There is apparently nothing this guy can't do. Here, he makes a shop vac out of a lidded bucket, some clear tube, plastic fittings, a little hot glue, and a regular vacuum. Genius.
Allow me to elucidate a recent observation
That seems to happen quite a bit in human population.
When people hang out all the time, we like to call them friends,
But with a small romance advance, that's when the frienship ends.
Sometimes there's a happy ending, sometimes there is pain,
But after you make that leap of faith, it's not the same again.
For better or ill a hormonal thrill can knock you on your ass.
So tread lightly 'round the fringe of friends; it's all a big morass.
That seems to happen quite a bit in human population.
When people hang out all the time, we like to call them friends,
But with a small romance advance, that's when the frienship ends.
Sometimes there's a happy ending, sometimes there is pain,
But after you make that leap of faith, it's not the same again.
For better or ill a hormonal thrill can knock you on your ass.
So tread lightly 'round the fringe of friends; it's all a big morass.
But when two people get along in perfect oscillation,
They may not realize at first their creeping affectation.
When you go to eat and play, your group of friends goes too.
But what do you call a group of friends that numbers only two?
Two friends that tend to separate into a little bubble,
That group of two, just you and you, that's what we call a couple.
And when that friendship reaches outward to the sky above,
That's not a frienship anymore, that's what we call love.
There's some new stuff I've just found, and some of it may be of interest to the rest of you.
- Coyote Ragtime Show - What would you say to a show that has gothic lolita girls... with guns... that are also robots? Would you say that's AWESOME? You're damned right that's what you'd say, because it is AWESOME. And that's just a small part of the AWESOME of Coyote Ragtime Show. A cast of engaging characters, multiple plotlines counting down to a final showdown, and tons of gunplay will hold fans of Cowboy Bebop or Gunslinger Girl riveted.
- NHK ni Yokosou! (Welcome to the NHK!) - This is a very interesting show that deals with Hikikomori in an interesting, artistic way. The main character is one such shut-in who seems to have found a way outside of his one-room apartment, but is struggling with himself to actually go through with it. The show frequently lapses into self-delusional episodes that very effectively convey the feelings of fear and loathing that have kept him isolated for three years. Part of this self-delusion is his belief that his state is part of a conspiracy by the NHK -- a broadcasting company in Japan, but in his mind it's the "Nihon Hikikomori Kyokai", or "Japan Social Withdrawal Association. This one is recommended heartily for anyone who has trouble dealing with the world around them (like I sometimes do). If you have no idea what I'm talking about, you'll just have to watch it to understand.
- Powerpuff Girls Z - THE END TIMES ARE UPON US. RUN. RUN FOR YOUR LIVES.
Not too long ago, while searching for the things a girl looks for in a guy (and why I was failing so miserably at it), I was told by a good friend that "despite all the ideal talk about not judging a book by it
s cover, a good sense of fashion always impresses a girl." After that, I did some soul searching, trying to find my "sense of fashion," that unique style that would make me feel good about myself and make the ladies feel good about me, too. I consulted friends, looked over catalogs both printed and hypertext, and shopped around. You know what I found?
I don't have it.
I have no sense of fashion. I have no preference for one style over another, because quite frankly, I hate them all. The only thing I care about in a shirt or a pair of pants is how comfortable or useful it is. I do not understand anything beyond that. And then it dawned on me. This is my fashion.
When you see me, unkempt hair, wrinkled khaki pants, and a ThinkGeek T-shirt, that's what I like. If I'm sitting at my desk with black shorts, black shirt, black shoes, and black socks pulled up as far as they'll go, that's my style. And when you see me on the DDR machine wearing gray sweatpants and a ratty TIS Bookstore T-shirt I found in a box of free clothes, that is my fashion. All of this is my way of saying "Fuck you!" to the bullshit regime of courtship-pressured narcissism. I will not buy your goddamned clothes from your goddamned trendy clothes store in order to be liked by girls. I will not wear something that I hate because some girl is too shallow to see beyond it.
I am a goddamned human being. If you cannot look past your distaste for my fashion and treat me like a human being, then kindly fuck off and die.
In our help system at work, we've been getting an increasing amount of spam. This beauty came in today, and I believe it to be an attempted circumvention of bayesian spam filters. I found it interesting for its poetic qualities. I feel as though it should be read at the local coffee shop to the rhythm of bongo drums. Yeah, man.
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The Mazda 787B is a car of legend. Not just because the 2.6 liter 4-rotor wankel engine puts out nearly 800 horsepower without the use of forced induction, or that all this power rides on a chassis weighing only 830 Kg. It's not because of its electronically controlled variable-geometry air intakes, or because the engine suffered no failures after driving some 3000 miles for 24 hours at Le Mans. No, the legend is twofold: One, the 787B was the first car to win Le Mans with a rotary engine. (And the last -- rotary engines were outlawed the following year) Two, it was the first time any Japanese manufacturer had won Le Mans.
Oh, and it's fast. Damn fast.
