my.bicycle

Do ^^^these guys^^^ come with a:

...and if so, do they still qualify as love dolls, or would that only be these things?

Spam is beginning to show up in the Comments sections of some popular blogs.

Strangeness from hereabouts. I'd like to see this subject matter handled by Chad Michael Ward; it would end up being like the S.I.C. series of Kikaider and Kamen Rider, or Nirasawa's work for Fewture.

I'm not sure why I think this is so cool, but I do: equations for sussing origami structures.

Anyway, is Meiwes guilty of murder? At the very real risk of pissing off the cannibal community (”yes, Virginia, there is a "cannibal community"; a few "cannibal supporters" have been attending Meiwes' trial, lending him their "moral" support”) I take a hard-line position on cannibalism. Gosh darn it, I just think it's wrong. Meiwes may have had his victim's consent (Brandes' consumption was not only videotaped, but also devoutly wished for), but there are times when the very act of giving your consent proves you're not competent to give your consent. A perfectly healthy person who consents to his own sexualized murder, for example, and eats his own tough, overcooked penis before being killed, is in need of mental help, not meat tenderizer. His consent is meaningless, and obtaining it does not exonerate the man who murdered him.

(Dan Savage/Onion AV Club)

Stuff to not-do at the Return of the King. One could greatly piss off some people.

(I had to include this Comment, in case HaloScan comments service ever goes under...)
Wonderful ideas all. They don't have my favorite thing to do tho': wait for Legolas to appear on screen and then go off on a "Jay" from "Jay and Silent Bob" joke tangent.
"Did joos see them fuckin' Orcs and shit, Silent Dwarf?!? You and me gots to go busta few arrows and whup some axes up in them ugly-ass sonsabitches, nootch! We're gonna defend this mutherfuckin' castle RANGER-style an' shit! Then I'm gonna be all UHHN UHHN with that fine-ass lady hobbit! SNOOGINS!"
K.D. | 12.28.03 - 10:56 pm

A sequel I'm actually excited about: Natalie Portman says she would be ready to do a sequel to Leon (The Professional). (via fark)

The goth girl and her squirrel have an non-holiday special up on their main page at Ill Will Press. It is full of all kinds of mirth and foul language.
Warren Ellis offers his year-end thoughts. In particular, I enjoy: "An unelected dictator responsible for horrific evil catches an unelected dictator responsible for horrific evil."

I was about to send out the Christmas letter as a MS Word document attachment to an email, when I checked the filesize: 7 MB. I know *I* wouldn't be happy to get a 7MB attachment in my mailbox. What the hell is MS doing with the 3, 270k pictures that are in it, that it needs to become 7 MB? Then I realized that a lot of people don't have word. Then I realized that the same would be true of an Adobe Acrobat Reader PDF. Maybe I should just throw a web-page up. I enjoy that this has come up when it's too late to just snailmail the things out. "Own damned fault."

k.d. bryan, who is as sharp as a just-sharpened pencil, hypothesized an imaginary band out of one tiny suggestion:

December 17, 2003 - 09:15 PM
Re: the fungal issues
I can just imagine the Rolling Stone interview:
"Well, there's no one way to describe our sound. The Fungal Issues sort of came out of all of us getting our groove on together, y'know, unified in the funk. I don't think it's fair to say that one person is responsible for all of The Fungal Issues. It is true that K.D. (Bryan, lead triangle) scratched the surface and really infected us with his enthusiasm - I mean, without him there would be no Fungal Issues. But the Fungal Issues is really everywhere now and I think that's because everybody can identify with the Fungal Issues."
Tempting . . . buuuut no.

