my.bicycle

It’s not entirely clear what Creative Labs was thinking when they commissioned this piece, but “This is rock ‘n’ roll!” (.wmv) manages to be both stupid and endearing at once. (via jwz - November 29th, 2004)

Shockwave Neko games (for Rachel). (via del.icio.us)

Photo ID needed to rent/buy violent video games:

Ontario, along with Manitoba and Nova Scotia, have taken steps to making sure that people under 18 can’t rent or purchase violent games. Ontario even went so far recently as to slap the Rockstar game “Manhunt” with an “R” rating. A rating previously reserved exclusively for movies.

This entry prompted more commentary than usual. in particular the following user comment was of interest:

If you are going to say GTA:SA is bad, you have to include Halo 2, Half-Life 2, and even Doom 3 with it. In the multiplayer modes you are killing humans. It may be killing humans in a futuristic setting with futuristic weapons, but it is killing humans nonetheless.

I know in America, we have a real problem with the whole age of responsibility question. We have 14 year-olds being tried as adults for crimes, 16 year-olds who hold jobs and pay taxes, 18 year-olds who can be drafted, and none of them have all of their rights. I personally say that if the government decides a 20 year-old isn't responsible enough to have a beer, he or she shouldn't be fully responsible to vote, for crimes they commit, or to be sent away to fight for their country.

The privlidges of age are getting pushed farther into the future, but many of the drawbacks are creeping earlier into childhood.

Rumble Roses reveals its hand, and that, really, there's only one involved:

Q: So, let’s get straight to the point. When a gamer buys Rumble Roses, how do you perceive the split of his time will be spent between playing the game and enjoying it, in the ‘gentleman’s way’?

A: Ha ha ha. I think about 20 percent gameplay and 80 percent masturbating. Hah ha ha!
(via kotaku)

First there was rocket jumping, then came Warthog Jumping. (Or is it Puma?) Lleyad brings us tank jumping. (via slashdot games) Yes, this means the site has already been slashdotted, so here is a bittorrent for you.

My friend Tim visits Osaka

The thought of travelling in Japan was quite daunting for me. Most of the places I’d travelled to before were either like Mexico, which takes its American tourist dollars very seriously and is thus set up for gringos, or like Europe, which is so aggressively multi-lingual that you have to search long and hard to find a restaurant that doesn't have it’s menu in four languages.

Not so in Japan. It is a wealthy island nation, and has a reputation for merely tolerating, not catering to its foreign visitors.

As it turns out this is mostly bunk.

Reading an interesting bastard pop article at WorldChanging, I found the Shrub covering Imagine in Imagine This (.mp3). Combined with my previous find of him covering Sunday, Bloody Sunday, it seems like he really gets his bootleg on.

From the same article, LenLowLand Music offers some interesting Bastard Pop ditties. Enlow’s blog says he'll be at Bootie in San Francisco!

Favorite tangential find from trawling the links: Miss Frenchie’s Funky Cold Milkshake.

Labels: music

SciFi.com is offering Chi-Chian, an episodic Flash webtoon. Its style is undeniably cool; check the trailer at least.

Labels: sf

Doom 3 compared and contrasted with Half-life 2

Although I haven’t completed either, I’ve spent enough time in each (I think) to develop a feel for what the later sections of each game will be like. Given that each has been fairly consistent thus far, it’d take a major shift for my opinion of either to change significantly.

Doom 3 HL2 style

Basically I wanted to see what HL2 type maps might look in Doom 3. I only got the textures from HL2 and I haven't spent THAT much time on the map (only a few rooms) because it'd be a waste of time doing a whole map that you won't release.

Adrenaline Vault’s Bob Mandel wonders if the push for realistic graphics has obscured gameplay. D’ya think? Hmm?

Various funny photos and comics.

Living in Japan means I have to get my Saturday Night Live fix in bits-and-pieces on the web through illicit sources. Finding things like The Barry Gibb Talk Show (.wmv) means I share them with you. (via cowbell tribe)

Check out this kigurumi-heavy video from DJ Format. No fanservice, but man, that bear has got some moves. I wish I could have been a passer-by when they were shooting this.

