Joe Mathlete Explains Maramduke

Marmaduke has finally died, thus completing the 2006 American Icon Yuletide Expiration Hat-Trick that James Brown and Gerald Ford kicked off several days ago. It remains uncertain whether he committed suicide, was murdered by his owner-girl (who did a fantastic job at making it look like an accident), or simply lost his balance in one of his frequent auto erotic asphyxiation binges.

Like any comic strip that reached its nadir about two decades ago but whose shambling bulk nevertheless marches on zombie-like through newspapers world-wide, Marmaduke is ripe for a send-up. Joe Mathlete combines just enough sarcasm, dry wit, and profane, disturbingly sexual content to make you remember how badly this sucks, and why doesn't God just let it die already. Now if he would only do the same for Family Circus, Garfield, and Dennis the Menace, he could probably quit his job. I'm sensing the beginning of a cottage industry here.

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Sony's Aibo is Returning

That's the rumour, at least. Aibo was always a neat looking toy -- maybe a little too cute, but hellishly robust in features: camera, visual recognition, wifi, voice recognition, and a solid AI. Now, according to the totally reputable Stuff magazine, Sony is going to give Aibo another chance and have it interface with your PS3 and PSP.

The old Aibo was totally drool-worthy for anyone with an interest in robotics -- the new Aibo, with redesigned, cooler body and proposed interface options, is even moreso. I mean, it's no voice-command R2-D2, but that's only because I have a real dog.

Link to story on Engadget
Link on Wikipedia to more Aibo sites

Splashback

This is one of my favourite games, and it's strange it didn't manage to get posted sooner. Maybe because I was never really any good at it, I don't know.

You start the game with 10 drops of liquid and a board filled with blobs. You can click in any square to add a drop of liquid to a blob. Too much liquid and the blob will explode, sending a drop in all four directions and adding an extra drop of liquid to your tank. The object is to clear all the blobs from the screen.

I find this game interesting because there's often a chance for good strategy, adding drops in such a way as to get the largest chain reaction. It's also fun to watch the screen clear as blob after blob explodes. I'm not sure about the whole alien and little girl thing, though. She's got this kind of knowing look on her face like we're down with something. Are we supposed to be down with the alien? I'm not. He's got a gut like my old man.

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Shuffle

In Shuffle, both you and your opponent start with a row of marbles, with the object being to knock your opponent's marbles off the board. Each round you win shortens your supply by one marble and moves you a step toward the center of the board. The first person to win four rounds wins the set.

Anyone good at pool will be good at this game. I'm not good at pool, and lasted only ten rounds before finally getting clobbered.

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Poloroid-o-nizer

Nothing but a fun little utility that takes an image from the web and turns it into a poloroid.

I have a friend experimenting with poloroid film right now, so this is a little more topical than I thought it would be.

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Peanuts by Charles Bukowski

Peanuts, re-imagined in the style of Charles Bukowski. This is dark, funny, and brilliant -- exactly the kind of thing the intarwebs were made for.

Link (via Memepool)

Rose and Camellia

You play Reiko, newly widowed and shunned from her home by the aristocratic members of the family. In order to secure her place in the house, she must defeat the other family members in a slap fight -- or what the game refers to as "the elegant art of feminine conflict".

The game is easy to play, but takes some time to get used to. Fortunately, it's also just silly enough to hold you attention, without being so silly as to lose credibility. I had great success on the Easy level; the harder levels require more patience than I was willing to put in.

Link (via Memepool)

Hypnotist Puts Man in Video Game

Thanks to the always delightful BoingBoing, I was reminded of an incredible video they'd posted about two years ago. In it a hypnotist named Derek Brown manages to hypnotize a man playing a video game about shooting zombies. He's then moved across the street to a warehouse set up to look just like the game he was playing -- including roaming undead. The result is that the man thinks he's been put in the game.

