I like em mac, pc, digg, or visual basic
name is Rob Scoble from the blogging nation
plug in the cam so we can youtube
now let's google sex on the cathode ray tube
you got indie rock all on your ipod lists
but im a techno geek this is how I mix
a nerdy little something on a gadget site
fruity loops lovin, cubasin all night
Techin it old school.
Wharfs whimpered and warped Woden wailed as floes and blustery blasts of slippery ice melted down from the pinnacle of the nova-crusted parasol. A dipping board bobbed down the mercury tide. Tinier than the tiniest pin, wobblier than Horton's Hoo, more crannied than raisin bran, the gnarled tree, the cue ball, the eternal cerulean, earth wobbled and bobbed, unifying the board and the venomous helm.
How would Earth survive the Sandman and Juggernaut clashing and dissolving into and out of each other while the pulsating yellow variable showered magenta and magnetism alternately, flopping from art to Victorian science and back to ancient monuments and eons-ago sunsets?
Crannied Venus, cocooned in furious ether, scalding vapor, verdant doom, unholy miasma, manifold blankets, and drafty streams, whipped its tailed green immensity through pools and momentum ponds. Streaking in behind the curvilinear tail, the Silver Surfer bent forward slightly and fired a brilliant, girder-straight beam at the tumbling Juggernaut and sprawled his ungainly bulk athwart the Van Allen Belt and its shepherd Endymion. The hyper velocity of the Power Cosmic nearly bent the unbendable, but Juggernaut, though stunned and unthinkably agonized by hitherto unfelt power, slowly reared himself back and upward, shrugging off the blast.
Another and another and another. Ten thousand crackling power cosmic rays, bolts and pyrotechnic dazzlings rained fearsomely down on the unstoppable, now a minute crawl, a never sleeping shark near fatal verges. Arboreal monuments, witnesses to meteors washing the idyllic sky of its meaningful silence, vast trunkful legs of petrified stone, aghast in the beech maple biome, aside ferny ferns and flitting mayflies, enormities of growth and life, wept as the clash cocooned the starry night and made all scintillate, the gloomy dawn.
Surfer, not micro not macro not effable nor awake, shiny with despair, a-brimming with overcontemplation and self-righteous moralizing, blasted the Hulk into a flux and returns every 10,000 years to reblast him down the gyre, thus vanquishing forever, or for so long as the Surfer lives, though not physically besting, the deepest harlequin myrtle monster the shale continents have cast away.
Now, a Cepheid Surfer cuts a G-clef arc and curve in the cosmic matrix as he perpetuates a tour of earth, the gyre, and a hundred more gleaming comets and brooding neutron stars, in his sacrifice to the universe. Superman hurls by.
Meaning of 'Jumping the Kordestani': the first non-tech hire of a Silicon Valley startup.
Named after Google's first non-tech hire, Omid Kordestani, hired in 1999 to manage sales.
Not an uncool chap, by the way.
OK, though a fascinating study in the valley bright, we shall dawdle a fleck then aim our telescopes at the steep summits and the mad stratus clouds.
Every one of these beasts and deities would not only defeat the Hulk but any other Marvel hero or villain. This is a list of primordial generative and destructive forces.
Atlas was strength personified way before the Hulk was and he can hold up the heavens. No strength limit. No contest here.
Not only would Archangel Michael defeat the Hulk, but he would thwack the entire Marvel roster into the abyss.
Though Marduk gave Tiamat the business, before the epic clash, the Hulk would merely run around and play on Tiamat's body. The conflict would not resemble a battle. It would be more like a person staving off a germ or something.
Cthulu. Rrrrrghgherrrghghgh!!! Not really primordial, unless you consider the tremulous psyche of Mr. Lovecraft primeval, but quite fearsome, and impossible to defeat with pure physical force.
The Kraken: It would rise from the sea, entwine the Hulk in a tentacled mass, and drag him back into the brine to drown. No rage-enhanced strength could break him free. These ancient beasts embody powers that are way beyond measurable physical strength.
