my.bicycle

I’m off to Cali for a whirlwhind business trip. No posts here for a couple days, though I did just drop off a few interesting bits at Futurismic , and my del.icio.us page may be good for chuckles to the terminally bored. I'll be back early next week.

Mario’s Princess is a little tramp ! (cute, but NSFW) (via kottke )

Superfuture is a review site for the hipper-than-me crowd. Still, some of the places are intriguing and not unreasonably priced. (via tokyopia forum )

Seeing this awesome Raffaele Iannello Knife Block makes me want to take a stab at designing a quirky appliance. ( deathboy links )

Boingboing offers several mirrors to the Star Wars Episode III fotonovella , which has about 6MB of pictures from the movie, following the narrative. Needless to say (so why do I say it?): spoilers galore .

It hurts to see know that there is a live-action Thundercats fan-film out there, but there it is ( .mpg ). (via screenhead )

“ Holy Bat-Gadgets , Batman!” ( deathboy )

All 510 contacts in Paris Hilton's phonebook have been leaked to the internet, clearly showing that the security on any network is only as strong as its weakest link. For scary implications, first picture if this was your data, then picture loads of spammers instead of slavering fans. As Warren Ellis points out , “If Ms Hilton wasn’t scammed out of her password, then there’s a hole in T-Mobile you could run a truck through.” Hey, I’m going to SMS Fred Durst.

If the games industry doesn’t create its own original IP then we’re just a tee-shirt sweat shop for the movie industry. — Tim Schafer on taking risks

The makers of Kit Kat are struggling to cope with a surge in demand for the chocolate bar in Japan, because the country's teenagers believe that it will help them pass exams. Kit Kat, an expression invented in Britain in the 1930s, sounds eerily close to “kitto katsu,” a Japanese exam-season mantra that literally means “I’ll do my best to make sure I succeed.” Telegraph.co.uk — Exam fever gives Japan a craving for Kit Kat I don’t buy that the Kit Kats are any harder to find than normal. They’re readily available from every convenience store and supermarket I frequent, and in a lot more flavors than the US sports. There are strawberry, lemon cheesecake, passionfruit, and green tea flavored Kit Kat, as well as “White” (white chocolate) and “Gold” varieties. Gold is interesting because it is an upgraded version of a normal Kit Kat; it has better wafer creme (vanilla?) in it, and the chocolate is dusted with cocoa pow...

Is it time already, Whateley? Don’t be silly. I know that I sent for you. My memory is as good as it ever was. Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’yeh wgah’nagl fthagn. You know what that means, don’t you? In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming. A justified exaggeration, that; I haven’t been feeling too well recently. It was a joke, one-head, a joke. Are you writing all this down? Good. Keep writing. I know where we got up to yesterday. — Neil Gaiman, I Cthulhu

“Every major entertainment company should buy a game company,” he says. “It’s the fastest-growing part of entertainment, and it’s competing with them. Name me another industry where you can buy out a competitor without fear of the antitrust laws.” — Sumner Redstone on Viacom’s acquisition of Midway Games

Playing a game, any kind of game, is inherently open-ended and interactive. Whether you’re playing chess, Go, or Super Mario Bros., you don’t really know how things will wind up or what will happen along the way. Narrative, on the other hand, is neither open-ended nor interactive. When you’re watching a story, you surrender masochistically to the storyteller. The fun is in not having control, in sitting still and going ‘Yeah? And then what happened? And then?’ — Clive Thompson, Oughtta Stay Out of Pictures — Why video games shouldn’t be like the movies

Tecmo Store is selling a Kasumi version of the previously mentioned breast-equipped mouse-pad for a meager US$25. (As opposed to US$55 for the dubiously-dubbed “Kasumi Squishy Pillow.”) (via kotaku , where you should absolutely check out the instructions for usage.)

I’d love to see this if I was in SF: Evil Dead Live is playing Feb 17,18, 19, 24, 25, 26, and Mar 3, 4, and 5 at 8pm. This is a small venue and it will sell out so I reccomend getting tickets asap. Visit evildeadlive.com or cafearts.com for for tickets. You'll most likely be sprayed with blood so don't wear that nice white dress - see you there! Tribe Discussion: Evil Dead movies - tribe.net

I’m a big Elmore Leonard fan, but the movie adaptations of his work are usually pretty poor. This has changed some recently, with Tarantino’s Jackie Brown (Rum Punch) and Barry Sonnenfeld’s Get Shorty . The sequel to which, Be Cool , is due out shortly. I’m looking forward to it for a number of reasons, but the primary one is The Rock shows a really sense of humor by starring in the role that was obviously mocking him in the novel — Eliot Wilhelm is a gay, samoan bodyguard who basically has only one charismatic trick: raising one eyebrow and looking skeptical. My only real worry is that I’ve never seen anything else by the director . Update: Additional clips available .

While neat in theory, and exposing even more of the fundamental geekery inherent in Mac OS X, this RAID made from iPod Shuffles is tremendously wasteful from a money-per-megabyte perspective.

