Number Spirals

I have no idea what is going on but still fascinating.
Link.

Amazing Paper Art

By artist Peter Callesen. There are tons of others on his site. His works "have lately been based around an exploration of the relationship between two and three dimensionality."

Yes, I am six years old

This game just makes me laugh.
Puzzel Farter!

(via Kotaku)

Now if I can only work it into a song

I was using the interwebs to look up rhymes for the word "day" and "jean baptiste pierre antoine de monet" came up.

Sensual Stretching

(via Chris Gethard)

OMG! SO FRACKIN' EXCITING!

Really, is there anything "sudden" about "sudden death" golf?

I suppose it's all relative.

Not Me

I am not the runner-up for some contest on xmarksthescot.com, a website for "kilt-wears and those who encourage the wearing of kilts."

Indiana Jones and The City of Mindless Repetition

SPOILERS

I started to write a whole entry about the Frank Danabont Indiana Jones script. All sorts of insightful thoughts and observations. But then I realized it came down to one thing: It had more Marion.

Really, it had a lot of the same problems of the filmed version. Most of it was just a Greatest Hits collection of action set pieces. I enjoyed where they start off playing with Jones' age, but it gets pretty much dropped. I also liked the Cold War stuff... but that gets dropped. There is a fun bit in the early on with a drunk, depressed and old Jones but it doesn't really go anywhere. A lot of dumped moments in Crystal Skull (see: monkeys and vine swinging) have there genesis in Danabont's script. They're less stupid... but still manage to be pretty stupid. And, yes, it is still aliens. They are angry aliens and the script doesn't feel the need to give as mindlessly stupid exposition at the end, but it adds up the same.

But it had more Marion and that is key. The Indiana/Marion relationship should be the center on it all. It makes me sad to think what might have been instead of the basically "I'm along for the ride roll she was given."

Monkey poop indeed.

Thoughts for a Sunday Morning

Here I am, hanging out at the UCB classrooms, waiting for Thank You, Robot's weekly practice to begin.  I'm noshing on a bagel, drinking coffee, basically trying to wake up.  This weekend has been a whirl wind of doing stuff around the house, making plans for next week, and seeing shows.  Tons of shows.

I wish I had been awake enough to discuss them after returning home on either Friday or Saturday night... but that was not the case.  And it won't happen today either.  Hopefully Monday I can ramble on a bit about the following stuff:

• That Indiana Jones and the City of Lost Gods script

• The Apple Sisters show at The P.I.T. and why silly is good.

• The Incredible Hulk and how Marvel will either reinvent superhero movies or (most likely) fail.

• Why I will probably end up seeing The Happening even though I know it is crap.

• Baby Wants Candy and musical improv

• Why A Week of Kindness is brings me joy

• Improv audiences vs. sketch comedy audiences: YouTube Makes Skirts Shorter

• Tens of Thousands makes me bounce

• Other shows I basically slept through

National Pigeon Day Today

Did you buy your pigeon a card?

(via The Gothamist)

Palindrome time... in Slovenian

"Ona seksa skesano."

(She's having sex with remorse.)

Penis

In honor of The Incredible Hulk opening today, a song from the set of Flight Club.

Sound NSFW... as if you couldn't tell from the title.

(via JoBlo)

I wish Cronenberg was on the list

For those you don't know, Spore is the next game (or perhaps "game") by Will Wright (and team), maker of TheSims (and SimCity... and SimAnts... man, I loved SimAnts). It has gotten video game geeks and the industry at large all atwitter with anticipation.

Like TheSims in is a "sandbox" game, in that there aren't really goals. It gives you a bunch of tools and such to play with. In Spore you start with a single celled creature, swimming in the muck. Then you evolve. As you evolve, you (the player) get to craft your creature into whatever you want. Forming your creature like Playdoh, attaching parts and coloring it. You want to have a creature with three legs and claws? Fine. How about arms that come of its ass? Will do. Something with a head twice the size of the rest of its body? Yep. Nigh infinite possibilities. And all full animated. How does a seven legged, three armed, spiked butted creature walk? Fight? Love?

It doesn't stop there. From creature it evolves into a society. Tribes to civilization. Develop a society, create technologies, go to war. Eventually travel to space... and explore the universe. So everything from a single sell to the universe. Compelling, yes?

(PapaSix pointed out that for a game about evolution, it teaches a pro-intelligent design message. I'm looking forward to that debate.)

Now, a lot of folks are saying this will be bigger than TheSims. I doubt that. The people who say that are people who follow computer gaming blogs and read gaming magazines. Geeks, nerds, what have you. Me. TheSims is so successful because it basically is playing with dolls. Dress them up, give them furniture, play house. Spore, on the other hand, appeals to people who's school notebooks were filled with drawings of space creatures and space ships and the like. You know, the people who now read gaming blogs.

Both games to appeal to people who like to pull the wings off flies. Or build bathrooms with out doors. Or beings without anuses. So theres that.

Anywhozits, in a marketing genius move, EA is selling just the creature building portion part of the game, cleverly named Spore Creature Creator. Yeah, it's $10 demo. To create some buzz, they're holding a celebrity creature building contest. Celebrities will build a creature, they'll but them up on the web and the unwashed masses (people who read gaming blog) will vote. A lot of the names of on the list are gaming bloggers and the like (celebrity is a flexible concept). But some...

