from gamesetwatch:

RetroRemakes forumer Darkevildemon revealed a new project he's working on with programmer Tomaz Kac (Head Over Heels remake) -- a full-color remake of Ocean Software's 3D isometric CPC/ZX/MSX game Batman

- read full article

had an interestingish weekend that i feel i should blog about. mixed thoughts, emotions. not sure what any of it means.

right now though i am just going to say that lj appears to be down, at the moment :P

i just remembered that when i lived in winnipeg, i didn't own a computer.

and when i lived there, the world wide web did not exist.

how things have changed...

i have some invites! let me know if you would like one. EDIT: sorry all gone...

and also:
i've been seeing way more dreamwidth-bashing than lj-bashing so far, which i gather is opposite from other people's experiences. then again, i'm not really part of any fandom communities on LJ, so maybe that's it?

my take so far: it's still very early. from a practical and technical point of view, there's not much reason to go to dreamwidth, at this point anyway. but so far, i like their apparent openness and their terms of service and their founding principles.

via gamesetwatch, a gallery of x-ray images of various game consoles and controllers (mostly).



i'd love to see some of these on t-shirts.

or photoshopped onto x-rays of people :P

i'm thinking this might be of interest to sonjaaa and others...

Does this icon say “language” to you?

It doesn’t to me.

But the OMC design studio feels so strongly about it that it has launched a web site to promote this icon as a global standard.

from global by design

like the author of the blog post, the first thing that popped into my head when i saw this icon was "floppy disk". maybe that just makes me an old-timer :P

a universal icon to represent "language choice" on websites might be a good idea, but i don't think this is the right one. not sure why this single design company has decided that its solution is the best. their faq doesn't seem to indicate any consultation with anyone else.

for some reason (which i will not go into at the moment) i was googling the term "muffin tinning". i ended up discovering some amusing (to me, anyway) terminology from solid-state physics: "muffin-tin approximation", "muffin-tin potential" and "muffin-tin orbital". and no i don't really understand what they mean.

however, a google image search on "muffin tin approximation" yields a fun mix of scientific graphs and delicious baked goods:



note that i have not tried the search with safesearch off...

in honour of april fool's, sort of, a barely-interactive pet:

An open source documentary about copyright and remix culture

this is showing at AMC yonge & dundas next weekend, anyone interested?

i'm guessing some people on my flist might be interested in going to this?

The Munk Centre Distinguished Lecture Series

"Innovation for Regrowth"

Margaret Atwood

 

Vivian and David Campbell Conference Facility, Munk Centre for International Studies

Monday, March 30, 5:30pm

 
The lecture is free and open to the public, but registration is required: http://webapp.mcis.utoronto.ca/EventDetails.aspx?eventid=7392

Margaret Atwood is an honoured Canadian author who is also recognized as a social and environmental activist. She is the author of over 35 books -- novels, short stories, poetry, literary criticism, social history, and books for children. Her books have been published around the world in more than 30 languages. Her latest work is Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (The CBC Massey Lectures 2008). Its publication coincided with the onset of the world financial crisis, adding to Ms. Atwood’s reputation for prescience and impeccable timing.

Ms. Atwood is also the primary inventor of the LongPen, the world's first and only remote, accurate, fully biometric pen-on-paper handwriting device -- first used in book signings, but now being seen as a remote solution for the execution of heritage documents in the judiciary, in government, and in business.

In her lecture, Margaret Atwood will examine the future and technology: where the world is headed in the next 20-25 years, why, and what sort of equipment would best benefit us on that journey. She will also assess the LongPen's role in the process. A portable LongPen will be present at the event for explanation and demonstration purposes.

i did this on facebook, cross-posting here.

( cut for boring )

hmmm this looks kind of crazy. it's a bollywood comedy kung-fu movie.



the toronto star gave it 3 out of 4 stars, saying:

Cinematic gene-splicing can yield some very weird mutations. But even after taking into account Indian cinema's reputation for lavish excess and the martial arts genre's ever-escalating taste for frenzied action, the first-ever Bollywood kung fu comedy qualifies as deliriously and endearingly bizarre.

Gravity-defying combat, absurd musical numbers, inane slapstick, Bond-like gadgets, an amnesia subplot, a potato imprinted with the face of Lord Ganesh – yes, there's room for everything within Chandni Chowk to China's running time of 153 minutes.

anyone local want to see it with me sometime this week maybe? right now it's playing at the AMC yonge & dundas 24.

because i feel like posting but i don't feel like writing...

1) The first article title on the page is the name of your band.
2) The last four words of the very last quote is the title of your album.
3) The third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.
4) Use your graphics program of choice to throw them together, and post it in your own journal.

( i did two... )
meh, that was less satisfying than i'd hoped.

i dug this up at my folks' place in halifax. i'm curious to see if anyone else on my flist remembers this game, from this close-up shot of one of the pages...

who remembers doing this as a kid?

Smarties box as a musical instrument

In Canada, as long as I can remember, Smarties have been packaged in a cardboard box. Up until something less than a decade ago, these boxes were well-loved by Canadian children, who all knew that if you sealed your mouth over the open end and blew, it would produce a distinctive honking/sqeaking noise. This was very much part of the Canadian Smartie experience. For some reason unknown to me, and at a date I can't recall (though I certainly did notice the event), they changed the box design in a way that eliminated this effect. Can anyone fill in the missing details so this can be added to the article?

from the discussion on the smarties wikipedia page

i have informally polled a few people. the only ones who remember it so far are older than 30...

i haven't blogged much at all this nanowrimo have i?

well tonight at the writing session i crossed the 50,000 mark for another year. i didn't jump up or cheer or anything. it was more a feeling of "glad that's over!" not that the story is done... but then again, there was barely a story to begin with.

this is easily the second worst nano novel i've written (the worst being 2006). it is total garbage.

i may retire from nanowrimo. i don't get the same thing out of this as i used to...

Originally posted on bunnyhero.vox.com

well i still kind of hate my novel, but at least i'm managing to write more words without wanting to off myself.

it helps when i remind myself that nanowrimo novels aren't like regular novels. i was in the middle of writing a very boring scene when i decided that out of the blue, the wall of the office would be knocked in by an explosion. i hadn't planned on any explosions happening for quite a while, and i'm really not sure who caused the explosion or why, but it got me writing again.

my novel looks like it's turning into a series of somewhat random action scenes strung together, instead of what i had hoped it would be. that's the nature of nanowrimo, though--letting go of things like expectations and lofty goals :P and i like writing action scenes, even if i'm not actually good at it... i just like writing them.

word count: 5037

Originally posted on bunnyhero.vox.com

It's only day 2 of writing my Nanowrimo novel and so far I'm already hating it. Bleah. Sorry for the negative post so soon. But this year feels almost as bad as 2006 did.

I think this is partly because I did not plan enough in advance-- that is to say, not at all. So I don't have any good idea of where any of the story is going. I get bored way too easily and if I just plunk words down on the page without something interesting up ahead to look forward to, I just want to stop.

In the years in which I had more success, I definitely did more plotting and thinking in advance. But I even tire of my premise now.

So hard not to just throw in the towel, especially since I've done this five times before already.

Sorry again for the downer post...

Originally posted on bunnyhero.vox.com