I think I just participated in a Turing test.  I had a problem ordering a new cell phone from Sprint, so I did an online chat with a customer service representative.  They said they would e-mail me a transcript, but they haven’t yet.  Since the chat was in a Flash object, I couldn’t select the text to copy and paste it, so I just combined two screenshots, and added some annotations.1

I don’t know about you guys, but I thought tonight’s Lost was excellent.

In the interest of those of you who haven’t seen it yet or are waiting for DVDs... that is all.

This is the funniest thing I have seen in a long time:

http://www.theonion.com/content/video/hot_new_video_game_consists

It’s a satirical news story from The Onion, about a video game called “Close Range.”  I would summarize it more, but I think it’ll be funnier for you if I don’t.

I recently discovered Pandora.com.  Basically, it’s internet radio.  You put in some bands or songs that you like as seeds to your “stations”, then it plays stuff it thinks you’ll like based on those seeds.  As it plays songs, you can give them a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” to let it know further what your tastes are.  And it’s all free and legal and the only ads are on-screen ads (i.e. no audio ads that you have to listen to).

I was skeptical at first, but I’ve been using it for a while and I’ve been surprised at the number of times it has presented me with a song from a band I’ve never heard of but which I actually liked.  For someone who hasn’t purchased a CD (or acquired new music in any form, really) in something like three years, this is a pretty great way to find something new to listen to.  And it’s much better than real radio.

(I’m going to start ranting now.)

I really don’t understand why radio stations insist on playing the same twenty or thirty songs over and over again.  With the internet being around, music distribution is so much different than it was even ten years ago.  The industry can support so many more bands, because music can be recorded, produced, and distributed digitally at a fraction of what it used to cost.  It seems like a radio station could easily fill a 5-hour rotation with only music recorded in the last year that is decent that fits the station’s genre, without repeating any songs.  Not that I have anything against music that is more than a year old; I’m just saying there is lots of music being made all the time which is at least decent, so I don’t see why I have to hear crappy Nickelback or Papa Roach songs every time I turn on the radio in my car.

Seriously, who really wants to listen to Chad Kroeger sing about his sex life?

This is awesome.

That is all.

If you haven’t seen something like it before, this is pretty cool.  It is a hacked Super Mario World level that can be completed without touching the controller.  As far as I can tell, it uses only elements which were already in the game (except it looks like they modified Yoshi egg blocks so that Mario automatically jumps when he hits one).  This one is a really impressive one because it is like 11 minutes long and choreographed with anime music.  Enjoy.

A hilarious blog I discovered a few months ago is Stuff White People Like.  I’ve been meaning to mention it here for a while, but a good post last week, entitled Being Offended, reminded me I needed to share.  Here is an excerpt:

Naturally, white people do not get offended by statements directed at white people.  ...  As a rule, white people strongly prefer to get offended on behalf of other people.

Another good one is Knowing What’s Best For Poor People:

It is a poorly guarded secret that, deep down, white people believe if given money and education that all poor people would be EXACTLY like them. In fact, the only reason that poor people make the choices they do is because they have not been given the means to make the right choices and care about the right things.

Those are two of my favorites.  Some other good ones to read are Study Abroad, Music Piracy, Organic Food, Hating Corporations, Religions that their parents don’t belong to, and Grammar.

And for a great cross-section of the kinds of idiots that reside on the internets, try to read some of the comments!  (I say “try to” because very few people will actually succeed.)

As you probably know, there was a total lunar eclipse last night, visible from most of the continental United States.  I tried my hand at photographing this event, and I think I got reasonably decent results, given my lack of a telephoto lens.  I used a tripod and the delayed-shot feature on my camera1.  I got half a dozen photos out of the event, which you can find on our photos page.  You can also see in all the pictures Saturn (down and to the left of the moon) and the star Regulus (above and slightly to the left).

While I was looking for information on the eclipse yesterday, I found NASA’s solar eclipse website, which has maps of every solar eclipse from 2000 BC to 3000 AD, in 20-year blocks.  It looks like I only get three chances to see a solar eclipse in my lifetime, assuming 1) I live in this general area of nation for my whole life; 2) I don’t want to travel more than 3-4 hours to see one; and 3) I live to be at least 96 years old.  There was a partial solar eclipse on May 30, 1984 which passed right over my hometown, but I guess I was too two to care at the time.  (See the map of 1981-2000 eclipses.2)  However, on Monday, August 21, 2017, a total solar eclipse will pass by very close to where I currently live.  I’m thinking on that day I’ll take the day off work and head out to somewhere in the western North Carolina mountains to see the eclipse.  If anyone wants to join me then go ahead and mark your calendars.

The third opportunity for me to see an eclipse will be May 11, 2078.  I will be 96.5 years old then, so I’m not sure if I’ll still care (assuming, of course, that I’m still alive, which is statistically improbable).

One last thing that I couldn’t think of a way to segue into: there is an interesting story about how Christopher Columbus used a lunar eclipse to save his life.  Proof once again that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

I had to devote a small part of my blog to spreading the word about The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters.  I wouldn’t be doing this except for the fact that you probably haven’t heard of it.  It’s a movie about Steve Weibe’s efforts to beat “Gamer of the Century” Billy Mitchell’s 1982 world record Donkey Kong high score, and the efforts of Billy and his posse to stop him.  It’s a documentary, but it’s still really entertaining and hilarious.  I won’t spend time repeating things you could read on various other sites.  I’ll just suggest that you go see it if you can find a theater that’s showing it (you currently only have two options in North Carolina...).  Failing that, save it in your Netflix/Blockbuster queue so that you can watch it whenever it comes out on DVD.

you’re the best around, nothing’s gonna ever keep you down

If you’re just joining us, where have you been??  This is the conclusion of a series on my demented mind.  If you’re lost, try reading all the other posts first.

