Fresh, Hot Wastes of Time

Praise be! (spew alert)

Nine Inch Nails has made available on MySpace a streaming download of their next album, With Teeth, due out next week. Pretty farking cool. They also…

WHAT THE HELL

Some video from Life Church just opened up Windows Media Player and started talking about overcoming Fear. Is this a joke? This is like the damn Patrick Swayze character from Donnie Darko. What the hell opened this link? Color me cornfused. “I was living life addicted to the approval of other people” – apparently goes against Scripture. Um.

So like I was saying, Nine Inch Nails also made available for download a GarageBand version of their song The Hand That Feeds and you can twiddle endlessly with it. I made it into a jazzy torch song, a radical departure from its techno-industrial feel.

Closing the Christian self-help video which took over the computer…

Ever wondered with Darth Vader would blog about? Wonder no more.
Dude Falling.
Guess the Google – it loads 20 images from Google Image Search; you try to guess the keyword searched which returned the images.
Transparent Screens – when people get creative with their desktop background images.

If anyone else gets the “Fear is the Mind-Killer” preacher guy, let me know what activated him, please. Unless it was Muad-dib trying to tell me something.

I’m such a geek.

The strange and ironic tale of Russia’s Amber Room. Germany builds Russia a treasure in 1700s; Germany absconds with said treasure during WWII; Russia inadvertently destroys treasure whilst occupying German stonghold.
Better get that knee looked at.
Real or fake?
Nothing like $8000 Hot Wheels.

Harvard University has up a series of Implicit Association Tests which are pretty interesting. They’re supposed to discover if you have subconscious prejudices. I think they work based on the same psychology quiz which asks you to name the colors, rather than the words.

My results so far:

– Your data suggest little or no automatic preference for White relative to Black
– Your data suggest a moderate automatic preference for Bush relative to Kerry
– Your data suggest a moderate automatic association between African American and Weapons
– Your data suggest a moderate automatic preference for GAY PEOPLE relative to STRAIGHT PEOPLE

That last one’s a stumper, since I didn’t think I really preferred either, but it’s all interesting.

In case you forgot the rules, here’s my previous post about them.

Today’s searches –

“French”.

“Patience”.

Addicting flash game like Pingu.

My friend Dave Szulborski‘s book was released today – check it out: This is Not a Game – A Guide to Alternate Reality Gaming. He honored me by asking if I would contribute a piece to it, which I happily did. Being a puppetmaster for Dread House was insanely fun. I only wish I could figure out a way to do that full-time and get paid for it. If I could choose any career, I think that would be it. It’s what I want to do when I grow up.

I got my garnet set into a ring. The stone changes from red to purple to blue to teal to green depending on the light source. Jewelry is so much fun. I think I’m going to set up a piggybank and put my extra change into it for future purchases.

Tomorrow my earrings should be ready. A couple of years ago Hub took a tennis bracelet that was left to me by my grandmother in to be lengthened, but it ended up being too big, so I took it in and asked my jeweler to shorten it. He’s going to set the little diamonds that are taken out into stud earrings. The nice part is that there are 6 extra diamonds, so there will be three pairs. One for me, one for each daughter. If we have any more daughters, I guess I’ll have to give my pair up. Since my health insurance doesn’t cover pregnancy and I am (even three years later) still traumatized from my second daughter’s delivery, there’s nothing on the baby radar at the moment.

After months of a dry spell in regards to beta testing, suddenly I have three games I’m working on! I’ve been beta testing computer games since 2000. Usually they are games being ported over from PC versions to the Macintosh. It’s not for pay, but most of the time I receive a boxed copy of the final product once it’s out in stores. A hobby where my nitpicking comes in handy. Although it seems like being able to play games before they’re released sounds like everyone’s dream, it’s not always idyllic. Most of the time something’s broken. Lots of the time I’ll spend a few hours testing a game, and it will crash and lose my saved game, so I have to start over from scratch. I’m also constantly pausing to write down notes, or trying to do things that will “break” it. Not as glamorous as it sounds, but I enjoy it!

“They had, it appeared, detected that an event of historic importance was about to take place before the terrorists had even boarded their fateful flights.”. – Can This Black Box See Into the Future?

I’m blown away. I remember reading something about this a couple of years ago but did not realize the implications were so far-reaching.

Don’t be a pussy. Do a line.