Like Cory, I don't know if this is real or not, but the man looks horrified enough to make me believe it's the real deal. It's certainly a great video either way.

Link to video
Link to BoingBoing post about video

Picnik

Picnik is one of the internet's coolest utilities. I didn't think I'd end up using it too often when I first heard about it, but I end up using it several times a week. It's just too convenient and too cool not to.

Picnik is a photo editing utility. The program itself is all flash-based, and the interface is smooth, fun, and very easy to grasp. It's not really geared toward top-end photoshop users, but it's more than sufficient for minor photo editing, and there's lots of room for novices to expand into. They're also adding more features all the time, so I suspect any digital scrapbookers out there might also find this to be very valuable.

All the regular editing features are provided, like resizing, cropping, levels, and colour adjustments. There's also a "pro" account you can upgrade to for $25/year which adds access to all kinds of fonts, shapes, photo frames, and digital effects like turning your photo into a pencil sketch and creating HDR images. Again, probably not really worth it to the gearheads, but way, way worth it if you're looking to ramp up the fun level of your image editing.

There's way too much great stuff about the site to mention here. But for me, the true convenience is how it can access your photos from Flickr, Webshots, Picassa, Photobucket, and even Facebook -- so you can load, edit, and save all through the Picnik interface, without having to download anything. And that's how it should be.

Link to Picnik

Vector Magic

Vector Magic is an awesome utility developed at Stanford that turns ordinary bitmapped photos or line art into vector graphics. It's fast, it's free, and it apparently outperforms Adobe Live Trace and Corel PowerTRACE -- which also makes it wicked.

You can see pretty much what it's capable of in the picture above. There are some more great samples to view on the Vector Magic site. The bitmap I played with didn't come out perfectly, but it was pretty darn close, and any modifications it needed could be done easily in Illustrator. This is a really handy site for anyone doing a lot of desktop publishing. I'm looking forward to playing with it as the software develops.

Link to Vector Magic

Word to Your....

You gotta know that a site featuring a giant caricature of Vanilla Ice is going to have some good stuff on it.

It's a collection of funny/goofy/strange pictures with the phrase "Word to your..." written on them. They're funny because the phrase overstates the obvious. Kind of like this description.

Anyway, I think this one here with Virgil, Wrestling Superstar is my favourite.

Link

Proxy.org

I've been looking for a good anonymous proxy for some time now. Mostly so I could watch streaming video of Grey's Anatomy online. But it turns out proxies have another use -- and this is protecting your privacy.

You may not realize it, but websites capture a lot of information about who's visiting them. There may be times, such as when you're surfing from work or some other registered domain, when you don't want people to be able to trace your referrer or your IP address. You should be using an anonymous proxy at times like these.

Proxy.org is a site that sends any URL you enter through an anonymous proxy, so you can surf those sites with confidence. It chooses a proxy randomly from a list of over 4000 proxies; unfortunately, quality does vary a little, so you may not be able to post to someone's blog or run scripts through the proxy you're given. In those cases, I recommend hitting the service a few times until you get a good proxy assigned to you. Or -- what the hell -- find a proxy you like and stay with it!

Link to Proxy.org

Multibabel

Lost in Translation is a fun little tool, held together with a Perl script and powered by Altavista's Babelfish translator. It takes the text you enter and translates it through several languages before returning it to English.

It's described on the site as the game of Telephone, but I think it's a lot more like Engrish. The one big fault is that sometimes a word will be translated which is not easily translated back, so you will end up with foreign language artifacts in your final English text.

Some examples:

• I think we're alone now, there doesn't seem to be anyone around. translates to Nontask that we are only hour, I look like here, all same that one to be around.


• She's buying a stairway to heaven. translates to Stairs of purchase one with the sky.


• You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. translates to They can control, when it appreciates, but you cannot never go.

Link to Lost in Translation
Link to Babelfish

Calvin and Hobbes

Is there anything better than a complete listing of Calvin and Hobbes cartoons?

