If you had left a comment in the last four days, it was unfortunately deleted because I was not about to sift through over 600 pieces of comment spam which had accumulated. The past two times this had happened, it was all spam, so I went with the flip of a coin and trashed it all 
I haven’t been so psyched about an idea in such a long time, as I’ve been about using a plasma widesceen display as a pinball playfield, and wouldn’t you know it, but it was thought of and implemented over a year ago… Multi-media Plasma Pinball Machine
Damn. I guess the only consolation is that no one seems to have the rest of my ideas (that I came up with last night) for the format.
I’d been thinking about making a pinball machine, not simply buying or restoring an older one, for some time now. A quick search on Google led me to this nice step-by-step on theMaking of the MONOPOLY Pinball Game at Pat Lawlor Design. It must be nice to have all those parts just laying around. The CNC router, too!
I spent the day off and on, while busting my ass on a robot cell that has to ship ASAP, imagining a spinning vortex that would keep the ball from draining to the bottom by centrifugal force, but that in itself won’t be interesting and couldn’t quite be called pinball, either. I think would be cool to make a mechanical tribute to Atari’s Tempest, much in the way Williams made HyperBall as pinball’s answer to their own game, Defender, back in the day.
Hit and Run has the scoop.
I think it’s an odd choice, but hey, they’re finally making an Iron Man film.
A few years back I made this 3D model of the Cydonia Mars “face” using a shape from shading calculation via Dr. Mark Carlotto’s online processor, Bryce 3D (mapping the image on the 3D mesh), and Photoshop (cropping, coloring, and image preparation)
Now compare it to what you see here…
Discovery Channel :: News, Photo Zoom :: Mars ‘Face’ Clearer Than Ever
The angle is different and I unfortunately cannot access images I made at similar angles due to a motherboard problem on my desktop PC, but this really makes me feel good about the job I did with off the shelf software and a NASA Mars Orbiter image.
(thanks for the link, Mac!)
This new music site is pretty cool so far. Much better and more functional than Mugshot was.
The evidence of their most heinous wank-dom left for all to see… Warren Ellis has shut off his blog comments for the forseeable future.
It’s a damned bloody shame.
Thanks a lot, morons.
curved-air
has a diverse out-of-print music collection centered around, but not limited to, 70’s prog and krautrock.
Right now I’m grabbing Mort Garson’s early MOOG masterpiece, Black Mass Lucifer.
Also got Patrick Vian’s Bruits Et Temps Analogues (scroll down, it’s at the bottom) off of White Noise another nice place to check out for music.
UPDATE: That Patrick Vian LP is a must download. I’m too lazy (and still listening) at the moment to put my feelings and thoughts into words and already erased several false-starts on the process.
Xeni Jardin’s little jab at NASCAR subculture (and no, I don’t watch it, either), while probably accurate, was entirely uncalled for and exploits the self-inflicted misfortune of an Indian, former-autorickshaw driver to get her dig in…
Sssshhh! Listen. What’s that sound, you ask? Hundreds of NASCAR he-men crying into their tea cozies.Boing Boing: Rickshaw Race Yakuzas in India: loser chops off thumbs
There’s enough incivility in this world without we of liberal and libertarian mindsets adding to it. Next time, try doing so constructively and with purpose. That was just a cheap shot.
while we appear on a sphere
what’s intuitively clear
can sometimes be wrong
just the same
there’s understandable doubt
but we’re really inside-out
(so I wrote you a song
by this name)
Related Info for: sauceruney.com/
I’m ranked at nearly 4.6 million out of who knows how many sites… but the really cool thing is it says people who visit my page also visit this awesome one I’d never seen before, notes from somewhere bizarre! We have some overlapping links in the blogroll, and I’m going to add her to mine right now.
I had another weird idea where I would dedicate space to some of my favorite, doom-tuned metal/ambient/prog music. I had mashed guitar and tzar together out of the blue and surprisingly enough, the domain was available.
Nothing there but an open directory. Same for squarewaves dot net, but at least I have wordpress installed there.
I will have three hours after work before my AutoCAD class starts at 8pm on Tues. and Thurs. It’s impractical to waste fuel to go home and back out to school since it’s 10 miles further east of work, and I live 30 miles to the west of the school. So in addition to doing homework and studying, I would hope to use that time to get these things off the ground.
