Weird Science

Ian alerted me to this article today:

In a surprising feat of miniaturization, scientists are reporting today that they have produced nuclear fusion - the same process that powers the sun - in a footlong cylinder just five inches in diameter. And they say they will soon be able to make the device even smaller.

While the device is probably too inefficient to produce electricity or other forms of energy, the scientists say, egg-size fusion generators could someday find uses in spacecraft thrusters, medical treatments and scanners that search for bombs.

Kick ass! The article goes on to warn that egg-sized fusion generators (one foot by five inches? That's a hell of an egg!) won't provide a limitless source of energy, but that they're useful in other ways. For example, clowns across the world finally have the limitless source of helium they've been craving for so long. Plus there's some nonsense about it being useful for security and medical purposes. Read the article. I ain't the Clif notes.

But I am the Clif notes for this article about putting mice into suspended animation:

The researchers from the University of Washington and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle put the mice in a chamber filled with air laced with 80 parts per million (ppm) of hydrogen sulphide (H2S) - the malodorous gas that gives rotten eggs their stink...

In the latest study, Dr Roth and his colleagues found that the mice stopped moving and appeared to lose consciousness within minutes of breathing the air and H2S mixture.
The animals' breathing rates dropped from the normal 120 breaths per minute to less than 10 breaths per minute.

During exposure their metabolic rates dropped by an astonishing 90%, and their core body temperatures fell from 37C to as low as 11C.

A similar effect can be caused by filling the air with Yo Yo Ma at 250 parts/million. Long-term exposure can lead to permanent torpor.

At Long Last, My Head...
Adrienne finally has Internet access at home, so she sent me the pictures of my birthday cake. Here they are, after much demand.

This will include little commentary, but if you want to know how things were made and what the process was, Adrienne has created a Power Point file that explains everything...er...sort of. You can find it here.

Here's the photos of process and the final cake without much commentary from me:

My Yummy Body Parts
Why I'm a Smart Guy
My Neck is Fully Recyclable (Thank you Adrienne for that joke)
Skull and Bone
Red Velvet Cake has Never Been More Disturbing
Existential Dillemma
Adrienne Gives Head...um... (oh come on...that joke had to be made eventually)
Another Great Idea Dawns on Me
Me, Myself
Fun at My Own Expense (I'm giving myself a wet willy, in case you can't see)
More Fun
And Now the Violence

That's that, folks.
It's Friday. I'm off. But not in love.

My Life as a Bootlegger

I've been running another batch of absinthe over the past week. This batch is a gallon's worth (actually turning out to be more like two or three liters...still not bad) meant to share with friends. It's not as good as the last batch I made, but it's pretty tasty.

In honor, I took this today. Not bad, I think. I scored a 91% on the hard liquors. I wonder why...

Bacardi 151 Congratulations! You're 134 proof, with specific scores in beer (80) , wine (83), and liquor (95).

All right. No more messing around. Your knowledge of alcohol is so high that you have drinking and getting plastered down to a science. Sure, you could get wasted drinking beer, but who needs all those trips to the bathroom? You head straight for the bar and pick up that which is most efficient.

My test tracked 4 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 58% on proof You scored higher than 86% on beer index You scored higher than 88% on wine index You scored higher than 91% on liquor index

Link: The Alcohol Knowledge Test written by hoppersplit on OkCupid Free Online Dating

Good and Bad News for Lesbians

Have I mentioned that Bonnie and Darcy have blogs, now? Well, they do. And they are listed in my sidebar. Bonnie's blog is called Ogle My Blogspot, which is kind of lewd. Hey baby, where's your blogspot?

Why, it's in my right frontal lobe, you old cad.

The bad news is, we have a new pope. This guy. He's kind of evil and decrepit looking, and is supposedly very conservative, which puts you out of the running for the job of pope in my book, but then what do I know?

This Easter, a few of us went to Easter vigil at a gorgeous bascilica near my office. The service was fun, all full of ritual and incense and other good things that I love, until it got to the part where the priest says a prayer and then everyone says "Lord, hear our prayers," and the priest said:

"Lord, put an end to abortion, euthanasia, and all of those ungodly experiments."

Then there was a moment of "Holy Shit! We're surrounded by the enemy!" from my end of the pew.

"Lord, fuck that prayer," said my friend Tiffani.

