Marq

I don't post so much here anymore.

2009-08-20T20:30:39Z

For the few people that catch up with me here as opposed to FB or Twitter.

After a long good run, my kitty cat, Chelsea, finally passed away this morning. I miss her a lot.

Best review EVAR

2009-03-24T16:23:20Z

I'm pretty sure I just received the best review of my entire life: http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/JimMcginley/20090324/975/GDC_2009__Surviving_Math_for_Programmers.php

Do what now?

2008-09-24T20:07:08Z

Looking through his contact info on Outlook, my coworker discovered that it thinks his title is "Sr. Digital Media Analyst". Considering he's an entry-level programmer this was a bit of a surprise. Needless to say, none of us actually knows what a Sr. Digital Media Analyst does. My best guess is that this is the guy who sits around all day looking at porn on-line. And analyzing it. And he's been doing it a long time.

just saying.

Hey! LJ Braintrust!

2008-08-20T20:47:37Z

Is there such a thing as non-gratuitous Vin Diesel?

And on a similar note, would you be more distressed if you picked up "XXX" expecting Vin Diesel and instead finding porn. Or would it be worse if you thought you had porn and got Vin Diesel?

They really need to hire me to check these things.

2008-08-04T18:30:20Z

In today's Raleigh News and Observer there's one of those little boxes, hinting at a story further on, at the top of the Life section. It reads:

"Cindy McCain and Michelle Obama have an affinity for chunky pearl necklaces."

All of the sudden I'm concerned about the candidates' STD status.

Cause that clearly ain't right.

LJ Braintrust

2008-04-29T19:32:54Z

I really wish I weren't serious...

...but does anyone know where I can get a hold of a 1-1.5 tons of quicklime?

(no...I'm not trying to dispose of a bunch of bodies)

New Truths

2008-04-29T18:29:51Z

Cap'n Port's Movie/Entertainment Lemma:

Anything is funnier if you add a monkey.
Anything is cooler/scarier if you add zombies.
Anything is more exciting when it's on fire.
And robots are just cool, so you should just throw em in wherever you can.

This has led to the corollary that zombie-monkey-robots on fire is pretty much the pinnacle of entertainment.

I would add to this the proposition that the addition of martial arts has a similar effect to fire. In that it immediately makes things more exciting.

I have also discovered that while the holy grail of the ZMRoF is the single greatest thing one could ever have, it is sometimes possible to have fewer of these key features and still hit a pretty high mark. IFF the features in question are of exceptional quality. This leads to my case in point and recent revelation:

Jet Li dressed as a monkey = ENTERTAINMENT GOLD!

Poultrygeist

2008-04-23T15:56:15Z

Chickens and ducks seem to deal with the world in different ways. We currently have a group of ducklings and a group of chicks, all roughly the same age. They also share a penchant for escaping from their nursery cages when they're hungry, thirsty, bored or none of the above. When a duckling makes a break for it, it pops out of the cage and plummets off of the table down to the floor with a kinda wet thud. It then proceeds to run around in circles just underneath the cage, until someone finds it, puts it back and corrects whatever problem which caused it to flee the safety of its cage. Apparently, "Peeppeeppeeppeeppeeppeeppeeppeeppeeppeeppeeppeeppeeppeeppeeppeeppeeppeeppeeppeeppeeppeeppeeppeeppeeppeep!!" is duckling for "Ohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygod!!"

The chicks, on the other hand, have a decidedly different approach. One will escape, and likewise plummet to the floor with a kinda wet thud. It will then figure out where in the house the actual people are. You'll see one poke its head around the couch, and having found you walk up. It will then let out a couple of very calm, yet firm peeps. "Peep! Peep peep-peep? Peep." Which as far as I can tell means, "As the duly appointed representative of the caged chickie alliance, I have been sent to inform you that we are currently lacking in food and/or water. And if it wouldn't be too much of a bother, we would also like a bed-time story."

Hey cool....

2008-03-31T17:05:04Z

I share a birthday with René Descartes (also Joseph Haydn, Robert Bunsen and Étienne Bézout (good day to be a French mathematician)

(Also, a buncha other people were born, and a buncha people died, and a buncha stuff happened)

And just for the record...

