my.bicycle

Next week will find me in Las Vegas, Nevada for the SEMA car show. It looks like weather will be cold. I’ve been to Vegas a few times, but I don’t gamble, so it’s no great shakes for me. My days are going to be completely packed, but I think my nights are somewhat open; I might attend an Elvis impersanator or just catch up on theatrically released movies. Any suggestions?

Foxylicious: integrate your del.icio.us bookmarks with your Firefox bookmarks. (via waxylicious)

While I’m on about Firefox, I've been enjoying the Noia 2.0 theme, which makes my browser look very Mac OS X like. When I use it at work, I sometimes forget I'm on a Windows machine.

...with stuff that’s at least funny. sacbee.com Molly Ivins: My hope for Election Day:

Meanwhile, many evangelical Christians are convinced gay marriage is upon us and will be the end of civilization. How they convinced themselves George W. Bush is the Lord's anointed is beyond me. I've known him since high school and watched him closely as a public official for 10 years, and I have yet to see the first sign of it.

Including this last, critical bit of information: “ I am hopeful. If you have trouble on Election Day, call (866) OUR-VOTE, set up by the Election Protection Coalition.”

Rogue taxidermy: “The artists herein are not wasteful, and nearly every piece of the animal is used toward some artistic goal.” (via starchy)

The entire Portland region of Liberty City from Grand Theft Auto 3 has been recreated in 2D goodness for NES emulation Brian Provinciano's Grand Theftendo. The author states that this is a private project, which will be available as a free download as a tribute to Rockstar’s game. I suspect that a litigous wall of ninja lawyers will likely prevent this intriguing and well-intentioned (if naïvely initiated) project from being released to the public. (via kotaku)

I've not yet seen House of 1000 Corpses, but Rob Zombie is making a sequel, The Devil’s Rejects, that carries on in the ’70’s shockfest (opened) vein. (via comingsoon; check here for the teaser trailer!)

Imomus again provides food for thought with his write up of Eminem's anti-Bush "Mosh" (real media file). The visuals in the piece are very compelling, and it is a blast to see exactly what the Forces of Authority are trying to prevent the masses from doing at the end of the video.

If you (like me) are a Real.com hater, check out Real Alternative for hassle-free playback of this particular codec. (via Imomus’ Click Opera)

John Peel has died; this news is all over the intarweb. Having only initially heard of him a couple months ago, I'm not feeling particularly affected by this certainly sad news, but here are legally offered MP3s of some of the music he introduced to the world. (via luscious boingboing)

Wired magazine is releasing a phycical CD under a Creative Commons license in their upcoming dead-tree issue:

These musicians are saying that true creativity needs to be open, fluid, and alive. When it comes to copyright, they are pro-choice. Here are 16 songs that encourage people to play with their tunes, not just play them.

These tracks may also be obtained through a legal torrent offered through, oddly enough, Legal Torrents.

Bush Relatives for Kerry:
"Bush Relatives for Kerry" grew out of a series of conversations that took place between a group of people that have two things in common: they are all related to George Walker Bush, and they are all voting for John Kerry. As the election approaches, we feel it is our responsibility to speak out about why we are voting for John Kerry, and to do our small part to help America heal from the sickness it has suffered since George Bush was appointed President in 2000. We invite you to read our stories, and please, don't vote for our cousin! (via Danger Army)

USA Today: A different October surprise -
Pick your issue. From abortion rights to racial preferences to religious freedom, every voter's life could be touched by the next president's appointments to the sharply divided court.

Though the candidates have been vague about the kind of justices they would pick, a reasonable bet is that Bush would expand the conservative bloc, and Kerry, the liberal faction. That's what social activists on both sides of the ideological spectrum expect.
(...)
Consider some of the 5-4 decisions in recent years that could be reversed by a change of just one justice. The court upheld taxpayer-funded vouchers for children to attend religious schools. It knocked down a law banning late-term abortions. It upheld affirmative action in college admissions.

And it ended the Florida recount of 2000 that allowed Bush to become president.

