That’s crazy!  But anyway, I’ve finally added entries in the article for Metroid Prime 3: Corruption and Super Smash Bros. Brawl.  And that, at long last, brings me entirely up-to-date with the games in the Metroid franchise.  Except for Metroid Prime Pinball.

Anyway, go read the end of the article, or the entire article if you haven’t read any of it yet:

Samus Aran is a Hottie — Updated Again!