Possibly not spam ramblings and links from the edge of the universe

27May/110

Burning Beats and a Shining Light of Craziness

Posted by dracoling

Last weekend was the Spring 2011 WildFire Retreat. I had the pleasure of traveling and camping with some of my dear friends from Consolidated Awesome, and it was amazing.

Lets get on with the good stuff? Okay, here it is!

  • friday.mp3 - 374.1mb 3h10m - Even though I forgot my power adapter for my MacBook Pro at home, I was able to record all the way up to the final "goodnight"! I was so happy to find out that I had gotten it all.
  • saturday.mp3 - 388.6mb 3h34m - I was fortunate enough to borrow a power adapter for Saturday night. Thanks again whoever you were (sorry, I'm awful with names).
  • sunday... - Sorry, there's no recording of Sunday because I was only able to borrow the power adapter for Saturday. In addition I was having far too much fun playing with my INSANE FLOWTOYS OF INSANITY (more below).

On Sunday night, after the performance class I assembled and lit the series of tubes that was variably named "a big mistake", "a bad idea" and "awesomely stupid" (all labels applied by me). It consisted of 20 FlowLights in various sized tubes assembled into mega-sized toys.

Round 1: MEGA POI - 10 lights, 2 connectors, 3 tubes in each of 2 gigantic (approximately 6ft) poi. They were spun on benches, and on stilts and I even spun them (with little hops and jumps) while standing (long arm) on the ground. After everyone who wanted to had tried this craziness out, we moved on to...

Round 2: MONSTER STAFF - Remove flowpoi caps, insert contact staff handle. Result? 15 foot contact staff with about a foot of sag from center to ends. This thing was insane. In a show of complete badassery, Terry Fields was able to pull off both a cartwheel  with the staff on his back and (what looked like) a full matrix. He and I then proceeded to harass the people standing around the fire pits into lighting up and getting the spinning started for real, by imitating a gigantic glowing bird screaming and chasing me across the field.

It was wonderful. It was hilarious. I didn't get any pictures of it! 🙁

If any of you have or know people who may have pictures or video of the epic flow madness from Sunday at 2011 Spring WildFire, please contact me to share.

Thanks for another great event, keep burning brightly, and spread the awesome!

~ Mike

5May/112

A Taste of Home

Posted by dracoling

Last year at WildFire Retreat I had the good fortune to be able to record the DJs on the burn field all three nights. I had originally hoped to release these immediately following the event but for many reasons (ooh! shiney!) I didn't.

Finally, only weeks before we head back into the wonderful world of WildFire, I have them to share. These files are posted on dropbox at the moment. If anyone knows of a better (preferably free) way to share them, please let me know.

Please keep in mind that these are unedited live mixes. Enjoy them as the moments of history that they are 🙂

Hope to see you soon.

- dracoling

EDIT: I just noticed that sadly the friday track had some recording issues. From about 5m into the recording until about the 30m mark there's some problems. It clears up after that. The other two days went well.
EDIT 2: Fixed the link for sunday. oops!

21May/100

All my children, and by children I mean poi

Posted by dracoling

Everyone knew it was only a matter of time before I finally wrote something about my latest and most lasting awesome hobby of doom, so here we go!

First Part - What is poi?

Poi is a performance art in which a ball or balls suspended from a length of flexible material, usually a plaited cord, are held in the hand and swung in circular patterns. Poi is one of the traditional performing arts of the Māori people of New Zealand, and has developed many forms used worldwide as a hobby, exercise, or performance art alongside juggling and other forms of object manipulation.
(says Wikipedia)

Part the second - Why?
Favorite answer: Why not?!

Well, this is a hard one for me to explain... no wait, it's not. Its because it's fun and it looks freakin cool!

The one important thing they don't mention above (because they're focusing on the basics) is that many/most poi spinners (in my experience) prefer to spin objects that are lit in some way. I generally spin glowing LED powered ones. Later this summer you'll find me LIGHTING THINGS ON FIRE AND SPINNING THEM AROUND ME DAFSASF!!!!!@#HHGH#@

Yes, you heard right, we light things on fire, and swing them around our bodies.

Part III - Danger Will Robinson!
Q: Wait, fire? Isn't that dangerous?
A: Yes, so is breathing, especially in Jersey, ever heard of cancer? ugh.

Life is short. Light things on fire!
... I feel like that should be a t-shirt or something.

Seriously though, when you take the appropriate precautions there's only a small risk of being harmed or harming others, most of which can be avoided by not being a complete jackass and/or trying with things that aren't on fire first.

Plus, did I forget to mention that it looks awesome?

Section 4: the revenge of the section (or, how do I do this poi thing anyway?)
The best way to learn poi is to just do it.
The easiest way to just do it is to learn poi.

Wait, I made a circle. Lets step back.

Poi at its heart is simply object manipulation. You put a weight on a string, you spin the object around. Suddenly this is poi.

Have keys on a lanyard? Have a tube sock and an orange? Piece of string and a banana?
All of this can be poi! (or breakfast... except the keys)!

Sure, you can spend lots of money buying cool toys, but who wants to wait for shipping when you could start hitting yourself and looking like an idiot right now!