Best new comic I have found: Cat and Girl. It's great. And completely open about the fact that it's a Calvin and Hobbes derivative.

Kudos to the Wikipedia for having the article about PB16's election to the papacy up about 15 seconds after it happened. My guess is that they have advanced time-travel technology at their disposal. Most likely a time popsicle.

Quote of the Day

"By persevering over all obstacles and distractions, one my unfailingly arrive at his chosen goal or destination."—Christopher Columbus

I read this quote today when reading a daily planner that the university puts out every year and just thought it was great. Because, of course, Christopher Columbus never once arrived at his chosen goal or destination. Christopher Columbus's chosen goal was the Far East, and with all his perseverance, he missed it by several thousand miles.

Who says there's no such thing as irony in real life?

one other thing...

I found this attached to Neil Gaiman's blog today. It simultaneously depressed me and made me laugh. Which is a sign that it's brilliant. I often feel like Dylan Thomas and Emily Dickinson do in this comic. Don't read just one...you have to read all of them.

updates...

Nothing major. The birthday post has been updated to include a picture of the lamb cake that started the whole anatomical birthday cake deal.

And Hud had this link on his blog: Make Your Own Southpark Character. Badass. This is me:



Oh...and I can upload pictures directly to this page now. Which makes me even more powerful than you could ever imagine.

The Thinking Man’s Improv

On Monday, I went and saw my friend Biddle’s show, The Monday Show, which is a long-form improv show that uses the art form to explore a themes, such as “Sex and Love,” “Beginnings,” etc. The show I saw was “War and Politics,” and it really blew me away. The performers were by and large willing to go to places—heavy and serious places—that I have rarely seen with improv shows and they went there comfortably, taking their time to establish the scene and bring the audience with them. The few times I’ve seen anything comparable in terms of dramatic improv, the performers went through the dramatic scenes seeming uncomfortable, almost apologetic for taking the show there, as if they weren’t sure it was okay to use improv for anything other than silliness and ephemera. It was really something to see a show try for something more, and frequently hit their mark dead on.

Afterward, Biddle and I had a long conversation about improv and theatre, in general and in Chicago. This is a function of their training. Improvisers are taught either short-form improv, which most commonly takes the form of sketch comedy, or long-form, which in Chicago, takes the form of the Harold, which is long in theory, but is actually composed of numerous sketches. And at the larger houses in Chicago, while it’s taught that people can do dramatic improv, by and large people not bringing in big laughs are ignored or dropped. As a result, the schools encourage improv that is jokey, and consequently devoid of real emotion; be they pleasant emotions or hurtful ones, everything felt or expressed in the shows is always done so with minimal after effect, and the improviser’s body language makes it clear that they aren’t really serious.

One of the trends I’ve noticed among the improvisers I’ve met in Chicago (and some actors, although I’ve met few actors who aren’t also improvisers here) is that there’s a quality to many of them that red-flags them almost immediately in conversation. I used to think of it as always being on, which is to say always trying to be the center of attention, but it’s different than that. I came to realize, in talking with Biddle, that it has more to do with always being in sketch-comedy world, where nothing you do has consequences. Emotion isn’t something expressed, except on the most shallow of levels, covered with the glossy veneer of a joke. In talking with them, they’ll happily say seriously insulting things to you and then act like you should learn to take a joke. I have a hard time imagining any of them expressing an actual emotion like love or anger or what have you without covering it up as a joke. Many of them say things like, “I’m not really an actor; I’m an improviser.” Which is crap. I don’t even know what that’s supposed to mean, in fact. Improv is acting, though it be a form without a script, and requiring a different set of skills than “standard” acting. That they seemingly teach otherwise in the big Chicago schools, and that they will take anyone, even people without any real training in acting or theatre, through advanced courses, makes me think these places are just huge money factories, to be avoided by all.

And it makes me happy and sad all at once that shows like The Monday Show are out there. Happy because they are so damn intelligent and it’s good to see people using such a versatile art for good ends. Sad because they are so often ignored. So go see it. It’s a great show and only runs for two more weeks. I’ll be there for both of them.

And now it’s time for Slide…

I promised it for many entries, and just when you’ve begun to think I wasn’t going to make good on the promise, Slide.

