by Chris Barrus
The only thing that’s more amazing than the announcement of Gliese 581c is the artwork that the Daily Mail used to illustrate it.
The new planet is apparently a 1950s cover to Fantasy & Science Fiction. Really the only thing missing there is a tri-tailfinned rocket and someone in a bubble-headed spacesuit. Maybe the way to kick-start a new space program isn’t with Apollo-era iconography, but with pulp SF guns, girls, and ghouls.
Somewhere out there Chesley Bonestell is grinning…
I haven’t looked into the emulation / 8-bit world for a long time… Most of my gaming time has been limited to short runs of MAME OS X (finally a universal version!) and that’s about it. I don’t understand how I’ve missed M.U.G.E.N all these years. It does for 2d fighting what GURPS did for RPGs: provide a common set of parameters so that characters from different games can compete against each other.
What does this mean? It means you can finally see what happens when Godzilla meets the Mario Brothers.
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I always find it interesting that political action groups will spend millions of dollars in commodifying their rage against video games, violent movies, and guns but aren’t willing to spend a cent in providing basic mental health care that could help prevent kids from snapping in the first place.
On the last cross-country road trip I stopped in at Blacksburg for a visit. Ended up spending the whole late morning/afternoon in town. Liked it a lot. I can’t imagine what’s going on out there right now but I’m postive that what they don’t need is minions from both the Church Of Scientology and Fred Phelps’ Westboro Baptist Church descending upon them. My only hope is that both groups will encounter each other and annihilate themselves like matter/anti-matter.
In lieu of any other kind of post at the moment, I’m somewhat traumatized after the trusty New Hampshire amp lost about two-thirds of it’s volume during last night’s practice.
1. I have to get it fixed since the only sound the Ampeg reliably makes is a 60 cycle hum.
2. Is this when I finally break down and buy an AC30? Anyone have a blue-speakered Vox they want to sell?
[after Diane gives Thornton an ‘F’ for his report, which was actually written by Kurt Vonnegut]
Diane: Whoever *did* write this doesn’t know the first thing about Kurt Vonnegut!
[cut to Thornton’s dorm suite]
Thornton Melon: [on the phone] … and *another* thing, Vonnegut! I’m gonna stop payment on the cheque!
[Kurt tells him off]
Thornton Melon: Fuck me? Hey, Kurt, can you read lips, *fuck you*! Next time I’ll call Robert Ludlum!
[hangs up]
The Hot Dog Show of Toluca Lake (as seen in the original 1956 Invasion Of The Body Snatchers)
And how it looks now.
It’s called Papoo’s Hot Dog Show now, but it’s still standing at the corner of Rose and Riverside in Toluca Lake since it opened in 1949. Good dogs too!
(Snatchers photo from Nostalgia Party No. 2)
This may just be is my favorite machinima so far. Speculative Bubble took the past 117 years of housing prices and plotted the graph as a roller coaster ride using Roller Coaster Tycoon. Look out for that 1985 drop!
[via Kottke]
My number one language irritation of 2007 isn’t vowel-less or cutsey bottom-of-the-barrel names of dubious Web 2.x sites. It’s not even moldy old hipsterspeak of “so-and-so’s joint” and “pimped out whatevers.” It’s the trend of adding “-ity” or “-ty” suffixes to words that are already nouns instead of the legitimate use of making nouns from adjectives. For example, “sharity” or “digesty.”
Are you responsible for any of this? If so, please feel free to kill yourself now. Don’t stop to overthink – just take a running start down the hallway and throw yourself out the window.
Finally, it appears that we’re closing in on a universal (a.k.a. GPS-optional) solution to embed geographic information in photo EXIF tags. It’s courtesy of the oddly named HoudahGeo which can read in GPS track files or bring up a Google Map chooser and then write out the proper EXIF tags into the files. I have hundreds of photos that I’ve scanned that have no geotags and I want to be able to embed the tags directly in the photos instead of relying on Flickr’s after-the-fact geocoding tools.
Of course, there’s the usual caveats. You have to insert the tags before you import the photos into your iPhoto library and if you want Flickr to recognize your EXIF location data you need to change your Flickr permission settings. But even with the early beta 4 of HoudahGeo, it worked!
And remember, if you go to the Sierra Vista swap meet, leave your sidearms at home.
QC has been out of town for a bit and didn’t get a chance to dogpile in with photos of the Burbank fire. However, I’ve pretty much concluded that every new “Los Angeles Is Doomed” book or news article will be illustrated with that picture of flames approaching the Hollywood Sign.
Anything that keeps more people from moving here…
