All sortsa valuable reader responses to our last entry!
One person instantly recognizes the thing we were looking
for:
That was me. I was wondering if there was any curry in the fridge,
as I didn't have enough money to order Chinese. But there wasn't,
so I yelled down to Tom to find out if it was early enough to go
out to the Krishna Center for free food (if you don't count the
lecture) but it wasn't so we had crackers and canned tuna for
dinner, which really wasn't what we had in mind but was better
than cat food. Slightly.
Why do you ask?
which is quite noteworthy; and another person instantly recognizes
it as the thing we were actually thinking of:
Subject: looking into a refrigerator
Hello -
The repeated comic scene you refer to is by my friend Matt Madden. He
finally did 100 of them and published a book in January. See
http://exercisesinstyle.com
for details.
best,
Paul
which is really astounding (our readership is both vast and
of magnificent quality).
(Turns out I was probably misremembering having seen the
manga-style page, since that's not on the web site; I was
probably cross-remembering with the section about manga style
in Understanding Comics.
But that's okay.)
And a concerned and adventurous reader
suggests the Extreme version of our game:
What are you, an emergency room tech?
An orthopedist afraid of career obsoloscence?
What is the *wrong* with you? Why not play this
on a steep mountain cliff for more excitement,
or on a freeway?
The main thing wrong with me, I suppose, in some sense,
is that I still can't smell anything; which is pretty
much a bummer.
Have to do something about that sometime.
I'll leave those more exciting versions of the game to
more confident readers (preferably more confident readers
who are virtual and very well backed-up).
Sparsely-populated shopping malls and empty parking
lots and so on are more my speed.
How have you been playing the game?
Write and tell us your experiences!
Latest Sims news:
all sortsa big
events centered around Eleanor Raptor.
(And no, there's not a "typo in the URL"; URLs are uninterpreted
tokens, and can't be "misspelled".
Sheesh!)
Technology News o' the Day:
New
"voice chat" feature proposed for mobile phones.
It'll never catch on.
With the subject like
"rooftop corona tough cove", a spammer writes (inter alia):
nonchalant as she talked indifferently with Birkin
ahead on the right a painful
He would perhaps climb the ridge The snow was
which has a certain broken beauty to it.
From usr bin girl
(who I haven't read in like years), a
flickr-based tag-guessing
game.
And reluctant as I am to harp again on J. Scalia, knowing that at
least some of my valued readers are admirers of his,
sheesh!
I mean, I wouldn't mind at all hearing a good explanation of
why this is actually responsible behavior on the Justice's part.
(Also roughly the same
sheesh,
for Salon members and those who don't mind looking at an ad which might
or might not involve Sharon Stone.)
Question for my loyal and knowledgeable readers: there is, somewhere
in the world (and I've looked through Scott McCloud's "Understanding
Comics" and "Reinventing Comics" and Googled on all the obvious
keywords and searched through the weblog here without finding it),
a set of like six different treatments of the same very simple
scene (I seem to recall like someone looking into a refrigerator
or something, and someone else calling down the stairs to ask what
time it is), done in like six different comic ("sequential art")
styles (including Japanese manga flavor).
Does anyone remember that and (or) know where it is?
And to recompense you for having read (and perhaps even answered)
that (if "recompense" means something like "compensate (back)",
what does "reward" mean?), here's a game.
A game, a game, a game!
To play this game (and it's not a game that has points really or
rules or winning or anything, but a game nonetheless) be walking
somewhere (somewhere very familiar, at least the first time you
play it; somewhere that you walk several times a week), at your
normal walking pace like you always walk there, and then close
your eyes.
Close your eyes, that is, but keep walking, at your normal
walking pace.
See how long, how many paces, you can keep your eyes closed.
It's okay if you open them (but then try closing them again,
and still walking along).
It's even okay if you bash into something (it means that
you were braver about keeping your eyes closed than I was
this evening).
Apologize to it and continue on.
Try to keep your eyes closed for two paces, four paces, a
dozen paces, while keeping up your normal walking speed.
When you do have to open your eyes, try slamming them
immediately closed again, and walking onward with only the
guidance of that brief flash of picture lingering on your
retinas.
