RocketCar: News Archive


	06/06/12 - When the RX-3 came out, this was page 2 of the brochure. Ah, broken dreams. For example, my car has just blown its second rotary engine and will be moving onto its 3rd. - XBox 360 Review PGR3 - Take PGR2 (best racing game) and remove the variety. Don't worry, they focused on the stuff that's not fun. Supercars only, no pacing of progression, horrible load times even when simply restarting a race. Ghost Recon - Hey guys, let's make a game where the only challenge is the interface. Need For Speed - Underground 2 with a fraction of the car customization plus cop chases equals not bad. Verdict: don't bother, at least not yet. - 05/09/17 - Went to Gio's wedding. He lent me his Lomo colorsplash. Most of my shots were crap, but here's some selects. Note that the drunkeness increases as you scroll down, in parallel with the amount of colourful blurry mess. - 04/10/31 - Not a good year for a full-on Halloween costume, but check out the injury I wore to Friday's party. - 04/02/15 - Understand Japan a little better. - 03/11/09 - This halloween, I went as a shop teacher. - 03/11/08 - Sorry for the delay... This year's pumpkins. - 03/10/28 - Last year's pumpkins. - 03/03/14 - Ben Greenman, of the McSweeney's family, is a talented writer. His book of short stories, Superbad, has a bunch of good stuff in it, from funny to serious but always with at least a touch of total avant garde intellectual stuntwork. He's the kind of guy who'll attempt to write a symmetrical story, or create a piece that consists only of reviews of itself. I've painfully transcribed a couple of my favorite pieces of his: Marlon Brando's Dreaming, which is good fun, and What 100 People, Real And Fake, Believe About Dolores, which is absolutely brilliant. - 02/08/29 - three ibexes. - 02/08/28 - yak. - 02/08/27 - Sorry no update very work busy no sleep. But this week I'll post some photos from my visit to the zoo. Here's elephant. - 02/08/10 - Alien Hominid Flash Game. ...Or if you want a direct link to the .swf for download use this. If you just want it in a scaleable window, I made this. - 02/07/03 - "I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings." -Albert Einstein - 02/05/21 - "George, you can type this shit, but you sure can't say it." -Harrison Ford - 02/04/27 - It appears that some thickheaded fucking numbnuts has keyed my car. Thanks. Karma kills. I hope. - 02/04/26 - After an epic, drawn out, patience-testing 11-week journey at the bodyshop, my car is at last an un-dented and fresh-faced Indigo Blue Metallic. - 01/12/24 - Merry Christmas! - 01/12/20 - Here's the halloween pumpkins I carved this year. - 01/12/18 - Whoa, did you see that picture of the guy on top of the world trade center on sept 11? ...I think I'm really behind the times on this, cause though I saw the lame original a while back, I've only just heard about this. (Most of it is really dumb, but there's some gems). Looks like someone caught the AllYourBase fire in a bottle a second time. - 01/12/12 - Now I'm stealing from old Harper's: Old Coca-Cola Slogans 1898 The best brain and nerve drink. 1905 The favorite drink for ladies when thirsty, weary, and despondent. 1910 Eminent scientists in every section of the country declare it to be no more harmful than tea or coffee. 1926 Nature's purest and most wholesome drink. 1927 For that tired, discouraged feeling, drink Coca-Cola. 1931 Every bottle sterilized. 1945 Coca-Cola helps show the world the friendliness of American ways. 1969 The drink you eat. - 01/11/01 - I want to sleep with you back to back With no breath to part us No word to distract us No eyes to lie to us With no clothes on. To sleep with you breast to breast Tense and sweating Shining with a thousand quivers Consumed by ecstatic mad inertia Stretched out on your shadow... -Joyce Mansour (1955) - 01/10/31 - "I consider perversion and vice to be the most revolutionary forms of thought and activity, just as I consider love to be the only attitude worthy of man's life." -Salvador Dalí (1930) - 01/05/04 - "Bush had the foresight to surround himself with smart people the way a hole surrounds itself with a doughnut" -Dennis Miller - 01/05/03 - "The California crunch really is the result of not enough power-generating plants and then not enough power to power the power of generating plants." -George W. Bush [Interview with the New York Times, Jan. 14, 2001] - 01/05/02 - "When I was coming up, it was a dangerous world, and you knew exactly who they were. It was us vs. them, and it was clear who them was. Today, we are not so sure who the they are, but we know they're there." -George W. Bush [Iowa Western Community College, Jan 21, 2000] - 01/04/05 - As a followup to the .50 caliber article, read up on the BarrettRifles site, under "Gun Rights", under "Firearms Dealers". Nice quotes like this: "[In a school] If somebody starts shooting, somebody has to be shooting back. That's saving lives in the real world." ..Conservatives are insane. - 01/04/03 - In the U.S. the public can buy rifles that can shoot through concrete bunkers from a mile