The Midgard Serpent: When the Midgard Serpent howled after biting his own tail, the reverberations would fling the Hulk to a distant galaxy.
Gaia: Would nurture and calm the Hulk instead of fighting him.
Medieval Dragon: Canonically invincible.
Actually, any number of canonically invincible entities would either triumph or at least fight to an eternal stalemate.
With the wretched serpent still under foot, a hulking greenness approached. Massive, angry, oh, very angry, its hands scrunched into deep fists. It readied itself to rend the archangel and twist him into feathers and fabric, all a-gossamer, all a-floating amid the hazy mead.
The ground thundered, the rage was endless, the sky, a deep red, the nearby lake, a teal glimmer. So awful was the gargantuan monstrosity that the dewy cherubs dabbling in watercolors and sporting over the mead flitted off in flickers and gleams, sparkly trails and glitter, fleeing in every way, in 360 degree ways, in awful terrains, over staccato hills, over grass and oceans, leading off toward the verge and its immense oneness.
A soft sweep of Michael's sword swept the green goliath into the sky and over the planet, dropping him into a primordial ocean with choppy waters, filled with unfolding trails and cryptic beasts. Greenness was not easily deterred. Greenness leapt out and over the curved continents in a wild, massive arc, landing feet away from the demur archangel. Greenness delivered a clobbering punch and Michael reeled, heaved and gasped, as he flew back and into a massive flustered yew.
This gentle fay of a messenger was not discouraged, only mildly psychically overwrought and twirling. He gathered himself and floated upward, his cheeks turning slightly rosy and touched with frustrated tints. His ivory wings spread wide as he approached the raging hulk with increasing menace and purpose. Onlookers swapped sides, realizing that the disarming innocence was now channeled, redirected to purpose for the occasion. The eyes squinted slightly. The muscled monster screamed: "Smash again. Silly man does not realize how strong Hulk is."
The seraphic eyes squinted to crescents and the sword loomed high in Michal's hand, growing beyond the laws of the universe, beyond brute strength, beyond newtonian mechanics, beyond any mechanics. The laws continued falling away into the entropic sea surrounding them both. The Hulk's eyes deepened with rage, but this angel was beyond strength and rage.
Just before the Hulk was thwacked into the lake of fire with a graceful swipe, he declouded for a lucid moment, sensing that the imminent display of power and lordship was beyond his ken, beyond what he could effectively neutralize or fathom. The blade's swaggering arc motion seemed almost prolonged, as if to taste the moment before the kill just a little bit longer, but angels are not capable of such measured spite and vengeance, and thus the coiling was simply vast. With this heart-sinking notion coalescing in the Hulk's wild but competent mind there was a conclusion to the vast sweep and then, silent contact:
As the Hulk hurled away from Michael, he followed the path of an arc beyond dimensions, beyond space and time, beyond string theory and multiverses, and it landed him in a lake of fire from which there was no escape.
Thus, the Hulk menace was gently and quickly disspelled by guardian Michael.
The Google Secretary-Artist Post received an unexpectedly powerful reaction via email and thread commentary, so we were kinda compelled to do a simple study to see if this is a trend or a flash in the pan style rarity.
Check out the results of our little survey: Download Google_creativity_profile_1
Otherwise, enjoy the first day of the new year!
You can have a resume 2 yards long, and be masterful at bending C++, Ajax, XML and CSS to your whim, be unique with a unique life story, have massive projects under your belt, and have startups that have taken flight into the ether
Or, you can be an MIT grad, with no real world experience whatsoever, just brilliance.
Those are the 2007 MIT undergraduate hires, right out of college, listed in the chart above. Some of us don't realize how much consultants and finance groups rely on math majors from elite universities to crunch numbers for them. They account for a good number of the hires listed.
