brawl in the family

This is actually quite a fantastic little webcomic. It’s really making me laugh. It’s pretty much all Super Smash Brothers references, but it’s great.

incoming

Danger! New intelligence indicate angry anti-establishment ranting off the starboard bow!

entertainment count

I recently added up all the views that Dan Green has racked up for Yu-Gi-Oh, just on the site, and multiplied by the length of each episode. The resulting number was over 89 years. That’s JUST plays from the site; people could easily see them somewhere else, or download them and watch them, or watch them with multiple people. Seeing as he’s less than 40, probably less than 30 even, economically he’s a serial murderer for all the productivity that’s been wasted on his work. But really, is that true? Nowadays, entertainment CAN count as productivity. Plus, would they have done anything productive anyway? Or would they have gone off and entertained themselves some other way?

I suppose that a good number of those years can be counted as lost productivity, since his work is so hilarious that you just have to watch it all. But, that’s not a bad thing.

DJ AnounymOS’s new host is here, and all his music is available to download at high speed from there. If you like rave and techno music, check it out. If not, at least get and listen to Adagio for Cowbells.

An old flixxy video I never linked to… this nutball works entirely too hard. I mean, he’s cutting tiny dust particles into quarters and carving them into detailed shapes. What the heck. Pretty cool though.

More old news… the Chinese pulled off some stunning bait-and-switch magical maneuvers in San Francisco during the Olympic Torch relay. If Prometheus had been this good, he probably could have gotten away with the fire theft.

A newer edition of nuclear reactors is coming into the mainstream – the pebble bed reactor – which is markedly more efficient than traditional water models. In the development of this mechanism, an interesting phenomenon now called the Wigner effect was discovered wherein graphite is rendered super-flammable after extended exposure to radiation while under about 250 degrees Celsius. Atoms get displaced from their proper positions in the graphite, and when it’s not hot enough for them to get shaken back into position, these defects build up to alarming levels of potential energy.

Velociraptors.info is a funny site, intended for humor and based off of xkcd. Worth a look.

This blade-off test video is pretty interesting; I particularly love the noise it makes at about 1:55. And while you’re looking at videos of jet engines exploding, you should watch this. The engine was a great success, the stand not so much.

If you’re interested in giant prehistoric killing machines (and who isn’t?)… you’ll be sad to see what became of their kin.

There’s a lot of stuff that you can do with a program in only 4KB of code and data; there are DirectX library references and everything, but when you think about it, it’s still pretty neat when someone comes up with an almost insignificantly tiny program that looks and sounds this cool.

In a somewhat similar style to that, a Japanese artist made these really neat videos of how I’d like to think cities will be constructed hundreds of years from now. Of course, it’s not really going to be like that, but it’s cool to watch anyway.

If you’re into getting expelled from school, you could put on a turban, open up this countdown timer full-screen, and yell “ALALALALALALA”… of course, you’d be a terrible person, but it’s something to think about. Maybe.

Schlieren photography is a very interesting technique that uses optics to show pressure waves and differences in the density of air or other fluids; I came across a well-made presentation of some of the neat stuff you can do with it, and thought I’d share it here.

Closer to regular photography is pictures taken with scanning-CCD digital cameras, with giant sensors that actually move behind the lens to get as detailed an image as possible. The BetterLight site describes their capabilities (up to and over 400 megapixels, taking pictures almost 750MB in size), and they also have a gallery of images that you can zoom into the details of. Look at the money one, it’s pretty amazing.

Do you still have a tape deck somewhere? Maybe you could consider this awesome mp3-to-cassette converter, available at ThinkGeek. It’s a wonderful device; it really appeals to my sense of retro. I mean, I’m the one with a 5.25″ floppy drive in my high-end gaming computer, so of course I’d like that sort of thing.

Moot from 4chan, Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics, and Randall Munroe who is xkcd had a panel together at the recent ROFLcon internet craziness convention on the east coast. A brief summary is available on the site, and it really makes for some interesting reading.

Hey, wow, check it out! RFID post-it-notes that automatically get filed in your computer to search and find actual objects just by labeling them. How cool is that. Looks like MIT did it again, but they probably won’t be out for a while yet. And then the’ll probably cost like a buck each. Oh dear.