away. This is insane. But somehow kind of cool. But mostly just scary. Read this article. - 01/03/23 - My new toy. - 01/03/13 - Anybody interested in interface design or simply ergonomics, or even those of you looking for ammo on why Apple is cool and Windows sucks, read this. - 01/03/05 - BridgeBuilder! Download bbdemo and stuff here. - 01/02/23 - Here's some graphic car art I did. - 01/02/13 - "I'm a victim of the new internet economy which, they tell me, is a lot like the old internet economy only minus the money." --David Wong, PointlessWasteOfTime.com - 01/02/07 - "Anticipating ... the continued predatory tactics of a monopolistically-positioned critical infrastructure vendor, VDC attempted to migrate from a low-growth, margin-squeezed international wholesale business to the higher margin retail domestic long distance business." --Anthony DeJesus, who was recently appointed Director, Chairman, C.E.O., C.F.O., Secretary and Treasurer of VDC Corporation (Amex: VDC) after all the other senior executives resigned. - 01/02/06 - "Somebody was saying to Picasso that he ought to make pictures of things the way they are--objective pictures. He mumbled he wasn't quite sure what that would be. The person who was bullying him produced a photograph of his wife from his wallet and said, 'There, you see, that is a picture of how she really is.' Picasso looked at it and said, 'She is rather small, isn't she? And flat?'" --Gregory Bateson - 01/02/01 - I've finally set my darkroom up and started playing. So maybe I'll actually have some new content again! Wow! ...So last night Daryl came over, and we did some experiments with how much we could crud up a negative and print it. First, I found a strip of negative that had some slightly blurry and somewhat boring images on it. Then while I mixed up chemicals, Daryl did the following with some coaching (and lots of laughing) from me: Scrunched it up, Baked it in the toaster oven, Nuked it in the microwave, Stepped all over it against concrete, Rollered it against a stucco wall, Burned it on a stove element, Fried it in olive oil, Seared it with lemon juice as it fried in olive oil, Rubbed salt into it. At the end it honestly looked like crispy bacon. But we printed it, and it looks pretty cool. - 01/01/16 - "The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me that my own is also" --Mark Twain - 00/12/22 - CarNight photo. - 00/12/01 - When Charles Schulz died this year bringing Peanuts to an end, I think a lot of us younger folk thought "what's the big deal about Peanuts?". The comic strip never really seemed to have much substance to it; we only recall the icons of Snoopy as a WWII ace and Charlie Brown missing the football kick. Well, in the early 1950s Peanuts had a wisdom and poignancy to it, a brilliance that I think faded as 50 years of needing fresh material wore on it. These earlier strips sported younger, more real versions of the characters and quietly balanced their subject matter between simple, funny observations about kids' behaviour, and setting these unwitting children up as potent symbols of adult fears and weaknesses. This week I'm posting some comics published in 1952-1954: Candy Bars Push Stars Playing House Making Fun Schroeder Linus and Lucy Snoopy Ghost Too Cold Christmas - 00/11/07 - I'm sometimes told I look like Pacey on Dawson's Creek (ie Josh Jackson). You be the judge. I'm glad that freaky-looking dude is considered cute, cause it scores me trickle-down cute factor. Plus I get to live vicariously through his character; he's getting together with Katie Holmes! Go Pacey! ...John mentioned that in that pic I look more like Charlie Sheen than me. - 00/08/29 - Spooky ghost in the reflection. - 00/07/12 - I haven't bothered to say much about this Napster hoopla, but there's a couple things lately that keep reminding me of it. First off, nobody seems to point out the fact that what Metallica is doing is simply getting angry that their music is being heard. It's half a step for them to start demanding that radio stations stop playing their songs. It's not like the mix-tape killed the music industry. If the record companies are whining about dismal sales, maybe they should shift focus from piracy to the fact that THE RECORDS ARE BORING. Besides, any artist doing sissy crying about piracy should know that A) Piracy means someone is SELLING your goods for profit and B) record sales are just promotion for their real meal-ticket: live concert ticket sales. Everything else is advertising for those concerts. So why piss off the very people that may actually see a live show or, god forbid, buy your albumn BECAUSE they had a no-risk way to check out your songs? On the same topic, stupid Apple has decided that AdCritic is infriging on them by posting their TV ads on the internet. For fuck's sake, companies are getting angry that THEIR COMMERCIALS ARE BEING WATCHED? What's next, Budweiser suing American males for co-opting "whazzup"? ...Well, perhaps all the complaining about free advertising equals publicity equals free advertising. All I know is these are what we will