Technology companies, like Google, Intel, Vecna, Oracle, and IBM, are also well represented, accounting for 43 hires, all with at or near six-figure starting salaries, as well as signing bonuses and incentives, and compensation packages, driving up the total realized much higher.
Not bad.
Again: Genius rules all!
Such a sexually charged word: 'Sex'.
Does life extension have a place in its aesthetic psyche for 'sex'?
Why are male grooming and 'sex' inveterately convolved?
What if there was no 'sex' in science fiction?
These are some of the questions we should explore.
Welcome!
An interesting twist on the old aphorism, 'there's no accounting for genius'.
A reliable source has informed us that an artist on the brink of Miro-level recognition takes dictations, formats correspondence, makes photocopies, and generally toils away in the lower echelons of the haunted, hallowed Googleplex halls by day, without a care for Web 3.0 and C++, but with much care for charcoal sketches and cracked compositions. It seems that the mindlessness of administrative and receptionist work allows her creative faculties to fully focus on abstract scapes and expressive portraits.
Brancusi
This is not a unique brilliance-inversion. It has happened many times throughout history. To note a few:
In fact, it is nearly statistically certain that the greatest creative minds that ever set foot in the Googleplex will be outsiders, visitors, payroll clerks, food servers, and rejected job applicants.
Sure, the rank-and-file intelligent minds will all be Google engineers and programmers, buttressing the continuing web revolution in an incremental fashion, but no Faulkners, Renoirs or Turings from thence will spring. 'Tis a mathematical certainty.
Sorry to be the ones to reveal this, Googlers.
The Google 'Idea Board'
So playful and imaginative. Matisse should take heed.
We feel kind of spiteful, but we cannot help but be mildly amused at how the news will break while the Googlers are playing Nerf soccer and vintage video games in the happy, fun rooms, or lounging in the spas and jacuzzis, feeling playful yet creative, brilliant yet whimsical, innovatively peerless, and then it will leak out that this hard working, scorned clerk has risen like the Kraken to artistic prominence, leaving every Googler in the dust in terms of pure creativity.
Someone has to knock the Googleplex down a few notches. Recognition of a lack of pure genius among its 'elite' is a perfect way to accomplish this. And for that, we have the splendid juxtaposition of a rising visual artist and a bunch of overly complacent, deluded-about-their-genius, techies.
A hater couldn't ask for a better scenario than the one that's about to unfold.
Klee
Our source? A Google employee whom we are acquainted with who befriended this artist at a nearby Burger King and learned of her accomplishments and that she was on the brink of fame. If you work at Google, you may already know her.
More of that caprice
More Google dalliance, or, should we say, Googliance.
Although presently a respected name in many artistic circles, she has somehow managed to keep it a secret that she works at Google, fearing it would negatively affect her artistic aspirations, but she also realizes that if an upcoming installation receives enough press coverage, allowing her to reach that critical mass, she is prepared to reveal herself to her employer. By the way, local San Francisco art blogger, The Laughing Squid, is aware of her, but has no idea about her day job.
Leger
Kutscherauer
Once we get the ok, we will post a mini gallery of her paintings.
Are we catty bitches or what?
And, to wrap things up:
We are certainly not frustrated techies.
We never worked for a large IT company, nor applied for work at one.
We is just roiling the kettle!
Endless exposure to coolness via mass culture channels reinforces my distaste for those who underestimate the general public.
Similar verbal meter:
If we are to assume those whales are ours to do with as we please, we would be as guilty as those who caused their extinction.
Skynet became self aware in 2258. There is gain and loss in self awareness. The loss is plain and heart shattering: never again can movie monster films populate with screaming Japanese citizens, fleeing in panic. All such scenes filmed now are post-self aware and, thus, neutered, dull, self-parody.
It is a worse state than jumping the shark, which almost always dramatically precedes self-aware.
There is a finite pool of pre-sentient Godzilla footage.
The rest is heresy.
The comic panel takes place in New York's dank storm sewer channels. It is abyssal, deep, planar, absolute and the Marvel of modern comic book monster movie craftsmanship.
