Time to celebrate one of the best Christmas movies around – Die Hard.
Funhouse Lounge here in Portland has done a Die Hard musical parody show for several years now. This year is no different and all the shows almost immediately sold out. However, given the COVID situation, they also graciously provided a streaming option. I gave it a watch, and recommend you do too – but hurry – there are only a few streaming opportunities left.
Newfields (location for Indianapolis Museum of Art) held a really cool Halloween festival with projection mapping, hundreds of pumpkins, and even a ghost train.
Magic was outlawed in Ethiopia in the 15th century. Presented here and stored in the British Library, is an ancient Ethiopian manuscript with prayers to perform magical transformations (such as turning into a lion or other creatures). Curator Eyob Derillo describes what is in the text and how historians study it to understand ancient African magic beliefs.
Just looking at the text, it appears to be beautifully illustrated. I wonder if you can get downloaded scans…
Code injection into Super Mario World has become a favorite of the speedrunning and the Mario hacking community. Usually this is done programmatically via automated controller input while exploiting overflow bugs. SethBling used the injection technique to enter a version of the game Flappy Bird – by hand.
Retro Game Mechanics Explained is a great series on retro game console programming. If you ever wanted to know how the cake is baked, this is a great channel.
One of the best series up so far is how to program the SNES system. His 16 part series talks about background effects, lag & blanking, DMA and HDMA, memory mapping, color math, hardware registers, background modes 0-6, and the infamous mode 7. It is one of the better explanations of mode 7 that I have seen (though folks with a more formal background in graphics might explain it with with affine transforms alone)
He also covers individual games and topics such as how the Atari 2600 ‘Raced the beam’, Atari quadrascan, pokemon sprite decompression, Pac-Man arcade’s famous kill screen, Mario’s wrong warp, and many other fun topics.
The “Clean House” mission in 2019’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is probably one of the most realistic gameplay sequences out there today. It’s not a cinematic, it’s a fully playable session. Read more about it here.
I ran into the Wizard of Christchurch (who later became the Wizard of New Zealand) in the early 2000’s. He is a former academic that would often bring a ladder to the central square and spoke on all kinds of different topics. Using ancient Greek-like rhetorical methods, he would often give both comical and controversial speeches, synthesising modern topics with the ideas/philosophical techniques of famous philosophers in farcical ways.
One of the things he used to talk about was how the world’s maps were created upside-down. Why should north be up? What if you made a map the ‘right’ way up – with New Zealand up top?
Enter Mapworld New Zealand. It turns out, they have one of his maps. A map of ‘the wizard’s interpretation of the upside down world, and the inside out universe.’ Not only is New Zealand up top, but the other countries also have more…creative interpretations.
You can read about his storied past, and how he became something of a tourist attraction in his own right. His gained fame for criticizing right-leaning politicians/agendas in the 80’s to the point it nearly got him arrested. This had the opposite effect of pushing him into fame. He started speaking openly in the city square for decades, criticizing politicians, company greed, cultural norms, and generally being a ‘free thinker’.
Unfortunately, it appears his fame has ended. He was canceled for offending the sensibilities of the left enough that he’s been removed from the city payroll as a tourism promoter. Fame is fickle, and it’s interesting to see how political tides, cancel culture, and ruling party techniques have changed (or not changed).
What a fascinating time of space exploration we live in. Pluto, Saturn, Jupiter, and now the sun. Over the last few years, the Parker Solar Probe has been making its way towards the sun and taking observations. Setting numerous speed records while doing so. Most recently, however, it entered the Sun’s corona and found fascinating streams of plasma.
There is even video footage from the craft traveling through the corona and being surrounded by these oscillating streams at 3:00 in this video. Give it a watch and learn about the astounding structures and complex discoveries it is making.
Believe it or not, but the field of optical illusions is still quite active. Here’s one of the newest ones by an digital artist jagarikin. The circles are spinning in place, but not moving or changing sizes. The arrows inside the circles is what makes it appear to be moving.
Here’s a good write-up of the effect called the Phi phenomenon.
Here are some more phi phenomenon effects he created that use color cycling:
Check out more of jagarikin’s work here.
At Star Wars: Galaxy Edge, you can build your own light saber at Savi’s Workshop. After being closed (likely due to union contract issues, not earlier stated parts availability issues) Disney World’s build a light saber workshop experience appears to be back open.
2021 prices are a whopping $219+CA tax but the experience regularly books up well in advance so reservations are highly recommended. Tom Bricker gives us a great description of the experience if you want to read it. There’s also lots of youtube videos of the experience as well.
However, many have strongly debated if it is worth it. The Disney build-a-saber experience is more than just a light saber, you also get a bit of a show while creating it. But if you’re looking for a really high quality saber, the jury seems to indicate you should look elsewhere.
So, if you want a truly beautiful piece – where should one go? It turns out, there are several.
Sabertrio makes arguably the best sabers out there. Running in the $500-$1000 range, they will definitely cost you. Parts availability have recently been a problem. Scans of the site show a great number of sabers out of stock in 2021.
Saberforge also makes high quality sabers for a lower entry price. You can even buy scratch and dent parts bags and put together your own.
Check out this link if you want to see other saber makers out there – everything from cheap Hasbro’s to $2000 custom works of art.