Saturday, October 17, 2009

The Latest from Boing Boing

The Latest from Boing Boing

Link to Boing Boing

Saturday Morning Science Experiment: Meat Stick Blowtorch

Posted: 16 Oct 2009 07:33 PM PDT

Saturday Morning Science Experiment continues on the vague food theme from last week, this time with a video demonstrating the energy (i.e. calories) stored in gas station-quality snack sausages. Naturally, eye protection is needed.

Tip of the hat to Ian Simmons, of the UK's Life Science Center, for suggesting this video! If you've got suggestions for upcoming Saturday Morning Science Experiment videos, send them my way!

Thumbnail photo courtesy Flickr user stallio, via CC. My apologies to readers outside the US, who may or may not get the reference.

Banned Books week window display returns!

Posted: 16 Oct 2009 09:55 PM PDT


Adrienne from the Henrico County, Virginia Public Library sez, "Every year we participate in National Banned Book Week, a week that celebrates the written word and the free exchange of ideas, as outlined in the First Amendment to our Constitution. We invite you to volunteer as a reader of a banned or challenged book. This is our way of celebrating that our community has the right to read freely. The Banned Book Reading Room will be open for three weeks (September 26--October 17, 2009), longer than the National Banned Book Week, because last year's Room was so popular! Ever since the written word has existed there have been those who would prevent others from reading material considered "objectionable" -- everything from the Harry Potter series to the American Heritage Dictionary. Join us as a volunteer reader! Call 364-1400 x5 for more information."

The Banned Book Reading Room at Twin Hickory Library! (Thanks, Adrienne!)

Previously:


Sick of graphs tee-shirt

Posted: 16 Oct 2009 09:48 PM PDT

From Topatco, this delightful, XKCD-esque "Grapathy" shirt, illustrating inflection point for comedy graphs.

Grapathy Shirt (via Torrez)


Social marketing vs publishing -- funny!

Posted: 16 Oct 2009 09:45 PM PDT

In the New Yorker's "Shouts and Murmurs," Ellis Weiner writes up a pitch-perfect parody of a certain kind of manic social-media-expert publishing marketdroid (thankfully, not any of the absolutely wonderful marketing people at my publishers are like this!):

To start: Do you blog? If not, get in touch with Kris and Christopher from our online department, although at this point I think only Christopher is left. I'll be out of the office from tomorrow until Monday, but when I get back I'll ask him if he spoke to you. We use CopyBuoy via Hoster Broaster, because it streams really easily into a Plaxo/LinkedIn yak-fest meld. When you register, click "Endless," and under "Contacts" just list everyone you've ever met. It would be great if you could post at least six hundred words every day until further notice.

If you already have a blog, make sure you spray-feed your URL in niblets open-face to the skein. We like Reddit bites (they're better than Delicious), because they max out the wiki snarls of RSS feeds, which means less jamming at the Google scaffold. Then just Digg your uploads in a viral spiral to your social networks via an FB/MS interlink torrent. You may have gotten the blast e-mail from Jason Zepp, your acquiring editor, saying that people who do this sort of thing will go to Hell, but just ignore it.

Subject: Our Marketing Plan (via Making Light)

Blowing bubbles with a mouthful of baby shampoo

Posted: 16 Oct 2009 09:41 PM PDT

Brandon Hardesty is filled with wide-eyed comical amazement at the killer soap bubbles he's able to blow after filling his mouth with -- yeccch -- baby shampoo. He does it so we don't have to.

I've Discovered Something Amazing! (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

They Shoot Porn Stars, Don't They? Susannah Breslin on recession and adult biz.

Posted: 16 Oct 2009 06:31 PM PDT

prnsts2.jpg (NSFW: sites linked in this post contain sexually explicit material).

Required weekend reading: "They Shoot Porn Stars, Don't They?," Susannah Breslin's bold and ambitious photo-essay on the recession's impact in "porn valley," the epicenter of the adult entertainment biz.

"Originally, I wrote it for a publication, but subsequently pulled it," says Breslin. "When no other publication expressed an interest in publishing it, I decided to self-publish."

