Science, Mad. And some movies.
Generic “this is what I did today” posts. Could also be comedic/dramatic bits or reviews of something.
Hey gesmerity. Are you jimmiged?
ga sm’rrty? Ga smere i tee?
Gimmiged?
You know when you wake up from a deep sleep and try to talk?
gesmerity I think is supposed to be “smarty” or “Smart-ass.” Jimmiged is related to garbage or “rummage” and means something related to “cleaned” as in “showered.”
PAOLO: david fincher is the best famous director i know
PAOLO: i just saw his best work ever
BRAIN: which one is that
BRAIN: I liked Fight Club
PAOLO: the billy idol video
BRAIN: better than Alien3, The Game, Seven, and Fight Club?
PAOLO: dude.
BRAIN: (I still havent’ seen Panic Room or Zodiac)
BRAIN: (or the Fitzgerald thingy)
PAOLO: have you seen the video?
BRAIN: no, url me
PAOLO: it gets props for like referencing electric dreams and ford fairlane
PAOLO: Billy Idol: Cradle of Love
PAOLO: actually i think the genius is this
PAOLO: ok rdy?
PAOLO: idol at the time of the sooting
PAOLO: was wheelchair bound.
BRAIN: oh really?
BRAIN: how did that happen
PAOLO: yes he had severe motorcycle accident
PAOLO: could not move from torso down
PAOLO: lol this video like spawned world of warcraft
BRAIN: Oh I remenmber this video
BRAIN: that girl always pissed me off
PAOLO: hahah
PAOLO: why’d the girl piss you off
BRAIN: because at the time I didn’t understand she is meant to be a fantasy for this nerdy guy
BRAIN: she basically comes to his nice apartment and wrecks it
BRAIN: she fucks with his stereo
PAOLO: oh
BRAIN: then she spills red wine all over the place
PAOLO: yeah i had some chick blow out my speakers once
PAOLO: it sucked
BRAIN: she messes up his bed
BRAIN: and he’s expected to cower in another room
BRAIN: while she plays this obnoxious music
PAOLO: why is he cowering that part i didn’t get
BRAIN: and then basically her macho boyfriend implicitly threatens him!
PAOLO: yeah if it’s a fantasy for that guy
PAOLO: why does he imagine the guy
PAOLO: the machog guy
BRAIN: maybe he is a cuckold fetishist
PAOLO: i think it makes sense that way
PAOLO: or as if the viewer is supposed to be in the apt too
PAOLO: ‘ok hot chick’
PAOLO: ‘ok dude isn’t doing shit, so’
BRAIN: what do you think the idea is?
PAOLO: i think the idea is “well she’s young, we should have her strip, and the last video that did well was the aha video so..”
BRAIN: so you think there was no narrative idea
PAOLO: lol no
I heart the Hipster Grifter.
Let me just say that although I am not a hipster, I do adore them, mainly because I parasitize the byproducts of their lifestyle. I need ready access to indie music, cheap fashion, cheap new art experiences, and even their mostly-baseless disdain for the tragically unhip.
Also I love con artists, because I am nutty like that.
But you know? The curmudgeons are right when they complain that there is nothing really that noteworthy about Keri Farrell. She’s doing what has been done before. I have known half a dozen sketchy sociopaths like her– partied with them, lost money to them, and pointed them at people I wanted to watch them destroy, like you might a pit bull in a dog fighting ring.
So this is not real new. Why is Kerri Farrell an internet celebrity then, when most of the other scam artists languish in relative obscurity? No idea. I can only surmise that she is pushing enough buttons all at the same time, or perhaps the internet-savvy percentage in the victim demographic has reached a critical mass. Who knows!
I kind of wonder if it’s due to some hipster backlash, like the “Disco Sucks” movement (July 12, 1979, “Disco Demolition Night” at Comiskey Park in Chicago, IL). Maybe this will be the beginning of the end of the phrase “hipster.”
I just spent most of the day making a prop for my giallo movie.
What is giallo? Read about it on wikipedia. I’ll write more once the project is done.
Anyway, I needed a cult-looking cross for my movie. I originally made it in clay, sometimes covered in aluminum foil, sometimes spraypainted silver, to look like metal… it melted in the blood we were using. This was unfired clay. Actually clay in general was looking way too sloppy.
So, I needed something more precise. I decided to laser-etch it. I bought a “prime” membership at Ponoko on the off chance I would need to make a bunch of these.
My initial cross design was a Rosicrucian cross, complete with all the rosettes and hebrew letters. But, it looked too fat, too alchemal, and not sinister enough. So, I drew a new cross, more Chaos-inspired, and put some glyphs on there from the Necronomicon (the big seal on the front of the book).
The thing that took me the longest to figure out: I really like brushwork in my illustrations, using custom pressure-sensitive brushes on my Wacom. But laser cutting needs zero-point strokes. No stroke. That means all your brushwork has to be converted to outlines. Okay, done.
