Don's Tumblog

A game of Flight Control generally ends in complete and total panic just before one or more crashes occur. The game is very simple: an aircraft flies onto the screen and you drag your finger from it to the runway or landing pad of its color. It starts at a nice leisurely pace and escalates into a multitasking panic attack. There are eleven aircraft on-screen, only two of which were heading to a landing zone…but a new personal hi score!

It’s finds like this that make me wonder why I stopped reading Gizmodo. For the record, I stopped reading them because they post, on average, 43.2 posts per day…a bit more than I care to keep up with. [via Gizmodo]

[via Hark! a vagrant]

Aliens vs. Predator for the Xbox 360 will be a game to keep an eye on. It’s being developed by Rebellion, who created the PC game way back in 1999. It’s an FPS that allows you to play as Alien, Predator, or Marine…and all the great gadgets, vision modes, and wall-crawlery are there. I remember playing the original with a friend directly connected over the phone line. If this new one has some kind of party system for the multiplayer, it should be a blast.

[via Montygog’s Art-O-Rama!]

[via Bizarro]

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

10 plays

I was looking for a ringtone today and thought it might be cool to use the bird song of a Whip-poor-will. I remember hearing them at my grandparents house and on camping trips…it’s a really cool sound and I always loved hearing it. And today I discovered that it wasn’t a Whip-poor-will that I was hearing, but a very similar bird called Chuck-will’s-widow. Which is weird, because I think the sound of the Chuck-will’s-widow sounds more like “Whip-poor-will”…but nobody asked me when naming them, so, oh well.

The Periodic Table of Typefaces! [via mstibbe]

“The Mother of All Funk Chords” mixed by Kutiman. This guy has created an album of music mixed from YouTube videos…pretty incredible, if you ask me. [via 43 Folders via Jonathan Coulton]

I came across this while reading a top albums of 2008 list and thought it was funny. Though I’ve always been leery of calling the United States of America simply “America”…it seemed a bit arrogant to ignore the fact that there are other countries on the American continents. Of course, either way, Canada would still be the hat, eh? So take off, you hosers!

Where no wake zones and no fly zones collide! [via sirpoins]

Adrian Holovaty plays the theme to Super Mario Bros. 2 in gypsy-jazz style…and was even kind enough to post the chords. The style was made popular by Django Reinhardt in the 1930’s. I love the sound and would love to learn to play that way.

If everyone were satisfied, no one would buy the new thing because no one would want it. The ore wouldn’t be mined; timber wouldn’t be cut. Almost immediately hard times would be upon us. You must accept this reasonable dissatisfaction with what you have and buy the new thing, or accept hard times. You can have your choice.

“

—

This is the conclusion of an article titled “Keep the Consumer Dissatisfied,” written by Charles F. Kettering in 1929. Kettering was head of research for General Motors from 1920 to 1947. I learned of this article via another article titled “The Gospel of Consumption,” which says this of Kettering: “Along with many of his corporate cohorts, he was defining a strategic shift for American industry—from fulfilling basic human needs to creating new ones.”

Internet Archive: Hot Club of Cowtown Live at The Continental Club on 2008-04-02 »

I just discovered that HCoC has six shows on archive.org. Seeing as their live album Continental Stomp is one of my favorites, this is a pretty exciting find for me.

The Crisis of Credit Visualized - This is a great animated explanation of our economy’s problems. It’s well worth 11 minutes and 10 seconds of your time.