This is to let all of you know that our son, Raishin, was born today (Feb 11) at 04:45 (GMT+9) after a 3 hour 50 minute labor. The kid is healthy and huge. He is 3912 grams (8.62 lbs) and 51.4 centimeters (just over 20 inches) in length. The kanji characters that make up "Raishin" in Japanese roughly translate to "A Dragon Comes," hence the subject line. Mom is healthy, and happy to have less than the 18.5 hour labor that our daughter previously required. We are all stoked beyond words.

Weezie recently told me about a pretty horrific experience in the Ikea parking lot, but apparently it can get much, much worse than even he imagined. (via linkbunnies )

Baby’s First Eggsack

Given any circumstances other than those of the unique and troubled period in which he embraced German politics, Hitler would have been an utter failure, likely to be laughed off the stage with his sputtering, eye-bulging speech and fantasy claims. He had never, except for extremely brief and intermittent times, before entering politics in the revolutionary ruin that was post-war Germany, made an honest living. There is a close parallel here with Bush. Except when friends of his powerful father made attractive, low-risk, undemanding opportunities available to him, young Bush was a failure. He demonstrated no business acumen, no academic application, and he did a lot of aimless drifting, much like Hitler's time in Vienna before the First World War. There are totally unexplained periods in Bush's early adult life, an extraordinary thing for an American national public figure. Through A Glass Darkly - An Interpretation of Bush’s Character To an audience at the Leo Baeck Insti...

The upcoming Ridley Scott movie, Kingdom of Heaven , looks really enticing. Maybe it will be Braveheart without the fag-jokes. Maybe it will be Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves with believable accents and missing the out-of-place slapstick and Bryan Adams song. It looks epic , but seeing only the main promotional image of hair-a-flying Orlando Bloom, I thought it was promoting the Wolverine movie.

After losing his video games as a punishment, 4-year-old Adrian Cole woke in the middle of the night, determined to replace them. He dressed, put on his winter coat and boots and climbed on a lounge chair to reach keys on the wall and unlock the dead-bolt. Then Adrian got into his mother's 1990 Geo Prizm and drove to Home Video, a quarter-mile up Northland Drive, the main drag through Sand Lake. It was closed at 1:30 a.m. Friday, so he started back home. -- Boy’s drive steers attention (via kotaku )

Superman is a Dick

As part of the run-up to the release of Star Wars: Episode III, Vanity Fair is running an intriguing, long piece on George Lucas and the whole six-movie series . Some of it is predictably fluffy, though others border on the spoilerrific.

I posted a year ago at Futurismic about the DOOM boardgame , which recently generated this excellent comment from Slashdot: Here’s a look at the roll result matrix: Roll a 1: You are unable to see shit; lost 5 HP Roll a 2: You are unable to see shit; lose 5 HP Roll a 3: You are unable to see shit; lose 5 HP Roll a 4: You are unable to see shit; lose 5 HP Roll a 5: You are unable to see shit; lose 5 HP Roll a 6: You are unable to see shit; lose 5 HP Roll a 7: You are unable to see shit; lose 5 HP Roll a 8: You are unable to see shit; lose 5 HP

(via kottke )

Male monkeys will ‘pay’ in fruit juice to look at a picture of a socially dominant monkey or a female’s hindquarters. In the wild, the animals help their fitness by monitoring what their leaders are doing, and which females are sexually receptive. (...) No surprise, then, that the juice-to-picture exchange rate was highest for images of female rears. “Virtually all monkeys will give up juice to see female hindquarters,” Deaner says of his male subjects. “They really value the images.” Nature.com (via boingboing )

Hope There’s Someone completely flipped my perspective on Antony, New York chamber-pop cabaret performer and budding gay icon. I’ve known his music for a while now, and always appreciated the songwriting, but I’ve been unable to get past the gratuitous vibrato in his voice, his sticky, overflowing, campy shtick. Then I heard this song, and all my reservations were overwhelmed by the power of it. Salon: Wednesday Morning Download

Another gallery of “gothic lolita” in Harajuku , following up on my previous post . (thanks to McKenzee ) Ah. And just for additional perv-factor, here’s a GameGirlAdvance article on cosplay . (via kotaku )

Charlie Stross is talking about The Jennifer Morgue, his new SF spy comedy novel in his LiveJournal . It makes me want to read it immediately: A second Bob-mobile has occured to me: a Hummer H2. (Not in scene yet -- I may not be able to use this one.) It needs to be a Hummer (or a supersized pickup truck) because the cargo deck is full of rack-mounted Apple XServe servers, about 60 of them, running a horribly complex neural network simulation fed by four webcams (on the front and rear windscreens). They suck so much juice that Bob has to run the aircon flat out to avoid melting in a perspiring heap, and the Hummer can only make fifty miles per hour and get four miles to the gallon. But while they're running, the servers act as quantum intermediating observers, controlling the collapse of the wave function in the car's environment. The neural network sim is designed to recognize and disbelieve in any of the various assassins trying to wipe Bob out with guided missiles/helicopter...