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Record Your Family’s Stories With Famento

Genealogy‘s a big hobby. Today’s site lies on the lighter end of that hobby, for those who just want to keep track of their close and extended family. If you sign up at Famento, you can create pages for members of your family, upload photos, and write biographies for each of them. There’s also a […]

Listen To Music You’ll Like With Last.fm

I’ve been hearing about Last.fm for months now, but I haven’t tried it. It’s a website—like Pandora—where you list a few of your favorite artists, and the site plays music that sounds similar. It catalogues music by what it sounds like, basically, then streams music that matches the music you like. But now I hear […]

Ela: Legend of Light!

Just stumbled across a very odd video called Ela: Legend of Light. It’s a combination live-action/CGI short film, made in Argentina, that very much evokes 1980’s American cartoons. One of its directors describes it as “a weird mix between She-Ra, Tron, and Flash Gordon,” a fairly accurate description. Besides the He-Man/She-Ra feel, I noticed what […]

I Turn My Back On a Job Offer

So I did something that might appear crazy today. I turned down a nice job offer. I got a phone call two weeks ago from a recruiter, who put me in touch with a local company who does ASP development. I had a phone interview with one of the founders, then went in for a face-to-face interview with the other founder and a few people there at the office. I’m trying to keep these people as anonymous […]

I Turn My Back on ICQ

My first encounter with IM was through ICQ. Over 10 years ago, the folks I chatted with on IRC encouraged me to try ICQ, and since then I’ve almost always had an IM client of some kind open. I’ve since expanded to AIM, MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, Google Talk. But I kept an ICQ account […]

Uncle Morty’s Dub Shack

Imagine a bunch of twenty-somethings getting their hands on a dubbing rig and a bunch of old, cheesy kung fu films. Now imagine that they threw out the old audio tracks and completely redubbed scenes from the films. That’s Uncle Morty’s Dub Shack, currently airing on ImaginAsian TV. Here are a few YouTube clips to give you an idea of their humor (despite the titles, they’re all clean): Exploding Apples Red […]

Brent Gets Blasted with High-Powered Soda

I enjoy making homemade soda. It’s usually delicious, and I have no problems. Except with ginger ale. For some reason, ginger ale gets incredibly carbonated. Explosively carbonated. So, when I found an old bottle of it in the back of the fridge, I figured I’d do a Diet-Coke-and-Mentos sort of video. I took it outside […]

Test Your ISP’s Nefarious Internet Blocking with Switzerland

Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have recently been cracking down on various kinds of internet traffic. Some is understandable; others interfere with legitimate uses of the ‘net. Worse, ISPs often do this without telling anyone. Well, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is striking back: they recently released Switzerland, a tool that will test your internet connection to […]

Surreal, Yet Real

Read a fascinating book lately: Boogiepop and Others. It’s the first novel in a whole franchise, which itself takes some explaining. The franchise focuses on an entity called Boogiepop, which exists in the collective unconscious, and surfaces in certain people whenever a paranormal danger to humanity manifests. So, yes, it’s something of an urban fantasy. […]

North World: The Legend of Conrad

For the past two weeks, I’ve been trying to figure out how to describe the online comic North World. And I can’t. That’s one of the reasons I like it. North World has elements of a fantasy story—the protagonist wields a sword and confidently fights creatures in the wilderness. But that’s crossed with a very […]

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