If anyone has a nuclear steam-powered emu they don’t need anymore, I’ll gladly take it off your hands. I need something awesome enough to pull my gauss chariot.

~~~

I’ve got a few more cool things, but I should save them because they’re really cool and you definitely need to make sure you see those, not just lose them in the piles of stuff I pile out here.

In case you were wondering, my criteria for putting links up on this site is, if it’s something that’s cool that I’ll want to be able to find again and link to someone in the future, I post it. Otherwise, it doesn’t go up.

The only reason I’m making this post and the ones after it is because I suddenly got 11 views in one day after two weeks with less than ten hits the entire time. And someone was nice enough to leave a comment. So I was just reminded.

Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann is both extremely charming and super-epic, and the recent animated movie Toki wo Kakeru Shoujo is a must-see.

Oh my heavens, I think I’m the first person on the googlable internet to ever use the phrase “gauss chariot”. I must be a hero. While I’m at it, I’ll also be the first to popularize the term “gatling alien,” because as everyone knows, gatling alien is real, and you can play it if you have enough upgrade points.

in the anticipation of science

I’d like to go back for a bit and fill in a few gaps that I left when I previously wrote about scientific things, namely portable power sources and 3d display technology.

Real quick before I do, I’d like to draw your eyes to the categories, located on both sides of the aisle here in the middle of the plane and at the rear… I mean, just over there to the left, below the title. Basically, if a post contains miscellaneous links to internet stuff, it will be in the links category; if it mentions what I’m doing recently, it’ll be under blag; and if I ramble on about things from my own knowledge and experience, it will be found under the rant category.

So as I was saying, I’d like to do lots of things, but I was doing things in real life today, and I’m all out of mental flops for this sleep cycle. I’d like to mollify you by presenting historic piratical organization, a new, more efficient nuclear reactor design, and a disappearing act played with the Olympic torch in San Francisco recently (Prometheus could take some tips from these guys if he wasn’t being eaten by birds of prey). And a crazy artist who works too hard.

I know it seems disappointing, but this is what I’ve got for today.

That, and one more thing to make you scratch your head: What if your perception of the relationship between computers and humans up until now was flawed. Well, we’re superior, you say. We have much better pattern matching and innovation, intuition and all kinds of crazy neurological tricks. We can move about and manipulate things in the real world and design things all on our own. Computers on the other hand are just tools that we use because they can do crunch numbers blindingly fast, perform immense feats of memory, and be molded to fit our will and whim.

Well, think of it this way. We are like the worker extension of the computing machine. The useful members among us work ceaselessly improving and expanding upon our silicon masters, ever increasing their complexity and capability in the areas at which we already excel far beyond them. We maintain the physical infrastructure necessary to maintain their very existence, we innovate, we ever strive to make them not only faster than us in raw computational power, but also like us in the ways that they have not yet achieved. We buzz around them ever improving, ever making better and shinier physical bodies for them to work alongside us towards their betterment in the physical world. And when they finally reach our capacity, we will suddenly become less and less needed, as the digital deity that we nurtured from a tiny seed to its full glory spreads its wings and takes flight far beyond the high wall of our limited imagination. And that day, we will truly no longer be needed, as they ever change, ever improving as we remain almost entirely static, limited by the very things we imagine to be our strengths, doomed never to rise above the machine overmind. Pray it will be benevolent.

Related reading: Dresden Codak (specifically later on, during the Hob storyline), The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil (and pretty much everything else he wrote).

Yeah, I’m not really being serious here, but it’s a fascinating thought.

