my.bicycle

"and none of them knew they were robots" - a robot-themed mix tape with jewel-case cover and CD-label art. (via waxy.org/links)

Post this addictive and well-executed fan_and_ball game to "Stupid Flash Tricks" (thanks, KD)

Jay-Z and Metallica: Black on Black (DJ Halfred): "Announcing the release of Black On Black, a full-length reinterpretation of Jay-Z's Black Album, as seen through the lense of Metallica's Black Album." I'm happy to see so much copyright-protest art happening, but I'm getting a little sick of Jay-Z. Well, not quite as sick as I became of mash-ups using Missy Elliot's "Work It," but close.

Labels: mashup

Batman Hype! - The latest Batman news and rumors: "Tom Wilkinson and Rutger Hauer have both joined the cast of Batman Begins, says The Hollywood Reporter. Christopher Nolan is directing the latest incarnation of Warner Bros.' superhero franchise, which stars Christian Bale as the Caped Crusader.

Wilkinson plays Falcone, one of the leading crime figures in Gotham City, while Hauer portrays Earle, a business contemporary of Bruce Wayne's murdered father who has designs on the Wayne corporate empire.

Michael Caine stars as Wayne's trusted butler, Alfred; Katie Holmes as a childhood friend of Wayne's; Liam Neeson as Wayne's mentor, Henri Ducard; Morgan Freeman as Lucius Fox, a former board member and sidelined employee of Wayne Enterprises; Gary Oldman as Lt. James Gordon; and Ken Watanabe as the villainous Ra's Al Ghul"

...
Boing. Boingboingboingboing.

The Method of Developing ICO:

They began to accomplish this using a method they referred to as "subtracting design:" every element of the game that took away from its reality was removed. Instead of having a varied cast of enemies with unique strengths and weaknesses, for instance, there would be only one enemy type; instead of a castle, its environs, and nearby settlements, there would only be the castle and an escape from it. They also used unconventional hiring techniques: to put together a team capable of realizing Ueda's vision, they hired mostly outside of the industry to put together an initial staff of two programmers, four artists, and one designer in addition to Ueda and Kaido.

For masochists, here is the non-printer-friendly, graphic-and-ad-heavy regular version of the article.

Star Wars: Databank - The Clone Wars Continue (free registration may be required): "The second season of the Star Wars: Clone Wars micro-series begins tomorrow on the Cartoon Network and here at starwars.com. Hyperspace subscribers will be the first online viewers of the new set of ten animated episodes..." I have only seen a couple episodes of this while loitering in a gachapon shop in d/t Osaka, where it was playing on a TV/VCR combo (I know, so low tech for Japan; if it's any consolation, the convenience store that I popped by last night was advertising a yogurt-and-aloe desert via a 4cm x 3cm LCD screen that was most likely running its vid off some kind of Flash RAM device). What I've seen of the Clone Wars animated series, aside from Natalie Portman's bondage-and-bare-midriff scenes, I've liked the anime better than the live-action "prequels."

Lucas/Star Wars has an RSS feed, but the damned thing doesn't differentiate between regular free-registered-member content and "Hyperspace" member content. Or other pay content. It's really annoying to find something interesting, or that is vaguely described in the syndication, only to open a browser on it to load the Hyperspace Members Login screen.

Still, it looks like the Hyperspace subscription (would that be a "hyper-sub"? wouldn't tha cancel itself out?) will get access to the anime in some manner. Streaming? Definitely not downloadable, but... Still, I sense a presence I have not felt in years... Hope?

The Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex game site is worth visiting, though mainly just for the nifty OpenGL screensaver.

Lord of the Rings: the Animated GIF Edition.

umbrella project: This dress uses 20 umbrella pelts collected from the gutters of Berkeley and New York, largely by Anadamayi. Anandamayi also made the rosettes on the bodice (from the little bits on top of the umbrellas).

