Your Cultural Education

From a teacher friend. Note truncated text at upper left. Also note bowl of motherfucking rice!

Culture mix

Via Tokyo, Edwardian and Victorian fashions arrive in today's L.A.



Here are some still shots.

Friggit!

Voshivo Inc.
Originally uploaded by nnenn

Yet another epic group of ships by the insidious Nnenn.
Not much else to say, as the stuff speaks for itself.
(Galspanic sighs wistfully)

Who doesn't love balloon animal sex?

Newspapers on the computer

This kind of makes me want to cry.




These guys say newspapers should establish endowments to survive. Great idea. Only the best will be worthy, though, which will lead to a brutal culling. But that's going to happen anyway. And newspapers with significant endowments will keep reporting the news, which is what is really important. Save the newspapers!

Uncanny X-Men 163

Covers is on! (Daredevil #163)

Galspanic said:

Hey guyth...

We should do this sometime.

Go!

Moose Sirloin Steaks

SIRLOIN

These are moose steaks. They came from the moose I met. They are big steaks. That plate is a standard 10" plate. Moose steaks. I am cooking them tonight with blue cheese moose fond with caramelized onions and heavy cream.

Hey guyth...

We should do this sometime.

Rites

Hey, new album from Friend of Pieces of Things, Tettix: Rites.

I'm hoping this album will be a bit of a surprise to most of you, it's unlike anything I've done before. The entire album is a remodeling of Igor Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring" - a ballet that caused riots at its 1913 debut because of a brazen use of dissonance and polyrythms. It was a symphony that changed the very definition of music and I hope I've done it at least some justice. If you're unfamiliar with the original, I highly recommend you check it out (there's full videos on Youtube of the symphony).

Check it out! Even though it looks like there may be some culture involved! Yikes!

Wrath of Khan: the Opera

From Robot Chicken

Old news report looking back on 10 years of America's 'Super-man'

(via AICN)

Toon Link Bento!

Toon Link Bento!
Originally uploaded by AnnaTheRed

I'm pretty sure that someone has already posted AnnaTheRed's work here, but it needs attention again.
So there.

I link blog, yes?

I saw this on the Boing Boing, and had to share. Not only does this resonate with the creepy themed hospital a while back, but it takes place in a place where I have ethnic heritage! Yay, my people are doing something creepy!
Ugh. I can't find that old hello kitty themed hospital post. This is what happens when I use labels frivolously.

Scientists definitely invent teleportation!

Not to be sensationalistic, but teleportation is finally here!


I've checked this with all the various energy forces available (ley lines, homeopathy, etc.) and it will definitely make all forms of transport (including walking) obsolete within the next 48 hours.

What Are You Looking at, Dicknose?

What Are You Looking at, Dicknose?
Originally uploaded by spacesick

These have been showing up on my radar whilst I peruse the aisles of flickr land. Spacesick has about a krillion images of awesome, but I found these really resonated with me. They are so freakin' choice. Check them all out for great justice!

Earth-sized exoplanet found?

A tiny exoplanet!

The "call me" motion

Thank you, Star-Bulletin:

Writing a live inauguration blog for the New York Times yesterday, reporter Katharine Q. Seelye had an interesting interpretation of Obama's shaka to the Punahou School Marching Band as it passed the reviewing stand.

Her 5:02 p.m. entry reads: "Next up, the band from the Punahou High School in Hawaii - Mr. Obama's alma mater. Mr. Obama is making a signal to someone as if to call him on his cell phone. He's flashing a thumbs up, laughing and grinning broadly."

Seelye clarified Obama's "signal" with her 5:15 p.m. entry: "President Obama's hand signal to his old high school band, which looked like a 'call me' motion, was a shaka sign - a pinky and thumb salute - symbolic of aloha and local culture in Hawaii."

Btw, the same article mentions a Punahou graduate from the Class of '91!

Inauguration Day (in UK)

I did draw him from the tv

Inauguration Day

Pics of the Inaugural Preparation

Tomorrow is gonna be a crazy day, folks. Not to mention momentous and world-changing, and possibly just a little bit surreal as well. Good thing we're keeping things in proportion and with realistic expectations, though.

Via Boston.com

I-I can't...needs no explanation...

Star Wars: Retold (by someone who hasn't seen it) from Joe Nicolosi on Vimeo.

Mario, where are you?

Turbo loves this song. I do too, apparently, because I remembered it well enough to sing it to him on a long car ride.



He made me sing it for the entire trip.

Lego Heads

Hey, some Finnish guy contacted me (via Flickr), asking me if he could use my LEGO heads as emoticons on his lego forum! So, like, look for them there, I guess! Viva la Palikkatakomo!

To protect the peace in space, you've got to defeat Darth Vader

From IO9.



Description and partial translation, here. If anyone's got the cantina song... omgpleeezepostokthxbai. ^_^

(Hopefully this isn't Rickrolled yet...)

