robolympics picture special report.

Just got back from the first day of the Robolympics up in Fort Mason, San Francisco, having witnessed some bonecrunchin' robot action.

Highlights involved the old Filipino lady next to me grabbing my knee in terror as one of the big spinning metal 'bots in the Lexan-plated arena looked like it was going to fly through and impale everyone in the front row (it didn't, but if it had done, it would have been more fun than sitting in the front row in Seaworld), seeing some amazing Japanese mini-humanoid robots that breakdance, punch, wrestle, and vibrate heartily, checking out the mini-sumo robots that push each other out of an arena, and most of all, lots of old-fashioned, synapse-rattlin' Battlebot-style destruction. Pictures are below:

    

    

    

    

broadcatching in the dark fatman ides?

So, lots happening, apparently. Most notably, my BitTorrent site for downloading free, legal music, LegalTorrents, got outfitted with a special RSS 2.0 feed, courtesy of Andrew Grumet, which allows 'enclosures', meaning you can do clever things like making your RSS aggregator automatically download a new Torrent every x hours/days. It's the first time this 'broadcatching' concept has actually been put into practice, so Wired News ran a story on it referencing us, lots of other people got interested, we gave away another 300gb of music as a result, and I christened my O'Reilly weblog by writing about the whole thing. Good stuff. [EDIT: the Wired News story also got picked up by Slashdot, courtesy of one of my fellow editors - but this is a nepotism-free zone, I promise.]

With relation to the Internet Archive and software collections, we're still building relationships and poking behind the scenes. In the meantime, we put up a temporary page for downloading The Adventures Of Fatman, an excellent, oldschool Sierra-style graphic adventure released last year for Windows and now freely distributable under a Creative Commons license. Go on, leech it, you know you want to.

Media? We don't need no stinkin' media! But if we did, we'd be watching A Shot In The Dark (delightfully, seminally absurd!), listening to XTC's 'Fossil Fuel' (pop so wistfully perfect, it hurts), and playing Ikaruga for the GameCube (I wish I could reverse polarity on life at will, sometimes :P)

fire volta gets duff policeman?

The weather is edging into spring here, and it's actually time to open the window in my office (only to be assailed by leaf blowers, pollen blasting my sinuses, and a bit of fresh air sneaking through there, somewhere or other.)

So my review of Alan Moore's 'Voice Of The Fire' was posted on Slashdot, and by and large, everyone didn't complain vehemently about it in the comments (although my quibbles about 'difficult prose' led one commenter to ask cheekily: 'Are you referring to the book or your review?', hah!) But it's nice to stretch my wings a little into needlessly over-florid verbiage, after over 2000 Slashdot posts which are each federally mandated to be 150 words or less.

Meanwhile, I'm getting a little annoyed at the lack of decent music videos on any US network. 'Subterranean' and 'Subterranean UK' only show very seldom on MTV2, and the rest of the time, the channels practically redefine the concept of 'heavy rotation' for the same ol' clips. Fuse occasionally show interesting videos on their 'Oven Fresh Keepers' show, which is where I saw the Mars Volta video for 'Televators' - really, oddly wonderful. But other than that, TiVo-ing MTV has only got me addicted to Hilary Duff's songwriting/production teams (The Matrix and others..) - is there something I can take for that? Oh, and I miss 'The New Tom Green Show' already.

Otherwise - here's the regular cacophany of media and events to discuss: TV ('Wire In The Blood on BBC America feels like a guilty pleasure because Robson Green is a Keanu Reeves version of John Thaw's Inspector Morse - like, deep psychological analysis, whoa?), books (Flann O'Brien's 'The Third Policeman', thanks to Alan Moore's referencing and Jess Nevins' pointing-out - what an amazing surreal transcendent experience of a book thus far!), games (the Flash masterpiece Warthog Launch - as based on Warthog Jump of course, how very meta - looking forward to Schadenfreude Interactive's upcoming products too, especially Age Of Ornithology), and... spam email (a Viagra spam arrived this morning with a quotation from Roman poet Horace in it - 'They change their climate, not their soul, who rush across the sea.' I feel spam-enriched already.)