It occurred to me, when playing Minecraft the other day, that paintings for art's sake just don't seem to translate well. The files have to be at such a tiny pixel resolution that very few images work without becoming walls of random pixels up close. And seriously, unless your base is one of those Khazad-Dum-sized monstrosities, how else are you going to view paintings except close-up?
So I figure, why make the paintings try to look like anything at all? That's when it hit me that abstract art would work best in this context. So today I'm sharing a couple of abstract art files, as a follow-up to my previous Minecraft Mystic artpack. Remember, these are just the painting files, not a complete texture pack for Minecraft. If you unzip your current texturepack and look for a folder called 'art' containing a file called 'kz.png' and replace it with one of these, then zip it back up, that'll install it. Or research how to install artpacks at the Minecraft Wiki or the Minecraft Forums.
Here's the two files, both named as 'kz.png':
Pack #1:
Pack #2:
I'm calling it all "abstract", but it includes dada, minimalism, cubism, modernism, and various other "-ism"-suffixed styles. They're mostly colorful, splashy, and blend easily with almost any interior decorating style. Furthermore, they're fit for the most pretentious snooty commentaries you want to reel off in the middle of your next YouTube Minecraft demo, like in these silly examples:
"On the right we have Morris Selton's 'Expiration of Linearity', from the crest of his 'wood period' just before the revolution."
"On the left, 'The Long Hall' by jazz-age artist Polimento Fabroginni; a return to form and color with the typical agitation he showed for the nonobjective. Nonrepresentational art would continue to be a morbid fascination of his, a medium he would flirt with but never court. And the right, a playful piece titled 'Sequitur Intersection' by pop dada artist Milo van Toot."
"On the left, 'Grossitude' by Serbian surf-bunny-turned-feminist-exiled-designer Ravello Digrunkblezwy, is explained by her to represent 'the death of hope in the wake of the cultural dark age of art, reflecting on the void of emotions numbing her after her friend's three abortions.' It's been censored in China."
"On the right, 'Wavy Orange Jello' by Douglas Farp, his final piece before he was committed to the home for the terminally insane. Farp's final commentary on this work was that it is a soap opera drama in which the far left squigly line is in love with the third one, who spurns this advance in favor of the second one, however the fourth one (his mother) will not allow them to marry, and so the fifth, sixth, and seventh squiggly lines are assassins hired to snuff her out."
"'Down the Shaft', Jesus de Rico's expressionist monocolor work on the right, pulls us with a mixture of intrigue and dread down the hole into the center of the Earth. What lies below? An abandoned mine, a stronghold, a wasteland of obsidian-lined caverns with a lurking creeper? The bleakness captures the feeling of melancholy underground exploration, but at the same time the dim light gives us hope that perhaps a patch of diamond could be twinkling down there."
"Dorian Earl Gray left us with this last dada-inspired tour-de-force before committing suicide to honor a pact he made with his opium-addicted mother in Bangkok. The balance, the vivid colors, and the tightness of the lines speak of his resignation to his fate, doubtless upon his mind as he conceived the canvas. Please don't touch; it flakes easily."
"Three pieces by Philipe vans Brouche, entitled 'Hopping', 'Folicle', and 'Explorers'. His widow was kind enough to lend them from his estate, as these were the only three that his hunting dogs didn't chew up."
"On the left is an experimental piece by a hacker collective who creates art by feeding daily social media tweets into an algorithm that picks values for colored pixels. This piece was produced in the few hours between the deaths of Farah Fawcett and Michael Jackson, totaling 7,642 tweets."
All kidding aside... They were actually all Gimp-produced, with various filters and plugins I'm sure all you Gimpers would recognize.
I checked out this link to find out what Google knows about me through its advertising-tracking thingie. I got this:
Now, everything else is just about dead on. "Music, programming, and puzzles" would do alright as the title of my biography. But my age gets pegged to 18 to 24?
Hey, I'm 42 over here, Google, old enough to be your dad! And no, I prefer not to edit it, because I like to see what the algorithm thinks based on my surfing habits. For one thing, I work in online media and professionally I have to focus on the 18-24 demographic. So I go where they do. May I always have the web surfing habits of an 18-24-year-old; that's gold when you're billing yourself as a "social media consultant".
This is also why I don't understand all the hype about "Teh Evul Googul" tracking your personal data. Big deal, my gender, age, and a few of my interests? I routinely disclose more than that to complete strangers in the average coffee shop conversation.
PS Yes, I'm starting to call myself a "social media consultant". I'm still just a hack writer and artist for websites. But there's ten thousand other hack writers and artists for websites out there, and I've recently discovered that they all call themselves "social media consultants" because it sounds Web-2.0-ier and they get to jack their prices up. So OK, I sometimes call what I do "social media consulting" now.