“Dedicated to the misuse of Chinese characters (Hanzi or Kanji) in Western culture” - Hanzi Smatter

Bringing the deader-than-dead "Am I Hot or Not" meme to gamers, unasked, Sexiest Gamer gives you the chance to swoon or shudder over the visages of many lads and lasses that you may have faced online.

Dr. Joshua Ellis weighs in on the voter registration obscenity in Nevada:

I thought the name sounded a little too patriotic,” Justin told me last week over the phone from a gig in the Caribbean. “But I thought, y’know, it’s the DMV, so it can’t be bullshit. When I was signing up, I almost -- almost -- didn’t put down ‘Democrat’ as my party affiliation. But I did it anyway.”

When [local Vegas CBS affiliate] KLAS broke a story featuring claims by former Voter Outreach of America employees that the company was illegally destroying voter registration forms from Democratic voters, Justin called the local registrar – and discovered that, in fact, he was not registered to vote.
(...)
The fact that Sproul continues to register (some) votes suggests that the RNC either doesn’t know or doesn’t care about these allegations. They’re certainly not making much of a big deal about it, or conducting any sort of big internal investigation. In fact, according to the Center for Responsive Politics database, they’ve paid Sproul and Associates, Inc. over $600,000 this year alone for voter registration and “political consulting”. Such a sum almost certainly suggests that Sproul has transcended the lame-duck Arizona GOP and found himself some new fishing buddies in the rarified circles of the national party. (via flummox)

Update: Sorry about the multiple-posting. Blogger was being a bit catty last night, and apparently I lost the yarn ball.

I know a stunningly talented game artist named Hyung Kim, but I’d not known of Hyung-Tae Kim, who appears to be a stunningly talented and accomplished concept artist for games. Here are some large images for a Capcom calendar. (listed as a prime inspiration for the somewhat NSFW The Dr. Pepper Show)

Gigantor, or Tetsujin #28, for your previewing pleasure.

For game-group-blogging-goodness, I’ve been enjoying Joystiq, but Gawker media’s Kotaku has a wider range of topics, links to less things that I’d have read anyway, and suffers from fewer grammar and spelling errors. Which is important for type-A virgos.

NEWPORT BEACH, CA (October 22, 2004) - Interactive entertainment developer and publisher inXile entertainment today announced that it is considering some form of leak of The Bard's Tale, its eagerly anticipated action-role playing game (RPG), as a strategic plan to follow a growing trend among Triple A games. (thanks, JP)

Labels: games

Barney may be more historically accurate than we thought. And he knew how to get down (warning: sound, language)

I’ve deleted my Friendster profile (actually a couple months ago), and have replaced it with a link to my del.icio.us bookmark directory. It has its own RSS feed, and is generally a dump for research, along with other notes.

If anyone else who reads this blog has a del.icio.us account, please leave a Comment.

Labels: administrivium, community

Dr. Hunter S. Thompson covers the current election in Rolling Stone Fear and Loathing, Campaign 2004. (via boingboing)

Things haven't changed all that much where George W. Bush comes from. Houston is a cruel and crazy town on a filthy river in East Texas with no zoning laws and a culture of sex, money and violence. It's a shabby sprawling metropolis ruled by brazen women, crooked cops and super-rich pansexual cowboys who live by the code of the West -- which can mean just about anything you need it to mean, in a pinch.

Labels: music

H.P. Lovecraft-styled adjectival phrase generator. (via cthuligans tribe)

THAT ADHESIVE, EFFUSIVE, LEPROUS CHAOS...
THAT OVAL, ENORMOUS INFECTION...
A TURBULENT, FECUND, CONGEALED, AWFUL INFECTION...

Stylistically related to this, see this bewitching political piece at Making Light.

Lost has been picked up for a full season. I really enjoyed the three episodes I saw while in the USA, and am happy that the show will have a fair shake at continuing.

