The Most Important Quiz EVER
How ready are you for the inevitable zombie apocalypse? It’s coming, don’t kid yourself. I know, we all think we’re ready, but is that enough? Don’t you want to know for sure? I mean, beforehand, not like, at the bottom of a zombie pile or something.
You Can’t Talk Your Way Out of It
Why you should always use your right to remain silent. There are no exceptions. Let this law professor and police detective tell you why:
Pre-Weekend Prep
Here’s where I get to throw some random cool thing at you for the weekend ahead. I heard somewhere that we, as a people, have a congnitive surplus. This should help with that.
Yeah, it's a big box.
This is a tabletop game where you create a dank dangerous dungeon, throw in your friends, and kill them. One player is the Overlord, Master of All That is Bad and the other players (up to 4) are the Heroes that will attempt to defeat you by killing your precious monsters and taking all your best treasure.
It’s great fun, and comes complete with character cards, tons of counters, and a big double handful of detailed plastic monsters. There are several expansions which add new scenarios, heroes, and creatures, as well as a game altering one called Road to Legend, which turns the whole thing into a heroic campaign of epic proportions(tm). RtL really rocks, as it adds evil plots for the Overlord to work towards, as well as overland encounters, city sieges, massive power upgrades for heroes, and a final showdown against the Overlord himself. Swanky.
There are even tons of extra scenarios you can get for free, right here.
Get to work, those monsters aren’t going to kill themselves.
Not Meant to Last
The Prelenger Archives can be found here. Why should you care? In their own words:
Prelinger Archives was founded in 1983 by Rick Prelinger in New York City. Over the next twenty years, it grew into a collection of over 60,000 “ephemeral” (advertising, educational, industrial, and amateur) films. In 2002, the film collection was acquired by the Library of Congress, Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division. Prelinger Archives remains in existence, holding approximately 4,000 titles on videotape and a smaller collection of film materials acquired subsequent to the Library of Congress transaction. Its goal remains to collect, preserve, and facilitate access to films of historic significance that haven’t been collected elsewhere. Included are films produced by and for many hundreds of important US corporations, nonprofit organizations, trade associations, community and interest groups, and educational institutions. Getty Images represents the collection for stock footage sale, and almost 2,000 key titles are available here. As a whole, the collection currently contains over 10% of the total production of ephemeral films between 1927 and 1987, and it may be the most complete and varied collection in existence of films from these poorly preserved genres.
The attractiveness of the archive isn’t just in the content, although a lot of it really is pretty cool, it’s in the way the content is presented. An amateur or non-commercial short film that is completely dedicated to its subject matter and niche audence can achieve a sort of purity that is very endearing.
If you enjoy it, check out the greater Internet Archive that contains it.
We Feel Fine
We Feel Fine is an art project which scours the net for the words “I feel”, grabs the entire sentence and uses the expressed sentiment in a variety of ways. The datasets are cool, but the gallery is really where it’s at. The sentences are captioned onto the pictures associated with the posts that they were culled from. CAUTION: The gallery can be very, very not safe for work.
It interesting that inside this collection of random thoughts culled by bots, the hopeful, the inspiring, and the thoughtful far outweigh the rest. It makes me feel pretty damn good about us as a species.
“i can still sometimes feel you if the weather is just right.”
Monkey Brains Love Spaceship Rumbles
Like many of you, I’m something of a stickler for accuracy when it comes to Sci-Fi. I enjoy pointing out the odd foible as I exit the theater, and I confess to many an eye-roll while reading some poorly researched foray into the average Quantum Adventure Novel.
But I recently had an epiphany, and I wanted to share it with you. You’re welcome, please send money.
For our purposes here today, I’m going to assign each of you sophisticated, jaded readers two brains. One Modern Brain, which is full of coffee and code, and one Monkey Brain who’s job it is to keep you from getting eaten. Don’t underestimate the Monkey Brain, as its job is also to get you laid. At that point, the Modern Brain can kiss my ass. But I digress.
I want you to recall, many misty moons ago, when you saw Star Wars for the first time. Remember in the very beginning, after the giant slab of InfoDump serenely moved off into the distance, how that Big Ass(tm) Star Destroyer passed overhead, rumbling like an avalanche? Do you remember the dopplered whine of the Tie Fighters zipping past the camera during the later space battles? I do, and I remember two things that happened to me at the same time.
My Modern Brain leaned over to my companion and sneered, “Sound can’t propagate in a vacuum, what were they thinking?” But at the same time my Monkey Brain was screaming, “JESUS H CHRIST! THAT THING IS FUCKING HUGE! WHY ARE WE STILL HERE? GET UP OR WE MAY WET OURSELVES!” and “DUCK! DUCK! DUCK!”.
Monkey Brains love spaceship rumbles. They don’t know about vacuums, but they know a crapload about judging the size and speed of something from the sound it makes. (The exception to this is the Cheetah, which sounds like a small kitten and is quite capable of producing monkey chiclets anyway.) And the best part is that they share this information with you whether you want them to or not. Without this bit of input, my Modern Brain, having no scaling information in the frame, would have no way to tell how huge the ship was. That majestic moment would have been lost on me completely.
Of course I was too busy sneering at the time to thank the Monkey Brain.
I went along like this for years, until the night that I was rescued by The Little Mermaid.
Some friends and relatives were all gathered together for the holidays. Someone’s children had gotten a copy of Disney’s The Little Mermaid for Christmas. There’s a large musical number in the beginning that features Sebastian the Crab singing and dancing like crazy. After his performance he stalks off to do his master’s bidding, and someone, we’ll call him Sparky, bellows out the following information:
Crabs don’t walk like that!
Silence. Heads turn. Eyes roll. Now, strictly speaking, while this is true, they don’t SING AND DANCE either. And I opened my mouth and said, “You’re missing the point!”
And as those words left my largest head orifice, I realized that I had been missing the point, and harpooning exactly this kind of thing for decades.
Alas, I suck.
The next time you find yourself about to pick that nit, just take a deep breath and let your Monkey Brain thrill to the rumble of huge spaceships as they tow that 50 zillion tons of gravel across a tin roof, or whatever the fuck it is they do that makes that noise.
Your brain, and one very talented little crab, will thank you for it.
Fugitive Prose 