A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

Some bonus silliness for you.

mrmorse pointed to the Pandora FAQ in a comment on my previous post. If you do a text search for "vamp" you'll be at the top of an interesting little glossary of (mainly popular-)music-theory terminology that Pandora uses in its song-taxonomy.

The term "headnodic beats" reminds me of the crowd from this 1970 TV-concert video of a very young Kraftwerk, even though its tempo may be too fast to qualify as such. (I have probably embedded this same video before, but why not do it again. It's fun.)

The shorts this year were a mixed bag, as usual. This was the first one that the whole audience liked, an antidote to the incomprehensible this-r-serious-film short that preceded it.

woodlander pointed me at this video for the song "Lollipop" by Mika, whom I hadn't heard of before. I can take or leave the music by itself, but mixed with this Peter Max-meets-Tex Avery animation from the French studio Bonzom, the result is three minutes of overwhelmingly positive energy (and just a little bit of naughtiness).

If you're like me, you'll watch it through, and then watch it through again, and the whole time feel a desperate need to see it through some channel other than YouTube's teeny tiny blur-o-vision. Here's one link to a less cruddy version. I ended up buying the video from iTunes for $1.50. I've vaguely wondered for a long time what would move me to spend ten bits on a music video, and now I know.



(Postscript: Have also taken to dropping two-dollah bills on Cartoon Brew Films' offerings, lately.)

I posted this in a friend's LJ to tease him but I have to share it here, too.


The only other time I saw this was ~25 years ago at the downtown Hingham premiere of "WarGames", the day before I started fifth grade at a new school in a new town. It's the only video-based ad for an arcade game I recall seeing, but there used to be quite a few in the game magazines I read at the time. They all came down to "Ask your local arcade operator to buy this game." What an odd concept!

Dig-Dug was absolutely my favorite video game at the time, and I will always have a fondness for it. Also, I could probably kick your butt at it right now, still. Just sayin.

So naturally it's on YouTube five times. How do people get a hold of this stuff?

For this cut, I edited out the potty humor used as the monologue's intro and outtro, since it just seemed random without the full episode's frame story of us hanging out in a bar. (And yet, I left in the sound effect of barroom background conversation running through the whole dialogue section. Oh well.)

I don't think I'll bother putting up Scott's review or any of the other show segments on YouTube. I like the idea of putting only our original game reviews on YouTube, encrusted with pleas to visit the website and watch the full episode.

Speaking of which, I've been learning the ropes with Movable Type 4.0 by coming up with a new Gameshelf website that will replace both the current jmac.org one and the increasingly crummy blip.tv site. MT4 has become thunderously more advanced than it was in 2004. I have some other sly ideas in this sphere, too... you'll see em when you'll see em.

This is the Youtube thing I was talking about. It is not the related-videos postroll that they've been doing for years, and which at least three people seem to think I was referring to.

Regarding the Fahrenheit article: one of the weenies kept reverting my changes and making comments like "Bradbury wrote the book; he knows what it's about". My crankiness about this is quelled by the fact that one of the people whose text I first changed has taken my side in the talk page, and did a reasonable job striking a happy medium in the article.

If I cared more I'd go find references to Bradbury's earlier, conflicting comments and add them to the article's head, which currently implies that he's always held the interpretation he does now. But generally when I find myself getting angry with a non-core project like this it's time to walk away.

This is the five-minute presentation that I gave at Ignite Boston last week. Here's a photo by Brian Jepson of me giving it. I am not making a questionable gesture or anything, despite appearances.

I recorded this particular soundtrack this afternoon in my apartment. It's the first real use I got from my new Blue Snowball mic. Pretty good, no? Also there were dogs barkin n trucks backin up n stuff and you don't hear any of that. I think I can recommend this mic.

I've decided to go ahead and start making "YouTube editions" of individual Gameshelf segments. It took me a long time to find AV compression settings that resulted in a video that both relatively artifact-free and less than 100MB in size (as that's YT's hard limit), but I think I nailed it here. (The sound could probably be better; I'll try downsampling it less next time.)

This is a reversal of my earlier rantlet where I refused to slice up the show into YouTube-sized chunks, because I felt (and still feel) that their arbitrary 10-minute limit is stupid, useless and crippling. In tune with other applied socio-technological epiphanies I've had lately, I have since accepted that if I really want to expose more people to the show, I've got to take it to where the people already are. Note that I whipped up a couple of new intro/outtro title cards specific to this version, with the full show's URL on.

Going to try to post this on BGG and see if they like it better this time. (My review centering around a simple hyperlink to the full show's blip.tv page got killed in moderation.)

[Error: unknown template video]

If you haven't seen the Werewolf review already because you didn't want to watch the entire 30-minute show, here's your chance.

Youtube is correct to stick a big fat ">"-shaped play button in the middle of their embedded player, and then make the entire player clickable on top of that - no matter where you click, it plays the video. Which is fine, since what else would you want to do with it?

I use Google Video instead of Youtube for several reasons, but I am sad that the sole interactive parts of their own embedded player, on initial load, are a wee play button down in one corner and a link to the Google Video main page in another. I am concerned that when people mouse over the still and see their cursor remain pointer-shaped, they assume it's just a screenshot and not an actual movie player. So I feel obligated to note in nearby text that you can click the play button right here on this very page, and I still worry that people will miss it.

What I'd also really like is a way to tell Google Video which frame I'd like to use as a representative still. Maybe there is a way? I don't know.