Pinball and Arcade Overdose

June 9, 2012

Easton's Article
The projector almost broke during this screening.  
The theater was worried that they would have to cancel the show.
Unfortunately, we had no such luck.
We had to watch this steaming turd.
Please don't make the same mistake.

Ugh... I need to get that bad taste out of my mouth.

A Story For Tomorrow

A Cinematic Meditation on the Human Condition
by Maria Popova of Brain Pickings

It is extremely rare when the cinematography and writing of a film are equally exquisite, converging in a poignant meditation on the secrets of happiness and what it means to be human. That’s exactly what creative duo Dan Riordan and Dana Saint, better known as gnarly bay productions, accomplish in a story for tomorrow — the most breathtaking, heart-stirring film I’ve seen since Radiolab’s Symmetry.

Watch with headphones, watch until the end, and watch with your whole heart.

Radiolab's Symmetry

Symmetry is a mesmerizing split-screen short film exploring the poetic parallels and contrasts of our world — birth and death, heart and brain, masculinity and femininity, all many more of humanity’s fundamental dualities. It’s the best thing you’ll watch all week, we promise. (Or, as Kirstin Butler put it, “[S]top everything and watch the most beautiful, satisfying split-screen video.”)

Django Unchained Trailer

Dopeness.


Today's Photos:
At the Northwest Pinball and Arcade Show

So many games.  This is one of ten different rows of machines.

Pinball + Any Sport = Cramazing.

Drag racing game from 1986.  
Embarrassing how long we played this one.
Graphics don't matter that much. 

Classic.
Total Classic.

The best games come from the simplest ideas.
Shoot the other guy.

Yes, like the band Journey.
Randy Jackson not included.

This is a crappy rip-off of Donkey Kong called "Congorilla"

"Make It So"

June 8, 2012

Icons of Science Fiction Exhibit
At EMP.  This exhibit really made me want to up my geek game.

I never got into Doctor Who, or Buffy, and I haven't seen Star Trek in years.

They also had some classic science fiction books that sound awesome.

Beggars in Spain

by Nancy Kress

Beggars in Spain (and its sequels) take place in a future where genetic engineering has become a reality, and faces the consequences of genetic modifications (genemods) on society and culture, the United States in particular. The world of Beggars in Spain is also powered by cold fusion, named "Y-energy" after its pioneer Kenzo Yagai. Yagai is also the founder of "Yagaiism", a moral worldview Kress based on Objectivism, in which dignity is solely the product of what a person can achieve through his or her own efforts, and the contract is the basis of society. As a corollary, the weak and unproductive are not owed anything.

The novel's title comes from its primary moral question, as presented by character Tony Indivino: what do productive and responsible members of society owe the "beggars in Spain," the unproductive masses who have nothing to offer except need? This is only underscored by the rift between Sleepers and Sleepless; Sleepless are superior in mind and body, and easily capable of outperforming their normal cousins. All men are not created equal. Where, then, is the line between equality and excellence? How far should any superior minority hold themselves back for fear of engendering feelings of inadequacy in their inferiors?—especially if this minority is not hated and feared, but rather the elite? This question is explored, but not elaborated on by the novel.

I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream

by Harlan Ellison

The story takes place 109 years after the complete destruction of human civilization. The Cold War had escalated into a world war, fought mainly between China, Russia, and the United States. As the war progressed, the three warring nations each created a super-computer capable of running the war more efficiently than humans. The machines are each referred to as "AM," which originally stood for "Allied Mastercomputer," and then was later called "Adaptive Manipulator." Finally, "AM" stands for "Aggressive Menace." One day, one of the three computers becomes self aware, and promptly absorbs the other two, thus taking control of the entire war. It carries out campaigns of mass genocide, killing off all but four men and one woman.

The survivors live together underground in an endless complex, the only habitable place left, although it is explained that the last few survivors had no choice but to remain underground. The master computer harbors an immeasurable hatred for the group and spends every available moment torturing them. AM has not only managed to keep the humans from taking their own lives, but has made them virtually immortal.