Bookstix IV was pretty good, it actually had some semblance of a plot.  But for Bookstix V, I went all-out with the story.  There were pages of text between every so many drawings.  The basic gist of the story was that the aliens from Bookstix IV were actually “archaliens,” sent to scout out our planet.  They killed most of the inhabitants, and now the more powerful “nualiens” had arrived.  The only earthling armies left were the Americans and Arabians.  And believe it or not, they actually teamed up with each other, in order to have any kind of hope against their new alien overlords.  The surviving earthlings were known as “Rebyls.”  The entire book followed these star wars of the worlds for independence days.

Another improvement in Bookstix V came in the artistic media.  All blood was drawn with colored pencils: red for rebyls, and purple for aliens.  In addition I used a drafting pencil for a lot of the background work, which had much softer lead than your standard bubble-filling #2 pencil.  So without further ado, here are some pages from the book.

First up is some of that text I was talking about.  This comes from the book’s introduction, and I think is probably the best writing in the whole book.  I still like it, although I have a problem with the way it posits the big bang theory and the theory of evolution as competing theories trying to explain the same thing, when that isn’t at all accurate.  I think most of all I like the way the drawings accent the text, and IMHO this is pretty well-written stuff here, except for the last paragraph maybe.

Moving on to battles, here we have the first one, which takes place on the Rebyl Warship.  Since it was in outer space and there was no gravity, I drew this with the speech bubbles going in all directions.  The explosions with the starfish-shaped light beams are from antimatter guns.  If you look closely you can see quite a clear difference in the darkness of the two types of pencils I used, especially with the text where I probably used 0.5 mm lead in a mechanical pencil.  I like the alien who is shooting the guy with two guns at the same time, splitting him into three parts.  Awesome!

Here is the second battle, which I think was meant to be happening in parallel with the first battle.  This is the aliens’ mother ship, being attacked by the rebyls.  Things to note: a painful alien examination of human reproductive organs (since they seem to like to do that during abductions), and a reference the lyrics to Closer by Nine Inch Nails.  I’m not sure why, I never really liked NIN all that much.  Also, some jokes from the two warship pictures: both of them have someone from the opposite group wondering what kind of spaceship this is, and in both cases someone is reprogramming the ship to have a destination of hell.  Because spaceships can travel there you know.

There was more of that story line that I won’t recount here.  Basically we find that the aliens are seeking Iron Trinicklide (FeNi₃), a substance that is plentiful in the earth’s core, but has been almost entirely depleted on the aliens’ home planet.  Throughout the book the aliens fight their way to a mine in South Africa, the deepest in the world, and start blasting a hole into the earth (to get to the core).  The book ends with a four page conclusion, which reveals that the aliens got the rock they wanted and left our planet in ruin.  That was four pages of single-spaced text, at a time when teachers struggled to get students to write a five paragraph essay.

I tried to start Bookstix VI: Vigilante Justice, whose title page is pictured here.  Unfortunately I lost interest after half-drawing a single battle.  The idea was that the earth was in chaos from the events of book 5, with no police, military, or government, and now the only way to survive was to become a vigilante.  I had intended to improve by using black ink (like, from a pen) for some of the detail work, and everything was to be drawn on plain white paper.  You can see this on the title page actually.  This was concluded at the beginning of my second semester of ninth grade, when I was fifteen.  I guess I just got bored with drawing these things.

Before we go, here are some random bits of information that I either forgot to mention earlier this week, or couldn’t work into the narrative.

• Most of my books were dedicated to “people in the future reading this after I die.”  Hopefully that won’t be until I have grandchildren that find these drawings and say “mom what was wrong with grandpa??”

• If you’re wondering, I pretyped about 90% of the material in these five posts in one sitting, last Sunday.  That’s just one of many ways I maintained a quality level consistent with the The Lord Of The Rings movies.

• I was originally only going to scan one drawing representative of the whole work, but I started looking through my drawings and realized there was way too much stuff worth sharing.

• To give more props, Kevin was doing stick drawings first, then Keith, Garrison, Peter, and I all borrowed the idea to varying degrees over the next three years.  It was definitely either Kevin or me who produced the most of these things though.

• While I was scanning these things, I scanned Garrison’s entry in my eight grade yearbook.  He made a post on his blog about it.  Go check it out if you haven’t already.

• Anyone found on the back page of a sheet of paper would be executed by a character from Mortal Kombat.  I really liked fatalities.

• A teacher did actually see these books once, when I let someone (I think Keith) borrow one of my books (I think the first one) to read it, and he was doing this during class and it got confiscated.  Either Mrs. Mims didn’t understand what it was or she didn’t look inside it, because we got it back later without getting into any trouble.

Well that concludes this week of Kip’s drawings from when he was 12-15 years old.  Let me know if you think this whole five-part series was cool or if it was way too much crap to read.  If you guys like it I may do something similar in the future, if I ever come up with a topic deserving several posts.  I hope you’ve enjoyed it.  And hopefully you’re not too much more scared of me now than you were a week ago.  Have a good Labor Day weekend!