It is unclear what benefit Panasonic is gaining from the Olympic Games in Action short film, Mariko Takahashi’s FITNESS VIDEO for being appraised as an “EX-FAT GIRL” might be, but it is... um... really weird. I had to temporarily stop viewing it once the poodles started working out, because I was afraid of losing my mind. (via mefi)

Speaking of popping eyes, and Popeye, here is a slightly less weird but hellaciously funny Popeye-meets-anime bit. (thanks, The Other Michael)

JU$T ANOTHER RICH KID, offers Traci Takes Tokyo, a hipster-meets-ghettofabulous, limited edition T-shirt. For US$60 you too can have a shirt that you can't wear to work. (via coolhunting)

Very cool, ironic and accurate disclaimer stickers for science textbooks.

This recording made in NYC features our pals Dan ‘Johnny’ Levine on the trombone and Mark ‘Loveman’ Pender on trumpet. The volcanic rendition of The Famous Polka includes solos from the Legendary Line Up-Dan, Danny and Marty.

They Might Be Giants’ Free Tunes Page | user=tmbg | pword=thespinesurfs | Sign up for the email newsletter to get new, free TMBG songs with surprising regularity.

Have a look at the fan-created Grand Theft Auto: Lego City (.mov) before the Rampage-resistant, brick-based lawyers have it yanked. (thanks, The Other Michael)

G-Cans project brings us extraordinary photos of massive, hidden Japanese urban landscapes. (via urban decay)

Scorpion Toddlerpede by Johnny beinArt
Toddlerpede collection. (via jwz)

Music: Snoop Dogg and Britney Spears collaborate in her latest video. Luckily I live in Japan, where this kind of thing can only reach me in little blurb banners from Hotmail, instead of being inundated by it at every newsstand.

Movies: Mrs. Doubtfire, a movie that should be praised for not backpedalling on the issue of divorce as a solution to dysfunctional marriages, but spurned for it’s portayal of parental stalking as healthy, is getting a sequel.

Television: Mixing trends for remakes with the wave of reality TV, The Real Gilligan's Island aims to take the old series and lowbrid it with Survivor.

Games: A Scottish company is creating a US$9.95 game in which players strive to accurately re-create the JFK assassination by playing as Lee Harvey Oswald. Cheap publicity stunt, or way cheap publicity stunt? You make the call.

“We believe that the only thing we're exploiting is new technology,” said Ewing, a former documentary filmmaker and senior executive with Scottish developer VIS, responsible for games like State of Emergency. He said he sent Edward Kennedy a letter before the game's release.

Outside the Inbox, a collection of “songs inspired by and titled after the subject lines of mass-email (spam),” is cool in both concept and execution, but Brad Sucks’ other music is also very ear-friendly. I suspect his claim to being a “one man band with no fans” is unfounded.

Students who thought of Superman volunteered much less of their time than those who thought about other superheroes. Furthermore, Superman-primed subjects were significantly less likely to show up at a meeting for volunteers held three months after they were initially asked to participate.

The reason, believes Nelson, is that asking people to compare themselves to an exceptional individual makes them realise their shortcomings. Whereas thinking about a general category encourages people to identify the strengths they have in common.
-- New Scientist: Superman too super a role model�

Penny Arcade’s list of Halo 2 archetypes may be sporting one pop reference too many, but it’s the first one that made me laugh in months.

Downhill Battle's blog torrent proposal; before the “pro-piracy” mudslinging starts, ponder the shared-file purchase report. It would be nice if the copyright syndicate recognized this for the opportunity it is. There have been entire media markets created through non-sanctioned distribution; complete and utter control is not only unnecessary, it's harmful.

SizzlingKeys for Apple iTunes in Mac OS X. (via timmeh)

Wiggety-wack electronica: Hey, Kid, Nice Robot (will launch new window, because it rudely resizes the browser) (via timmeh)

It's hard now to remember what that was like. Try. Remember what it was like to walk down your street during summer vacation and see a flag outside someone's window? It always gave me a warm feeling, hard to describe, but a sense that me and the person behind that door had something in common. If you'd asked us if we were patriots, we would have been confused by the question. Of course we were. Who wasn't? We had a deep, abiding love for our country that was simple, non-nationalistic, the same way reasonable people feel about their baseball team. Yours is good, maybe, but ours is better. No insult, just confidence.

Of course things are different now. The flag and its colors have been stolen by people whose goal is not inclusion but exclusion. Now, instead of settling our differences, we hold grudges against each other, question whether people who disagree with us are aiding the Official Enemy of the Hour, and define our America as the kind of walled-in neighborhood where everyone stays inside their big, cookie-cutter house and huddles for protection behind their 'privacy' fence. Posted: No trespassing, no homosexuals, no questioning, and no friendly dissent.
Clint's Notebook - Remember Patriotism?

