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Space Paris has robots with moustaches

February 15, 2008 /

Look why are you not reading The Fabian Society? If what we had in Space Paris meant anything you’d read The Fabian Society every day and even on days when he (Quintus) (or possibly Henry) doesn’t update you’d be all up in his archives reading the older stuff you missed. I know I already told you to read it back in 2006, but obviously you weren’t listening, and anyway since then he’s been developing the kind of effortless grace in prose that makes me stomp around in jealous anger. I am so angry that you are not reading The Goddamn Fabian Society! What! Yes! Don’t impose your human consistency on me! We already had this fight in Space Paris!

Start with Petra, Endless Frank, Fishbowls and Ptolemy I, and if you’re not hooked by the third one you’re doing it wrong.

Rock Band Wishlist

February 5, 2008 /

My phone has no ringtones and I’ve never owned a CD I didn’t rip, but the record industry has finally found a way to get even me to pay for songs I already own: Rock Band. At least the downloadable tracks have the value-add of being interactive at multiple levels. What they do not have, sadly, is a way to cater exclusively to my taste. Until now!

I put these together working on the three-songs-per-band model they’ve established on Live so far, and basically within the creators’ bent toward three- or four-piece groups and a fairly narrow definition of “rock.” Also with the fact that I don’t really know anything about music before 1998.

Semisonic:

  • “Brand New Baby”
  • “Closing Time” (well, I mean, come on)
  • “Get a Grip”

Queen, although I know these are all impossible for one reason or another:

  • “Bohemian Rhapsody”
  • “Under Pressure”
  • “Killer Queen”

Jimmy Eat World:

  • “Lucky Denver Mint”
  • “Sweetness”
  • “Nightdrive”

Barenaked Ladies (man, this is hard):

  • “Brian Wilson (live)”
  • “Too Little Too Late”
  • “Maybe You’re Right”

Ted Leo and the Pharmacists:

  • “Me and Mia”
  • “Counting Down the Hours”
  • “La Costa Brava”

I know there are already a million Foo Fighters songs, but still:

  • “Everlong”
  • “Breakout”
  • “All My Life”

The New Pornographers:

  • “Mass Romantic”
  • “Letter from an Occupant”
  • “Sing Me Spanish Techno”

And, finally, U2 (yeah, I know they’re working on it):

  • “Desire”
  • “Mysterious Ways”
  • “If God Will Send His Angels”

I invite you to eviscerate me in commentary, or post your own wishlists. Maria, for example: Prince? Lisa: TMBG? Someone: Beck or the Decemberists?

Update 1432 hrs: Andy suggests replacing “Sing Me Spanish Techno” with “The Bleeding Hearts Show,” and offers a Tragically Hip three-pack:

  • “New Orleans Is Sinking”
  • “38 Years Old”
  • “Fireworks”

And Ken, inevitably, has a list with a lot more depth than mine:

Jamiroquai:

  • “Canned Heat”
  • “Alright”
  • “Black Capricorn Day”

Smashing Pumpkins:

  • “Cherub Rock”
  • “Bullet With Butterfly Wings”
  • “Today”

Guns N Roses:

  • “Welcome to the Jungle”
  • “Live and Let Die”
  • “Nighttrain”

Pearl Jam:

  • “Life Wasted”
  • “Alive”
  • “Rearviewmirror”

Talking Heads:

  • “Psycho Killer”
  • “Uh Oh, Love Comes to Town”
  • “Take Me to the River”

Beck (most doesn’t translate well to guitar, bass and drums):

  • “Loser”
  • “E-Pro”
  • “The New Pollution”

Spoon:

  • “Don’t You Evah”
  • “I Turn My Camera On”
  • “Sister Jack”

Jimi Hendrix:

  • “Spanish Castle Magic”
  • “Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)”
  • “Fire”

Pink Floyd:

  • “Comfortably Numb”
  • “Money”
  • “Arnold Layne”