The mammalian horror wends a woven wave against the reptilian wrathfulness and hopes that brindly fire douses weepy waves whilst the window of life weeds out the warlike long ancient dinosaurs for all time for the hirsute beast's reign and the arctic rain crying down the glacier bed for honeyed ever splendid middle of the night song and trickling dance that drops from the swiveling hips to where the fairy sings.
Happy that honor and fairy waltz the speckled waltz, flit the tangled trot and bound the strumming minuet?
Renaissance Xer: 1. Someone from Generation X who has, over time, acquired a large, broad base of knowledge, in many fields, via audodidactic post-college and post-formal education means. 2. A typically intelligent Generation Xer, who is almost invariably possessed of a wide, expansive base of knowledge that slowly accretes over time.
Reawaken your youthful princess crush with the edgy, updated Leia's Metal Bikini site.
This ad has been out for a while, but we just caught it today. It speaks manuals in a multimedia alchemy of succinct tea titles and deadpan delivery.
Teas:
Quite clever. Quite useful. Watch.
Let's say I have two cups from the night before, one that contained soda and one that contained dry cereal, and I want to have soda and cereal again tonight, and, most importantly, I am lazy, so I do not feel like washing both cups.
So, I will wash, at most, one cup.
What should I do?
Solution below:
Wash the cereal cup and use it for soda.
Rinse the soda cup and use it for cereal.
Why? It is easier to wash the cereal cup, and, thus it will take less energy to clean and make ready for any usage, including a beverage, whereas the soda cup will take more energy to clean thoroughly, but, with just a rinse, it becomes usable for cereal, which does not absorb the cup's residue the same way that a beverage does.
There is something deep and universal here.
There is a law of nature that I do not see but feel. The inversion. The dreamstate.
Rods. Champ. Inner Earth Beings. Steve Wozniak.
The surreal holographic redundancy.
They make me walk along the moonlit path and look up at the stars in wonder, with carnival-adoring Whitman as my guide.
Soda: Cherry Coke Zero
Cereal: Honey Nut Cheerios
Although many Hulk fans on various forums brag about how the Hulk easily won this brief When Titans Collide encounter, I finally got a chance to check it out. It is actually a flashback from an earlier comic book.
True, The Hulk got a few good shots in on an a surprised and unprepared Hercules, but as soon as Hercules got serious, he stopped the Hulk's assault with one fist.
Conclusion: Inconclusive.
Read more about it at Comic Vine.
You might not think it possible, but Time magazine's Nerd World blog is tame but satisfying light reading that covers all *impulse areas: the newest gadgets, up and coming sci-fi and graphic-novel-based movies, nerdy music, and video games.
It all seems a little contrived and full of artful device, but, as a Grecian goldsmith would attest, every sincere poet wishes to be gathered into the artifice of eternity. And, it is more easily paced than the frantic Engadget and its spawn.
The Canonical List of Free Print-and-Play Games at boardgamegeek.com
Donald Seagraves did all the work, and we have not tried even one of these game yet, but we definitely believe and trust a friend who insists that this list will make it possible to never have to visit Toys R Us or Wal-Mart, a comic book store, or anywhere else for that matter, for cool boardgames again. We are sold on this prospect and are currently browsing the lists from this meta-list for the best sounding ones.
Happy gaming.
The photo is of counters from Demonlord, The Epic Game of Sorcery and Conquest.
agencynet.com web development employment opportunities
I have been coming across job listings all the time while browsing for a web developer. I should probably post them here for those interested. This is the first of many.
They appear to be seeking developers skilled with Flash, JavaScript, ASP.NET and CSS.
I am supposed to be focused on browsing Flash developers, but agencynet had the nerve to place an enticing word search on their Capabilities page. Now, I am fully aware of their eBranding, microsite-development, and advergame abilities, but I have just wasted several minutes solving their puzzle, which is a fine example of interactive eBranding, by the way.