look back on as the salad days of the internet, when content was easy to redistribute and enjoy. The record companies will be striking up licensing deals with online mp3 dealers soon. How long before the Exploding Whale starts demanding royalties on downloads? - 00/06/06 - Included in a package of Tortillas. - 00/05/03 - "...happiness if affected more by one's movement toward (or away from) success than by one's position near (or far from) it. Thus a famous king and conqueror, who has always had everything he wanted, but whose fortunes are slipping slightly, is less happy than a blind beggar, who never had anything he wanted, but has just found himself a tasty crust of bread. So the law of happiness says happiness waxes and wanes in direct proportion to a sense of progress toward or away from a goal, a worthy cause, a creation, a companion to be loved..." --Guy Murchie - 00/03/09 - IMAX News clipping. The funny part is I'm working on the IMAX 3D Gulliver's Travels. - 00/02/11 "As a human being, one has been endowed with just enough intelligence to be able to see clearly how utterly inadequate that intelligence is when confronted with what exists." --Albert Einstein - 00/02/03 - "Nine women can't produce a baby in one month." This is a common production analogy, one that should make immediate sense. But where I work, the theory tends to get somewhat misapplied and turns out more like this: Nine women are given nine months to make one total baby. They proceed to appoint the virgin as leader and spend 8 months trying to decide on what position is best for conception. Eventually they realize they're a month from deadline, disregard all discussions from the past 8 months, frantically attempt to achieve 9 months of combined incubation in 1 month, and finally give birth to one fractured, retarded child. - 00/02/02 - The Hurricane reviewed. Even though it was cheap night, this movie cost me $179.00. My stupid friend egged me on to try to race a Porche. The Porche didn't care to join the race, and I got my first ticket since my traffic crime spree of 97. Oh well, the cop was pretty cool. I like cops that don't make a big show, that see the car and the open road and know the score. He even made sure not to make me miss the movie. - 00/01/29 - Irony. I couldn't post yesterday's message until today, because the webserver has been refusing connection for the last 18 hours or so. - 00/01/28 - Alright, this is fucking bullshit. One, my email was down all night till around midnight. Two, the webserver is currently down, so my page won't come up as I'm writing this. I've had enough of this terrible service from Rogers. Now begins my letter writing campaign. I encourage you to join me. Every day that I have a hassle with email or webservice, I will write an email to Rogers stating what the problem is, and kindly asking for that day's Wave fee back. Eventually they will become form letters like this: to:support@rogers.home.net Hi, it's me again. Last night your email service was down, again, leaving me unable to send or recieve email, again. Please reimburse me the $1.29 I paid that day for a service you promised but did not deliver. The current total of money you have stolen from me is $63.21. You will hear from me later. Michael Ferraro - 00/01/22 "A sculpture of clay is defined by its spaces of absence. Doors, windows in a house are used for their emptiness. And thus we are helped by what is not there." - 00/01/21 - Guess what I just found out? What I already knew: Fantasia 2000 is going to be wide-released as a 35mm film later this year, after IMAX is done with their "exclusive" deal. "So," I wondered to myself, "does that mean they're going to crop it down to wide aspect for 35mm release? Or are they going to show it square? The answer: Neither. They made the movie in 1.85 wide 35mm. 2k resolution. They blew it up and cropped it square for IMAX, meaning a final resolution of about 1500x1100. That's why it was pixely. Thank you IMAX for tricking me into going to the theatre to pay 12 bucks for a pan-and-scanned, the-screen-is-too-big-for-images-composed-like-this, HDTV-resolution show. I'm glad you wasted so much money on burning low-res images onto 70mm film. Bravo. But hey, at least I got a 10 minute laser show telling me how good IMAX is cause all their shit is so much bigger. Bigger equals better, right IMAX? Go cram your 1 ton projector up your collective ass. - 99/12/31 - If I hear one more fucking person tell me that the millenium doesn't start until 2001, I'm going to start kicking babies. Listen: YES, there was no year 0. Thanks for the lesson in inclusive math. But here's a history lesson: there was also no year 1, 2, 3, 4, all the way to the fucking hundreds. Monks back-dated it later on a best guess. And you know what? They missed by a couple years. 2000 was closer to 1998. And who gives a shit about celebrating Christ's exact 2000th birthday anyway? Are you a religious nut? If so, you missed the birthday party by a couple years. If not, shut the fuck up and celebrate the odometer turning over like the rest of humanity.