Wonder not, of where we are going, but marvel instead, at where we have been.
From the impressive repertoire of photographer, David M. Hogan [flickr]
Monday, November 28, 2011
Important Images For You All To Look At
Wonder not, of where we are going, but marvel instead, at where we have been.
From the impressive repertoire of photographer, David M. Hogan [flickr]
Lindsey Vonn's Husband Files For Divorce
Lindsey Vonn in the starting gate for the first run of this years giant slalom in Aspen*
After burning relationships already with her father and best friend [Maria Riesch] it appears that Lindsey Vonn's husband just had enough of it all too. I was only discussing the marriage of skiers this very weekend, on the Twitters. My argument is that marriage will only ever ruin your [skiing] career. I pointed towards this years lackluster performance of newly married Maria Höfl-Riesch, when I was reminded that Lindsey Vnn has been married for years without any effect to her game. Well, we see the truth of it all now.
I don't see this particular incident as a bad reflection on Vonn though. I think it's just another example of the consequences one must go through when one is as dedicated as she is. It's not the first time we've seen a talent be a difficult person to relate with.
* Click image for an animated GIF >700kb
Sunday, November 27, 2011
Saturday, November 26, 2011
Kate Beckinsale & The Facial Apocalypse
Growing old is a better option, Kate, it really is. Your face here resembles an abortion. It's such a shame. [more]
Monday, November 21, 2011
The IMDB Forums Are A Magical Place
| If you had sex with your other self... |  |
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Irish Model Makes It Big
You know you've made it as an model when a still from a dodgey photoshoot ends up being part of an online Nazi meme. I came across the image in the jolly ThirdReich Soup.io stream.
Scandal over VIP Taxis photoshoot errupted a few months back, when the images were used as part of safety campaign for woman to be aware of rogue taxi cabs. Not only did it fall into the "Don't tell woman not to dress like sluts; tell men not to rape" thing, but the overall look was so cheap and contrived that it couldn't be taken in any serious light whatsoever. The "safety campaign" came out as a lousy advertising venture for VIP Taxis. Der Fuehrer ist nicht pleased.
The "Golden Girls / Judge Judy" Post That Never Was
Last year I was planning a post, that tied The Golden Girls, Judge Judy, and Feminism all together into one magical unified strand.... and then BigMentalDisease came along and 'shoped together a picture with Judge Judy doing kung fu with the Golden Girls and that summond the death knell for that post. The remaining elements will follow later.
The offending image in question...
Sunday, November 20, 2011
Anja Pärson & The Spontaneous Gif Magic
I thought of making this while driving one day. I wanted something really tacky. I don't think I got it as tacky as I imagined, but it's not bad. I love those tacky gifs.
Doom3: Still The Most Frightening Game
Everyone is talking about Skyrim! So let's talk about Doom3.
Back in the day (2004) the big debate was whether you were a Half Life 2 or Doom3 player. Well I was a Doom3 player, initially at least. Half Life introduced this notice of "Activation by Steam". That shit was enough to put me off the game until an offline pirated version was available. I still won't buy a game that has any of that Steam rubbish built in. Steam... more like a steaming pile of shit! I often dust Half-Half 2 though, and you'll see many mentions of it here in posts.
So yeah, Doom3 anyway. A lot of people didn't like it. They thought it wasn't much fun. And it wasn't much fun, it was scary as fuck! Frightening as going to the bathroom and ending up filling the toilet bowel full of blood! So ironically, while I love the game, I've never actually finished it. Far too stressful. I started playing again recently and had to give up. That shit had my heart rate up to Jason Statham in Crank levels.
I have diagnosed why the game is so effective. Yes, it's claustrophobic and full of "cheap scares" with demons popping out of nowhere, but it's the sound that really gets to me. Playing the game without sound isn't actually too bad. If I put on headphones though, that's an entirely different story. I'm spraying bullets into random dark corners like a coked up Gerry Ryan on PCP.
