Random links for June 10th.

It’s been a while since I posted a bit of randomness. Recent favorites:

Brodyquest “the best day of Adrien Brody’s life”.

82 Superheroes/Supervillains drawn as Mr. Men and Little Miss characters.

16 items they only sell at Chinese Walmarts

A pregnant Batman just shouldn’t be.

“George”, the George Costanza and Susan Biddle Ross saga dramatized.

Add comment June 10th, 2010

Megalodons! Awesome!

Hello!

I would like to reassure our blog-readers that the recent flooding of the Charles River did not drown us all, so, you can stop worrying now.

However, it did wash up this AWESOME megalodon.

It’s true.

[Unscramble this: erp-unneadewabdysov (Hints: More than 2 words, find it on our homepage). Go there.]

Add comment March 18th, 2010

Chuck Attacks!

Being in Waltham has been a bit more adventuresome this week, thanks to the weather and the Charles River. We’ve been enjoying the new found water-front view by our office so far:

The stairs on the side of our office building -- luckily, we don't use these.

My feeeet....notice where the railing ends.

Slowly starting to drain the next day...

The water level came right up to under the bridge!

Starting to see that plow in the background emerge after some draining. This is our lovely bike path.

Thanks, Chuck.

Add comment March 17th, 2010

Random News

Sega has a pair of quite cool Zippo lighters. Show your love for the Saturn and Mega Drive the next time you need to make a fire. Maybe not $114 worth of cool, but still cool never the less.

Nintendo is coming out with yet another iteration of the DS. This time it’s the DSi LL. It’s the DSi, only bigger. I wish they’d spend more time controlling the hundreds of terrible Wii games that keep getting the ok instead of pushing out a new DS every other minute.

The Left4Dead 2 demo is out. Any impressions?

Epic Mickey looks awesome. Warren Spector meets Mickey Mouse? I’m there.

Updating an older post here: Champions Online turned out to be a snoozefest. Aion is now where it’s at.

You can now use Facebook and Twitter on your Xbox 360. I’m not sure why you’d want to, but hey, it’s there.

DJ Hero is amazingly fun. Look for a future post on it.

MaxConsole claims to have specs for Wii 2 . 1080p and Blu-Ray? Hm.

Add comment October 29th, 2009

Random Again

Scott’s randomness for this week:

Enjoy the Zork walkthrough in song.  If you don’t know what Zork is, you’re most likely fairly young and need to explore this classic game.

Is it a cheese or a font?

Currently taking up too much time: Crush the Castle, Crush the Castle: Players Pack and the iPhone/iPod Touch version. So addictive.

A simulator: You fell asleep watching a DVD.

Do’s and don’t with babies. Amazingly helpful.

Microsoft shows you how to make quite the creepy Halloween mask. Sorry Apple owners.

The Monstropedia is fantastic. Warning, there may be some Victorian era topless paintings in there.

I had the Little Professor calculator as a kid. Not to date myself, but I loved this thing and it was the last video game I had until the Atari 2600.

Add comment October 16th, 2009

Time to Pie. What do?

I slept really badly last night, so I may as well make a pie. Because I love pie almost as much as sleeping, pie and sleep are interchangeable like that. So…also making up recipe as I go because sleep deprived. Ingredients list at the bottom for those interested.

Prepare for the longest post ever :3

Step 1. Wash and peel applessssss.

Step 2. Seriously, use an apple corer tall enough not to bash your knuckles.

Step 3. Remove any core junk the corer left behind. Surprisingly important!

Step 4. Omnislash apples, then time for dry ingredients!

Step 5. Mix dry ingredients alone, then gently coat apples with mixture.

Step 6. French style crumb topping?!?!? なに??

Step 7. Cutting butter into flour will take the rest of your natural life.

Step 8. Fit ready-made pie crust into baking pan; somewhat arrange apple mess.

Step 9. Smash on as much topping as possible!!!!

Step 10. After 30 minutes at 350° I was afraid the edges would burn, so I covered them with foil.

Step 11. After 20 more minutes at 300°, OMG PIE!!

Step 12. We almost accidentally the whole thing...!

Filling Ingredients:
7 – medium/large sized mcintosh apples
lemon juice – squirt it like lighter fluid
¼ cup – granulated sugar
2 tbsp – whole wheat flour
1 ¼ tsp – ground cinnamon
¼ tsp – ground nutmeg
¼ tsp – ground ginger

Topping Ingredients:
½ cup – BUTTER!! Yeah, the whole stick.
½ cup – packed brown sugar
⅔ cup – all purpose flour
⅓ cup – oats
1 tsp – more cinnamon
a couple dashes – ground cloves

Now it’s time to play some FF6. YEAH!!

Add comment October 6th, 2009

Randomness Part 309

How many people are in space right now?

Behold the wonder of Zlad Vladcik’s Elektronic Supersonik.

Listen to “Conquer the Video Craze”, a record of videogame hints from 1982.

How long can you bounce one ball while balancing another?

The Parade of Unfortunate Star Wars Costumes.

Public Domain 4U has a terrible name, but lots of good, old blues tracks for download.

Amaze your friends by quoting from the dictionary of old hobo slang

For no reason other than to waste your time, here’s the square root of two to 1 million digits.

1 comment October 2nd, 2009

Lolita Fashion in Video Games Makes Me Happy

I am a huge dork for lolita. Now I’m not talking Nabokov (good book though), I mean Japanese street fashion. For any japanophile, lolita fashion is not anything new. But for the rest of you, you may have encountered some characters in game without realizing it and thought to yourself, “What the hell is she wearing?” (Ok, probably not….?)

