Words for the wise from the mouth of a fool.
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The weblog of Seth Johnson -------------- INKSLINGER.ORG -------------- OD ARCHIVES -------------- FEEDS Posts:  Shared Items:
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Saturday, October 12, 2002
MC Hawking, Tom Lehrer, Schoolhouse Rock--of course I'm the perfect sucker for Science Groove (warning; MP3 hard-encoded on linked page.)(link via MeFi)
Friday, October 11, 2002
Yeah, it's been everywhere this week, but I might want to find this link to the Surrealist later: Ober Dicta is a fax machine that catches spiders, revolves and scares dogs.
Michael Giacchino has posted a bunch of new music to his website, including some MOHFrontline tracks and a whole page of Alias clips--which only makes me ache for an Alias soundtrack disc that much more. Note in this interview where he reveals that he scored each first-season episode in just three days.
In another interview (which offers more sound clips, by the way, and good news in that JJ Abrams not only wants an Alias soundtrack, he wants a Varèse Sarabande soundtrack--along with a big WTF in the form of the soundtrack album image at the bottom of the article) he says now in the second season he gets five days per episode. Wow. (As an aside, it does my freelancer's heart good to read the story of how he landed the Alias gig.)
Unfortunately, while Frontline is now available at the EA Store, it doesn't sound like there are any plans for a MOHAA soundtrack release. Man, listening to Gaincchio's music first makes me wonder when John Williams went so wrong--and then it makes me stop caring.
While I'm at it, I might reccommend checking out the site of Giacchino's assistant/collaborator Chris Tilton-- a little bit of Alias goodness if you dig deep enough, but also a lot of great stuff on his demo page. Also, Bill Brown, composer for the Rainbow Six games, RtCW, and Anachronox among other things, has posted a ton of music on his site.
Thursday, October 10, 2002
Okay--what I was talking about last night. It's not finished, but I'd like to get some reactions (and bugspotting, and typospotting): the entrance to this domain is now my online c.v./portfolio. Take a look and let me know what you all think.
Wednesday, October 09, 2002
There are times where it doesn't pay to be an insomniac. In fact, there are times where it downright sucks. Case in point: Knockoff is now playing on my television.
Setting modesty aside for a moment...
I've been working on another section of this site, one that I'll unveil to all you OD loyalites in a few days*. But it's meant digging through a lot of my old files and doing a lot of egoGoogling. Check out what I found along the way: I'm underappreciated--and in amazing company, too.
I'll go back to being modest now.
* No, probably nothing to get all that excited about, unless you're me. Or my mom.
"The modern world is a cruel place for a sensitive homunculus." and, of course, "Tuesday, Marmaduke sits in the chair."
"Funny Paper" is rapidly becoming one of my online favorites.
I'm a big fan of the Watchmen annotations on the Net, so I'm happy to see that the Moore obsessives are back with annotations for The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. You know, all of this would be a lot easier if Moore would just publish all his scripts like he did with From Hell.
Boingboing reminded me of Copyfight, which (as usual) is doing a fantastic job of collecting reports from the Supreme Court hearing of the Eldred copyright extension review.
Interesting. I knew AllConsuming was a site about what books were being discussed in the blogosphere. I didn't know it autotracked individual pages like this one and generates lists of mentioned books. Neat.
Tuesday, October 08, 2002
"Uncredentialed losers, outsiders, dilettantes, frustrated lawyers, unabashed alcoholics—and, yes, creative psychopaths..."
Heck, at least three of those apply to me. I could be a journalist!
For crying out loud! If I hadn't been allowed to carry sixty pounds of books to second grade every day, I would have no upper body strength whatsoever! Way to take away the only crosstraining the geek squad gets on a regular basis...
(As an aside, I'm fascinated by the article's mention of double-issued textbooks. Did anyone actually enjoy this luxury?)
GameSpot's review of Sniper is so fantastic I don't even know which part to quote. Howsabout: "This would be a great idea if Sniper had been developed as a foul-mouthed interactive Mother's Day card..."
I just can't believe that the company that brought us Mortyr (another great review, courtesy of the departed (?) OMM and the Internet Archive) managed to make a game that is even worse.
Whoops. Gotta keep an eye on those student journalists.
From the same paper, honesty from a professor: "Most students who enroll in his Entomology 101 class genuinely are uninterested in insects and are looking only to fill the biological science requirement." I bet they get more involved once they hear the course involves bug tacos!
Monday, October 07, 2002
Poking around Amazon I stumbled into the science fiction calendar section and saw
There's a prize for the best rationalization of why American Baby magazine is related to SF calendars.
It's about time: the next book in George Martin's "Song of Fire and Ice" series has been announced. Called A Feast for Crows, Amazon says it will ship next April.
Let me get this straight: the dorm rats get the NASA Channel but I don't? Where's the justice? I just want to watch today's launch, and all of the online streams are being swamped (thanks a freakin' lot to the person who posted the stream link to MeFi...)
UPDATE: List of alternate audio/video Net feeds found. NASA Channel stills available on NASA TV site and updated cyclically.
UPDATE 2: Picture form the Shuttle's new external tank cam, or "Shuttlecam" as the news calls it, completely ignoring the dozens of other cameras onboard. Pretty cool, but you just know that somebody saw Apollo 13 and said "Why can't we get that shot in real life?" There it is.
This spring I read Glen David Gold's fantastic novel Carter Beats the Devil. It may not have the social context of Kavalier and Clay, but I would argue that it has twice the narrative strength; I read the hardcover from beginning to end, went back to the beginning, and read it through again. I don't remember the last time I did that.
Believe me when I say it's a terrific book.
So I bought my mom a copy of the newly-released trade paperback and brought it along when I went to see them last weekend. When I was handing the book over, I felt something odd. I had to wait until Mom had finished looking at the book to check it out, but there it was: a row of raised bumps along the bottom of the front cover. Braille!
Strange; I know for certain that the Braille wasn't on my hardcover. Trapped far from a Net connection, all I could do was make a rubbing and ruminate.
(Note that you can see the Braille on Amazon's larger version of the trade cover.)
Okay, I did try and decode the letters using brute force, but as there were only ten symbols (out of a possible twenty-six) and fifteen 'letters', it was a bit of a lost cause.
However, upon returning to Madison, I...well, I watched Alias. But then I pulled up an online Braille alphabet and went to work:
So the question is: what does this mean? I can think of at least one character in the novel that it might refer to, but I can't see why that datum would be important enough to encode on the front of the novel. The obvious Google searches turn up nothing useful.
Another reading of the novel is obviously in order.
UPDATE: Someone who works with Jon has reminded me what in the book this refers to, but I still wonder why they did it. I suppose it was just a neat thing to toss in while embossing the cover, but ever since the AI game, I always wonder when I see something like this...
Sunday, October 06, 2002
I've been hearing a lot of high Bookworm scores going around, but far as I know I watched Tritz take the cake this evening:
UPDATE: Dr Chris sent me a screenshot from a game of his over the weekend; a pretty high score--and with no fire tiles in sight...
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