December 19, 2003 - 02:17 AM
Re: Making the Band
Spin's review of our self-indulgent fourteenth album, "We Are The Fungal Issues":
"Breaking onto the scene in the early 00's, The Fungal Issues were pioneers in the field of Nu Polka Drum N' Skank. With their smoldering licks matched only by their scathing social commentary and raw sex appeal, The Fungal Issues galvanized, energized and vulcanized an entire generation. Now, on their fourteenth album, it seems that the roots of the Fungus are deep and far away.
The vital elements remain on this self-indulgent experimental album - K.D.'s lyrics remain full of hope and self-loathing, Travis creates many a mesmerizing timpani opus and Sarah's wicked bass lines mesh innovatively, inexhaustibly and inexplicably with the frenetic washboard stylings of Tim X-13. Yet, the feeling remains that they are not the band they once were.
One might blame this apathy on the tragic loss of their guitarist/lead vocalist Brian Wanamaker, due to his now legendary and invariably fatal hobby of mixing aviation, herion addiction and autoeroticasphyxiation. Or one could simply conclude that some of the band, in the wake of their loss, have simply given up. Sarah's sexy sneer and explosive guitar theatrics seem strained in the wake of such tragedy and K.D.'s lyrics about "finding the squirrel of rage in the oak tree of hope" seem to ring false - especially when delivered in a tinny falsetto by guest vocalist MC McGooglewhack. It has even been rumored that Tim X-13 is considering leaving the band for a solo project, entitled "Wash on, Wash off".
Regardless, "We Are The Fungal Issues" is, while utterly inessential, a tentative addition to a formerly great band's oeuvre. We can only hope that the band recovers from this tragedy to find their sound once more. As Travis puts it, "We can still play on by playing the way we've always played. That's how we used to play and how we're always going to play. Brian definitely would never let us play any other way."
K.D. also had this to add: "Y'know, giving the music out is just what Brian would have wanted, man. Not for free or anything but y'know I what I mean. Tempus fugit ergo coginto sum carpe diem tu stultus es, man. That was his favorite phrase. His legacy. It's enraved on Betsy [Travis' traditional rain stick] so he'll always be here with us. Right here."
Sarah, in a fitting tribute, told us "You can go fuck yourselves with a slinky. Fucking Spin assholes."
We at Spin can only hope, pray and think happy thoughts that this is true.
***1/2 stars out of 7.6
(via The Stealth Tribe)

Labels: community

This year at Yuke's has been particularly long and challenging; I spent about ½ of it on Supreme Crunch-Plus Overtime. In 8 or so years of game development, I think this was the most productive year to-date. We shipped WrestleMania XIX for NGC, and we Japanese-localized 3 different versions of Finding Nemo in time for sale on it's December 6 opening day. It was our first GBA project, and our first multiplatform project, so it feels like it was a huge accomplishment.

Today is the last day of work for the year. Well, for me anyway. I get several free days off, and by just taking a couple more, I get from now until the 6th of January off. If this causes jealousy, please post the punishment of your choice in the handy Comments field provided.

Tales of the Plush Cthulhu and Callgirl of Cthulhu. I'm tempted to take this one step further, and make jokes about plushies or tentacle pr0n, but that way lies madness.

Labels: nsfw

Shockwave movies about a goth girl and her squirrel. (via stelpa's "tall little brother") note: misquote has been corrected - it's "taste" not "face" -- the squirrel was all bent out of shape about it.

I still think the Hello Kitty "finger massager" would be a better USB device, but if you want to talk to a low-end animatronic with a related screensaver, here's your thing. Two ports, though? Honestly, I assumed for US$80 that Kitty had more than two ports. (via boingboing)

Context: From Astra's G.L.I.T.T.E.R.A..T.I. tribe of shiny people, where I operate as a sleeper agent:
Re: if you HAD to be a super hero/villain...
My costume would be the one I debuted on the Castro with: a formfitting black leather mask, Kato-style, that ties with a matching thong in the back. Of course, under that is black greasepaint around the eyes, right up to the eyelids, for that seamless look. Add a black latex T-shirt (mixing two chewable surfaces), and black jeans with heavy black shoes. I'd add to that (once-existing) costume, a gadget-laden codpiece, called (in deference to an earlier thread) "The Jeweled Meat Hammer."

