Shepherd Link

Scenes from the upcoming Legend of Zelda game accompanied by an interview with one of the game developers. It's cowboy themed. Well, actually shepherd themed, but I guess the Japanese don't know what a shepherd is according to the guy being interviewed.

Drip, drip, drip

Amazing sand, fire, water, oil game -- totally addicting. . .

Mario Kart 64 shortcuts

If you ever want to be competitive again, checkout this gallery of MarioKart 64 best times and shortcuts. I gues we're never playing D.K.'s Jungle Parkway again. . .

Origami Boulder

"My domain OrigamiBoulder.com, but most people too stupid to understand, so I explain now at beginning.

Origami, is Japanese art of folding paper. Boulder is round rock. Origami Boulder is wadded up paper! You understand now, dumbo? Then hurry up and buy wadded paper! You see picture at top of site don't you?

This site about origami boulder very fine wadded paper artwork. I make artwork for you and you buy it now. I am famous Internet artist. You find my site didn't you?

Site is real. You order and you really get origami boulder artwork with special card to display at your home or workplace. Make good unforgettable gift for friends!"

The "Performance Art" option seems like the best way to go.

Origami Boulder

Oorxax and Iktsuarpok

"The Greeks had a word for it," we used to say, when stumped for the precise way to describe something. Now, thanks to Adam Jacot de Boinod and his collection of bizarre foreign words, we discover that the Malays, Hawaiians and Sumatrans had, and still have, words for it too. There is a word for the fold of skin under your chin (alang - it's Nicaraguan). There is a word for the ring you put in the nose of a calf in order to stop it suckling its mother (oorxax, and, as you know, it's from the Khakas region of Siberia). There is, thank God, a word that sums up that annoying thing you do when your taxi is 20 minutes late and you're too restless to wait for the doorbell to ring. It's iktsuarpok - "to go outside often to see if someone is coming."

article about strange words from around the world

Linklater Directs "Fast Food Nation"

Weird:

Fox Searchlight on 'Fast Food' binge
Sunday December 18 7:42 PM ET

Fox Searchlight Pictures has acquired North American distribution rights to "Fast Food Nation."

Directed by Richard Linklater, the film is a dramatic character study about the fast-food industry based on Eric Schlosser's nonfiction best-seller. A 2006 release is planned.

The ensemble cast includes Patricia Arquette, Bobby Cannavale, Luis Guzman, Ethan Hawke, Ashley Johnson, Greg Kinnear, Kris Kristofferson, Avril Lavigne, Esai Morales, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Lou Taylor Pucci, Ana Claudia Talancon and Wilmer Valderrama. It was shot in Mexico, Texas and Colorado.

Linklater, who met Schlosser four years ago when the author came through Austin on a book tour, said: "The idea that came out of our meetings was that the movie would not be a documentary but a character study of the lives behind the facts and figures. I'm more interested in fiction than nonfiction. You get to the point through human storytelling."

Linklater's recent credits include "School of Rock" and "Before Sunset," for which he was nominated for an Academy Award for best original screenplay.

Reuters/Hollywood Reporter

The Textless Internet?

Here is an aexcerpt from an interesting, non surprising, but nonetheless disheartening NYTimes article about the literacy level of college graduates as measured in 2003:

"Grover J. Whitehurst, director of an institute within the Department of Education that helped to oversee the test, said he believed that the literacy of college graduates had dropped because a rising number of young Americans in recent years had spent their free time watching television and surfing the Internet."

Okay, TV, maybe I'll grant you that in terms of literacy (of course, the question about the effects of TV on cognitive abilities and such as a totally different matter as Steven Johnson has explored), but - DO THEY THINK THE INTERNET IS A BUNCH OF PICTURES? ARE THERE NO WORDS ON THE INTERNET?

I would be interested to know, at what point will there be more individual words (mispelled or no) than in all of published literature. The above is the kind of conclusion drawn by someone...well, by someone who works in the cabinet of a president not too familiar with "the internets."

I would also make an argument here about the percentage of students studying liberal arts even ten years ago as opposed to now, what the growth of Systems Administration-type majors and such. Not that those are necessarily any less needed.

