Recently in Miscellaneous Category

Someday, when I have an entry in the IMDB, it will include something like:

Oozerts (2008) (VG) (voice: English version) .... Scoop McGoop

Yes, it's true. I have made my voice acting debut as an irascible Irish monster with a jetpack. And it was awesome.

David Hayter, I'm coming for you.

Oh, hell yes.

I just found out that John Styn's beloved Grandpa Caleb passed away yesterday. I'm so sorry, Halcyon.

Yesterday Warren Ellis made a cool blog post consisting of an image by Dennis Culver: a zombie astronaut, stranded on an asteroid in space, its helmet shattered and its air cord severed, with a bewildered look on its decaying face and uttering a plaintive "Brains?" It's a great story-image for all kinds of reasons. Zombies in space! A zombie antihero trying desperately to get off that rock! A zombie retelling of The Little Prince!

Of course, my warped brain went somewhere else completely first, which was something I'd been grappling with for a while – why do zombies want to eat brains?

(Okay, 'grappling with' is a bit of a stretch. Wondering, then.)

I think zombies are the cultural result of people wondering what happens to their bodies after they die. Scientists will explain in gorey, gooey detail how the body breaks down and decomposes, but for those that believe in a soul that takes the elevator up or down following the big ta-da, there's a kind of worry there. When my spirit leaves my body, what happens? Is that corpse still me? Is my body me, or a vehicle that the real me just uses to get around?

What if zombies seek out brains because of a kind of Phantom Limb Syndrome, because the body somehow remains living but still seeks the part that's been removed – the soul, or mind? Which is, of course, the brain?

Worse, what if spirits suffer from Phantom Everything Syndrome? Can a ghost itch a noncorporeal leg? What if hell is being eternally hungry but unable to eat? What if a medium can't go grocery shopping because every time she walks into the supermarket she's haunted by thousands of hungry spirits, pawing uselessly at the food on the shelves?

I have to close a ton of tabs in order to reboot a suddenly unstable MacBook Pro. I have not read all of these yet, but they all look interesting, so I thought I would share.

• BioWare embracing episodic content for all future projects - Joystiq.
• Inside Bungie - Edge Online.
• Ban conflict diamonds.
• Conflict Diamonds: Amnesty International's Human Rights Concerns.
• Choose Your Own Adventure on iPod.
• CozmoTV.
• Andy Ihntako: You Could Call iPhone Perfect. Or not -- more on that later.
• Tropism: Tim Pratt's Journal.
• Locus is hiring.
• Why Joost is Good for TV.
• Kate Elliott: Why Writing a Fat Fantasy Series is a) really easy, b) very, very hard, c) fun, and d) not much better than beating your head against the wall until it's bloody – all at the same time.
• Ozymndias: Your Thoughts on the Future of Live? Open-source R&D, niiiice.
• Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society. God bless the bizarre.
• Write or Wrong 19: Likeable Characters - Newsarama.
• Comparing Xbox Live, the PlayStation Network and WiiConnect24 as-is - Joystiq.
• Creatorcon.com. Another comics-creator MySpace clone.
• Trend Blend 2007 Map. Hottt.
• Taking the Novel Approach with Greg Cox - Newsarama.
• Rocket Magazine. More on this later – this may be my new favorite magazine.
• Ivy Film Festival. Oy, Shannon!
• Storytellers Unplugged: The Great Secret to Writing a Novel.
• The Old Farmer's Almanac: Monthly Sky Highlights and Moon Phase Calendar.
• IGDA Member Discounts and Promos.
• XBLA File Size Limit Raised to 250MB - Joystiq.
• EA Offering FIFA for Free? - Joystiq.
• Herman Miller planning "Desk of the Future" - Engadget. The Future... The Future... The Future...
• Indigo Macintosh Home Automation.
• Right Hand of Doom: A Study of Hellboy.
• Web Trends 2007 Map. Also hottt.
• Vlad the Impaler's castle up for sale. Anyone got 40M quid I can borrow?
• The Daily Record. Man, my hometown is weird.
• Storytellers Unplugged: I Really Hated Writing Query Letters.
• On Writing Horror - Amazon.com. Rule #1: don't open with 'Boogedy boogedy boogedy.'
• 2007 Game Developers Conference. Hmmmm.
• Where MySpace Meets the Mall.
• Slew of New Nike+ Gear Leaked - Engadget. May 1st for my iPod-controlling watch, woo!
• Switched On: AppleTV Deletes DMA Deficiencies.
• Mystery Sequel to be Annouced Shortly. I'm pulling for Kid Icarus.
• Dark Horse Press Submission Guidelines. How the heck does one get a Hellboy novel approved, anyway?
• Dremhost, Movable Type and FastCGI. FastCGI, which is apparently enabled in the new MT3.34 by default, is supposed to offer a ludicrous increase in performance. (They've gone to plaid!)
• Storytellers Unplugged: The Value of Time Off.
• Microsoft Says Half of 360 Owners Didn't Buy Original Xbox - Kotaku. I sure as hell didn't. The original Xbox was one of the ugliest things I've ever seen and aside from Halo didn't have any killer games for me. XBLA changed that – although I'm still waiting for Castle Crashers.
• Del Toro Films – The Official Guillermo Del Toro Fansite. How can you be an 'official fansite'? I'm hoping to catch Pan's Labyrinth sometime this weekend.
• Storytellers Unplugged: A Rumination on Genre.
• Podcast Academy. For a little gig.