And, apparently they know talent when they see it, since they said that I should consider working there. Quite delightful, but, at this moment, I am much more interested in finding a skilled Flash development team than becoming a part of one.
Fractals, Cellular Automata, and Fibonacci Numbers:
The trivium is complete.
The instant 'in' for aspiring geek scholars is laid bare.
The pond surges. The heath bends against the plasma vortex. The hermit shrieks.
Levitated.net's Invader Fractal would have been a useful tool for early video game design, and, in a MOMA Digital Installation-kind-of-way, is a quirky game-like experience in and of itself, although I dread that critics from The New Yorker would expound more on what statement about viruses, xenophobic anxiety, and the asymmetry of modern society, the artist was trying to express than about the sheer fun imparted to gamers.
The underlying game engine is actually a 'region of space filled recursively with 15 bit combinatoric objects affectionately called Invaders', which is another way of saying that Hercules is fighting the Hydra.
This site generates the same giddy-positivistic resonation as Gizmodo and io9. And, anyone who browses and thinks it rant and madness should read biographies on Newton, Van Gogh, Lewis Carroll, and Mary Lamb, and then delve into a cryptogram, followed by a difficult sudoku puzzle, then an old-school GRE logic games section, and then write a sonnet.
This should effectively eliminate any false posturing of the sort that can hinder progress, enlightenment and understanding. Embrace Technology Review, New Scientist, Engadget, and, now, halfbakery, and realize that the threshold between them is permeable and uncertain.
Anything else, and the savants will slip by unnoticed to everyone's detriment.
Illustration is a T-Shirt decal, designed by Jutta Degener, available on a webpage on www.panix.com
Critical fumble decks, dice, battle maps, miniatures, character sheets, books, dungeon walls and doors, artifacts, relics, potions, rings, staves, scrolls, tomes, manuals, charts, maps, crystal balls, wands: game aids or gadgets?
The threshold between the real-life prestidigitations of d20 and the rods, staves, and wands wielded and spun in the fantasy matrix is tenuous and, on certain evenings, disappears altogether, leaving a sprawling band of errants brandishing swords and pointing mystic bolts at each other while rampaging down back alleys and Silicon Valley.
Since Engadget really isn't a geek site, perhaps DMGadget could be a misfitted alternative that touts the latest epic spell component as vigorously as the latest XML expression.
Mini sketched armory by Nicholas Webb
I am almost at the point of a hypergraphic burst and, where once it would have flowed onto countless reams of copy paper and notepad files, it will now flow into the sorting digital Coinstar of our TypePad blog, *impulse.
Let it all go, the power and content. All the teachings. All the musings, the meanderings, the wild ideas, the dreams.
Once my writer's thoughts connect with the blogging content entry fields and keyboard interface, then the renaissance will truly begin and it will be glorious. It will never stop. It will be intellectual, fun, every whim, comments on Charmed, on Keats, on Xbox, on iPhone, on beauty, on Chai Tea, on Titian, on antiaging, on veganism, on politics, on anything and everything.
A sweeping away of insincere artificial content traces will result, leaving behind only the artificial vessel, the container for the sincere prose to spill into, like a beaker full of geeky gadgets, with beaded bubbles winking at the cosmos, and happy happy blogging ecstasy.
This is a far better approach than arbitrary sincerity, which, imho, would mean just cutting and pasting intimate notepad files right into blog entries and posting them. It is better to unify with the blog administrator's interface, like Schelling's romantic horse merged in form and substance with its magical rider, than it is to take what was meant for private reflection and post it for all to see.
Left as legacy from the artifice might be the capping off of posts with aphoristic hermit urgings and dulcet asides, purely so that thematic and aesthetic pattern unity would run throughout the entire site, through every post, every blog-muttered word.
Comet dust, spill down on to me and cast your eerie glow across the heath so that I may see, in quicksilvery opacity, the enormous truths strewn throughout the many eternities of joy and tomorrow.