Astra would be my demented brother/sister/arch-enemy, in a sort of binary orbit of several G.L.I.T.T.E.R.A.T.I. subcliques: Lovers of Virtue Eternum, and Hellbound Apathets' Terror Engineering. We would fight tooth and nail in public all week, but send each other chocolate and tiny electronics on weekends.

My secret identity would be a scatterbrained lab researcher who always leaves the bunsen burner on "high."

A Russian artsite with a lot of exceptional Painter stuff. makes me want to learn the program. Actually, it makes me wish Photoshop would quit whoring itself to web-heads, and get some more artist tools integrated. Someone's going to come along and eat their lunch, like Quark did to PageMaker. I hope.

Ooh! And another good site:

heads-up: here is some tasty transhuman erotica by Warren Ellis, the creator of Spider Jerusalem.

Some days, Japan is a country of creepy shit.

Leave it to the brothers quay to make an AIDS awareness spot with dolls, and get it just a little bit more creepy than charming. (via miss w. tod)

Sammy is taking over Sega: big news, but not stunning. But as two Japanese companies, the fact that Sammy's top dog, Hajime Satomi, is publicly slapping Sega around with the new corporate agenda is pretty surprising.

Satomi has also indicated that he wants the respected Japanese publisher to start using Sammy’s Atomiswave arcade technology and has suggested that if there is any resistance from existing Sega employees, then Sammy will simply purchase more shares - in order to force its point.

There's a FAQ for Japan. Unofficial of course, but so is the SAQ. These would both have been helpful before I came over here the first time in 1993. There's all kinds of stuff in these that I didn't know. Hrm. (via memepool)

In case you're wondering, the subtitle to the blog, "kono fakku yarou to onaji you ni, ne." is the translator's dialog from Quentin's Kill Bill. The English dialog is, "...the same as this fuck right here!" Blogger didn't like actual Japanese characters mixed in with the Western unicode to which it's set.

Interesting interview with Steve Jobs about Apple's new role in the music industry.

At first, they kicked us out. But we kept going back again and again. The first record company to really understand this stuff was Warner. Next was Universal. Then we started making headway. And the reason we did, I think, is because we made predictions. And we were right. We told them the music subscription services they were pushing were going to fail. MusicNet was gonna fail, Pressplay was gonna fail. Here's why: People don't want to buy their music as a subscription. They bought 45s, then they bought LPs, they bought cassettes, they bought 8-tracks, then they bought CDs. They're going to want to buy downloads.
They didn't see it that way. There were people running around -- business-development people -- who kept pointing to AOL as the great model for this and saying, "No, we want that -- we want a subscription business."
Slowly but surely, as these things didn't pan out, we started to gain some credibility with these folks.

I'm reminded of the P-A statement about marketing/sales types: "...to these people, the phrase 'recurring revenue stream' sounds exactly the same as 'Anna Kournikova naked.'"

He seems stunningly realistic about Apple's position in the computing world, and how dominant Windows has become. It's funny though, a number of hardcore PC users (I can't really call them Windows fans) are learning a new appreciation for Apple's intelligent design through using iTunes to manage their music. And yes, I wish those lawyer-happy fuckwits at Apple Records would leave Apple, Inc. alone. (via popdex)

...all in Xeni's lifetime. Golly, she's a sharp one. (via DPH)

Japan has its own set of emoticons. These are called kao-moji, which literally translates to "face characters." There are so many variations on these, it's overwhelming. For instance, if I want to convey concern or worry to a friend in the US, I'm limited to this: :-/ On the other hand, in Japan, I can use this: (^_^);; (that's "sweat"), or any of these, or even imply the need for a full-blown retreat. There are so many of them, webpages devoted to them are broken down into sections, with screens worth of variants. The kao-moji are less an accepted standard, and more of a form of freestyled text-art that shares more with ASCII art text files than the static happy faces of the West.