I never thought I'd be blogging about The Frothy One in my august pages, but holy smoking clover! Santorum just came out and said what the entire Christian wing of the Republican party has always been thinking: They're anti-education - period!
"The indoctrination that occurs in American universities is one of the keys to the left holding and maintaining power in America. And it is indoctrination."
Wait, what about teaching people how to be, you know, engineers and doctors and lawyers and whatnot?
"62 percent of children who enter college with a faith conviction leave without it."
Could that be the effect of people who believed in young-Earth creationism being confronted with contrary evidence from things like the fossil record?
All this was him firing back after President Obama's State of the Union address, in which Obama simply called for more college education - calling it an economic imperative. What's that we hear every day? We need to create more jobs? Doesn't college help you get one, last I heard?
Well, Iowa, my home state, what do you have to say for yourselves? Iowa, the state with one of the best reputations for educational standards. Iowa, the state where Rick Santorum won the 2012 Republican caucus. Are you proud of yourselves?
Latest moral panic: How Google Search Is Destroying Our Memory. As stupid and predictable as this is, it's the same story that comes around every six months or so, but it will still be front-paged across web media and we'll still be scrolling past it in our RSS feeds by next week.
Hey, once again (again and again and again), I'll be the only one to shoot this down with common sense: Books.
Before there was Google, there were books. Indeed, the number of books I keep on hand has decreased since the advent of Google, and I know I'm not the only one. And the purpose of keeping many books is for research and reference.
So, I guess that's why dictionaries were invented, so we don't have to walk around memorizing the spelling, pronunciation, and definition of every word. And perhaps why telephone books were invented, so you didn't have to memorize every phone number. And why encyclopedia sets used to be a common household fixture, so you could look up facts on a broad range of topics. And why dispatchers had a big city streets atlas pinned to the wall, so they didn't have to memorize every street in town.
Before we kept our external memory on Google, we kept it in books. In fact, Google has done nothing but make all this diverse information faster and easier to re-locate again. It was never common to have all the names of the presidents memorized, except just to show off. Thirty years ago, if asked which was the last US president from the Whig party, I'd flip to the index of a tome and have the answer in one minute (#13 Fillmore). Now I Wiki it and have the answer in twenty seconds. It's the same process, just using different technology!
How come I never used to read magazine articles about how print media is destroying our memory?
I'll tell you why. Because psychology professors are stupider now than they used to be. It's a good enough answer for me. In case anybody Googled it, here you are.
None of us ever get famous for what we want to be famous for...
I spend five years of my life pounding on desks until they break, trying to preach core messages and truths - they get ignored. But I post some silly little bit of frippery just to lighten the mood for a minute? That gets the world's attention, and I'll never live it down. Oy vey, ye web schlemiels, vy you are so exasperating, you drive me to Yiddish?
Over five years ago, I posted One for the ladies: How to date a geek guy? Not even in the top 90% of my most thoughtful work. Well, somehow, through extended linking and Google-bombing, I have accidentally become the Internet's expert on geek dating. That damn post gets more hits than everything else in this blog put together.
But, uh, folks? I've now been happily married for 18+ years. So I'm a little bit out of the loop on the dating thing by now, OK? I still remember something about fork etiquette at a restaurant and that you're not supposed to initiate bondage play on the first date, but otherwise, were I (Heavens forbid!!!) single at this moment, I would either have to remain a bachelor for the rest of my existence or auction myself off on eBay (winning bid $1.50? WTF?).
OK, so, finally, at goddamn last, I can tell you that I get some 50 search hits per week for "geek date ideas". Google keeps sendin' 'em and there ain't no geek date ideas here. So what'cha gonna do? You gonna post a list o' geek date ideas, so people at least have some page to land on and at least they got something for the hit, right? You see how nice I am? No wonder I've stayed married 18 years!
Number one recommendation, without a doubt. None of us ever get out to museums as often as we'd like, and then as soon as you're in the door you're all "this is nice, we should do this more often." Science museums are the best, because they're geared towards kids with lots of hands-on stuff to play with. If you both have to drag each other away from playing with the exhibits, get married immediately. At the gift shop at the end, you can buy each other Mensa-level wooden puzzles and those stinky rubber lizards. If there's no science museum, well, art ones are nice too. Most geeks at least have some appreciation of history, so a historic museum is fun too.
Or the zoo
Second to museums for high-brow amusement is the zoo. What geek doesn't like animals? Zoos make fun dates because it's something different you haven't done in a while, it's kinda science-y, you can each fawn over your favorite exotic animal (every time I have visited the zoo, all the reptiles act like they want to follow me home), and in case you have some romantic aspirations for later in the evening, the occasional humping wallaby pair will be more than happy to provide some inspiration.