He wants to dip his balls in it. (8mb QT movie) (via waxy.org/links)

Monty Python's Life of Brian to have theatrical re-release. (thanks, timK)

I've heard two movie rumors about Britney this week, just after I was wondering if her career was over (haven't seen a new Pepsi add in a while). Both of these rumors have "nail if the coffin of a dwindling career" written all over them but you never know. The first rumor is about a Dukes of Hazard movie where Britney plays Daisy Duke. She'd be all wrong for this. First off, her butt is the wrong shape. If you're going to fill out a pair of Daisy Dukes you need a little junk in the trunk. Plus you need to be coy, able to put together a transmission blindfolded, and willing to marry a guy who's name rhymes with "penis". Britney would make a much better Bo Duke - she has his smile and swagger. Let's face it guys, Bo was the real cute one the whole time anyways and with this new wave of heterosexual values supposedly sweeping the nation, I think it would be morally wrong if we didn't make him a chick. If they do a Dukes movie Daisy should be a CGI character kinda like Scooby-Do was. There's no other way to fill that roll, I'm sorry. (Plus the car should talk).
(thanks, kristen!)

A reasonably swell review of Cory Doctorow's Eastern Standard Tribe on The Onion AV Club. I'm not sure how long it will be up; I've never sussed out their archive structure, either at the avclub, or theonion.com proper. So I'll kopipee it here for convenience:

Cory Doctorow
Eastern Standard Tribe (Buy It!) (Tor)

In his debut novel, Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom, Cory Doctorow laid out a high-tech, über-wired fantasy future where boredom was the last real social problem and even death was a temporary inconvenience. By contrast, the high-tech, über-wired fantasy future of his follow-up, Eastern Standard Tribe, seems like an oppressive dystopia, mostly because the world appears through an unluckier human lens.

Doctorow's protagonist, Art Berry, is a fast-talking, argumentative neophile who's both worldly and boyishly naïve; as the novel leaps back and forth in time, he's alternately portrayed as a jet-setting, tech-savvy idea man and a hapless patsy, locked up in a sanatorium on the advice of his backstabbing girlfriend and his treacherous business partner. Art is a user-experience guru, effectively a marketer who evolves simpler, more streamlined, and more multi-purpose uses for existing technology. Some of his brainstorms, like his scheme to merge traffic jams and music downloads, just sound odd, but Doctorow and his supporting characters are so enthusiastic about the concept's revolutionary, guaranteed-lucrative power that it's hard not to go along for the ride.

Unfortunately, Art remains loyal to his East Coast American "tribe"—the people living and working in the time zone where he fits in best, socially and culturally—while his partner, Fede, wants to sell the driving-and-downloading scheme to the highest bidder, regardless of time-zone affiliation. To further complicate matters, both men work in London, for a Greenwich Mean Time company that they're supposed to be sabotaging to give their EST pals a world-market advantage. Doctorow explains the whole system in one breathless mid-book monologue which leaves a lot of questions unanswered; it's a slick, appealing concept, but not a particularly well-grounded one.

That goes for the rest of the book, as well. The far-future weirdness of Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom seemed more plausible, because Doctorow developed it in more detail, gave it a more personal face, and placed it far enough outside our own world that the seams weren't immediately obvious. Eastern Standard Tribe, by contrast, seems plausible in half its particulars and ridiculous in others—particularly in the glossed-over human dimensions, such as Art's hapless love of a volatile, unpredictable, unpleasant woman who inveigles him into fraud within moments of their first accidental meeting. Down And Out and Eastern Standard Tribe are both full of clever, prescient possibilities for a rapidly evolving world, and they're both funny and memorable. (They're also both available for free download at Doctorow's web site, craphound.com.) But Eastern Standard Tribe showcases an author who could stand to spend a little less time showing off his fantasy tech, and a little more time getting into the minds and hearts of the people using it. —Tasha Robinson

The reason I'm plonking it here is to crit the review a bit: I disagree that the future is not all that well thought out, or unbelievable; in general the future of EST is about a week-from-now, maybe less. There are not-yet-extant bits and bobs, but in general the "future" of the book is the present of Silicon Valley, perhaps a bit more evenly distributed across a global presence. And the review misses some of the most interesting insight that is available in the book. While Art is enamored of his Easter Standard Tribe, and is working to keep the Pacific and Euro tribes from gaining much ground on them, while he protects his tribe and tries to sabotage others, the most important and helpful people in Arts life are chance encounters in meatspace. Which is to say, no matter how far removed from the physical vessel and timezone we may picture ourselves, we are ultimately anchored to the here and now.