Edit: i completely missed the cantina song mixed in there and I don't know how. I'm thinking I was still recovering from a cataleptic fit.

The Singing Shark

Chinese Robot

Ok, this is awesome! Just when you thought we'd never crack the robot-rickshaw problem.



Let me know if anyone's having problems with the new blog layout...

The Life of an Internet Meme

Comment by Shaper_pmp of Reddit:

All memes go through this lifecycle:

1. Meme is born. Almost nobody understands it, and it's barely funny when you do.


2. Meme gets adopted by a specific social group. Meme now serves as a shibboleth indicating membership of the group, and encourages feelings of belonging and "insidership" whenever it's encountered. At this stage, the meme varies between mildly amusing and hilarious, depending on how it's used.


3. Meme becomes mainstream - everyone is using it at every opportunity, and - its use as a shibboleth negated - it gradually gets stale from overuse. Meme is hilarious to newcomers, but increasingly sterile and boring to older users.


4. Meme effectively dies - people using it are generally downmodded or castigated for trying for "easy" posts. Importantly, it can still be funny even at this stage if it's used particularly well... however, 99% of the uses at this point are people trying to cash in on easy karma - the kind of people who tell the same jokes for years without realising that the 17th time you hear it, it's no longer funny.


5. Meme is effectively dead, but may experience rare and infrequent resurrection in particularly deserving cases. Generally these uses get applauded, because nobody wants to risk approbation for posting stale memes unless they're really sure this is a perfect opportunity for it - one that's literally too good to miss.

Importantly, by stage 5 the meme starts once again to be funny, because it's once again serving as a shibboleth... though this time instead of showing how advanced and up-to-date the poster is, it instead serves to indicate his membership in the "old guard" of whatever social group it's posted to - "I've been around here so long I remember when this was funny", it quietly indicates to other old-timers and well-educated newbies alike.

Collaborative Post Test #1

www.flickr.com

Based on Ruby's plan for a collaborative post--this is a Flickr badge, made with Flickr's own interface (also available from the "Tools" link in the footer on every Flickr page), and the Pieces of Things Flickr Account I made a while back. I was having trouble getting the keywords part of it to work, but the mechanism seems to be there, so maybe I'm missing something or misspelling something.

I'll send out the Flickr account password again, in case anyone wants to mess with it, or add anything.

1970s Japanese crime drama

Pondering my career prospects this morning, I thought of the gangsters I used to watch on Japanese crime dramas growing up. Taiyo ni Hoero ( 太陽にほえろ) or "Howl at the Sun" broadcast from 1972 to 1986, was the king of those shows. It's probably one of postwar Japan's most beloved and popular television programs.

The heroes are macho cops who pursue guys resembling the gentleman above.

I remember rushing home from third grade summer school, which got out at midday, just so I could catch the reruns on daytime TV.

I found a rare, short clip on YouTube. (The copyright holder, Toho, appears to be aggressively making sure episodes are removed. This is the only one I was able to find.) Check it out if you want a glimpse of macho 1970s Japan...



I still get a thrill when I hear the theme music!! Seriously. The song was running through my head all day.

Garfield Minus Garfield

This is for Demon,
who has not seen it yet.

Simple arcades games is good for trauma! I !@#$% knew it!!!!!

Pee-oow! Pee-oow!

I has the finest bucket in the land

Ari Brouillette is getting famous today on the Curated Internet for his Amazon review of The Secret, but I'm partial to his assessment of the Dover Parkersburg 610.

Thug Life ’09

My tribute to Odori..

Galspanic's wife Princess L. Panic wants to post...

a few of her favorite things. I was trying to force her into posting these herself, but she's also the other person who keeps my kids alive, so I guess I'm doing this for her....Today.
These links are courtesy of the Katy Elliot Blog, which I hate to say I am also kind of sold on. It's kinda like watching your significant other's favorite TV show, I guess.

Bill Maher's final comment from Religulous

More great quotes here than you can shake a cross at.

For your religious inspiration

The anti-torture CIA chief

Obama's pick to head the CIA is unambiguously against torture. What a powerful message his appointment will send.

I hope he and Obama are somehow able to hold Bush people accountable for systematically abusing and killing detainees. (Jane Mayer's "The Dark Side" documents at least one case of a detainee who died during CIA interrogation. I think she wrote there were probably more, but I can't remember everything in the book.)

Collaborating on Posts

After that chat we had last night, I'm trying to think of ways we can collaborate on posts. Anyone have any ideas? Could we use other sites? We could start a Flickr Group for each post... That seems a bit much, but maybe it's on the right track.

Playstation Home

I've been messing around with Playstation Home, which is this free virtual world thingy that just appeared one day in the menus of My PS3. For all you World of Warcraft players out there, it's like Second Life, but without anything fun to do. For you Second Lifers, it's like WoW without anything fun to do. For the rest of you, it's like Hell, as depicted in No Exit, but with bowling.