Dukes of Hazzard Starts Principal Photography
Warner Bros. Pictures' action-comedy The Dukes of Hazzard, starring Johnny Knoxville, Seann William Scott and Jessica Simpson, commenced principal photography on location in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on November 15th, it was announced today by Jeff Robinov, President of Production, Warner Bros. Pictures. The film also stars Burt Reynolds, with Lynda Carter and Willie Nelson.

Microsoft’s Halo 2 viral marketing campaign, ilovebees.com (see my Futurismic post for details), has finally revealed its hand. It turns out that Sean Stewart, one of the least appreciated speculative fiction authors alive today, was the Lead Author on this, just as he was for The Beast, a similar campaign developed to promote Steven Spielberg’s A.I.

If you're interested in Sean’s work, there are excerpts on his site. I recently read the three chapters from the chilling A Perfect Circle on Salon, and am now anxious to read the entire work.

Public Enemy's music was affected [by copyright lawsuits] more than anybody's because we were taking thousands of sounds. If you separated the sounds, they wouldn't have been anything -- they were unrecognizable. The sounds were all collaged together to make a sonic wall. Public Enemy was affected because it is too expensive to defend against a claim. So we had to change our whole style, the style of It Takes a Nation and Fear of a Black Planet, by 1991.
From the DNA Lounge: DNA Sequencing

In Warren Ellis’ Mister Sleepless livejournal, he has given a link to the torrent file for the Justice League Unlimited episode that he wrote. It features the best Batman deadpan I’ve seen to date, and proof that Atom is a very lucky superhero.

Labels: TV

If you need even more bastardpoppybits, check DJ Riko’s offerings. Riko gets a bit more oldschool than most mixes; right now I'm enjoying bits of Leave It mixed with heavy scratching. (.mp3) (via waxy)

Labels: mashup, music

1968 The Beatles release "The White Album"
2003 Jay Z records "The Black Album"
2004 DJ Danger Mouse mixes both "The Grey Album"

Witness The Grey Video, all in good fun and wonderfully executed. (via davextreme)

RoboDump is a robot. Sort of. And it poops. Sort of. Forever. A horrible, never-ending bowel movement complete with straining grunts, horrific gas, splashes, and pee sounds.

RoboDump 1.0 (via jwz)

In case you are desperate for some kitsch in your kitchen, here are ceramic versions of those little cups for take-out coffee.

There are some who would say that I sound bitter, that now is the time for healing, to bring the nation together. Let me tell you a little story. Last night, I watched the returns come in with some friends here in Los Angeles. As the night progressed, people began to talk half-seriously about secession, a red state / blue state split. The reasoning was this: We in blue states produce the vast majority of the wealth in this country and pay the most taxes, and you in the red states receive the majority of the money from those taxes while complaining about 'em. We in the blue states are the only ones who've been attacked by foreign terrorists, yet you in the red states are gung ho to fight a war in our name. We in the blue states produce the entertainment that you consume so greedily each day, while you in the red states show open disdain for us and our values. Blue state civilians are the actual victims and targets of the war on terror, while red state civilians are the ones standing behind us and yelling ‘Oh, yeah!? Bring it on!’
-- Fanatical Apathy: Concession Speech

Related News: Half of America apologizes to rest of world. (gallery)

Mozilla Update :: Extensions - List - Blogging - Page 1: "BlogThis 0.2.1
By Phil Ringnalda
Adds right-click access to Blogger's BlogThis popup."

City of Heroes is either very addictive or very repetitive, depending on who you ask. To an impressive number of players, it is also an excuse to bust out with a costume and parade about as their virtual, heroic selves. (via screenhead)

Real Otaku Heroes’ tribute to the thankfully rare male-playing-female cosplayer breed. (.mp3)

Labels: music

An excellent, thoughtful Op/Ed piece by Krugman at the NYT on what this election meant to the democrats and moderates, and why we cannot give up.

This election did not prove the Republicans unbeatable. Mr. Bush did not win in a landslide. Without the fading but still potent aura of 9/11, when the nation was ready to rally around any leader, he wouldn't have won at all. And future events will almost surely offer opportunities for a Democratic comeback.

I don't hope for more and worse scandals and failures during Mr. Bush's second term, but I do expect them. The resurgence of Al Qaeda, the debacle in Iraq, the explosion of the budget deficit and the failure to create jobs weren't things that just happened to occur on Mr. Bush's watch. They were the consequences of bad policies made by people who let ideology trump reality.

