weirder than yours.
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Photoblog - Hurricane Earl from space
Amazing - this is the world I live in, where a hurricane can be photographed from a mobile home parked in orbit around the planet.
Photo by claytoncubitt:
Beef patty with faux grill marks, fried rice with three random peas, MRE picnic, Queens
Clayton’s picnic to “celebrate” the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina is inspired. MREs are provided by the government and almost get the job done, but you wish someone stepped in and did it better - just like the levies.
When my dad was in the National Guard1 in California he would take the expired MREs for our earthquake supplies (as they were being thrown out anyway). MREs basically never go bad, but apparently the taste degrades.2
Some of the extras we would get to eat for camping trips or excursions to our fort in the backyard. Gubmint peanut butter tastes very similar to Whole Foods fresh peanut butter - just crushed peanuts. Gubmint cheese is horrible, as are their desserts. Some of the entrees were decent - mostly the liquids, soups and such.
Five years since Katrina…almost a decade since 9-11. Time flies when you’re having fun and being anally-probed by the TSA, Homeland Security, National Guard, FEMA, and/or the New Orleans Police.
My father quit when they would only let him re-renlist for a seven-year term. He needed two years to earn his military pension. One weekend a month and two weeks in the summer became forty hours per week and multiple weeks in the summer. He also had guardsmen he would not turn his back on when they live ammo and guns because he didn’t trust them.
They’ll pay for college and take everything. Caveat emptor. ↩
This is not verifiable as the taste rates in the bottom ten percent of all foods available to mankind. ↩
This is how my week has felt - except for the catching up part.
Click-through for the exciting conclusion to Scott’s Adventure at Nerf This by sc0tticus.
…I’d sink to your city streets if I wasn’t buried in your hands
I’m reminded (by cgunit) that I need to get my old linkblog back online. Daniel Danger easily found a place there with this piece, which I spent close to an hour tracking down the source of originally.
Lush colours that remind me of dreams and night-time places, where you can’t differentiate the sounds and edges of your surroundings. Subjects both strange and familiar, comforting in an unsettling manner.
Your shadow always looks bigger when the light is behind you.
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It’s been such a great season for plant growth that besides the usual cage, the tomato plants had to be anchored to the fence. Rain, heat, rain, heat - everything is growing quickly, including the mosquito hordes.
The Princess Planet - Shadows of Dooooom! – part 25
The most frustrating portion of Super Mario Galaxy 2 for me was the difficulty being enforced by the camera positioning. Cameras are hard in three-dimensional space, and harder when the user can move them, but to miss the same jump repeatedly because the view shifted just as I jumped drove me to swears (and fake-throwing my wrist-bonded Wii controller). The worst sin of this is it dropped me out of suspension-of-disbelief and forced me to recognize I was playing a game instead of experiencing something.
Game economics is a similar issue for me. Difficulty increases to maintain the level of “fun” as the player improves and as a result the various tools increase in power: minor healing potion becomes haling potion becomes mega healing potion becomes just-toss-the-effing-Phoenix-Down-every-other-turn.
Why does the smithy still have a mortgage or a tax obligation? How does he buy my extra kit? Why can’t I rob his fabulous wallet?
Some games attempt to get around this by limiting the amount of purchasing power: Fallout 3 vendors have a set limit on money and when it is depleted it takes time to rebuild (seven days without mods). But the vendors still buy everything (some items at 0 value, but they’ll take it) and never complain about my wasting their time when I sell items, then buy a high-cost, low-weight item and sell them more shite. Where is their encumbrance rule?
Also in Fallout 3 you can modify your experience with mods. One of them increases the difficulty by decreasing the amount of ammunition in the world - a plausible scenario is we’re a century following total world nuclear annihilation. Perhaps the Brotherhood is still manufacturing bullets (why, they have laser cannons?) but the supply is limited. The bad guys then become too difficult (for me), they can see further, hear more, run faster, hit harder.
