Prof.Sakamoto

Laoshu – Foreign Language Roadrunning

Yesterday, we lost a local legend. Moses “Laoshu” McCormick was a giant among polyglots, having developed his own Foreign Language Roadrunning method to practice and speak dozens of languages. He recently became internet famous for finding foreigners and surprising them with conversations in their native languages. I’m fortunate to have met Moses and Marcell at our local fighting game meetups and Asian Festivals, and I’m glad Moses could pass on his knowledge through his online courses.

Source: Laoshu505000 and Foreign Language Running

chanomach – ナナメから世界を見たって、何もいいことはない ／ Enjoy correctly.

Hi, Internet! I apologize; I’ve been pretty glitchy lately and things have been crazy, what with the weddings and holidays and conventions and all. My cross-posting pipeline is broken so I have to write the same posts four times. That’s too much work!

My stream is erratic, too, but I’ve been experimenting with restream.io to stream to Mixer, Twitch, Smashcast, and Facebook all at once, usually on Friday nights. Once the cartridge is reseated and things work again, I’ll try to relaunch the blog and the stream. These experiments have been fun, though.

Source: Chanoma.ch

ナナメから世界を見たって、何もいいことはない ／ Enjoy correctly.

普通でいいんだよ。

Mystery Skulls Animated – Ghost

Mystery Ben makes animated music videos for Mystery Skulls songs. Ghost could have been a simple Scooby Doo parody, but every second seems to have important details for TV Tropes to analyze. This attracted a far bigger fandom than the official live action music video, prompting Mystery Ben to continue the series…

Source: Mystery Ben via Anime Hell at Ohayocon 2015

UberNES - Nintendo Screen Saver

If you still use screen savers, Columbus-based developer M \ K Productions has a good one for you. Nintendo Saver 2015 fills your monitors with several NES games. Each one is actually a fully-functioning NES emulator playing a replay that was recorded in UberNES, and if you like, you can pick up a gamepad and take over control of one of the games on the spot. The recorded replays include my Super Mario Bros 3 playaround and a couple shorter videos showing glitches in Super Mario Bros 1 and Mega Man 2. If you like it, maybe I’ll record some more.

Source: http://www.ubernes.com/nesscreensaver.html via the UberNES – NES Screen Saver Facebook page

hpknight – Saturday

pixiv is basically the Japanese DeviantArt, full of talented artists I’d never have heard of otherwise. I picked up Udon’s Pixiv Almanac last year at PAX East and I craved more. I’m now subscribed to pixiv Top Weekly – Top 20 which gives a good balance of quality and quantity. Other pixiv feeds are available at PixivRss. If people like this post, I may do some more like this in the future.

You can click each image below to visit its posting on pixiv. If you register an account there, you can download the full resolution image. Also, this is a good time to remind you that I write mouseover text for almost every image on this blog, which you can see whether you’re on my site or reading my RSS feed.

(This post and the four before it were all one post over on my old blog. Tumblr doesn’t support mouseover text, so I’ve copied those over as plain text for each image’s post.)

That sky is pretty! I use this as the wallpaper for my Grub menu to choose which OS to boot into. I think I was actually linked to this one by a Tumblr blog I followed, but I forget which one. Sorry.

UPDATE: Added Google Translate-based guesses for all titles and usernames to bring this more in line with my other pixiv posts

Source: 「土曜日」/「嗨P」のイラスト [pixiv]

Columbus Police Tear Gas and Pepper Spray

UPDATE: I wanted to say something positive here, but it wasn't true. Columbus Police continue to pepper spray peaceful protestors who block the streets, and the mayor allows it. They even stole a double amputee's prosthetic legs and forced him to crawl on his hands to seek medical attention. The city demands answers.

In the wake of the killing of George Floyd, downtown Columbus, Ohio saw several days of peaceful protests and unfortunately, some looting of small businesses. Mayor Ginther found it necessary to have a curfew for seven nights. Columbus police with nameless uniforms repeatedly used tear gas, pepper spray, and rubber bullets indiscriminately against peaceful protestors, street medics, bystanders, news reporters, a veteran, government officials, and hippie circus performers.

But this is a blog about good things! I'm happy to report that the police were ordered to stop using tear gas and pepper spray on peaceful crowds. Now that we can walk the downtown streets in peace, we can discuss how to heal the racial divide. Columbus State has decided to take down their statue of Christopher Columbus. If the city of Columbus can do it, hopefully the rest can follow. Please continue to fight for racial justice. Black Lives Matter!

Source: T. Greg Doucette, WBNS 10TV, the Columbus Dispatch, WOSU, and the rest of the Internet, pretty much

QBillion

From my pile of forgotten Game Boy carts comes QBillion. You have a top-down view of stacks of boxes. The goal is to reduce these boxes to a single flat layer. Once you wrap your head around that, it’s intuitive, but the puzzles get downright fiendish. 15 years later, the developer is gone, the copyright has lapsed, and a young developer has made a free HTML5 remake.

Yup, this is the HD version. Everything is about double the resolution of the Game Boy game. Click here to play.

Source: http://qbillionhd.com and LTD Interactive via Wikipedia and Game Boy World. I saw the screenshots in this Rock Paper Shotgun article and thought it was about this game.

Thank You Scientist

Spotify’s Discover Weekly playlist is the gift that keeps on giving, and yesterday it introduced me to Thank You Scientist. This seven course dinner of a crossover prog rock band uses strings, saxophones, and brass to fill out their sound.

Source: Thank You Scientist via Spotify

Chart Party – The search for the saddest punt in the world

Sports geekery is geekery like anything else. SB Nation's Chart Party answers tricky questions by doing deep dives into a vast amounts of statistics. The show has tackled what if Barry Bonds didn't have a bat and just how profoundly bad the Cleveland Browns are. This one's still my favorite. It uses a complex formula to determine how "sad" a punt is, and then runs it on every punt in the modern NFL. This inspired me to do my own absurdly complicated formula to decide what retro games I should put on my handhelds' limited storage space. I might report on that later, but I should stop punting and finish a blog post already.

Source: Chart Party via GeekNights

Canvas for Pebble

UPDATE: I made another Canvas screen called Wallpaper Watchface. Go get that one instead. It’s better.

Wearable devices are the next big thing in tech. I’ve jumped on the bandwagon with a Pebble, and I want to develop for it. On Android, Canvas for Pebble lets you quickly make watchfaces that nicely display the time, date, weather, and your phone’s unread message and missed call counts. I took a few hours and made a watchface I like that displays seconds, and you can have it too.

If you want to try on the Dr. Mo Day 1 watchface, you’ll need a Pebble running  firmware 2.0 beta and Canvas for Pebble 2.0 beta. These should still work when Pebble 2.0 and Canvas for Pebble 2.0 are released. Once that’s installed, visit this post on your phone and click the version you want below.

Dr. Mo Day 1 Imperial Dr. Mo Day 1 Metric

Ever notice how almost every watch ad has the time set to 10:10? Analog watches look better that way, but I'm not so sure about digital watches. It's a lot harder to fake the time on a cell phone.

Source: My blog’s first ever selfie, Numberphile, and Canvas for Pebble