iam(still)kevin.

Archive for June, 2004

lots of random stuff.

Wednesday, June 30th, 2004

Update:
This is the best thing ever: a job posting on portland’s craiglist for technical support girls, which is fine. except it warns “calls can become sensual so you need to be ok with that.” The job posting is for Ask The Tech Girl.
Phone sex for geeks hidden under the pretense of tech support, only $2.95 a minute. kick ass.
(via something*positive)

have you ever thought, man, i should really build myself a flame thrower out of $100 of parts i can buy at homedepot?
this guy did.
(via gizmodo)

even though it may be tempting don’t play porn on your in car DVD player like this guy or you’ll get busted.

patrons with weak hearts should not ride the DDR.
(via engadget)

Cory Doctorow’s book Down And Out in the Magic Kingdom has won the Locus Award for Best First Novel of 2003

you can now rent a puppy in japan… It might be risky to introduce this to some other countries unless they introduce some kind of “eating the merchandise” penalty.

There’s the Seattle underground, Cleveland has an abandoned subway project, but Portland has “Shanghai tunnels” that were used to abduct sailors for slave labor. That’s pretty cool.
(via boingboing)

you’re mother nature and an atom bomb

Posted in nonsense. | No Comments »

pax.

Sunday, June 27th, 2004

so i’m going to pax
it is without a doubt the geekiest thing i have ever done, and if any of you want to come, just let me know.
it’s basically a 2 day gaming event, but it’s much more than just a lan party.
There are going to be talks from various people in the video game industry from Midway, Studio Gigante, Microsoft, Sabretooth, and Monolith, talking about about subjects like Breaking Into the Video Game Industry, The Development Process, Online Gaming and more.
Also some musical guests: Optimus Rhyme whom i’ve talked about before, the Minibosses (who play videogame music, rock style), and piano arrangements of Final Fantasy music by Conney Lin an accomplished pianist in the Puget Sound area.
The Red Vs. Blue guys are going to be there too.

Of course, there will be lots of games: console, pc, and tabletop games alike, with lots of tournaments, and the Omegathon, a ridiculous game tournament to win basically every single game ever. Well, not really, but it’s a lot of stuff.

anyway, i’m going, and it’ll be cool.

crazy and a nighttime angel
she had a colorful career.

Posted in games. | 5 Comments »

kmfdm. anti-bada. riddick.

Sunday, June 27th, 2004

damn it. typed something out, then i lost it. now must retype.

i went to see kmfdm at the fenix friday night. it was a pretty good show, and my ears are still ringing. but i think that’s from the… “band” before them. black.japan sucks, it was basically loud painful awful noise with the occasional car honking sound for about 10 minutes, and then we went downstairs because they just didn’t stop. they were pretty shitty in the opinions of me, jim, jen, and the other people whose names i’ve forgotten. we went back up 15 minutes later and they were still playing crap, so we went back down. then they ended and all was well.
KMFDM was cool though. they are 2 guitarists (one was actually pretty good, the other i don’t know, he was on the other end of the stage), a drummer, the lead singer who’s got a 6 inch bleached mohawk, and another singer, a pretty good lookin’ girl named Lucia. oh and some electronic machines of some kind. They played all their biggest hits like… well really i don’t know any of their songs, but it was good, loud, german industrial music. conducive to a lot of moshing incidentally. luckily we were just outside the range of that bullshit, so we were ok. I did get yelled at by this huge black guy cause i was making fun of black.japan. i have no idea who this guy was or why he was pissed, he just told me to stop it, and well, i’m genrally gonna listen to a big guy that’s pissed at me.
(more…)

Posted in general. | 4 Comments »

no mini in your mini? hotmail plus.

Friday, June 25th, 2004

Saw this on gizmodo, either bmw or apple have changed their minds about ipods working in mini coopers. Now it’s just the 3 series, fancy SUVs and Z4s.
Personally, i think keeping it in the mini would have sold a lot more, and I don’t think any BWM owners would have been slighted. I mean really, you can’t hate the Mini.
Who knows, maybe it just wasn’t supposed to be in the mini at all, but it seems like it’s some kind of elitist thing.