In case anyone's wondering, the big, nasty typhoon that has killed at least 48 people blew through here yesterday. We were sent home from work during the storm, but prior to the trains shutting down service. I arrived at home while the eye was near Osaka, so there was nearly no wind or rain for my walk home. This quickly changed after arriving at home, when the wind kicked up, the rain and lightining started, and the sky quickly darkened to black, an hour and a half before sunset. This has been a horrid year for typhoons hitting Japan, but at least I'm not on Shikoku or Kyushu...

How many Bush administration officials does it take to change a light bulb?

None. There’s nothing wrong with that light bulb. There is no need to change anything. We made the right decision and nothing has happened to change our minds. People who criticize this light bulb now, just because it doesn’t work anymore, supported us when we first screwed it in, and when these flip-floppers insist on saying that it is burned out, they are merely giving aid and encouragement to the Forces of Darkness.
-- John Cleese (via William Gibson's blog)

This will be the next anime I rent. Mark my words, Mindgame is to anime as espresso is to coffee.

This year’s Bay Area event has come and gone, but anyone who is interested in saké should think about attending Joy of Sake. At US$65, it seems like a great chance to familiarize one’s self with a variety of splendid nihonshuu.

Shell Snow Man from Fessura. (via SensoryImpact)

Mobster

• Integrates seamlessly with iTunes to provide suggestions for the currently playing artist.
• Easily create playlists in your library from your recommendations.
• Browse your music easier with one click artist playing.
• Find new music in the iTunes Music Store based on your personalized recommendations.
• Filter your recommendations by popularity.
• Use Musicmobs to track what you listen to and share your listening habits with your friends.

Eros ex mathematica -- pervy algorhithmic display.

Rachel Smythe’s The Doctor Pepper Show mixes manga, gothic lolita-ism, and medical fetishes. (via Red Cross LJ community)

Dungeons and Dragons celebrated it’s 30th anniversary. From this MSNBC article:

The game peaked in the 1980s, but there are plenty of fans left. Some 4 million people play D&D regularly. Many of them laugh at a common suggestion that fantasy gamers are geeks: Of course they are, they say.
“I think a lot of people who get drawn to this game are loners, but here’s a real opportunity to come out of that shell and feel safe about it,” said fan Mitch Hamburger, 32.

It’s splitting hairs, but I'd say that D&D hasn’t yet peaked. Then again, I'm counting people who are playing D&D licensed games, especially Neverwinter Nights, which has a rich set of design tools built into it, and allows geographyically-separated groups to play through dungeon modules (official or user-designed) over the intarweb. I’m expecting that there will eventually be games that allow the tabletop style interaction over broadband, though this will more likely be a teleconferencing setup rather than a bleeding-edge graphicsfest.

For a clue on just how geeky things can get, check Über Goober, a documentary that does for the gaming scene what Trekkies did to the Star Trek scene. Or just check this list of questionable campaign happenings.

My bro-in-law took me to Hot Topic to see all the game shirts they have for sale. While impressive, I still want to support small, quality efforts like GameSkins more than I want to encourage mall-zombieness. Besides, I think I like the gaming vibe nerdcore, without the hipster chic, pseudo-goff, or brown-is-the-new-black color scheme. That said, I regret not picking up the Mario shirt, and if they’d had a Mr. Sparkle shirt in stock, I’d have bought it.

If you still have the originals, why buy all the little remake/re-issue cartridges to play nostalgic NES (Famicom) games? Intead you could use AdoFami (short for Advance Famicom) to play your original cartridges and on your GameBoy Advance.

RollingStone.com: News - The Killers - Wal-Mart Wants $10 CDs

Wal-mart wants every CD you buy to cost less than ten bucks. And the nation's largest retailer -- which moved a quarter of a trillion dollars' worth of goods last year -- usually gets its way. Suppliers who don't accede to Wal-Mart's 'everyday low price' mantra often find their products bounced from the chain's stores, excluded from being sold to the 138 million people who shop at a Wal-Mart store every week.

Instiki, a multiplatform, malleable wiki-like application that runs on Ruby (Mac OS X flavor has Ruby built-into the .app).