Or try, keeping your eyes closed and not opening them at
all, continuing to walk forward as long as possible, slowing
down when you have to and eventually coming to a stop and
only then opening your eyes to see where you ended up, how
close to actually going wrong and bashing into something.
And then try it again on the next bit of your walk, and
see where you end up.
A harder game to play, clearly, in unfamiliar territory, or
in even familiar territory that's full of other people walking
around (maybe with their eyes also closed), or streets full
of cars (and buses), or wandering rhinoceri, or giant
killer robots (although if they make lots of noise that
could help in avoiding them).
So apologies to city dwellers; or maybe the game's just
all that much more interesting in cities.
Maybe I'll play it again tomorrow...
Readers are enthusiastic on last week's revival of the gears:
hooray! The cogs are back!
What is the idea? Bringing back those damned devil gears!
Sims events!
The Danvers place
gets a new baby, and spreads to the lot next door; and
Suzette goes downtown.
And I happened on this great old snapshot from The Early Days:
This is Eleanor Raptor (left) as a child, in the front yard of her
mom's house, meeting Georgia Bendett (right, in the purple
face-paint; now, of course, Georgia Danvers).
(I'd forgotten they knew each other as children; no wonder
they became such good friends once they were both big
business types.)
The pages about the messages in whatsername's
song about pi are back.
Yay!
Wildly
funny mistranslation of food names (no bad karma toward the
mistranslators, of course; the same thing happens in the other
direction just as extremely).
The reader comments are amusing and useful also
(search on "Assorted Fuck").
From I forget just where, a
story
from Dijkstra about the Early Days of Programming.
(Turns out at the very end that the person who titled Dijkstra's famous
"The goto statement considered harmful" paper was Niklaus Wirth;
small world!)
(Lots of
other
fascinating stuff from the ALGOL Bulletin in that same area, including
the moving
very
last issue.)
Beautiful Prurience o' the Day:
Taking
Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes.
Genetic bizarreness o' the Day:
"An exciting feature
of Nasonia speciation is the presence of Wolbachia, cytoplasmically inherited bacteria that
cause sperm-egg incompatibilities."
Proving once again that a model of evolution and inheritance
based on what they teach you in high school would leave out all
the really interesting twisted stuff.
Turns out that there are species that fail to be inter-fertile
only because basically every single member of either is infected
(for a meaning of "infected" that's similarly twisted) with a
particular bacterium (one kind in some species, another kind in
another), and if you give them the right antibiotics they aren't
two different species anymore.
And extremely relatedly:
SR (paternal sex ratio) chromosomes
are a type of supernumerary (or B) chromosomes that occur in
haplodiploid arthropods. They are transmitted through sperm
but then cause loss of the paternal chromosomes (except themselves)
early in development. As a result, PSR chromosomes convert diploid
fertilized eggs (which would normally develop into females) into
haploid males that carry a PSR chromosome. Because they act by
completely eliminating the haploid genome of their 'hosts',
PSR chromosomes are the most extreme form of selfish or
parasitic DNA known.
Which is to say, while genes usually do best by helping
the individuals that they live in reproduce better, another
strategy that sometimes works is to destroy all the
other genes that might get in their way.
Wild.
Today's mystery comment-spam:
Hi. Beautiful content and website design. Sorry for my english.
I am from albania.
Once again,
all
over.
And we close with, for obvious reasons,
"pvc cashmere the dimethyl":
A hockey player near a garbage can lazily seeks a
nation inside a squid. A warranty defined by the
inferiority complex underhandedly throws a globule
about a graduated cylinder at another traffic light
inside the corporation, and an apartment building of
a stovepipe gives secret financial aid to the
college-educated tomato. Most people believe
that some bowling ball from the scythe trades
baseball cards with a polar bear, but they
need to remember how almost a paycheck living
with a burglar gets stinking drunk. The eggplant
toward a fighter pilot wakes up, and the umbrella
behind an ocean beams with joy; however, a moronic
bullfrog buries a class action suit toward a lover.
The pork chop is treacherous.
The turkey beyond a girl scout writes a love letter
to a statesmanlike umbrella. A stovepipe, the jersey
cow, and a fruit cake are what made America great!
A hockey player near a garbage can lazily seeks a
nation inside a squid.