The story and images unfold over ten online sections. Here is a snip from the part devoted to shock auteur Jim Powers:

photo2.jpg Fascinating, horrifying, and amusing--oftentimes all of those things at the same time--Powers' celluloid world is one populated by midgets, bald chicks, and crazed men outfitted with monster-sized papier-mâché phalluses which spew torrents of goo onto the naked bodies of supine women, movies in which everyone has sex all of the time, and in which, most of the time, no one appears to win.

Take, for example, "The Bride of Dong," in which two young, unsuspecting women "inadvertently unleash the power and massive cock of an ancient fertility god when they decide to house sit for the summer," the result of which is the "call[ing] forth an ancient being from another time and world who bridges the cosmos to shove his massive tool up their asses," and the true star of which is neither the decidedly comely Gia Paloma or Julie Night but a six-foot prosthetic penis that belongs to an onerous, fanged beast that emerges upon a full moon. (An online reviewer noted dutifully: "It's hard to possibly make anything of this, other than to say that it's vintage Jim Powers," adding, "I haven't seen a prosthetic dong this big since 'Boogie Nights.'")

To decry Powers-helmed series--like "Gag Factor," in which women, not infrequently, hang upside down and perform oral sex on male costars to the point of gagging and sometimes vomiting; "White Trash Whore," in which seemingly innocent Caucasian women are gangbanged by roving packs of African-American men, and for which the box cover copy reads, "Mom, Dad ... I hate you this much!"; and "Young and Anal," again, the title here is self-revelatory--as "misogynist" is almost beside the point.

Read it all: theyshootstars.com (Note: site designed by Chris Bishop of "Obama Rides a Unicorn" fame). Photo: a man preparing for a bukkake shoot, shot by Susannah Breslin.

Web zen: grab bag (including THE YES DANCE)

Posted: 16 Oct 2009 04:56 PM PDT

the yes dance
symmetry explorer
i do believe i came with a hat
gawker (timelapse)
there i fixed it
vikings

Permalink for this edition. Web Zen is created and curated by Frank Davis, and re-posted here on Boing Boing with his kind permission. Web Zen Home and Archives, Store, Twitter.

Modest Mouse: "The Whale Song" (dir. Nando Costa/Bent Image Lab)

Posted: 16 Oct 2009 05:01 PM PDT

A lovely new video for Modest Mouse, by Bent Image Lab's Nando Costa. The video incorporates stop motion, visual effects, and motion graphics techniques, and tells the tale of an artist who enters his personal sanctuary and is "presented with a hand-crafted drawing tool that assists him in materializing his mental impressions."

Through drawing circular patterns, the machine discharges an endless web of yarn that guides him through his visual representations of his memories. The story progresses to reveal that he is divided between two worlds, one of dull reality and the second of warped memories. In the process of finding a way out of his consciousness, he is trapped between the two competing spaces, which eventually inflict lethal damage, acting as metaphors to self-destruction.
Super neat. More about the making of the video here. Stills from production here and here. "The Whale Song" appears on Modest Mouse's new EP No One's First, And You're Next." (Amazon)

Dead guy on balcony 4 days, neighbors mistook for "Halloween dummy"

Posted: 16 Oct 2009 04:36 PM PDT

The body of a 75-year-old LA area man who died Monday sat decomposing on his balcony for four days because his neighbors figured the corpse was part of a Halloween display. He died of a single gunshot wound to the eye.
49893424.jpgNeighbors on the 13900 block of Bora Bora Way told Raishbrook that they noticed the body Monday "but didn't bother calling authorities because it looked like a Halloween dummy," he said. "The body was in plain view of the entire apartment complex [and] they all didn't do anything," Raishbrook said. "It's very strange. It did look unreal, to be honest."
Dead man slumped on balcony mistaken for Halloween decoration (LA Times)

Google Wave (Huh! Good God, Y'all!) What is it good for? Absolutely something! (say it again).

