industry

IN the DUST TREE

nothing grows.

Toblo

I approve of Toblo.

Toblo is probably the coolest game i’ve seen in a while. It’s unique, fun, and simple. the basic premise is that you have 2 teams of 3. You play as the leader of one team and the game is Capture the Flag. What makes this game amazingly fun and unique is that EVERYTHING around you is made of blocks and you can pick up these blocks and throw them at your enemies. You can hold a cache of up to 20 blocks at a time and it doesn’t matter how big the blocks are. Each teams base and the trees and structures around the map are all made of blocks. If you pull out the foundation blocks of your teams base, the walls collapse. You can also have bombs too which are fun to get a hold of. The great part of this game is that there is a pretty big community of developers constantly adding on to and transforming the game in a lot of interesting ways. I don’t really know how to describe how much fun it is. I have on the other hand found some videos on youtube where you can see it in action.

I haven’t had much of a chance to go into the forums on their website and see what kinds of mods or additional components people have made to the game but so far the one downside i see is that although you can play the game over a Local Area Network, You can’t play this game with your friends online. I’ll have to check the forums to be sure though.

Here’s the website where you can get the game for FREE and start having fun.

*UPDATE: there is a self extracting download that you can run for your “/program files/toblo/” folder that will give you some extra levels. It’s in german though, but you can pretty much figure out which button to press.

Port Forwarding for Soulseek

This video is a screen capture showing how to configure your ports for soulseek so that you can get better results and faster and more reliable file transfers.

First i am showing how to check if your ports are open or closed.

next i show how to find your IP adress: you will need to go to your start menu and type “cmd” and then at the command prompt, type “ipconfig /all”

you will then need to look at the ip address given on the “ip address” line.

then i show how to access your router. the default ip for this may be different for you, i suggest to google search the particular model of the router you use.

you will then need to find something similar to “virtual servers” and once in there put in the right ip address and the port you’ve specified from the soulseek preferences menu.

after that is saved, you will need to close soulseek and open it back up as the changes will not come into effect until you do.

then check your ports again. ta-da. if that doesnt work you most probably have a firewall that is blocking that port whether it be the windows firewall or the one that comes with your security software. you will need to go into your firewall and open that particular port for soulseek.

Corey Adams loves Dutty Wine

Corey Adams loves Dutty Wine.

DUTTY WINE the VIDEO

but he also denies it.

watch weird science online.

*edit* please disregard the majority of this article. veohtv apparently has lost the rights to show weird science and therefor it lacks what i would call “any good content.” You can still watch weird science on fancast.com but it runs in a tiny box and you can’t fullscreen it and it blares these dumb ads for a truck all the time, oh yeah and the background is bright white which makes it hard to watch a video in a small window on a bright white background. AHHHH anyway here’s what i wrote which is almost toally useless now:

i approve of the USA network television show from the 90′s Weird Science

the show was based on a movie with the same title which is ehhh …okay, but the tv show was amazing, i loved it as a kid and i love it still. the best part is that i can watch it now for free whenever i want with the aid of a semi-high speed internet connection. i’m always looking for ways to watch tv on my laptop and i had run into a brickwall when it came to content until rercently. a website called fancast just recently got permission to show a bunch of new stuff, including my beloved weird science. you can watch the shows from their website but you’ll run into a few pains that way. my preferred method is to use a piece of software called veohtv. i used this software a while back and it was extremely lacking in content. it was genuinely a pain in the butt. but now it has the most content of any application i’ve used including tvu, joost, and miro. i still use miro for podcasts though even though i dont need to. i encourage everyone to go get a headful of some weird science episodes.

creative charity

while there are many charities out there that feed and clothe the poor, educate those without access to good education, or help people with disabilities it seems to me that there is a niche in the charity market that’s not being filled. My idea is to (hypothetically) establish some sort of charitable organization that caters to young rich eccentrics. i think a lot of them don’t contribute to charities because they feel like everyone gets what they deserve, good or bad (that’s a good thought when you’re filthy rich.) being involved with charities like the ones i mentioned makes them have to think about misery and a lot of bad thoughts. so instead i imagined a charity that would do things like pay people’s parking tickets or give gift cards to random people. i don’t know, something exciting. also the perks of establishing this charity are getting paid as the brains of the operation. i won’t be using this idea so run with it if you feel like it.