Interesting/stupid.

Blogging About Recording

Hey Guys-

I hope you're all doing well wherever you are, however chilly (or un)- the clime.

Team At Dusk is holed away in the studio as of a few days ago, and I just wanted to let you know that we're basically keeping a production diary on our webpage.

If you want to know more about how we're spending our days then you want to know.

Later...

Hey Crackhead

Found on Craigslist: an open letter to some crackheads. Apparently, they kept stealing the sparkplugs from this guy's motorcycle in order to make crackpipes and he went a little bonkers:

OK, now I'm rambling. But the point is, Crackhead, that you have done me wrong. Now, I get that you love crack. That is totally understandable. I've heard it is really fun, at first, and quite addictive. What I don't understand is,

YOU ARE A CRACKHEAD. WHY DON'T YOU OWN A CRACKPIPE?

I am an engineer. Do you ever see me shaking down bums in the Loin for a calculator and sliderule? No, you don't. Because engineering is the main thing I do, I went and bought myself a calculator. The main thing you do is crack. How do you get by without a crackpipe? The other crackheads must clown on you non-stop. I mean, the fucking saw you used to saw off my sparkplugs is probably worth five or ten bucks. Why not sell or trade it for a crackpipe? You really haven't put much thought into this, have you?

Please, Crackhead, please don't tell me you sold your crackpipe to buy crack. Even a stupid crackhead such as yourself couldn't possibly be that stupid.

(via TWiT)

Coca-Cola Blak Death

Apparently, Coke is introducing a new product, Coca-Cola Blak which will be a combination of Coke with "coffee extracts". Blech!

The End of Our Innocence

Can this be true?

from the Sunday Mirror:

4 December 2005
SONG SALE £70M FOR COURTNEY
ROCK widow Courtney Love will net £70million by selling her late husband Kurt Cobain's songs.

The actress and rock singer is selling a quarter of the Nirvana frontman's back catalogue to disgraced US lifestyle guru Martha Stewart.

Released from jail this year after five months for insider trading, Stewart wants the songs as an investment.

A friend said: "It's an astonishing deal. It sorts out Courtney financially."

Cobain and Courtney, 41, wed in 1992. They had a daughter Frances Bean, now 11, before he killed himself with a gun in April 1994, aged 27.

Cobain rose to fame with songs like Smells Like Teen Spirit and Come As You Are. The album Nevermind sold over 10 million copies.

Myspace Deaths

Myspace Deaths is a livejournal chronicle of the Myspace pages of people who've died. Reading the comments left by people on these pages (some stretching on for months and months after the person died) is totally amazing, a bizarre public grieving process that never really existed before.

Marie Antoinette

Trailer for Sofia Coppola's new movie Marie Antoinette.

I dunno. I'm a little ambivalent. On the one hand, I really liked the Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation. And there's some good stuff in the trailer. On the other hand, ill-justified anachronisms drive me nuts. And it looks like it could fall into the usual historical movie pitfall: given a phenomenally broad and semantically rich subject, they almost always tell the narrowest, least interesting story possible.

Then again, Kirsten Dunst is hot. So that's good.

Verite Sci-Fi

The work of director Neil Blomkamp seems particularly zeitgeisty His new short Alive In Joburg is in a weird verite sci-fi style that seems to fit our paranoid and media saturated moment like a glove. I think I may have previously posted about Tetra Vaal Robot, his movie about a street-policing robot. The new one is similar, but a little darker and more disturbing, imagining a future where aliens have landed and been transformed into yet another persecuted African minority. Both films are haunting, imaginative, and post-apocalyptic in ways that seem utterly believable. Good stuff

Japanuts

So. Apparently, there's a new Japanese fighting game featuring little girls. Here's how it goes. It's pretty much a fighting game where little girls attack each other, but. . .

"The kicker, however, is that any damage you do to your opponent will slowly regenerate unless… wait for it… you take a picture of her panties. Yes. A fighting game where panty-shots are the core mechanic. You don’t believe me, do you? Then watch the VIDEO. That’s it. The Japanese are done. They can now return to planet Japania, leaving all the people of Earth horribly confused and scarred for life."