Posted: 16 Oct 2009 04:28 PM PDT

What is Google Wave good for? I don't know! I haven't used it. Above, two Google Wave demo-tainment videos you must watch. YouTube hacker/artist Joe "copyrighthater" Sabia has done it again. Two Google Wave experimental films, Pulp WAVE Fiction, and Good WAVE Hunting.

And, more soberly now: in an extensive feature-by-feature blog post, Daniel Tenner breaks down what purpose Google Wave serves, and why early detractors may be missing the point.

0012-01.jpg I believe this is partly Google's fault: they released Wave to geeks and hackers and social media folks first. But Wave is not a geek/hacker tool, or a social media tool, it's a corporate tool that solves work problems (more on that later). On the other hand, they never claimed it would be a Facebook replacement or a Twitter killer. Google calls wave an "online tool for real-time communication and collaboration". The way Google should have advertised Wave is: "it solves the problems with email".
What problems does Google Wave solve? A matter of perspective. (danieltenner.com, via @carr2n)

Digital Open Winner: A Living Diorama, to Change the World.

Posted: 16 Oct 2009 02:22 PM PDT

(Download MP4 video or Watch on YouTube, or view with subtitles on Dotsub).

Institute for the Future teamed up with Sun Microsystems and Boing Boing Video to co-host the Digital Open, an online tech expo for teens 17 and under around the world.

In today's episode, you'll meet young Ms. Alexis McAdams, whose winning project was a concept for a kind of "living diorama," called "Dioractive." The idea: re-enact current events (say, the floods in the Phillippines, or the internally displaced refugees in Darfur) with human actors, to help people understand and empathize, and feel motivated to change the world.

Alexis told us she found out about the Digital Open by reading Boing Boing, and she's been a fan of our blog for some time (thanks, cool!). She says the idea for "Dioractive" came from varied sources of inspiration: LARPers (folks who do live-action roleplaying games), Civil War re-enactments (the real-life kind), history-based videogames (her brother's into these), and a diorama project she did in third grade. She digs theater, and learning foreign languages. All of this combined into an idea of how to place ourselves into the lives of the "other," and understand in a more personal way just how interconnected we all are.

Read more about the youth competition in IFTF's press release announcing Digital Open winners.

Previously:


Sabotage on the Large Hadron Collider?

Posted: 16 Oct 2009 12:55 PM PDT

Sabotage...from the future?

That's the theory being put forward by two top physicists. Even they admit it's a little weird. The idea could be groundbreaking. Or, it could be a valuable lesson that even scientists can fall prey to the very human tendency to see patterns in actually random events.

Some people have this experience and come away believing in astrology. Instead, Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, have ended up with the theory that the Future is trying to stop us from creating a Higgs boson particle.

This malign influence from the future, they argue, could explain why the United States Superconducting Supercollider, also designed to find the Higgs, was canceled in 1993 after billions of dollars had already been spent, an event so unlikely that Dr. Nielsen calls it an "anti-miracle."
...While it is a paradox to go back in time and kill your grandfather, physicists agree there is no paradox if you go back in time and save him from being hit by a bus. In the case of the Higgs and the collider, it is as if something is going back in time to keep the universe from being hit by a bus. Although just why the Higgs would be a catastrophe is not clear. If we knew, presumably, we wouldn't be trying to make one.

Life: Detroit and WWII image gallery

Posted: 16 Oct 2009 12:33 PM PDT

Detroitwonnn
Above, a 1943 amphibious vehicle test in Detroit's Rouge River (Photo: Charles E. Steinheimer./Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images). Life's Ben Cosgrove emails:
As Time's site has it: "For the next year, Time Inc. journalists will cover all aspects of the Motor City. Because the future of Detroit affects all of us." I believe that. I've always liked Detroit -- my first visit to the amazing Detroit Institute of Arts remains one of the most wonderful cultural surprises of my life; I was a callow jerk, expecting little, and was utterly blown away by DIA's collection -- and I thought I knew a little bit about the city. But somehow I never knew anything about Detroit's central role in helping the Allies win WWII. Well, when I did finally hear about it, I thought a gallery was in order.
WWII: How Detroit Won The War