I think it's also the look of the game. All those surfaces, glistening like wet leather, set against the blackest shadows we had ever seen in a game at the time. That was nightmare stuff right there. Sure, it wasn't hyper-realistic looking, not as much as Half Life 2, but half Life 2 had no soul. I eventually got around to playing that sometime later, and while it certainly was fun, it just felt really empty. Thinking back to it, I get no vibes, no emotive reflections, nothing. The much touted "Ravenholm" level was a pile of piss. As scary as waking up with an erection (admittedly, that's probably more scary if you're a woman).
Half Life did have those infected head crab zombie things though, now they were scary. They had me running like it was Doom3 whenever I heard them. And again, it was the sound within the game that proved to be most effective.
I realise that most people will scoff at this post, but I make no claims about being a macho gamer. I like getting wrapped up in things, and Doom3 just happened to work it's jizz on me. I think the game still looks great too. Obviously, it's technically dated at this stage, but that idTech4 engine allowed for some truly horrific biomechanic environments, as seen in other games that used the engine, like Prey and Quake4.
Finally, that's me playing Doom3 in the video, if you hadn't gathered. I wanted to test out the video recording feature included in the game. The output was a little cumbersome to get into a video format. First you had to record your gameplay, then play it back, and the game would save screen shots which you could sew into a video stream manually. It did record the audio, which was nice, but it had timing issues, so I had to manually move things around. You will notice some of these sound issues if you watch it. Rendered at 720i resolution, 4x antialiasing, if I remember correctly.
Occupy The Television Set
I saw a woman on the TV, with awesome hair and a cool "sci-fi" top. She looked like a character out of Star Trek. Wonderful!
It turned out to be none other than Laurie Penny! Who? Well yes, I asked myself that too. She is a journalist / activist, or journalist-activist... just use whatever symbol you want between the two, I guess. She is currently in New York covering the "Occupy Wall Street" happenings. According to my Twitter machine, a few of my left-leaning followers follow her too. Fantastic.
I'm not going to go into the OWS movement in this post, I just liked the look she has going on. Very striking. Occupy the Delta Quadrant!
Monday, November 14, 2011
I Offer You Half Of My Precious Avocado
Noteworthy for it being the first image I created on a Windows machine over VNC from Linux. Since then, I have now had excellent results using Microsofts "Remote Desktop" protocol (which I got going after a night of breaking a few Microsoft EULAs), latency is cut back to the barest few miliseconds.
The title of this post comes from the script of "Kiss of the Spider Woman" (1985), which I've never seen but remember watching the video clip that was included in Microsoft's Cinemania '95, 15+ years ago.
[source images via]
A Selection Of My October Posts In Google+
The 1% has many surprising members ^_^ #NoAgenda #TWiT
plus.google.com/.../Uh3Eis5Hisg
I found this tacky little face-tracking feature on my phone's standard Android camera app. What the hell, it gave me a giggle for a couple of minutes while watching tv. #cnn #JacksonTrial #aras11
plus.google.com/./WCrLkPcmVkc
"MS Security Center has found suspicious stuff in file: OS_Lion_Keygen.exe"
It seems to me... if the FBI, the CIA, the MIAA, or even the MIB really wanted to catch people who are downloading illegal warez, they should just develop and release for free, the best anti-virus software out there. While providing astounding free viral protection on your machine, it would create a log of all file names discovered when doing a routine scan, and return the logs to HQ for the FBI to build a profile on you.
In fact, if the logs were sent directly to Barry Obama the Oval Office, he could sort through them and find terrorists based on files with names like "Plans_For_9/11_Part_2.pdf". Jenius.
plus.google.com/./QtFRmck2QHBXubuntu
After experimenting for the past year, I have settled on Xubuntu!
Here's why I've switched to Xubuntu on all of my machines. Firstly, it's Ubuntu, which mean's that I get to work with the most popular, and therefore easiest to find support and pre-compiled packages for. I'm not someone who likes the fuss of interface bells and whistles (one of the reason I balked at Windows post XP) and even Linux Mint, which I was using up until Xubuntu, had too much crap. XFCE is the only interface you need.