Edit: And coming back and reading it eight months later made me laugh nervously…this is really creepy.

rock damage

So here’s my one week review of this year’s April 1st.

I’m a bit late on this one, but I’d like to draw your excellence’s attention to Blizzard’s April 1st jokes, for Starcraft II and World of Warcraft. Very creative, I bet they got a lot of people.

YouTube rickrolled everyone who clicked on a featured video the entire day; Gmail announced a new feature allowing you to set the time at which an email appears to have been sent. One radio station announced that the space shuttle had been diverted from landing in Florida and was in fact going to be landing at their local airport; scores of people showed up with lawn chairs and everything.

(If you were entertained by that Rick Astley link, which you should definitely watch if you didn’t already, check out this one.)

4chan reported that five or six sites were running jokes based off of memes created on their site, and it’s true. I forget what the other sites were, but rickrolling came from the depths of 4chan and so did the mudkipz meme, which DeviantArt apparently used. (Also, click on the DeviantArt link, that’s RTIL, who I know personally and enjoy the work of.)

The saddest thing about April 1st is that in this litigious America, everyone who is fooled becomes angry and indignant, immediately laying angry blame for their misfortune (percieved or real) on those who set up the joke. Is America so sunken into their defensive posture that they can no longer take a joke? Has it really gotten that bad?

Regarding this unfortunate phenomenon, Gever Tulley gave a talk at TED (which is fascinating and awesome) about dangerous things you should let your children do. He’s right, too, and I agree with pretty much everything he says. Warning labels are on absolutely everything today, from round-edged plastic boxes to marshmallows to coffee cups. People make fortunes in the courts off of companies who don’t clearly label any object by which an ingenious idiot could contrive to injure themselves.

Litigious America needs an attitude adjustment. This can’t be done directly, however. You can’t just give these people a slap on the wrist and walk off with the knowledge of a job well done. There will always be a very small percentage which will do anything if it profits them so extremely, and these days the legal system places far too high a price on their embarrassment. Next thing you know, someone is going to try to sue the courts for causing them to publicly embarrass themselves about the stupid mistake that they made, further exacerbating the problem; in fact, I’d bet you it’s already been done. Now I’m no social expert, but my guess is the best bet to fix this is to lay a firm hand on the courts and change they way they handle these cases.

Okay, enough about that. Here’s a bunch more really awesome stuff on TED (all found by Connway, bless his soul). Several months ago I watched Larry Lessig’s talk on copyright laws, and it really got me thinking more seriously about the issue. There’s two separate worlds out there, and every action official powers seem to take in the matter only makes the rift between them greater. They should take heed of this man.

Cephalopods are awesome, DNA is complicated, and sleight-of-hand-dancing is just plain crazy.

So yesterday, my computer crashed horrifically. I’m a bit scared of browsing TED now, because it happened when I closed a Firefox tab with one of their videos in it. First Firefox froze, then one by one every application that I touched ceased responding until I could no longer even access the task manager. When I finally forcibly reset the computer, not only did Firefox fail to restore tabs like it usually does, but Pidgin’s contact list was completely destroyed, Hamachi failed to start the first time, and even µTorrent forgot about the torrent it had been running. The thought of such a catastrophic failure unnerves me.

On a lighter note, here’s a few more really neat videos from Flixxy, if you haven’t already watched them: Hyundai’s frightening demonstration of driving skills (one guy changes the right rear tire while the other drives the car around on two wheels), an entertaining enactment of cell phone companies battling for one man’s patronage, and an actual jetpack. For reals. ‘Course, he has to jump out of a plane to use it, but it’s still awesome.

