MOTHERBRAIN

Spring finally hits Boston

Like a filthy dog finally surrendering to bath-time, the Boston winter seems to have finally lost its grip on the area for the summer.  Which isn't to say there won't be a few rainy days spent wondering how its within the realm of possibility that it can be 40 degrees at the end of June, for the most part though, it seems to be smooth sailing for the next few months.

Its these months that must be the reason why the colonists didn't just close up shop to look for a more reasonable climate to transform into metropolis.  The Red Sox now provide another reason … I’m fairly certain people here wouldn’t leave if the place was radioactive.  Picture The Hills Have Eyes as a baseball movie.  People here are hardy, and they take pride in their baseball fandom.  There’s no amount of radioactive burn that could chase them out of this place. 

But I digress.  You can really feel a change once it warms up in May. 

The throngs of wooing boozed up college kids talking loudly about how drunk they were last night are gone, replaced by kids wearing bad suits who are very impressed with each other for starting law school and talking very loudly about that.  All of that nets a population drop of noticeable proportions, along with a substantial reduction in Friday night hollerin'.  I know I sound like some crotchety old man, but there’s a marked slowdown that occurs that, combined with the pleasant weather makes for an incredible summertime experience. 

The pace of everything is noticeably slower.  For instance, this morning my commute to work was less hectic and harried, leaving time to stop and smell the roses, realize that the woman who has been serving me coffee for going on a year and half has actually spent time living as a man at some point.  Also, the guy cleaning up trash for community service now has time to not only sit down, but to “place [his] ass on something.”  

I love this time of year.  Its kind of like when you’re a kid and you get home from church, and it’s the furthest possible point away from the next time you have to go to church.   Its the time of year that no one mentions when you mention you live in Boston.  “Whoa its really cold up there!”  No kidding.  I think from now on I’m going to make it a point to talk about the 4 months when it turns into San Diego. 

Uwe Boll missunderstands Grand Theft Auto

"Grand Theft Auto would be super interesting for me, and I think I would actually be the right guy to do it, because my movies are all bloody and violent and I don't have a problem with action scenes."

Uwe Boll quoted in New York Magazine (via Destructiod)

I'm pretty sure I've never played a good videogame that is based on a movie.  Conversely, I've never seen a good movie that was based on a videogame.  The reason being is that the story and characters are not the reason for the games being successful.  It's the gameplay. 

So now this guy thinks its a good idea to make a Grand Theft Auto movie.  And it seems like he thinks that the essence to making a Grand Theft Auto movie is gory violence. 

Destructoid seems confident that Rockstar wouldn't license its premier franchise for a movie, which is a good thing, because I think Uwe has missed the point of GTA and what makes it so phenomenally popular. 

Freedom. 

And not George W's freedom that "the terrorists hate".  GTA has been so wildly successful chiefly because of the complete and utter freedom that it allows the player.  It's not the story or the characters that wow gamers, its the ability to run wild, non-linear, in a enormous, complicated and lifelike cityscape.  You can't make a movie that recreates that feeling.

...this one goes to 11

I've always loved how ridiculous the marketing of guitar paraphernalia can be.  There's probably never been a cool guitar company poster or ad EVER, despite how hard they try or the celebrity they have access to.  One thing that some companies have mastered though, is standing out from the cornucopia of gear for sale with incredible product designs and names. 

One of the guys that plays guitar in my band had seen an amplifier featuring a setting called "Ninja Boost". Which is hilarious, until it almost becomes your band name.  He actually found one for sale, and sent pictures as proof that he was thinking about buying an amp for its ability to boost a guitar's ninja:

Luckily he didn't buy it, and I'm not in a band called Ninja Boost.  But it reminded me that I haven't actually looked through the guitar section at a music store in a long time, so I thought I'd see what kinds of strange and absurd things companies are trying to sell to the real life guitar heros. 

Here goes...

 

First up is the SNARLING DOGS.  While I think it would've been more effective if they had used a Z to pluralize DOGS, I do love the "Attack Control" on this one.  Do you want all SNARL and no BITE, or are you going to shove your boot down the audience's throat by going all BITE and no SNARL?  Well, luckily for guitarists everywhere, you don't have to choose anymore.   There is a knob for both.

And who can forget the Big Muff.  No clever named knobs here, just a really great/absurd name. 

It turns out there are a number of Muffs out there...including the METAL MUFF.

