Friday Linkswap: Boing Boing Gadgets
One of the peculiar things about running a website with a fairly large readership is that you begin to get to know lots of other blogfolk. We now count the staff of many of the blogs you lot read on a daily basis as friends of RPS, and in the spirit of that online chummery we're going to start linking to one of them. Boing Boing Gadgets, with whom we've struck up a healthy, manly relationship, are going to be swapping some headlines with us. We're going to pick the stuff we think has been cool on BBG, and link it here and vice versa. It's not going to be all about PC gaming, but we hope its stuff that some of you guys will still find interesting. Likewise the BB crowd will be getting pointed in the direction of our busy little PC gaming ghetto and introduced to the opinionated melange that is Rock, Paper, Shotgun. Click onwards for the links, a BBG quote, and my own vague, flippant commentary.
The BBG 1k Competition Gallery. BBG says: "1 kilobyte. 1 kibibyte. 1 kilobit. 1,000 ASCII characters. Source code, file size, tile size, the number of letters in a short story: you decide." Jim says: A clever line-up of 1k creations, but I suspect RPS readers are more talented than BBG readers. Right? Anyway, the idea of 1k short stories amuses me enormously. Do they take up 1k of space in my imagination?
Marilyn Manson's Absinthe: BBG says: "Mansinthe. This is the exact name of the house specialty at a strange underground absinthe bar I was dragged to in San Francisco's Castro district a few years back. You don't even want to know how they louched it." Jim says: It's almost as if Kieron could have named it. I've always suspected there was a link between the bearded one's love of eyeliner and the Californian millionaire goth scene.
The modular reforming robot. BBG says: "The day is soon approaching when even smashing apart our rebellious robot slaves with hammers and axes will not prevent each individually severed body part from crawling towards you across the room, a murderous and autonomous agent of servo-controlled musculature." Jim says: The End Times. (That's a great name for a newspaper, isn't it?)
The Space Invader Chopping Board. BBG says: "If anyone asks, just tell everyone that the design on your new cutting board is a macroscopic view of one of the virulent bacterium dwelling in its wooden gouges." Jim says: My girlfriend has already said I can't have one, despite it unifying my great loves of videogaming and cooking dinner for her every single night.
Who gives a shit about Mp3's killing the album? BBG says: "Albums should have their own beginning, middle and end: shuffling an album should shuffle its emotional tenor. For me, listening to a song at random without listening to the rest of the album is like reading a chapter randomly from a book. A song might be wonderful, but it is contextless out of its larger body." Jim says: I find myself reordering jumbled Winamp'd MP3s into original album listings all too often. BBG and RPS are united in some kind of OCD nerdhell. Who'd have thought it? But in all seriousness: I've always enjoyed the way albums are artfully structured by bands and producers, it'd be hideous to lose that.