Plain old day at the library
What with Kindle books and the Internet in every home, libraries are almost becoming nostalgic. But geeks, by definition, cram books, so you'll both have something to talk about. Note, I didn't say you each had to check out a stack. Just browse for fun. Find out if you read the same authors. Better yet, check out one book for each other that the other must read.
Attend a convention
Any convention centered around any interest or hobby you both share will do. It doesn't have to be a Trekcon or comic books. Coin and stamp collector's conventions are a perfectly geeky pursuit, I assure you.
Shop in the Bohemian district
Quaint little bookshops with hard-to-find titles, vintage clothing stores with outrageous outfits, thrift stores filled with goofy junk, antique stores with a basement full of fascinating treasures, music stores that cater to your bizarre tastes, and so on. Every major city has that one "village" neighborhood. And of course, lunch or dinner at that ridiculously tiny cafe where all the hipsters hang out and grumble over coffee that's strong enough to dissolve lead.
(Bad) Movie night at your place
Forget the movie theater, unless it happens to be showing a major sci-fi or superhero flick, and even then... Nope, rent a stack of flicks for home over popcorn, but it can be either time-worn geek classics that you can relive together, or really awful, obscure, off-beat genre titles you've never heard of. A Z-list horror movie that's more fun to make fun of than it is to watch works wonders here.
Hiking (picnic optional)
Got some woods and a trail? It's been noted many times that when geeks do practice athletic pursuits, it's usually non-competitive things like surfing, mountain climbing, and so on. A hike in the woods, with perhaps a cooler with a hand-packed lunch, sounds so refreshing right now, doesn't it?
Gaming night
Can be video games, but really, you both play video games all the time or you wouldn't be here, right? So match wits over a chess board, have a spicy game of Monopoly where the loser can do special favors to pay off their debt, or drag out the poly-hexy-dodacahera-gonal dice for an old-fashioned dungeon romp.
Hang out and work on a project together
Can be your latest, mad-science, Mentos-and-Coke-powered robot kit or an all-night web design session... that doesn't sound romantic until you consider that you can snuggle together with laptops checking modules in and out of Git. Or whatever - who says a geek project can't be needlepoint, or reupholstering an ottoman, or planting zucchini? Just remember, anybody can be pleasant on a dinner-and-a-movie date, but a couple that can get a website launched without killing each other is truly compatible.
Pull off a social engineering hack together
Oooooh! For the daring geek couple. Infiltrate a culture neither of you belong in and see if you can con the members into accepting you as native. Confuse the devil out of a random passerby by both pretending to know them from way back. Go to the local jail and visit one random prisoner, whoever's name you can guess first. Show up at a sporting event and pretend to be press, see who you can get to grant you an interview. Go door to door witnessing for Cthulhu. Pretend to be time travelers and run up to people on the street asking them what year it is. You get the idea.
Dammit, this is frustrating. You see how prophecy works? It's just like in the stories, where you make a wish to a genie and you wish to be a millionaire, and then you're buried in piles of worthless Zimbabwe currency that's worth about $1.88 American, and the genie goes, "Oooooh, you meant in DOLLARS! Well, sorry, you already spent your wish."
A while ago last December, I spake the Prophecy "SOPA shall not pass". And I promised to follow up on that, which I'm doing now.
It came half-true: Lamar Smith has now cut the DNS-blocking part from the SOPA bill. This was the part that made the bill so Draconian and had everybody in such an uproar. So, without the Gestapo-like powers to black out millions of websites at the fingertips of the Black Hand of the MPAA/RIAA, SOPA now becomes another toothless, gummy, mushy bill that kinda-sorta makes online piracy a no-no, just like twenty other laws we already have.
But they're still trying to pass SOPA anyway.
So I do a half-victory-dance for my prophecy that came half-true. Technically speaking (arguing my case just like that aforementioned genie), SOPA, as it originally existed on 12/16/11, is now dead, so that's a point for me. But SOPA in its present form? Meh, might go through. Thus forever splitting future scholars into the people who thought I was right, the people who thought I was wrong, and the people who know I'm half-right.
Part Deux: How Did I Know SOPA Would Not Pass?
Let me tell you a joke: There's this fly, see, and he lands on a bridge. And right when he does that, an earthquake hits. The bridge starts rumbling. The fly gets alarmed and does his fly thing and buzzes back into the air. As he circles the bridge wondering what's happening, the bridge crumbles from the earthquake and falls into the bay. And the fly says to himself: "Damn, I need to lose some weight!"
