- logging coolness from 127.0.0.1, daily.
Sure, he's not a super-cyberpunk webhead geek, rather a traditional humor scribe, but you may have forgotten that Dave Barry is still one of the funniest writers in the world. And look, he got interviewed on Slashdot recently. And he's got a blog. So maybe he's a super-cyberpunk ninja webhead geek in secret! Read all his columns and decide for yourself. After you've finished guffawing uncontrollably. And if this entry was a tad obvious, let's go tangential - we direct you to Dave's fellow Miami Herald columnist, Carl Hiaasen, whose bizarre environmental slapstick murder mystery books are heavenly, and whose wry but more hard-edge columns for the Herald are excellent in themselves.
So my PC (an old Pentium 450 or so) completely failed to turn on last night - power dead, unresponsive. So I went to check out getting a backup machine for moments like this at Weird Stuff Warehouse, which is located near me, in the heart of Silicon Valley, and which I'd heard good things about. Turns out their Sunnyvale warehouse is full of the best selection of old PC/Mac hardware and software I've ever seen. A very helpful employee picked out a Dell Dimension XPS 400, with a Pentium II 400, 12gb, 128mb of RAM, a 16mb TNT graphics card, ethernet, cd-rom, and sound card, for just $99. Sure, it's an old machine, but great value for web browsing and.. updating sites like this :P Weirdstuff also have a sealed bid sale which had some awfully weird+interesting archaic computing equipment when I checked it out. So.. fun if you like digging through old computer parts, f'sure, and a great place if you want to get a computer cheap for a needy friend or relative.
Poking around the nether regions of the Internet again, looking at the rather excellent, if dated, Tolkein videogames page, and found.. wha.. hwa.. 'Jet Set Willy:The Lord Of The Rings'?!? And of course, don't forget its companion piece, 'Manic Miner: The Hobbit'. Sure, Tolkein is probably rotating pretty rapidly in his grave at this, but Matthew Smith, now he's stopped living on that Dutch commune, must be pretty freaked out too. 'Riddles in the dark', indeed.
Since I'm looking at archive and library resources a lot more nowadays with my new interests in software archiving, I found this great resource at the San Francisco Public Library. Unfortunately, the site is a little drab and slow, but there's an amazing collection from the vintage photo archive up there - 30,000 of the 250,000 photos are searchable and viewable. Since I've been living in the Bay Area for the past 3 years, it's great to see the history of the area so vividly depicted, from robot job pickets to classic baseball snapshots.
Even though this was my 2nd copy, I picked up 'Starship Titanic' to get the packed-in bonus item, the somewhat sought-after official strategy guide, at Barnes and Noble yesterday. It's got a full solution, plus a bunch of 'making of' info to what is essentially the third in the late Douglas Adams' interactive fiction trilogy - the first two being 'The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy' and the wonderfully screwy 'Bureaucracy'. Despite 'Starship Titanic' being a bit of a disappointment in many's eyes, it was a valiant attempt to resurrect the text adventure as a videogame format, with an interesting but flawed parser which really _tried_ to advance the genre. Oh, and John Cleese as a talking bomb. All good.
On my return from Las Vegas with the folks, noticed mono211.com had been crawled/searched/read pretty hardcore by a site called openmute. Go check it out - well, actually, it looks like it's sorta an internal site, so maybe you're not meant to, but it claims to be 'an ambitious free resource project aiming to support cultural practice in the information era'. That sounds like fun! Aha.. I see one of the people behind it is Ian Morrison of Spamradio 'fame' - that's the voice-converted spam + monotonik music site which got nominated for a Webby award in 2002, that's how I (vaguely) know him :P Anyhow, more news of websites we don't understand that look intriguing.. as we get it.
Now I see regular visitors on the referrer logs, my resolve to update daily is strengthening. And a visit to the discount book store yielded something worth mentioning, for a buck, no less - a copy of 'Gadget:The Third Force' by Marc Laidlaw, the _excellent_ cyberpunk writer, nowadays best known for his writing work at Valve Software on 'Half-Life', one of the best PC games ever. I actually interviewed him before 'Half-Life's release, back in '97 or so, and haven't had a chance to check out many of his novels, so was delighted to find this semi-rarity, based on the Lynch-ian 'Gadget' CD-ROM done, 'Myst'-stylee, when 'multimedia' was the next big thing.
Trying my best not to recycle links that everyone else goes with, but sometimes.. I fail. So.. I enjoy Penn Jillette's website columns a _lot_. He's one half of the beautifully subversive magicians Penn and Teller. It came up in weblogs a while back because of his issues with airport security, but read through everything - his work learning the jazz bass is, well, kinda inspiring. Otherwise.. well, the duo have previously and intriguigly hooked up with The Residents, and I wish I had 'Showtime' to check out their new psychic-debunking series, 'Penn And Teller:Bullshit'. Hah, and having data-mined a bit, guess what I found? A log-file from the Penn+Teller BBS, 'Mofo Ex Machina', circa 1988. Love it!
heh, ok, i just _had_ to include this one. apparently Mad Magazine's latest issue has 'Grand Theft Auto:Vice City' on the cover, and a feature on heart-stopping new improvements for the game. That's just such an.. odd culture clash, a 'Miami Vice'-spoofing game made by Scottish people as satirised by Alfred E. Neuman. :P
Apologies there haven't been updates in a little while - I wanted to continue with detailed entries, memepool-style, so posting takes up more time than I often have. As for what's up, I've been doing more work at the Internet Archive, trying to work out how their software archive should develop. Unfortunately, the CD-ROM archive work is on hold due to rights issues. But I'm looking both at open source/public domain collections we could host for download, plus old software we could collect physical copies of, to save from decay. But no definite direction yet. [Plus, I'm doing some interviews with games industry luminaries for Gamasutra - I'll yell when they're up.] Oh, and my family's in town for a week, starting tomorrow, so updates will be slow for a while. Take care, w00t.