How i killed my Myspace

I disapprove of Myspace

Facebook has been beeping on my radar for a while as the upcoming social networking evil. They’ve been trying to integrate their advertising with their ability to share information and the fact that they own your information. First there was the whole beacon mess and now i heard that they are thinking about using people’s pictures in advertisements without having to ask or compensate. Facebook is going downhill sure but the reason i’ve killed my myspace today was not because of anything so principled. Myspace just got on my nerves. Not only is it messy and juvenile in design it’s juvenile in content. I got really tired of all the girls in bikini’s named Tom trying to be my friend and getting messages from fished accounts telling me about the latest deals on viagra, macy’s cards, ipods, or some girl named emily that likes me. So instead of deleting my myspace page and abandoning the many friends i have there i came up with a way to kill my myspace page without really deleting it. I just made everything black and included some links to my other online existences. I also included my e-mail which may be a mistake since there are tons of bots scouring myspace for e-mail accounts to spam but hopefully the spaces i broke it up with will send them off my trail. you can see my new page here. I can still log into my account and read my comments and messages but the fact that they don’t show up will hopefully encourage some friends to jump off the bandwagon and find another way to communicate with me online. I used one of those Myspace pimpers or whatever to create the code but i’ve deleted every referential link back to them from the code. here it is if you want to do the same.

code to kill myspace

(just copy and paste into any field of your profile editing page)

be sure to include some links to any other pages you may have online so you don’t leave your pals hanging.

Why is Barack Obama Black?

Following Barack Obama’s Iowa win the media has been buzzing about how a black man man named Barack Obama won a state that is one of the whitest in the Union. All the pundits and even uber-liberal Bill Maher keep mentioning that Barack Obama is a black man. I’m interested in understanding and explaining why Barack Obama is labeled as a Black man. Besides the fact that Race is very relative and a socially constructed labeling mechanism we can still analyze it as a labeling mechanism and accept that it is effective as such.

First point i should clear up is that Barack Obama was born of a Black father and a White mother. So why is he considered Black and not White? I’ve seen people who are considered to be white with darker skin and darker hair than Barack Obama. Is it his facial features? that seems pretty superficial. To me it goes deeper than that. American society has a very hegemonic conception of race and that conception is inherently racist against those of black origin. Back in the day if you were as little as 1/32 black you had to register as such in certain states. The purpose of this style of labeling was the belief that if you had any black blood in you, you were tainted, you were still black. In this way “blackness” is akin to dirtiness. if something is only a little bit dirty, it’s still dirty; if something is a little bit clean that doesn’t make it clean. Just like how Barack Obama is black and not white. If you were one of millions who automatically bought into this system of labeling it doesn’t make you racist necessarily, it just makes you part of racist society.

It also seems that supporters of Barack Obama prefer that he be labeled as a black man rather than a man of mixed race. Although America has come a long way in its acceptance of black people the majority of the population is slower in coming to accept the idea of inter-racial relationships and people of mixed race as equals. There are still many Americans who openly accept black people into their communities and work-places but would not let their white daughter date a black boy or feel that inter-racial relationships are unnatural or wrong. What comes to mind is the image of black men portrayed in America’s first block buster film “The Birth of a Nation.” That image of black men persists in the collective conscious of many white Americans. Barack Obama’s supporters are at least unconsciously aware of this when they choose to label Barack Obama as black rather than mixed.

It is still important to recognize the power of labels. Although Barack Obama is of a mixed background it should be recognized that race is often determined by superficial qualities and that even though Barack Obama is the son of an black African immigrant and a white Midwestern woman he has grown up and lived life as a black man in most people’s eyes. By being labeled as a black man and by being percieved as one he shares in the experience of being a black man in America.