Tantalus is already well at work on our next show, Slide, which is described by the producer as a “philosophical groove musical” based on Upton Sinclair’s book, The Jungle. That’s really all I can say about it at this point, because we’re only a week or two into the process and we don’t have a script yet. What we have is a concept, which strays from The Jungle in terms of location and time period for the purpose of universality and metaphor, and a few songs and the beginnings of a script. The producer, my friend Ed, described it to someone as being an airplane on the tarmac about to takeoff. Personally, I think it’s more like a group of people in a room with a diagram of the basic principles of aerodynamics. Maybe we’ve begun to build a wing or two, but we won’t be testing them for at least another week.

This project is in the interesting position, one I’m not envious of, of coming on the heels of a show that was very powerful and exceeded anyone’s expectations in terms of success. It’s a little like being the guy who had to follow the Beatles the first time they appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show. There are now vast expectations of what our company can do, and it will be a difficult task to live up to them. Being the first show to try to keep alive what we’ve begun is an awkward position to be in.

That said, I think it can live up to those expectations. The people working on the show are all very talented in their ways, and come to meetings with suggestions and arguments. Which is good, because, as Ed also said, anything good is worth fighting about. There are a couple of things that I worry about in it. Keeping continuity in it, and avoiding lots of random elements thrown in just because they seem neat is one of them. Which is more or less why I took the role of the script editor (a.k.a. the Narrative Nazi)—to make sure those many random elements (such as a society that created an industry just to randomly destroy objects for no reason) don’t get out of control in the show. Which means I’m a bit of a hard ass a lot of the time, and that’s okay by me. The Jungle is meaty enough without lots of excess additives and filler (that’s a little meat-packing joke).

Birthday Cannibalism, Fetal Ninja, and Other Things Zygotic

So today is my birthday. I’m twenty-seven years old, which I’m told is a good age to be, and if the party is any indication, things should be fun. My friends, Mark and Adrienne, hold a weekly potluck, to which they always apply a theme. Since last night’s potluck fell so close to my birthday, the theme was “Foods Matt Would Make.” It was generally agreed that I would make just about anything (with the exception of any of these dishes), so there was quite a bit of food, from matzoh-ball soup to ultra-spicy chicken rolls to this delicious eggplant pasta dish that Bonnie made. Of them, I had two favorites. Jess made some pasties molded into the shape of breasts wearing pasties (they came in both A-cups and a pair of C-cups). But the cream of the crop was the birthday cake, which was made to look like an anatomically correct model of my head. A story:

Last year around my birthday, I was flipping through Neil Gaiman’s site and found this (created by possibly two of the coolest women in the world; seriously, if I ever meet them, I might have to propose…to both of them at the same time). My birthday just happened to fall on Easter last year, so instead of the usual birthday cake, I decided I would make a sacrificial lamb cake that bled raspberry sauce when I stabbed its neck. It was a great success, inasmuch as a cake that clears a room when cut can be considered a great success (but seriously…the photos of people’s faces make it all worthwhile), but it wasn’t quite enough. I needed more.

I conceived of a cake that would be an anatomically correct model of my head. There would be a skull made of dark chocolate, perched on a spinal column of the same. A layer of buttercream frosting would affix red velvet cake flesh to the skull, followed by a layer of modeling chocolate for skin or some other kind of smooth sculpting material. The eyes would be chocolate candies with white chocolate coating them. When I served it to my guests, I would break open the skull to reveal a pink raspberry mousse brain. I logged this plan under “Things I Won’t Likely Ever Do” and then moved on to other zany schemes.

One year later (give or take a few months) Mark and Adrienne agreed to hold my birthday potluck with the stipulation that Adrienne would get to make my birthday cake, which was no sacrifice on my part. When she asked me what kind of cake I’d like, I said, “I’m fond of Irish cream cheesecake. Oh…and I once thought of making a cake that was an anatomical model of my head.” And thus she became a woman obsessed. For several weeks, it was all Adrienne could talk about: how would she adhere the cake? How would she make the skull? The face, the eyes, the skin?

The end result was a little like me if I was transformed into a muppet—or if someone was going to eat me in effigy (which was really the point)—and the brains looked exactly like brains, wrinkles and all. The best part, outside of all the effort that Adrienne put into it was the fact that my former roommate, who when I first came up with the idea told me he thought it was gross and that he would never eat it, loved it so much that he even stuck a number two pencil in its eye. Yeah.

I’ll post pictures when they become available.