Alan Rapp on architectural photographer Tim Griffith

Posted: 16 Oct 2009 12:16 PM PDT

2009 09 One
Over at the Artificial Infinite, old-school bOING bOING pal Alan Rapp posted a critical essay about the state of architectural photography. The provocative essay is accompanied by absolutely incredible images by Tim Griffith, an architectural photographer who I wasn't familiar with. His hazy, atmospheric images of our strange built environments are sure to turn up in my dreams. From Alan's essay:
...The current practice of architectural photography has in many ways evolved more toward art. Fairly conceptual photographers such as Iwan Baan and Frank van der Salm are regularly tapped by the titans of the architecture industry—OMA, Herzog & De Meuron—to create photographs of their projects that seem to violate most of Molitor's tenets.

A brief exploration of the work of Tim Griffith provides further example of this new "artistic" approach to architectural imaging and the shifting state of architectural photography. Giffith's work, recently included in the Ballarat International Foto Bienniale, depicts some of the most prominent architectural projects of our age. Australian-born and US-based, Griffith explores the parallels and tensions inherent in this yoking of architecture and photography; his work is formed by professional rigor yet inflected toward art, hypertechnological in subject and approach, yet suggestive of an already fading moment.
"Architectural Photography is Art Photography"

The Nerdy Dozens

Posted: 16 Oct 2009 12:07 PM PDT

I'm posting geek "yo momma" jokes to my Twitter feed, and people who think that sort of nonsense is amusing have been replying with even funnier ones that I'm retweeting in an infinite circle of endless insult lulz. Here are a few selections.
  • Yo momma so ugly, she make goatse cry for a unicorn chaser. (@xenijardin)
  • Yo momma so fat THX can't even surround her. (@mustardhamsters)
  • Yo momma so dumb, she went to the dentist and asked for a bluetooth.(@seanbonner)
  • Yo momma so stupid, she thinks the Large Hadron Collider is a gay porn film.(@xenijardin)
  • Yo momma's so big and ugly she lies dreaming in R'lyeh.(@Orlovsky)
  • Yo momma so fat she doesn't just have a low center of gravity, she has an elliptical orbit.(@seanmoriva)
  • Yo momma so old, she's an arguing point between Creationists and Evolutionists. (@Nightwyrm)
  • Yo Momma so fat, even Ralph Lauren's Photoshop team can't help her ass. (@rawkreative)
  • Yo momma so old she goes on carbon dates. (@sfslim)
  • Yo momma so dense she got her own event horizon. (@sfslim)
  • Yo momma so weak physicists have unified her with electromagnetism. (@sfslim)
  • Your momma is so fat NASA shot a rocket into her ass looking for water. (@tbias)
  • Yo momma so fat, she took geometry in high school just cause she heard there was gonna be some pi. (@MatthewMors)
  • Yo mamma so fat, China uses her to block the internet. (@thelizupdate )
Follow me for more if you like. I promise not to tweet other crap at least for the rest of the day, so you can tune in to nothing but yo momma jokes without having to endure me talking about what I ate for lunch or what I'm the mayor of, or whatever.

History is Comedy

Posted: 16 Oct 2009 02:50 PM PDT

I was traveling this week, which, in these days of the abomination that is HLN*, means I spend my hotel mornings watching random non-news cable networks. This time, the choice was HBO Comedy, which is how I ended up watching a great classroom-themed, comedic retelling of American history featuring Robert Wuhl.

I caught a couple of incorrect details here and there, but in general Wuhl was on track and worth watching...if only for his take on the ascendancy of Franklin Pierce and his (in my opinion) pretty insightful overarching lessons:

1) Our understanding of history is "based on a true story"

and

2) "We'll get through it" makes a pretty good philosophy from which to approach American politics.

UPDATE: I should note that there's swearing in these videos. So, play audio with caution in respect to bosses, small children and your own proclivities.

*CNN's "Talk Soup"-ish replacement for the Headline News channel is so horrible, I'm not even going to link to it.

