No Compelling Content

Well, not “this” machine.

by Zacharias @ http://inexactitu.de . October 3, 2010 . 6:43PM

Kind of hard to run a Democracy when people are this badly-informed of social issues.

by Zacharias @ http://inexactitu.de . October 2, 2010 . 12:08AM

via an argument on a website about a conversation about a comedian and a “journalist” arguing with each other.

Sarah, our cities are teeming with millions of fatherless welfare thugs, welfare super-breeders, illegals and their anchor babies, all parasites on the taxpayers. Do you refuse to acknowledge that??

We used to trust politicians to figure this crap out for us, at least on a micro-level. Maybe that, not the media, not the current national situation, makes our time and political circlejerking so interesting and unique.

[Review] The Dungeon Master by William Dear

by Zacharias @ http://inexactitu.de . September 19, 2010 . 9:19PM

A little background before the review proper: When I was a child, my mother had a campaign of “saving” me from Dungeons and Dragons. Since I was somewhat fated to enjoy the devil’s foreplay, I managed to get my hands on books much worse (The Mission Earth series comes to mind) and I am a D&D player and fan today. When I found about this quiet campaign of hers, she quoted the media backlash against Dungeons and Dragons that happened “a year or two before you were born” as the reason.

As I was born in the early 1980′s I wasn’t alive when Dallas Egbert went missing in August 1979. The story of his disappearance, and the wild theories that followed were based around his playing a LARP (Live Action Role-playing) version of D&D in the nine miles of unguarded and unmonitored tunnels that ran beneath the campus of MSU. Egbert was a genius, in the pure sense of the word, and was sixteen years old at the time of his disappearance.

“The Dungeon Master” is the 1984 book written by the flamboyant Texas-based private eye hired by Dallas’ parents. As this book was a single-serving social issue book that was subsequently never reprinted and ignored in lieu of the “cautionary tale” Mazes and Monsters, book, then movie with a damned-loose interpretation of the case, was released in 1982.

As who-done-it cases go, William Dear does a pretty thorough job of describing his process, albeit with some obligatory run-troughs of his super-cool gear. Many twist and turn lead investigators through many fruitless avenues and literal dead-end tunnels abound. The movie, and even the Newsweek review of the book printed on the back cover want to make so much hay of Dear trying a game of Dungeons and Dragons – either I must be totally desensitized to the idea of make-believe or again, the media looks for the best angle of attack. What happened to Dallas Egbert between his rescue and his tragic death is perhaps the least fleshed-out portion of the story and the most interesting.

By the end of this case, it becomes obvious that the boogey-man isn’t D&D, or role-playing; especially in the seen-through-the-minivan-windshield portrayal of it that William Dear gives us. Instead, it was the lack of support for a too-young person going to a large, impersonal university, drugs, and the hands-off, high-pressure treatment of gifted individuals. (Dear gets credit from me for posing this issue early and often)

Let us say for a moment that Egbert’s disappearance was due to his role-playing compulsion or addiction. Adult and child alike are known to descend into fantasy when reality becomes too much. The causes of these compulsions or fantasies aren’t to be blamed on the fantasy, but instead of a person unable to deal with the reality they’ve been placed in. I can’t blame the underclassmen that LARPed with Egbert for not seeing this as a mental illness, or at least a pressure valve stuck on “release” – the media is not the message. Novels didn’t destroy Victorian England, television didn’t destroy the children of the 1960s, and the Beatles didn’t cause the Manson murders. How much would of an enlightened mentor providing emotional support would have helped Egbert, an odd child with hardly any social skills? A lot more than D&D, and the drugs that Egbert used, thats for sure.

So, I’m watching Lake of Fire

by Zacharias @ http://inexactitu.de . July 22, 2010 . 8:22PM

“They show you how things used to work back in the day. Like with the gays and the lesbians – look at what he did to Sodom and Gomorrah.”

Long Tail Play: What you can get for the price of a Mirodi Travel Notebook.

by Zacharias @ http://inexactitu.de . July 2, 2010 . 11:50PM

Ladies and gentleman, in this corner – a squareish piece of leather made in Thailand along with a 60 page notebook.