Also, i got a Gmail acount recently, which is neat, you know 1GB storage and all that, but looky here:

As a valued MSN Hotmail Extra Storage subscriber, we will be upgrading your storage capacity to a massive 2GB with 20MB attachment size at no extra cost to you*!

(down below…)
* No extra cost during your current subscription period. At the end of your current subscription period, you will be automatically renewed to the MSN Hotmail Plus subscription offering and your credit card charged at the current rate for MSN Hotmail Plus.

Now this is just because I signed up for the Extra storage thing for my hotmail account, but who knows, maybe they’ll up regular storage from the already gigantic 2 MB that you get for free. Looks like MSN plus is $50 a year, so I’ll probably get rid of it cause I don’t need that much space.

how can you laugh

Posted in general. | 1 Comment »

team ninja is cool. riddick ost.

Thursday, June 24th, 2004

even if you don’t care about games, what Tecmo and Team Ninja are doing with ninja gaiden is pretty impressive. In August, they’re going to release Ninja Gaiden 1.1, which is a huge update to ninja gaiden.
IGN has the details, but the overview is:
The game itself won’t change, but the content in it will, so there will be
New Enemies - they’ll replace some existing enemies and replace them with new monsters to fight.
New Bosses - same, but with bosses
New Weapons - adding 3 new weapons, among them a bo staff.
Improved AI - making a hard game even harder
New Camera - this is significant, they’re replacing the camera system with a new camera that gives you more control. NG has a frustrating camera to use at the moment.
Action Engine - They’re updating the game engine to make everything faster. I think it’s faster in terms of time, since the engine already runs very smoothly with no slowdown that i can remember.

That’s a big update, and it’s all going to be free as long as you have xbox Live (and the game of course). That is really good developer support.

Meanwhile, Vivendi Universal has released the soundtrack to Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay (that’s the xbox game, not the movie). It’s pretty decent actually, you can get it from vugames.com
I also rented riddick last night, and I think i’m about a little under 1/3 of the way through. I like it so far. good graphics (riddick really looks like vin diesel), a decent story so far, and good voice acting with lots of big names (vin diesel of course, and cole hauser, and the coolest guy ever, Ron Perlman. Oh and Xzibit! right..) [i think it's funny and yet also cool that IMDB lists video games]
it really comes off as another chapter in the series, the “acting” is convincing, as is the storyline (except for the way he got his eyes’ “shine job”, i didn’t like that so much). Escape from Butcher Bay is a prequel to Pitch Black, telling how he ended up where he did.
I might pick up Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Fury, an anime directed by Peter Chung (Æon Flux, Matriculated from the Animatrix), which falls in between Pitch Black and Chronicles of Riddick (the movie).

and in other news, bunny!

i’m making miracles like jesus

Posted in games. | 6 Comments »

notmuchtosay.

Wednesday, June 23rd, 2004

volleyball was fun last night, and the waiter at red robin was terrible.
denali is a good dog.
weather on the weekend was nice.
microsoft owns a patent on your skin. (not really, just conducting electricity on your skin).
hot women playing classical music is good: bond.
maroon 5 are also good.

i’ma go.

fly robin fly

Posted in general. | No Comments »

lollapalooza cancelled.

Tuesday, June 22nd, 2004

wow, i thought there were more indie and eclectic music fans in this country, but i guess not. lollapalooza was cancelled - at least for this year - due to low ticket sales. honestly, i couldn’t care less that the bands in the lineup aren’t playing, but it’s kinda sad that such a big name concert festival wasn’t able to cut it.

here’s the lineup that didn’t sell the tickets:
big name bands:
morissey
sonic youth
pj harvey
modest mouse
le tigre
black rebel motorcycle club
the von bondies
the string cheese incident
flaming lips
pixies
basement jaxx
wilco
michael franti & spearhead
gomez
the polyphonic spree
tv on the radio

smaller bands:
broken social scene
the walkmen
wolf eyes
danger mouse
the datsuns
sound tribe sector 9
the thrills
the coup
the fire theft
wheat
mike watt + the secondmen
bumblebeez 81
the dresden dolls
carina round
ross golan & moplehead
theliving things
peretz
alez graham

wow, that’s literally the most unappealing lineup (to me) ever. not one single band i want to see except just a little bit the Pixies, who i’ll see at bumbershoot anyway.