This robot car makes the segway look like a goofy-ass toy. And unlike that unicycle that was making the rounds, this is at least a running prototype. Maybe we can get it to voltron with this wheelchair, so we can get little single-rider ATV versions of these. (via boingboing)

Some ass-hat fscking clan gamer thought it would be smart to settle an argument ...with a real gun? It's unclear. This hasn't really broken into the mainstream media yet, but I suspect a gamer holding a gun to another gamer's head at a game-related event will eventually get into the "games encourage violent behavior" coverage. See also the press statement. (via gamasutra news)

When I saw the link for a trailer to Enki Bilal's new film, it got me all worked up. His art is stunning, inspired, accomplished. I own several collections of his work. The teaser, though... Is poor. I'd no idea it would resemble a mediocre portfolio reel. (via DPH)

Make your own underwear. I mean snowflakes. Cut-out snowflakes. Download them, or save them to the online gallery. It's hosted by Jockey, which is why I made the "underwear" mistake. But you could cut up underwear this way, and have a mixed statement about the nature of winter holidays, and their commercialization. I'm sleepy. (via d.yeti)

If you don't have time to find out why you shouldn't see a movie, check Defective Yeti's Bad Review Revue: sets of reviews, reduced to one-liners that give the essence of raison d'éviter.

NHK is Japan's national TV channel. It's like the Public Broadcasting System would be in America, if PBS had an army of door to door salesmen that can legally demand money just because you have a TV and might be watching their channel. However, it's really neat to have a weird, educational, and progressive station that is showing stuff that doesn't have a place on a commercial channel. No, they didn't do Domo-kun, that's BS (Broadcast Satellite), which is another system again. However, NHK has created series that have had their own explosive fads as well. Pitagora Switch is a daily dose of cartoons and Rube Goldberg devices; in it, two previously unknown comedians invented Arugorizumu Taisou (Algorhythm Exercise), a strangely droll but hypnotic sequence of stretching exercises designed to near-miss during a series of would-be violent connections with one's exercise partner. While looking for online presentations of it, I also came across a flash presentation of algorhythm koushin, which may be an earlier version.

What is Samurai Champloo? It looks like Cowboy Bebop's mirror universe. It starts here in spring of '04, on broadcast TV. Does this mean I have to figure out how to program my VCR? (via M. Christian)

The title should be read to the same beat as "magically delicious."
Sega is suing a mess of companies over the gameplay of Simpsons: Road Rage being too similar to Crazy Taxi. What's craziest is they have apparently been granted a patent on the gameplay. Patent reform... Really. Please, someone show the patent office the light...

Lawyers from Sega of America have filed a patent infringement suit, claiming that The Simpsons: Road Rage was designed to "deliberately copy and imitate" the basic concept and gameplay from Crazy Taxi, to which it holds a patent. The suit names publisher Fox Interactive, distributor Electronic Arts and developer Radical Entertainment.
Road Rage was widely criticised at its time of release for being a blatant Crazy Taxi clone and indeed the company is using several such reviews as part of its evidence. If successful the move could have a huge impact on the game industry, which since the earliest days of Pong and Space Invaders has seen successful titles being ‘cloned’, copied and adapted by other companies.

(see gamasutra news)

This post is to provide a convenient place to engage in Commenty dialog regarding Kim Stanley Robinson's Years of Rice and Salt, which would have been topical when that was the author on the sidebar, and now would appear simply silly. Comment away, Tim.

Labels: administrivium, web

My wee little k-opticom cellular modem (equivalent to dualISDN), which is currently my only home connection to the internet, is beginning to warp and buckle from the the internet stresses currently placed on it. Well, that, or the in-progress printing of the annual Christmas gift calendar is furthering the local PC slowdown via poorly written drivers that offload the bulk of print-thinking to my PC rather than handling it at the device that is doing the actual printing. However, I'd vote for extradimensional interference, given a choice. As for why I don't have broadband, in one of the cheapest broadband fee countries in the world, that's a story for another post.