Sublime:

  • “Smoke Two Joints”
  • “Santeria”
  • “Pawn Shop”

And single songs:

  • The Dandy Warhols – “Bohemian Like You”
  • TV on the Radio – “Wolf Like Me”
  • !!! – “Must Be the Moon”
  • Arctic Monkeys – “I’ll Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor”
  • Styx – “Renegade”

And Scott put up a list for Bryan Scary and the Shredding Tears, who would be insanely fun (and REALLY HARD) to play in RB–not impossible, either, as Harmonix has been pretty good to indie rock:

  • Flight of the Knife
  • Imitation of the Sky
  • Son of Stab

January 25, 2008 /

Okay, I thought I read once about an interactive fiction game that begins with a single paragraph of description, which just repeats over and over–but gradually expands and changes as you take actions. It’s a fascinating idea, but I never got around to downloading it, and now I can’t find the right google-juju to summon it again. Anyone else heard of this?

Update 1357 hrs: Kevan to the rescue, with Andrew Plotkin’s The Space Under the Window and Aisle. bloody_peasants also suggests Shade and the One Room Game Competition.

Brendan painstakingly imitates a Photoshop filter, third in a series

January 23, 2008 /

I will probably never love another episode of television as much as I love Battlestar Galactica, season 3, episode 9, “Unfinished Business.” And not just because it has images like this:

GET UP. We're just getting STARTED.

I’ve spent at least the last year and a half (actually, more like seven years, since my undergrad Drawing I class) being obsessed with this limited-tone art style. I called it “rotoscoping” once, and Lisa and Will jumped on me because there’s no animation involved, so I have to admit that it’s actually what people call “tracing.” But selective tracing.

As was likely very obvious to anyone in my family, and as I only realized yesterday, my playing around with tone is blatantly derived from my uncle John’s painting and wood engraving work, especially his portraits of my grandfather (which he often combines with layered collage). Mr. Olmos there has some features similar to his, like the disappearing eyes which Ian and I inherited. I hope I get to look that craggy eventually. Right now people are still asking me what my major is, despite the obvious gray in my hair.

I almost forgot to mention that this is the first thing I’ve ever inked with the brushes I bought in 2003, and although it was a lot slower than my usual pens, I completely get why cartoonists get so excited about it now. There’s a feeling of dynamic control over the line weight that you just can’t get with pens, even the brush pen with which I inked a lot of later Xorph strips. (Not that there are actually any distinct lines in the finished images below. Good.)

So I made a picture and it’s a wallpaper if you want it: the images below link to 1600×1200 and 1600×1000 (widescreen) jpegs. There’s also a browser-sized version if you just want to zoom in a bit.

Adama at standard ratio, with logo.

Adama at normal ratio, no logo.

PS Can Battlestar Galactica be back on now plz

Update 2008.01.26 0001 hrs: Naturally, UJ has a much more cogent post on the subject (the art, not Battlestar), along with one of the portraits I was talking about.

You are hereby ordered to waste your afternoon

January 22, 2008 /

Everybody should be reading Starslip Crisis, and if you’re not, you need to start. With the Spine of the Cosmos. Once you’re done with that–if you just want to get the stuff that majorly advances the plot–you can read about the Ars Ad Astra gala, the Starslip Catastrophe, the Battle of Cirbozoid, the subsequent Glorysong, the Shark Time Jump, the Battle of Terra and… well, just read everything from that onward, it’s pretty recent. Then get kind of put out that you have to wait until tomorrow for the next one. Then go back to the beginning and read all the other stuff in between, because you’ll see the way all the story arcs tag into each other in startling and funny ways.

I’m not sure if I’ll ever love Starslip like I loved Checkerboard Nightmare, but come on, it’s still in the top five comic strips ever made. Reading back through to do this roundup, I noticed that some of the random-seeming asides are actually jokes that have just taken years to pay off. That’s Arrested Development-level, man.