Today's Photos:

Whitney with an Alien.

He immediately knew this was not made to scale.

Star Trek Captain's Chair.
It's Kirk's chair, but I like Picard.
"ENGAGE!"

Terminator
My brother is terrified of Skynet.
It's what happens when all the computer link up and become self aware.
Like when you let your Facebook talk to Google, which links with your Bing... uh oh.

Critters
Critters 2 involves the creatures being fried at a fast food joint, and congregating into a giant tumbleweed to wreck the town.

Rookies

June 7, 2012

You Are Not Special

I tell students they are not "magical and unique snowflakes".

This guy did it better:

“Here we are on a literal level playing field. That matters. That says something. And your ceremonial costume … shapeless, uniform, one-size-fits-all. Whether male or female, tall or short, scholar or slacker, spray-tanned prom queen or intergalactic X-Box assassin, each of you is dressed, you’ll notice, exactly the same. And your diploma … but for your name, exactly the same.

All of this is as it should be, because none of you is special.

You are not special. You are not exceptional.

Contrary to what your u9 soccer trophy suggests, your glowing seventh grade report card, despite every assurance of a certain corpulent purple dinosaur, that nice Mister Rogers and your batty Aunt Sylvia, no matter how often your maternal caped crusader has swooped in to save you … you’re nothing special.”

“It’s an epidemic — and in its way, not even dear old Wellesley High is immune … one of the best of the 37,000 nationwide, Wellesley High School … where good is no longer good enough, where a B is the new C, and the midlevel curriculum is called Advanced College Placement. And I hope you caught me when I said “one of the best.” I said “one of the best” so we can feel better about ourselves, so we can bask in a little easy distinction, however vague and unverifiable, and count ourselves among the elite, whoever they might be, and enjoy a perceived leg up on the perceived competition. But the phrase defies logic. By definition there can be only one best. You’re it or you’re not.”

There Is No Best Player In The NBA

Yes, we still compare basketball players to Michael Jordan.

And they can never be as good as Michael Jordan.

So our best players are never good enough.

Then Michael Jordan happened, and the Jordan Brand, and every playoff game became a referendum on immortality, which Jordan would win. The selling point was that we were watching the greatest player ever. And but then the player, the singular embodiment of basketball excellence, retired and unretired and retired and got old and unretired and retired for real, at last, while the job description he'd created stayed open. Kobe Bryant performed the duties as a sort of temp or long-term contractor, but in the end—no, not him.

Now that leaves James, the Chosen One, begging the question with both parts of his nickname. If choosing is how these things are decided, and if what is chosen is a One, then everything was settled before he even graduated from high school. Yet the public and the basketball press is unsatisfied. LeBron is a choker. LeBron is the MVP. LeBron is overpowering. LeBron is timid. LeBron is the greatest player alive and hopelessly overrated.

It would be fun to turn NBA commenters loose on a Rock-Scissors-Paper tournament sometime:

ROCK IS UNSTOPPABLE.

I CAN'T BELIEVE HOW ROCK CHOKED AGAINST PAPER.

WHEN YOU LOOK AT HOW SCISSORS BEAT PAPER, YOU HAVE TO THINK SCISSORS IS IN THE CONVERSATION FOR ALL-TIME GREATEST.

Rookies

Cool sports bar in Columbia City.  

So Seattle. 

2.50 Rainiers during Happy Hour, vegan "Field Roast" substitutions, and there's some kind of teacher happy hour on Thursdays.  

(They don't have it listed on the website, but I SWEAR I saw it in the bar.)

Today's Photo:

I know it's 2012, but when I see this, I still want to pump my fist in the air.

Quantify The Rainbow

June 6, 2012

Usher Samples Uptown Girl
You can listen to the song here.

It was just a'ight for me dog.

I could have used more Billy.

Take My Money, HBO!