Alien Loves Predator: Webcomic along the stylistic lines of Twisted ToyFare Theater (updated link, with samples) (née Twisted Mego Theater). If the movie taken this route, it would have gone gangbusters. (thanks, El Otro Miguel)

STOP ALIEN ABDUCTIONS (via gominosensei)

Throughout the history of the human race, wars were fought with bigger and better weapons. Muskets replaced bows and arrows, automatic rifles replaced single action ones, rockets replaced cannons, aircraft carriers replaced battleships, ballistic missiles replaced bombers, jet interceptors replaced propeller driven fighters. Weapons got more accurate, faster, with greater ranges of action and greater explosive power. In all of the wars until now, technology and numerical superiority determined victory. Superior technology, tactics and numerical strength were the key elements in warfare. All wars fought until now were "technology wars." Wars w(h)ere technological superiority were decisive.

Since we are being invaded by an alien force from another world, we have a different kind of war. Our war with these beings is one of mind control, mind scan, and telepathic control, as reported by Budd Hopkins, David Jacobs and Raymond Fowler. I call this type of conflict "telepathic war" to differentiate if from a "technology war." A "telepathic war" uses telepathy as a weapon in addition to the machines of a "technology war." Until now, the creatures attacking us could do so at will: they could "switch off" people or render them powerless, manipulate people's thoughts and cause them to move against their will, project mental images to us, masquerade as a friendly or sexually attractive human, and scan our entire minds.

If you're up for another beta item, Google Desktop (wait for it...) BETA is now being offered for MS Windows, with a lot less fanfare and hoopla than I’d expect for such a crazy-big-event. O’Reilly has an overview on it, which anyone should read prior to installing (e.g. it apparently takes a 1/2 gig of HDD space), and PC World has already pointed out a big security issue. (via Waxy)

Leave it to Bush, with Gary Busey. *jedi-hand-wave (thanks, kristen)

BBC NEWS | Health | Arty cosmetic surgery alternative

Mr Hartley explained: 'I wanted to make a series of garments in response to facial ideals of today.
'I was interesting in how the soft tissues of the face can be manipulated, moved around and changed.
'It's the same way that body corsets were used to change the figure.'

William Gibson has re-initiated his blog. Boo ya. (via boingboing):

Why?
Because the United States currently has, as Jack Womack so succintly puts it, a president who makes Richard Nixon look like Abraham Lincoln.
And because, as the Spanish philospher Unamuno said, "At times, to be silent is to lie."

William Shatner has an album out, HasBeen (iTMS) with Ben Folds and a mess of other talented artists. I could have sworn I linked to the single Common People (iTMS) (with Joe Jackson) when it came out, but apparently that was in the Dark Universe, where I don’t have a silly beard and violent tendencies. (via Chuji)

10. 'Look how far I can roll this barrel with my bullets!'
9. 'Ohhh...light motes.'
8. 'The new Office map is better looking than my real office.'
7. 'The hostages still looked spaced out.'
6. 'At least when I die I look cool doing it.'
5. 'I just like flying around the levels in spectator mode.'
4. 'The textures look just as crisp as my Special K.'
3. 'Wow..the weapon models are so good I'm scared I'm using a real gun.'
2. 'The wait for Half-Life 2 just got harder and easier depending on your point of view.'
And the number one thing said while playing Counter-Strike: Source:
1. 'Five years of playing CS and I still am always the first one on my team shot dead..darn it.'
--HomeLAN Fed

Check out the teaser trailer for The Ring Two; the site appears to be hammered right now -- at least the trailer is loading for crap.

I saw Ringu prolly four years ago, and The Ring (US remake) during my recent trip to the USA; it was a lot better than expected, but quite different than the Japanese original in many ways. A five paragraph essay, comparing and contrasting the two, is in the works. Hey, we have to use that damned skill somewhere, right?

Normally I sit an make faces at the monitor whenever I hear there's a remake movie based on a 70’s or 80’ TV show. So even though the Miami Vice movie will have Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx as Crockett and Tubbs, I was pulling faces until I noted that Michael Mann is slotted to write, direct, and produce the movie. Now I'm just all-excited. Miami Vice brought movie-level budgets to TV -- what kind of budget will the movie version have? A space-program budget?