2008-02-06T16:22:53Z

I cannot top the badness of the bad morning that golemkennels had this morning, nor will I ever be able to top it. No matter how bad I have it, I won't be able to compare to a shoefull of amniotic fluid.

...what's worse...Shoefull of Amniotic Fluid isn't even a very good band name.

Out Shouting

2008-02-06T16:18:30Z

For those of you in the RTP area. (Or those of you elsewhere who really like driving, or are really bored or...I dunno, sumpthin.) My buddy, rdansky, is going to be doing a reading from his new book Firefly Rain (which I, like a total slacker have not yet read or even purchased a copy of yet) (did I mention the total slacker thing?) At the Regulator Bookshop in Durham (Map), at 7:00pm this Thursday, February 7th. I think his fiction would appeal to a good chunk of the people on my friends list, especially since a good half of you already know him.

Oh yeah...The Regulator is right next door to Francesca's Dessert Cafe so you stop by for painfully yummy gelato afterwards.

I must be like butter, cause I'm on a roll

2007-12-17T14:00:04Z

A little bit later, in this very same supermarket, I hear this over the intercom:

Man's Voice: "Price check on (something...maybe it was all-wool socks).."
Woman's Voice: "Two ninety-nine."
Man's Voice: "What was that?"
Woman's Voice: "Two ninety-nine."
Man's Voice: "Say it again!"
Woman's Voice: "Two ninety-nine."
Man's Voice: "Ohhhh yeah! That's what I wanna hear!"

Since when is Cary this interesting on a Sunday night??

Every now and then people impress me

2007-12-17T13:55:50Z

One of my favorite things about having blue hair is the way kids react to it...actually, no, scratch that, it's the way their parents react to them reacting to it. Unfortunately, my amusement is often at the expense of the kid cause the parent is usually scolding them not to be rude.

Yesterday, I went into the restroom at a supermarket and there was a guy in there helping his 7-8 year old son wash up. As I squeezed past them, the kid says, "Hey! That guy has blue hair." But instead of the usual squashing of youthful enthusiasm, dad says, "Well son, that's what you call 'being an individual'. And there's nothing wrong with that." They exit the room, and dad is still going on. "...you know someday when you're older, maybe you can have blue hair too."

I need to go shopping more on Sunday evenings.

Operative phrase from Wednesday night

2007-12-07T18:13:42Z

X-Posted to: good_bandnames

Smurf Bukake

no...I'm not going to explain it. It's more fun this way.

Of course I'm not gonna post about my own life...

2007-11-13T19:56:20Z

...that would require having one, or having worth posting about.

OTOH, a few of you have noticed that golemkennels doesn't post so much anymore. She still doesn't, but she's begun journaling the process of training her new enormous, cow-shaped dog. You can find said exploits are my_first_ox (by Fisher Price).

Oh yeah..and she wins because the first person to friend her is a Russian walrus trainer!

Special Needs Puppies

2007-10-22T14:48:06Z

(ok, aside from that being a reasonable band name, I actually had something in mind)

Many of you have met our Blind Cave Dog also known as Frost.

If you haven't, you should drop by and check him out sometime, he has the sweetest disposition in the world. He moves around with such confidence, it's very easy to forget that he is deaf and blind. He's a smooth collie (like Lassie with a buzz-cut) with a double copy of the merle gene, that's the factor that makes some of our dogs have the nifty looking blue coat. The gene is dominant. A single copy of the gene results in dogs that looks like Pow or Brick, solid color with patches of blue. With a double copy most of the pigment goes away leaving a white, or mostly white coat. Unfortunately, that same pigment is involved in the development of eyes and ears. As a result most double-merles have problems with hearing, vision or both.

The reason I'm going through all this is I've been told that Collie Rescue of the Carolinas has two double-merles coming up for adoption this week. One of them is deaf, the other is blind. I'm told these dogs have equally sweet dispositions compared to our guy. Admittedly, this is not the kinda dog that everyone can handle. Big and blind means a lot of bumping into things. Not the sort of dog you want if you have lots of cases full of Hummel figurines*. But if this is the sorta thing that does appeal to you or you know someone, you should give Collie Rescue a call. I can't speak for golemkennels directly, but I'm pretty sure she'd be happy to assist in training, having worked with a few dogs with sensory problems.

