There’s been an option on here to click sitemap for a while now, providing a list of all tags used on the blog. That in itself is quite handy, but now I’ve also updated it with a neat pirate treasure map that has links to all the major sections of the site, along with a large helping of other minor minutia. Check it out!
Every once and a while some older post will suddenly get a lot of clicks for no apparent reason. Once and I while I can trace this to search terms or referrers, which I find interesting just for the sake of learning how and/or why people walk through the door around here. Today I noticed that the top viewed post for the last 7 days is this one, talking about obsessive-compulsive fan collecting from last spring. I checked out the referrers list and found out that someone on a fan-collecting forum had linked to the post and brought a lot of their friends through the door. To that I say:
Welcome, esteemed connoisseurs of fine blades and stylized means of airflow generation!
I am down with the fan collectors.
What’s definitely making me laugh though, is the fact that the guy who posted the link is mocking me, saying essentially that I’m an idiot for thinking that plastic fans are cool, and that metal fans are where it’s at. Oh the embarrassment! I had no idea that real fan collectors have to make the jump up to metal! This whole time I’ve been nothing but a poser! Gasp!! I guess you ain’t hardcore unless you rock the METAL.
\nn/ \nn/ WEEEEWWWW!!!!! (that’s me doing air guitar)
Okay, any of you metal fan fiends, I wanna see some example pictures in the comments, because I’m just not convinced that it’s all about the metal. What if you dig like 60′s or 70′s design, are there sweet metal fans like that? You come to my website for ‘ignorance at its finest’ and the cup overfloweth.
Actually, I think it’s pretty awesome that someone is getting bent out of shape over what I thought looked cool. I mean, that’s part of the nature of design–what looks hip to one person will inevitably seem passé to another. I’m imagning this guy in his secret lair of glimmering display cases filled with ALL METAL fans, at the moment that his google searching brought him to my blog and erupting in a righteous fury of indignance “Oh my god dude, oh my god. You totally have no clue what you’re talking about here, oh my god. Good fans are METAL fans?! Hello? Everyone knows that, I mean, oh my god, everyone knows that!! Duh duh duh duh duhduhhh! Oh my god, clear my afternoon I need to rant about this right. now.”
Oh my god.
I guess this solidifies my cred as a wannabe, armchair fan collector, never to join the ranks of the hip’n'with-it Collectors with a capital C. I think I can live with that. Speaking of air guitar, I recently watched a very over-the-top documentary about the World Air Guitar Championships (yes, this is really a thing) which sort of reinforced the idea that with esoteric, niche hobbies there’s a fine line between kickass and laughably ridiculous. I’m content to sit on the sidelines and watch other people walk that tightrope.
I’m also content to continue basking in my ignorance (okay that deserves it’s own tag on the blog from now on) when it comes to plastic versus metal. There was a salient comment on the original post when it comes to ‘hoarders with more money than brains’ in the hobby of fan collecting… oh man that comment applies SO DAMN HARD when it comes to model trains as well. Probably applies to telescopes and amateur astronomy too. Sweaty-keyboard-elitists aside (every hobby’s got em!) the model railroaders I have met, and the amateur astronomers I have met, have been by and large a swell group of people whom I greatly enjoyed chatting with. I’m sure fan collectors are swell people too.
Do they have like meet ups for this kind of thing? Or conventions? Is this the first step on my way to an eventual 12-step recovery program for metal fan addiction? Tune in next time to find out! This is JB on the fans tag, signing out for now.
Ah, like the first snowflake of an avalanche-to-be, I have spent $25 on astronomy. This is surely the start of a costly and destructive addiction.
