The motorcycle race on the Isle of Man is legendary.
Peter Hickman just obliterated the lap record onboard his FHO Racing BMW M 1000 RR and average 136.358 mph. Ride along for the whole 17 minutes of utter madness. You couldn’t pay me enough to even try this at 1/2 the speed – in a car.
Little Bubbly Child has some of the more colorful characters one might meet in rural/Appalachian locations. While I love rural areas and find them full of the wonderful and often well educated people, if you’ve lived in these locations you’ve probably met one or more of these folks that everyone sighs when they interact with them.
Ever see people doing demonstrations in big box stores, fairs, or outdoor markets? They’re usually showing off the latest knifes, miracle cleaning products, heating pads, etc. These are almost always multilevel marketing schemes.
MLM’s are marketing machines that have used the entrepreneur bandwagon and selling the idea of controlling your own destiny/ownership. While some may be legitimate, a great number of them are just thinly veiled pyramid schemes. As you move up, you are called an ‘owner’ but are always working in the pyramid – just with a different title. Many of those in these organizations make little money despite working insanely long hours.
Researchers have found these businesses are increasingly operated with the same methods as cults. Yes, cults. They push endless positivity, promote a step-by-step plans for entrepreneurial ‘salvation’, invent their own terminology, and create in/out dynamics to isolate and keep people from questioning what they’re doing. All techniques cults use.
It’s worth reading about these techniques, because as researchers are finding, these cult-like control techniques are increasingly spreading to social media, business, political groups, and social justice movements. It might be time to move past the word ‘cult’ as people don’t realize that the techniques can be used to ensnare anyone for almost anything – and they pull in even the smartest people.
I’ve written about how startup culture often has this same cult-like atmosphere.
Read more about the truth behind direct marketing here: https://thedevilcorp.wordpress.com
Nissan has made some concept robotic chairs that return to their proper positions when you clap your hands.
I think it could get funny if someone gets applause during a meeting.
Parvenu – par·ve·nu /ˈpärvəˌno͞o/ noun
“A person of obscure origin who has gained wealth, influence, or celebrity.”
“The Catholic Church is an institution I am bound to hold divine – but for unbelievers a proof of its divinity might be found in the fact that no merely human institution conducted with such knavish imbecility would have lasted a fortnight” – Hilaire Belloc
While US arcades haven’t seen a lot of growth or interesting development, Japan has kept their arcade experiences fresh and expanding in all kinds of creative ways.
Wacca is a Japanese rhythm arcade system developed by Marvelous along with hardcore techno label HARDCORE TANO*C. What makes it interesting is it’s focus on techno music and features a unique 360 multicolored touchscreen interface. The game’s circular display screen is enveloped by a circular touch panel on the outside. The player taps on the corresponding section of the touch panel as music notes approach the border of the circular screen. In addition to touch notes, the game also features hold notes, notes that slide left and right, and notes that involve flicking forwards and backwards on the touch pad.
Circular interfaces aren’t new. When I was in Japan before Covid, Sega’s game maimai was just becoming popular and really proved the interface had some serious possibilities. While first joking about the fact it looked like a front-loanding washing machine, it became a real hit.
An interesting part of Japanese arcade games is the increasing social and internet connectivity component. Unlike old stand-alone arcades, players can use players cards or a computer or smartphone to connect with maimai DX NET to access their scores and achievements, customize game settings, register with and compare friends’/rivals’ accomplishments/scores as well as compete in national rankings. Before maimai DX was released, it was possible to link a niconico account to upload a recording of the play from the camera built into the arcade machine. As time has gone on, there are now collaborations between different rhythm games and accounts.
This online and connected social aspect of the game along with the fun gameplay has really helped it become popular. As time went on, over 20 updates to the game and songs were released as well as a second generation of cabinets that were also constantly updated.
The regular updates (almost like seasons) keeps the play fresh and fun. As updates come out, players rank up and unlock new songs and new play mechanics. As players become advanced, they discover interesting hidden techniques and methods. Certain artists use particular touch motifs/techniques to add their own signature to their songs (swipes, taps, etc). It’s a real rabbit hole you can get into.
Wacca continued this trend of social connected play with regular updates when it was introduced in 2018. It looks like they have shut down Wacca and the online servers are now gone, but there is still a very active social community and now a fan project to bring it to VR.
It even made an appearance at GDQ 2024
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Have written previously about my experiments with the very excellent Greaseweazle; but that was reading things like my old Kings Quest 5.25″ floppy disks from my modern 12th Gen Intel PC running Windows 10.
Recently I acquired some old pc hardware and put together a retro 486-DX pc. To that end, I needed to create a DOS boot disk for this old system. That meant I needed to write a 1.2mb DOS boot disk.
Previously I used some boot disk images to create an old DOS virtual machine running Windows 1.0. For that, I used a bunch of archived boot disks images from WinWorld archive.
But how do I write these little beasts?
I floundered around with greaseweezle’s command line but this guide from Tech Tangents really helped out. There’s clearly a lot more I need to learn, but this got me a bootable 5.25″ 1.2mb floppy disk. I was able to test it on 2 different drives, and both worked. So, that’s pretty sweet!
How to write DOS 6.22 image to a 5.25″ 1.2m floppy drive attached to the ribbon cable right before the cable twist:
gw write --drive b --format ibm.1200 Dos6.22-5.25.img
To write a DOS 3.30 image to a 5.25″ 360k floppy drive attached to the ribbon cable right before the twist:
gw write --drive b --format ibm.360 DOS330-360k.img
Emm used her iPhone 12 Pro + @Scenario3d iphone app to generate this 3D image of her daughter.
Scenario makes a number of products. Read more about Scenario3d here.
LumiLabs also has some of their own offerings to capture scenes.
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I recently found out about an old-Portland speakeasy. Dean opened up his basement in NE Freemont for people to come hang out and drink. He made some beers, ‘gave’ them away for a $20 door donation, and never bothered to get a liquor license or card people. People would come hang out in his basement and have some beers.
He got shut down in 2014 by the OLCC and it appears he died just a few years later, but not before he had tons of people swing by. He didn’t bother to card and it was apparently quite the little hangout.
It appears it was purchased and re-opened in 2018 after being under uncertain ownership.
Read about more legitimate undeground bars here.
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