I recently bought an all-black version of the 787B in GT4, which IMNSHO, looks completely bad-ass. Now, there's a track in GT4, El Capitan, which more or less sits on a mountainside. There is a part where you make a left, then drive over a hill while turning right. It likes to make cars airborne, even little 63HP crap-boxes like the Suzuki Alto Works. So imagine what happens when I forget about this hill in a car that has twelve times the power and weighs 600 pounds less than a Honda Fit.
WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!
There's a genre of video game that is popular in Japan, but sees very little, if any exposure in American markets: the dating simulation game. The game typically involves you as the main (usually male) character, who interacts with a number of girls, with the intent of getting a date with them (or, for the naughtier games, getting them into bed). The games themselves unfold similarly to visual novels, with the flow changed by your decisions at important junctions, much like a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book.
I came up with an idea today for just the opposite: An anti-dating simulation game. You play a girl (!) in an engineering school (!), who is surrounded by single men who think you're cute. But your goal is not to get a date. Your intent, rather, is to avoid these guys' advances by any means necessary. And sometimes, it's necessary to use all the horrors of engineering to your advantage (and their detriment). For example:
Scene: Power Circuits Lab
Guy: So, how about getting some lunch after this?
Choose:
- Go to lunch with him
- Tell him you already ate before class
- Accidentally jab him with the 10,000V supply leads
I think it would be an interesting satire of the genre, as well as having fun with the other side of the lopsided gender statistics in engineering.
At karaoke last night, Chrissy says to me, "You've got a good singing voice, why don't you sing more?"
"Well," I replied, "It just doesn't come up that much in my everyday life."
And it's true. It's not like I'll be sitting at my desk at work, coding up some Perl, and someone asks a question that I feel compelled to respond to in song.
When your computer's feeling sluggish
And you think, "This thing is rubbish!"
I can fix it, don't despair,
It just sounds like you've got spyware!
Nope. Doesn't happen. It would not even be cool if it did.
Not too long ago I headed over to the local Barnes and Noble in order to be a dutiful fanboy and pick up Megatokyo vol. 4. Why, you ask, do I feel the need to buy a dead tree version of a bunch of comics I can find online, and have already read, to boot? Because Fred Gallagher gave up a steady, well-paying job to follow through with something he believed in. That's awesome, and I want to support him in following his dreams. I couldn't resist the allure of printed paper, so I picked up the first volume of the Read Or Die manga, and "The Gripping Hand" by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.
The Read Or Die manga takes place before both the OVA and the TV series, and I recommend it for any fan of those. "The Gripping Hand" is the sequel to "The Mote in God's Eye", an absolutely amazing sci-fi novel that you should read. Even if you've already read it. Yes. Go read it now.
I've been perusing Whispered Apologies, which is interesting in that no two comics are alike, since they're created from a random mishmash of writers and artists. Some of them are very thought-provoking, like this one about the pursuit of happiness. This led me to Andrew Danner's TwentySevenLetters, which threw me over to The Pretentious History of Everything. I forgot where I got sidetracked into Flaky Pastry, but it's starting to look eerily famililar. Is it... Nethack?
The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya has ended, so I've been browsing for a new series to watch. Ouran High School Host Club has taught me not to judge a cross-gender anime by it's cover, so I downloaded the first episode of Kashimashi, which sounds really awful, but it's not that bad. Long story short, a boy gets rejected, runs off into the woods, and takes a falling spaceship to the face. The kid is sort of vaporized, but the aliens rebuild him... as a girl. To add insult to injury, the aliens broadcast across the world, "Um, so, we kinda smeared one of yours while we were de-orbiting, but it's OK, 'cause we rebuilt him. Everything will be OK. Oh, by the way, he's a she, now, bye!" Yuri ensues.
But really! It's really an entertaining show! I don't care what you think!
My much hacked upon and scraped together Alpha box is finally up and running. I've installed NetBSD 3.0 on it, which required some compiling. Thankfully, pkgsrc made this completely trivial. (Note to Gentoo fanboys: NetBSD did it first) Just a few essentials, like perl, apache, vim, screen, wget... and nethack.
For those unfamiliar with nethack, it is an RPG of the old school. Graphics are ASCII, and minimalistic to the point of being cryptic. The mechanics, though, are full-featured, rivaling games like Diablo. For those able to work through the zillion commands and the dated (or nonexistent, really) graphics, it's a rewarding game that will have you sitting in front of a terminal for hours. For those who can't, there's always Falcon's Eye.
Despite having been a hardcore Linux geek for over five years, now, I've never really picked up nethack. So my initial attempts were pretty poor. Like:
No Points Name Hp [max]
5 65 chip-Mon-Hum-Mal-Law died in The Dungeons of Doom on
level 1. Killed by kicking a boulder. - [14]
Which is my worst score, but isn't nearly as hilarious as:
No Points Name Hp [max]
3 162 chip-Wiz-Hum-Mal-Cha was poisoned in The Dungeons of
Doom on level 1. Poisoned by a rotted kitten corpse. 7 [12]
A lesson for everyone here: If you're going to eat a kitten corpse, make sure it's a fresh kitten corpse. The life you save may be your own.