Screencapture is from JUXT Interactive's MySpace Cherry Coke campaign
Loose, subjective impressions of microformats and the communities that develop them:
This blog, microformats, hAtom, and every other essential wrinkle and being, psychically gather in a secluded Greenwich Village pub. It is some sort of cyber back door into quirky, literary web goings on, much more obscure and offbeat than the galactic channels opened by the upswelling paradigm shifts affected by microblogging, bioinformatics, and Ajax programming.
There is something about the witty, intelligent, impoverished, and fascinating people involved in microformatting that emits a resonation quite unlike the aura of a gadget lover's fair or the giddiness of a tech conference, but, rather, more like the perning gyres of The New Yorker magazine and the Lilliput Review .
End of loose subjective impressions.
The stuttering staggering lateral steps, the lurching, loping quest toward the Tron-geek singularity:
It is truly a new age
Screenshot is of the Science Fiction room by sciencefictioncomputer
Look out, Superman and The Incredible Hulk, a list of invincible beasts in mythology is being compiled here: monsters that will make you quake in your spandex and shredded trousers!
Though qualified and watered down for modern fantasy and role playing games, the medieval dragon was often invulnerable to physical attacks, was primordial, fearsome, and unbelievably huge, and would doubtlessly give Superman, The Hulk or Silver Surfer the business in a really quick and effortless manner.
Bartholomaeus Anglicus notes of the serpent: "for to the end to slay anything, to him venom is not needful, for whom he findeth he slayeth"
And, further, from the Harley MS 4751 (Harley Bestiary): "It is harmless as to poisons, but they say poisons are not needful to
this creature for dealing death, because if it has caught any one in
its coils, it kills him."
And, in the cascading style sheets of invincibility, the most ancient is prioritized, for it is cryptozoological, frightening, immense, and terrifying.
Up next, perhaps the Basilisk, Catoblepas, or the Kraken.
Nothing systematic here. Just a few incomplete bullet point summaries of but a few of the ways that Star Wars has been perceived and interpreted over the last 30 years:
Star Wars The Western: shootouts, corrupt mayors with large posses, chase scenes, loner cowboys who oppose the status quo.
Once Upon a Time In the West
Star Wars The Fairy Tale: poor farm boy embarks on an adventure which eventually leads him into confrontation with and triumph over ultimate evil.
Jack and the Beanstalk, Hansel and Gretel.
Star Wars The Comic Book: masked villains, super powers, space craft, super weapons that can destroy the planet.
The Fantastic Four, The Avengers, Superman
Star Wars The Legend: mystical swords and duels, armored warriors, impregnable fortresses, wizards, magic-like powers, princess rescue, exiled nobility, archetypal heroes and villains.
Arthurian, Scandinavian
A quick trivia question: Is Star Wars referenced in any Rush song?
And a parting thought: candy stripes fall, one per star, to the heath, and crickets begin their ascent, one per band, to the orbs, the whirling, whirring, spindle-tossing, ebbing and waxing orbs, the haloed, happy, greedy, flirty spheres. Nebulous splice, a crown-shaped splish, and a bossy Werdna hasten us through the halls and the vector dungeons. Where is Vader?
Link: Best Movie Villains.
Courtesy of the Miami Poetry Review.
Includes Frank Booth, Hannibal Lector, Norman Bates, Tommy DeVito, and Pazuzu, as depicted in The Exorcist: not as a demonized agricultural deity, but as a 1970s potty mouthed interloper. Though, on a slightly critical note, no list of screen villains is complete without Ralph Fiennes' terrifying depiction of Amon Goeth: absolutely merciless.
A splendid list with humorous commentary.
Screenshot is of Darth Vader from The Empire Strikes Back.
References to Death Cab For Cutie, MIT's Technology Review, skateboarding, tattoos, rock climbing, and much more. Check him out.