After all the political posts in which I indulged in the past couple of months, it is probably a mystery why I’ve not yet posted anything on it. The answer is twofold: (1) I’m still thinking through my reaction, and (2) I’m still in shock.

The UK’s Daily Mirror’s title How Can 59,054,087 People Be So Dumb? is a bit unfair. I think it’s necessary to realize that this election was nearly entirely about fear. Well, fear and “moral issues,” another troubling phrase that I'd like to see stay the hell out of my American government. The fear is easy to understand: we are in a war, and it is particularly difficult to unseat a sitting president while at war. This is apparently true even when the war in which we are engaged is over false pretenses, has switched from a pre-emptive strike to combat Weapons of Mass Destruction to a focus on liberating the Iraqi people and newly invented ties between Hussein and Al Qaeda.

The election’s morale issues are harder to justify. One of the few bits of Government Class in 9th grade that actually interested me had to deal with the separation of church and state. The realization that so much of this election became about how people interpreted the candidates’ stance on gay marriage, stem cell research, and abortion/pro-choice/pro-life is staggering.

It is tempting to point to the rough evidence that the states that voted for Bush are, on average, not that smart. There is probably some truth to the idea that, like in 2000, a number of bubba-types simply voted with the guy who seemed nicer, and wasn’t challenging their intelligence or trying to get them to think about the issues. A big part of me wants to adopt the stance of authors of FuckTheSouth.com, and flip the bird to the red states in the same way that Bush has flipped the bird (.mov) to the just-short-of-half of voters that turned out in record numbers to evict him, but I suspect the truth may be significantly more complex than a simple map showing binary states for each of our fifty.

What can be done? What will happen? Well, we’ve got another four years ahead of us while this radical regime has its way with our Constitution and Bill of Rights, but that’s not necessarily a given. Just prior to the election, it seemed like a number of news sources remembered their place in the public trust, snapped out of their pornographic attraction to free tank rides in exchange for journalistic integrity, and woke up to the reality of what road W. is leading us. It has turned out to be too little, too late for the election, but there is a strong possibility that this next stretch could generate another Woodward and Bernstein, and Bush (and Cheney soon thereafter) could be impeached. To be honest, since Clinton was nearly impeached over technically lying under oath, it is a mystery how this has not been brought up as a possible solution to the cheatocracy.

More than anything, I am getting more than a little sick of hearing how the democrats need to “heal the rift” between the right and the left, the red and the blue, and find some median ground on which we can stand and agree. Bull-fucking-shit; we are in a war for the culture of America, which has been hijacked by the Karl Rove cabal, and manipulated against its own fears. We do not need to find a middle ground, because there is none; this group will run as far to the right as they can, and then keep running, all of us in tow, right off a cliff. If half the country thinks that the way Bush has run things is acceptable, it is not time for us to find a way to all get along and play nice, it is time to get out there an educate these fools, and get our government to look out for our interests again.

Full update on Vegas et al after I recover from this creeping crud of a cold that I had during the entire trip, but meanwhile enjoy these Sleeping sarariman (salarymen) photos, once again by MasaManiA. (via boingboing)

Blizzard’s World of Warcraft will be in stores shortly. If cleaving orcs in twain with a rune-ensorceled blade is a bit too outré for you, you may look forward to Hello Kitty Online World.

Labels: games

Last minute thing: excellent Berkeley store Comic Relief are getting evicted from their premises. I’ll be signing there Thursday, 5-7pm, to say goodbye to the current location and to support the moving process. Come by and buy a comic. More details on DPH, comicrelief.net.
SPREAD THE WORD.
(via warren ellis’ BAD SIGNAL mailing list)

Rats. Comic Relief is a great store, which I have visited many, many times. Most likely it will become a Starbucks or something equally ubiquitous and redundant. Crap, crap, crap. Biggest selection of trade paperbacks I’ve ever seen.

Dremel is unknowingly hosting a pumpkin image of pure grotesquery. (via waxy)

This cautionary tale of a GTA:San Andreas pre-order gone sadly awry shows that all GTA players are not violent headcases, and that Best Buy may not be the best place to shop, unless you like being treated suspiciously, and paying extra for games that you had on reserve. (via joystiq)

Black and white photography - likely photoshoppery, but I've not read up on his details, but the work is eerie, dark, and ingriguing: Joel-Peter Witkin Love & Redemption