• Stan Lee
• Richard Branson
• David Lynch
• Ellijah Wood
• Kevin Rose
• Mark Cuban
• Curt Schilling
• Kent Nichols
• Robert Scoble
• Veronica Belmont
• Carlos Santana
• Bijou Phillips
• Brian Crecente
  
• Flight of the Conchords

I have to say, I am very curious to what Lynch does. And Flight of the Conchords.

(via Kotaku)

"We are only as strong as the weakest brick..."

A Flickr group pool dedicated to the Lego apocalypse: ApocaLego.

It's no "Snakes. Why'd it have to be snakes?" but...

SPOILER ALERT.

I'm working my way through Frank Darabont's Indiana Jones IV draft that appeared on the interwebs. I'll chat more about it in more geek-obsessive-what-could-have-been detail later, but I did want to share my favorite line so far.

Bottom of page 64, after a hair raising biplane chase/fight scene.

INDY
The monkey pooped on my chest.

See? That's good writing!

No. Not that Christopher Scott.

No, I am not the male lead character of Miss Saigon.

Nor the Dallas actor with Downs syndrome (co-star of My Brother with Vanessa Williams)

Nor the dancer in Mariah Carey's Pepsi commerical and Step Up 2: The Streets.

Nor the director of Golf: The Musical.

I'm also not this singer.

And I am not Christopher Scott Emmett Virginian death row inmate.


I'm the other one.

Correction to last post... IN YOUR FACE!

After I made my last post (Cole Porter... IN YOUR FACE!), I decided that I should find a nice image of the costumes. And I stumbled on this poster. So, yes. It was shot for 3D. And, yes. The spanking scene is weird.

It's just a weird movie.

Cole Porter... IN YOUR FACE!

I watched the film version of Kiss Me Kate. Now, I am fully aware that Cole Porter musicals were just them coming up with a pseudo-plot to string together a few already written songs with a couple of specific songs written just for the show. (I can't believe Porter write a song about traveling actors traveling from on Italian town to the next before he realized the whole Taming of a Shew thing. Although, to be honest, it didn't actually have much to do with the play either). And the movie of course gets butchered even more by cramming it into and hour and a half. (Which does create the weird "We need to have Too Darn Hot because it's a hit song... but it doesn't fit... well, we'll sing it at the beginning and then just say it has been cut from the play within the movie." Weird.)

The weirdest thing was how it appeared the director thought he was shooting the movie in 3D. The actors kept throwing things at the camera lens. Maybe he thought it would make it more intimate. It just made it scary. Ahhh! A banana coming at me!

Then there is the song Tom, Dick and Harry. This is of course just a case of words taking on different meanings (I am assuming.) The chorus:

I'm a maid who would marry
And will take with no qualm
Any Tom, Dick or Harry,
Any Harry, Dick or Tom,
I'm a maid mad to marry
And will take double-quick
Any Tom, Dick or Harry,
Any Tom, Harry or Dick.

Harry and Dick doesn't sound quite right anymore, but I suppose if you're a maid mad to marry.... I lost it at the chant at the end:

A dicka dick,
A dicka dick,
A dicka dick,
A dicka dick!
A dicka dick,
A dicka dick,
A dicka dick...

Admitted catchy lyrics.

Plus side: The costumes of the play within the play were awesome, in a skin tight-Technicolor way.

Why a flailing economy brings joy

Staples.

That's right. Staples.

You see, I am a messy reader. I can be pretty hard on books. I don't know, I believe books should be experienced, not coddled. Whatever tome I am currently reading follows me everywhere. On the subway. In and out of my bag (with the melted gum from two weeks before and the not-quite-fully closed bottle of Coke). In the bathtub. On my midnight tours of the sewers, searching relics of times long forgot. You know. I dog-ear page corners. I fold back covers and crease the spines. When I'm done with a book, it knows it has been read.

I do it to everything I read. Somehow between reading the appetizers to getting to the desserts, I manage to turn menus into a short term exhibition at MOMA. Hand me a flyer for you show? See how quickly it disappeared into confetti? I like to think of it not as a flaw but a talent.

Newspapers are the worst. All of those loose, unconnected sheets of newsprint. In my hands it rapidly becomes a cartoon folding map, getting larger with each turn of the page, until I am obscured behind a maze of headlines and sudoku. And for some reason, the worst of the worst is the Village Voice. I don't know why. Maybe it's that the sheets are half the size regular news papers. Maybe it's because I never read the Voice in order. I always jumps from on section to the next, in some odd ritual pattern I've developed over the years. I start with Savage Love in the back, jump to movies, then Musto, then Tom Robbins, then the features, then... okay, you get the point. With me the Voice doesn't just expand, it multiplies.

But with a flailing economy, less people are buying ads. Which means less pages. And when the page count drops to a certain level, they begin to add staples in the spine, holding it all together. Which makes my every Wednesday just a little more pleasant.

I'm a half-full kind of guy.

26 Days Until Doomsday

In 26 days the Large Hardon Collider [ed.- HADRON, idiot] goes online. A 17-mile ring stretching from near Geneva and into France, the LHC will crash particles together, producing "tiny fireballs of primordial energy, recreating conditions that last prevailed when the universe was less than a trillionth of a second old." Imagine creating the universe, over and over, 30 million times a second.

Chances are discoveries will be made that will make theoretical physicists swoon and make the rest of use say, "Awesome. I'm going to go see The Dark Knight." But there as never been a collider near this scale so who knows what will happen.

(via Gizmodo)