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I don't know if this is a really nice, sweet story, or if it's got somewhat creepy undertones (or both)… either way, I thought it was interesting and worth mentioning here.
| "RS" stands for "Rachel Sheena", which are the initials of a girl I've never met.
Rachel is her real name and Sheena is the name she used online. We had plans to meet each other in Phoenix — due to the fact that she lives in the Midwest, this was the one and only shot without an expensive bus ticket... but because of a fuck up on my part I missed our rendezvous! For the next three hours we were walking the same four blocks, never running into each other.
Needless to say she was very upset, thinking I had stood her up, and after that she never really talked to me. I think of this tattoo as a memorial to a friend I never met.
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Seriously, what in the world motivates people to send me photos like this of themslves? Sometimes I think there's some kind of secret contest people run about who can get the most messed up picture of themselves posted to BME, and that they're laughing their asses off every time one of their pictures slips into an update.
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As I promised I would do, I have just posted another thousand images to BME. This scene will repeat tomorrow (and then again). Thanks to all the image contributors, and to Moritura for being on the cover. While the update was loading, I wrote this code:
My implementation isn't optimized yet so it's a bit of a memory hog, but I'm pretty proud of myself that I got it written inside of half an hour.
L33T. I'm going to use this code to re-render a much nicer version of the animation in the entry below.
I made a little full-day animation of yesterday's use of IAM (it's about a three meg WMV file). Blue dots represent a user online at that instant, and a yellow glow of various sizes gets emitted depending on how many users are online in that location at that moment. You'll notice two or three users that have mis-entered their location as well (you can see below someone showing up in the Marquesas Islands, which I'm guessing is wishful thinking). Timecode is EST by the way:
please right-click+save to view
Since I always get asked this, the audio over the video is a brief excerpt from
“Popcorn”, AKA the soundrack from Arkanoid “Long Dark” by Electrelane (off the
Rock it to the Moon album). When I get a chance I'm going to improve my rendering routines and create a prettier version of this as well.
Well, Brent went and got the GoldenPalace.com forehead tattoo. I really hope it was worth it for him and my sombre predictions are just biased naysaying… It's no secret that Brent really rubs me the wrong way — and I think the same in reverse — but maybe it's time to finally do an interview feature on him… I don't think I could do a fair job on it, I'm too biased, so maybe I'll burden one of the new staff with this task. Anyway, if you want to watch the video…
…it's funny that he calls them a company that's known for their
“humanitarian work”. I was happy that they sponsored one of the X-Prize competitors, but their reputation in the world of online gambling is far from spotless — things along the lines of tampering with odds and falsifying RNGs, as well as simply not delivering payouts as owed. If I was going to risk my money online, that's not the place I'd do it, even with their forehead tattoo ads, kooky amateur spaceships, and other
nutcase media grabs…
