Stillness

By KindaGamey On June 30th, 2008

A car accident in the downtown expressway tunnel, the wonders of the Mechanicsville Flea Depot, a VA Beach Disc Golf excursion; just so much to behold:

I’ve been busy figuring out the Universe.

This guy used to be a money-grubbing success hunter until he found Eckhart Tolle; now he only posts when he wants to too. So I guess its ok.

Bought two new games this weekend:

Ninja Gaiden is so difficult, but you will never be more in the NOW then when you are punching those buttons as millions of ninjas and creatures descend upon you – it has more strategy than you’d think – but strategy at light speed. (Demo available.)

Bad Company is really cute and I’m sure the multiplayer will be a hell of a good time. Destructable Environments should be mandatory from now on! (Demo available and strangely not as good as the real game.)

Solid

If you are a long-time reader of mine you already know and hate the “book” I wrote. I wrote it in broken-prose, which is like poetry but not. It’s regular prose broken up so that I can force you to read at the rhythm of my choosing rather than your own.

Click the banner (or right-click, Save As) to download the PDF. (293 KB)

It is pretty bitter, but I wrote it at a different time. Then again, there is something positive there too. Something I didn’t believe at the time, but totally believe now. How odd. The emphasis on geometry intrigues me as well.

Click Read More for an entire chapter.
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I Hate It When This Happens

By KindaGamey On June 24th, 2008

Uploaded a video:

Helped some buddies launch a website we’ve been working on:
http://www.tagline-media.com

And survived a five car pile-up in an expressway tunnel in the middle car that didn’t get scratched (well, it did get a light O impression in the bumper from a 350 truck, but it could have been much worse.) Somehow the spinning car missed us and chose to hit the car in front instead; pushing it out of the way and barely whipping past our bumper. I was just opening the window to take a picture of the tunnel lights for you guys when I heard the tires screeching behind me.

As I said before, it’s not my time to die.
Anyway, not bad for a day’s work.

Apocalypse Then

By KindaGamey On June 18th, 2008

Remember that Learning Every Day thing I talked about? Well don’t take a day off cause it’s hard to get back on track. The same goes for working out and trimming your ego.

And don’t download Fallout 1 and 2 unless you want to suck away all your free time and get nothing accomplished. Man, I’m excited about Fallout 3 (Oct 7, 2008), but going back and playing Fallout 1 – it is still so enjoyable and relevant even though it was released in 1997. It was an incredibly innovative 1950s-stylized alternate-universe post-apocalyptic turn-based RPG like the world had never seen. The only thing it needs is an auto-save because I keep dying and then screaming, “Oh No!” and then having to start over at the beginning. I think that’s why I never beat it.

Quantum Leap Award from Gamasutra – Fallout #1

Fallout 1 Intro (1997)

Fallout 3 Trailer – 2008

Fallout 1 & 2 + Patches .torrent
(If you don’t know what to do with that, see my post How to Steal Shit from the Internet.)

I can’t believe I’ve got all this computing hardware now and I’m playing the oldies. I should download Crysis to see what this baby can do, but I’m just blah about it. (And maybe scared.)

And now, something completely different

A woman who drives with a plate of spaghetti who stopped at the 7-11. View from a dog. Just so much goodness.

The Towed Martyr

By KindaGamey On June 18th, 2008

“Sedona is the worst place to have a car accident because you’ll be dying in the street… and people come by and say, “Why did you create that in your life?”"
- Nassim Haramein, rogue physicist, about the conscious co-creation phenomenon

The Towed Martyr

The turd got his car towed due to street cleaning. He moved it from one side of the street where they were cleaning to the other side where they cleaned the next day. We hope that if enough of these doh/dough moments stack up then one day he may turn out all right. And yet, 5 lost cell phones and 5 new driver’s licenses haven’t yet inspired caution and forethought. We love him.

When we got to the towing joint I spied one of the crossbeam trucks and I’ve always wanted to take this picture, but it was inside the DO NOT ENTER gate. I had to ask the guy at the window and he said, “We don’t like pictures” and I told him it’d be quick and he asked the mechanic and he asked the manager and pretty soon we had six guys standing around saying, “You want to take a picture of what?” Awk-ward! The turd was very brave and one of the towing guys actually lowered the beam for us. I was devastated when reviewing the first pic, his arms and head covered the crossbeams and ruined the picture, but the second one turned out fantastico.

Crossing the Event Horizon

I’m getting this 4-DVD set. Watch the short trailer at www.theresonanceproject.org.

He is asserting that the universe is not predisposed toward entropy – where everything falls apart and turns to dust – but that the universe is a self-ordering mechanism that is striving towards more and more complex creations through evolution and that each living creation is a feedback loop whereby information is exchanged to and from the universe itself. The nature of the structure of this universe, he believes, is geometry. (Pythagoras would have agreed. He made a religious cult out of it.)

There are things that truly resonated with me when I watched his lecture because I had already discovered them on my own:
1. The universe is fractal in nature.
2. The mysterious dark matter that scientists go on about is bullshit. They cocked up their equations and rather than admit it they just keep seeking for something that isn’t there. (4% of the universe is visible matter and 22% of the universe is hypothetical dark matter and 74% is hypothetical dark energy and 100% of that is hypothetical bullshit.)
3. Infinity is still possible within a closed system; like a sphere. (See #1.) Walk half the distance in a room, then half that, then half that to infinity – you never leave the room, but we can subdivide the space of that room forever.
4. Empty space is never empty.
5. We are each the center of our own universes.

Should be interesting.

Free Spore Trial

Try the demo creature creator for free. (PC or Mac.) Or, buy the full version of the creature creator for $9.99, and get $10 off the real game when it comes out in September.

Interesting tidbit: A guy at Joystiq found an old Spore-like boardgame.

Ticket to Ride (2004)

I forgot to tell you about my new board game, Ticket to Ride.

Players: 2-5 players
Age: 8 and up (we played with an 8 year old who did quite well)
Time: An hour or more

So far we’ve played it twice and I had a good experience both times. Once was even a two player game over beers in a redneck irish bar. (Luckily we attempted no pretense of ‘being cool’ and therefore were able to have a good game in a public setting.)

In the game you collect colored train cards until you have enough to lay down a route on the board, which gives you points. You can get tickets that will give you extra points for getting a route, but those points could be deducted at the end of the game if you don’t successfully connect the two cities. You must balance your greed for extra points with your ability to succeed. Simple. Elegant. Non-gamers and gamers alike can both enjoy.

A Dog That Seems To Know When His Owner is Coming Home
Videotaped Experiments and Observations

Rupert Sheldrake and Pamela Smart
Journal of Scientific Exploration 14, 233-255 (2000)
http://www.sheldrake.org/articles/pdf/40.pdf

In this paper we describe a series of videotaped experiments and observations with a dog called Jaytee, belonging to Pamela Smart (PS).

Basically, they tried to scientifically eliminate any way that the dog could acquire knowledge about when the owner was coming home. They had PS come home at varying times, from varying locations, via different methods of transportation (in case the dog was hearing the car.) They tried to make sure that the people in the house weren’t tipping the dog off by having PS paged at a random time to come home and by conducting the experiment both with people in the house and without. Each time the dog seemed to go to the window and wait for her as soon as she had the intent to go home. Scarily, sometimes the dog would go to the window before someone paged her to come back which inspired her intent to go home.

Interestingly, the dog went to the window more often when people were home than without; she still did it enough times without to indicate beyond statistical chance that the ‘telepathy/precognition’ was still there, but it was as if she did it more around people to indicate to the unaware humans that PS was on her way home.

Actual text from the pdf below, click read more:

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