Currently there is an array of browser tabs open in the one Mozilla window that is sitting in my taskbar, and it's loading several more tabs worth of web pages while I type into this, the Blogger tab. In terms of Task Bar space, this is funny, because the less complicated (and nearly as helpful Getleft takes up a process button on the Task Bar for any window in it you might open. GetLeft is a kind of Windows GUI interfaced version of WGET, which means it's tool for downloading all content of webpages to a local directory for viewing at your leisure. Currently, it's working on a couple of pages worth of MP3s:

• bittersoundfoundation's current bastard pop sexiness
• brad sucks: a collection of songs inspired by spam email

So far, of bittercream's original offerings, I am particularly happy with "paranoia revisited." In the bastard pop realm, "Tears for Superman" and "Crystal Blue Kylie" are good, and good for you.

As for what I'm reading in the other tabs, a collection of Morning News pieces by Defective Yeti's very clever scribe Matthew Baldwin. A photo gallery of Super Dollfies, an expensive and vaguely eerie doll trend that is currently popular in Japan. A column by Warren Ellis, because my friend and chief harasstrix, Sarah, told me that the best way to know if you'll like a comic author is if you like the way they talk. The only work of his I've read to date is Listener, which I'm hoping he'll finish someday. Based less upon the tone of his blog, and more on the attitude of his sass at Artbomb.net, and his professed respect for my friend Justine's work, I'm going to have to order a few more tradepaperbacks from the comic shop in the US to get dragged over to these shores. Here's a sample about Dave Sim:

Dave Sim is into the last lap of his berserk genre-eating magnum opus CEREBUS, a three-hundred episode serial that has taken some twenty-seven years to complete. It began as a Seventies fantasy parody, swapping Conan The Barbarian for a sadistic aardvark stomping on the bones of the genre Howard The Duck-style. Over the course of many thousands of pages, it's also been a detailed political novel, a comedy of the court, a drama of the church, a vision quest, a biography of the last days of Oscar Wilde, several deeply strange attacks on feminism and women in general, and an exegesis of Sim's own bizarre personal take on religion. It fascinates because Sim is an absolutely brilliant maker of pages, a sublime cartoonist with total control of the form... and because, during the progression of the work, you can clearly see his mind crumbling under the pressure of his immense undertaking and twenty-five years of increasing solitude in which he can only express himself to the world through the agency of a talking anteater. It's almost a shame that the big 500-page collections don't include the personal notes that fill out the serial singles in which the work sees initial publication, in which Sim details the entirety of life on Earth as a war against the evil of women and proclaims that "if you learn to leave your penis alone, it will learn to leave you alone." For a while now, people have been taking bets on whether Sim will commit suicide immediately after CEREBUS is complete.

Primarily, the critical tone is dead on, I only wish he'd been careful enough to spell "magnificent octopus" correctly; "magnum opus" is just sloppy prroffing.

This post is becoming just about as jumbled as my single window has become with browser tabs. That's fine, because really, the main point of this whole dealy is to push Mozilla and XUL Apps Tabbrowser Extensions, an exceptionally handy set of tabbed-browsing enhancement tools that allow simple manipulation of tabs. Had I the equivalent for my head, this whole post would be an organizational masterpiece.

Tabbed browsing is great. Arranging one's open browser windows on-the-fly is enough to make any real virgo moist. Most obviously click-and-dragging an open tab and dropping into it's new space on the tab bar, so current blogging topics are coneniently close to the open Blogger tab. So when I want to blog Kristen's link to an enraged Klingon's response to mail about his fanfic, it can be right there, instead of ass-over-sunday on the other side of the world. Tabbrowser Extensions allows users to google a topic, tab-browse the first N number of hits with as many control-clicks, and if none of them pan out, close-tabs-to-the-right (subsequent), or if there's only one hit that's promising, I can close-tabs-to-the-left, leaving only the good stuff. Mousewheeling over the tab-bar cycles through them. I suspect that I will only grow more enamored with it in the coming weeks. (Thanks, Mike!)

See? This is what happens when Tribe.net begins returning pages that start: Horrible Exception: org.apache.velocity.exception...