Falling space junk

Posted: 16 Oct 2009 11:59 AM PDT

A four pound hunk of metal crashed through the roof of Peter and Mair Welton's home in Hull, UK. The Royal Air Force first thought the debris fell off an airplane but now they say it came from space. From the BBC News:
Media Images 46557000 Jpg 46557673 Space It was not known where the metal had come from but it seemed likely that it was "space debris", investigators said.

The RAF Flight Safety Branch said it was the only incident of this kind it had dealt with for five years.
Couple's home hit by space metal

Just to Prove I Have Nothing Against Gummi Bears

Posted: 16 Oct 2009 11:54 AM PDT

Last Saturday, I brought you a video of horrible gummi bear torture. Now, I want to set the record straight. Some of my best friends were* gummi bears. I swear.

To make it up to the gummi bear community, I present to you, their life story: From the early days in Bonn, Germany, to being an inspiration for breast implants. Gummi bears have had a full and happy life before we get to them. And don't let PETA tell you otherwise.

gummirescue.jpg

Pictured: Stalwart, brave gummies save their comrades from what might otherwise have been a tragic mountaineering accident. Flickr user iwona_kellie captured the event on film. Used here via CC.

*Some friends are tastier than others.

Previously:


Telcos and Hollywood ask Canadian govt for right to secretly install spyware, listen in on your network connection -- ACT NOW!

Posted: 16 Oct 2009 11:20 AM PDT

Michael Geist sez,
C-27 is the Canadian anti-spam bill that comes out of committee on Monday. The opposition Liberals have proposed amendments which appear to have been drafted by copyright and telecom lobbyists. They would allow for surreptitious installation of computer programs and - even more outrageously - would allow copyright owners to secretly access information on users' computers.

The bill contains an anti-spyware provision, yet the Liberal motion would allow for the collection of personal information on a computer without authorization if the collection is related to a "investigating a breach of an agreement or a contravention of the laws of Canada." Note that that is private sector surveillance, not the police.

On top of these provisions, the Liberals have also tabled motions to extend the exemptions for telecom providers including allow telecom providers to engage in a host of activities - right down to scanning for and removing computer programs - without permission.

With the hearing on Monday, it is critical for Canadians to speak out - yet again - to ensure that C-27 does not leave the door open to private surreptitious surveillance.

Michael has links to contact the relevant MPs with your comments. Yes, we have to keep doing this, because the second we stop, they'll break the goddamned Internet, put spyware on your computer, and start listening in on every click and email.

The Copyright Lobby's Secret Pressure On the Anti-Spam Bill

Print ephemera at Systems of Operation blog

Posted: 16 Oct 2009 03:33 PM PDT

Icls3Agqkgc Snkxirmkhmi Aaaaaaaabze Wef9Cmu4Ha S1600 Lettera3
Ufobookokok
Last night, Federated Media's Neil Chase and I presented at my alma mater, the UC Berkeley Grad School of Journalism, about online publishing. The conversation was all about digital media, so afterwards I was delighted when a student there named Diana Jou came up to me wanting to talk about print 'zines! She has a blog, called Systems of Operation, where she (mostly) posts photos of 'zines, print ephemera, and artists books whose design she digs. Her taste seems to overlap with my own and I hope she starts updating her blog more frequently! The images above come from an instruction manual for an Olivetti typewriter and a booklet from the Society for Scientific Investigations of Anomalous Atmospherical and Radar Phenomena. Systems of Operation blog

National Lampoon cover gallery 1970-1998

Posted: 16 Oct 2009 10:05 AM PDT

200910160956

Here's a complete run of National Lampoon covers from 1971 - 1998. The August 1971 cover depicts American war criminal William Calley as the imbecilic Alfred E. Neuman, painted by the inimitable science fiction illustrator Kelly Freas.

