This Island Keith
This Island Keith. A realm which among other things, may contain philosophy, discord, politics, nonsense, dungeons and/or dragons, science, science fiction, video games, movies, LEGO blocks, brutal war, hippie love, culture, counter-culture, comedy, frivolity, monkeys, discussion of the Tabasco Sauce Incident, or even personal feelings. Not responsible for offending the closed-minded, so enter at your own memetic risk.
Monday, March 07, 2005
Long absence... many thoughts...
Some things that have happened to me since my last post....
Discovered the incredible BoingBoing blog, your one-stop shop for all that is nifty.
Celebrated my daughter Samantha's second birthday!
Saw a rainbow appear to actually land within 30 yards of me. Had insane impulse to search for pot of gold as well as being awed by the prismatic glory of nature.
Enjoyed the heck out of the new stop-motion show "Robot Chicken."
Failed to enjoy the new adaptation of Battlestar Galactica. Apparently I have too much childhood nostalgia for the old version...
Joined a cool site which has DJs compete to remix a donated song (with handily-cut-apart loops, no less!). Remixfight! Having messed with this stuff in the past, I am excited to have an excuse to practice this. Still too bad I lost my masters for the first ELOMD cd. Have only five surviving songs to show for more than 15 polished tracks.
Saw an insanely bad movie or two. Browsed a heck of a lot of insane internet sites, imagine that, no way can I list them here... sorry! :)
Ran several very intense D&D sessions. Most memorable being a two-parter with the PCs struggling to beat some cranked yuan-ti, a yuan-ti abomination fighter/tempest, a pureblood yuan-ti wizard/coiled cabalist, and a human priest of Set... Now the players are chasing the Nether Scrolls... fun stuff!
Forgot to post to my blog. Heh. oops!
bye for now
Discovered the incredible BoingBoing blog, your one-stop shop for all that is nifty.
Celebrated my daughter Samantha's second birthday!
Saw a rainbow appear to actually land within 30 yards of me. Had insane impulse to search for pot of gold as well as being awed by the prismatic glory of nature.
Enjoyed the heck out of the new stop-motion show "Robot Chicken."
Failed to enjoy the new adaptation of Battlestar Galactica. Apparently I have too much childhood nostalgia for the old version...
Joined a cool site which has DJs compete to remix a donated song (with handily-cut-apart loops, no less!). Remixfight! Having messed with this stuff in the past, I am excited to have an excuse to practice this. Still too bad I lost my masters for the first ELOMD cd. Have only five surviving songs to show for more than 15 polished tracks.
Saw an insanely bad movie or two. Browsed a heck of a lot of insane internet sites, imagine that, no way can I list them here... sorry! :)
Ran several very intense D&D sessions. Most memorable being a two-parter with the PCs struggling to beat some cranked yuan-ti, a yuan-ti abomination fighter/tempest, a pureblood yuan-ti wizard/coiled cabalist, and a human priest of Set... Now the players are chasing the Nether Scrolls... fun stuff!
Forgot to post to my blog. Heh. oops!
bye for now
Tuesday, January 25, 2005
Black Thursday
As if November 3rd wasn't depressing enough.
Some of you may have noticed the site was black for a few days (more than just on Thursday, for good measure). If you missed it, the entire blog was black except a "RIP: Democracy" graphic...
Fight the power, friends, it's not over. Don't let future generations ask why we let a redneck Hitler rip our Constitution and values into little bits for purposes of greed.
bye for now
Some of you may have noticed the site was black for a few days (more than just on Thursday, for good measure). If you missed it, the entire blog was black except a "RIP: Democracy" graphic...
Fight the power, friends, it's not over. Don't let future generations ask why we let a redneck Hitler rip our Constitution and values into little bits for purposes of greed.
bye for now
Saturday, December 18, 2004
Some Interesting Political Quotes
"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote."
-- Benjamin Franklin
"Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war."
-- John Adams
"If tyranny and oppression come to this land it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy."
-- James Madison
"The executive has no right, in any case, to decide the question, whether there is or is not cause for declaring war."
-- James Madison
"When the legislature is corrupted, the people are undone."
-- John Adams
"A man cannot ride your back unless you are bent."
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.
"It's not who votes that counts, it's who counts the votes."
-- Josef Stalin
"My kind of loyalty was to one's country, not to its institutions or officeholders."
-- Mark Twain
"Sometimes the truth is so precious, it must be accompanied by a bodyguard of lies."
-- Donald Rumsfeld
"Illegal we do immediately, the unconstitutional takes a bit longer."