We Are Legion

The Story of the Hacktivists

Anonymous hackers don't usually give interviews.

This documentary is a fascinating look at hackers, their culture, and their impact on the world.

Riveting.

Today's Photo:

I bought the math kids Skittles today.
I bought myself two days of quiet while they work.

Brandi at Easy Street

June 5, 2012

Please Stop Apologizing

by Bill Maher in New York Times

The answer to whenever another human being annoys you is not “make them go away forever.” We need to learn to coexist, and it’s actually pretty easy to do. For example, I find Rush Limbaugh obnoxious, but I’ve been able to coexist comfortably with him for 20 years by using this simple method: I never listen to his program. The only time I hear him is when I’m at a stoplight next to a pickup truck.

When the lady at Costco gives you a free sample of its new ham pudding and you don’t like it, you spit it into a napkin and keep shopping. You don’t declare a holy war on ham.

I don’t want to live in a country where no one ever says anything that offends anyone. 

That’s why we have Canada. 

South Park Stick of Truth Trailer

All That Jazz - A Guide to Jazz Clubs in Seattle
This just sounds like a great thing to do on a summer night.

People Like Us

Ugh.  

Another SIFF dud.

Don't see this movie.

It's not good.  

"But it's by the same guys that wrote 'Fringe' and 'Transformers', maybe it'll be cool."
No.

It's one of those movies where he could just tell her right away and the movie is over.

And the little kid stinks.

Today's Photos:
Brandi Carlile at Easy Street Records

(Photo by Jason Tang)

Fantastic blog post about the performance here.

A blog post from Brandi about the night (with video)

Full photo gallery here.

Batman + Robosaur

June 4, 2012

The Art Of Overthinking
by Jules Kushner

I have a degree in Overthinking. It’s from the College in My Head, which I know for a fact is not accredited, and yet I continue to be a student there. Over the years, this not-fine art of overthinking has probably been the most difficult habit for me to break. I’d say it’s definitely been the most difficult habit for me to break, but then I’d reassess saying ‘definitely’ and probably switch it back to ‘probably.’ Is it easy being me? No. Do I have it way easier than many and create my own stress? Yes! Do I win something for that? A trophy where someone is just gently patting someone else on the back? Probably not.

Here are some examples of how it goes for me: I regularly make decisions about what other people were thinking when they said or didn’t say something to me, only to later find out that they don’t even recall saying the original thing to me in the first place. That’s how much weight the moment had for them. None. Even though I’ve spent hours deconstructing these moments. There have been occasions when I’ve decided that people don’t like me and why they don’t like me during the same period of time that I was their favorite person. Here’s another. Often, when someone says that they have to talk to me, my initial instinct is that they’re either going to break up with me or fire me. That’s right around when I try to remind myself, I’m neither dating or working for them. My head works way harder than a rocket scientist’s, without the super smart about rocket science part.

Today's Photo:

That's Batman riding Rexy.
Rexy is a robot, and can prowl, growl and sniff nearby kids.
If I understood advanced robotics as a 8-year-old, this is what I would have built.

Tuning Fork In Your Loins

June 3, 2012

Today's Photo:
A good shot at the driving range.

Yes, I still care about Foursquare badges.

Robo-tastic

June 2, 2012

Beasts of the Southern Wild

Beautiful.

Analyzing Mariner Drafts - Seattle Times
Depressing.

Today's Photos:

Science Festival at Seattle Center

Axe & Shield

May 30, 2012

United States vs Brazil

We lost.

Which was to be expected.

But we played pretty well.

And we finally changed off those silver numbers.

Sonics Arena Rally -  June 14

4:00pm in Occidental Park

Today's Photo:

Honkfest 2012

June 1, 2012

Pretty Snarky Articles

Jen Andrews writes about Regina Spektor and the 40 Most Powerful Photographs.  I'm so sad Jen isn't on my favorite podcast anymore.