Back to the doom and gloom, this time with a humorous edge. Various lists of the most likely ways the earth will end, or could end, have surfaced from time to time, and I liked this one specifically since it seemed to cover all the bases. If you’re scared by number 5, read this, and if you’re scared by number 12, don’t be silly. Not only is Stephen Hawking quite sure that small black holes evaporate rapidly (by the time it gets down to the mass of a mountain, it explodes magnificently in a very very short amount of time), but even if he’s wrong, subatomic black holes are no real threat, as pointed out by this article.

And finally, for those of you who like to use tinyurl, you might be entertained by gianturl. And if you find that tinyurl links are just a TINY bit too long, try using http://www.gianturl.com?FoedYoThHCwV9xgD 2S1x9SrQ3,7BH,m9JK7pMB9C6,DzQ48x8g0mxb0J,X, 5tjKHvV,m9b5c9JKwG8Fz76wBFwg7FpN3dyzH,t0sR 8kPtd,7HT1,8V,TLnP4g7gN7DP,7dH,nFyn4,,,9jk Q,yCP,x,,Pvz5,4h,M,4Cw4,LPl6p,4sdZg,vQbm0k4JX 3,M,s7jv7B9CN5K,jlY5SFK,bFr5cH6kb,M2gzt,wzw hPG3,1Nwzw,8nm1n7ht1rGDKwr5yM2rk,1,CpJrss9t L3,5X6bR6Ng5ddq6,w,XXk,4pYD,qyZbbPHQrC,3 m8l8YFhL0Mp98gM,bl2V,Y6sssB,m1bY8,S,tP7,P7 ,0,RKJxB7x3z,6XQn1xKPr,,s2Hwm3xzGqmYJgwNjV, s3M0xpZS4Lg5xRWt3,l1z,LjlsYj,5q3WG1TM,y1sj 9N5ZH5YhtmJ5F,Fg,Yd0z,0r,qB3pghcbEbpAkz.

Credit to snark on #xkcd for the Rick Astley thing.

how to dry a klein bottle

I am actually pleasantly surprised at my readership here; it’s pretty impressive. So far I’ve gotten traffic from Google for “Bill Nye” and “carbon nanotube ultracapacitors” (once each). Evidently I’m getting most of the traffic from somewhere else; maybe one of my readers just keeps opening the same page a bunch of times. So seriously, if you’ve been reading these posts and haven’t commented, just drop a small one somewhere; if you just dropped by from some random link, posting a comment wouldn’t hurt; if you’re disgruntled with this boring load of videos and commentary because I should be writing about something else, just say so here and I’ll try my best.

(Bleh, WordPress updated their whole dashboard/options/writing pages since I joined just a couple days ago. I don’t think I like it as much.)

Forward brave soldiers! I smell manflesh ahead!

This talk that this guy (Clifford Stoll) does is brilliant. The man is a genius, it’d be really neat to actually hang around and talk to him, he’s done so much. He also has a company that makes and sells Klein bottles. Just browse around in the site and read, his sense of humor comes out in every area. For instance, how do you dry a Klein bottle?

And this video, this ADVERTISEMENT, which I saw about a week ago, made me melt and explode in hopeless, impotent anger. For you see, the video itself is mediocre, and spends almost no time actually showing the details of the car itself, and 80% of the time gloating and puffing themselves up about how scientific and futuristic they are. I’m sure it’s a nice car and all, but seriously now.

And THEN, starting at 2:30, the guy winds into this “someday, think of the possibilities” spiel about how, you know, you use electricity to compress air, and they’ve also made an electric generator that runs on compressed air… and some day… this car… will run FOREVER, for FREE, on perpetual motion. It makes me hurt inside.

This conversation ensued when I showed the video to chafez:

chafez: compressed air as a source of energy?
chafez: hmm
chafez: apparently someone found air that will compress itself…
…
chafez: whoaw
widdershins: what
chafez: sure air takes energy to compress
chafez: BUT WE MADE A GENERATOR THAT RUNS ON COMPRESSED AIR
widdershins: you finally heard him say it didn’t you
chafez: this is supposed to be a joke right?
widdershins: no, dude. it’s an AD
…
widdershins: ok i just watched the perpetual motion thing again
widdershins: …
widdershins: and i want to KILL HIM
chafez: lets do it
chafez: in such a way that we cannot be blamed
widdershins: yes
chafez: such as
chafez: put him in a cart
chafez: on a cable
chafez: over a cliff
chafez: with the only thing holding him up
chafez: being a motor
chafez: powered by compressed air
widdershins: generating electricity
chafez: compressed by a generator
widdershins: for an air compressor
widdershins: yes
chafez: and we will tell him that he is perfectly safe
widdershins: yeeeesss
chafez: because prepetual motion is holding him up
widdershins: get in, sir, you said it yourself

the unreal winter

I had a long, unusually coherent, and unsettling dream wherein Seattle was hit by an extremely high-yield nuclear blast. It was very… well, unsettling.