Woof. I think I now understand why my MacBook is unstable.

Why is it that the coolest cars so rarely make it out of the Concept Car ring at auto shows? Check out the new Ford Reflex, currently on display at Detroit. Homina homina homina.

Couple of quick things while I wait for the microwave to ding:

1. Massachusetts is currently being spanked with cold wind and torrential rain. Not good when you're supposed to be leaving on a jet plane. "What the hell," I growled as I punched up weather.com – and then I saw the culprit: Wilma, wending her witchy way up the coast. Grrr.
2. It's a good thing that I exist right at the nexus of two demographics classically known for being unkempt – the creative type and the MIT geek type – because I am having zero luck finding a place to get a trim here in Cambridge. There are plenty of them, but most of them don't have room for walk-ins, and the one that did wanted forty-five bucks for a haircut. Unh uh. I'm a grad student, thanks. Forty-five smackers buys a lot of Taco Bell.
3. I spent all morning making business cards at Kinko's, due to a typo I made in my own design for the Convergence Culture Consortium cards. Last week I made business cards for five of us, and I spent so much time and energy on making sure that nobody else's cards had any errors that I completely forgot to proofread my own. D'oh! The shoemaker's son truly does go barefoot. Anyway, the moral of this story is be nice to the poor guys who work at Kinko's – it really does take a long time to make your business cards on the spot, since what seems like an easy series of cuts actually translates into tons and tons of work. Trust me. Voice of experience.
4. The Tohubohu gang pulled it off again – I can't wait to see the finished product, a short called "Homemade Hero". Way to go, gang!
5. Mercifully, all my friends in Florida have emerged out the other side of another hurricane relatively unscathed. For a great story (with pictures!) check out David Seitzinger's weblog.
6. Weather like this is made for soup. And that was the microwave dinging. Lunch is served. :)

This is undoubtedly an optical illusion, but it's so cool to have even a slight hope for something like this...

A photo of two peculiar dragon-shaped objects taken from a plane flying over Tibet’s Himalayas piqued many users’ interest when displayed on a Chinese website. The photographer is an amateur.

On June 22, 2004, the photographer went to Tibet’s Amdo region to attend the Qinghai-to-Xizang Railroad laying ceremony, and then took a plane from Lhasa to fly back inland. When flying over the Himalayas, he accidentally caught these two "dragons" in a picture that he took. He called these two objects "the Tibet dragons."

Looking at the photo, these two objects appear to have the characteristics of crawling creatures: The bodies seem to be covered by scales, the backs have spine-like protuberances, and also they have gradually thinning rear ends. Although the photo caught only a portion of the entire scene, it was sufficient to create the appearance of two gigantic dragons flying in the clouds.

The full story and the photo in question here: The Epoch Times, "Dragons in the Tibet Sky".

I gotta say, traveloregon.com is one hot piece of web design. And how cool would the Oregon Shakespeare Festival have to be? I mean, seriously? Othello among the pines? Badass.