November 10, 2014
This is like a game of the automaton of telephones.
Original text:
"Bad Translator" takes any English text input, pings it back and forth on a translation engine through a few other languages, and outputs the result, again in English, but... different. It's like a robot game of "Telephone."...5 translations later, SDL gives us:
To bad door of translator of the sounds the given English of the text, that of a long time an in extend in a motor of translation through someone the other languages and the result go, again in the English, but outside of of... contraryly. This is like a game of the automaton of telephones.[more inside]
If you love movies, then you'll love Perfect Shots
A lieutenant general's op-ed about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
Lieutenant General Daniel P. Bolger, recently retired from 35 years in the US Army, reflects on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. "As a general, I got it wrong."
Best of the Web for home pizza makers
Pizza making questions come up on Ask Mefi and the Blue semi-regularly. But I was surprised to find that (before it was a pricey book) ENCYCLOPIZZA was a web site that has apparently never been mentioned here. It went officially offline at the end of 2011, but thanks to the Wayback Machine, the online ENCYCLOPIZZA can still be yours. If you are serious about learning and hanging out with other serious pizzamakers of all stripes, you should also get thee to the pizzamaking.com forums. (Previously: A Layman's Guide to Regional Styles, and The Ridiculously Thorough Guide to Making Your Own Pizza )
These carpets are magic
Dear Ask: Which type of post-zombie apocalypse shelter is best?
Does the US Air Force treats the nuclear arsenal as a punishment detail?
Mother Jones: Death Wears Bunny Slippers Guarding and maintaining the ICBMs based in central Montana and other United States Air Force installations is vital to not only the safety of American citizens, but that of everybody on earth. But the personnel to whom the USAF entrusts this mission are bored, burned out, and suffer from bad leadership.
Why would a compulsive Elf-chronicler need encouragement?
Brandon Rhodes is known for his excellent talks at Python conferences. At this year's PyGotham, he took the opportunity to discuss writing in general: How To Shut Down Tolkien. [more inside]
It's a Twine game. Cats also like Twine. That's all I've got.
Cat Petting Simulator: You see a cat sitting on the back of the couch, licking her paw. Pet that cat.
Bingo has the hots for you, Jane, for sure.
"This is it, baby. Hold me."
A decade after Halo 2 (and a day before the MCC), enjoy this loose timeline of essential Halo fandom: Halo.Bungie.Org /
Halo at Macworld '99 /
Red vs. Blue /
The Halo Trilogy in 5 minutes /
The Cortana Letters /
HBO's cutscene library and dialog databank /
Main Menus /
Kitty Cat /
Warthog Jump (and BOLL's Warthog Launch game) /
How Not To Be Seen /
Fan Art /
Panoramas /
The Music of Marty O'Donnell (prev.) /
Video Games Live: Halo /
Analysis by Stephen Loftus /
Who was Brian Morden? /
I Love Bees and the ARG radio drama /
Halo 2 Trailer /
Halo 2 E3 '04 Demo /
Full Halo 2 making-of documentary /
Voice acting /
Conversations from the Universe /
The Beastiarum /
Surround Sound Test! /
Geography of New Mombasa /
This Spartan Life /
The Solid Gold Elite Dancers /
Creepy Guy at Work /
Gameplay May Change /
Master Chief Sucks at Halo /
Another Day at the Beach /
'06 Bungie Studios Tour /
Halo 3 Trailer /
Starry Night /
Believe /
HALOID /
No Scope Was Involved /
100 Ways to Die /
"Bungie Favorites" gallery /
Mister Chief /
OONSK /
OneOneSe7en /
2553 Civilian 'Hog Review /
Griffball /
ForgeHub /
405th Cosplay /
Neill Blomkamp's Landfall /
Weta's Real-life Warthog /
Halo Legends anime anthology /
List of Halo novels /
Halopedia /
Halo 3 Terminal Archive /
DDR Dance /
Animatronic Elite project /
HBO's "Guilt-O-Lantern" contest /
Keep It Clean /
We Are ODST /
Sadie's Story /
Halocraft /
"A Fistful of Arrows" fan comic /
RvB Animated (and CGI) /
Project Contingency /
Halo Zero /
Halo 2600 (prev.) /
Reach Datapad Transcripts /
The last Halo 2 player on Xbox LIVE /
Bungie's Final Halo Stats Infographic /
Key & Peele: Obama on Halo 4 /
Top 10 Halo Easter Eggs / Behind the scenes of Halo 2 Anniversary
Initial Offering
Your wrought iron gate lacks that identifying touch, your wax seal seems a little anonymous, and your handkerchief might as well belong to anyone: you definitely need a monogram. Perhaps one of these 1200 gorgeous public domain examples drafted by A. A. Turbayne, famed Art Nouveau designer, will do the trick. [more inside]
Mountain Blue
After the recent move of putting its Frito chips in its Taco Bell burritos, PepsiCo has made another attempt at cross-pollination of its various product divisions. Since their merger into PepsiCo in the '60s, Pepsi-Cola and Frito-Lay mostly kept their business lines separate, one focusing on drinks and the other focusing on what we shall generously refer to as 'foods'. In more recent years, though, PepsiCo has also begun pushing various Dorito products into its Taco Bell selection, and even gave Taco Bell its own personal flavor of Mountain Dew (did you know there's an entire wiki just for Mountain Dew? neither did I! (appropriately for this post, there is also a Mountain Dew Blue)). Anyway, in its most recently announced monstrosity, PepsiCo is testing a Dorito-flavored version of Mountain Dew. Needless to say, reactions are mixed. Also mixed are home-made mad-science Dorito/Mountain Dew experimentations. (don't forget to turn on the audio)
Pour yourself a heaping glass of white wine...