-- Henry Kissinger
"We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence... by the military-industrial complex."
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Just things to think about.
bye for now
Tuesday, December 14, 2004
Non-Frivolous Post Ahead
Like all too many of us, probably more than the polls reported, I was almost catatonically depressed by the outcome of the 2004 election. I sulked about for a week, then ignored all news for a while, but finally am coming back around again to a stance of activism.
But how to strike back without actually killing the neocons personally?? The best answer is, in their bloated pocketbooks!
The fuel that allows the Republican political machine to steamroll over everything good and true is the hellish fluid called Political Contributions. But these contributions are (mostly) not coming from ordinary joes like yourself. Then where are they coming from? In a sense, they ARE actually coming from you, even if you're dyed-in-the-wool blue and hate the conservative machine. When you buy stuff, you may be inadvertently fueling that evil hate machine!
But most people don't have time to do in-depth research along these lines, tracing the money chain from the GOP through the corporate PACs back to the places of business from which you innocently bought something.
However, there is GOOD NEWS! Some good folks have made a site on which you can find out the political contribution habits of various businesses. Using www.buyblue.org, you can do this, especially if you write them to tell them WHY you boycott them, you can vote with your wallet. Pull the carpet out from under our cruel corporate masters!
Let's have a Blue Christmas!
bye for now
But how to strike back without actually killing the neocons personally?? The best answer is, in their bloated pocketbooks!
The fuel that allows the Republican political machine to steamroll over everything good and true is the hellish fluid called Political Contributions. But these contributions are (mostly) not coming from ordinary joes like yourself. Then where are they coming from? In a sense, they ARE actually coming from you, even if you're dyed-in-the-wool blue and hate the conservative machine. When you buy stuff, you may be inadvertently fueling that evil hate machine!
But most people don't have time to do in-depth research along these lines, tracing the money chain from the GOP through the corporate PACs back to the places of business from which you innocently bought something.
However, there is GOOD NEWS! Some good folks have made a site on which you can find out the political contribution habits of various businesses. Using www.buyblue.org, you can do this, especially if you write them to tell them WHY you boycott them, you can vote with your wallet. Pull the carpet out from under our cruel corporate masters!
Let's have a Blue Christmas!
bye for now
Saturday, December 11, 2004
CGI Baby Ant-Rescue Team Adventure Page!
I've been trying to share really neat pictures. I understand the impulse. Making cool renderings (albeit in my case using the PrntScrn button during particularly graphic matches of Dawn of War) is fine, and there are many fine sites featuring quality CGI artwork. Or software to do it.
But some people just should not be given access to Poser. For example, whatever evil demonic force created the "Dancing Baby", featured on Ally McLemia or whatever show that was. That sort of demonic intrusion into the world of man is horrible enough when the people are CGI and photo software pros.
So I see this picture, when my girl was looking for pictures of faeries, she made a horrid noise, like a Call of Cthulhu character who has just taken a sudden massive loss of Sanity points, and had the lack of foresight to call my attention to the reality-searing monstrosity that I exhibit below:
Now, babies are cute. There are statistical research results that prove that people like babies and all that. And, arguably, dinosaurs are cute. Don Bluth has been arguing this for about 38 sequels of "Land Before Time" by the time you read this. And ants, well. Ants just aren't cute. Even CGI ants have to really really work at it. Well we'd have to be talkin' about one charmin' motherfuckin' ant. I mean he'd have to be ten times more charmin' than that Charlotte on Charlotte's Web, you know what I'm sayin'? But here is an argument for ant cuteness that is, sadly, spectacularly ineffective. And that CGI baby looks way way too much like Chucky, the Official Demonic Talking Doll of the NFL Football League.
Give yourself a few minutes to let your equilibrium return after viewing this. Operation of heavy machinery and/or driving are not recommended until your eyes stop burning and auditory hallucinations of the torments of lost souls recede into a dull roar.
And what about the concept? I mean, you can page through hundreds of art books and never see a painting by a famous artist about a baby saving his oversized plastic ant friend from a crested dinosaur of uncertain paleontological pedigree. You might think you see one in the Cubist section, but you'd probably be wrong. And Dali drew the line well before stuff THAT weird.
Not everything on the Graphics by Pati page is as shockingly bizarre as this. But much of it comes close. Venture there if you dare.
