Science, Mad. And some movies.
Looks like Jason Shiga is releasing “Meanwhile” a third time, this time on iPad. It is a cool book – steer the protagonist as he travels in time, gets food poisoning, accidentally kills the world, and reads the minds of corpses. And that is just the tip of the iceberg!
My favorite edition is still the original ghetto “collated at the copy shop” version, but the color hardback is very nice.
Once several years ago when I was working at a startup with my friend Tim, and I told him I dreamed something about reading about a sports team and some online music – I think this was the moment just now and I was seeing the future again.
These are the two things I was just reading when this occurred to me:
http://blogs.villagevoice.com/music/2011/09/the_big_4_restaurant_specials.php
http://pitchfork.com/tv/special-presentation/1597-smith-westerns/2529-weekend/
Note: in my original feeling, it had something to do with pineapple or another fruit, or edible thing, which had music in it. I believe now that this was a reference to the Flaming Lips “gummy skull” USB art object.
Saturday we had our annual Columbus Day party, and Diane made a huge amount of food over the previous week, including six kinds of Parisian macarons, two lasagnas (including a sweet pumpkin lasagna) five different kinds of hand-made pizzas!
Sunday we finally made it into the San Francisco Columbus Day parade in North Beach, after years of being too exhausted of getting to it. It was pretty cool, the streets were packed and the parade lasted several hours. We saw some local prominent SF families there – I think I saw the Aliotos reserve an entire table at a restaurant on the street. Pretty cool!
In the 1980s my dad was going to Japan on business a lot, and sometimes he’d bring us back some of the cool toys he saw there.
As we discovered more than 20 years later, often the toys would be from a TV show, but without any way of seeing the source shows in question, everything was very mysterious. We got some Valkyries from Macross, and years later when Robotech came out, we knew they were from “Robotech.” Actually this was inaccurate, there was no show “Robotech” in Japan, just three totally unrelated shows all spliced together in an American dub.
There were little catalogs that came with the toys showing all the other related toys. We never conceived of trying to find these other toys, they just seemed a glimpse from a mysterious universe. However this was sort of irrelevant – since dad only went to Japan once every few years, by the time he went back, these toys were no longer for sale.
But the coolest toy we got was the “vehicle Voltron,” which I have since learned was actually called Armored Fleet Dairugger XV. The catalog for this was very confusing – we knew this thing was called “Voltron” here in the US. I saw it on TV once.
Then the “lion Voltron” aired on TV, and was much more popular. This was another combination robot, but instead of 15 vehicles, this one was made of five lions. Whenever someone referred to “Voltron,” this was the cartoon they were talking about.
This was appalling for a number of reasons. First of all, I knew for a fact that my toy was the “real Voltron.” I had seen it on TV, and I had the toys. They were right there, hard evidence of Voltron.
Secondly, this lion thing wasn’t even in the toy catalog! The only other Voltron (we called it “the second Voltron”) was a combiner robot in three parts (three robots combined into one) that I now know was called “Lightspeed Electroid Albegas,” (aka “Gladiator Voltron”). I never saw the cartoon.
The third toy had a lion, it’s true – but it wasn’t five lions. No, this “third Voltron” had a lion head for a torso. I’ve since learned this was “Mirai Robo Daltanious.” There was no cartoon. Why?
From Wikipedia:
The Japanese Mirai Robo Daltanious series was originally planned to be adapted by World Events Productions as one act of the Voltron: Defender of the Universe series in the United States and abroad. The intention was for Voltron to have 3 series components made up of Daltanious, Dairugger XV (the “Vehicle Voltron”), and Albegas (“Gladiator Voltron”). When requesting master tapes from Toei Animation for translation purposes, the World Events Productions producers requested the “[The] ones with the lion.” Mistakenly, Toei then proceeded to ship World Events copies of Beast King GoLion, another “combining-robot” anime featuring lion-shaped fighters. However, the World Events producers greatly preferred the GoLion series over Daltanious, and the GoLion episodes went on to become the most popular portion of the original Voltron run.
I dug a little deeper, and found this saga of the US release of Voltron, St Louis station KPLR, and owner Harold Koplar and his son Ted Koplar.
I was watching Walt & El Grupo on TV, a documentary about Walt Disney’s trip to Nazi-sympathetic South America in 1941.
Randomly, one of the people reminiscing about Walt Disney showed a letter sent to them… it had an address of 711 Hanover in Palo Alto. The writing was a bit smudgy, it may have been Homer.
While it looks like 711 Homer is a home off Middlefield, 711 Hanover no longer exists – the street ends at 2000. But! The street comes to a “T” at Escondido Elementary… Which was built in 1960. So the address of this person may have been bulldozed to build the school.
Sort of random but interesting.
BRAIN: gaypon?
SHAC: you heard me
BRAIN: why do gays need their own coupons
BRAIN: there’s a hook up app for gay men
SHAC: holy
SHAC: why didnt i think of that?
BRAIN: grindr
SHAC: i wish you had stopped short of telling me the name
BRAIN: lesbian friends complain there is no equiv for ladies
SHAC: what would you call it?
SHAC: liqr?
BRAIN: you are a marketing god
SHAC: oh man that took all the creative power out of me
BRAIN: churros aren’t seasonal are they
SHAC: not really
SHAC: but in my opinion they have a certain comfort aspect
SHAC: when served warm
BRAIN: so maybe valentines day
BRAIN: “you’ll die alone. Have a churro!”
Are you sick of the stupid “weighing 8 objects on a scale” interview question? How about this one:
In “The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap,” Link finds a vending machine which sells figurines of all the monsters in Hyrule – these machines are called gashapon in Japanese. Link wants to collect all the monsters in the machine, which accepts the local currency, “shells.”
The question: describe a strategy to acquire every figure which economizes on the number of shells spent assuming there are 136 unique monsters and figures, and :
I was just reading a great post on Millenial rebranding, and an emergent problem – many people can no longer buy “just” strawberry ice cream. It’s always some weird flavor hybrid.
Many of us have the “strawberry ice cream problem,” and frequently it’s not just about a product that is no longer popular… or imagined to be popular. How many times have you seen a film that was very very expensive, but just not that memorable? Most summer movies nowadays will never ever be someone’s “favorite movie.” The problem has to do with the conundrum of marketing to the mainstream – as pointed out in The Tipping Point, even when remarkable coffee will be tart or black or some other memorable quality, POPULAR coffee will be bland and sweet.
I think the answer is in Long Tail thinking, as a consumer – we as consumers are now expected to specialize, to search out products that match our aesthetics. Thanks to the internet, this is now not only possible but pretty convenient!
As for the actual strawberry ice cream problem – think of it as an opportunity. Other people will want strawberry ice cream near you; you can sell it to them. In the San Francisco Bay Area, we don’t have a lack of strawberry ice cream – you can get it at any ice cream shop, especially small independent shops like Fenton’s or Preston’s Candy & Ice Cream.
Watching the long-lost original ending of Little Shop of Horrors and savoring its 1960s B-movie goodness.
This ending is true to the stage production… I remember being so angry when I saw the theatrical release in theaters.