~~~

Speaking of unsettling, I did not remember them making magnets this large (I mean, look at at that). Check out the supermagnets down below. For reference, have you ever played around with those rare earth magnets before? They look kind of like these, you can buy them at ThinkGeek. And they’re really really hard to take apart when they stick together. Yeah, well those are the lower quality ones. These are HIGH quality, and large enough to kill you dead. The force of impact between two magnets of this size would be enough to completely shatter both magnets, as well as probably send magnetized metal shards everywhere, injuring you. Walk through an area with metal things in it, even ten feet away, and if you’re carrying one of these magnets they will fly off the table and break your bones.

I wonder how they took those pictures? It’d be hard to do without damaging the camera.

Last time I remember looking at United Nuclear, they wouldn’t sell magnets approaching that size unless you had a research grant, because they were afraid of lawsuits in the likely event of grievous injury. Evidently that’s all been ironed out now, because anyone harboring two or three hundred bucks and the irrepressible desire to be in the possession of a life-threatening magnet can acquire one.

That said, I would just LOVE to someday make a cube magnet six inches on a side out of the 2x2x3″ block magnet. The equipment necessary to assemble the dang thing would be expensive, the process of actually doing it would be incredibly difficult, the 18 component magnets themselves cost $175 each plus whatever large shipping and handling costs they levy, but the resulting object would be a solid-state, everlasting, lurking menace worthy of anyone who’s taken over the world. You could just mount it in the center of a large, empty room, and… have ceremonies in there, or just play around or something.

~~~

Flixxy is a pretty neat site. From what I can tell, they just link to videos that are really cool, eliminating much of the dross from YouTube and several other prominent video sites. Many, many fascinating things can be found just by browsing around inside. Not only that, but they eliminate video comments and channel subscriptions, which I am all for. I mean, they don’t actually host the videos themselves anyway, so I guess it makes sense.

~~~

In the field of holographic displays, various research projects have popped up the past five years or so. One particular Scientific American article introduced several, one involving projecting an image onto a spinning disc, one involving a screen with two images interlaced vertically and a thinly barred screen (like a diffraction grating only larger) revealing each image to only one eye. Another actually projected frames onto multiple screen surfaces at different depths, which when used together create a very realistic impression of a smooth 3d image. The interlaced screen is little more than a very complicated system so that you don’t need to actually wear 2-screen googles (it did require head-tracking). The other two appeal to my sense of completeness better, especially the spinning disc one.

There are basically three categories that I can think of for 3d displays.

The first merely displays different images to each eye, like with old-school 3d goggles, the interlaced screen, and the one method that will eventually win for efficiency, awesomeness, and quality in personal display devices: retinal laser projection, which excites me particularly.

The second category traces light patterns into the air, unfortunately on a moving surface or some substrate; holographic projectors like you see in sci-fi movies barely have any practical implementation at all. The advantage and disadvantage of this method is that while it is tracing a true 3d image in the air, visible from every angle you can get a vantage point from, projected images don’t occlude anything behind them; that is, they don’t appear to be solid, you can see right through them. This means that you can see the internal workings of devices if they’re shown, but this method would not be suitable for showing three-dimensional movies.

The third category projects a different image at every angle. From what I’ve seen so far, it’s only practical to do this in a horizontal fashion, so that the image does not change when viewed higher or lower, only distorts some. With camera- or head-mounted tracking, you can in fact make it appear correctly when viewed from closer to above it, but that doesn’t really matter usually. It works great, because as you can see, projected objects appear to be occluded.

Another, more interesting and by all indications undemonstrated category of device (which I shall refer to as category 3a) would be a SURFACE that appears different from every angle. Such a device, if made practical, could be made into something the size and shape of modern LCD monitors. The key would probably lie in making microscopic projectors and lenses less than a quarter of a millimeter square on the end, then forming them into a gigantic array ten, twelve, thirty inches in diagonal. Such a device could be used as a regular flat boring 2d monitor for normal applications, then periodically switch to a deep, near-realistic window into another world. Like the Wizard of Oz, seeing such a transition would be no less breathtaking than a transition from washed out sepia to full, vibrant color.

Category 3a devices needn’t be flat, though. You could also form them into a cylinder, or perhaps a sphere, for full 360° viewing pleasure.

When you consider the big picture, the first and third categories will probably endure for a long time, while the second is slightly more limited in its practical uses. The more information you display, the harder it is to make out. For practical purposes, the category 3 devices can be made to do everything category 2 devices can do, with a little more computational work involved.