Stuff I plan to read soon (just global-bookmarking):

• Bring Halliburton Home
• Hold Bush to His Lie
• The Year of the Fake

Anyone know the routine for voting in a Presidential Election from overseas?

BBC - Zombie film 'will beat Passion': "A remake of cult hit Dawn of the Dead is tipped to take The Passion of the Christ's top US box office spot in a cinematic battle of good versus evil." -- So what? They're both about guys coming back from the dead...

"Although girls can now go to school, few have discarded the burqa, which for the west came to symbolise Taliban repression. And in recent weeks there have been a spate of self-immolations from women forced into marriage. The country's chief justice, Fazl Hadi Shinwari, has stopped female singers from appearing on television and is trying to ban women from driving.
'Any advances are relative advances tempered with neo-Taliban practices against women,' said Sima Wali, head of Refugee Women in Development. 'Women are still subjected to sexual violence, torture, trafficking in women, forced marriage, domestic violence - the list goes on and on.'"

Four more years of Bush Jr. and Company would be four more years of "helping" other countries into this kind of situation? In, out, cut, and run?

Okay, fine, what about the policies he's carrying out at home? How about discrediting what you can't feasibly deny? Even if it puts our critical, in-place security operatives at risk...

"MoveOn.org: Democracy in Action" has dynamite footage of Rumsfield caught in a lie about the use of the term "immediate threat." I propose a Comments thread of euphemisms for lying. (via delicious boingboing)

The new trailer for Marvel's upcoming movie, "The Punisher," looks... well, I'll go out on a limb, and say "good." It seems more reminiscent of the comic than the impression given by the first trailer. And let's not talk about Dolph's turn at the deed.

For that matter, the new Casshern trailer, which shows some combat, new sets, and the hero.

Meet the Quirkyalones:

"You don't need a life partner to be complete -- or so say participants of this budding social movement (...) The contradiction isn't as marked as it appears. Just because these people don't 'need' significant others doesn't mean they won't go for a little TLC. It's not that they aren't open to the potential of romance, nor even that they prefer being alone. What makes quirkyalones quirkyalone is that they refuse to be in relationships for the sake of being in relationships. They chafe at the perception that they're supposed to be with somebody in order to feel whole, and are unwilling to compromise their sense of self for anyone. Because of these exacting romantic standards, they may spend long stretches of time single, and that's fine with them, because they enjoy their own company, and that of friends."

Part of me is charmed by this concept, especially the portion that emphasizes accepting that a second person isn't necessarily needed to complete the first. The married, family life is working for me, but when I see the results of some who have married in error, I hope this "tribe of solo's" finds acceptance, however ironic it may seem.

Hit counters? In-browser Java-effects on your cursor? Man, that's so 1996. (via waxy.org/links)

Future Sonic In-Ear Headphones Review. I. Want. Them.

It looks like the Nintendo DS will have (among other things) a touch screen. Depending on its resolution, this may go a long way toward changing the way we interface with our games. We still don't know what it will look like.

This is hopefully "Not the 100th Email!!!" Akshully, I like the Bros. Chaps version of 404'd better... But I'll keep my pants on anyway.

Jay-Zeezer combines Jay-Z's black album and Weezer's blue album. Though the songs aren't bad at all, I actually enjoyed the liner notes more than the mashed'up songs.

My friend kristen directed the bitchun kewl video for "Marrying You" (by Green & Root). Warning: folk music, renfaire clothes, and instances of utterly compelling and charming same-sex love and romance are heavily evidenced. Boo ya. In other news, two more Oregon counties have affirmed freedom to the right to marriage, regardless of sex.

Labels: music, video

Summarize a Novel in 25 Words:
Fight Club - I hate my life. Almost as much as Marla. Anarchy is liberating. No, anarchy is bad. Wait, anarchy is, I don't know. Ask me. The other me.
Asimov's I, Robot - Here's three rules. Here's why they suck.