On The Cult of Connie Britton: "But loving the Britton of today is tantamount to ignoring much of what Hollywood has tried to impute as ideal. She’s still thin, white, beautiful, and straight, but she’s the thing that the vast majority of mainstream media pretends doesn’t exist: a woman over 40. More specifically, a woman over 40 whose image combines the sexual and the maternal, the ambitious and the empathetic. " Connie Britton is a late bloomer (NYTimes, 2013). Things I could have said to Connie Britton when she came into my coffee shop the other day.
the cult of the uniform
You don’t protect my freedom: Our childish insistence on calling soldiers heroes deadens real democracy [more inside]
Curious Cabinets for Terrible Teeth
If you were a Victorian dentist, only recently raised from the barbarity of barbering, and needed some place to store all those picks and pokers and pliers and porcelain where they wouldn't panic your patients, while giving an air of aristocratic and academic authority, how might you outfit your office with adequate opulence to signify stability and sincerity? A top-of-the-line dental cabinet.
They look nothing alike but they love each other.
"2013. In my Medieval Literature class at the University of Pittsburgh, we’re talking about Margery Kempe, a 14th century English woman who wanted very, very much to be a saint, one of the few roles an ambitious woman of her time could aspire to achieve. She talked a monk into writing down her dictated autobiography, a sort of proto-memoir/self-hagiography that – along with a lengthy explanation of how she convinced God to make her a virgin again after having 14 children – includes visions of interacting with the Christ child. There’s one in which she explains to Mary, the mother of God, how to diaper the baby." [more inside]
A dose of audio nostalgia for early netizens: much of IUMA, back online
"If you want to hear music, you know what you do - you turn on the radio, put on a CD, or even go to a concert. But as the age of the info superhighway inches forward, you can even get music from your own home computer." That's the intro to a short CNN segment on IUMA, the Internet Underground Music Archive, which opened in 1992 as an effort for unsigned bands to share their music on the world-wide web, for free. Unfortunately, it fell the way of many early 1990s online entities: it was bought out, then the new owners couldn't keep up with changing times, and the site went dark. Except before IUMA disappeared, John Gilmore grabbed much of the material and backed it up on tapes, and turned to (MeFi's Own) Jason Scott and Archive.org to bring back IUMA. They did, and you can now browse through over 45,000 bands and artists, and more than 680,000 tracks of music.
How one-party rule is shaping politics in the Deep South.
The Death of the Southern White Democrat Hurts African-Americans the Most (previously) while the South’s Republicans Look a Lot Like Its 1970s Democrats
Die you sons a bitches! Shit!
And The Motorcade Sped On
How do you get your VIPs from A to B? The motorcade, that seemingly endless stream of steel and blue light which takes possession of however much public highway it likes. If you're America, Russia or China, it's almost a competitive sport over who has the longest, with city blocks and motorway lanes locked off for the security bubble.
London does it a little differently... [more inside]
Obama endorses net neutrality
Obama just came out endorsing net neutrality, and going even further, saying the FCC should reclassify the Internet as a utility. Here's the full plan.
"heres a load more completed modular trax... what a fucking racket"
Over the past several months, Dave Noyze (né Dave Burraston) has been interviewing Aphex Twin. He's finally put the exchanges together as a "SYROBONKERS" interview. Part 1 was published on November 3, and Part 2 was published today. Both interviews were accompanied by a number of previously unreleased pieces of music, including a 21-track playlist of unheard songs made using Buchla and Serge modular synthesizers.
Srsly. Mallory Ortberg's "Texts from Jane Eyre"
"Ortberg’s writing comes from a culture that is both unapologetically and unconventionally political. Not all of her work is explicitly gendered — perhaps my favorite piece of hers is a list of “The Eleven Worst Plants” — but the intersection of gender, art (writ large), and social power is her great topic, and she returns to it almost weekly in posts exploring issues such as “Women Who Want to Be Alone in Western Art History.” With Texts from Jane Eyre, Ortberg’s writing is poised to reach a wider audience. This seems, then, a good moment to pause and take stock of the stakes of her project. Why texts; why Jane Eyre?"
Continually Hearing Asinine Vernacular
"The endurance of "chav" reflects the new meanness of the UK, a hardening of the so-called squeezed middle while the safety net of the welfare state is stripped." Chav - slur, social descriptor, element of nostalgia, or fodder for trend forecasters?
I should go
How Bioware helped one lucky couple unlock the paramour achievement in Mass Effect.
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