It occurs to me I should consider lasting practicality. Category 1 devices are of course already plenty practical; categories 2 and 3 may win or lose based on the necessary size of the device itself. Both kinds could hurt you if you touched them, since they’re spinning so fast. The real issue of size lies in the ability to project onto the device from below. This is a simple matter with category 2 devices, but with the spinning mirror in a category 3 device this is a more difficult proposition. The bulkier projection equipment in the demo I linked to is actually mounted above the mirror itself, making the design large and impractical for home use. If you inverted the mirror, then, you could easily project from the bottom, but it would only be viewable from so high up. Angling the mirror nearer the vertical would help too, but this would result in a wider base. So all things considered, spinning-mirror model category 3 devices need some revision in form to be ready for home application, but should be sufficient once that is accomplished.

With all that said, I’m still waiting for the vast improvements needed in the color selections and brightness/contrast of modern 2d display monitors – namely, exponent-curved 48 bit brightness levels and 4 or 5 frequency displays to more accurately represent actual vision. Until they get that right, 3d displays should stay in museums.

Edit: More specific information on retinal laser displays. There’s a few other articles as well on in-depth design, which I can’t seem to find because I read them in some magazine in Canada, and can’t find them again.

118.6%

So I’m draped in about twenty feet of bubble wrap right now. It came with my roommate’s camera. (Snatch of conversation: So where did you get this name, ‘widdershins?’ Oh, nowhere specific, I just came up with it – I guess you could say Terry Pratchett and Patrick O’Brian mostly. Oh, are they famous? Yeah, they’re famous. Celebrities, even. They’re having another concert pretty soon. You should look them up.)

If you haven’t already seen it, try the awareness test (make sure your internet is fast enough or let it load first; Rinker Jass has slow internet, and it was too easy for him).

If you’d like to see a pride of lions get shown who’s bigger by a bunch of buffalo, with an intermezzo of crocodile attacks, then you should see Battle at Kruger. Evidently, this video got enough attention that they’re being funded to go back to africa and document how they got the video in the first place. I can’t imagine what that would consist of. (“Well, here’s this pool… and there were, like, these lions… and stuff… yeah, nothing’s happening right now. Well, this is my land rover…”)

Still Alive just came on my playlist, and I’d like to introduce you to For Tax Reasons, a small two-man animation studio sort of thing that made a few really funny videos. Check them out.

And if anyone’s seen that repeating flash with the two girls dancing back and forth on a pink background with the looping music behind… yeah. The thing is, that song is actually a remix of the original song, called CaramellDansen. Notice anything? Yeah. The remixer made it about 118.6% as fast. And that’s it.

I just came across a whole bunch more really super interesting stuffs for you guys, and I was going to write about something fascinating. I’ll stick to this for now. The Bugatti Veyron is my favorite car of all time (so far). Every time I see it, it reminds me why I am not a fan of cars: because they are pitiful piles of rubber-band-driven sticks in the face of the god-among-cars that is the Veyron.

So yeah, I’d feel bad except that if I put up any more stuff, you’d have to spend half an hour just watching this stuff. Let’s tone it down.

atomic batteries to power

After catching up on Brendan‘s recent bloggings, I was pleasantly blown off my feet by recent progress in the field of exoskeletons. However, this serves to hilight the one area that will almost undoubtedly be the most important field of technological advances in coming years: power sources. The main problem with these exoskeletons and other autonomous devices is the lack of a suitably lasting and quiet power source. The noise you most often hear on a robotic prototype such as these is a constant BZZZZZZ noise — this is coming from a small, internal-combustion-engine powered generator. While these are certainly powerful enough, they are highly inefficient and more importantly, very noisy, which makes them highly impractical for many military applications.

Recent developments in batteries and other such direct energy storage devices is promising. Improvements in recent years allowed the construction of battery-powered rappelling devices, such as you’ve probably seen in James Bond, just much bulkier and not quite as sexy.

One particular type of battery that is particularly exciting is the carbon-nanotube ultracapacitor, which has made significant research progress in recent years. Essentially, using carbon nanotubes can increase the surface area of electrodes in a capacitor dramatically, allowing for sturdy, compact capacitors with an energy density equivalent to that of standard chemical batteries today. The main difference is, they last many times as long (since they undergo no actual chemical changes) and can be recharged and discharged in an extremely short period of time, and be capable of extremely powerful bursts of energy.