SHAKESKIN: This is the Shakeskin gallery. We want you to contribute! It's easy: all you need is a camera and some loose skin.

A bit of the USA PATRIOT Act chipped away as gag orders are confirmed as being unconstitutional. (via thousand faced moon)

"After laboring under a gag provision for months, it is an enormous relief to be able to tell the world just how dangerous and extreme this Patriot Act power is," said ACLU Associate Legal Director Ann Beeson. "As the judge recognized, the Patriot Act imposed a ‘categorical, perpetual and automatic’ gag on every person who received a National Security Letter, as well as their lawyers."

Between this, and secret laws that require secret briefs to address them, it is difficult to recognize the free speech nature of the democratic US these days; we don't even get to hear about the stuff we should be fighting.

Transformers: A History: Too much love, too late applied, and on an Angelfire site at that (IE users, this prolly means pop-ups for you). Still, a fascinating read for those who miss Optimus Prime.

Just bookmarking, so that in the future I can be graduate from sans-clue about wireless networking stuff: Know Your Wireless (via boingboing.net)

King Conan: Crown of Iron is in the works, to be directed by John Milius, the same director who brought us all the original. Boo ya.

I am SO jetlagged, a good five days or so out from my return to Japan. Usually it's so much more simple coming to Japan than going to America. The trips to the US usually find me up late into the night and trying to fall asleep. In my fervor to avoid jetlag, I stayed up late almost every night in the USA, and got up early; it didn't provide a lot of rest. Now it appears to have backfired, since my early evenings have felt like the last half-turn of a wind-up toy’s key, and have found me ready to sleep by 20:00. It would be funny if it weren't somewhere between an affliction and fatigue. It is improving, since tonight it's 18:12 (boom-boom-BOOM) and I'm still relatively lucid.

“Japanese girls, bitch-slapping each other.” (via kristen)

Another US trip, another round of movies caught in that strange limbo between their US DVD release and their Japanese theatrical release (or sans-theater, direct-to-video release in some cases). Though the return flight was the longest through which I’ve ever suffered (11.5 hours, avoiding three typhoon and fighting a 175 kph headwind), I didn't watch any on the way out so I don”t have nearly as many as last time. Here were this round’s players:

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: A lot of people seem really down on Jim Carrey -- I’m not sure why, because he continues to impress me. Even in The Majestic, a tear-jerker rife with sentimental low-blows and an odd form of exposition from start-to-finish, Carrey seemed to handle his acting chores with a minimum of low bathos. In Eternal Sunshine he was blessed by an intelligent and unpredictable script by Charlie Kaufman and intriguing pacing and visuals by Michel Gondry. There were no simple answers in this movie, no simple Right and Wrong choices. This movie is still rattling and buzzing around my head nicely. I will have to buy a DVD and watch it on a better screen.

The Clearing: There was a time that I’d have assumed that any movie with both Willem Dafoe and Robert Redford in it would be engaging and thought provoking. Maybe I missed something here, but this movie seemed to be grasping at greater meaning, but failed. A successful, loved, self-made businessman (Redford) is kidnapped by a disenfranchised unemployed man (Dafoe). Gradually, things are revealed to not be entirely as they appear. Except it mostly is... predictably... what you think it is. I feel like this movie would have been significantly more interesting if the actors’ roles had been reversed. The central theme seems to be that we all make choices, we all keep secrets from those we love, and we all suffer from self doubt. That may be original content for a movie centered on a kidnapping, but in general there weren’t many chances taken in this movie, despite a clear need for them. Helen Mirren was very good in her conflicted role as the wife of the victim.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban: After reading the first book and enjoying it, the first movie was a terrible disappointment. As one friend put it, “It’s just like the book, only it feels really long, and has had all the fun and soul sucked out of it.” Consequently it was a pleasant surprise that this, the third movie, was substantially better than expected. Maybe the CG doesn’t stand out as badly. Maybe it was the change in director. Maybe it was the increase in humanity allowed to Harry’s character. It wasn’t bad at all.