Labels: music

"The whole of the site is basically one big series of 5 star Amazon reviews for every movie ever made. Knowles would rave about a movie that was a three second loop of a cow exploding set to techno music." (Something Awful, regarding Aintitcoolnews.com) (via tkolar)

Making the rounds:

The animal, a new member of a large species group called ostracode, was buried under volcanic ash which mineralized and retained an image of its soft body parts. That unique preservation enabled researchers to construct a highly detailed three-dimensional picture of the animal after digging the fossil from a rock bed in Herefordshire.
Details revealed include gills, eyes, limbs designed for swimming and the oldest known male organ in the fossil record. It was this last that led researchers to name the new species, Colymbosathon ecplecticos, which is Greek for "amazing swimmer with large penis."(thanks Monty!)

(via boingboing)

Day Six:
Orcs killed: none. Disappointing. Stubble update: I look rugged and manly. Yes!
Keep wanting to drop-kick Gimli. Holding myself back.
Still not King.

(via kristen)

My friends made the xbox "Superman: Man of Steel" game (as Circus Freak Studios). Who knew, like the game's character, the xbox can deflect bullets? Short recap for those unwilling to read a Baltimore newspaper: Roommates playing games at excessive volumes until the wee hours. Roommates fail to be considerate of gun-owning-roommate's sleeping schedule. G-O-Roommate kills xbox. I've wondered about the bullet-stopping power of the xbox ever since first seeing its massive form two TGS's ago. (Note to self: if an xbox is used offensively, bide time, and inflict ninja justice on it using the killing-palm technique; it's untraceable (except for the palmprint), and doesn't lead to JAIL.) (via gamespot)

"She is a cameleon-type writer." Yes. I make fun of the linguistically impaired. One should be well-versed in at least one tongue. Still, I found the rant self-promotion somewhat comerical. (via DPH)

This FTAA incident reminds me of an incident, less about violence and the misuse of public resources (which is covered in the FTAA thing well enough) than just misrepresentativeness in the current legal system:

Two friends of mine were walking through the woods in the hills behind UCSC. One was attending school there, and the other was visiting from Berkeley. They happened to walk into an area where protesters had chained themselves to trees, and officers were arresting them for impeding a construction process (IIRC). My two friends, who had paused to see what the hubbub was about, were quickly surrounded, arrested, and taken into custody. This begs the question, "why?" to me. It's one thing to get a speeding ticket, or a jaywalking ticket, but to be arrested for being in the wrong place seemed foolish on the part of the police.

Both friends were booked, put in jail, and were made to wait overnight for a preliminary hearing. The friend from Berkeley had both work and school exams, and had no way to be excused either. He pleaded "no contest," which has the same result as saying "guilty as charged," but without admitting guilt. He has that on his permanent record, for whatever that can influence.

The other friend, equally irate, but benefiting from being local, pleaded "not guilty," and the prelim went to actual trial. I'm a little fuzzy on this, but she was released, and told to show up in court on a specific date. where the case was dismissed as wrongful.

Now one of them has a questionable record and the other does not. The one with the questionable record got it from trying to be responsible to his commitments while the other has no record of the event because she had time to fight it. (via scattershot)

Leland Yee, of the California State Assembly, wants to make all FPS (first person perspective shooting games) illegal for sale to minors (google news). I wonder if he knows that GTA is a 3rd person game... Ah, well, I bet the legalese will handily take care of a whole mess of purchasing freedoms, like a sloppy drive-by. You can link to the Sacramento Bee article from the slashdot thread. It all gets down to the same problem: parents need to be aware of any entertainment their children are involved in. No amount of legislation will change that, or replace an active, involved parent.

Monty provided a new set of fantasy-themed paintings to drool over. Makes me want to paint. Monty's stuff always makes me want to grab a pencil, and start sketching, in a desperate scrabble to "catch up."

This story from the long-defunct OMNI magazine (I'm not pulling an Abe Vigoda Is Dead thing here, am I?) holds up well, though I unfortunately picture the Simpsons' aliens having the chat. (Thanks, Monty!) As a followup, I tried to provide the tastiness of justmeat.com, but it's GONE. No, I normally didn't have the stomach to view more than a couple images.