Rock Star alter egos are growing in numbers "You're forming a fake band -- that's what you do," says Sadri, calling the game "the best part of karaoke, adding in a drummer and guitars."
The Magpie Developer Jeff Atwood is one of the best programmer/writers around. I love reading his stuff, some I agree wholeheartedly with, other stuff we disagree, but this post is about a dead-on as they come. This idea has been floating in my head for a long time, but it is hard for me to conceptualize it in words, Atwood does a brilliant job at it. Must read for any developer.
Andy Olmsted's Last Blog Entry. (Warning: Pretty rough) No matter how you feel politically about the war, this reminds you that each number people throw around as statistics is a human life. This is extremely well written, and pretty rough on your soul towards the end, but something everyone should read. Its a shitty situation all around, but there is always a human face behind the statistics and I want to make sure I never forget that.
To preserve his body during the voyage home, the second-in-command stored Nelson's body in the ship's vat of rum and halted all liquor rations to the crew. Not a bad idea, but when the ship reached port, officials went to retrieve Nelson's body and found the vat dry.
Disregarding good taste (in every sense), the crew had been secretly drinking from it the entire way home. After that, naval rum was referred to as Nelson's Blood.
making vodka pills in 24 hours Recently, Chef Fabian was experimenting further with the Adria/Torreblanca technique of making 'vodka pills.' I use this word to describe the process of making liquid-filled candies by pouring flavored alcohol syrups into cornstarch and letting it set until a hard outer shell forms.
Strategy Letter VI - joelonsoftware.com As a programmer, thanks to plummeting memory prices, and CPU speeds doubling every year, you had a choice. You could spend six months rewriting your inner loops in Assembler, or take six months off to play drums in a rock and roll band, and in either case, your program would run faster. Assembler programmers don’t have groupies.
Entire Article is Dead On. A must read for anyone in the software biz.
Brad wanted to make sure everything was working, so he got on drums, I picked up a guitar, and we started the game. I quickly discovered, as other real guitarists have, that knowing how to play guitar in no way qualifies you to play Rock Band (or Guitar Hero). It's the same way that being a doctor doesn't make you good at the game Operation.
We started with one of the easier songs, Weezer's "Say It Ain't So." Rock Band uses the actual master recordings, so if you are hitting the right notes, your performance should sound exactly like the real song. But if you hit the wrong notes, the instrument you're playing drops out of the song for as long as you keep messing up. Basically, you get to sound experimental and avant-garde for one moment before you get kicked out of the band. If enough of you are playing poorly, the song ends in an abject moment of humiliation. The music comes to a screeching halt, like someone bumped the needle on a record player; on screen, your avatar either insouciantly shrugs off the incident or appears to be pointing an accusing finger at another band member (some aspects of the game are more realistic than others).
My wife and I's band 'The Jack Russel Terrors' (formerly 'Cyanbane & The Farting Camels') currently are playing medium sized dives in Berlin and schlepping our own gear in a old burned out van. Making peanuts, but playing some amazing music at this point in our pseudo-careers. Not only will I soon have enough money to purchase a new axe, but she is starting to amass a decent sized closet of leather. We are starting to become fairly proficient, she has moved up to 'Hard' on vocals while I can still thrash some Gimmie Shelter on Hard mode, I lose some of my my finger pressing skills only about 30 seconds into Cherub Rock (Damn you 5th orange button!)
But hey, atleast we are living the life right?
Very cool take on one of the best RPG's ever created:
Quit paying to blow up bridges in Iraq and then paying to rebuild them. Bring that money home. Our bridges are falling down. Our levees are falling down. The only way we can get enough money is by stopping this insane foreign policy of running this empire that we can't afford. Policing the world? It's impossible.
I read a decent amount of comic books as a kid. I didn't live necessarily in the middle of no where, but there were very few places that I could ride my bike too. One of these fortunately was downtown Loganville, I would meet a friend named JR and we would ride down to the center of town to an antique shop that happen to sell comics. The funny thing was that I think they made more money off the comics so over the 2 or so years it was in business the comic inventory grew substantially. Since the owners were not really into comics (they were catering to all the kids who shopped there) they really didn't know too much about what they ordered. A lot of times we would just tell them how many we wanted and they would order ours plus a few extras. "Special orders" cost more of course, but since we didn't have the "comic shop guy" we missed out on a lot of the more in depth comic books/graphic novels that those type people would suggest or we would notice being read on the counter. We were regulated to more of the main stream comic selection (Marvel/DC/Image/Valiant etc). Which in looking back, I really wish we had our own Jeff Albertson to help us discover some of these odder more fringe novels and comics that barely got a mention in the monthly Wizard. Most of the odder stuff we would hear about on BBS and such, but were never really available to purchase and Amazon (and the majority of the net) was just a twinkle in someones eye.