National Lampoon cover gallery (Via Jack Shafer)

Props of Mad Men

Posted: 16 Oct 2009 10:22 AM PDT

Articles Wp-Content Uploads 2009 10 Lane-Pryce-And-Don-Draper-E
The Collectors Weekly published a fascinating interview with Scott Buckwald, the original prop master for Mad Men. Buckwald is a fascinating character and his work on Mad Men is obsessively awesome. For Mad Men, Buckwald and his team sought out vintage taxicab meters, constructed lipstick display cases, printed TV Guides of the era, reproduced a 1960 Sara Lee cherry cheesecake box, and even cooked hamburgers that matched the time period. From The Collectors Weekly:
Collectors Weekly: When it came to the Mad Men office scenes, did you have to get vintage typewriters and pencils and pens?

Buckwald: Well, pencils are pencils. There's no change in the pencils, and a lot of offices were using ballpoint pens. Fountain pens had largely disappeared. Certainly for formal use, the fountain pen was still there, but not as an everyday office tool.

I thought Mad Men made a big mistake on the typewriters. They knew what the right history was, but they ignored it. The secretaries at that advertising firm would have still been using vintage-style typewriters, but they used IBM Selectrics simply because the producer liked the way they looked and they made less noise on set. So we got many letters about how they were wrong, but, again, that's his call. And right or wrong, it's his show. He can do whatever he wants with it.

There was a typewriter repairman in North Hollywood, California. He couldn't believe it when all of a sudden someone deposited 24 vintage typewriters on his doorstep and said, "Make them look new." He probably hadn't had that much work in the last 25 years. He was probably just about ready to hang up the "Going out of business" sign and cursing the arrival of the laptop computer when all of a sudden here I come with 24 typewriters...

Collectors Weekly: If someone is drinking Coca-Cola in Mad Men, would you have to get the actual Coca-Cola bottle from 1960? Buckwald: Yes. Vintage Coca-Cola bottles are pretty easy to get, so I would get the bottles, fill them up with Coke, and use a bottle capper to press the original caps back on. We did an episode when the first canned Coca-Cola was coming out. Coke was trying to promote its first cans, but they were nothing like today's cans. There's nothing similar to it. Even the material of the can was different. It was steel as opposed to aluminum. So I had to remake the original Coke can, which was a blast.

Believe or not, we actually found a peanut jar in the New York area that was the same size and shape of a Coke can. It was metal on the top but the sides were cardboard. We made a decal of a Coke label and wrapped it around the jar. By the touch, you could tell that it wasn't made out of metal, but on camera it looked like a metal Coke can.

It's always turning one thing into another. That's what I love about doing this. It's always last-minute thinking and being innovative--being the mad scientist. It never gets boring because everything is different. In Mad Men, I was a 1960s advertising executive. In The Prestige, I was a 1890s magician. In You Again, I'm a 2009 wedding planner. I've been a policeman. I've been a doctor. I've been a lawyer. I've been a gynecologist. I get to step into other people's lives.
An Interview with Scott Buckwald, Prop Master for the Hit TV Show Mad Men

French fry coated hot dog on a stick

Posted: 16 Oct 2009 09:48 AM PDT

200910160944 Behold the french fry coated hot dog, a Korean treat. (Via Kristie Lu Stout)

Vegas uses computers to nab card counters

Posted: 16 Oct 2009 09:39 AM PDT

As if Vegas casinos don't already rake in enough money from suckers, now they are developing technology to automatically detect people who count cards.
200910160935The anti-card-counter system uses cameras to watch players and keep track of the actual "count" of the cards, the same way a player would. It also measures how much each player is betting on each hand, and it syncs up the two data points to look for patterns in the action. If a player is betting big when the count is indeed favorable, and keeping his chips to himself when it's not, he's fingered by the computer... and, in the real world, he'd probably receive a visit from a burly dude in a bad suit, too.

The system reportedly works even if the gambler intentionally attempts to mislead it with high bets at unfavorable times.


Computers to crack down on card counters

Disney gags on "Ho White" beer

Posted: 16 Oct 2009 09:00 AM PDT

200910160850

Boing Boing guestblogger Connie Choe is a health and culture writer by day and a professional kimchimonger by night.

According to Slashfood, an Australian brewery has reportedly set off the alarms in Disney's legal department with a Raspberry Ale ad campaign featuring Ho White, an "anything but sweet" character who blows smoke rings while reclined in bed with the seven dwarves.