The zygote portion of the evening…

My friends, Sam and Terry got married a couple of years ago, and recently Sam sent me an e-mail to tell me that Terry is pregnant. To which I responded with a giant exclamation point. I was a little worried that Sam would suddenly go the dad route, turn all straight-laced and responsible, become suburban. A couple of weeks ago, I got this, followed by this, and all my worries went right away. My friends are weird, even with heavy responsibility on the horizon.

Which is good to know, because it gives me something to hope for, for my brother. As of today, I’m an uncle-to-be. My father spilled the beans yesterday that I would be an uncle sometime in December, which is, suffice to say, fan-spanking-tastic news. I can’t wait…Uncle Matt.

I was eating an apple on Saturday and a couple of the seeds that fell out of it had taken root and were getting ready to sprout. So I potted them and am trying to get them to grow. If they grow, I think I’ll give one of the trees to my brother, my sister-in-law, and to my nephew.

Next time: Slide...really...no, honestly this time...

Quests and Whanot

The computer: it is to my generate what the television was to my parent's generation. This strange new technology that, when it first appeared seemed strange, untilitarian, even ugly and frightening, but at the same time mystical and cool. If your friends had a computer, you wanted to be around it, to play with it. You wanted to spend hours obsessively writing lines of Basic so that you could make your computer say "Hi, (insert your name), how are you?" and then answer, "That's great!" when you told it you were fine.

My dad got into programming early in his career. He's a smart guy, my dad (writer, Jonathan Carroll once told me my dad was the smartest person he ever knew. It made my dad blush when I told him that; I was so proud), and he could tell that computers were the new and the coming way of the world, so he learned how to use them. Dad was an English teacher at the time, which I guess is why it was so easy for him to pick computers up. The transition from one language to another must have just struck him as natural. So I grew up around computers, and as a result, I grew up around computer games. The first game I ever played was The Leather Goddesses of Phobos, a racy sci-fi game in that was text-based, which meant that, at age nine, I always knew something kind of sexy was going on without having any inkling what that might be.

But the game that really had me hooked was King's Quest III. I can still remember the day I went over to Mark Irving's (he was my best friend at the time) and found him playing this guy on his computer. We spent the rest of the afternoon in front of the monitor, likely blowing out our retinas in the process, as we guided our heavily pixellated hero around collecting various items to use in potions, solve puzzles, fight pirates, and defeat the evil wizard who had us enslaved (that's the guy on the box cover).

King's Quest III was followed by Space Quest, Quest for Glory, King's Quest IV, and Space Quest III, Quest for Glory II and III. They were all the adventure I wanted, needed, could realistically expect as a chubby suburbanite kid with a fantasy bent. Other of my friends ran around with B.B. guns playing war games. Not me. I stayed pale and inside and fought dragons and griffins out in the Shapier desert. As the games demanded ever-greater graphics components and drive space, I spent birthday and Christmas presents year after year, just so I coould keep up with them. I had to have them. How could I not have them?

As I grew up, I still loved the adventure puzzle games, but the tides were shifting. Computer gamers had fallen in love with the first-person shooter. Doom, Wolfenstein 3D, Duke Nukem: while my little adventures mired themselves in two dimensions, these games rendered environments in three, making game play a fuly-immersive experience. The market changed, and by the time I got out of college, the adventure games I grew up with had gone the way of the dinosaur. It was a sad day.

When I was about a year out of college, had just moved back home, and was bumming around in my dad's place, looking for something to do in my spare time while I looked for a job and tried to break into my imminent career as a world-famous actor, I found the Hero 6 project on the Internet. Hero 6 was the efforts of a group of devoted Quest for Glory fans who didn't want to see their favorite series die, so they took matters in their own hands and started writing their own game: not a sequel to QFG, but an hommage. I jumped on the project, and before I knew it, I was writing dialogue, quests, etc. for a game series like the one I had loved most as a teenager. It was great for a while. But the project was mismanaged. Too many voices with too many disparate aims and few people willing to iron fist it. This guy wanted a ranger class and it was in. This guy wanted a realistic Celtic style, but this guy didn't. This guy wanted a more DND feel to the game and was depressed that the original was just too easy to build stats in. And so on and so on. Each of these voices pulled and prodded and pulled again, taking the project this way and that, like a ship caught in a storm. And after a while, real-world concerns, like finding a job and working in theatre, took my attention. So I abandoned the project.