Chumby (rhymes with Gumby, damnit!) looks damned cool. I don’t know but it seems that since it’s WiFi that the home/bedroom would be limiting on use potential. Thousands of toy-toting candy-ravers could become a net of connected mallrats. College students would become even greater public-users considering Chumby’s portability. High Schools would be more restrictive, I think, just because of the strict conformist nature of their zero-tolerance policies toward anything that could be seen as disruptive… though I imagine that the first Chumby-related school suspension would cause even more sales.
Anyway, I’m sure I’ll have even more thoughts on this later. Right now I just wonder if they’ll come in black.
When I was a kid, I used to live for Saturday evening television. This was what I used to watch in the days B.C. (before cable) on the local UHF station, WUAB: channel 43… broadcast right here out of Parma.
6-7pm… The Wild Wild West
I was sort of ambivalent about this show. My dad had it on so there really much else I could do except maybe play Pong or Atari on an ancient Zenith B&W vacuum-tube set. I used to love watching the spot in the center of the CRT as it warmed up and then at the end when the set was shut off… heh, I was into psychedelia long before I even tried any psychedelics.
7-8pm… Star Trek
To this day, nothing Paramount puts on television called ‘Star Trek’ can compare to these episodes of the original series.
Nothing.
8-9pm… SPACE: 1999
Right about now I’d be sent to bed. It didn’t mean I went to sleep though.
Space:1999… I need to think about this one because I really don’t have a recollection of what drew me to liking it other than I was, as with Star Trek, always enthralled by the different aliens and their technology that they would encounter on their journey. The set design too. I loved the Eagle interior. I remember wanting to build my own replica cockpit to sit in and made a bunch of control panel pieces out of things I pulled from the garbage. They got thrown away by my father because, well, I don’t think he realized they weren’t trash anymore. I was pretty discouraged at that, I remember. Creative streaks come and go in spurts for me, and that was the result of one of them. It seems every time I’m on a truly original and creative streak something happens to kill it.
Every time. That was just one of many.
I think that’s why I keep feeling blocked. Who wants to find out what kills my next venture?
because liberty or death are no longer options in this country, unless you favor the ‘or death’ part.
What’s funny is I do believe this is the first time I ever saw this ‘IN COLOR’… we had a black and white television until into the mid 80’s when I bought my own.
If only the internet had been what it is now… 20 years earlier, I wouldn’t be searching and searching for a video of the Sour Grapes Bunch girls singing and playing guitar on the Banana Splits Show. I did find the title sequence from Danger Island, though.
It’s truly amazing how adding three little words to the end of anything a Neocon says, can put things in their proper perspective.
(link via | Reason )
The Tradesman Tavern… where I’ll be watching my friends play… and it’s rumored that someone is having a (day late) surprise party for me against my wishes… but it will be fun, I’m sure.
Taking pictures. Still can’t get ‘em off the camera.
TheStar.com - Cape Breton joins space race
N.S. signs private launch facility deal
Space station flights planned by 2009
Aug. 16, 2006. 11:14 AM
SCOTT SIMMIE
STAFF REPORTERCape Canaveral’s got competition.
Cape Breton is going to enter the space race.
The Toronto Star has learned that Nova Scotia has signed a “team agreement” to provide 300 acres of land — and perhaps even some funding — for a massive orbital launch facility that will involve industry giants and could eventually be on scale with huge NASA operations.
“We’re basically building a private manned space program for Canada,” says Chicago’s Dr. Chirinjeev Kathuria, chairman of the PlanetSpace firm that lit the fuse for this deal.
“The facility will see orbital flights, similar to the Kennedy Space Center.”
Nova Scotia, which confirmed the agreement late yesterday, could not be happier.
Like New Mexico, which is making a huge investment in a spaceport for commercial use, it envisions virtually unlimited economic spinoffs as private enterprise goes to space.
“This is a huge opportunity for the province,” says Mark James, business development executive, Defence and Aerospace, for Nova Scotia Business Inc. — a development agency that promotes economic growth in the province.
(link via | hit & run )
hey, it’s my birthday… I can post whatever I want
ROLLERGIRL on Vimeo
I mean, really… there are what looks to be four crappy, taped off MTV videos interspersed between hundreds of copies of the same terrible concert footage, and fan-produced pieces of shite…
amazing.
when this episode first aired I was sitting on the floor, laughing so hard I was in tears