Once a week my mom took me to Galactic Quest for art lessons (which rocked) and I would get to see the full swath of a comic store selection. Very rarely did I ever purchase any graphic novels, the ones that come to mind that I did was Sin City and some of Neil Gaimen's Sandman collection. Being around 12 or 13 and about as far from the gothesque scene of comic books as possible I freely admit I didn't understand shit about them. I read them, but they didn't hold my interest like my favorite Rai or WildC.A.T.S. any of the others I followed. I wouldn't say I shunned graphic novels in any sense, I just kept up with more of the mainstream superhero reads.
About 4 or 5 months ago I was talking with a friend at work and he had brought up that he was in the middle of reading The Watchmen. I had heard passing mentions on some boards about a movie for it, but I didn't really know too much about it. I checked into the price on Amazon and decided to pick it up, and I started it for "throne reading" about 2 months ago (I poop quick -- hence 2 months). I finished it up today, and man what an amazing read. I NEVER thought that someone could create such an amazing and somewhat emotionally bizarre storyline, and the 'scenes' and their overlay to other stories (you need to read it to understand) was just brilliant.
The story centers around a group of "superheros" and their interactions between themselves, society, the government and one technically "real" superhero (again hard to explain). The story deals with emotions from the past between each of them, and the story on how they deal with the way they were treated when they were superheroes, and the way they were treated after they "retired". It really is a pretty neat introspective into these people, who by the end of the novel you really feel emotions about. The writer and artist just do a fantastic job in presenting information about each of them and their pasts in pseudo-flashbacks from themselves or other characters (not necessarily the other heroes either) in really creative ways (dossier, past records, newspaper clippings etc). By the end of the novel, you really are debating if these guys should be celebrated or committed or killed by the greater society, and you will feel different about each one.
It is probably one of the best pieces of fiction I have read in a long time and then you add in this amazing art and it really deserves to be read even if you don't think you could ever be a fan of comic books/graphic novels.
The above picture is from some pics of they released the other day from the movies website. It looks amazingly good and dreary and very close to the drawings. One thing that was interesting as I read the novel was that since I knew a movie was being made about it I was thinking the entire time how tough it must be to do this movie, because you are not taking just a story and creating your vision of it (a la batman/spidey etc) but you are taking an exact vision of someone else (writer and artist) and then trying to add your touches without impeding on their art, or maybe you are just trying your damndest to replicate their visuals and making your mark by edits in the screen play. It is a tough job regardless.
Do you self a favor and pick it up if you can, certainly worth the read. Before I read it I had seen that Time magazine had named it one of the 100 best novels of all time, so I had very high expectations, but as you can see I do think it deserves a place on that list.
I didn't completely swallow the koolaid, but I guess my previous post did take a sip. In my excitement from reading about Kindle I failed to think about what I might lose from purchasing books on Kindle, as opposed to what I might gain (portability/searchability/reference device) etc.
Quite Simply, I really want one and I hope this thing takes off like a rocket.
I really hope this takes off, if not for just for the ease of acquiring (AND STORING/SEARCHING!) your library. There are so many markets to tap into with something like this. I think this would be HUGE in the college world where books are purchased and most fall to the wayside after a semester. Also as a programmer I used to spend $1k+ a year in books until I joined Safari, if I could get some of those books at $20-$25 electronically a piece (I assume they would be more expensive than a Daniel Steel novel), AND be able to carry them around and search anytime I need to, that would be GOLDEN. Half the price of a physical book and instant topics/keyword search ability, count me in.
Most people are going to say that it won't take off because of the price tag (very fair assumption), but I actually like the $400 price tag. I think that I would really enjoy this for only certain kind of books. I still would probably read a lot of fiction on them, but the real value to me is find-ability etc of technical books and also of books that get updated frequently or are only used to classrooms, etc.
Me and my wife go to B&N at least once every 2 weeks, if not more than once. We literally will spend some Friday night there (geeks) and just read and browse. Ava is only 3 months old and I think has already purchased 3 or 4 books, and I don't ever want the fun part of "going to the bookstore" to be taken away, but to be fair during the rise of Amazon everyone predicted that would happen (and it did to Mom and Pop stores).
