Hey. Just breaking radio silence to mention that I've decided to repost all the old rice cooker comics to angriestricecooker.tumblr.com at a rate of roughly one a day just for old time's sake. Anyone reading this has the easy ability to read all of them as is, but if you've been dying to like or repost them, now it'll be a little easier. I also noticed today that at some point angriestricecooker.com got hacked. I'll work on getting that back, too.
So, I’ve been going to law school for the past couple of years and therefore haven’t posted anything here. I’ll be done with that in half a year or so, and have some ideas for things to do here–not Rice Cooker comics, probably, but perhaps some funny things in a similar line:
Also, tonight I made this:
(Well, I made the “Christmas Mix” of the Strauss. My girlfriend made the image. And, um, Strauss made the music. Except the bells. This dude made those: benjaminflack. I “mixed” it all.)
A friend noticed that this extra in the climactic scene of Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog bears a suspicious resemblance to a certain high-profile member of the cast of another Joss Whedon production in a wig and glasses:
I need some help from my brilliant LJ friends list.
For a party I'm having in about a month, I'm trying to put together a collection of "great moments in Haxploitation." Think movies like Hackers, Wargames, and The Net that trade on the inherent awesomeness of illegal computer usage to be "cool." For this project, I'm mostly looking for cool clips/scenes that capture the genre. Scenes from Hackers, Wargames, and Sneakers aren't needed, since I'm screening those films at the party. Right now I'm more looking for scenes that won't otherwise be represented. Some ideas I'm currently planning on using:
R2D2 hacks the Death Star Some Keanu stuff from The Matrix The tense "hit the escape button" scene from The Net, along with possibly some other stuff Some of the hacking stuff from Mission: Impossible The hyperdramatic vertigo shot from AntiTrust Some stuff from Jurassic Park, probably
So, my question is whether you know of any other awesome cinematic hacking moments that I should be including. If so, please comment.
So, I heard on Journalista the other day that Neil Gaiman is offering his novel American Godsfor free online for a month. I’d never read it, having had a friend read it for a high school project and haaate it. I’d always meant to give it a shot for myself, though and hey, free’s free, so I went ahead and started it. I just came to this passage, where the main character, Shadow, is talking to a girl, Sam, about Herodotus.
“And there’re battles in there, all sorts of normal things. And then there are the gods. Some guy is running back to report on the outcome of a battle and he’s running and running, and he sees Pan in a glade. And Pan says, ‘Tell them to build me a temple here.’ So he says okay, and runs the rest of the way back. And he reports the battle news, and then says, ‘Oh, and by the way, Pan wants you to build him a temple.’ It’s really matter-of-fact, you know?”
“So there are stories with gods in them. What are you trying to say? That these guys had hallucinations?”
“No,” said Shadow. “That’s not it.”
She chewed a hangnail. “I read some book about brains,” she said. “My roommate had it and she kept waving it around. It was like, how five thousand years ago the lobes of the brain fused and before that people thought when the right lobe of the brain said anything it was the voice of some god telling them what to do. It’s just brains.”
“I like my theory better,” said Shadow.
“What’s your theory?”
“That back then people used to run into the gods from time to time.”
[…]
“I bet it’s like space aliens,” she said. “These days, people see space aliens. Back then they saw gods. Maybe the space aliens come from the right side of the brain.”
American Gods was published in 2001. In the the collected version of Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell, published 1999, Moore expands in the appendix on something his character Gull says:
Gull’s remarks about how divine visions are reported quite routinely in ancient historical accounts are born out by everyone from the historian, Geoffrey of Monmouth, to the Old Testament including a mass of old parish records along the way. One account in the Roman military logs tells how a column of troops had reached a river which they suspected was too fast and deep for them to cross, even though the delay might add days to their march. At this point, the log records, the Great God Pan appeared, picked up one of the heralds trumpets, waded easily across the river and blew a fanfare upon reaching the opposite bank. Unsurprisingly, the soldiers took this to auger that they should cross the river, which they did in perfect safety and continued with their march as planned. As Gull remarks here, medical researches seem to indicate that the corpus callosum–the strand of neural gristle that connects the twin lobes of our brain–has become more complex and efficient across the centuries. As a purely personal speculation, I would point out that in today’s world, the act of crossing a busy road is similar to the problem afforded the Romans by the river. We judge, by looking and listening, how far away the approaching cars are, which way they are coming and how fast they are bearing down upon us. Somewhere in the depths of our subconscious an extremely complex calculation is performed at lightning speed, telling us how fast we need to walk in order to cross the road in safety. That message is then flashed from our unconscious right brain to our conscious left brain across the narrow causeway of gristle that connects the two
If we accept that in the past the connection between the two halves of the brain was less sophisticated, then presumably there would have been a different relationship between our conscious and unconscious minds. Perhaps the subconscious of the Roman soldiers was perfectly capable of making lightning calculations as to the river’s depth and the speed of its current, but was unable to pass it to their conscious minds int he direct manner that modern brains employ. Could it be that the visions of gods or supernatural figures that populate our histories are projections, messages from an unconscious that was at the time unable to communicate in any other way?
Carl Jung has suggested that even such comparatively modern phenomena as UFOs may be projections of what he calls the mass unconscious.
Reference to Pan? Two lobes of the brain? UFOs? I guess Alan Moore’s influence on Gaiman didn’t stop when Gaiman stopped making comics.
As I walked home, I listened to the new Escape Pod, Friction. The Ellison story is a classic (no doubt partly because of its really awesome title) but it really had nothing on this story. This one goes on the “Why Science Fiction is Worth Reading” shelf. Or, in this case, listening to. It might be the best Escape Pod I’ve ever heard, and it’s one of the best stories I’ve read in months. I’d love to see this one get some love at award time.
An 800-year-old wizard wants to be a college football player in “The Football Phase” by Connor Moran. This fun, light tale follows the wizard’s long-suffering assistant as she attempts to keep his latest folly “under the radar” and evil, power-hungry wizards off his trail.
angryricecooker