Pomegranate Reads on Hello Giggles
I’d like to offer you the literary pomegranate. A little more difficult to crack open and eat, but with a glut of delicious, vitamin-rich morsels to enjoy within. Rather than a few minutes of uninspired sucking, a pomegranate presents a period of careful picking at delicious juice-filled seeds. Challenging and healthy, but also delicious, refreshing and kind of an adventure. Also a little hard to come by. The literary pomegranate is the “smart” summer beach read. Sure, pomegranates are a winter thing, but they’re still refreshing, right?

Catch Your Dream 

The lyrics are terrible.

Geek Dad - Comics As Literature - Part 1
Okay, I’ve had my rants (here and here) about comics being serious literature but those were really more about being pedantic than the actual appreciation of comics. So I started compiling my lists and thinking about which titles I’d want to include in a list of “serious comics,” and … time got away from me. I found myself devouring some really great comics, some serious and some less so, and I didn’t feel like slowing down to write about them.

When I was in high school and our English teacher was always talking about “literary merit,” my friends and I decided that the two main indicators of literary merit (based on the books we were assigned) were length and death. The longer the book, and the more people died, the more literary merit. Old Man and the Sea? Kind of short, relatively speaking, and not much death (unless you count the marlin and some sharks): questionable literary merit. The Great Gatsby? Not so long, but a good amount of death: yep, that’s got literary merit. Tess of the d’Urbervilles? Really long, important people die: loads of literary merit. Oh, right — and of course it ranks higher if it’s dreadfully boring, too.

Save The Date
Doesn't have a trailer yet.
But it was pretty good.


Today's Photos:
Honkfest West

Western Migration

May 31, 2012

(I'm a week behind.  I'm giving myself one hour to get caught up.  DO NOT EXPECT GREATNESS.)

Hit Fix Songs of Summer
I love Songs of the Summer.  

Google World Wonder Project
You can tour landmarks using Google Street View.

MusicFestNW Lineup

September 5-9 in Portland

Tickets are $75 and Girl Talk is headlining.
Kanye West Pyramid Movie Theater

It's seven stories tall. 

And strangely, this pyramid makes me like him more.

Artists should be a little bit crazy.

Today's Photo:

Back on the best coast.
Welcome home.

"Continue Testing"

May 29, 2012

Pulp Fiction Infographic
This is not a terribly complicated movie.
A few scenes are shifted out of chronological order.
This poster puts things back in line.

Chernobyl Diaries and Meta Horror
by Tess Lynch on Grantland
(She also has a great article on her conflicted feelings about Girls)
Perhaps this is why Cabin in the Woods feels like a snow globe containing much better snowflakes than the single icy particle that is Chernobyl Diaries: a horror film that doesn’t try to hit some kind of new nerve is, almost always, the worst movie you’ll claim to have ever seen (until you forget and attend the next one, chauffeured by a lack of interest in Moonrise Kingdom). They don’t have to be meta to be relevant: Splatter and torture horror films dominated both the post-Vietnam and post-9/11 eras, providing an escape from graphic violence with … you know, fake graphic violence. Meta-horror, however, just doesn’t produce the same adrenaline-sweat palm puddles. It’s its own genre, more suspenseful than terrifying. It’s difficult to clutch the arm of your movie seat while at the same time tapping your finger against your chin and saying, “Hmmmm.” The degrees of remove are critical: It’s more thought-provoking to watch the watchers, the manipulative force turning the gears in Cabin in the Woods, but it’s downright scarier, somehow more primal, to just witness the found footage unfolding, as it did in each chapter of Paranormal Activity or the thalassophobic Open Water.

Today's Photo:

Started Portal 2.
The Cake Is A Lie

SIFF 2012 - Day 12: The First Dud

May 28, 2012

Eliminate: Archie Cookson

The trailer still looks funny.

Quick wit, bumbling spy, dry humor.

I saw this before, when it was called, 

"The Man Who Knew Too Little"

Archie Cookson wasn't quite ripe yet.

It was a 30 minute idea ballooned into a 90 minute movie.