Read Starslip Crisis.

Bing bong bing

January 21, 2008 /

I downloaded LCD Soundsystem’s 45:33 because it’s the first album I’d heard of that was specifically designed to be run to. Unfortunately it’s way too slow for that, but it’s still pretty good music. I had been rating everything on it three or four stars on iTunes, and suddenly–halfway through a song I’d already rated–I found my mouse hovering over the five-star button. Because somebody had started playing chimes.

This is a serious problem and I don’t know what to do about it. As soon as a song incorporates chimes, handbells or tone bars of any kind–especially, as they are often used, in counterpoint–I will unconsciously decide that it is the greatest song ever and listen to it ten times in a row. I can’t help it!

I would say that this is a flaw in my musical taste, but it is widely agreed that my musical taste already consists largely of flaws. This is a crack in the very foundations of my aesthetic sensibilities. It is a metaflaw. Chimes are a sloppy exploit for the kernel of my brain.

Someone recommend a song that will ruin chimes for me forever. I want to change.

Pirateball

January 17, 2008 /

It’s time to canonize the rules of Pirateball. I would put this on Wikipedia but we all know how that would go.

Pirateball was developed by myself, Jon Brasfield, Darren Hudson and McKinley Moore. Fellow contributors and playtesters included Tim Downing and Will Johnston, and possibly other people I don’t remember; this was developed at Centre College between 2001 and 2003.

There are no pirates involved.

Pirateball is like baseball in aspect, and ideally is played on a baseball diamond, but is an individual sport. The minimum number of players is three, comprising a batter, a pitcher and a first baseman. If you have more players, you can put them in the outfield or have a catcher, but too many fielders makes the game pretty much impossible, so if you have six or more players you should just start a batting queue. After each at-bat, players rotate through positions (with a minimal crew, it goes batter to first baseman to pitcher to batter and so on).

You will need two wiffle bats, a wiffle ball and a beach ball or one of those big latex balls you get at K-Mart. If you don’t have a second wiffle bat you can just use an umbrella or something.

Here is how an at-bat works:

  • The pitcher throws the ball in the batter’s general direction. Don’t be a dick about this.
  • The batter swings at the ball. There aren’t any balls, only strikes, so you might as well swing. Foul balls count as strikes.
    • You get four tries to at hitting the ball to get it into play. It says something about our collective athletic ability that we had to allow four strikes with a wiffle ball.
    • If you miss all four, the pitcher throws a fifth pitch, using the beach ball.
    • If you miss the beach ball, not only are you out, you lose a point and don’t get to have sex for five years.
      • I’m really glad it’s 2008.
  • Once you hit the ball, you run to first base, HOLDING ONTO YOUR BAT. If you drop it out of habit you’ll have to go back for it.
  • You will need your bat because when you get to first base you will have to fight the baseman, who has the second bat. Luckily for you, the rules specify that he is “kind of a wuss” at this.
  • Having touched first base, you head directly to third, over the pitcher’s mound (literally over: you have to jump), and then head for home.
  • The pitcher and fielders, if any, are spending this time getting the ball and trying to get you out with it. Catching the ball does not count as an out, nor does tagging: you have to be hit by a thrown ball. If one player throws and misses, a different player has to take the next throw. This is why the game gets a lot harder with more players.
  • If you reach home untagged, you score a point for yourself, and you can be pretty proud of it because almost nobody ever scores.

The game continues to cycle through batters until it is dark and everybody is tired. The winner is the player with the most points, or, more specifically, not me.

You’ll note that I have used masculine forms in the description above, but of course pirateball is a coed sport. If you’re in the Winston-Salem or Triad areas of NC and would like to experience the majesty of pirateball, let us know! You will have to provide the diamond or equivalent playing field. You will also have to provide the balls, bats or batlike self-defense weapon.

We will be glad to provide the sexy.