- RADIOHEAD - ELECTIONEERING
-
TED LEO/PHARMACISTS - THE ONE WHO GOT US OUT
- THE FIERY FURNACES - NAVY NURSE
-
THE RAPTURE - HOUSE OF JEALOUS LOVERS
- VELVET UNDERGROUND - ROCK & ROLL
Saw a blind guy at school walking around with an iPhone. Soooooo..... How does that work exactly? Is Apple really as awesome as the fanboys scream and built heavy accessibility features into a touchscreen phone?
In other gadget news, my 360 went to the hospital. Despite the Team Fortress 2 withdrawl, I don't even care, as long as it gets back in time for Rock Band. Because it's actually coming out and oh mah car.
UPDATE: the morning after I wrote this the xbox landed on my front porch. So, in exchange for my stupidity, you get music.
This one's for the kids in the crowd who don't inhale the internet with every breath. They exist, I guess?
This may not appear to be much at first glance, but check out the tech video to get an idea of what's happening behind the scenes. When that video first made the rounds, the tech seemed too good to be true, but hey, here it is in a flash wrapper for all to play with! Not tremendously useful in practice, the deformation is pretty noticeable for large resizings, but still very neat. Hope these guys end up with a lot of money.
Out of nowhere, Radiohead's guitarist pops up and tells the world they'll be releasing an album next week. That'd be pretty nuts by itself, but it seems the madness goes even further. They'll initially be releasing the mp3 version of the album from their own servers for whatever price you feel like paying. Guh?! Looks like one of the biggest bands around finally put their "music needs to be free" rhetoric to practice. Those are some mighty big balls. Awesome to see them try something this neat immediately after finishing their contract with Parlophone, assumedly what they're trying is about as indie as it can get.
IRO's doing a group buy, which means you can get a brand new singlespeed frame + fork for about 50% off the already pretty cheap price, and from what I hear, the bikes are verified as "worth a damn". I'm planning on picking one up to finally fufill my urge to build a bike from the ground up. If this sounds like something you'd like as well, jump quick, he'll stop taking reservations on October 5th.
Recently, I've had the spark to touch a skateboard again. And not because of a certain game, no, this urge has been chewing on me for a while. I'm way rubbish, of course, but I was never that hot to begin with, so hey, no great loss. Without the ability to do much more than roll around, this is more a grab at nostalgia than anything else. So I decided to do this proper and make a field trip out of it, hitting up the old spots of yore.
- Turkey Bowl
It used to be in a vague nowhere, but now you can easily spot it from the intersection of Barstow and Slaughter. I suspect the recent development brings the kids today plenty of hassle, but back in the day, we could skate all day long without seeing another soul. If they weren't skating street, this is where all the south Austin skateboarders would be. My crew certainly couldn't skate anything featuring ledges or handrails, so this is where we lived. Pumpable enough to be enjoyable, coping for ride-up grinds at the dirt edge made of whatever we could drag back there... It was kinda ramshackle, but it was good enough for us. There was a wooden quarterpipe that someone brought for a time, that was good rickety fun, until Giambrone hit it from the steep side of the bowl and launched himself about 10 feet in the air, destroying his knee on the return to earth. We were all a bit weary of its tendency to tilt back after that.
This ditch really couldn't have been designed for anything else, in my opinion. The steep but ridable angles, the launch points, short of an actual parking lot it's always looked like some mischevious civic designer's deed in the middle of a field. There's the attatched pit that always looked interesting, but was always filled with muck. Almost proves my theory, I say.
- Rat Bowl (?)
When the Turkey Bowl was filled to the brim with kids who could actually skate, we searched for an open sanctuary. Nestled between the trees in the way-south Mopac median a bit after La Crosse, we found the Rat Bowl... Or maybe Shark Bowl, something stupid like that... Anyway, I like to believe we were the first ones there. I'd never heard anyone talk about it, not that it was really worth talking about. It was a pretty tiny ride, but I liked it for its huge flat and tremendously grindable edges. But of course, the main draw was that my crew could goof off all day without getting in anyone else's way, it was ours, all ours. Despite our secrecy, it looks like it's been inherited by someone who's kept it clean and installed some nice parking blocks, good job kids.
It was a pretty quirky place, with ridable tunnels, weirdo bowls on the side, and a constant water hazard at the mouth to keep you on your toes. More of a place to hang out than a place to get serious skating done. The years following high school graduation provided a few ditches pretending to the throne and the crew grew lazy, apathetic, and more employed, so the skateboards got shoved in the closet. But I've been riding around with a deck in the trunk, hoping to find a excuse to skate around. So how about it? I mean, there's this ditch I always see kids skating right next to the Triangle off 45th...
my vidya here, as EA has not yet implemented a embed for the clips. I say it's pretty cool. The game, that is, not anything previously mentioned.
Anyways, I've started up a Vox group for the players, so if you want in on the festivities, send me a message and I'll add you in.
Peach + strawberry pie from scratch. Not bad for a pair of first-timers.
40-49 down, halfway thru. Don't know if I can take it much further, the highscore videos for the remaining levels rely on some crazy abuse of physics that are still mystery to me. In other news, go take part in Dan's blindcat challenge. Here's my entry:
Oh yeah, that's the thing I forgot to tell you about. My other game obsession. In between arthritis-enducing sessions of N, I find happiness with the beautiful simplicity of Gimme Friction Baby. Stupid name, yes, you know, the Dutch. What can you do. Anyway, basically, we're looking at a Puzzle Bobble turned into a freeform Tetris. The platform is so simple that it's pretty much pointless to talk about it, an opinion shared by the official lack of instructions. Just click. Blow up balls. Don't die. Repeat and repeat and repeat. It's a blank enough palette to require a bit of skill and strategy. When you hit that perfect Death Star bankshot into a crevice, annihilating everything in sight, life is awesome. Now go beat me @ 23.