Cousinhood

This movie actually was funny.

How To Win At Battleship

This guy runs complex computer algorithms to win at board games.  I'm glad scientists are working on the important problems: strategizing about games with no reading, minimal counting, and Gloppy the Molasses Monster.

Today's Photo: 

Outside the Egyptian Theater.
See all those little people in line?
Usually that means there's a good movie inside.
Not this time.

Poo Poo Point

May 27, 2012

The Year We Loved The Spurs
The kicker: The Thunder, for all their chaos-sowing and trans-positional weirdness, are in many ways based on the Spurs template. Symbolically, their brilliant young GM Sam Presti came up in the Spurs organization. His career took off when he urged the team to target Tony Parker and was proved very, very right. Durant and Duncan are very different players, but both are superstars brought to town via the draft, big dudes with many dimensions to their game, and quiet leaders who dominate games without making a show of it. Westbrook is like Parker if the already feisty Frenchman mainlined an entire candy factory. Harden, whose pro role was unclear when Presti nabbed him in the draft, has emerged as nothing less than Manu Ginobili's lone heir. Manu is a truly idiosyncratic player but the Thunder have locked Harde into that same role: part-scorer, part-facilitator, and equally discreet and aggressive. Oh, and he comes off the bench when his talent level would seem to demand otherwise. Thabo is Bruce Bowen's Revenge. Perkins is the largely functional centers that San Antonio for years carried next to Duncan.

Today's Photos:

Poo Poo Point

Yes, that's what it's really called.

Josh Radnor skyping about his movie "Liberal Arts"
(It doesn't have a trailer yet, but it was really good.)

K! K! K! K! K! K! K!

May 26, 2012

50 Best Streaming Movies on Netflix Instant
It's almost impossible to be bored anymore.

Live Tweeting Everest
Sandra Leduc is an attorney from Canada who quite literally just finished scaling the world's highest mountain. She also live-tweeted her ascent.

Her tweets are a mix of pure joy and determination and the numbing rawness one would expect from tens of thousands of feet above sea level. She experienced many setbacks and saw things that sound absolutely terrifying and disturbing, but she also kept upbeat—making jokes about Snickers bars, watching Indiana Jones and fantasizing about the creature comforts once she was done.

Northwest Pinball and Arcade Show - June 8-10
The 2012 NW Pinball and Arcade Show takes place June 8th-10th at the Seattle Center! The show is a family friendly event that will feature over 300 pinball and arcade games all set on free play! Over the weekend there will be guest speakers and personalities from the world of pinball and video games, from designers and manufacturers to world record high score holders. The show includes vendors, tournaments, contests and give a ways. Enter for your chance to win a full-sized pinball and arcade game, along with hundreds of other game related items, t-shirts, posters and more!

Ridgetop Red Pub Crawl - July 14

Join us for our 2nd Anual Mariner's/Ridgetop Red Pub crawl! Saturday July 14th, we will meet in Pioneer Square in Front of Swannies at 2:30 pm to kick off the crawl at 3pm. Tickets are $25 (plus service fees) and include the following.
- Ticket to the Seattle Mariners vs. The Texas Rangers, 6:10 pm game time
- 1 Silver City Ridgetop Red Shirt (To be proudly adorned during the pub crawl \& the game)
- Ridgetop Red special pricing at the participating Pioneer Square Pubs
- Chances to win great prizes from the poker run
~ collect poker cards at each "Ridgetop Red" bar (minimum of 5 cards to qualify) best 10 hands win a prize. Prizing to be done in the stadium during the first inning.
- A map of each participating bar will be supplied at the Swannie's rally point.

Secrets of Mental Math

I fell asleep on the couch tonight.  When I woke up, this ad was on tv.  Still half asleep, I thought this sounded awesome.  "I could multiply really big numbers in my head!" I could totally see myself buying this over the summer and locking myself in a room for a few days.

Today's Photos:

From the Retro, 50's, Rainiers, King's Court: