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Hey, Evan & Katelyn, what have you been up to? "Oh, you know, we made a bean phone case"
It's been a minute since we've had one of these, and boy does it seem like a good time for it: what are you playing, lately? What are the games (video and otherwise) that are keeping your attention, keeping your eyeline off Other Things, giving you the distraction and joy and dissociation and etc. that you need lately? What's good, what's bad-but-good, what are you revisiting, what are you looking forward to?
Beating Pokemon Platinum: not very hard. Easy game for babies.Beating all 4 billion+ different possible random seeds of Pokemon Platinum with a single static set of button presses: somewhat more complicated. But thanks to, among other things, intentionally sabotaging your own pets and using transdimensional mail to bifurcate reality now and then, youtuber MartSnake shows that it is in fact possible. [via RPS]
Edwin Evans-Thirlwell of Rock Paper Shotgun spends some time unpacking the implications of sanitizing, softening, and aggressively commoditizing the originally absurdist, monstrous post-human Imperial war-slaves of the Warhammer 40K universe in: Why play a fascist? Unpacking the hideousness of the Space Marine
Non-Euclidean Doom: A 2022 talk by Luke Gotszling about taking the already-very-slightly-wrong value of pi encoded in iD Software's seminal 1993 title Doom and pushing it into actually-quite-wrong values to see what will happen. (Nothing good will happen.)
Tom Walker tries desperately, with halting success, to complete some very basic missions in Grand Theft Auto 4 while all the cars on the map lose their fucking minds. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. Come for the comedy car deaths, stay for the slow evolution of a "this is a horror stealth game" playstyle that makes it at all possible to make progress.
Warning: sharp, startling static sounds
Turns out if you crash a GBA game and wait a couple hours, it will start singing the entire content of its memory to you: Dumping the ROM of a GBA game by crashing it
Turns out if you crash a GBA game and wait a couple hours, it will start singing the entire content of its memory to you: Dumping the ROM of a GBA game by crashing it
Vaporwave goodbye to the waking world in dreamcore95.exe, a chill, short idle game with impeccable vibes and, if that's not enough inducement, also a defragging widget.
Ivan Miranda decides to use a lot of 3D printing and a lot of hand tooling to, both figuratively and literally, roll his own seven-segment digital clock: Building a Marble Clock - part 1 and part 2.
Would you like to look at a truly boggling number of linear and circular slide rules, and related paraphernalia, on a website with a comfortingly 20th century aesthetic?
Of course you would, which is why you should spend some time at The Oughtred Society's Archive of Collections.
TW Lim writes about knife-sharpening as a process less about making a knife objectively, maximally sharp than about making a knife be what what it needs to be to do its particular job, in Forming an Edge. Don't miss the electron microsopy.
I bought a dremel a couple days ago after years of thinking about it; got here today, tested it out, and I'm already very satisfied with it being a good solution for the soft carving I was primarily getting it for (soapstone, anthracite coal, wood). But now I've got this good tool and no experience with it, so: what else might I want to get for it for carving/shaping art and craft purposes, and, hell, what else in particular have folks found themselves surprised/pleased to be able to accomplish in general with a rotary tool?
Bring Me To Life but it's Otamatones
Do you know your town like the back of your hand?
Then prove it, with, uh, Back Of Your Hand, a web game that asks you to identify randomly selected streets on a map and scores you on how close you got.
Got some legos, need to do some long-term planning? Guess you could make a billion-year clock.
The always wonderful Simone Giertz accidentally panders directly to me personally by choosing to make a robot out of stained glass.
I am contemplating a multi-session viewing of every Muppet cinematic release with friends. I would like to (primarily) match one period appropriate contemporaneous film and (secondarily) match some snack or meal with each film. Please give me your recommendations for some or all of these!
In How To Find Things Online, v buckenham looks at the web as an unwilling data source for Large Language Models (among other omnivorous machine learning projects), and how the changing incentives for both people making content and corporations hosting/controlling that content may undercut the assumption that useful information will continue to find its way into those hungry artificial hippos.
Pask Makes A Mid-Century Table: a chill and genial Aussie woodworker narrates his way start to finish through a very pretty one-off dining table project that I absolutely did not start watching just because of the tiling table top pattern. Includes a brief cameo by a placid, sleepy surprise python, because Australia.
Nothing survives transcription, nothing doesn’t survive transcription: a talk (or the text thereof, and, yes yes, you're very clever, now shut up and read it) about the fundamental inability of transcription to capture that which it is transcribing, by Mefi's Own Allison Parrish.
I'm spearheading a three-day bachelor party for a dear old friend, with a guest list of 15-20 folks total, and it's not something I've done before. My biggest blind spot here is logistics: I'm local to Portland and have plenty of go-to spots, but it's enough people that my usual small-group planning experiences don't feel sufficient. How can I best make this work seamlessly for a dozen and a half people who don't know my home town?
MeFi's Own Andy Baio on interacting with a world that wasn't designed with color-blindness in mind. Come for the interactive diagrams, stay for the solid The Purge joke.
Defrag your brain and pipeline the instruction set of your soul with Personal Computer, the most recent heavy-as-balls chiptune metal album from the always-excellent (and MeFi's Own) Master Boot Record.