A month or so ago, I went back to the page and discovered, to my delight, that my login still works. So I've been stalking their boards here and there. Largely, it seems to be moving forward, although with the same ship-in-the-storm direction that I remembered.

I assumed for the longest time that Hero 6 was the only such project out there, but yesterday, just tooling around the board for a while, I found AGD Interactive, a group dedicated, not to writing new games based on the old, but to revamping the old games for VGA computers. They've already done the first King's Quest games, and are working on the second Quest for Glory. From there, I discovered the SQ7 project, which is making a sequel to the Space Quest series, and Quest for Infamy, a sort of antithesis to Quest for Glory. I discovered a bevvy of these projects. There's Quest for Glory 4.5, and Re-Quest for Glory, which patches the original QFG into the very beautiful style of Morrowind. There are an astonishing number of projects like these. Low-budget, collaborative efforts made just for the love of the game.

I'm really glad to see these sites. In the future, my generation will talk of the computer the way our parents talked about the TV. We'll remember what it was like not to have one, and we'll be savvy enough with them to be able to see how they so cleanly will define the first half of this century. We are the last generation of whom that's true. When the first-person shooter game became the norm of the gaming industry, I sort of lost my interest in computer games. The graphics were cool, sure, but I never cared about that. All I cared about were the stories, the plots, the clever one-liners. Without that, you couldn't keep me in my seat long enough to get good with a sniper rifle. As a result, computers became a hassle to me, a thing I didn't really see any reason to know much about. I've since gotten over that, but it's nice to know some remnant of that old style of game still lives out there and that there are people who still care enough about it to devote their free time to creating new ones.

Best of luck to all of you.

Next time: Slide (this time for real)

post blog entry aside

Monday is my birthday. I turn 27. While I don't require gifts, I also wouldn't mind being showered with lots of chocolate and gold. In that order.

I Likea the Girl Scout Cookies...

I haven't gotten around to posting for the past couple of weeks, partially because I've been really busy at work (which is where I do most of my blogging), partially because I've been writing a short story that's going really smoothly, and I didn't want to mess with my energy while writing it. But mostly, I haven't written in a couple of weeks, because I haven't had much of anything to say.

I considered writing something about Terri Schiavo, but found I didn't have much to say about it that I didn't consider obvious. Bonnie sent me this article and also this one on the day Terri died. Both make good points about the political circus that this case was and about the tricky situation of determining if a brain dead woman would have wanted to die. It seems to me that the only person who really knew for sure was her, and that any further decisions amounted less to a question of "did Terri want to die?" than a question of "can we bear to see our loved one live like this?" Her parents could. Her husband couldn't. His argument won out. All the rest was political bullshit, as evidenced by this memo from U.S. President, George Bush, proving that this has more to do with votes than it does to do with life.

But I'm preaching to the choir, which is why I didn't post this article in the first place. However, in the off chance I get into a ghastly accident and find myself in a permanent vegetative state, let this stand as my official request that you let me die. Preferrably in a way that takes out as many of these people as possible.

So, like I said, I haven't written in a a couple of weeks, because I haven't had much to say.

Then two things happened yesterday: the third person commented on my lack of blog and the Pope died.

I can't really say which has driven me to write more, but I can tell you I'll miss the Pope. JP2 has been Pope since before I was born. He's the only Pope I can really visualize, and even though I'm not and never will be Catholic, I'm really going to miss the guy. I liked JP2. Sure he said all sorts of ridiculous shit about birth control and homosexuality being sins against God, but what do you expect? He's the Pope. He's a Catholic...in fact, he's THE Catholic. There's certain standards he has to uphold. However, he's been willing to break with a couple of traditions. For starters, unlike his predecessors, JP2 wasn't hit on the head with a hammer to determine his death. They just took his pulse this time. And the Cardinals won't be locked in the Sistine Chapel until they vote in the new Pope. Presumably because the ghost of Michelangelo proved just too scary for Cardinals Shaggy and Scooby to bear.

Bonnie and Darcy have a picture of JP2 up on their chalkboard, for reasons I've never known. It's a picture of him looking very contemplative. One day I walked by the chalkboard and found "Girl Scout Cookies" on the board. So I wrote in a thought bubble and the words "I likea the Girl Scout Cookies..." Bonnie and Darcy thought it was so funny, they've left it there ever since.

That's that.
Next time: Slide...