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Entries from March 2016

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Null / undefined (31 Mar 2016 at 23:19)

Hi, i have been working all month on my SIGBOVIK project, but i can't reveal it until tomorrow, so I have nothing to post. Check back tomorrow!

(2 comments — almost 9 years ago) [ comment ]

Entries from February 2016

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Winter Vacation 2016 (29 Feb 2016 at 18:02)

Go ahead and blame the victim, but my head is covered in epic scales of sun-burn, which dead-ass skin also seems to have absorbed the entirety of the sun-tan, so these large size dry-ass patches are substantially darker than the enreddened prematurely newborn skin beneath as it peels, and it's peeling in these interlobing elliptic scales, so that my forehead looks like I accidentally forgot to finish my human makeup, outing my true reptilian shapeshifter form. It's kind of gross. I know how to use sunscreen and everything, at least I'd claim that, knowing that I totally sprayed it on all parts, then wiped it with my hands to get even in the secret spots where sun-burn can penetrate, like the sensitive inner lining of the eyelids. In fact I'd say it's pretty good proof of proper use that the sunburn is fully uniform, absent only in the contours where the body in running pose shades itself, like the undersides of my now terrifyingly highlighted pectoral muscles. Due to the uninterrupted and voluminous shedding I have vowed to not commit any crimes where I could be implicated by reptilian DNA evidence, for the next few days.

Same sun as always toasts us, but this one was from the vantage point of the tiny island in the Carribbean, Curaçao. I still can't figure out if it's technically a country or not, but if so it's surely the smallest country I've ever been in. We went there for vacation and I burned myself running across its girth, at approximately its widest part, the first time I've run across the girth of a thing that may be a country at approximately its widest part, unlocking that achievement.

ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED
Ran across a thing that ...

(Running may be an overstatement, though—the north parts are pretty remote, there was no shade, and I ran out of water, so I did plenty of walking so as not to hurt myself.) Even though Curaçao is an island and gets lots of sea-mist, it's basically a desert, sort of like an inverted oasis for the ocean itself. On my run it was comically hot and dry, like literally there were dead dry-ass cactuses and dead dry-ass buzzards (probably not actually buzzards, but I imagined them as buzzards for comic purposes) and dead dry-ass skeletal apocalypse horses, e.g.,

...

The north coast is super beautiful and a great payoff, though. It's this tall coral embankment that's being eaten away by the waves from the underside, which eventually causes reptilian scales to disintegrate from the coral, exposing caves and giant tidal pools, like so:

These could be anywhere beneath your feat

A full account of the trip would take more space than this tiny margin could contain (but seriously, isn't it also getting kind of funny how narrow this page is, by 2016 standards? I haven't changed the design since Stalkertron 2000 launched in Y2K, but somehow this has not stemmed the tide of ever-widening screens. But it may have made me mobile-optimized.), and most of it was very pleasant exploring and relaxing and programming and normal touristy stuff. There were a few other miscellaneous things that delighted me, though:

First, the language(s). It seems everyone there speaks 3 or 4 languages, which is impressive, and signs sort of switch fluidly between them. For example, one sign (NO PHOTO) reads:

Boat tours of
the both sides
of de island

Perfectly intelligible, and to be clear this is an expression of my delight, not making fun (especially since I barely speak one human language), but wha? It was just four words ago that you demonstrated knowledge (if not quite mastery) of the definite article in English! And I know you already know this, but Dutch is so funny to English speakers, seeming on signs to mostly be lolcats or earnest typos of English, like news of the impending "Elekshon", or this delightful specimen:

"Let op! Drempels"

OMG ♥. My next band will be called Drempels. Then there is their currency, normal except for the 1/100 guilder coin, approximately worth one-half US cent. It's so minuscule and lightweight as to be classified as an inhalation hazard:

Use only NIOSH N95 or equivalent

And finally, ruminate on this survey machine found outside the bathroom in the airport terminal (and note that the need for a survey machine may give you hints about the expected answers).

Again note hints of reptilian conspiracy.

But to simplify the rumination, imagine that it just has a single frowny face button, that just says "Please touch this button if you are one of the people who just went in a really unclean bathroom" or perhaps just: "Did you wash your hands? Y/N"

(6 comments — almost 9 years ago) [ comment ]

Entries from January 2016

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Consolation prize (31 Jan 2016 at 14:25)

Well, welcome again to Tom 7 Radar, where on the last day of each month I post a hastily-written last minute apology for not accomplishing anything interesting to work on during the month.

This month I have been working on my weird computational Nintendo stuff a lot. I finished the systems stuff (especially an extremely painful project to clean up the code of the NES emulator I've been using and make it thread-safe) and now I'm on the "fun" part where I can try experiments and make it do crazy stuff. But the fun part is also rough going so there are ups and downs to that. Hopefully putting together a video before SIGBOVIK, including some explanations of the systems stuff. I had the realization recently that I think it's possible that I've executed more NES cycles than any person ever; these recent experiments are about 2 billion frames a day (which is about a year of running at native NES speed). Don't think there is a Guinness Book entry for this yet.