Alexey Titarenko is a Russian photographer with a particular focus on long exposure and city photography, a combination that leads to stunning civic ghostliness as in, among other collections, City of Shadows (1991-1994), or the somewhat more restrained New York (2004-present). See also his photocollage of perestroika-era signs and symbols, Nomenclature of Signs.
How did the graphics on NES' Punch Out work? It's a little complicated!
Nirvana's Nevermind but with the Super Mario 64 soundfont
Weezer's Blue Album but it's me and my friend trying to sing everything from memory
About a year ago, Nashville musician Jim Lill asked: where does an electric guitar's tone come from? Lill has since asked a few more questions and done his best to document some answers in additional short entertaining videos:
- where does sustain come from?
- where does guitar string tone come from?
- does scale length affect the tone?
- where does speaker cabinet tone come from?
- where does amplifier head tone come from?
- where does sustain come from?
- where does guitar string tone come from?
- does scale length affect the tone?
- where does speaker cabinet tone come from?
- where does amplifier head tone come from?
"Sayable Space is a television game for 1 or more people, it consists of saying "Space" out loud at the same time as Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) during the intro to Star Trek: The Next Generation." See also, therein, "Mike's Crush", where you say hi to the very briefly visible anonymous cool smoking woman near the start of the Night Court intro that Mike may or may not have said at one point he had a crush on.
Using only a pixel baseball bat and one (or possibly more) balls, can you fend off an ever-increasing swarm of abstract dots? Find out in the delightful Vampire Survivors-alike Bases Loaded.
Throw the ball on the roof. 1. If you catch it when it comes down, that's a point. 2. If it hits the big chimney pipe, that's five points for a Ping. 3. If it goes up on one side of the ping pipe and down on the other, that's an Around for ten points. 4. If it hits the the small chimney pipe, that's a five point multiplier for the catch itself. 5. If it hits the grey Volvo on the way down, that's minus one point. 6. If it goes over the house, that's minus five points and you have to go get the ball.
Got it? Good. Let's play Roofball.
Got it? Good. Let's play Roofball.
A short surreal animated film by Felix Colgrave: DONKS.
Mondrian's Toothpicks Spent the last week executing an idea I had earlier this month: a stained glass piece based on the Toothpick Sequence, a simple mathematical ruleset about line-drawing that generates complicated results. I ended up going with four color scheme for the collection of rectangles and squares, and so: Mondrian's Toothpicks.
Passing on some sad news: long-time site member eotvos died earlier today after suffering a critical brain injury this weekend. He's survived by his wife, who knew his MeFi handle and may see this post; my condolences to you, and to everyone in the MetaFilter community who knew him either as a friend or as a familiar voice on the site.
Written In Stone: a collection of photographs of maker's marks in sidewalks.
Woodworker Olivier Gomis builds a wormhole-themed coffee table.
Mathematician and numeric encylopedstrian N. J. A. Sloane looks back on the history of his work and collaborations on what became the wonder that is the OEIS in a brief and very accessible paper, “A Handbook of Integer Sequences” Fifty Years Later.
All I Want For Christmas Is You except it's the Wii Shop channel music, or vice versa maybe
Narrative designer Bruno Dias (cf. Fallen London) presents: A [not yet] Compleat History of the Magic: the Gathering Metagame, an ongoing weekly series about the decades-long evolution of which kinds of decks competitive M:tG players were relying on in tournament play and exactly which stupid terrible broken cards were responsible for that before subsequently being banned from play forever. The story begins with Chapter 1: Magic as Dr Richard Garfield, PhD Intended.
Black Growth, Green Growth, and Creepy Eyes: three of a number of fascinating and unsettling procedural animations by rich_lord.
The year is very very definitely 1971, and these are Rare Moog Dancers.
I was just out with for lunch with a friend at a busy place and did my usual eye-contact-hand-signal request to clear out to the passing server, and that turned into a conversation about what, exactly, that hand signal actually means in like semantic terms.
Marine, aka moonovermarine, is a French embroidery artist much of whose work adapts imagery from games, movies, and other cultural wells. Their current project: a series of scenes from the monochrome ZX Spectrum game "Sentinel".
Want to hate Tetris, or for Tetris to hate you? The answer may be Hatetris (which you can play here), an adversarial Tetris game (by MeFi's Own qntm) that tries to serve you the worst possible pieces you could ever not hope for. Here's a detailed writeup of understanding and breaking the high score record by David & Filipe, who just shattered their previous record with 148 whole points.
Koch snowflake a little too symmetrical for you? Consider the Kochawave Curve [pdf] (arxiv.org page), a variant that leans hard to the side and has a number of interesting properties and tilings of its own.
Finishing my grandfather's work: stained glass menorah A few years ago my parents gave me my Grandpa Milt's old stained glass stuff, including a large unfinished menorah piece. I've spent the last two weeks finally tackling the logistically and emotionally complicated job of repairing and elaborating on his piece to create a finished work. This is a summary with photos of that process. I also created an exhaustive step-by-step process thread on the fly as I worked through the whole thing.
I've been thinking about hard-driving pop songs I love and one of the things I've recognized is how much I love emotive but club-ready tunes that have a driving but expertly musically well-rounded vibe like e.g. Robyn's "Dancing On My Own" and Carly Rae Jepsen's "Run Away With Me". That's a fuzzy definition but the key is: absolutely unstoppable pop production married to a lyrical vibe that has a stark emotional/narrative appeal.