Gotta love the Japanese.

311 Throw Down on Scott Stapp

This may well be the defining moment of 2005:

Scott Stapp and 311 Brawl

Former Creed frontman gets in tussle with L.A. rockers in Baltimore (from Rolling Stone Online)

At Baltimore's Harbor Court Hotel on Thanksgiving night, members of Los Angeles rockers 311, on a day off from their national tour, got into a fist fight with former Creed frontman Scott Stapp, in town to promote his solo debut, The Great Divide. 311 singer S.A. Martinez suffered a fractured knuckle as a result of the brawl, which the band says Stapp started.
"We had just finished dinner and were at the hotel bar to watch the Lakers game when Scott Stapp walked in being very loud and obnoxious," Martinez tells Rolling Stone. "In fact, one of the first things he said was that he loved to fight. So he started doing shots and breaking the glass on the bar, almost hitting one of our crew guys. My wife and I moved to a table and eventually Scott made his way over and sat down. He was looking for attention. Even before that, he had wadded up a napkin that he lobbed in our direction. It was pathetic, and we tried to ignore him, but it was impossible. Then he made a pretty disrespectful comment to my wife, which I'd rather not repeat, but in no uncertain terms, the word 'fuck' was used. That's when [drummer] Chad [Sexton] walked over."

"I had run into Scott that day," says Sexton. "We have some things in common, like the same producer, and we chatted for a few minutes. So knowing we got along earlier, I kindly asked him not to disrespect anybody and reminded him that we're all friends. That's when he sucker-punched me -- hit me right in the face."

"When Scott punched Chad," adds Martinez, "in the follow-through, he hit my wife so then I threw my punch. I think the last time I got into a fight was in the third grade, but it was an instant reaction on my part. [311 bassist] P-Nut also came over and he got sucked into it, opening up a scar on his right arm from a recent surgery. Scott went down, and his girl came over and sat on him to get him to stop, but he got up, enraged, still wanting to fight. After about five minutes, hotel security finally broke it up and kicked him out. Honestly, the hotel was really at fault for not kicking him out when he threw the first shot glass."

Later that night, Martinez went to a local hospital to treat what's called a "boxer's fracture." His right hand is now in a cast, but he was able to perform the following day in Baltimore. "It was different, because I'm used to holding the mike in that hand," he says. "Thankfully, I can still bust a move."

Ironically, before the situation escalated, Stapp had told the members of 311 that he was a fan, according to Martinez. "He was telling us how he'd been to a show of ours in Florida, where he got up on stage, and that he was so thankful that we didn't kick him off," says the singer. "He was saying, 'You had no idea that you guys being so cool to me would inspire me to start a band, and for me to sell 30 million records, win a Grammy, VMAs, Billboard Awards . . .' He just went on and on, like some drunk guy who wouldn't shut the fuck up, while we just wanted to watch the game."

In the end, 311 insist they were acting in self-defense and, according to Sexton, have gone public as a response to rumors to "tell what really happened that so there's no misinformation out there . . . We're very positive people. We've preached positivity on every record we've made. We don't have altercations like this ever. And we even wish Scott well."

For Stapp, this is not the first such incident. In April of 2001, while a member of Creed, he was involved in a bar brawl in St. Augustine, Florida. Witnesses told Rolling Stone at the time that Stapp threw a punch at a man who had taunted him.

When contacted by Rolling Stone, Stapp's representative had no comment on the Baltimore altercation. And according to the Baltimore police department, no charges have been filed.

The City of Theater-Museums

The NYTimes ran an article today about how Moscow is experiencing an unprecedented boom in theater construction. There were two quotes in this article that struck me as quite illustrative of the contemporary Russian bureaucratic and artistic mentalities:

The theater's Web site, et-cetera.ru, cites Mayor Luzhkov 's praise for the results: "It's very unusual, but very beautiful. You don't even have to put on plays. It will be enough for viewers to simply come here and look at the theater."

"In no other city in the world do you see what's happening in Moscow," Mr. Kalyagin said in a recent interview. "In no other country is there so much theater construction."