I must cleanse my mind of the taint of this picture, so... Oh wait. I just noticed a rainbow on the *ground* behind the 'dinosaur'. My mind is going. I can feel it.
bye for now
But some people just should not be given access to Poser. For example, whatever evil demonic force created the "Dancing Baby", featured on Ally McLemia or whatever show that was. That sort of demonic intrusion into the world of man is horrible enough when the people are CGI and photo software pros.
So I see this picture, when my girl was looking for pictures of faeries, she made a horrid noise, like a Call of Cthulhu character who has just taken a sudden massive loss of Sanity points, and had the lack of foresight to call my attention to the reality-searing monstrosity that I exhibit below:
Now, babies are cute. There are statistical research results that prove that people like babies and all that. And, arguably, dinosaurs are cute. Don Bluth has been arguing this for about 38 sequels of "Land Before Time" by the time you read this. And ants, well. Ants just aren't cute. Even CGI ants have to really really work at it. Well we'd have to be talkin' about one charmin' motherfuckin' ant. I mean he'd have to be ten times more charmin' than that Charlotte on Charlotte's Web, you know what I'm sayin'? But here is an argument for ant cuteness that is, sadly, spectacularly ineffective. And that CGI baby looks way way too much like Chucky, the Official Demonic Talking Doll of the NFL Football League.
Give yourself a few minutes to let your equilibrium return after viewing this. Operation of heavy machinery and/or driving are not recommended until your eyes stop burning and auditory hallucinations of the torments of lost souls recede into a dull roar.
And what about the concept? I mean, you can page through hundreds of art books and never see a painting by a famous artist about a baby saving his oversized plastic ant friend from a crested dinosaur of uncertain paleontological pedigree. You might think you see one in the Cubist section, but you'd probably be wrong. And Dali drew the line well before stuff THAT weird.
Not everything on the Graphics by Pati page is as shockingly bizarre as this. But much of it comes close. Venture there if you dare.
I must cleanse my mind of the taint of this picture, so... Oh wait. I just noticed a rainbow on the *ground* behind the 'dinosaur'. My mind is going. I can feel it.
bye for now
Wednesday, December 08, 2004
CRY HAVOC!
My longing for battle is quenched. The Eldar have become victorious over every foe faced so far... assuring me I need to turn the AI settings up. I have some visual goodies for you folks from this game:
First, a squad of Howling Banshees in a post-victory pose:
Next, a Wraithlord, with some Warp Spiders running by:
And, I'm sure you've already noticed the Avatar fight animation which has now become part of my sidebar. Chaos stands no chance against the Avatar of Kaela Mensha Kaine!
Snoqualmie Pass is iced-in today, so I can't pursue my travel plans until tomorrow at the earliest. Dang. *goes to boot up Dawn of War again*
bye for now
First, a squad of Howling Banshees in a post-victory pose:
Next, a Wraithlord, with some Warp Spiders running by:
And, I'm sure you've already noticed the Avatar fight animation which has now become part of my sidebar. Chaos stands no chance against the Avatar of Kaela Mensha Kaine!
Snoqualmie Pass is iced-in today, so I can't pursue my travel plans until tomorrow at the earliest. Dang. *goes to boot up Dawn of War again*
bye for now
Monday, December 06, 2004
TV Makes No Sense Anymore
Adult Swim... Ah, it has been accused of being nonsensical. But, for whatever reason, my twisted brain "gets it" about 99% of the time. Except for maybe that weird episode of the Brak Show where a Japanese company took over Brak's family.
Maybe I just don't understand Japanese humor...? Because this new show on Adult Swim, Super Milk Chan, makes ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE. I mean, I appreciate the pointlessly bizarre as much as anyone, perhaps more so.
But who IS this little too-long-sleeved munchkin? Why does she live with a giant bottle-shaped robo-nanny? Who is the menacing scientist with the Union Jack eyepatch and the weird ghost hands? Why does the President call a five-year-old to solve problems? What is with the green mustached slug?
My brain hurts!!
And why are rice cakes supposed to be STRETCHY?!? *shudder*
bye for now
Maybe I just don't understand Japanese humor...? Because this new show on Adult Swim, Super Milk Chan, makes ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE. I mean, I appreciate the pointlessly bizarre as much as anyone, perhaps more so.
But who IS this little too-long-sleeved munchkin? Why does she live with a giant bottle-shaped robo-nanny? Who is the menacing scientist with the Union Jack eyepatch and the weird ghost hands? Why does the President call a five-year-old to solve problems? What is with the green mustached slug?
My brain hurts!!
And why are rice cakes supposed to be STRETCHY?!? *shudder*
bye for now