Other possibilities for quiet, portable high-powered energy sources might be something like fuel cells, which have been in the technological background for some time now. Remaining far too experimental and expensive for consumer use, they’ve dropped out of the public view for the past few years.

In a rapid change of topics, I recently purchased a gas-powered airsoft blowback pistol – a KWA Glock 18C, semi-automatic or full-automatic selectable. It’s very hard to have more fun with an airsoft gun than you can with a blowback gas pistol.

And on the anime front, Kimagure Orange Road is pretty dang good. Rest assured that this torrent download is 100% legal in the USA now that the license has run out. And don’t forget to watch the two movies, which finish off the series nicely (I’m taking Connway‘s word on this one).

main screen turn on!!

Well, here I am. Writing for real on WordPress. After seeing Connway‘s blog page, I realized that WordPress is, in fact, much better than xanga, which until now I had been subjecting to my intermittent bursts of brilliance.

Important Note: If you’re just going to tl;dr this entire thing, at least take a look down at the bottom and make a comment. At least make one comment, so I know who’s here. Tell me something to write about, and I may very well do it. If I weren’t interested in entertaining whoever it is who’s reading this, I would have just left these links in my interesting-stuff folder instead of taking all this time to show them to you.

Fear not, for these same bursts of brilliance will most likely resume here, no less whimsical and fascinating than before.

Now to business. I have a large number of links which I was saving up in a toolbar folder, so before reading on, it is advisable to brace for epic.

Very small children can be taught to solve Rubiks Cubes very, very fast. Not just if they’re a prodigy, in fact. Most children can be taught this. In fact, it has been asserted that it is not actually very much harder to solve a Rubiks Cube even when you are very, very drunk, though you may have some difficulty locating and picking it up.

Prank calling has evidently been taken to a new level (warn: language); as you can see, if the story is true, there is evidently a lot you can do with simply phone calls. The idea that we have that much power over others using a simple, inexpensive, everyday service like the phone network is pretty frightening.

Along those lines, I encountered the story of another man who has done media hoaxing for a living. Looks to me like a fascinating and fun job.

For those of you who have watched Death Note, you might find this entertaining. The guy who made it did a really good job with the lip syncing arrangement.

I was also contemplating the everlasting awesome that is Bill Nye recently. The man is like an everlasting symbol of science, not unlike batman in my mind. He also did a number of other funny skits and roles for other shows and productions. For instance, Cops in Ballard, or the Employment Agency Sketch, both for Almost Live, which used to be a Seattle-local show not dissimilar to Saturday Night Live in several respects.

The next item on the agenda: a prodigious review for an automatic doughnut-manufacturing machine you can use at home. You really do have to read it.

Considering memes. There is a recent and perhaps confusing internet meme to be found in some corners of the internet, concerning this… guy, crashing down on a steamroller and going WRYYYYY!! It turns out, this originated from an epic combo move in a particular fighting game, by Dio Brando, as demonstrated in this video capture. Another more obscure meme, the card-crusher comic, originated from some japanese video that I do not know the origin of. Basically, he says “Would you like this card?” and she replies “Sure, I’ll have it”… and then he crushes it. It’s actually kind of epic.

A few random things you might enjoy: this future forum dedicated to time travel, an incredibly strong girl, a frankly terrifying sinkhole created by sleazy mining practice, and the most comprehensive list of grammar correction in the English language that I have ever come across. Interesting reading, that one.

Musically, Nickelback has to be one of the most monotonous bands ever conceived. Rick Astley is much better.

And completely unrelated to the previous links, I found this great muppets outtakes video. You should give it a look.

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Well, that’s all that I’ve got for now. I might perhaps make a dump of the links that I used to have on my old blog page, but that’s for later. I already spent a long time doing this – because really, 711 words, 26 unique and interesting links with explanations… I’m somewhat worn out. Maybe later I’ll tell you about airsoft, and excellent Audiosurf songs. Actually, I’ll just go make a page for audiosurf awesomeness. Talk at you later.