The Mirodi Traveler’s Notebook is a device that has some traction in the neigh-unimaginable delve that is Stationary Blogging. For various reasons (the most compelling I’ve seen that its hard to buy in the US and anything Amazon doesn’t sell directly is for PROs, of course) this notebook has captured the imaginations of many weird people that are “travelers.” I do not need a teardown of components (like the kind routinely done to Apple products) to figure out I can find a square foot of leather and a decent stack of paper for less than $50.

Thankfully, if you have $50, and thinking “hey, I was going to make sweet consumer love over this product” – allow me to provide a useful alternative for the American traveler:

• An off-brand track suit. Thankfully, Uncle Sam (not that one) has us taken care of for just $26! (Wal*Mart)

• A Moleskine traveler’s notebook. (Moleskine Direct, $11 retail) No, it won’t work very well with your $300 fountain pen, but that Bic you swiped from Motel 8? Magic. Also, this guy has more than twice as many pages. Have more memories!

• A cheeseburger ($1-3, various) can be had, because you are a US American! $1 BK double pictured.

• Ten to Twelve Dollars.

Project Plan: Unportable Game Boy

by Zacharias @ http://inexactitu.de . June 20, 2010 . 2:53PM

As a dude who owns five of the first six Game Boy major revisions made until the introduction to the Nintendo DS – I was on ebay looking for a cheap one to complete the collection.  I found one for $2 with a broken LCD. Buying it immediately, I then found how damned expensive the LCD replacements are ($30?!). I figure, hey, since I have to take this apart, I might as well turn it into an all-in-one games console.

I’ve been interested in the hacking movement to portabalize classic (and not-so-classic) games consoles that are reincarnated into huge handhelds. Since I am really interested in making an all-in-one system, and have been for a while, I’m going to recase this Game Boy Advance SP into something like a alarm clock case and also wire it for external control, internal amplified speakers, and fabricate a really neat controller to work the whole thing.

So, the plan goes something like this:

Step 1: Buy all the junk I need to make it. (sources and status noted)

1. Game Boy Advance SP (ebay, purchased)
2. Replacement LCD screen for GBASP (ebay, not purchased)
3. Junky Computer Speaker (thrift store, not purchased)
4. AC/DC power converter (thrift store, not purchased)
5. Wires (ide/ribbon/rainbow cabling, maybe a DB25 cable)
6. Interfaces – controller plug (thinking a DB25 connector), power, headphone (Radioshack,  not purchased)
7. Nylon wire braided sleeve (for controller) (Digikey, not yet)
8. Heat shrink tubing (always need more than you think, amirite) (purchased)
9. Tact switches (haven’t sourced them yet)
10. Poly enclosure for controller (Polycase, not purchased)
11. Solder (have)
12. Bondo, Paint, Sandpaper, cut glass for casing. (Autozone/Hardware stores, not purchased)

Step 2: Create a wiring schematic for the project

1. Need to keep power, video, audio and control wires in mind.
2. Should have a good idea of the power needs by that point.
3. Unit test wiring schematic against parts in hand (is every connection accounted for?)

Step 4: Wire the Game Boy and associated parts to work together

1. Power for all devices
2. Extend the ribbon cable for GBA screen to front of device (hardest part I can forsee)
3. control wires for each GBA button

Step 4: Fabricate the enclosures for the project

1. Make a list of ports
2. Source all wire grommets/interfaces needed
3. Roughs of the controller tested and working 100%
4. Roughs of the GBA/audio/video case working 100%
5. Bondo and sand and sand and sand and sand
6. Paint and sand and sand and sand

So, that should cover the whole thing. This plan will probably change over time as I ask various online communities for input as I go.

If this goes really well, the next step would be to create something I’ve been dreaming about for days now: a portrait Game Boy Advance.

Outta be fun! I’m shooting for an August 1st ship date!