He is a definite honorary wunderkind, being young and pretty at 31, but he may not be enough of a nerd to enter the inner circle of antiaging4geekdom. ;-)
Geekbabe
Link: Bill Gates E-Mail Reveals His Frustration With Windows, Too - Switched.
The advertisement will probably be gone by the time you click on the link, but it was just a great pairing, a memorable mashup, courtesy of Switched.com on AOL Tech:
Bill Gates in a picture, circa 1985, as the lead photo for an article on the Microsoft master, and Lance Johnson in a vitamin supplement advertisement. Together. Side by side. Gates all congenial and happily resigned, and Johnson all alpha male-ish and yet, somehow, friendly as well.
Twins' Julius Benedict meets Real Genius.
Bruce Jenner and Anthony Michael Hall.
The Woz and David Beckham.
Mark Zuckerberg and Mark Zuckerberg. Even though geeky and very quirky in a good way, for some reason, something about this guy just screams frat house.
Not as far apart as one might think in this age of consilience.
OK, it seems that our recent posts are heading toward a singularity which can only be reached via compiling a list of beings in mythology, comic books, role playing games, film, and television, that are explicitly described as being possessed of unlimited strength or force, indestructibility, irresistibility, or invincibility.
As a contrary example, though Galactus and Silver Surfer may be extremely powerful, it is never explicitly stated, or implied beyond a doubt canonically, that their powers are unlimited [like Hercules], or that they are superlative in their powers [like He-Man], and thus, they are excluded from the list. But, if you think you may have heard or read that a being has unlimited power and can't remember your information source, then we can tentatively include him/her/it, pending validation.
So far, we have:
Illustration is of the Marvel Comics villain, Blob.
If anyone cares to try:
dkm software's Sudoku Online
Puzzle number: 58244723
Difficulty level: Supreme
I solved this puzzle with no penciling in of possible values, but rather, with nothing but mental imaginings.
Did several others at the Supreme difficulty level in this challenging fashion just prior to solving this one, but didn't think to notice game number or to get screenshot.
Just starting to play sudoku, btw. Kind of avoided it for a while.
Affected meteoric rise from absolute novice puzzles to difficult ones, now solved with no penciling in of possibilities and no use of other mind-alleviating crutches, in about a week.
Who is the baddest?! ;-)
Just saw The Incredible Hulk (grade: B) and quickly began to think of Hulk vs. different superheroes, mythological beings, movie monsters, Dungeons & Dragons beasts, and science fiction entities, particularly from Star Wars.
The Superman vs. Hulk match up is as old as time and was sort of resolved in a Marvel-DC Crossover comic books miniseries, with Superman winning, but this was based on popular vote. As if basing the properties of the elements of the periodic table on a popular vote would decide their nature forevermore. This is science. Hard facts, cold data, metrics, and calculations should have been employed to determine the victor, a la Animal Face Off. Nevertheless, Superman vs. The Hulk is a great confrontation.
I Googled a few more match ups, such as Hulk vs. The Silver Surfer and Hulk vs. The Emperor, and then remembered a descriptive line from Deities & Demigods, an early Advanced Dungeons & Dragons volume: 'Nothing he can't lift, nothing he can't bend, and nothing he can't break'. I believe this described Hercules, though it may have been describing Atlas.
Was this unlimited strength game-determined or was it derived from myth? The 11th Labor of Hercules involved Hercules holding up the heavens, but it is not clear whether the heavens were supposed to be THAT heavy to the ancient Greeks. The balance of the tales are all brutal and might very well imply that Hercules has god-infused strength.
Results: Hercules over The Hulk, Superman, Silver Surfer, Palpatine, and the rest of them.
You need not look in modern graphic novels to find superheroes.
The ancient mythologies contain the most exciting, sci-fi, gadget-laden, powerful, magical, superhuman, and charismatic beings the world has ever known.
But, finally, before seeming to imply that modern comic book heroes are anything less than awesome, they DO have a certain style and they do rule. Their costumes are unparalleled. Their adventures are geekriffic in the best of ways, and they excite in a way that the ancients do not.