How about a comic strip search engine so you can find the exact strip you're looking for?

Link to Calvin and Hobbes archive
Link to Calvin and Hobbes Extensive Strip Search (C.H.E.S.S)

True Porn Clerk Stories

As soon as I start sharing websites with friends, I ought to start putting them up here.

The prologue to this website says that the stories were collected starting in 2002. It seems to me that I learned about it before then, but even a usenet search doesn't pull up anything prior to 2002.

Anyway. Some good writing here, interesting insights, and a great read.

This is the one porn impulse that I honestly don't get. (Oh, all right. I don't get peeing on each other or hurting each other, but I think I understand intellectually how one might get there.) I don't understand the need to degrade someone. But that need is definitely, sadly out there. One of our best-renting titles of long standing is called Grudge Fuck.* It rents right back out as soon as we can replace the tag. Every time.

Much as I hate to say it, it seems to be a straight guy thing.

There's definitely a Captain Kirk-style exploration up and down the imaginary social ladder in both the straight and gay sections. In addition to the dozens of variations on (oddly - or sadly) still taboo interracial pairings, we have More Dirty Debutantes and White Trash Whore on the straight side, Straight off the Street and The Other Side of Aspen on the gay side. You can fuck rich or fuck poor on either side of the invisible barrier between the straight and gay sections. But you can only fuck lesser in straight.

I think it's because there's not enough otherness in gay porn. There's still bondage and S&M stuff, plenty of dominance and submission, but even the most submissive sub is still a man just like the dom, just like the viewer. How much separation can there be?

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50 States Game

Place all 50 states in their correct positions on the map. The game keeps track of your average distance "wrong" as well as how long it takes you. I managed to make it through once without any errors, but some of it was luck.

While it isn't the most amusing game in the world, it's good to reference every now and then, just to keep my US geography fresh.

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Guess-the-Google

A grid of 20 pictures is presented, each representing a single keyword. Your goal is to determine which word, plugged into Google, will produce search results with these images.

There are some tricky ones sometimes, but the game is really as easy as it seems. It's also a lot more addictive than it seems. Be prepared to spend a lot of time here.

Link

Have a Slogan

A fun little site that does nothing more than pair a randomly chosen word with a randomly chosen corporate slogan. It's a cute little time waster that generates some genuine laughs.

If you're really looking for a slogan for something, I suggest you bounce on over to Sloganizer. It's a lot more serious and a lot less fun, unless you sloganize a word like poop, or assholes.

Link to Have a Slogan
Link to Sloganizer

The Juggernaut, Bitch!

This video continues to crack me up! This is a must-see for anyone raised on comic books or Saturday morning cartoons. Actually, if Saturday morning cartoons were this good I'd go back to getting up at 6:00 a.m. and watching a morning of cartoons from inside a fort made from sofa cushions.*

The video starts to drag about four and-a-half minutes in, so you may wish to stop it there and read about the ending on Wikipedia.

Link to Juggernaut, Bitch video
Link to Juggernaut, Bitch on Wikipedia

* Those who know me know this to be a long-time career option

Strangest Disaster of the 20th Centruy

Things like this story is what this blog was originally about.

I used to do a remaindered link section on my other blog on Sundays, where I'd round up the interesting links I wanted to share with people. I do a lot of surfing: more than any of my friends, and, some of them tell me, more than anyone they know. Because of this, I end up with a lot of interesting sites that I want to share with people. And because I don't do e-mail forwards, it all led to this.

Anyway.

This is a great story about a natural disaster that resulted in the death of nearly 1,800 humans and thousands of animals. I'm not going to say what it is here, because the story is very well-written; but it's not earthquakes, floods, tsunamis, viruses, or exploding tanks of molasses (which was my original guess on what the disaster was). It's even stranger than when Lake Peigneur got sucked into that salt mine (and if you're not going to read about it, at least watch the video)!

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