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i feel great 2012.02.03 
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A while back I mighta referenced this parody Nutrigrain ad:


I got interested in the music behind it. Someone online claimed it was Ananda Shankar's Dancing Drums but I think it was actually Streets Of Calcutta. Both are pretty good, I need to get the MP3s.

  ...of the moment  
Beli-chic -- could Bill Belichick be the best dressed coach in the NFL?
"More like FUNrequited love."
--no one (via http://twitter.com/BoobsRadley )
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cyk7utV_D2I My goodness. GloZell and the Cinnamon Challenge might be the funniest video of 2012 thus far. kudos for her posting it! (You get the idea by 1:45)
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/destructive-austerity-usa/ Krugman on Destructive Austerity. After reading some Illuminanti trilogy , I think the GOP might be Illuminanti tools. (I mean duh, who isn't really BUT STILL)

the other mona lisa 2012.02.02 
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Wow, sister painting of "Mona Lisa" found?

  ...of the moment  
We just got a Roku 2 XD box. (A bit like the AppleTV, for streaming.) It's so wee! And the UI so charmingly sparse- nicer than the PC we had hooked up to the tv for Netflix and Hulu etc.
http://english.bouletcorp.com/2012/02/01/darkness/ - best 24 hour comic I've seen. Really great.
The videogame EDF:Insect Armageddon and how it Fails to Go Up to 11.

splish splash 2012.02.01 
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From this kinda great Quota What's Your Favorite Parable page:
Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.
--Douglas Adams

  ...of the moment  
http://venturebeat.com/2012/01/31/html5-versus-flash-infographic/ the Flash vs HTML5 really got me thinking. At the very least I need to get offa Processing Applets...
"YO MAMA IS SO EASY THAT IN THE MANY WORLDS INTERPRETATION OF QUANTUM MECHANICS I'VE SLEPT WITH HER IN EVERY UNIVERSE!"
--Calamities of Nature
RIP Wislawa Szymborska -- check out his brilliant Four in the Morning.
"Today's date is 1.2.12. Better known as International Microphone Testing Day."
--http://twitter.com/x_BeccaRella_x

primarily 2012.01.31 
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--via 22words

  ...of the moment  
"#joke: Q: What's brown and smells like dog poop? A: Dog poop."
--http://twitter.com/unclesamkent
"The GOP race is between a man who wants a colony on the moon and one who thinks God will give him his own planet."
--http://twitter.com/BorowitzReport
"Time moves in one direction, memory in another. We are that strange species that constructs artifacts intended to counter the natural flow of forgetting."
--William Gibson
"Truly, there is something in the quality of a good translation that can never be captured in the original."
--William Gibson
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stelarc - posthumanism among us.

velocipediraptor! 2012.01.30 
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It's Draw A Dinosaur Day!
This is my velocipediraptor.
Now go draw a dinosaur and post it on the site!

  ...of the moment  
http://t.co/sEXifOs9 - Amber's always observant of developers being off by a factor of 2 or 3 in their time estimates, this detailed "software as a long hike" metaphor nails some of why that is.
"sir, i believe we built this city on rock and roll- what do you mean it has basically no infrastructure?! what happened to the crazy train?!"
--http://twitter.com/ughrevolution
Ever since I saw a photo w/ a student wiring up "a cube of 4,096 individual LEDs" in The Tech I wanna know more about MIT's Bad Idea Weekend -- http://bad-ideas.mit.edu/ is still too lite in information.
BTW where did Google Calendar settings go? Now when I click on the gear all I see is changing the damn look and feel. #googlefail
That the Lumières Brothers had that name and went on to be major pioneers in inventing the moving picture camera is beautiful.

snakebits! 2012.01.29 
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So this weekend my team of 4 or so made this game:

click to play


(Here's the official ggj site about it.) It came out well. I was especially pleased with the level of graphic design we got on it. It's a variant of Snake/Nibbles, where you're a snake who has to protect its gems from the maurading peasants. Unlike traditional "Snake", you can cross your own body, and in fact you have to bite your own tail, because this was this year's official GGJ theme:
That's the Ouroboros (Can I just say that is a crazily sexually charged image? Such a weirdly wonderful combination of the masculine phallus and a more feminine/Yonic shape...)