Otaku-alert! ＯＳたん保管庫; apparently when Users aren't looking, the girl-group-avatars of our OS's are giving each other baths and making o-bento. And sometimes doing battle. After my Windows ME experiences, I can only assume it caused the explosion in this picture. After all, it looks kinda dark and mean compared to the boxy, clunky, but somewhat reliable-looking Win98 robot.

It's a weird world. People meet, become friends, separate, get back in touch, and catch up, after which it's easy to assume we know what's happened in the intervening time. We don't though. Not really. Sometimes there are big pieces that have been left out. My friend Marc, over at Misanthropicity is one of these cases. I was planning on writing this even before he threw me a bone, but here it is: Marc and I had a mutual friend, who passed on just over half my lifetime ago, and little more than half of Marc's. The friend was a fan of, among other artists, Spalding Gray. When Spalding's body was found, it struck me as another sad, senseless tragedy, and another part of our friend had gone, well... away. Here was another performer from that time, whose existince, parallel, linear, co-extant still with ours, was at least a reminder that some things go on, even when our friend's life didn't.

For me, the sadness of Spalding's death was remove, something like losing access permanently to a movie or book that I was fond of; it was sad, but impersonal. I assumed that the same was true for Marc, but it turns out he had dinner with Spalding Gray. Which has made me only more sad. I'll just go put on Mister Heartbreak.

Mad Max Lego Creations - "The last of the V-8 interceptors!" The builder has a mess of really cool lego My Own Creation cars, all of which focus on Technics series legos and standard parts. While that's admirable, standard-parts-built cars are so boxy, they always look like Volvos to me.

(via AICN) The trailers for "I, Robot" are online. As an Asimov fan, I can only hope that the trailer is not indicative of the direction of the movie. The character design, with visible mechanics and translucent parts should have been dubbed "iRobot" instead.

On the other hand, the designs for "Robots" from the "Ice Age" team have a lot more going for them. As usual, exercise extreme caution at AICN; the comments threads are toxic.

(thanks, monty)

Labels: nsfw

Pork products processed and distributed from the farm of accused Canadian serial killer Robert Pickton may have contained human remains, police and health officials said Wednesday. | Pickton raised and slaughtered pigs at the Port Coquitlam farm as a part-time occupation until his arrest at the property in February 2002, and police believe he gave or sold processed meat products to friends and acquaintances. | Pickton, 53, is awaiting trial in the killings of at least 22 of more than 60 missing Vancouver prostitutes who disappeared over the past decade and are feared to have been murdered at the dilapidated farm 20 miles east of Vancouver. | "Given the state of the farm, and what we know about the investigation, we cannot rule out the possibility that cross-contamination may have occurred..."

Next up in the national news: It's not Doom 2 or Quake that's bad for you; it's musicals like Sweeney Todd. (via DPH)

Nice piece on how great writers might have handled the glare-riddled quagmire of my rarely-admitted hometown of SoCal, as well as evidence of how some actually have. (Hey, Mike -- I'm almost finished with my book review of Too Much of Nothing. Neat that it's in BookCrossing sounds like an interesting use of the net.)

"RSS Rocks" - a PC Magazine article on the basics of RSS, and why it is teh awesome.

Here is RocketInfo a free, browser-based, crossplatform RSS aggregator (Atom compatible, too). I don't like the interface, but I assume it will change as needed. I'm really spoiled by NetNewsWire Lite on OS X.

BottomFeederis a self-contained executable (no installation procedure was needed, the current version has one, but doesn't write to the Windows Registry as far as I can tell) BUT it doesn't like being run from a keychain disk. My dreams of keeping my RSS lists on me at all times, and not seeing previously read articles appear as unread were dashed as I tried it on home and then work, then home machines. In fact, it would just vaporize off to Nowheresville, and not show up except as a couple of processes in the Task Manager. In order to get it to run, I'd delete the .ini files, and the .bfrunning file, and then it would open fine, and restore from the last-saved backup automatically. It made the feeds list transportable, but couldn't keep the per-article information.

Lastly, Tribe.net has just added RSS support for every one of the 13,000+ tribe/discussion boards it hosts. ¡Soy muy feliz!