You start by making a avatar. The character creation system is fine, if you want to make a charming and attractive hipster mid-20s human avatar. Not super-surprising, but I was disappointed that the parameters are so limited. I made Mike (pictured, above), and it sort of looks like him.

You have your very own apartment, which overlooks a marina. Kind of relaxing. Nothing to do, though. So you leave and go to the Central Plaza, which looks like some sort of Central Plaza. The Central Plaza is filled with other avatars, real people having conversations that look like what you'd imagine 14-year olds' SMS conversations look like. Turns out, that's pretty much what's going on. Beyond "whr u from" and "lol this sux", I didn't get very far with anyone, as far as talking about stuff goes. I mean, the avatars are bland, the environments are bland, I figured that the point of Home was human interaction.

So I made a new avatar, and made her look like Lois. This unlocked a whole new aspect of the game, and out in the Plaza, lots of people had all kinds of things to say to me. Mostly "Hey baby", but often, folks dug deep and tried to think of interesting things to say.


I was talking to this person named Lonestar-Loc, (about the game environment, mostly, and specifically the Mall, where you can buy stuff using real money--including my green shirt, which I was totally willing to shell out a dollar for) and then this other person named Mid_Zero came and started dancing at us. He said some incomprehensible things, and then invited us back to his apartment. I had no idea you could do that, and I said yes right away. My new friend Lonestar came too. At which point, things quickly got out of hand.





Here are some things I have learned from this experiment:

1. When random people come up to you and start dancing at you, it is a very strange thing they are doing. I vow to immediately stop doing this to women in real life.


2. As you can see, Zero's apartment looks just like mine, and it overlooks the same marina. Sony is offering furniture for sale, again, for real dollars. While I heard many people in the Home complain about having to buy individuality in an essentially free game, I think it's worth pointing out that this is one of the most tried and true business models in human history.


3. Sony does not want to have Home populated with creatures that look like giant penises. As noble a goal as that may be, it is clear that erring on the side of caution is still an err. I think having a giant penis head is a great conversation starter. I predict that this will be the next great debate in gaming, whether or not you allow giant penis people in your game. All else hinges upon this question.


4. Rather than being accurate models of the real world, environments like this are subsets of subsets of subsets of people, and are full of weirdos. Not of women in these environments, either. I cannot blame them!


5. I'm pretty sure Lonestar was a guy pretending to be a girl!


6. I look good in green.

Later, I went bowling with some people. None of us said anything beyond "Nice shot." I got a strike!

thanX

Hey, the Grant Morrison X-mens were great. I was sooo surprised by the Magneto thing, and I really liked Cassandra Nova's weird origin and the nanosentinels. Generally, they filled in all the interesting back stories to the Joss Whedon ones, the only other X-books I've read in modern times. Stupid Rob Liefeld and his stupid punching and mullets and pouches!

Anyone have any other recommendations for good X-men reads? My wife and I's pallettes are whetted for more!

Mushi Battle

Link here. No one picks the butterfly type in Sapporo.

Art lesson

Watch, please!

Also...

It looks like I can spend more time with the boys instead of making art! Yay!

Will this be...

The thing that finally breaks the wild Pony?

Pieces of Things Housekeeping Forum

This post is a general forum related to general administration of the Pieces of Things blog.

Pieces of Things: How to Make a Link

Here is how you make a link:

<a href="http://piecesofthings.net">Pieces of Things</a>

This link will look like this:

Pieces of Things

Clicking the link text will take you the the URL you used in your link. Try it!

Pieces of Things: How to Embed YouTube Videos

Here's the code you should be copying into your post, in order to embed videos that play when clicked. Find this on the right-hand column of the YouTube video page. [note that after you copy the embeding link, you should click on the "Edit Html" tab at the upper right corner of the editing window before pasting].

To make your video fit better, change all of the widths in the embed code to 475 530 525, which is the width of the posts in this blog. There will probably be at least two instances of the "width" variable in the code. Change them all. NOTE: This works with nearly all embedable video players! Try it, you slobs!

Update: To get the movie to fit as best as possible, you'll need to change the height, too. Try a proportion calculator. Enter the embed tag's current dimensions for the original size, and enter 525 for the target (reproduction) width. Press "Calculate" and replace the current dimensions with the target dimensions in the embed tag (in both places).

Pieces of Things Analytics Notes

Authors should have access to the Pieces of Things Analytics Report at Google Analytics. Let me know if you don't, and would like access. It's kind of fun to browse through; to see how many people are reading what, and so on, and how people are finding us.

***

You can now track how are Twitter feeds are received, as bit.ly, the URL shortener we use offers metrics on clicks via Twitter. Tweets consist of the title you give your post, and a link. So titles count!

@piecesofthings can be tracked here:
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