This week in the mail, a pair of el-cheapo Tasco 7×35 binoculars arrived. I had been watching the binos classified on astromart.com, waiting for an awesome pair to show up, hopefully made by some telescope maker. A couple weeks ago there were some 10×50 Celestrons and I got all excited, thinking, ooh, this is it! Then I searched for reviews on them and found out that everyone was bad mouthing these binoculars. So much for patience and diligence paying off! Buried in one of the threads on the cloudynights forums, I found someone who said that they have several pairs of pricey binos but that these Tasco 7x35s were just so comfortable and easy to use that they did all of their observing with them. The guy even went on to say that they had tried like thousand dollar binoculars (seriously, there is such a thing?!) and that these cheapo Tascos felt just as good. Okay, screw it, I’m just getting these then.
The other night I busted them out and checked out the full moon, which was pretty sweet. You can see plenty of detail on it, and I was pleasantly surprised to see how many stars reveal themselves, even from a light-polluted backyard. There’s a nice double star just above Vega that jumped out at me. Sweet…
Also, binos, like rhinos and dinos is my new favorite word.
We were riding the subway in NYC when we pulled up to the West 4th street stop and there was this kickass drumming going on when the doors slid open. I listened for a split second and then said to my brother & girlfriend, hey let’s get off for a minute and check this out. My bro was like … YEAH!
So we step on to the platform and I pull out my admittedly huge camera and the dudes kinda trailed off. They looked at me and said ‘hey we gots to get paid or else we can’t play!’ So I dropped some jazz millions in the collection bucket and told them to keep it rolling.
True story.
There’s a NEW Grand Theft Auto! And it’s going to have stuff in it that’s never been in those other GTAs before! OMG!
Alright, but seriously. Wait… I’m still not over it yet–Oh. My. God.
Just check out this trailer.
Aw man, GTA, how I adore thee.
One thing I definitely look forward to is the launch night. For the past two releases in the series me and my buddy Roberto have made an occasion out of this with an all-night GTA binge. Last time this happened, we were so excited to go pick up the game that on the way out, I forgot to grab my keys… which I then realized after we were locked outside of my apartment building. And my apartment was on the 2nd floor. Rob was like, did you lock your balcony door? Answer: No!–and a high five! Boosted him up with my hands and he climbed over the railing, then came running down the stairs roaring triumphantly. I asked, “So did you get the keys?” and he was like, “Ummm, actually no. I thought I just had to let you back in the building door??” (my apartment door locks behind you!) Solid laughs right here. “So rinse and repeat on the infilitration routine, then?” Good times.
Another amusing thing that we did was to set our own goals and just forget about the game storyline. For example, when San Andreas came out, the first place we wanted to go on the map was Las Vegas (aka Las Venturas). Sadly, this area is locked at the beginning of the game, inaccessible to even the most obsessed motorist due to barricaded bridges. Hmmm, what to do? Undeterred, we hatched a plan so crazy it just might work: find a tall truck, park it next to the barbed wire fence at the airport, climb the truck, jump the fence, and steal a learjet which we could then fly to Vegas!
It took many tries. Every step of this process turned out to be more difficult than we’d anticipated. Including the unexpected twist that there were fighter jets that will shoot you down if you stray into locked parts of the map, which we had to evade! But lo and behold, after hours of trying and against the handicap of inebriation, we totally crashed a learjet into the Vegas strip. And it was pretty amazing really.
It made me pretty excited to see the learjet at the end of the first GTA V trailer, just because it makes me remember our crazy, successful plot to cheat our way into places we weren’t supposed to go. And I also know that stealing this jet is also going to be one of the very top objectives when we get set loose in GTA V!
If this article interested you, check out my winding yarn about what makes GTA so great.
Oh man. I am fired. Up. Fired up for the FUNK.
Fired up for the press access, fired up over maybe getting to meet some of these musicians backstage, fired up to take a boatload of pictures, and fired up for the music festival atmosphere.
As a recap, check out this post with the discussion of Soulive’s performance last year. AWWW GIT IT!
So in the near future there will be some time-lapse movies on here of various places in NYC that I shot whilst visiting my brother, along with my lovely lady. I knew I wanted to do some time-lapse of crowds in motion, but how to steady the camera? Carrying a tripod around the whole trip would be very tedious, and plus it takes up a lot of room on the sidewalk. Solution: one of those gorillapods–you can even wrap it around a signpost and put it above head-level! I bought a gorillapod with ball head expressly for this purpose, and you can see it in action in the photo here. I think it performed admirably well, although it is definitely way more susceptible to wind gusts than a normal tripod.
