KENTUCKY – I got a friend (I’m as shocked as you, I assure you) who just “rescued” two horses – “Alpo” and “Glue Factory” are their names, I think.  This, I suppose is a fine and humanitarian gesture.  If you’re into that sort of thing.  Her heart is in the right place but I don’t think the horses are, this being the year 2010 of our Lord, Rahm Emanuel.

Don’t get me wrong; when I was five (5) years of age, I was convinced that I would grow up to be a farmer and have a horse farm in the field across the street from my parents’ house.   That part in The Never Ending Story where the horse drowns in a black tar swamp made up of its own depression in a prolonged sequence while his master screeches for it not to die?  Scarred me for life.  No joke.

This site would be all bunnies and talking about how much I love Sarah Palin if I hadn’t seen that shit.  You think I’m going to find a link on Youtube of that scene? You can forget it.  Never happening.  Want nothing to do with it.  I mean… it’s a movie for KIDS, man!  KIDS!  You kill a HORSE?  And you DROWN IT? In BLACK GOO? Are you fucking out of your goddamn MIND?  Have you never met a child in your entire life?!  WHO FUCKING KILLS A HORSE IN A CHILDREN’S MOVIE?!

[ahem]

As I grew older, obviously, I abandoned the dream of having my own equestrian center because:

1) for some reason, when an adult male likes horses, it’s gay (sorry, Roy)

2) seriously, people, fuck horses.

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Tags: Culinaria, Uncategorized by Cash Money
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illustrations by Cash Money

Drawing from a collective unconscious (in which his belief is tenuous at best), Cash asked me why the ones and zeroes in one computer weren’t any good to another. Why can’t we just hook an Atari cartridge up to a Windows machine and have it work?

I promised him that I would explain it. I promised him that the expansion of your mind would be collateral damage.

Eeeverybody knows that what happens inside a computer can be fundamentally broken down into 1 and 0, over and over and over again. Too bad that’s WRONG. The inside of a computer is not a blackboard. It’s not your math homework. Stop watching ReBoot, because you will never see tiny digits racing purposefully around in your laptop’s innards.

What a computer is is a myriad of tiny automatic electrical switches, discerning not 1 from 0, but rather ON from OFF.

The simplest computer you use each day is a light switch. You want light, so you input a perfectly simple program with the switch on the wall. You flip the toggle, an internal mechanism connects electrical wires, and somewhere in the room that electricity fires up a light bulb. You don’t enter 1 or 0 or anything else into that switch. You just turn it ON and the mechanism does its thing.

If turning on (or off) a light bulb is a dead-simple program, a slightly more complex one gets a train to its destination over a series of track switches. At each junction the train can be switched to the right or the left, like a squirrel choosing which branches to follow as it climbs a tree. Left-left-right-left will get the train to a different location than right-left-left-right. We can say that one place is Topeka and the other is St. Louis, but as far as the train is concerned it’s enough to say left-left-right-left and right-left-left-right. On-on-off-on and off-on-on-off. Those tiny sequences of data are programs, or at least commands, which lead consistently to the same result.

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Tags: Technophilia, Uncategorized by KahrlZero
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CASABLANCA - Okay, okay, okay.  Now you’ve read easy-to-get-into comics, comics about comics, literary comics, and down-and-dirty mystery comics.

You’ve done your homework and now it’s time to cut loose.  Let’s pick up some dumb fun.  Then, we’ll check in with my comic collecting compatriots and see what comics they’ve enjoyed in the past and in the present!

But I know what you’re saying: “I was led believe there would be a man wrestling a squid.”

Well, here ya go, ya punk!

BAM! Page 1 of this week’s comics selection:

The Umbrella Academy: The Apocalypse Suite

Written by Gerard “Yes, the guy from My Chemical Romance, JEEZ, let it GO!” Way

Illustrated by Gabriel Bá

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Tags: Aesthetiophilia, Pictoriphilia, Uncategorized by Cash Money
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GOTHAM CITY - A dark night in a city that keeps its secrets.

But one man is still trying to find the answers to life’s persistent questions…

Guy No- wait, no. Cash Money!

I love me a good mystery and I love it even more when it’s 90% shadows and fedoras.  A femme fatale, a dangling cigarette, and some chopper-wielding gunsels hanging off the running-boards and I’m raring to go.