I'm going to update this later today with some links to awesome tutorial videos and pictures, maybe if you're lucky I'll post up where to get the same toys I use.
Until then, hold your breath... okay?

I'm gonna go spin. seeya in a bit.
[To Be Continued...]

29Jan/100

Ve vill pahmp yoo up!

Posted by dracoling

Tonight I got my membership at Anytime Fitness with my buddy Scott, so now I can work out whenever I feel like it! Hopefully I start feeling like it soon... this membership junk isn't cheap.

News from other worlds

I posted this zombie thing on my Facebook status the other day:
Facebook | Zombie thing

I came to work the next day and a Andrew tells me "Dude! That stupid zombie thing you posted gave me nightmares last night! I dreamed I was running around the studio with a shotgun because [Famous Star Who Shall Not Be Named] had been turned into a zombie!"

Needless to say, I LOLed, as did everyone else who heard the story.

Things that happened:

I had a random adventure in video casting last night, if you want to see the recording, please head over to the show page for Boredom Rampant on ustream.tv. The first 10 minutes are okay, I kinda liked the little logo I made, and then the show sorta devolved because I didn't really pick a topic. I got some pretty positive feedback from the twothree people who watched it, so I'll probably try again.

That pretty much wraps up tonight's spam. Sorry for the crappy posts the past few days, but you get what you paid for, and nobody paid me NUFFIN!

Reading Material:

25Jan/102

Heavy Metal!

Posted by dracoling

I was asked today "are you in to heavy metal?"

This question confused me, until I thought about the two chainmail cuffs on my wrists and the long hair. I said "I guess, I'm into a lot of music".

On the way in to work this morning I was sorta sleeping to Oren Lavie's album The Opposite Side of the Sea, on the subway I was doing some Daft Punk, and on the way home it was Rockapella.  But yeah, sometimes I'm into heavy metal. Mostly chainmaile and webservers 😉

PS: For those of you who noticed: yes, I did almost miss posting today, it was an astoundingly hectic day at work. Massive virus outbreak threatened the youtube-ability of all those poor office workers and I had to beat it back into submission!

PPS: if anyone felt like commenting on this or any other entry, that'd be awesome. Sometimes I like feeling like this is going nowhere, and sometimes I don't.

PPPS: Don't forget this thursday is the first episode of Boredom Rampant. I'm still accepting suggestions (hint, hint).

Reading:

22Jan/100

I, Robot

Posted by dracoling

Last night I installed xdandroid on my Sprint Touch Pro. Man am I ready to run screaming away from Windows Mobile into the loving arms of an Android based phone. Even in the alpha-quality hacked-together implementation I was using last night the phone was unbelievably responsive and the interface was a pleasure to use.

Reading Material:

New Things I've Signed Up For:

  • blip.fm/dracoling - A musical microblogging platform?
  • blippy.com/dracoling - Brag about my Woot!/iTunes purchases automagically. Not sure why this is useful or who would care, but I signed up anyway.
21Jan/100

Forty-Two.

Posted by dracoling

In the interests of stimulating my poor decaying brain, I have decided to try to post at least one entry a day for the next 344 days. Today's entry is kinda useless, and there will probably be other useless entries, but its a goal.

Reading Material:
New Music:
Daft Punk - Discovery - Yes I know it's not new, but it's new to me and I've been listening to it obsessively.
Idea of the Moment:
Comic-bot, IRC/Web bot watches your 'subscribed' comics for new ones, upon request gives you the latest pull-sheet. Keeps track of when requested, how many new pages since last request. Ability to display "today's comics" pull-sheet via JSinclude on blogs.
Been done before? probably. Will do it anyway? probably.
13Sep/090

Game Core Con ’09

Posted by dracoling

I spent over 15 hours Friday/Saturday putting together the Magic:The Gathering price list for the crew at We've Got Freakin' Video Games. Then I slept for about half an hour before I jumped in the car and drove out to Oaks, PA for the Game Core Convention 2009 a gathering of video, console, tabletop and other gamers.

One of the highlights for me was getting to see YTCracker and MC Lars perform in the music area of the con. I got to record a little bit of video which I actually remembered to put up on my YouTube this time (not sure if I'll post it on my vimeo too).

While I was hanging in the music room they were holding the door-prize raffle in the main con space. Agnes was hanging out there listening. We won cartridge #1 of #50 limited edition printing of a BRAND NEW game for the Atari 2600 called Shield Shifter that was released at the con by the folks at Good Deal Games.

Yes kids, you read that correctly, a brand new game (released September 12, 2009) for the Atari 2600 (released in October 1977). Needless to say I was shocked and amazed, happy as could be, and then I traded it to Jim for his collection (since he actually collects games and I just, uh, don't). I now have cartridge #8 of 50, and someday when I find my 2600 I'm gonna play the hell out of it.

After about 8 hours at con (running on 30 minutes of sleep in the last 42 hours) we decided to head home, having declared victory and gone on a bit of a spending binge (I bought used books again! >.<). Tune in next time for another exciting update on a topic that has NOTHING to do with this one!