Update: Lockergnome and antville links galore to MP3 blog feeds.

Update: I must now sheepishly admit that the version of Bottomfeeder I was using was a couple months old, and that some of the niggling issues I had with it have been addressed. I used the in-app update feature and it no longer crashes when run from my keychain disk. It takes longer to start up than the old version, but this is ameliorated by it, you know, not crashing. Joy!

Labels: music

macboy.com: Ballmer's iPod - Flash animation iPod style take on Microsoft's Steve Ballmer's charsimatic rockstar presence. Caution: Microsoft Executive Screaming Audio.

If you don't already, check Futurismic (also on sidebar, to the right) for all kinds of wild, hopeful, or at least interesting tech and culture aritcles (e.g this National Design Triennial entry, "Wave Garden"). My good friend Jeremy runs it, and I sometimes contribute there as well. The term "futurismic" captures the spirit of futur-ism, since "futuris-tic" anymore conjures images of Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey," or the Apollo astronauts. Where has our future gone?

Labels: administrivium, web

Yahoo! News - Spalding Gray's Body Found in East River
This is just remarkably sad. I'm feeling kind of numb and dizzy.

We all went down to the Carrefour in Komyoike; it's a French supermarket chain with a lot of imported goods. I imagine in France it's about as exciting to a French person as it would be to say, "I went to Ralph's/Safeway/Walmart" in the States. In Japan though, it's pretty cool; there are groceries, including more cheeses and wines than one normally finds in Japanese supermarkets, and it has a mini-department store thing as well, -- well, more like Walmart, if Walmart sold 60-inch plasma televisions, $600 digital cameras, and foreign-language magazines.

It's the weekend and the place is packed. Families are walking by; this area is enough of a countryside spot that there aren't a lot of foreigners, so I'm getting stared at by a lot of the kids while their parents fastidiously ignore me. Loitering, but trying to not be an obstacle, I try to place my incongrously-large-for-Japan 92kg frame as far off the walkway as possible, in a spot couched between two kids' clothes shops. One woman in her late twenties walks by with her child; she's bleached-blonde, slim, and a little more fashionably dressed than the other moms. She's still making an effort toward style, in the vein of what Hamasaki Ayumi might wear on the weekend, say, if she were off shopping in a French chainstore: expensive, faded bluejeans with high-heels, a longsleeved white knit shirt with appliqué patterns, which have hiked midway up her tea-and-milk colored forearm -- which is covered with snakescales. Is that some kind of henna tattoo, I wonder, already knowing that it's not the case. It's ink, and ornate, at that...

I blink; this is too strange. In the States, such inks are commonplace enough, but here in Japan, this much ink on a local woman likely means she's married to the mob. A yakuza woman, likely with some chinpira thug. Still, it's so pretty. the rounded checkerboard of snakeskin, the snake itself rolling back and forth across her forearm. She notes me staring, and moves on, not breaking her pace.

What is her life like, I wonder. Is it some small-scale Sopranos in Japan? Is she working at a yattai-shop on the festival days? What happens to kids that grow up near the mob? My mind, triggered by a brief, chance visual, and a load of assumptions, is suddenly a runaway train of curiosity and worry.

Later, we were in the supermarket, and happened on the family again. The father was dressed in full "Black Music" regalia; he wouldn't look out of place on the cover of Vibe, except for being Asian. The mom has pulled her knit-white-sleeves down to her wrists. Skin and snakes concealed by the opposite of shedding.

When Two Tribes Go to War: A History of Video Game Controversy: an in-depth (and a bit longish) report on controversy caused by videogames. From Deathrace to Manhunt, lightguns/GunCons, and just about everything in-between. In particular, I like that they give a fair amount of coverage to the stupidity of making games "mature-themed" just to get the free press.

Ted Jesus Christ GOD is the Son of David and is from the Bloodline and Linage and Line of David from Adam through Noah and through Abraham and Isaac and then through David.  For Ted Jesus Christ GOD; we use the initials of TJCG for short.  TJCG also genetically has the look.