Posted in music. | 2 Comments »

dr.o likes king. space. minimini. half-life 2.

Monday, June 21st, 2004

cory docotorow, the guy I went to hear speak last week, likes the Dark Tower series.
see? http://www.boingboing.net/2004/06/18/kings_new_dark_tower.html

space may not be so far away: http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/space/06/21/suborbital.test/index.html
the first private craft was successfully flown into space, an altitude of more than 100 kilometers (62.5 miles) above ground. SpaceShipOne was funded in part by Paul Allen (Seattle’s spendiest billionaire - he owns the Mariners, the Cinerama, and the EMP and SciFi museum are his babies, and lots more).
John Carmack (big guy at id studios, makers of quake, doom, etc) has his own team of people working on a competitor, and jeff bezos (crazy amazon/segway guy) has a team as well.

you can put a mini in a mini - apple is going to have some way of integrating the ipod with BMW’s and also with Mini Coopers. any 3 series, x3, x5, z4, or mini newer than 2002 can get an ipod adapter installed. It looks like steering wheel controls work too.
http://www.apple.com/ipod/bmw/

(non-gamers are excused now)
also, in an interview with Gabe Newell (head of valve studios) about the 2D Codename: Gordon mod for half-life, Gabe said that he “anticipates delivering it [Half-Life 2] to Vivendi in august.” Now, last year up until September 29th, valve and vivendi were saying that half-life 2 would ship on september 30th, so you might take that with a grain of salt, but it means they’re relatively close to getting done.
Hopefully it’ll be HL2 in September, Halo 2 in November, and probably Doom 3 somewhere in there.

And i’ll be sure to get one of these beasts to play my new games with.

we’re only several miles from the sun

Posted in books. | No Comments »

holy geek!

Thursday, June 17th, 2004

Update: And here’s the link to his talk: http://www.craphound.com/msftdrm.txt

That’s the first thing I thought when I walked into the room at U-W where Cory Doctorow gave a talk last night. I don’t frequently go to too many places where there’s such an exclusive collection of geeky people. Not like my friends are the epitomy of non-geek, on the contrary, but they aren’t as unabashedly geek as the people at Cory’s talk. Nothing wrong with that of course, it was just kinda funny.
(more…)

Posted in general. | 1 Comment »

give some love to mr. pullman.

Thursday, June 17th, 2004

remember those His Dark Materials books i read a while back (The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass)?

Robin pointed out a great review of the trilogy at the Boston Globe, which further enforces the fact that you should go read the books now! Especially if you liked Harry Potter, because they’re SO much better. The third book in the series, “The Amber Spyglass” became the first young-adult novel ever to win Britain’s prestigious Whitbread Prize for Book of the Year. Have any of the Harry Potter books won any awards? Honestly, i don’t know, but I doubt it. Well, book 6 won the people’s choice award, but that’s just a popularity thing, not litarary merit.

Read it and weep! I mean… just read it. well, you might weep because it’s SO DAMN GOOD.

Posted in books. | No Comments »

Archive for June, 2004

lots of random stuff.

pax.

kmfdm. anti-bada. riddick.

no mini in your mini? hotmail plus.

team ninja is cool. riddick ost.

notmuchtosay.

lollapalooza cancelled.

dr.o likes king. space. minimini. half-life 2.

holy geek!

give some love to mr. pullman.

i am pages.

twitter.

i am comments

Blogroll

i am categories.

i am archives.

i am meta.

Archive for June, 2004

i am pages.

i am comments

Blogroll

i am tags.

i am categories.

i am archives.

i am meta.