Can’t go wrong with Moog synthesizers. The bloopier, the better. This is first-rate stuff. But nothing prepared me for the end. (Not even the title of the video, which I apparently didn’t read before watching it.)
(From here via here. And just in case you were wondering…)
I’m not sure anyone else on the planet has taken notice, but I for one have enjoyed a recent addition to this site — the “On This Day in Room 34 History” panel in the middle column of the home page. It is programmed to automatically display an excerpt and link to any posts I’ve ever made on the current date in years past, going back to the earliest days of the blog-ified version of my site in 2002.
Today’s historical artifact is of particular interest. It is a short story I wrote in 2003 called “The Poster.”
It’s interesting (to me, anyway) because I rarely write fiction. I wrote a lot of short stories, and poems too, for that matter, back in middle school and high school, but since then, nothing. Well, almost nothing. Just this one short story, six years ago today.
Why did I write it? I can’t really say. I literally just woke up that morning with the entire story fully formed in my mind. As soon as I got to work — yeah, I blogged a lot at work back in those days; it was my way of surviving a semi-pointless job in a rat-infested basement of an old house in the northern Atlanta suburbs that had been converted into an office — I set about writing it.
It doesn’t happen a lot, but I do occasionally wake up in the morning with a creative spark for some ridiculous project like this. Most of the time I either lose interest or inspiration before I get around to doing anything with the idea. Sometimes, as was the case last week when I got an idea for a second RPM album, I’m motivated enough by the idea that I get right down to the business of executing it, but it ends up not living up to the vision and I abandon it. And on the rarest of occasions, it actually comes together and I nail it.
Well, I’m not totally sure I nailed it with “The Poster.” I sure thought I nailed it right after I had written it. But now, looking back on it having not read it in at least five years, I’m not so sure. It definitely has the quality of a dream where it seems to exist in a small, enclosed world with its own twisted logic. When examined critically as a work of short fiction, it’s probably rubbish (just like the objet d’art it so prominently features), but taken as a recounting of a typically bizarre dream vision, it’s kind of cool.
At any rate, if it’s fiction you’re looking for, this is all I have to offer. Enjoy.
This one’s making the rounds… Daring Fireball and Cabel Sasser at the very least, but it bears sharing.
I’ve had this game on both the PC and the NES, and I’ve tried it in MAME. It’s way cool… way ahead of its time… and way crazy-hard. But I loved it, even though I was never any good at it.
I’ve never actually had the opportunity to play it the way it was meant to be played — with a trackball in an arcade cabinet. But I have a feeling that even if I did it would require years of practice for me to play it this well:
As a kid I often wondered if the whole “dig a hole to China” idea really held water. I was suspicious that my hole through the center of the Earth wouldn’t actually come out within the boundaries of Asia’s most populous nation.
Of course, at the time I was probably so young that I wasn’t aware that China was Asia’s most populous nation, considering that I also somehow thought such a hole would actually be possible to dig. Oh yeah, and I never just, you know, looked at a globe to prove that it was a ridiculous proposition.
For a long time now, I’ve realized that line drawn from Minnesota through the center of the planet would emerge on the other side somewhere in the remote vastness of the southern Indian Ocean, but I never knew where until antipodr came along. Now I know that it would be roughly midway between Perth, Western Australia and the Kerguelen Islands, a place I have known about for approximately 5 minutes now, and which is apparently populated predominantly by feral cats, rabbits and sheep introduced by human visitors over the past couple of centuries. Sweet.
Well… I’m off to the garage for my shovel. Gotta start digging sometime!
I think it was probably around 1983 that I got my first Rubik’s Cube. Wasn’t that the year they really hit big in the U.S.? Anyway, I just never had the patience or the logical foresight to be able to solve it. Never. Not once. Oh, sure, I was able to solve one side. I think once I might have solved two. But I could never envision how to put it all together. It’s the same reason I suck at chess.
Before long, I knew that it wasn’t possible to just solve the whole thing one side at a time. And, unnervingly, when you were closest to having the whole puzzle solved, just a couple of turns away from a complete solution, there would be a sequence of moves where none of the sides were solved. That was just too much for my 9-year-old brain.
Eventually I just gave up on ever solving my Rubik’s Cube. It didn’t help that I had also learned that you could turn one side to a 45-degree angle, pop out the middle edge piece, and easily disassemble the entire thing, reassembling it in perfect order. And so it was, that my speedy solution to the Rubik’s Cube, sadly, always involved a screwdriver.
This year my parents gave me a Rubik’s Cube for Christmas. (It’s OK… that’s not the only thing they got me for Christmas. I also got this, which rocks.) Today I decided, by gum, I’m gonna solve it! Of course, not on my own. These days Rubik’s Cubes ship with a little pamphlet revealing the magical seven-step solution. (No, not seven moves, more like a hundred or so. But seven basic logical steps.)
I was doing great… halfway through the seventh and final step, when… well, the whole thing fell apart. Not literally. They’re made pretty well — and it’s no longer possible to pop out the edge piece with a screwdriver. (Don’t ask me how I know that it’s no longer possible. I just have my ways.)
I realized after a moment of fretting that I had misinterpreted part of Step 7. I was left with this:
One good side, and five sides of crap. (Much like Yessongs. Sorry… had to say it. Not too often you can work in a joke about a 36-year-old prog rock triple live album. By Yes.)
After dinner I was sufficiently distanced from my devastating defeat that I was willing to have another go, and this time… success!