Please release me: Brutal Legend, A Boy and his Blob, Machinarium, Gridrunner Revolution

Posted: 16 Oct 2009 09:37 AM PDT

Kicking off a new series of weekly round-ups of the most essential just-released games (spanning retail, indie, downloadable, iPhone, freeware, and all otherwise), this week takes us on a trip through heavy metal fantasy, jellybean puzzle solving, rusted robot worlds, and Indian-spiced psychadelic shooters. Brutal Legend (Double Fine, PS3/Xbox 360) Certainly one of the highest profile games of the season, Double Fine's Brutal Legend (at top) has been garnering all the media acclaim it richly deserves following its release earlier this week. Created by former LucasArts adventure vet Tim Schafer (Day of the Tentacle, Grim Fandango) and starring Jack Black alongside a league of metal legends (Judas Priest's Rob Halford, Motorhead's Lemmy Kilmister, Lita Ford, and, of course, Black Sabbath's Ozzy Osbourne), the studio's open-world/driving/lite real-time-strategy opus is every medieval-apocalypse album cover brought to glorious life, finally fulfilling the wishes of two generations of disaffected patched-jean-jacketed and notebook-cover-doodling Hessians. A Boy and his Blob (WayForward, Wii) On the polar opposite of the spectrum, WayForward's A Boy and his Blob is a spiritual sequel to a game that, even if you aren't directly familiar with, you will appreciate the lineage of, having been the 8-bit NES platforming debut of David Crane, former Activision designer behind genre-defining Atari 2600 game Pitfall. Blob's essentially ludicrous premise (the titular boy's titular sidekick transforming into a series of helpful level-navigating utilities after eating one of many various jellybeans) is softened by its gorgeous cel-animated art-style, which itself belies the challenges you'll find within. It's also one of the first (but hopefully not near the last) games released to contain a dedicated 'hug' button, a detail which should seal the deal for many. Machinarium (Amanita, PC/Mac) Amanita's point and click adventure was featured at much greater length here earlier in the week, but suffice it to say the studio's third major release is well worth the wait, and well worth showing your support for a group of indies trying to keep the limping genre alive with true hand-polished passion. Gridrunner Revolution (Llamasoft, PC) Finally, cheating the system just a bit to mention a game that's fallen between the cracks for the past few weeks, Gridrunner Revolution -- the latest evolutionary chapter in creator Jeff Minter's decades long quest for the psychedelically sublime -- would be a worthy choice for weekend gaming if only for a dose of the eye-searing light-show seen above. But the truth is that behind its happily harrowing hallucinogenics and ungulate-fancy are surprisingly complex mechanics (see Minter's 'Sheepintology' video for an introduction to those) that's made it one of the most rewarding indie shooters of the year. Don't pass this one up if you have already -- download the demo version for PCs here.

This Side of Jordan - Violent jazz age novel by Charles M Schulz's son Monte

Posted: 16 Oct 2009 05:53 PM PDT


Monte Schulz's This Side of Jordan is the first volume of a jazz-age trilogy that was twelve years in the writing, produced in tribute to Schulz's father, the cartoonist Charles M Schulz. It is beautifully written and thoroughly researched, a veritable time-machine that whirled me through time to the dirty back roads of the American midwest in the year before the Depression.

This Side of Jordan is the story of Alvin Pendergast, a selfish, ignorant, bitter consumptive farm-boy who lights out across America with Chester Burke, a vicious gangster and serial killer. On their first job, they pick up Rascal, a mad dwarf who's been imprisoned by his aunt who hopes to steal his inheritance. The three set out on a series of violent, picaresque adventures as Chester drags them from one act of bloody, senseless criminality to the next.

Did I mention how good the writing is? The writing is excellent. The characters -- the unlikable, passive Alvin; the unlikable, psychotic Chester; the unlikable, compulsive liar Rascal -- are extremely well drawn. The setting is so vivid I felt like I could fall into the book and lose myself there, landing on some dusty road in a tourist camp where the hicks waited to be fleeced or killed by Chester.

