Life Imitates Art

Some of my friends have been asking for more personal posts: here ya go.

I got a prank call at work today; some girl who may have been drunk called while I was away from my desk. She left her name and number, silly thing, and said she needed help with her "power plant", giggling all the while (I work for Fisher Scientific, so I imagine she found this amusing and decided to call).

So of course I call back.

I get some other girl, and ask to speak with the caller (I'll get to her name later). I hear some kind of exchange, and she asks who's calling, so I say Peter, from Fisher Scientific (I should have said "To discuss her power plant problems" but only thought of it afterwards).

Pause.

>click<


Chicken! =)


Anyway here are the weird (weirder?) bits:

1) She said her name was Anastasia. This is the same name as a girl who works around the corner at a framing place, who I had a silly little crush on a while ago. For the life of me I can't remember if I ever gave her my work number. Probably not. Anyway, how many Anastasia's can there be around here?
2) I do a reverse-directory search on the phone number, and find that (here comes a mouthful) she is the immediate neighbour of the person that babysat my mom's dog last week. Anastasia's in unit 'D', the babysitter was in unit 'E'. I went there briefly to drop off some dog food.
3) The kicker: I watched "I *heart* Huckabees" last night. For those who haven't seen it, the starting point for the movie is that the main character goes to existential detectives to help him sort out the meaning of three coincidences (wackiness ensues -- great flick).

So, what now? As far as I know, existential detectives do not exist. There's a philosophy joke there, but I can't quite make it out.

50 people see an eye

50 people see an eye
Originally uploaded by brevity.

Flickr astounds me yet again. brevity has created a progam that averages together 50 pictures of whatever tag he chooses. Clicking the image will take you to many more examples. Bloody cool.

Set Your iTunes Free

Jon Johansen (aka DVD Jon) has released an app that will allow you to download your tunes sans-DRM (Digital Rights Management for you non-techies). I don't use iTunes, or even have an iPod (because I'm poor and terminally unhip) but I'm all for spreading the word on how to get around "features" that companies use to keep you from using what you *bought* any way you see fit. For practical reasons (and lazy ones), I'll just link you to the post at Boingboing, where you can find insightful commentary and links to the download.

Under Mars

Found this through Worldchanging, which is always interesting. It's an online archive of photos snapped by soldiers in Iraq, with whatever text the soldier provides. I haven't looked through it yet, both because I'm at work and because I'm having a good day and I'm afraid of what I might see. From the main page:

"I can not emphasize enough that this site contains graphic and disturbing images of war and what it does to people. Some of the photos are beautiful and some expose the true horror of what we humans do at times. Please do not enter if you are not comfortable seeing such images. The pictures are not sorted or censored and many may be quite upsetting, as is war."

My New Favourite (unreleased) Game

Will Wright, who created SimCity and The Sims, recently gave a demonstration of his newest baby: Spore. Check out the comprehensive Gamespy covereage here. Here's a quote from Gamespot that sums up the game nicely:

"A sim that allows the players to control life on all conceivable scales--an emergent and beautiful simulation game that ranges from the cellular level all the way to the galactic level."

That is very exciting, to me. I'm all about the "sandbox" games; games that give you some tools, and an environment, then set you loose to do whatever you feel like doing (usually with some optional goals thrown in). Very exciting, INDEED. Of course, I didn't much care for The Sims, and I haven't played SimCity very much (although I am very impressed with the design of both), so we'll see if Spore turns out to be the game I'm hoping for.

Update: Screenshots!!!
Found via Tycho over at Penny Arcade, who demostrates why he makes a living off of his writing, while I write incomplete, incoherent blog posts on my lunchbreak, furtively glancing over my shoulder. He talks purdy-like, and describes all the things I meant to say about the game but forgot.

Some odd games for ya

Here's a link that I'm putting up here in part to remind me to check it out later. I am sick and in no mood to install and figure out strange games. Found it via Kottke, which is one of many blogs linking to this, which is a good read if you wanna hear people in the game design business rant about how back-asswards the industry is. Fun-fact about me: I like reading about the game design industry/process more than I like playing most games. Some day I'll tell you all about my "Army of Pete" Quake mod... suffice to say, it was glorious.

Anyway, the first link goes to a page with a bunch of games designed according to the following rulez:

• each game must be made in less than 7 days
• each game must be made by one person, including all art, sound, and programming
• each game must be based around a certain "toy" ie. "gravity", "vegetation", "swarm behavior", etc.

If that isn't a recipe for wacky fun, I don't know what is.