There's no excuse for this, but the perfect pop song-writing of Gregg Alexander has me all thrown for a loop. You may know him from his former band The New Radicals and their one hit 'You Only Get What You Give'. But he disbanded the group as soon as they got known, and now he's a songwriting gun for hire, notable in Europe for writing all of Ronan Keating's 'good' songs, including 'Life Is A Rollercoaster'. Maddeningly, the only up-to-date fanpage is in German, but you can still read about his tracks for English pop princess Sophie Ellis-Bextor, his high-profile hit with Santana+Michelle Branch, 'Game Of Love' - but strangely, his classic work with Australian TV's 'Pop Star' winner isn't yet mentioned there, hah - too whorish even for them? Other pop geeks are similarly conflicted about Gregg's genius - but I assure you, it _is_ genius :P
So, since ffwd uses the lovely movabletype here on mono211.com, and it supports multiple weblogs from multiple users, I thought it'd be cool to give a couple of friends their own space to post things in. So, although it's VERY early on and they haven't customised/added much content, please welcome a new mono211.com blog from Keith 'Vim!' Baylis, super-majestic UK-based electronic musician and long-time releaser on Monotonik, our net.music.label, and another new blog from Connor 'Grandma' Long, the American _genius_ guitar +sung +weirdness +elektronik musician and another Monotonik inmate. Watch for updates (hopefully!) from them over the next few days/weeks. And if any other of my net.geek.friends are reading this and want a blog too, drop me a line.
Though it's a web store first and foremost, if you want to check out the latest and greatest Hong Kong/Japanese limited-edition action figures, try out Ningyoushi for size. Their message board is an amazing source of information about cool toys coming out, as well as all the bootlegs coming out as unscrupulous toy pirates try to muscle in on the action. Haha, but they have bootleg 'Shaolin Soccer' Be@arbricks!! How much does THAT rock? ['Shaolin Soccer' is a kungfusoccerdocious Hong Kong movie, btw, due out in the US later this year - see a trailer here.]
Maths is glamorous, Oscar-winning work for almost everyone who practises it, and for those wanting to get into the seductive world of calculus, Eric Weisstein's World Of Mathematics is a perfect introduction and reference. Fascinating even for the layman, with details on a myriad of fractals (far-out, man!), Archimedes' cattle problem (MOO!), and even the number of the beast (take that, Ozzy!), the site is funded by wunderkind Stephen Wolfram, whose work with his book 'A New Kind Of Science' has thrust him controversially into the public eye, but whose computer program 'Mathematica', sorta like a Casio scientific calculator times infinity, is something eggheads can ALL agree to love.
Many of you may have noticed the excellent archive of ephemeral films from America's past, presented by Rick Prelinger and freely downloadable at the Internet Archive. There's some hilarious and telling stuff in there, such as 'Duck And Cover' and 'Perversion for Profit'. A number of these clips were formerly compiled for Voyager's 12-disc epic CD-ROM series, 'Our Secret Century' (which is awfully high on my wish list for the CD-ROM archive.) But if you want to watch similarly carefully chosen highlights, Fantoma has recently compiled the 'Educational Archive' DVDs, with some Prelinger-contributed, similarly amusing contents about sex, drugs, driver's ed, and all the _important_ things in life.
More poking around in the wonderful world of interactive fiction has revealed some amazing results. Whilst acknowledging the host of award winners that really elevate the genre to an art form, we have, in contrast, the seminally bad 'Detective', closely followed by 'Mystery Science Theater 3000 Presents 'Detective', with 'adaptive heckling'. Hah! Oh, and how about text adventure versions of famous arcade games? There's 'Donkey Kong', 'Asteroids', and to cap it all, a text adventure version of 'Metroid' inspired by this Penny Arcade cartoon?
[Btw, for those wanting to meddle in some recent and older text adventures without downloading, there's Java versions of a bunch, including 'Being Andrew Plotkin', on this site.]
The idea of some kind of encyclopedia which _everyone_ can contribute to has been kicked around on the Net for a while now. One of the first ones I discovered was h2g2, or the online 'Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy', originally devised+constructed by the saintly Douglas Adams, but lacking a little spark now it's more strictly regulated by the BBC. The plain-looking but information-packed Wikipedia is probably the best straight encyclopedia created by its users, and deals with many important subjects of relevance to the modern populace. But my favorite (and I'm a little biased 'cos I know Nate wot made it) is the truly gigantic, truly inspirational Everything2. Posted today alone, we have such vital topics as 'How To Shave Your Bikini Line', Joseph Goebbels, and 'Smash TV' (the game _and_ the song.) Noding is all the mode, dontcha know?