My other projects have been fun but uninteresting (to you) home projects, like redoing all the lighting and scraping paint for hours in my basement. One thing I did finish this month that's moderately interesting to look at is another carpentry project. Behind my couch was this mess of wires and an iPad and mixer for playing music. You couldn't really see it but it was impossible to clean and you'd have to pull the couch out or suck in your stomach and sidle to even change the volume or put on music, which was stupid. I built this skinny thing which you can see in its final home:

Console <i>mis en place</i>

Console mis en place

This one—known as "Console", since every project gets a name—is made with somewhat more complex joinery than before. The corner joints are the most interesting, where slots in the vertical beams support cross beams, themselves routed out to fit the top member. The "inlays" around them (made of oak; the rest is pine) are actually me covering up a mistake I made wherein I subtracted rather than added kerf, which was pretty dumb, but I've come to like this feature. Corner joints:

Don't know what this joint is called, if it even has a name

You can see my sloppy gluing highlighted by lacquer shine. This is one thing I still have not figured out how to do well. The rest of the connects are with dowel joints. This time I put the whole thing together with dry press-fit joints like the dowels before doing any glue, which I think helps a lot with a problem I've had in the past where although all my measurements are right, it's an uncomfortable fit due to the fact that the wood is not really straight or flat over these kinds of distances. The finished thing, obviously overkill for where it's used, but I'm happy with it:

It matches!

Right this moment I am in the airport IAD stopping briefly on my way to the airport called ZRH for a short work trip in Zurich. I had hoped to get some newish T7ES covers online this morning, but I realized that my software for rendering them does not support drums so that was a bust. Still you can listen to Theme from Zurich.

[ comment ]

Entries from December 2015

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I'm not an IDIOT who needs COLOR CHEAT CODES (31 Dec 2015 at 21:28)

Well, here we are at the end of 2015. December was a bunch of travel (14 segments!) and relaxing for me, neither of which make good stories.

The show in New York that I wrote about in post 1126 was awesome. I had some last minute trouble with the electronics after a wire broke (it was hook-up wire, not good for repeated stress). Though I have no recollection of it, I'm certain that at some point when I was assembling that USB laser hat 7 years ago, I momentarily considered, should I really use black wire to denote POSITIVE, just because it's handy? And then thought, sure, it's not like I'm going to FORGET that I made that switch. I'm not an IDIOT who needs COLOR CHEAT CODES. So imagine my chagrin when in 2015 I foolishly soldered the positive and negative leads together and then spent minutes trying to connect to the thing over USB while it was just cooking. But I didn't fry it, and got the software up to modern OS X standards, fit it all in my luggage MacGyver style and got through airport security just fine, and even managed to get the drums there too. The show was super fun! A bunch of people I hadn't seen in ages but who happened to be in NY (or make the trek) surprised me by showing up, and I think I played my weird video game music to about 70 people. Definitely one neat thing about New York is how many people you can find that actually care about some obscure thing like that. I also really enjoyed seeing the other bands rock it live. There are a few videos of my section, and to show my gratitude I also made T7ES-heroifications of songs by Kleenex Girl Wonder and Saskrotch both, all of which I'll try to convert into a reasonable format and post here. But as you know it's New Year's Eve and that means the tradition of Drinking begins imminently!

Also: People have been rediscovering my Alphabetical Star Wars recently due to the new movie. Just tonight I was alerted to this tribute called ACEPS ABLLS which is the same idea applied to the even more hallowed Space Balls. This one is different because it was done automatically, using some new transcription alignment software which seems pretty cool. (It definitely has mistakes in it, but the accuracy is pretty impressive! It even hilariously catches some words in the singing in the closing credits.) So all of you who were asking for alternative supercuts with the ARST ARSW data can now create this on your own without too much tedium.

(9 comments — almost 9 years ago) [ comment ]

Entries from November 2015

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Kleenex Girl Wonder, Saskrotch, Tom 7, Thunder & Lightning (30 Nov 2015 at 22:06)

Hi team,

I'm excited that on this Friday, December 4, I'll be playing a show in New York City. I'm delighted that this show is with two artists I really like. Headliner in charge is Kleenex Girl Wonder, whose precocious album Ponyoak is surely in my personal Top 10, and in some ways inspired my own poopy 7-track project(s). I also really love the strange redundant epic Yes Boss, which has some of the best lyrics this side of Franklin Bruno. But wait! This is not just a Rock 'n Roll show. Also performing is Saskrotch, who among other things made the chipmusic for the muy dificil exploration platformer game Rex Rocket. I heartily recommend the game and Saskrotch's sdtk.. (No offense to the other band playing! I just haven't heard your music yet. Also, no official word on whether I like my own music but you can probably guess.)

ROCK and ROL

Here is the Facebook event which you can "friend" or "poke." The show is 4 Dec 2015 at Fat Baby in LES, 7:30 doors, and costs $8/$10.

Though the show is billed as "Tom 7" I'll be performing my Tom 7 Entertainment System project. It's a kind of weird performance-art piece / chiptune thing; you can get a pretty good idea of what from this video of me performing it 8 years ago. I have some new music and some new technology this time, but if you get very bored of things that happen at 8 year intervals and have something in common, I invite you to not attend. But if you live in the York or environs, come say hi!

In other slow progression of time news, I just finished up the busy time at work so I expect to get to finishing some in-progress projects right after I get back from NYC. Watch this spot ----> [ ]

(4 comments — almost 9 years ago) [ comment ]

... Nov 2015 continued

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