These are so funny I almost died. I was afraid people in my building were going to think I was insane, what with a pair of frenzied Japanese voices screaming bloody murder and me crying with laughter.

Here’s the game (which I fully intend to try as soon as possible): in Mario 64, find a level with a hidden 1up mushroom. As soon as it pops up, you have to collect the 8 red coins and get the star before the mushroom catches you. It constantly flies straight for you at about running speed but can be tricked, teleported away from, and dodged. These kids manage to do it after probably 20 or 30 tries. There are a ton more here.

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

Imagine my surprise when the Midnighter, part of the world-monitoring superteam the Authority, expressed disgust for our very own Tacoma. I’m thinking the writer at the time must have been a Northwest native.

For the record, it’s volume 3 (Revolution), issue 3, February 2004.

I love this. The Pirate Bay’s trial is going on right now, and pictured are one of the defendants (Peter Sunde, left) and one of the plaintiffs (Per Sundin, right). Both are basically huge people in the world of media and the internet, and here they are looking totally cool and dressed in normal winter clothes. If this were happening in the US they’d be in suits and surrounded by more suits.

Garkov replaces the text of a few Garfield strips with text in Markov chains, “a probabilistic model well suited to semi-coherent text synthesis.” I’m not sure exactly what it means, but it’s semi-random and completely weird. Here are a few good ones I turned up.

If you get a good one, you can’t just “save image,” you have to take a screenshot; the text is not part of the image so you’ll get a blank one.

Buck Rogers!

Here are the cover and the first two pages of comics. Yeah, those are some big images. The book itself is coffee-table size.
Click through to get the full size.

Page 1
Page 2

Isn’t this stuff absolutely amazing? It just gets more insane, and the stories run into one another like movements in a ridiculous space symphony.

Wow. I just made a great find at Half Price Books. It’s not every day I feel the need to drop $50 on a book, but this one just called out to me. The Collected World of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. I know – what the hell, right? But it’s awesome. I’m a big fan of Little Nemo, as my family knows, which is really the only comparable strip from the era (20 years earlier, but still).

This sci-fi epic lasted for some 35 years, chronicling the adventures of the eponymous Buck Rogers. The world has been enslaved by a sort of conglomerated Asiatic race, the Mongols, who sport Chinese hats and Fu Manchu mustaches. Buck, a refugee from 1929, preserved by mysterious gases in a mine shaft, awakens just in time to save flying soldier/flapper Wilma from certain death at the hands of the “half-breeds.” The whole thing is just busting with imagination, detail, and innocent sci-fi fun. And boy is there a lot of it.

The picture above isn’t the book itself, but the one I have is rare and out of print, especially with an immaculate dust cover. Even Amazon only has a 100-pixel-wide picture. It was worth every penny.

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I heard another Eric Whitacre piece on the radio one day and was surprised to find he was a contemporary choral composer, not however many decades or centuries old. “Sleep” is not particularly complicated musically, but his sense of harmony is stunning.

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A Sunny Day In Glasgow – 5:15 Train

Excellent and otherworldly electro-dreampop. Not sure how else to describe it.

The weekend on the island (not over yet) has been flickr’d. Check out some Orcas-y pictures.

1709, a year in which all Europe nearly froze to death

Thought this was a very interesting little article. Apparently there was an unbelievably cold Winter in 1709 throughout Europe, resulting in the death of almost every crop and herb, not to mention huge amounts of animals and people. Nobody really knows why.