parody of a parody

The cthulhu political poster made me make this.
Why?

Mulling over the mechanics of safety pins

In my pursuit of the Total Perspective Vortex, I've been admiring the self-regulation ability of candles. The flame burns off the tip of the wick if it's too far up to draw wax, keeping the flame from getting so big it melts the entire candle. If the flame gets to where a lot of wax melts, the level of liquid wax raises on the wick, making the flame smaller which limits its heat and stops adding to the wax pool. In turn, that keeps the melted wax from snuffing the flame. Hmmmm.
I sure hope coffee works well as a Brownian Motion calculator. I'm not that big a fan of tea. Oh wait. That's the Infinite Improbability generator. The Vortex requires cake as an extrapolator. In theory, anyway. Meanwhile, the dust-speck remains insignificant and without a sense of proportion.

Fear of a squid planet

Trickle-down Ergonomics

Weight-loss and fitness have been successful finally. Really good strength and definition have resulted. I've got traps now. The scale said 166 yesterday. To add some cardio and back-strength, I've restarted the daily bike ride. Yes, the goal is currently cheap cigarettes, but it's easier if I have a reason to go and a destination. I figure it offsets.
There's other benefits. Spring smells and sights. Plus on a bike, you see more than a car. Today, I saw two young brothers with the reddest hair since ever. Yesterday, a guy pulled his pants down on his front porch, full-on harry crack- shorts to the knees. I'm sure it was more benign stupidity of "Ther's sumthin in muh shorts." than malignant sex-offender "here's muh ass", but damn, dude. Keep yer shorts up... and wear underwear.
There's a place right around the corner with great honeysuckle smell. There's another place that usually smells like fabric softener. There's a long stretch on the park where hot girls walk their dogs, and a couple of thigh-burn hill climbs. Most of the route is tree-covered. It seems last years ice-storm only culled the weak branches, and what's left is full and healthy.
I do it every day. It's a little over 3 miles long and it gets easier every day. Come ride with me.

8-bit bliss

Old-school. Was putzin around the Radiohead site and found alink to this.
An 8-bit style sidescroller freeware. It's kinda a cross between mega-man and zelda with a little bit of bomberman thrown in. Storyline, powerups, puzzles, shootems, good bosses. It's un-complicated but full-featured. It's easy while not too easy. There's an english patch and it's pretty good. And it's free.


It's at your own risk, tho. I didn't get any alerts and haven't noticed anything malicious.

You're for me, Punk Rock Girl.

yes. Yes you are.


Remember when Gwen Stefani was punk? Neither do I.

Cinco De Mayo

Well eat my worm, it's time for another drinking holiday. Originally a celebration of the Mexican army's victory over French forces in 1862, Cinco de Mayo has devolved into yet another excuse to get completely blotto, if anyone needed one at all. Like the observance of St. Patrick's driving out of the Druids (or "snakes" if you like your dogma served with seltzer) and the German celebration of the October harvest... let's drink, because drinkers need enabling and everything else is history.

Bad... Ass

This might be the most bad-ass photo I have ever seen.

I found it rummaging among the copious Library of Congress / Flickr royalty-free image project website.
It's an M3 "General Lee" Medium Tank and it's crew with some serious firepower brought to bear. That's:
Four - M1917 .45 caliber, double-action, 6 shot revolvers.
Two - M1A1 Thompson .45 caliber sub-machine guns with 50 round magazines
One - M3A1 37mm High-velocity cannon
One - M3 75mm main cannon
...and one godamn proud American. Thank you, Second Amendment. Thank you, Library of Congress.

Too weird to live.

To rare to die.
The more strange and rare a cartoon, the more I love it. The more I love it, the quicker they seem to be canceled. There are 4 main examples that I will present here: with the help of the internet's uncanny ability to infringe on intellectual property.

First, Sam & Max.

On for 2 short seasons. With such great writing and adult themes, it was doomed. I wanted to post the episode where they go to save their favorite snack, "The Fried McGuffin" but couldn't find it. So in it's place, I give you the "$59.95 wedding package with complementary passes to the Buddy Hacket Experience."
Way too weird to live.


Second, Invader Zim.

The darkest of the dark, and one of the best animated series ever. 2 seasons short, even winning an Emmy couldn't save it. From shooting chickens into the sun, to developing a virus to turn people into baloney, to having a giant, sloshing, hypnotic zit named "Pusstulio," Invader Zim at least attained Cult status. He's even got an entire fan-made collection on Newgrounds. His robot, Gir, was so great a character, he could have had his own spin-off. Alas, it was so good as to be completely, predictably doom doom da doom doom doomed.

Below is the only full episode posted on youtube. It doesn't have Zim in it, but it shows just how dark the series is. What's extra skin-crawlingly awesome is that this episode is typically... not extraordinarily, dark for the show. Probably why it was doomed. Both seasons live on in DVD, which is why you can't find youtube episodes. Guess I'll have to pony up.


Third, The Tick.

The tamest of the list, it was a short three seasons long. With characters like Die Fledermaus, Sewer Urchin and American Maid, villains like Chairhead Chippendale and The Mad Bomber What Bombs at Midnight, and a battle-cry of SPOON!...it was doomed. So doomed, I don't know why a live-action sit-com was green-lit. It was doomed too.

Last, and definitely first: The Venture Brothers.

What more could you ask for? Brock Sampson may be the greatest straight-man ever to slaughter an entire army with a lawnmower. Who could be man enough to train such a great character? Why, only a government-assasin version of Hunter S. Thompson. That's who. Brock F'n Sampson, man. Dibbs on his cigarette butt.

It's still on TV, and on DVD and whole episodes on adultswim.com, so I won't embed a video. So great I can't explain why it's 3rd season starts June 1, and wikipedia reports a fourth in the works. I wouldn't put money on it, but here's hoping it lives, because it's the greatest thing on TV. Go team Venture.

I found it.

Everyone I mentioned this to thought I was crazy, but I found it and can prove it exists now.
It was an animated Christmas special from the 70's. It was only played 2 times that I can remember, and I recognized it for how different it was. "Different" seems to translate to "weird" in good ol' 'Muricka, which is probably why it didn't make a longer run on 'Murican TV. Or maybe the Baby-Boomers didn't like being portrayed as greedy, uncaring and stupid.
Whatever the reason, I present A Cosmic Christmas from Nelvana Studios. I knew I wasn't crazy.
Stay weird, Canada.

Progress

I registered roninrobot(dot)com this week thinking about an animation studio.
It's unhosted as of this moment, but I've got the URL. I was pretty happy it wasn't taken. Let's see if I do something with it.
Meanwhile, I'm working on a new flash website. It's unsold, so if Saturn Grill doesn't want it, I'll revamp it for either Deep Deuce Grill, or even Roninrobot. I've learned a lot, and functionality is getting better and cooler cuz I know more a lot more actionscript.
It's kinda like teaching myself latin, as many programing languages have very similar syntax. Hopefully, actionscript will let me learn the others easier.
Not much works, but the basics are there and you can see it here if you care:
Saturn Grill Flash

I really like the navigation bar. The script font caused me some problems, but I worked around it cuz it's cool. I'm getting faster too. It only took me 12 hours to get it to this point...from scratch. That's amazing to me.