If there is one person or more on your friends list who makes your world a better place just because they exist and who you would not have met (in real life or not) without the internet, then post this same sentence in your journal.

Current Mood: glad

What happens if you're some animators who take inspiration from Moebius, Heavy Metal, bad 80s cartoons, Nausicaa and prog rock album covers? You get The Parachute Ending, and it is good.

And then, if you'd like to play a browser-based flash puzzle game that's dead easy and has excellent visual design, try Little Wheel.

Finally, I was going through older blog posts by ToplessRobot who runs geek contests from time to time, and discovered a great collection of Robot Haiku (nsfw).

I don't always remember these, but Happy Birthday, thewerewolf!

Now that the daytime weather is turning warm and it's still light out by 7 pm, this afternoon I started cleaning up outside the house. All the leaves I was too lazy to rake up last fall before the first snow, are now raked and bagged. Even so, the backyard still looks a mess, due to wood chips everywhere from when I had a tree removed last month. It was healthy, but cast so much shade my garden didn't grow very well. Mind you, my garden also didn't grow well because of the gumbo soil and my heavy antipathy towards weeding.

I also finished destroying a horrible old cupboard inside the garage that took up space. After several hours with a hammer and a borrowed crowbar, I had two dozen pieces of wood and twice that many nails. The crappy wood has been stored in the garage's rafters using the "out of sight, out of mind" philosophy. Then I went around removing any prominent nails inside the garage that posed a potential hazard. End result: safer, slightly more spacious crappy garage, for the few times a friend visits and doesn't want to park their car on the street.

Objects accidentally destroyed: A pair of light winter gloves, and some young raspberry shoots.

Objects found: A spare key to my house in the garage (badly hidden); a muddy, weathered pair of drumsticks; a tiny useless handsaw; a bent fireplace poker.

Current Mood: tired

Glum Buster is a recently-released indie game I've been playing this week that will keep you occupied for about 4-6 hours. It's rather hard to describe without giving away spoilers. I'd probably categorize it as a platformer-puzzler-art game with a gradual, exploratory pace. You need both hands to play; one to use the arrow keys and the other to use the left and right mouse buttons.

There are five chapters to explore. Along the way, you can collect hats, five special butterflies, and little yellow things called "grins". Some grins are hidden; you basically have to walk into them to find them. Other grins are acquired when you defeat enemies. Supposedly there are 275 grins to collect, which I think is only possible if you defeat multiple enemies simultaneously, the first time you meet them.

What really sold me on this game is the atmosphere, the graphics and the level design. My only complaint is that it's too *dark* - I don't meen moody, I mean I occasionally had to turn my monitor's gamma levels way way up so I could see things. Even so, this is a very well-designed game, definitely worth checking out. A worthy successor to Seiklus!

Current Mood: chipper

From atara - I had to do this meme, I'm a big fan of animation! And yet despite that claim, there's a ton of animated films I haven't seen.


( Put under cut )

I like certain pieces of minimalist music. Not all of it. I never want to listen to Philip Glass' Einstein on the Beach ever again, but I'll always enjoy Glassworks and it was also great to hear parts of the Koyaanisqatsi soundtrack show up in Watchmen. On the other hand, the brief satire made of him in an early South Park episode is spot-on.

Another composer frequently mentioned alongside Glass is Steve Reich. Reich sometimes makes "additive music", where he'll have a repetitive background thing going on, and then he'll play a single note, which repeats each cycle. Then he adds a second note, and both notes repeat. Then he adds another note, so now there's three repeating... and he'll keep adding notes to the cycle until it's a closed melody and you're not quite sure where it originally began anymore. I enjoy this.

Here's a short example, from Music for 18 musicians. Listen to the foreground xylophone (or marimba, or whatever it is), and you'll hear what I mean by additive. (Incidentally, there's also a bass pattern near the end, following a beat that goes 6-4-3-3-2-1-[5 silent] that I really like.)

Now here's a second example, self-plagiarising slightly, from Reich's Electric Counterpoint. By the way, if this is giving you a melodic sense of deja-vu, it's because some of it was used in this.

Why am I bothering to post about this? Because I just found Tonematrix. Fill in any squares you like. Time moves from left to right. Add more squares, slowly, and voila! You too can make additive music! Yep, I'm enjoying this thing a *lot*.

Going through grade school doing French immersion, we were forced to read and analyze The Little Prince three separate times, to the point that it's no longer any fun to read. So it is with great joy that I came upon a wonderfully skewed version of another over-used childhood story, from Fables de La Fontaine. Bless you, Bombird! (If it looks too small, click to enlarge.)

Thanks for the book suggestions, too! :)

Anyone heading out to Worldcon in Montreal this summer? I'd like to organize some panels and such but need a headcount.

Current Mood: curious

A thin moon and a very bright Venus close together! Low, to the west.