Category: looky

Man, they took my idea! I can’t believe all this time I could have just
paid someone to plan my vacation for me!

From Mainichi Daily:

In Ecuador, Japanese can, according to the men’s weekly, hunt for children in a different manner as they are armed with a rifle and permitted to track down a youth let loose in the jungle. About 10 Japanese have so far taken part in the tours, with only three getting a shot off at their target and no fatalities reported.

Japanese are tapping into the underground in European countries, too. Belarus attracts a monthly gathering of people from all over the world for its sickening slave auctions.

“I’m what you’d call a broker. My job is to buy people (in Belarus) and sell them all over the world. Buyers are the types you’d expect, doctors, politicians and the like. Belarus has its underground slavery companies. They have a monthly auction in poor villages. Young men, women, children and even the middle-aged are auctioned off,” an unnamed man tells Tokusatsu Shinsengumi. “Belarussian women are beautiful, so they sell for a high price. Higher than you’d imagine. Basically, the younger they are, the better price they command. Let’s face it, they can be enjoyed for longer, right?”

• BluRobot – Layouts

Motorcycle Ape despairs of fixing his .css:

M A: I’m begining to think it can’t be solved
M A: or at least not acceptably
M A: i will just use tables
M A: and be way nonleet
BRIAN: GASP but then people in Japan on DoCoMo phones can’t read your blog!
M A: well they jsut wull ahve to live with a little formatting wierdness
BRIAN: nooooooooooooo it must be PRETTY
BRIAN: you don’t understand the pressures girls in japan face!
BRIAN: what if they have your ugly-formatted page on their cute pink and white Sanrio phone?!?
BRIAN: they’ll be LAUGHED OFF THE SUBWAY
M A: cool
BRIAN: the SHAME

• San Francisco Bay Area Book Arts
• SF Center for the Book

Web link of note: article on “Credibility networks”
(At http://rands.jerkcity.com/archives/000147.html)

Web link of note: Testicle Festival
(At http://www.testyfesty.com/)

From an article at Stomp Tokyo:

Pulgasari: The Legendary Monster (1985)

The story behind this film may be more interesting than the film itself. Unlike the other films on this website, this film was produced in North Korea, not South Korea. According to news reports, current North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il (son of former leader Kim Il-Sung) is a big movie fan, and in 1978 he had his agents abduct two South Korean movie personalities, director Shin Sang-Ok and his wife, actress Choe Un-Hee.

These two made at least two movies in North Korea. As near as I can tell, Pulgasari: The Legendary Monster (1985) was the last one. Shortly after it was completed, Shin and Choe fled to America. For this reason, or perhaps for reasons of content, the movie was shelved for years. In 1998 the film was championed by a Japanese film critic, and was released in Japan, apparetly to some sucess.

A few weeks ago a random motorcycle ape got a bee in his bonnet:

M A:  Brian, what do you know about J2ME? ("Java 2 Micro Edition")
BRIAN:  A little.  MIDP, that stuff.  Why?
M A:  We have to make cell phone games!
BRIAN:  We do?
M A:  A bunch of companies are all releasing
               phones with microJava.
BRIAN:  Whoa.  Okay...

So he looked at the development kit Sun put out, and all was quiet…

A week later to celebrate getting a new job I bought the Gameboy Advance SP,
the slick new flip-top gameboy- I previously only had a Gameboy Color and one of the giant original GameBoys with the pea-green monochrome screen, so I couldn’t play any of the new games.
With it I bought Wario Ware, Inc. (Mega Microgame$).

This game is so perfect. It’s basically a bunch of very simple games
(“microgames”) that you play for about 3 seconds each. A single word instruction
will show up like “PICK!”

Pick!

Eat!

Brush!

and you have to figure out what the object of the microgame is
and how to play it. In the case of many of them it’s a matter of pressing
a single button at the right time, or pressing a single button fast enough.

Suddenly Motorcycle Ape’s obsession makes total sense.
He saw this game and got hooked, and being a game developer
thought “I can do this!”
And it’s true. The games are so simple you could
easily write one in a single day, even if you’re not a game programmer.
They are all based on hobbyist games which people made at home.

Some of the games are so Japanese
( = “random” or “pointless” or “nonsensical” )
you can tell the impetus was indeed tiny cell phone applets.

The next question: making a tiny game and showing it to your friends is
simple. But:

• How would one use the network connectivity to make multi-player games?
  What would gameplay be like?
• How would one get huge numbers of people to play it?

Here’s something interesting: 2D Barcoding.

You’ve probably seen a weird pattern on your UPS package
which looks like a target with a bunch of tiny hexagonal dots around it-
that’s called Maxicode. It was developed by UPS.

All of this is a step up from “Code 39”, which is the thing we’ve all seen,
and which UPC is based on-
the scannable squares on groceries and other products. Code 39 is
really “code 3 of 9” (sounds like a Borg name) in which every character is 9
stripes, alternating black and white, and three of them are “fat”.
To see an illustration of this, check out my
Code 39 Converter

It’s interesting what extensive use MT makes of DIV and SPAN-
The entire design is based on DIV and style sheets.

I wonder what Dave Siegel thinks of this. His design was always very tight and anal-retentive. Back before stylesheets, he despaired at not being able to control link underlining. Maybe he just retired rich, seeing as his site hasn’t been updated since 1998.

Usually my web design is more precisely defined, making heavy use of
TABLE and restricting exactly the width of the various parts of a page.
For example, usually I will have a graphic cut into neat pieces and forced into a table with cell widths and heights identical to the image slices. Thus the width of every piece is a forced definition, and only a certain part of the graphic is allowed to expand. This free-flowing style that MT uses is harder to control.

Web link of note: Emotion Eric
(At http://www.emotioneric.com/)