Potato Powered Doom
How many potatoes does it take to run Doom? About 770 potato slices if you run it on a TI-84 calculator. 770 very stinky potatoes.
High Altitude Penitentes
Snow can get funny at high altitudes and on mountains. It can be powdery soft, squeeky and crunchy, wet and gummy, or even form strange shapes depending on pressure, humidity, temperature, and a host of other conditions. It’s one of the fascinating parts I love about climbing mountains.
In the high Atacama desert, Penitentes, or nieves penitentes (Spanish for “penitent-shaped snows”), are snow formations found at high altitudes. They take the form of elongated, thin blades of hardened snow or ice, closely spaced and pointing towards the general direction of the sun.
The name comes from the resemblance of a field of penitentes – a crowd of kneeling people doing penance. The formation evokes the tall, pointed habits and hoods worn by brothers of religious orders in the Processions of Penance during Spanish Holy Week. In particular the brothers’ hats are tall, narrow, and white, with a pointed top.
These spires of snow and ice grow over all glaciated and snow-covered areas in the dry andes above 4,000 metres (13,000 ft).They range in length from a few centimetres to over 5 metres (16 ft).
Penitentes up to 15 metres (49 ft) high are suggested to be present in the tropics zone on Europa, a satellite of Jupiter. According to a recent study, NASA’s New Horizons has discovered penitentes on Pluto, in a region informally named Tartarus Dorsa
03/2024 Update:
There are similar rock formations in the extreme areas of Russian Siberia in the Ulakhan-Sis Mountain Range.
Whimsical Furniture Flashbacks
I’m pretty sure I’ve met Dust Furniture‘s Vincent Leman back in the day when he was using a studio right next to the computer shop I worked at in Brookston, Indiana. His company makes very Disney-esque style whimsical furniture pieces that would also look just as at home in a Tim Burton feature.
I hadn’t thought of his work in years, yet ran across a pintrest pic of the stacked cabinet and it all came back. Great to see he’s still at it and doing well.
John Robertson’s Dark Room improv
John Robertson is here to guide you through an adventure of expertly crafted chaos and anarchy. And in the end, eeeeeverybody plays!
YOU AWAKE TO FIND YOURSELF IN A DARK ROOM is a live action video game that has the audience trapped in an interactive, retro gaming nightmare; choose an option, find a way out, and escape The Dark Room! If you succeed, you’ll take home £1,000… but if you fail, YOU WILL DIE!
Hercule Poirot’s Orient Express
David Suchet, famous for his portrayal of Hercule Poirot, take a real-life trip on the Venice Simplon Orient Express. While very expensive, it is definitely on my bucket list. Give it a watch.
I got to do a one day murder mystery trip on the train on my last trip to England. It appears this has gone so well, they’ve really upped the cost and length.
The man that lives at Narita Airport
Most people have heard of Mehran Karimi Nasseri, the Iranian refugee who was forced to live in the departure lounge of Paris-Charles de Gaulle Airport from 1988 until 2006. His story was made into a book and then the 2004 Tom Hanks movie The Terminal. This is not that story.
Instead, this is set in Japan about a very different man. One I am almost certain I taxied right past in one of my trips to Japan.
Takao Shito is a farmer living in the Narita International Airport in Tokyo, Japan. Unlike other farmers who left when the airport was built in the 1960s, he chose to stay and continue to cultivate his farmland. He’s been offered the equivalent of $1.5 million USD – but refuses to leave the land his family farmed for 100 years. It’s a rare an interesting view into land rights disputes and Japanese culture.
And when I say he lives right in the middle of the airport – I mean it. Here you can see the red spot exactly where his farm is located on the north end of the terminals right between the terminals and runway 34R.
Other info:
https://www.odditycentral.com/news/farmer-lives-in-the-middle-of-japans-second-largest-airport.html
Star Trek B-Sides
Star Trek TNG B-Sides is a clever fan edited series that re-contextualizes the secondary subplot that arise within episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation to make them the primary focus. The result is an entertaining series of 15-minute videos that effectively look at things in a different way than the original.
Funky Melon
French musician MEZERG kicks out some groovy sounds using one of the silliest musical instruments – a watermelon.
2022 Update: Want to try this yourself? Makey Makey has a directional/gamepad like circuit board with inputs that allow you to hook up anything you’d like to your pc – including fruit.
Creating The Oregon Trail
In 1984 I was given the assignment to help create a completely new version of The Oregon Trail. The text-based version of the game had already been around for more than a decade — but in all that time the game had never been substantially modified, much less redesigned from the ground up. But that was about to change. MECC, the publisher of the game, was ready to replace the aging product with something completely new, and I was selected to be the team leader and lead designer for the project.
Learn how R. Philip Bouchard lead the creation of The Oregon Trail we know today, but also the hunting minigame was made. Fascinating stuff.
https://medium.com/the-philipendium/designing-the-hunting-game-for-the-oregon-trail-257924bdc6ae