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Digital Culture

More Sci-Fi Sexuality

This is brilliant. Potentially NSFW.

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Digital Culture

Never go over in america, volume 1

I really, really don’t understand Germany. Or Germans. I give you: The Dreamship Surprise!

Dreamship SurpriseSpace in the year 2304: in a UFO that crash-landed in the Nevada desert 300 years ago, mankind found the scientific guidelines which were used to colonize Mars half a century later. Now the descendants of the first colonists are on their way back to Earth. Led by their unbelievably wicked Regulator Rogul and his unbelievably even more wicked disciple Jens Maul, they are up to no good. In fact, the Martians are planning to subjugate the blue planet to the red one. With a huge array of spaceships, a conquest of Earth seems imminent. And only the crazy crew of Dreamship Surprise can “help”: Captain Kork, engineer Shrotty and first officer Mr. Spuck. But instead of fighting intergalactic crime, they´re busy with their choreography for the upcoming “Miss Waikiki Pageant”. With the help of the space cowboy and taxi-pilot Rock, they set out to save the earth from invasion…

Watch the trailer for the ultimate in gay space heroes. The only one I could find to embed is in Japanese (with German audio)…so be warned. Wonderfully off-kilter gay sci-fi movies…there’s just not enough of them.

I dare anyone to find a more homosexual sci-fi picture than this:

cast

Just another example of the sort of thing that would never happen here. This film had the largest theatrical opening in the history of Germany. And it doesn’t even have The Hoff in it.

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Digital Culture

BarCampRDU

BarCampRDU
Yet another reason that I miss the Triangle…incredibly fun things like BarCampRDU. It looks like Fred and Paul and the gang did an incredible job with this, and I’m sad to have missed it. Next year, guys?

Oh, and do you have any of those rockin’ tshirts left over in XL? 🙂

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Digital Culture

Wikipedia’s Reference Desk

How could I have possibly not known that Wikipedia has a Reference desk?

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Digital Culture

Valleyschwag #3

Valleyschwag posterMy Valleyschwag showed up late last week, and it was a great one:

Stickers Plaxo shirt

But the best schwag was this:

messenger bag

One of the rockin’ messenger bags! The poster was also a neat surprise, and very well done. Very happy with this month’s schwag…here’s hoping that it keeps up! For anyone who loves the Web 2.0 explosion and is a tech-head, this is a fun once-a-month surprise.

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Digital Culture

Google Cubes

Google Cubes

Another pic I’ve been meaning to get to…these are little promo items from the Google Bash at this year’s American Library Association Annual meeting in New Orleans. They were at the bar, and when you ordered a drink the bartender would pop one in along with the booze and ice. When you do that, they light up:

Google Cubes all lit up

They have a couple of electrodes on the back that need to be bridged with some conductive item before they light up. Clever, and they gave the party a decidedly sci-fi aura, with everyone walking around with different colored glowing drinks.

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Digital Culture

Blue in Kentucky

Most people have heard “Blue Moon of Kentucky”, but few have probably heard of the blue people from Kentucky. Seriously. Blue. People.

They’re known simply as the “blue people” in the hills and hollows around Troublesome and Ball Creeks. Most lived to their 80s and 90s without serious illness associated with the skin discoloration. For some, though, there was a pain not seen in lab tests. That was the pain of being blue in a world that is mostly shades of white to black.

There was always speculation in the hollows about what made the blue people blue: heart disease, a lung disorder, the possibility proposed by one old-timer that “their blood is just a little closer to their skin.” But no one knew for sure, and doctors rarely paid visits to the remote creekside settlements where most of the “blue Fugates ” lived until well into the 1950s. By the time a young hematologist from the University of Kentucky came down to Troublesome Creek in the 1960s to cure the blue people, Martin Fugate’s descendants had multiplied their recessive genes all over the Cumberland Plateau.

I grew up just north from Hazard and Perry County, and heard about these genetically interesting folks growing up. I never met anyone with this genetic quirk, but there are still some in the area. Here’s a really well-written story about them, how they came to be so blue, and how they’ve dealt with it. Story is old, but fascinating.

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Digital Culture Personal

Valleyschwag 2

ValleySchwag 2 unwrapped

I recieved my first Valleyschwag package yesterday…I must say, I’m impressed. From the detail put into the packaging to the schwag itself, a cool once a month surprise. It’s like having a birthday every month!

ValleySchwag!

It was, as you can see, wrapped in painted burlap. After you peeled away the burlap, the goodies inside were:

ValleySchwag 2 contents

All in all, not bad for $14.95. The Rubyred T-shirt and the Goatse stickers will be worth that much in conversation at least, and the PerplexCity cards are just cool.

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Digital Culture

Xbox Media Center rocks my face off

So I spent nearly all of today working with my old, non-360 Xbox trying to make it a useful part of our entertainment system. I am A friend is now the successful owner of a system running Xbox Media Center, and connected to my home network.

I already have an Airport connecting our music to our surround sound system, and we use iTunes to stream all over the house. But I’ve got a decent amount of video/photos that I’d love to be able to access on the TV, and now, I my friend can.

Overall, I my friend followed this walkthrough, although because of the DMCA and other laws, they can’t actually link to the software necessary (which means, of course, that finding it is difficult, but not impossible). Part of the software completely eluded me my friend (the bootloader that actually makes linux a possibility on the xbox). However, there was another version, not mentioned in the walkthrough, that allowed me to bootstrap myself into XBMC, and streaming happiness. I My friend has no idea how it manages it, down deep, but it’s played every single video type I’ve thrown at it, perfectly. No stutter, no issues…just played them. I’m incredibly impressed.

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Digital Culture

David Beckham Chia Head

David Beckham Chia HeadOk….sometimes, I just can’t help myself. I see something for sale, and it’s just weird enough that I must own it. This happened last weekend, when Betsy and I took a trip to the Unclaimed Baggage Center. This is the place where all the stuff that the airlines lose goes to die be sold. My favorite part about this process was seeing the sorts of things people lose/airlines lose/people leave behind on planes. Things like…oh…wheelchairs. What happens when they lose your wheelchair? They had an anatomical model of the lower arm. They had random sporting equipment. They had used underwear. There is seriously anything you can imagine, and a few things you can’t. This is one of them.

Yes, this appears to be a David Beckham Chia Head. I’ll say that one more time for those of you in the back: A David. Beckham. Chia. Head.

While I’m not a huge soccer fan, even I know who he is. Why it is that someone, somewhere felt it necessary to make a model of his head with which to grow vegetation is another question.

Well, I had to own this. Not only that, but I decided that I had to photograph the evidence, and try to actually grow said vegetation. I’ll document this, and post updates and analysis here on my blog. Stay tuned for the ongoing saga of the David Beckham Chia!