A good system would be varied and keep track of total goods in the world (or region). More swords would take time to create if you destroyed all of them, you could attack mines (a la Baldur’s Gate>, or refineries, or levy taxes on coal to slow production. They would be harder to write, but more immersive.
Why do I always start with a crowbar and end with an auto-laser? Even Deus Ex for all its alternate paths ended with me rocketing the last enemy to death for there was no way to stealth him or compete with his augmentations. I’m not the FPS-guy, though I enjoy them to a point. Why can’t I have options besides the path that travels from small sword to bastard sword +5, with each town being incrementally more powerful in their small arms trade? Why does this smithy have access to meteor-iron and this one pig-iron and this one only wood?
Smaug was killed by the Black Arrow, but Bard only had one of them and was a damn fine shot. Why not given the player a chance for glory or defeat like that?
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The classical white is such a refined look that the first reaction of most everyone, excluding small children1, will be, “ugh.” Is the clean stone look refined because it is so or because we thought the refined greeks created it?
The “repainted” pieces feel more baroque/rococo: garishly opulent. Does it make you feel better that the Greeks invented the eighteenth century two thousand years earlier? Was renaissance Europe just rehashing Greek artistic ideals - the Michael Bay/Jerry Bruckheimer of their era?
By now, everyone knows that marble sculptures of ancient Greece weren’t actually bone-white, right? They were painted because guess what, everyone loves color. So I hope you don’t freak out if I say that I’m kind of getting into the look of these re-colored pieces. I still appreciate the ascetic white look, but, y’know… color!
More information at io9 on how researchers used infrared and x-ray spectroscopy to determine likely colors.
And why do we discount the reaction of children? They don’t know better, have no taste, aren’t educated, can’t understand style, etc. What makes us right? The avant-garde create new works that could never fit into the current structure of art: think of the cutting edge fashion designers, Jean-Paul Gaultier or Alexander McQueen for example. You could never wear most of their pieces except on stage at an opera, but the ideas about cut and hang, the purpose of clothing and ornamentation, the obvious calls to former styles re-imagined, the use of new fabrics and techniques: these things eventually filter down to prêt-à-porter (off the rack). Average Joe and Jane never think about fashion except to wear what they are told is fashionable. Vogue and GQ and the others curate new fashion into specific looks and tips. The avant-garde becomes manageable once it is managed, but it is no longer cutting-edge.
The taste of young children never changes. Bright colors, flashing lights, movement. Why do we discount these as we age? Is it exhaustion, the constant simulation, or taste? Most people have none, even when slavishly following the best advice, for the best taste and style is always unique and personal is some way; tailored to what we like, even if it garishly colored or adorned with glitter. ↩
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AT&T has resorted to fear tactics to sell landlines. (and I started to spell “sell” as “cell”.)
The pylon-figures can be configured to respond to their environment with appropriate gestures. As the carried electrical lines ascend a hill, the pylon-figures change posture, imitating a climbing person. Over long spans, the pylon-figure stretches to gain increased height, crouches for increased strength or strains under the weight of the wires.
The pylon-figures can also be arranged to create a sense of place through deliberate expression. Subtle alterations in the hands and head combined with repositioning of the main body parts in the x, y and z-axis, allow for a rich variety of expressions. The pylon-figures can be placed in pairs, walking in the same direction or opposite directions, glancing at each other as they pass by or kneeling respectively, head bowed at a town.
Despite the large number of possible forms, each pylon-figure is made from the same major assembled parts (torso, fore arm, upper leg, hand etc.) and uses a library of pre-assembled joints between these parts to create the pylon-figures’ appearance. This design allows for many variations in form and height while the pylon-figures’ cost is kept low through identical production, simple assembly and construction.
What if we chose beauty and wonder over utility.
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This is what Paul Atreides’ guest room looks like.
That’s the last time I house-sit on Arrakis.
Gotta give props for an Atreides’ drop.
These are from abandoned colonialist houses in Namibia. We can try to transform the world to suit us, but it ends up changing us.
I'm Ethan.
strange birds is where I write, post my photographs, and post interesting things so search engines can index my brain.
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