A Funkaoshi Production

I almost missed their birthday. The site feels like it’s in an odd place right now, trying hard to turn itself around after years of sitting on its hands. I am still a big fan of Flickr. It’s where all my photos go.

I actually had some chicken mcnuggets today, and they were fantastic.

I love Montreal, but yeah.

“AcademicTorrents allows researchers to upload datasets, articles and other research material. The site runs it own tracker and supports web-seeds as well, which guarantee that files are available at all times.”

For those not paying attention, Philip Seymour Hoffman died of a heroin overdose a couple days ago. There are no happy endings with heroin. This article from Brand is pretty old now, but worth a read. I wrote about opiates on this blog a while ago, back when I was taking them for my broken leg. My favourite line from that post: “At the time Heroin was being taken off the market because it was Heroin.”

On the one hand it’s hard to get worked up here because software engineers aren’t really hurting for money, especially in San Fransisco. On the other hand this story is crazy.

Even if you have no interest in video games of football, this article is hilarious and awesome.

This documentary about the early history D&D is looking pretty cool.

Of course this was coming.

This is what happens when it snows a little bit in a place that isn’t prepared for snow.

JS: It seems that you’re actively participating in two traditional painting genres: female nudes and still lifes. But you mash them together in an interesting way. There will be the female nude as the center of the canvas but she is surrounded by all this stuff.

ZS: I think part of it is that in other art and media, I hardly see anything that looks real. It doesn’t look like life. The people look off. Their apartments look empty. How many times have you seen a movie where the office is empty, nobody has anything taped to their wall? Like in that movie Drive, which is a fun movie, but he goes into this strip club and it’s the cleanest strip club I’ve ever seen. It creates a barrier where things don’t feel real—at least to me. So I seize on details that feel real which make things look like real life. Open a purse and inside it you will find a change purse with a crab on it, keys, gun, and whatever else. Wong Kar-wai and Wes Anderson seem to catch that on some level of detail. Some people say that my pieces are messy. I’m always like, I don’t believe you. If you have kids your house is messy, and if you are a guy you definitely have a messy house. Right now we are at a restaurant and it’s a cluttered place. It’s a nice, clean restaurant but this table is just chaos. There’s a milk container, a peppershaker, a PBR can, empty sugar packs, and silverware everywhere. You never see this in art or media

An interview with the artist Zak Smith—who I sometimes play D&D with.

As I have mentioned here before, no doubt, I ran a BBS in the early 90s: Land of the Wicker People. It ran off my old 486, using a 2400bps modem. What!

A great response to Tom Perkins’ ridiculous op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. You need to read that op-ed if you haven’t.

The Verge really kills it with their longer articles.

2014 marks the 40th anniversary of D&D.

Bombaclot.

The rise and fall of the undisputed giant of desktop publishing.