Its often hard to get the correct amount of Inject, Bleed, or Filth from the typical, less ostentatious effects pedal.  Luckily there is the Blood Drive.  Never before has giving blood rokked you so hard. 

And if you find that your guitar's tone isn't using women as objects quite enough for your liking, you can always switch on The Womanizer.   

 

Genius. 

I would be interested in doing the Pepsi Challenge with these pedals to see if guys that swear by them could tell the difference between them and their less ostentatious counterparts. 

 

My personal battle with information overload and nerdery

Coming back from being in Mexico for a week and a half followed by a week of focus groups has left me tremendously behind on my RSS feeds.  So far behind that I'm not even looking at them because I know the only effective way of dealing with the problem is to mark them all as read, and I feel like I'm going to miss something vitally important.  I hate this feeling.  Especially because I know full well that while there is surely some good stuff I'd be missing out on, there is nothing vitally important in there.  (or is there?)

What it has done however is once again raised the problem of trying to deal with RSS overload.  I did have my feeds set up in categories (Advertising, Sports, 16th Century Norwegian Ship Paintings) when I realized that that system doesn't really help anything.  So I did some digging online and found the current system I'm using:

Daily - read daily, no matter what
Volume - try to read daily
Bulk - try to read eventually
Probation - feed tryouts, more or less

So now I've usually got my daily feeds under control.  But Volume has over 300 unread items while Bulk and Probation each have over a thousand unread items.

The other problem has been sites that are good, but are so frequently updated that they clog things up.  I don't always want to look through 5,000 Boing Boing entries in a row to get to Mr. Gaffney.   So I've now started removing those sites that spew forth incredible volumes of content from folders so I can just see them and browse through them if I have time.  But now I don't ever feel the inclination to open up Volume or Bulk or Probation.  Maybe I'm just subscribing to too much stuff that I'm "supposed to" instead of the stuff thats actually good. Or maybe there is a better way.  (is there?)

But don't tell anyone

Mexico con Mayans Y Zipline

Thanks to everyone for all the well wishes here and elsewhere.  Everything went great, the weather was perfect, and the fajita bar was delicious (so I'm told). 

For our Honeymoon, we jetted off to Playa del Carmen, Mexico. 

Yeah, it looks like that.  All the time. 

Besides hanging out on the beach of the resort, we were able to check out some of the Mayan ruins  scattered throughout the Yucatan (which one of our tour guides said translates to "I don't understand" in the native dialect, although the Internets seem to disagree.)

Chichen Itza, despite the 3.5 hour drive was well worth the trip. I knew that the Mayans were advanced mathematicians and astronomers, but it was entirely different to experience this in person.  The pyramid at Chichen Itza is a large representation of the Mayan calendar, indicating the length of the calendar and the 52 year cycle of their generations, and aligned so that it accurately marks the solstices  equinoxes throughout the year using light from the sun.  The coolest thing about it though, which I had never heard of before, was that it was acoustically engineered so that when people clap in front of the stairs, it returns the sound of the Quetzal bird, the sacred bird associated with both the name of the pyramid and the chief Mayan deity, Kukulkan.  If you're off to an angle, like where the above picture was taken, you'll only hear echoing clapping sounds, but if you're directly in front of the steps you'll hear the bird (as demonstrated by some guy on YouTube):

 

Some other buildings at Chichen Itza:

This was the observatory, where they had a circle of water in the tower that reflected the stars allowing the Mayan astronomers to very accurately track them.

This is a bad picture of the Ball Court and a Russian guy in a wife-beater.  The Ball Court is another structure where the builders flexed their acoustic  know-how.  There were seven players on each team of the game that was played here, and when you clap in between the two walls, it echoes seven times.  Also, there are two buildings at each end where it is thought that the referees officiated the game.  These were designed so that the acoustics allowed the refs could talk to each other with ease despite the huge gap between them. 

Oh, and the captain of either the winner or the loser's team got decapitated at the end.  Huzzah!

All of this kind of made me wonder why modern architecture doesn't seem to be interactive in the way that the Mayan's buildings were. Seems like some architect would've at least tried it once or twice since then...

We also went to the ruins at Tulum, which are the only Mayan ruins on the ocean.  It was beautiful there, and there were iguanas everywhere.  The ruins there are somewhat less awe inspiring than those at Chichen Itza, but that might be due to the ocean views stealing the show. 

We also took an excursion into the Jungle to go repelling, ziplining and snorkling in a Cenote (picture withheld due to extremely pale skin). 

All in all, it was a great trip.  Highly recommended.