The Internet Hivemind (Anonymous, 4chan, Reddit, Digg, Slashdot, Twitter, whatever-the-collective name becomes) chances upon a "grassroots" (Har de har har!) outcry against SOPA and joins the fight, because that's where they happened to land. The fight is actually between huge, huge corporations, battling for control of the US government. The bigger, stronger corporations beat the smaller, weaker corporations, and the fight is over. The Internet Hivemind, having done as much damage as a flea to the weaker corporations before the bigger corporations delivered the coup de grace, now land on the corpse of the defeated corporations and thrust their tiny little tin swords into the air and roar. Victory! We did it! We slayed the dragon!
No guys. You had nothing to do with it.
Not that it should let that stop you all from charging around beating your chests and kissing each other's asses for being such hot stuff. By all means, have your fun. You need the boost to your e-testosterone.
Here's why SOPA Classic could not have passed: It was anti-business. Online business is becoming damned important to this economy, need I remind you? It was so anti-business that Microsoft, Apple, Google, Yahoo, and Facebook all came out against it before ANY of you ever HEARD about SOPA. That doomed SOPA, end of line, even before other online businesses began jumping on the bandwagon.
Listen folks, I don't know how this could not be obvious to all of you, but you know that corporate control of the US government that this little thing called "Occupy Wall Street" (perhaps you've heard of it???) has been up in arms about? Well it cuts both ways. What you just saw is an attempted coup in which Old Media, (MPAA/RIAA) tried to wrestle control of government from New Media (Internet companies), and failed. The corporations of New Media still run the show, still buy and sell politicians like baseball cards. You still have no control of your government, and the politicians still simply voted for who wrote them the biggest check.
Once I saw Microsoft, Apple, and Google all three allied against SOPA, I knew it was a won fight. Believe me, all kidding aside, when I solemnly assure you that if Microsoft, Apple, and Google came out against peeing, you'd all have corks superglued into your urethras like Saddam Hussein torture victims and most of you would go tweet "It's not so bad once you get used to it!"
As Smith says, he came to this decision "after consultation with industry groups across the country", not giving a damn about threatened web blackouts, the protesters in Guy Fawkes masks on his front lawn, and all the other hissy fits everybody was throwing. Read: "New Media wrote me a bigger check."
Now, back to the 1,278 OTHER problems where our freedoms are happily chomped away by hungry corporations looking to enslave the world while you all apathetically go back to your Angry Birds games...
Update 1/16/12: Two days later, SOPA officially flatlined. In accordance with the prophecy spake by your humble prophet. Gloat. Gloat. Gloat gloat gloat.
"Imagine the dramatic change which could be possible in just a few years, once we remove the roadblock of the existing ICT curriculum. Instead of children bored out of their minds being taught how to use Word and Excel by bored teachers, we could have 11-year-olds able to write simple 2D computer animations using an MIT tool called Scratch.
By 16, they could have an understanding of formal logic previously covered only in university courses and be writing their own apps for smartphones."
That's... ah! Oh! Augh! Words fail me! I sink to my knees and genuflect and kowtow in veneration of Michael Gove's wisdom! We are not worthy! We are not worthy! Is Michael Gove starting his own religion? May I be his apostle? Can I be his freaking bellhop??? I will carry water, bwana - take me with you!
OK, well, there's some minor nits. True, having Microsoft input involved, even tangentially, in something called an "open source curriculum" is utter blasphemy, and MIT's Scratch reminds me of those touch-screen interfaces that lab techs use to talk to chimpanzees rather than programming.
Be those objections sustained, the mere sight of the stock photo showing students discovering a powerbox together plus the fire-and-brimstone speech of Gove gives me hope for a new world. It's almost enough to erase eight years of Bush from my memory.
And there's no reason that US schools couldn't do exactly the same.
I listen to the war stories my kids bring home, from the tiny, reluctant, Medieval amount of computer education they get. Here is what a junior-high-school computer class in Iowa (top education achievement in the country, mind you) is teaching as of last month: "OK, kids, today we're going to create an account at a web page. Open the broooowser, use the moooouuuse, click on the liiiink... We're going to open a 'Hotmail' email account..."
I am not making this up. In fact, the same class reconvened, not to use use their sparkly new Hotmail accounts, oh my my no, but to create another account at another website, because so many students were lost and confused on the previous lesson. Which is just as well, because my offspring, already well-equipped with Gmail accounts they've been using from home, tend to greet the word 'Hotmail' with general nose-holding, eye-rolling, gag-reflex-retching, etc. Then - as I say, this was last month - the school powers-that-be have since replaced computer class with more gym.
Bounce the ball.
I'm too lazy to go look up where I said it before, but I've said that schools do not teach computing. They teach typewriting, using computers. They go from touch-typing to office documents and that's the end. In a nutshell, they kept the same IBM-Selectric classes from the 1970s and just upgraded the Selectrics.
But the UK, through Gove, will lead the way to the future! Follow the man with the sword and the crown - I think he has a battle plan!