Lolita fashion is based on aristocratic Victorian-era clothing, with lots of construction details — ruffles, bows, and other embellishments. Think of it as how you’d dress a porcelain doll. Within lolita fashion, there are many sub-categories, most notably EGL (Elegant Gothic Lolita) which is black and white and er, goth; Sweet Lolita, characterized by pastels and cuteness; and Classic Lolita, which is more subdued and sophisticated.

Some examples of Classic Lolita style clothing

Gothic lolita Super Dollfie collaboration with h. Naoto; Sweet lolita Dal collaboration with Angelic Pretty

I absolutely love that it is becoming prevalent enough to show up in more video games, but it still seems pretty confined to certain genres — mainly fighters, horror, and RPGs. Maybe it just seems that way because those are basically the genres I play (hmm…), but hey, I’m not going to argue about all my hobbies merging into a singular amazing super hobby of sorts!

Gothic fighter characters Ninon Beart (King of Fighters) and Rachel Alucard (BlazBlue)

Characters from Shadow Hearts, Growlanser, and No More Heroes

Lolitas tend to be associated with creepy gore, horror, and general violence in video games, and with good reason. Maybe it is partly due to the association with visual kei bands, partly because horror movies and creepy dolls and gore are what many lolitas actually enjoy, but also because of what I think of as a Japanese cultural fascination with the juxtaposition of violent and cute, that brings to mind the work of Junko Mizuno and Takashi Murakami. And the game Deathsmiles:

I kid you not, this is an R-Type style kill-everything shooter game.

Seriously, watch a youtube video. 1:59 WTF o_O!!

So for anyone still reading this, there is a very fun Make-A-Loli creator-game-thing on artist Claire Belton’s website. It is very very very easy to spend time clicking away at all the different objects in the room and coming up with your own seemingly endless designs. This is by far the most fun and cute one of these that I’ve seen, and it is totally worth checking out even if you don’t think you’d like it!!

I made this one yaaaaaay

For actual info about lolita fashion, I recommend wikipedia, but I personally found out about EGL through my love for visual kei, a Japanese genre of rock music with a strong emphasis on the visual style of the band — usually androgynous make-up and elaborate goth-punk fashion, like if you mixed vampire movies and kabuki with 80’s glam-rock, and sometimes pirates and/or clowns. Most bands have one member who looks especially female, like Mana, who back in the days of Malice Mizer, really popularized lolita fashion along with the band. Mana even has his own line of lolita brand clothing, which causes some devoted EGLs to froth at the mouth with glee.

Mana (ex-Malice Mizer), creator of Moi-Meme-Moitie

Add comment September 21st, 2009

Random Links Take II

Randomness:

I wish my local bakery would make bread this interesting. A plain loaf? Psh. A bloodied torso? Delicious!

The Bird and the Bee’s ode to David Lee Roth has an entertaining video: Diamond Dave. Oh Eric Wareheim, you’re silly.

Unusual canned foods? What’s so unusual about canned and roasted scorpions I ask?

I can’t say I’ve ever thought about what Miles Davis’ classic album “Kind of Blue” would sound like if it was ion 8-bit, but apparently someone else did. Warning: they want actual cash for the whole thing. The samples are well worth the visit though.

See Mad Magazine Fold-Ins from 1960 to now using Flash. Good work New York Times!

I bet your Orbs song isn’t half as annoying as mine. It made my dog actually howl. When you’re done creating chaos, check out a Flash game on the same site called Space Walker.

Halloween’s right around the corner, so don’t forget to make your Christopher Walken mask.

Want to see if the new username you’re thinking of taking has availability on many different sites? Check with this site first.

Can you guess the accent? My terrible score of 28 says that I myself can not.

Neil Young playing with Devo? It happened.

Add comment September 15th, 2009

Re-Ment, for the (Miniature) Food Obsessed

Hello again,

BlazBlue may always be on my mind, but I’m going to pry myself from it’s ridiculous-ice-car-spamming ways for a moment.

I am a total nerd for random Japanese stuff, so at some point I was doomed to get into miniatures. Currently, that means re-ment. For anyone not familiar with re-ment, they are collectible blind-box 1/6 scale miniatures with extreme attention to detail. Most of them are either food or food related, and being Chinese and Italian, I find that pretty hard to resist (yes, some stereotypes are true). I like cakes, so I’ve gotten a bit obsessed with the Elegant Sweets set, which is made up of fantastic looking desserts (mostly cakes!)

This is set #1. Everything is always carefully wrapped...

Look at all those cute little pieces! That's right, I think food is cute.

I’m also pretty obsessed with Kuroshitsuji right now – including the dolls from Jun Planning. I only have Ciel. I love that he is such an irritable and depressing shota character. Good thing he is always the one having tea and cakes!

Ciel Phantomhive from Kuroshitsuji, Dal by Jun Planning

Re-ment photographs perfectly with 1/6 scale dolls, so this is becoming the slippery slope of one obsession feeding another (no pun intended!) The level of detail on this doll is incredible, from the articulation points to the face-up, and the elegant outfit is beautifully constructed. He even came with an eye patch and a walking stick! And the contract seal on his right eye is enough to please any OCD anime fangirl (*cough*ahem…) Being able to shift the eyes around with a switch is another creepy perk. Ciel is my first Jun Planning doll, and I couldn’t be happier with him. Expensive, but worth it. The gigantic heads…so cuuute……

omnomnomnomnom

So basically he just needs a friend (or a butler…:3 ), and until then he’ll be having tea and cakes alone!

That look says ''Maybe you should just get a cat...?''

Add comment September 2nd, 2009