Ubuntu itself is ugly, Unity is completely horrendous. I gave it a second chance with Ubuntu 11.10 and tried to convince myself it was the "future" but I just couldn't stomach it. I can't believe people are swallowing what's happening to Ubuntu. Even before the abomination of Ubuntu 11.04 was released, we had this weird hommage to Apple OSX, as if Shuttleworth had his tongue firmly inserted between the butt cheeks of Steve Jobs' boney ass. That's not to say I didn't like it though, it just seemed different for the sake of being different. And now Ubuntu has adopted that fucked up OSX single menu thing. What's next, disabling right click‽ I shouldn't joke, it could very well happen!
So that's me done with OSs. Windows XP is the love that never dies though, and I just don't think I'll ever get away from it, but with the Remote Desktop option to connect to a dedicated Windows machine, I should be set for life in Linux. Until next week anyway.
Sunday, November 13, 2011
A Flickr Stream I Can Endorse
What an interesting flickr stream, I wonder who created it. Currently at 11 pages of truth. [hakkach flickr]
Saturday, November 12, 2011
My Name Is Legion, For We Are Many
Poor Peter Collins had a spot of identity theft on Twitter during the week, not once, not twice, not even thrice but... what the hell comes after thrice‽ Anyway, a reported 4 accounts were set up in his name, each arguing that they were the real Peter Collins.
The whole thing kicked off when one of the accounts tweeted during an episode of "Tonight with Vincent Browne", stating that all traveller's were scum and the women folk weren't even any good for climbing up on, because your dick would smell of smoke and onions afterwards (or words to that effect, it's hard to remember). That tweet lead to a spate of retweeting and much srs bns within the #vinb hashtag.
Peter is now vouching revenge and is going to prosecute all those involved. But what if more "Peter Collins" accounts sprang up? What if they kept coming? Could Peter Collins be the new face of Anonymous Ireland? "Remember, remember, the 8th of Novemeber"?
[ story thejournal.ie ]
The Unfortunate Reality Of Global Warming
We're all familiar with graphs like the one above. Rising Co2 levels plotted against rising global temperatures for the last 100+ years. We're also familiar with people going hammer & tongs, arguing over how significant the correlation between these two trends is. I for one, don't care. Co2 in the atmosphere traps heat? Cool! Lets go with that. Humans have produced vast amounts of Co2 over the years of temperature increase, so why not. The only thing I disagree with is why we stop at Co2 levels. Let have a look at another graph...
Some might have seen the BBC News page about the population of humans on the planet [ What Number Are You? ]. I took a screen grab of the graph they supplied, showing the populace of the planet from 1500 to present day. It's a familiar shaped trend, so let's do a little bit of superimposing.
And there you have it. A direct correlation between human existence and global temperature, as sound and as accurate as mapping Co2 levels against global temperatures. Co2 release is just one facet of humans influence on the planet. Humans have affected the dynamics of Earth in an ever expanding myriad of ways, some of which are so obscure that they may never be discovered.
I'm not interested in debating how much an individual phenomenon like Urban Heat Islands is to blame, but if you look at how many reasons urban areas are much warmer than country areas (to an extent that they affect local climate), and then look at the exponential growth of building over the last 100 years, it is again more damning evidence that human existence is radically changing how the planet behaves.
Environmentalists have this notion burned into their head: cut Co2, reduce temperatures. They glibly inform us that they are driving a Toyota Prius, as if it's going to magically cool down the planet. This cretinous choice of personal motor vehicle is designed to reduce personal guilt rather than global temperature. I'm a firm advocate for finding alternative energies as we are burning through finite resources, in greatly inefficient manners, releasing all kinds of noxious elements, but Co2 is a symptom of a much greater problem.
Anyone who's really thought about this will tell you: If you want to save* the planet, don't have children; if you really want to save* the planet, kill yourself. Perhaps I will email this to Paul Gogarty for his views.
* the planet itself doesn't need saving. It will either be around long after we're gone, or destroyed at the same time of our extinction, from some external factor. Humans are just an entropic factor in the Earths continuing evolution.
Population graph [bbc] Global Temperature graph [zfacts]
Friday, November 11, 2011
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