In case you missed it, though, I should reiterate that I didn't like any of these characters. The most active character was a sociopath. The secondmost active character was a hopeless, compulsive liar. The point of view character never does a thing off his own bat, and is, instead, led through the action by the people around him.

But I kept reading. I couldn't stop. This book is a masterpiece of setting and storytelling, even if most of the dramatic tension came from waiting for someone who wasn't an utter fool or villain to do something, anything, to change the situation.

This Side of Jordan

Sympathy for the Lamprey

Posted: 16 Oct 2009 09:45 AM PDT

"Lampreys don't charm most people," begins a pamphlet from the Minnesota Sea Grant.

Truer words, my environmental research friends, truer words.

lampreyface.jpg

Yes, it's hard out there for a lamprey. Already cursed with a face not even their mothers (who die shortly after spawning) could love, these fish were further saddled with 50 years of bad PR brought on when one invasive species, the sea lamprey, moved into the Great Lakes and wreaked a trail of parasitic havoc from New York to Minnesota. Lost in the shuffle were several native lamprey species, some of which aren't even parasitic. Despite living in the Great Lakes for 1000s of years in co-evolved cooperation with other fish, non-invasive lamprey have paid the price for their cousin's misdeeds.

The problem stems from the (really fascinating) lamprey life cycle. Instead of having a short childhood and many years of maturity, lamprey basically spend most of their lives as larvae, buried in the mud at the bottom of stream beds*. They survive this way, feeding on microorganisms filtered out of the water, for anywhere from three to seven years, depending on the species. (Insert your own joke about college students here.) The adult stage of life, in contrast, can be as short as a single breeding season. In fact, some non-parasitic species don't even eat after becoming adults. Their digestive tracts just wither away and they use stored fat for energy during the short time they have left on Earth.

Lamprey's bottom-feeding phase basically creates a captive audience, in so much as "captive audience" means "conveniently having lots of lamprey in one place so you can poison them."

Now, before you call PETA, there's a good reason for the lampreycide. Sea lamprey are an invasive species that first entered the Great Lakes probably around the 1930s, when canals were opened allowing the lamprey to swim around Niagara Falls. Sea lamprey are big, and hungry, feasting on the blood of fish. And, for all but the largest fish, the embrace of the sea lamprey usually means death. (Native parasitic lamprey, by contrast, are much smaller and usually don't kill fish.) The Departments of Natural Resources in several states have been poisoning the streams favored by invasive sea lamprey larvae in order to save native fish since the 1950s.

The good news: The poison used is pretty lamprey specific and (again, because of that long larval cycle) DNR officials usually only need to poison a given stream once every four years or so.

The bad news: The poison will also kill native lamprey (which often live in the mud alongside the sea lamprey). The natives haven't been driven to the point of species endangerment by lamprey poisonings, says Phil Cochran, lamprey expert and chair of biology at Saint Mary's University of Minnesota. But geographic populations of these friendly, neighborhood lamprey have been threatened, and even wiped out.

So, over the last several decades, the DNR has been working to improve their aim, using both new control methods and a better understanding of native lamprey habitats. For instance, Cochran says, today we know that native lamprey often live further upstream than sea lamprey, so control crews can apply the poison at a point in the stream where it won't affect most of the native larvae.

And new, poison-free, methods of control are under research. One idea is to catch male sea lamprey and chemically sterilize them. "You release those males into wild populations and they dilute the breeding effort," says Cochran. "It will take a while to see whether this works with sea lamprey, but it's been used successfully on insects before."

Pheromones are also a possibility. Adult lamprey are attracted to chemicals released by larval lamprey. In fact, Cochran says these chemical signals might be the thing that helps lamprey make their way from lakes to the breeding grounds in streams. Scientists don't yet know whether these chemicals are specific to species but, if they are, they could be used to lure sea lamprey into a trap. (Insert Admiral Akbar joke here.)

*I, for one, will be thinking twice about squishing my toes through the mud at the bottom of stream beds from now on.

Image courtesy Flickr user edans, via CC.

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