Sergei Descartes – an antihero for our time.

by Zacharias @ http://inexactitu.de . June 18, 2010 . 12:30PM

I’ve been looking towards a glorious day where my academic responsibilities are finally subsided for a matter of WEEKS on end. As this day, June twentysomethingith, gets closer to becoming a reality, I’ve been thinking on what sort of projects can combine the various media I’d like to dabble in: creating music (chiptune), coding (in C for Game Boy, specifically), photography, and writing. But doing unrelated projects would mean I’d have 3-5 unfinished collections of newbish junk, and I have plenty of that (on here and elsewhere).

Then, while jaywalking across Richmond Street, I came up with it: create a story, fleshing out the world of a central character (the aforementioned Sergei Descartes), and take that feeling and world and exploit it using the mediums

The thematic conflicts, as such, I hope will be:

The plastic feeling of fanboyism and fetishistic collection vs. Making

Responsiblity as identity vs. self-determined persona

Anyways, the short-short story I made the other day will be the springboard of the world I’m imaginating. Look forward to it.

As for inspirations for this world, I’ve been thinking about:

• The history of monopoly
• Heavy Rain (the PS3 game)
• “Mission Earth” by L.Ron Hubbard
• Check Cashing Concerns
• “Free to Choose” by Thomas Friedman
• Cory Doctorow’s “Makers” (my review here)
• Robert Harris’ “Fatherland”
• Quitting smoking

New (super) Short Story – Wal*Mart Backpack

by Zacharias @ http://inexactitu.de . June 17, 2010 . 5:55PM

Hello friends, wanted to let you all know that I managed to write me a three page short story trying out my new typewriter, and it seemed a waste to just type cuss words in it without any sort of agenda.

Anyways, I already forgot what it was about, but I did put the typewriter in it.

Wal*Mart Backpack [pdf]

Holla, then.

Starting a new project – Unportable GameBoy Advance SP

by Zacharias @ http://inexactitu.de . June 16, 2010 . 10:53PM

I recently won an ebay auction for a Gameboy Advance SP – which is the only Gameboy I’m missing in the entire series. This SP has a broken LCD (twas only $2.25, though), which got me down the road of perhaps implementing a TV-out hack and reportablizing the device with a super-cheap handheld TV I saw online. Alas, the SP doesn’t support video out (not even the hack that the GBA has for TV out that is by all accounts horrible, anyways).

So, that leads me to two conclusions:

• I’m actually going to have to buy an LCD for this thing.
• Since it’s already broken, I can certainly break it more and nobody’d be the wiser.

Portablizing home consoles is so in fashion (ala anything Ben Heck) – why not unportablize a handheld instead?

So, I now have an epic one-page sketch of what technology it’ll require (the target budget soup-to-nuts is $50) and even thought out a never-before-seen regime of control scheme (a very physical-layer solution is promised here). A hint: it’ll involve no less than 10 normally-closed switches and a DB25 connector.

Maybe once I get my bona fides in the console hacker world, I can finally inspire someone to create my dream console: the PSP stuffed into a GBP shell:

Once I have a proper project plan, I will update the three of you.

Interesting Things on the web that I am doing.

by Zacharias @ http://inexactitu.de . June 7, 2010 . 8:33PM

I am an internet man, so I’m usually on the web pretty hard.

Today, I learned about the super-cool-but-never-mass-produced-and-well-named B-58 Hustler, which was the first in the proud heritage of American jet-powered aircraft that could end the world or at least ruin your day. Early jet pilots were either insane or crazy, depending on your point of view. Chuck Horner and Tom Clancy’s oddly-awesome Every Man A Tiger, in which Horner relates his mucho appreciated military careet, including flying some aircraft that look definately non-gravity defying.

Then, I read about two years worth of Overcompansating (for perhaps the third time) – I’ll be god-damned if it doesn’t speak to this man’s soul.

My doubleTwist experiment is going badly, as the program doesn’t know how to kill with fire earlier copies of podcasts and nobody needs 9 episodes of the History of Rome in triplicate on their phone.  Especially since the Evo’s battery wouldn’t last through 3 of them in the subway system, RF emitting frantically for a reply, slowly microwaving my left leg.

Still looking for an awesome manual typewriter in some thrift store in this city so I can fall in love with it, ignore it for six months and then sell it for a tidy profit on ebay come Chrismastime.

Good day, in all.