Not Watched (The Path Untaken):
Around the World in Eighty Days: Jackie Chan. Dude. I remember when you were the coolest thing in the world. I wanted to watch the whole thing, but ended up catching the last 20 minutes three times. I saw the big fight with the Chinese “dragon lady” -- Jackie did his usual Great Tricks with Furniture, but other than that his presence was relegated as a backup player to mug it up behind a British actor I’d neither seen nor heard of previously. Kathy Bates appears as Queen Victoria. Is she British? No, she’s from Tennessee. There were so many British people running around in that movie, it seems strange that they couldn’t get one to opt-in for the role of Highest Possible Brit. I suppose I should just be thankful they didn’t get John Cleese.

Spider-Man 2: I wanted to see this in theaters, but missed it. The first movie balanced action with drama so very well, much like the comic on which it is based. The second movie, according to many, is even more so. I will feel let-down somewhat to see it on my reasonably large TV screen. There is no way I could get the viewing experience I crave from a 5-inch screen with questionable image contrast.

The Day After Tomorrow: Basically all the stuff I said about Spider-Man 2, minus the hope of it being good.

The Terminal: Tom Hanks stars as a man who is caught in a permanent bureaucratic limbo while trying to enter a country. Who the fuck thought this was good entertainment for an international flight? Evaded.

Garfield: The Movie: Not only did I not watch this thing, my hand stuttered on the Channel button each time I had to skip past it. 11.5 hours of evading a computer generated cat? Mission accomplished.

“How do you run a convention on a record of failure?” - (.mov)

Attention Chuji: We have determined what your next US$700 game peripheral should be.

If songs like They Might Be Giants’ Why Does the Sun Shine? cause you fits of bliss, you might enjoy Singing Science Records. (thanks, Karin!)

Check out the free mod for Battlefield 1942, Galactic Conquest (via waxy). If you want it, you’d best get it now. With Star Wars: Battlefront on sale, I can’t imagine that the Lawyers of the Sith will allow this temple of Jedi worship to stand in defiance for long.

Bad voiceover work from videogames: Winback (mp3), Megaman 8 (mp3), Resident Evil (mp3), Shenmue (mp3), Star Ocean 2 (mp3), Last Alert (mp3)

Labels: music

Christopher Reeve is dead.

Using PearPC and Linux, you can turn your XBox into a Mac OS XBox. This project strikes me as the spiritual opposite to the G5-to-MiniITX casemod hoax. I'm assuming that this is in the “because you can” category of modifications, because trouble shooting an error with this config must be un-fun.

Cartoon Action Hour is a pen-and-pencil RPG recreating the joy of mid-eighties heroic cartoons like He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, Transformers and G.I. Joe. I would be interested to see the results of mixing this with Unknown Armies.

Labels: games

My friend Tim is traveling and offering clever(ly worded) insights as he goes:

Reythemno is the third largest town on Crete with a population of 25,000 people, several of whom do not own motor scooters. It is also a big German tourist destination, and I am frequently addressed by the local Greeks in that language. To be fair I try to play up the German thing, particularly by swearing auf Deutsch whenever possible. No need for Americans to get a rap as foul-mouthed travellers.

Badly need bootie mashups with Queen? Try A Night at the Hip-Hopera by the Kleptones; Waxy is offering a local copy, or you can bag it via BitTorrent, using this torrent. (Thanks for the heads-up to The Other Michæl)

Update: I’ve been listening to this throughout the day. Jeebus, this may be one of my favorite booties evar.

My return to the Land of the Rising Fun has left me jetlagged but blissed. The plane ride was 11.5+ hrs, evading three typhoon and battling 175 kph (108 mph) headwinds the whole way.

And if you’re only here for the weird shit and not for news on my life, here is an ebay auction for an Angelina Jolie life mask, which is listed as “nude” for some inexplicably creepy reason.

I’ve been in the USA for two weeks, and will be heading back to Japan tomorrow morning. Having watched the first two episodes of (the surprisingly impressive) Lost, I will be crossing my fingers the whole way, hoping to avoid a catas-tropic landing, as well as vomit (via waxy).