* Ok, if I had a bunch of Hummels, this is EXACTLY the kind of dog I'd want.

Since she doesn't read LJ so much anymore

2007-09-27T19:45:09Z

If you know golemkennels drop her a note and wish her a happy birthday today. If you don't have her contact info, you can always reply to an old LJ entry.

Heck...if you don't know her, wish her a happy birthday!

File under stuff I didn't expect

2007-09-24T16:14:24Z

Ok...so living on a farm involves a lot of lifting and sweating and grunting and other definitively manly activities. One source of macho-trips that I was not entirely prepared for: moving hay bales. As an unrepentant city boy I thought, "It's hay. There's no way it could be all that heavy, even those big ol rolls of it." Turns out, those big ol' rolls (or round bales as some might call em) weigh in excess of half a ton. There's something kinda exhilarating in realizing that you're moving half a ton with pure brute force. Admittedly, rolling is not the same as lifting or even dragging, but you're still providing the energy to start a half ton moving, and even more impressive...stop it.

Of course, it's also a lot of really exhausting work to push half a ton around. Last night, after moving one of these behemoths into the pasture and setting it upright, I was understandably a little on the tuckered side. This caused me to declare, "You know, the next time some chick offers me a roll in the hay, I'm gonna have to pass."

Not to be outdone, golemkennels quickly pointed out that, no, first I'd ask what the forage quality* was. It bothers me that she's right.

* as an example, the forage quality of the stuff we were moving last night isn't all that great. This means that it's got lots of other crap besides grass, and most of that crap has thorn or burrs or something unpleasant. The end result is that not only are you pushing around a lopsided, half ton ball, but it is also a lopsided, half ton ball of bees and mosquitoes.

Jonathan Coulton Ate My Baby

2007-08-15T19:54:18Z

Mandelbrot Set

You’re a Rorschach Test on fire
You’re a day-glo pterodactyl
You’re a heart-shaped box of springs and wire
You’re one badass fucking fractal.

....sorry...I've had that stuck in my head for about a week, so I had to share the pain.

oh and mary_mayhem, I dunno if I pointed you at this when I sent you all that Coulton stuff, but I'd be remiss if I didn't show you: Flickr one of the few songs of his that requires the visual.

EDIT: Apparently some entries get skipped in the RSS feeds unless they have a title. So I'm adding a few to my most recent postings.

Hot MLP on MLP action

2007-08-02T15:54:09Z

Usually when confronted with any reference to My Little Pony, I'm forced to point out that there was only one male MLP, and his name was "Lucky"! ...no...really...

However, after however many years that they've been around, it was only this morning that I realized the each and every pony has a tramp-stamp!

(that combined with the fact that an MLP that I was just gifted with appears to be wearing Playboy Bunny ears...I really don't wanna speculate what Hasbro had in mind.)

File under: Things I did not sign up for...

2007-05-20T17:21:54Z

Greco-Ovine Wrestling.

And that's all I'm sayin'

Despite the fact it would be a great band name.

Possibly the best phrase EVAR

2007-04-18T13:35:13Z

X-posted to good_bandnames

Snot Otter

Which is apparently an alternate name for the Hellbender. Kinda appropriate.

My Drinking Buddy Has Been Vindicated

2007-03-02T14:54:07Z

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/02/0117257

I don't really know him all that well, but we seem to drink together at every DragonCon. I can say that he's a very nice guy, and a champion drinker, and that 13 years is way too long to wait on a fairly bogus charge.

Not only do I live in the CITY OF THE FUTURE

2007-02-28T00:49:57Z

...but I apparently live in some sorta game development mecca. This morning, local NPR was doing a story on new game development lab at Wake Tech. The general gist was that the Associates Degree program was too small before it started, given that the Triangle area has some thirty industry related companies. Thirty? I can maybe name 15 off the top of my head and I'd have to dip down into defense contractors and the like. Apparently we have the highest density of said companies in the Southeast.

...And we all know how dense game developers can be!

< rimshot > < /rimshot >

Nevermore Post Mortem

2007-02-26T15:47:17Z

For some reason I decided to post a report on Nevermore. Partly it's because I usually have to do a trip report when I go to GDC and partly it's because mary_mayhem unintentionally guilted me into it by saying she was going to do the same. I almost thought I wouldn't make it this year, so I didn't even mention it here. Friday, I had house guests so I didn't go at all.