Also, all the fancy compound shapes need to be simple, nonoverlapping outlines. So I used a lot of Pathfinder and the “Expand” function, which is basically “make a vector path that is what I’m seeing at the moment.” Very useful.
Ponoko color-codes their laser operations. Cutting is blue. Heavy raster is black-filled. Heavy vector (not cutting) is red. So my design has a lot of those three colors.
I started at around 2; I just finished at 7:30. 5 and a half hours… including shipping, it cost only $20 for 2 copies of my design! Very worth it! Here’s hoping the design worked!
Maybe if it looks super awesome I’ll make it in metal and sell it as jewelry to gamers.
Fishbots!
As detailed at nixiepixel, a fishbot is a AIM bot that picks two random strangers and sends them each provocative conversation openers. The strangers are connected and have a conversation, each thinking they have been contacted by the person they are talking to.
Kind of annoying. It’s bad enough when absolute strangers try to chat you, but having a bot connect an unwilling person to you kinda sucks.
On a positive note, you might be thinking, “isn’t that clever!” or “how nice, a way to connect with strangers!”
But over here in real life it usually doesn’t work that way. Here’s an actual transcript which is pretty representative of how these chats go:
malnourishedcoho: Have you ever been diagnosed with a mental illness?
BRAIN: and is bulemia a mental illness
malnourishedcoho is now known as malnourishedcoho.
malnourishedcoho:Â whos this?
BRAIN: you are a coho victim
malnourishedcoho: huh
BRAIN: anything ending with -coho is a bot
BRAIN: that randomly connects strangers on IM
malnourishedcoho: i see
malnourishedcoho: get a ffucking life idiot
BRAIN: see to me it looks like you IM’d me first
malnourishedcoho: how
BRAIN: you said:
BRAIN: malnourishedcoho: Have you ever been diagnosed with a mental illness?
BRAIN: and I responded
BRAIN: but see it was actually this coho bot
malnourishedcoho: did not
BRAIN: yes, do you understand, it’s a bot
malnourishedcoho: stop being such a loser and go do sum worth while nerd
BRAIN: you are not very smart
BRAIN: I feel sorry for you
BRAIN: but you are probably a teenager
BRAIN: with low reading comprehension
SHAC:Â http://valleywag.gawker.com/5168039/dude-turns-to-twitter-as-guy-breaks-in-his-house
BRAIN: retarded
BRAIN: “ok poop coming out now”
BRAIN: ustream!?
BRAIN: also, who doesn’t lock their door in SF?!
SHAC: are you supposed to?
BRAIN: what is your address again?
M FOSTER:the world is a sad
M FOSTER:Â sad place
M FOSTER: Best part is where he talks about being out of TP
BRAIN: can you imagine not locking your door in SF?
M FOSTER: yeah no joke
M FOSTER: and then not calling the police in this situation….I was really hoping the last tweet would be something like.  “OMG he’s kicking down the door to my bedroom. The door just broke. He’s got a chainsaw. He’s sawing off my leg. It hurts so bad. Is that my torso? Oh noes! Don’t cut off my torso.
BRAIN: “ok – I’m bleeding all over the place. I wonder if I should call an ambulance?”
On my commute this morning I was talking to myself, running through a hypothetical Star Trek: Enterprise fanfic I’ll never write, because I think fanfic is stupid.
But for fun I did all my lines as Jeremy Irons playing Claus von Bülow in Reversal of Fortune. His accent and delivery are so awesome in that movie.
The Innowave UVF3 is here in this office.
It’s a water dispenser that doesn’t use bottles. Instead, it takes water from the tap (green!) and then filters it (sorta green) and then irradiates it with UV light (uhm…). Which may not be very Green but it’s pretty damn cool.
However it has a pretty bad interface design. The major problem is that it has buttons on it I cannot identify.
There’s 5 buttons: a giant one with a drop of water on it, two identical ones that have a glass with ice in it, and two on the other side, one which is a mug of hot drink, and the other the same mug, but with a “+” on it.
Since there is no manual, this is unnecessarily challenging.
Al I can figure is it’s using a mass-produced shell used for other models and this is why the (at least) 1 extra button
Am I the only person who’s confused Drew Peterson with Scott Peterson?
Drew Peterson is an ex-police officer who is in the news these days for maybe killing his wife, STACEY Peterson. This is in Illinois.
Scott Peterson is a dude in California (pretty close to me actually) who was convicted of killing his wife LACI Peterson.
DIANE: If you petition to change your name to Peterson I’m leaving the country.
It’s the modern version of the Stairway to Heaven scare. A bunch of apes hear “Islam is the light” and “Satan is king” in a baby toy gibberish. Then they demand the stores pull the babies off the shelf. What is especially humorous: they complaint says the Islam message is “spouting hate.” And by humorous I mean humorous I don’t live near them.
Even the hypothetical Satan message isn’t “spouting hate.” It’s saying how much you like Satan! Yay!