I never thought I'd stumble upon this in my archives, and, if I did, I promised myself I would destroy all copies of it and never let it be seen by human eyes. But, what the heck? Here it is. :)
The year is 1998:
I was trying to impress a girl [a few actually] by telling her that I was going to master a programming language in order to join in on and merge with the IT/dotcom craze that was stirring and fomenting at the time.
For some reason, perhaps the world wide web buzz surrounding it, I chose Java. And, to accompany my inspiration, desire, and excitement, I wrote a poem...
Since then, I have become fairly proficient at reading and understanding code, and pretty much 'getting' all of IT for that matter, at some novice to intermediate level, even some of the more advanced mathematical stuff, but I never mastered any subfield or programming paradigm well enough to be able to use it as an artistic medium in the way that I fancy I use pencil and paper, the written word, and the primordial sketch. Thus, this poem's argument still remains an elusivity.
Without further adieu, I present, in unparalleled geekness, peerless corniness, and skin-crawling doggerel, worse than an 80s haircut and comparable to Three's Company's most horribly sentimental moment, 'Learning Java Well', the first and only poem that will appear on *impulse:
Learning Java Well
Why haven’t I learned Java well yet?
I do not feel the urgent press yet.
I will soon, very soon.
Java will rise within me like the moon,
And I will surely know it.
In my bosom: It will be true.
I will be the most fluid Java poet.
I will soon be able to woo
Every dryad girl with lustery jewels.
All the moon burnished maiden’s feet
Will be pattering along my silken beach.
At night, they will haunt my meadow like ghouls.
I think I will want to glide with them too,
But I will be too attentive to crafting
The abstracted struts and crossing beams
That make a program like a tenuous fancy wafting
In logical certainty but within a dream.
Such ethereal constructions as these
Will bring the fairy palaces to me
As well as all the forest that I please
And rivers that hem between the stony trees.
But only nymphs that wander vagrantly,
Dallying and dreaming far within the night,
Who let me rescue them so gallantly,
While they have slipped into a state of fright,
Will have my honor as they fill my halls
And scuff their jeweled dresses along the ground.
I will answer to their slightest shriek or call
Then listen to their warbling peacock sounds.
Friendly wolves and bears would only roam
About my pastures and my dappled gardens.
They could be heard as they often moaned:
The dewy, floating damsels made them ardent.
Looks like a hoax but still worth checking out.
The Running Man from OTR Escape 11/2/1952
Any digital history book, or Wikipedia for that matter (UNIVAC), will highlight the 1952 presidential election and its use of the UNIVAC I Mainframe computer to tabulate votes and predict the outcome, but during an intermission of Old Time Radio program Escape's episode The Running Man, it was noted, with awe, that it could tabulate faster than any man.
It is kind of exciting that this episode aired election night and conveyed some computer excitement that was already present in the early 1950s.
A great show.
A glimpse of 1952's popular view of computers.
Perhaps the spark to ignite a lifetime of OTR (Old Time Radio) enjoyment.
Stumbled upon this and liked the blogger's aspirations, accomplishments, aesthetics, philosophy, visions and renaissance person range of interests. The only thing I differ with is some of the influences and shout outs. I wonder if someone so vibrant and ready to build 'the culture of tomorrow', with such abstruse musical conceptualizations can really like Stanley Kubrick...2001 A Space Odyssey, excepted, of course, because it is awesome. But, the balance of Kubrick is, imho, overrated and stagnant.
The spelling is another highlight: either purposefully or via stream of conscious phonetics, is visually pleasing.
Link: Matt Searles.com Home.
This looks pretty interesting: different from Facebook, MySpace, LiveJournal, Twitter, GoogleDocs, and other file sharing and storing, social networking, and blogging services and sites, particularly in the way information is associated with individuals and groups.
I should like to incorporate this into my digital organization, but I am not sure if I will. Pretty cool nonetheless.
Link: PersonalGrid™.