Saturday

The Beach Party at the Threshold of Hell

Movies with titles like this are either really good or trying too hard. I really expected this one to be the former, but it was surprisingly good and really original. Stylistically, it jumps all over the place. The humor follows a similar pattern going from bizarre to slapstick to nearly serious, and it still manages to hold together. The description at the link describes it pretty well, but it doesn't even scrap the surface. Should be coming out on DVD this Summer. It's well worth renting if not owning.

Dead Alive

Yes, I know this isn't a new film, or even a recent film. But it was a brand spanking new 35mm print and I'd never seen this on a big screen. There's not a lot to say about this film that hasn't already been said. I still firmly believe that it has the single best "guy running over a room full of zombies scene" in cinematic history. It's also one of the films that convinced me that Peter Jackson was possibly the only person on the planet insane enough to really pull off a movie version of LOTR. It's been a while since I've seen this, and it was interesting how much of "Heavenly Creatures" you can see lurking around in this film. Sometimes you have to wipe away ankle-deep zombie pulp to see it, but it's still there.

Sunday

Traditionally, Nevermore has been snowed out on Sunday...like for several years running now. So they moved the date up a bit to avoid that. I had actually seen a flake or two in the sky Saturday night, and figured the universe was taunting me. But there was no snow...

...Instead, the ENTIRE downtown durham power grid went down, traffic lights n' all. The Carolina Theatre was getting sporadic power and big blips. I found out about the first of these when I tried to get tickets and their credit card machine had been hobbled by said blip. So I wandered over to the Marriott ATM to get cash. On the way someone flagged me down to lemme know that my film had moved from one theter to another. No, big deal, films move around all the time at Nevermore. Right after I purchase the ticket, I'm told that the film has moved *again* to another theater. No biggie. When I get into Fletcher Hall, the omens are not good. The house lights are flickering and then turning off and then back on full bright, etc. After sitting for five minuted in pitch black, some come in to say that the light controls are on the fritz, but they will be showing the movie...immediately followed by another person to correct him and say, no we won't be showing it because 35mm projectors suck down so much power that they're destabilizing the little bit they had available. But, they had an LCD projector and would show one of the films I missed, or people could get a refund or they could see one of the others. I stayed for the film they had in that theater. Which turned out to be a good move.

And by the time I got out of that showing, they had miraculously convinced Duke Power to keep their part of the grid on while repairs were being done and somehow ended up with enough power to run the rest of the festival. And what's more I got the see the film I'd originally gone to see without paying, so that kinda rocked.

anyway....

Shutter

This was the bonus film, due to power weirdness. Turned out to be a pretty good Asian ghost story. Really creepy, nicely put together. In a way it was almost a live action Fatal Frame. I liked that they twisted the story in interesting ways. Not in the sense that they tried to be overly clever plot-twisty, ala M. Night Sham-a-lam-a-ding-dong. But more as a "someone hasn't been telling the whole story". I also liked that they didn't try to be a Japanese ghost story, as that's what the cool kids are into these days. The film was very Thai. And very every day Joe (or everyday Ban or Tun or whatever), so the language was much more like what you hear in the streets in Bankok. For that reason I think golemkennels will like it in particular.

Severance

Only the brits could make a quaint slasher film. Really funny, completely preposteroussetting. As the write up says a cross of Sean of The Dead and The Office, but I'd add a little Friday The 13th to that.

In Memorium and Of Darkness

Wow...creepy, creepy, creepy! I saw these two with mary_mayhem. I have no idea when Of Darkness is going to be available, since it's only 20 minutes long, but it's worth finding when and if it is. Short, simple, right to the point. It illustrates why 12 year-olds should not be allowed to play with the Necronomicon.

In Memorium was actually pretty similar. One of the things I've noticed recently with a lot of independent films is a tendency to experiment with media or at least the look of the film. As this is the story of someone documenting their last days with cameras and mikes all through the house, it looks like it was shot with a high quality motion sensing camera. That wonderful static-y blip you get when a camera first turns on makes some of the transitions much more jarring and adds to the general creepiness.

I think that's it. Everything I saw was pretty worthwhile. I'm curious to hear what people thought about the films I missed.