Linkdump!

Alright, I have way too many tabs open. Thankfully, they're on the Desktop - my laptop could not handle this many tabs open, especially with so any websites now integrating flash and javascript to show the latest tweet about themselves - and I'm not referring to personal people here, I'm referring to clogged sites that resemble Kotaku. Anyways! Pardon my rambling, let's get this started, shall we?

- Last week (I think on Wednesday), one of the three people behind Extra Credits had some bad news - the artist who normally draws the episodes had suffered some kind of detached shoulder muscle, and her insurance wouldn't pay for it as it was a pre-existing condition from swimming. They set up a Rocketfuel account which is similar to Kickstarter, asking for $15,000 to cover the costs. They disappeared for a couple of hours to brainstorm ideas locally, and by the time they came back, people had raised $20,000. As of right now, less than a week in, they're at 500% of their goal (and if some estimates are correct, the surgery may cost a lot more than the initial $15,000). I watched this happen, I happened to have my twitter feed open when I saw him announcing this all, and the outpouring has been completely stunning. It's things like this that really appreciate that the world is a good place. :D
- Touch Your Friends. You know you want to.
- The Alien Wedding Cake that made it to BoingBoing this week only reminds me of the scene from Spaceballs.
- Another from the "Maybe I should be attending these" files, Anime Expo was this past weekend. Some of the costumes were just great - a NyanCat Warrior, and I'm more amused by the two people dressed up as deer with the, well, "deer caught in the headlights" look. XD Mikunopolis was also held there, and I would've loved to see that, too. Maybe the attendance of 20,000 people will tell the Vocaloids that they need to tour to other Anime Expos...
- One of the best things about the movie Just Go With It was the music. A lot of the music was mashups! Sadly, the mashups didn't make it to the official soundtrack, probably because the music industry is not progressing as fast as the internet is, and "fair use" clauses haven't been used fairly. The soundtrack only contains the separated songs, no mashups. Whatever. The point is, here's the mashups for free!
- The founder of Amazon wants to build a 10,000-year clock, something that will stand the test of time and make future generations ponder its purpose. I'm curious to see how this will pan out. So we have anything that was created 10,000 years ago - heck, how about 1,000? 100? - that's still around? Okay, Stonehenge, but that's the point - he wants to make something that will have future people look at it and wonder its purpose. The part of me that wishes to retain a legacy is loving the concept! What I'm hating is all the bureaucracy that he has to go through to make something last that long (i.e. finding space, rights, etc)...
- Watched a half-episode of Gate Keepers, now I'm back :)
- Steam's got a Summer Sale going on right now, with a Prize Booth for accomplishing certain things (as complex as spending less than 500 seconds in Hell in Super Meat Boy, or as simple as playing a free demo). I've gotten my 6 tickets for the two things I found use for (I don't own any of the games listed other than Portal 2 and TF2, so I have the Bots' Snorkel, and Sunglasses, respectively), but you can also win the top 10 games on your Steam wishlist if you get tickets, so there's a reason to collect the tickets, too :)
- I think the Discovery Channel found this for me... Jetman - a personal jetpack... maaaaan, I really want to be able to try these things. :< I've also added "hang-gliding" to that list.
- Coutesy umadoshi: Local heroes take Japanese video games to the world, a look at localization of video games. Also something I have a great respect for :)
- Watered the plants, then came back.
- A bit late for Canada Day, but here's William Shatner singing O'Canada.
- I can't remember who was talking about Waldoes, but when I heard the story, my mind went to Roujin-Z. Anyone else remember that classic anime?
- Speaking of animes, I was happy to hear that Viz picked up the rights to Professor Layton and the Eternal Diva! Now, I wonder if they'll just retain the dub from the UK version or not. It had the same VA for Layton as the games, so I wonder...
- Jim Carrey tweeted a picture of himself at Machu Piccu. *adds to life-goal list*
- Similar to Swiss Chalet's Rotisserie Channel (which you can view online now!), Burger King has a channel now, and if you watch long enough, you get a coupon for a Whopper. I CAN'T BELIEVE THIS IS A THING, PEOPLE.
- With "Weird Al" Yankovic coming into town, and his latest album, Alpocalypse, doing well on the charts, a lot of Yankovic interviews have been showing up recently. Here's a Setlist interview (going through his songs), and here's another video interview (of which I haven't watched yet)! I had never heard "The Rye or the Kaiser" before, and several other songs on there... I should complete my Weird Al Collection.
- Christine's been reorganizing the bookshelves, and since my anime DVDs are having to be brought down to reorganize, I may as well cobble it into my Collection. I'll get to that in a day or two, and it's vastly outdated since it has VHS tapes listed on there...
- Gonna try my hand at Scottish Scones this afternoon and see how they stack-up to the biscuit-y scones that I've made in my class. They're in the oven, fingers crossed :D

Retro Gaming :D

I just hooked my Commodore 64 up to the TV to see if it still worked. (This was actually less to see if the computer worked and more to see if the C64 would actually play on the bigscreen TV. ^^)

It does! However, there are some issues. Being that the C64 used an RF adapter way back in the day, I could not get a clear signal, so I was only able to get it to work on the old CRT in the bedroom, with a fuzzy screen (some of you newer kids would call this a "filter"). I get this feeling that there is just too many radio frequencies in this day and age to permit the RF adapter to give a perfect signal, and the way it is with digital TVs in this day and age, either you get a perfect signal or nothing at all, even on the "Antenna" setting. I wonder if there's a different way that I could connect it. I noticed the C64 had a "video" port on it beside the RF out, but that would normally go to a C64 monitor. I wonder if there are adapters for that.

Thanks to my parents, they had located a handful of my old C64 disks, and I was kinda amused at how odd they felt in my hands. I haven't held a disk to put in a disk drive for years. They're light. My go-to game was right on the top of the pile - Gerry The Germ. I started loading it, walked away, and before I could even grab something to drink, it was loaded and playing music from the bedroom. I don't remember the games loading that quickly.

I also don't have any C64 joysticks laying about, so sadly I couldn't play any other games aside from the aforementioned Gerry the Germ, as it has a built-in keymapper. ^^ If I could find a Genesis controller, I'd be set, really - they use the exact same connector.

Now, I could also just get X64 to run on my laptop as I had managed to do up at the cottage, which resulted in a pitch- and pixel-perfect emulation of Gerry, but c'mon, where's the fun in that? (Also, see needing a controller somehow.)

I wonder if the Xbox controller would count as a joystick for a Windows C64 emulator...

"But Tama," you ask, "how are the scones?" I had to add some extra water to get them to come together before baking them, and they came out somehow both chewy and dry. But, when combined with Tea, they're lovely. :D