Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Category Archives: Things Stolen From Jake
Frontier psychiatrist: the samples
Remember when folks used to gush over Moby’s sampling techniques? I’ll bet Moby never sampled a John Waters movie . . .
D.
Frontier psychiatrist
I challenge you to watch this without your jaw dropping. Probably several times.
D.
Must resist timesuck!
So how is everyone? What are you guys reading? I reread Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, and while I love Bladerunner, DADES cries out for a more faithful adaptation. Also reading Tim Powers’s Declare.
I’ve been working like a dog, visiting college campuses with Jake, and writing, roughly in that order. (Should finish the current chapter tonight, which leaves two chapters to go. I need to finish one last scene . . .)
From my son, here’s Cyanide and Happiness, which is also a web comic — but my first experience with them was this video:
and the next was this,
In both cases, they’ve mastered the essential “I didn’t see that coming” aspect of comedy. Gotta resist the urge to bask in their brilliance.
D.
LINE PIECE!
Whoever decided that the game Battleship should be turned into a movie must have seen this video.
D.
Still here, and writing
Just went by the 40K-word mark yesterday, in fact. Sorry I haven’t updated here, but life has been crazy. I’m pleased it hasn’t screwed with the writing because that is soooo easy.
So, hey: take a beloved American novel . . . some claim the Great American Novel. And turn it into a Nintendo platformer.
Here’s the video walkthrough, in case you’d rather not mash buttons to see how it ends.
I want to see their treatment of Heart of Darkness. Then again, maybe I don’t.
D.
Someone’s been reading my unpubbed book
For those of you who don’t know it, the critters in my SF novel are birds whose wings have devolved into arms and hands. I had in mind arms that look a lot more like bird legs than human arms, but I will take what I can get. Anyway, I think this is cool. Hat tip to my son; this came off one of his Mafia Scum forums.
Creepy video, great music
You really need to listen to this. (Watch, not so much.)
Yet another great group of musicians my son and I discovered by playing video games. BTW, the CD containing this song, Book of Silk, is out of print (or whatever you call it). Downloadable as an MP3, or you can pay some exorbitant amount to sellers on Amazon. How does a great CD like this go out of print?
D.
This is going to be AWESOME!
What Bioshock did for Ayn Rand’s objectivism, Bioshock Infinite promises to do for American exceptionalism:
The primary setting of BioShock Infinite is a city suspended in the air by giant blimps and balloons, called “Columbia”. Unlike the secret development of the underwater city of Rapture, Columbia was proudly boasted by the American government when launched in 1900, centralized on the idea of American exceptionalism; the reveal trailer for the game alludes to the 1893 Worlds Fair which is historically considered to be the emergence of American exceptionalism. Between its launch and the game’s events, the well-armed city became involved in an “international incident”, and the location of the city was soon lost from everyone else. Like Rapture, Columbia is considered a failed utopia, with signs present suggesting a theocratic government taking control at some point, and similar racial-purification concepts such as nazism and xenophobia.
And the artwork looks appealing, too.
Slated for release in 2012, which means 2013. If we’re lucky.
Hell, I’m still waiting for Diablo III . . .
D.
