Sing! Sing a Song! Sing OUT LOUD!

"With my Freeze-Ray,
I will stop

The pain.
It's not a death-ray
or an ice-beam
that's all Johnny Snow..."





"That's the plan
Rule the World
You and me
Any day."


Neil Patrick Harris is so kule. He did theater and was in Sweeney Todd: Demon Barber of Fleet Street.

Scoot Back...

Japanese Tradition

Laser Engraved Art

I want a laser engraver, I found one on Amazon.com to add to my wishlist, yet it's not currently available. Damn!




From this flickr album:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/barking-madcrow/2130774807/in/pool-digitalfabrication/

Mmmm.. Yummie

I'm a bit of a foodie, so I perked up while randomly going through Blogger.com (there are 3 blogs that keep coming up as I've been looking - grrr). If you like yummy pastries and whatnot; go here:

http://muffinscookiesealtripasticci.blogspot.com/

If you don't understand Italian; go here:
Translated version using Google Language tools

So what if it's not in whatever your mother-tongue is in, it's likely to have something you've never tried before, or have tried that was "Americanized". And if it's chocolate, try throwing in a bit of crushed cayenne pepper; because it's yummier that way sometimes. I like to eat those spicy fried pork rinds with melted dark chocolate already in my mouth. It's sooooo bad, yet sooooo good.

RC Plane Ballet

Ooooh...

When Things Go Bump In The Night...

Sometimes there's someone to bump back.

Yay! Guillermo Toro is back doing Hellboy ΙΙ: The Golden Army and I'm bouncing with glee! Yippity yippity yippity...

http://www.hellboymovie.com/

If you enjoyed Pan's Labyrinth (El Laberinto del Fauno), you should go see all of Guillermo's other movies because they are better than 90% of what's coming of of Hollywood. I saw The Orphanage (El Orfanato) just over a month ago and it was one of the best movies ever. Why do you have to see a movie out of France, Japan, or Mexico to really be impressed nowadays? Pixar is doing pretty good, yet I sometime wish they'd do something rated R or NC-17 (not that anyone allows their movies to be rated NC-17 anymore). Anyhoo, this next installment of the Hellboy movies has Johann Kraus in it! Ja?... Ja!

Go here for Guillermo's IMDb.com profile:
http://imdb.com/name/nm0868219/

I love the Hellboy Franchise, it's the mind-child of artist Mike Mignola that had supposedly started as a doodle with a permanent marker on the inside of the bathroom stall of the short lived San Francisco Comic Relief. I did the accounting for a while at the Berkeley Comic Relief, down in the lower depths of The Second Hobbit Bookstore. I'll discuss that some other day though.

Anyhoo, back to Hellboy; when Mike Mignola does his stories, he researches and include all kinds of really old folklore, the kind which the Catholic Papacy tried to destroy with their missionary crusades. Luckily, the stories were recycled and still live on so people like Mignola can give them voice again in his B.P.R.D. universe. Mike uses the old legends as a step stone and then creates all new stories with Hellboy as the foil to spin tales when homo sapiens were a minority and pawns in the struggles between wrestling forces throughout the world.

Plus; Hellboy fights Nazi-cyborg-gorillas and other Nazi occultists! How kule is that?

One of the best parts about the Hellboy graphic novels/comics is that they stick to a limited defined range of hues for the colour palette. It's a good idea, because when you limit an artist, they have to get creative with how they use the limitations creatively. This is why I think Episodes IV to VI of Star Wars are so much better than the prequels since George got to do whatever he wanted in the recent trilogy and the plot suffered for it. The actors seemed too busy placing themselves in position for the green-screen instead of character development.

If you enjoy Gothic-Lovecraft-ish and/or Steam-Punk: You should also check out The Amazing Screw-On Head which is about a... Umm... Head, that screws onto robotic steam-driven bodies and does special work for Abe Lincoln.

The Sc-Fi Channel did a test pilot episode to see if they wanted to make a series out of it. The DVD is out for about $9 USD, yet no news if there will ever be a series; which starred Paul Giamatti, David Hyde Pierce & Molly Shannon. Here's the trailer to wet your appetite:



Oh and...
   Go, SPEED RACER! GO!   
I just wish the actors flapped their jaws as an effect and the lines were delivered in ADR. It'd be soooo much better that way.

We'll just skip the glove and go the the encephalograph

I've been waiting for someone to come out with those uber-nifty gloves from that Minority Report movie so I could just sign and glyph with my hands to input text and control the UI on my computer. It would just be better ergonomically and promote more arm exercise and let one stand away from the table. Then I'd want VR goggles, and the next thing you know I'd be all gargoyled out with a Mac Mini pouched on my belt.

Yes, I've been wanting to build gloves like that myself, but I'd need some really cheap and low power dual-axis accelerometers first. Otherwise they'd be too clunky and gauntlet like.

Then I find this:
http://www.ocztechnology.com/aboutocz/press/2008/273

A headband that reads the electroencephalographic impulses firing off in your brain plugged into a USB dock you connect to your computer. The thing is going to do a running scan on your brainwaves and decipher the electromagnetic pulses of the firing synapses in your noodle and turn it into peripheral input. OCZ Technologies has begun consumer production.

How sensitive are the receptors in that headband?

Now you will need to configure the software to properly interpret your thoughts and commands, so every user will have a different experience. If you've tried to use voice recognition software with little success, I wonder how much better you'd do with this. Worse, what happens when your friends' hot sister(s) and/or mom walks by and all your naughty files pop open?

Is there a day when you can build an EEG headband you plug into a cell phone and do away with the touchscreen and keys all together? No need to talk, just think what you want to type or say and a phonetic map of your voice and inflections is sent out through the transceiver.

Or better yet, plug the EEG headband into a t-shirt with a built in 26K colour eink panel and you can blog to your chest; screw the net.

Nano Couture

Oooh...

ALF - The Autism Liberation Front !

http://www.autistics.org/

OH!

SWEET!

JEBUS!

Before you dare make any Life Of Brian jokes, know that there is really an Autism Liberation Front. This has got to be one of the kulest things I've seen in a while (and yes, I deliberately mis-spelled "coolest" so live with it or byte me). And another thing, before you go making fun of their acronym, go read Permanent Midnight, and that's read the book, != rent the DVD.

These people are actually using Second Life to easily communicate with each other and overcome their inability to easily form relationships in first person. In the first TV season of Ghost ^{in the} Shell: Stand Alone Complex, they deal with the same subject in an episode with young autistic kids who excel at manipulating cyber-space to aggregate the net better than regular people.