Let’s take any of your classic flat-foot sleuths, replace his trench-coat with a black cape and change his Stetson into a cowl and you get this week’s feature:

BATMAN: THE LONG HALLOWEEN

Written by Jeff “The Guy Who Writes Heroes” Loeb

Illustrated by Tim “Cash’s Favorite Comics Guy” Sale

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Tags: Aesthetiophilia, Uncategorized by Cash Money
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PORTLAND, OREGON - There is no secret to drawing comics.  Draw all your female characters with odd proportions, have them wear skin-tight outfits with their boobs hanging out, then have all the dudes have their teeth clenched, make sure they have a dark past that has come back to haunt them, punch a few dudes.

Done and done.

Everyone goes home with an Warner Brother’s animated series with Mickey Rourke in a villain role for your sequel.

[lights cigar with $100]

[puts feet on desk]

[gloats]

Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art

Written & Illustrated by Scott McCloud

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Tags: Uncategorized by Cash Money
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Subcategory: Grave robbing

Subcategory: Not actually Africa

Grave-robbers steal former Cyprus president’s corpse

AP, via UK Guardian, Dec. 11, 2009

CYPRUS – Former president and candidate for world’s best name, Tassos Papadopoulos, is missing from his grave on the first anniversary of his death.

Clues found at site:

-1 pile of dirt, including set of footprints that appears to be all right feet

-1 rubber mask, wolfman

-1 bucket phosphorous paint, empty, of brand not seen since Papadopoulos shut down Old Man Agathocleous’ paint factory

-1 Sonnovox

Tags: Uncategorized by Cash Money
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I’m mostly interested in writing about Things Worth Having, which make up for their cost in improved Quality of Life. I usually mean high-quality every-day objects when I say that but there’s also a bunch of intangible data worth having. Some people even give it away. Data (i.e. software) takes up no space, so when someone gives a piece of software away, it’s hard not to see it as Worth Having, even if it sucks. At first glance that’s how the math comes out. The cost, however, is the time you spend using it. And it is in that spirit that I give you A Buncha Free Games, Volume I.

Capt. Forever
I’m now officially belaboring this point, but it’s just so good. And now that Capt. Successor is out, you can play the original for free. Now. NOW. (Read the rest later, damn you. That link will open in a new tab.)

Cave Story (Doukutsu Monogatari)

When Darwinia+ finally comes out I’ll try and explain how much I hate genre-boundaries, because I hate them. Books, music, films, and games that transgress and can’t be classified are lots more fun. Cave Story is a fast, pixelated platformer with RPG-ish NPC development, a nice big inventory, and a story that just goes on and on. (Disclosure: I haven’t completed a single game in this post because they’re all so satisfyingly long.) My point is that if you haven’t played it before, you haven’t played it before. Its not Mario or Metroid, Duke Nukem (THE FIRST ONE) or Commander Keen. It’s cute, the music’s excellent, and the controls are flawless. It’s clearly a labor of love by the author, and you can download it for free and keep it forever. I think you should.
Win – Mac – Linux

Knytt

Every bit as atmospheric as Canabalt, but not nearly as intense. Well, that’s not fair. The little Knytt got abducted by an incompetent alien and now has to fix the broken spaceship without help. It’s a quiet, beautiful puzzle platform/adventure-thing that is massively cute in a way that makes the solitude of crawling around alone on an alien world seem all the more dire. Again, it’s an ingenious labor of love and totally downloadable, along with its extensible successor, Knytt Stories.
Win – and I run it on my CrunchBang Linux netbook through Wine

Monuments of Mars

This game is so old! Do you even know what CGA graphics are? It’s amazing what you can do with two bits-per-pixel, provided they’re the right two bits. These ones give you Black, Red, Orange, and Green. Monuments of Mars is my favorite exploration of just how much awesome can be gleaned from four colors, and I just found out that all four chapters have been released into the public domain.
YOUR COMPUTER CAN’T RUN THIS GAME! You need to get DOSBOX first so you both can pretend it’s 1992.

ZZT

I know, I’m trying to run you over with my time machine. ZZT is another absurd blast-from-the-past. Think 4 colors looks primitive? ZZT is all ASCII characters. We care because Tim Sweeney released it almost 20 years ago, and now is still Head Morlock behind the Unreal Engine, which runs Mass Effect, BioShock, Dead Space, Gears of War, Borderlands, Mirror’s Edge, Deus Ex… It all started with ridiculous DOS text characters. In all seriousness, you don’t have to play this game, but it did have a really slick scripting system that made it really easy to build mods. The level editors in Lode Runner and Boulder Dash didn’t hold a candle.
DOSBOX

Tags: Aesthetiophilia, Methodology, Technophilia, Uncategorized by KahrlZero
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