Some teams at MIT/Gambit took it literally (like Hoopsnake who absolutely had the funniest entry) and others as a more figurative symbol of recurrence and rebirth.

My favorite other entry was Sleepwalking Backwards, an emo-ish (in a good way) art piece that actually ran on a C=64.

So it was a good weekend. Like last year's sredavni (invaders backwards) I'm a little worried that my project was a bit of a genre piece, but I guess if a bunch of people are going to sink a whole weekend into something, it makes sense to be a bit conservative and end up with a fun quality thing, rather than force something to be more experimental.

  ...of the moment  
NOW OR EVER

uruguay is a-ok 2012.01.28 
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I'm doing the Global Game Jam again this year...a 48-hour world-wide make-a-team,then make-a-game fest, with MIT/Gambit Lab as my generous hosts. Every year they make a nice keynote video. The middle section queued up here by Gonzalo Frasca was REALLY inspiring, just the greatest tale of how it's ok to be the little guy.

  ...of the moment  
At the Global Game Jam-"Snakebits" is coming along, but I'm getting crispy. Favorite variable name so far: "boolean itsOkItsALadder;" #ggj12

Funny "Big Lebowski" Poster in the MIT/Gambit lab kitchen. Works on two or three levels of funny.

overlap 2012.01.27 
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  ...of the moment  
"List of words containing "meow": meow, meowed, meowing, meows, homeowner"
--http://twitter.com/terrycavanagh

'sucker punch': the good parts version 2012.01.26 
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Found looking for Glitch Mob music-- their cover of the White Stripe's Seven Nation Army is evocative.

  ...of the moment  
"English has too many emotions, or it has not enough punctuation marks."
--http://twitter.com/Tetsuo_Milk
"@kirkjerk @ExciteMike @daphaknee Hey guys, Nerd != Manchild.  Nerd is somebody who uses != to mean "not"."
--http://twitter.com/Snapman_I_Am

things look so much bigger on tv 2012.01.25 
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--via the Criterion Collection (thanks Diane)

  ...of the moment  
Huh. I think the Kindle Fire is a better commute reader than the iPad. And I tote a MacBook Air on general principles. Guess iPad is still better as a home machine, for twitter and browsing and misc. fun apps.

hey einstein! 2012.01.24 
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"People slowly accustomed themselves to the idea that the physical states of space itself were the final physical reality."
--Professor Albert Einstein


I grew up with this cartoon in one of those big New Yorker compendiums. I'm still not sure I really know what it the quote fully means, but it came up in my UU "Science and Spirituality" group reading. It's intriguing how the concept of relatively might've influenced some of the post-modern, "there is no objective stance" pop-culture thinking that came later.

  ...of the moment  
Enjoying a Jr Sized Frosty from Wendy's, gotta use that booklet of 10 I bought before Halloween before February...
Man, screw AT+T and iPhones. If the service actually is "Searching", say so. #attfail

books books books! 2012.01.23 
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--via Amber's Dad

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Patriots have now beaten a team with a > .500 record! Hooray! (Superbowl is gonna rely on being bit more "Any Given Sunday" than I'd like..)

tendrils 2012.01.22 
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Tendrils is a game I made for Glorious Trainwreck's Klik of the Month #55.

You can also just sit and watch the organic oddness of it!

This is the HTML5 Processing.js version. IE users can play the java version

  ...of the moment  
Man, BattleTanx Global Assault for the N64. What a fine game, that really knows what it's about.
Yikes Robert Kraft man-kisses as embarrassingly as he high-fives! and that game- talk about by the skin of their teeth...
That kid from the show "Touch"-- I want him on my MIT #mysteryhunt team next year (we led lower half of standings, good for small team)

never meta joke i didn't like 2012.01.21 
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At work, I don't make 420 jokes, which might violate company policy, but I do make metajokes with Hannah. (At this point, it might be a metameta joke.) I appreciated her screen capture, tasteful cropping (or at least to the point of plausible deniability) and posting to FB.

  ...of the moment  
I dunno. I'm kind of foreseeing a monoculture world where everyone buys anything via Amazon Prime and all computers and phones are Apple's.