Author: Nick

I caught up with Simon for lunch yesterday. Afterwards we made things out of Lego and K’NEX. Simon made this awesome lawnmover:

We took a bunch of still images and I used GIMP to create this animated gif of it tearing up LEGO grass (and a little bit of background paper).

I changed my dual-boot (Ubuntu 8.10, Windows Vista Ultimate) Dell XPS M1330 laptop to a single boot machine running Ubuntu 9.04 with Windows Vista in a VirtualBox 3.0.0 VM (using 1GB RAM and 40GB of HDD space).

After installing Guest Additions I have Vista running well at fullscreen. (I tried Integrated mode, but it feels a little messy to me.) As expected, the early Direct3D support is rather slow, but I’m not too concerned. I’m mostly interested in running different browsers and FlashDevelop without the kludge of dual-booting.

I came across this fantastic acoustic cover of “Hybrid Rainbow” by The Pillows:

There are a whole bunch of pillow covers (har har) on YouTube. Many are in response to their latest promotion/competition, described on their English website as:

Celebrating “the pillows 20th Anniversary Year” titled ‘LATE BLOOMER SERIES’ and the live at Budoukan, we will be holding the Copy Band Event to be aimed at the pillows’ fans in all over the world!!

Basically, they posted a video to YouTube letting people know that the best covers posted as a response will be featured at an upcoming live concert to which the cover group will also win tickets (and some travels costs).

They are known internationally (mostly due to their music being featured on FLCL), so I wonder if there will be many entries from outside of Japan.

Is anyone planning on going to the Supanova Pop Culture Expo this weekend?

I went last time and quite enjoyed the cosplay competition. It’s about people wanting to share something they love, and passionately working to do so. Even if their costumes don’t quite turn out, there’s a supportive crowd that appreciates their participation and recognises their accomplishments.

Update: Didn’t end up going. Too busy.

“Gettin’ Rough” was my favourite Dinosaur Jr song for a while. I wasn’t a big fan of the Hand it Over album, but this song stood out to me (it’s the banjo).

There’s no official music video (that I’m aware of). The only video I could find featuring the song was this skating video:

I used to be really into Dinosaur Jr and the songs that I still like tend to be the softer ones (rather than the crazy high-distortion extended guitar solo ones, which I can still enjoy depending on mood).

I saw J Mascis play during his solo tour before Dinosaur Jr reformed. He had this sort of layered style using an acoustic guitar with pickup, and various effects pedals for distortion and looping. Personally, I think this was some of his best work. Quick cuts from soft strumming to shrill solos make for interesting pacing and constrast.

Here’s J playing “Ammaring” during that period:

Just making a few trivial notes on the (very) recent Videogame Trivia Night. Look for a full event write-up over at Let’s Make Games in the next few days.

I felt that things went very well. There was a great turn-out and people were kept happy with an abundance of bar prizes courtesy of WALAN. It’s always difficult to run a trivia night on such a niche topic, but I guess it just means that you attract a certain niche of people. Those that loved it seemed to really love it.

Here are a few nice things that stood out to me:

• Sid Meier’s Quiz Night, the winning team from the last (OneTwenty) trivia night, returned to claim 3rd prize!
• People seemed to love our snacks, especially Pocky and Hello Panda.
• A lot of people managed to answer our HARDCORE questions correctly!

There are a few things that we will need to iron out next time. Here’s a brief list of things we should change, and how we could change them:

• Pizza collection took ages and was a lot of work. Next time we should aim to book a venue with a staffed kitchen.
• Marking took ages at half-time. We should create more answer sheets and collect and mark them more frequently with more volunteers.
• Drinks are nice, but there could be more variety in prizes. We should aim for more random giveaways such as snacks, games, or videogame books.
• The presenter (me!) was a little distracted at the start. I should get things sorted out earlier and have a practice run at the venue!

A lot of the above came about by virtue of it being our first trivia event as a team, and our organising it on rather short notice. We contemplated pushing the event to July, but we were all really keen to have a big event in June.

Thanks to Minh, Dan, and Anthony for all their hard work making this event happen. Thanks to all the volunteers on the night who helped setup and cleanup. Finally, thanks to our sponsors and to everyone who came along!

I get the feeling that we will be making this an annual event. 😉

Update: One last thing we need to do next time is make sure that we have someone taking photos! If you have any please let me know!

I think that “I Can’t Get Next To You” by The Temptations is probably my favourite Motown song:

Here are some choice lyrics from the song:

I can build a castle from a single grain of sand.
I can make a ship sail on dry land.

It’s lyrical magic at funk factor five, and plays perfectly to the strengths of a musical group with five male singers (although I find it fun to sing alone, fumbling through Eddie Kendrick‘s crazy high notes).

Jack and Simon‘s top 10 songs posts have inspired me to post 10 songs that I like. Since I’m embedding videos, I’ll spread them out over a few posts.

I usually ignore lists like “the hottest 100 songs of all time” because:

1. Aesthetics aren’t objective, static, universal, or one-dimensional
2. People tend to put too much value on music (and media) preferences

As a result, I get the feeling that such lists often end up being a reflection of what respondents feel that they should like. I find it incredibly odd how much self-identity people derive from what music they like, and how much people judge others based on such subjective preferences.

So why would I post about songs that I like? Well, I’ve only come to learn about some of favourite musicians through other people and I appreciate people sharing things that they love (even if I don’t get into them).

And now onto the first song… “Electrified” by Dressy Bessy:

I first found out about Dressy Bessy via The Powerpuff Girls Soundtrack. It’s a great CD with music also contributed by Shonen Knife, Apples in Stereo, and Cornelius.

I love the stop-start pace of this song, the purposeful break to chorus, and the deliberate casual singing of Tammy Ealom. It feels like a lot of thought has been put into the juxtaposition of structured minimalism and hang-loose fun.

Hmmm… that’s enough for now. I’ll post more songs later. 😉

This post is a little reminder regarding team composition for next Tuesday’s videogame trivia night. Just like any other trivia night, it’s better to have a bigger and more varied team. You never know who is going to have the answer!

I obviously can’t reveal any questions (or answers), but I can reveal the four categories. Here they are:

• Old school
• New school
• Casual
• Hardcore

Questions focus predominantly on games, but also include references to related popular culture, companies, and personalities. We’ve worked to balance questions between platforms (PC, consoles, etc.) and difficulty levels. So there really should be something for everyone!

Pre-purchase tickets are available at GameTraders (Carillon City and Carousel) for $10. Any tickets sold at the door will be $15.

I took this photo while in Seoul (Insa-dong I think).