So in an almost elitist way I kinda like the $400 price tag, it is still a little to steep for the casual reader, and puts this into a specialized unit / early adopters class of tech products. I don't think it will be there for long, I am sure by 2010 if these take off they will be in the $200 range.
But for now I think you will probably only see the "Tech-Savy" crowd with these in literature heavy occupations (medical/lawyer/engineer/etc).
Regardless sounds like a very cool, network independent device, which the geek inside of me is screaming 2 things:
Excellent. Great ending...there was one in there I was confused about...the one where the dude pushed down the other guy. I couldn't figure out what that was.
That was Pokemon double team battles on Emerald where you call in another monster to finish the battle for EXP tag teaming.. Why exactly that one dude had a sword though was beyond me. (They are all monsters).
P.S. I don't know why I know that, b/c i really never played pokemon. PROMISE.
Atlanta politicians, the newspaper said, "can't bring themselves to tell their greedy constituents complaining about the low flows in their toilets this week that perhaps if they didn't have six bathrooms, it might ease the situation a bit. That watering your lawn isn't as important as watering crops. Or that their greedy overbuilding has taxed their supplies of natural resources beyond their capabilities."
I don't know if we would be classified as "metro" Atlanta or not being a decent ways OTP, but man I don't know what to say to something like this. I know its true. And I know it sucks. The majority of people (at least that I know) don't have 6 toilets, but everyone is certainly wasteful of water in many ways. This is one of those situations where I feel bad, but I don't really know how to help other than trying to somewhat conserve for my family. I am all for a "step" billing system and I think it should be implemented, honestly not sure why it hasn't been done yet.
It looks like like a Saturday morning cartoon but the story will carry it for me regardless of the underwhelming visuals. I am too much of a Dragonlance fan to not be excited. Especially since I never expect anything to ever be made from the novels. I guess I like crappy cartoons...
Holy crap, this was green-lit? I am definitely in the wrong business. All this time waiting, hoping for a Dragonlance movie and the best they can do is a poorly animated cartoon?
Travis - The Boy With No Name Travis is back. I wouldn't say I hated 12 memories, it was meant to be very political, I just thought it went a little overboard and was somewhat preachy. Then when the greatest hits CD came out to be honest I was really hoping it didn't mean the end to one of my favorite brit bands. Boy With No Name is everything they were capable of. Supurb CD all the way through. Every song is brilliant. Big Chair is probably my favorite song and the opening to the CD on 3 Times is as good as it gets in music imho.
Pop! Why Bubbles are Great For The Economys (Gross) One of the better economic books I have read in while, where the author gets their premise across in a well written, clear and concise manner. Basically Gross believes that the infrastructure left over after economic bubbles, provides companies with the ability to move forward (maybe more than the original bubble did). Not a hard read, I would definitely suggest it for a day and the beach/lake.
Feist - The Reminder I CANNOT GET "I feel it all" OUT OF MY HEAD. Period. Great album, angelic voice.
Catan - Xbox Live Arcade I am hopelessly addicted to this board-turned-video game on the xbox360. I had never played the board game but had seen it being played in some comic shops growing up. Click the Pick and play the demo, it isn't the 360 interface, but same game.
Arctic Monkeys - Favorite Worse Nightmare No Sophomore slump here. Just as good (if not better) than Whatever they Say.
Beautiful Evidence (Tufte) Tufte reads like a text book, most people would say bleh, but the information about "information" that he can deliver is top notch. My first Tufte book was "A Visual Display To Quantitative Information" and it was extremely well done, albeit confusing at time. I think beautiful Evidence is a little easier of a read (I am still only half way through it) and a little easier for myself to understand the ideas he is presenting..
Fountains of Wayne - Traffic and Weather Fountains of Wayne are the Gods of pop music. If Welcome Interstate Managers was a collection of short stories in song form, then Traffic and Weather is an even better collection with more humor. I already feel like CNN has the hottest female anchors, imagining them throwing their lust around like the Title track to the CD makes it even better.
Game of Thrones (Martin) I started this book assuming it was going to be a high fantasy novel. Elfs, Dragons, Magic and the like. It isn't. It IS fantasy but more surrounding the politics and cunning of a few high ranking families. Incest, Murder, Intrigue, unscrupulous midgets. It has it all and more.