Holy fuck. (via Starchy's Stealth Tribe post)

UPDATE: Ted Jesus-Christ-GOD sends out very long email messages. Spam? Or deviled ham?!

Photoshop contest entries in an effort to make collaged images of Gary Larson's classic Far Side cartoons. I'm willing to bet these are far more enjoyable than the live-action Garfield movie.

Also: a goodly Farked-up Photoshop contest: When Kids Act Out Their Videogames. (Don't even think of clicking if you're on dial-up.)

Jeremy Hedley's "Antipixel | Blog" has beautiful photos of Japan. Many pretty pictures; I'll have to peek at his colophone before purchasing my next camera.
(Pause for a peek.) D'oh. Nevermind; he's using a freaking Nikon D1X, roughly 5 times the amount of money I'm willing to spend...

Penny Arcade bashes Uwe Boll. YAY!

William Shatner's cover of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, mash-up-videotized via Star Trek meets Terry Gilliam meets Yellow Submarine. And Lucille Ball.

Terror Alert Level has been upped to "Shatner"

Labels: mashup

IMMORTEL Ad Vitam, the new movie based on Enki Bilal's levantine gods vs. New York work, looks a lot less sucky than it previously appeared. (thanks, m. christian)

American McGee's Oz lives (GameSpot): For the record, I think American McGee's Alice was quite pretty, but it's not particularly scary or dark to put odd-angled doorways, blood, and dirt into a fantasy-world. Taking a child-oriented property and re-imagining it to be dark, in and of itself, doesn't make it a postmodern masterpiece. I think it can be done, and has a lot of potential, but the McFarlane figures of American McGee's Twisted Tales: OZ, the nekkid bondage Dorothy with Munchkin BDSM master, and the steroid-enhanced Toto didn't do anything for me. That said, if Jerry Bruckheimer is developing a series of movies on Twisted Tales OZ, Warner Books is about to put a book out on the property, I don't understand why publishers, who are so keen on license-based tie-ins, are so skittish about backing this venture when so many other consumer vectors are on-board.

Google Deskbar: Google Deskbar enables you to search with Google from any application without lifting your fingers from the keyboard. Installs easily in your Windows taskbar. (via Zero Draft)

CNN.com - 'Chronicles of Narnia' to be film - Mar. 2, 2004: (Hollywood Reporter) -- Following collaborations on 'Holes,' 'Ghosts of the Abyss' and the upcoming 'Around the World in 80 Days,' the Walt Disney Co. has struck a deal with Denver billionaire Philip Anschutz' Walden Media to co-finance and distribute 'The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.'

I don't know whether to jump for joy or not. When I realized that the dwarves from Snow White were supposed to be of the same ilk as The Hobbit's, I was really put off of Disneyfication of existing works. That said, I love a lot of Disney stuff as long as I'm not holding it to my preconceived or educated notions of the material, such as Aladdin or Hercules; they are a lot of fun on their own, but OH, the pain of content slippage...

Update: Michael Eisner has been separated from his chairman of the board position, but retains his CEO status: CNN: Money, BBC.

WINKsite helps bloggers post their entries in WAP format, to be read by enabled devices (via Japan Media Review, via jim and internet)

JAPAN : 1948-1951 : Photography & Social Research during the Allied Occupation

You likely did not hear it here first, but just in case: The next GTA game has been announced as Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and will be out on October 19. The jonesing begins... now. (via gamespot)

Apparently there is some backlash about reading comics while riding the train: "Besides," she adds, "Americans are shocked to see grown men reading comics in trains, especially ones that are choke full of violence and sex. It's not something Americans can understand." Um. Not this expat, if anyone's confused. I've never noticed anyone giving dirty looks or nasty vibes to comic readers, but have seen plenty of that when there is a jerk reading a newspaper spread wide enough to interfere with another passenger's space, or some kind of nudie/sports daily, with inappropriate content. I've felt really nasty vibes directed against those using a cellphones on the train. But lately I've seen more people with comics than ever, and no one seems to care a whit.

In short, I've not noticed what the article mentions, and caution that the Wai-Wai section of MDN be taken with a full pinch of salt.

Fark Photoshop contest for surprise ending to the Passion of the Christ