For anyone curious, the gorillapod actually did stay right in position as it is shown here, except for when a gust of wind would blow the signpost, or my hand went up there to fiddle with it.
Pretty neat.
I might have to start a new series of posts showing the gorillapod in extreme action poses.
Entry #1.
UPDATE: The Video HERE.
I love it when I can make a post using the “Moment of Genesis” tag. That in itself is a tiny triumph. I think this one qualifies:
In the mail a couple weeks ago I recieved all the little bits of plastic I’ll need to construct an HO-scale replica of the steel viaduct at Mine Creek. This is a giant trestle along the Milwaukee Road mainline in the Snoqualmie Valley of Washington state, and indeed my replica will be GIANT as well. Check out the whole setup below, with the locos and some inspiring artwork seen in the background:
Someday I dream of being ‘that-guy’ with the huge attic empire of a sprawling model railroad. To help that dream come true, I plan on building smaller dioramas or set-pieces which will someday become the focal points of a large sized train layout. This huge bridge will most definitely be one of these!
I will probably still need to pick up a few more minor pieces to model the top deck, the railing, and the catenary posts (those parts that hold up the overhead wire), but the major pieces are all here now, which is very exciting. Micro Engineering, the company who manufacturers these bridge kits, is one of the best companies out there. When this bridge is done, it will be spectacular indeed! Also, it will probably be a very non-trivial endeavor to build it! These are advanced-level kits, not intended for the faint-of-heart. Oh boy.
Anyway, it will probably be a while before I actually break all this open, airbrush it, cut it from the sprues and then build it. There’s a house move in the near future and all this stuff is a can of worms to be respected. But still, it’s here, and I see the potential in it. This thing is gonna be AWESOME.
To be continued…………..
In 1987 Compuserve introduced the .gif format so that it could someday culminate in the perfect storm of kickassery that you now witness below. At the time of its inception, it was never dreamed that the format would someday achieve this level of incredibleness. Now that it has reached its zenith with this image, heretoforth animated gifs shall ever be in a state of decline, never quite living up to the golden standard achieved here.
aka Awesome Search Terms That Crack Me UP.
I check the stats pretty regularly on this blog and one thing that is an eternal source of fascination and amusement are the search terms that bring people around. If a website is a wide open door, it’s pretty neat to listen in on the reasons why new people came through it. I’ll divide the terms into two groups, with a few comments inserted here and there.
group one
“Kindred Spirits”:
mind blowing things to think about
vastness of the universe
infinity written out -just as futile as trying to write out a googolplex?
girls brain waves voyager -We all know who this is referring to!
how small we are compared to other things
van gogh yourself -I want to do this too!
be-positive-spelled-out-in-colorful-refrigerator-magnets -this one made me smile. And sort of bummed out a little bit that I don’t have the right picture to reward whomever came through trying to find this. Tell you what, let’s fix that right now:
and group two
“You Came Here Looking For WHAT?”:
selective choices among low-brow tastes -AWESOME. I wanna be like the bargain basement headquarters for this! Matter of fact, new tag, starting now.
changing dimensions green man -green man? Like It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia “green man”?
99% of snapple facts are fake -I hope you’re right
“space porn” -ok I get that.
disco speaker building
fuji obey -a testament to the seductive power of the X100?
message in a bottle in the sewer -I was with you until that last part
oinking a goomba -I really do AND DON’T want to know what this means. Maybe I should not be encouraging people looking for this to come here.
like raspberries but thinner and longer -You ate what?
james brown seti -what a mashup! HAH!
why not to scream around cicadas -WTF, seriously.
what is this
This second group has made me laugh out loud on several occasions, while the first makes me smile in a different way. Keep on comin’ you kooky kids! I check the results every day and it always raises an eyebrow. Love it!
