the horror

There’s an unfortunate lack of words in the English Language suitable for describing different ways in which an object can be tumultuously rent asunder, and yea unto many pieces strewn yonder and away. Just as unfortunately, there are no words for describing the process by which something may be reconstituted after such a traumatic event, whether by painstaking reassembly or miraculous reversal of nearby time. I have thus striven to bring before you a proposition, an offering if you will, a standard by which future violence and its sudden reversal may be briefly and succinctly described:


explode – to blow up, as by an explosion.
(Antonym – desplode)

asplode – to be blown up by some force internal or external, esp. after a critical failure.
(Antonym – unplode)

implode – to blow up, only inwards as opposed to outwards.
(Antonym – resplode)

preplode – to destruct—indeed, become stroyed—in so comprehensive (and often indescribably horrific) a manner that the past prior to the event is indelibly altered and the object hardly was. (See also balefire)
(Antonym – by definition, there can be no antonym; the oft-considered relation postplode, upon detailed investigation, was discovered to be a process by which a preploded object is annihilated again.)


Upon observing the new and revised definitions, many plebes are unwisely curious about the aftermath of a preplosion. Only a veteran with the battle-hardened visage of one who has observed an actual preplosion in action can suitably describe it (a wild light in their eyes as they speak) in a way that renders the appearance of the aftermath comprehensible to the uninitiated. Some, it seems, even pass off scenes of a preplosion as abstract art to the unsuspecting public.

However inoffensive it may seem to the masses, such an unearthly grim sight is enough to turn the stomach of one who truly knows, ruining not only the entire day thence forth but indeed, often weeks at a time.


A small disclaimer: the practices that follow may break the terms of use agreements of various video sites. They don’t like you actually saving these files to your hard drive, so they can have the power to take away the videos so you can no longer view them. Just so you know.

I have done some research and figured out how to directly download YouTube videos in both high quality (mp4) and normal quality (flv) from the web site with only Internet Explorer, and without visiting any sites other than the YouTube page.

I looked about and eventually found a couple sites that had bookmarklets, which are basically javascript programs that you store in a bookmark. You just click on the bookmark to use the program on the page you currently have open.

The first site has a really big bookmarklet which is slightly outdated but provides a lot of insight into how the systems of various sites actually work (or did work at the time it was made). You might notice that the bookmarklet is incredibly long; this is because it encodes several images as extra base-64 data, and there’s also a lot of code in there.

The second site has another bookmarklet, which is pretty slick since it acts like a little add-on for the YouTube page, and adds a link below the video information section.

For formatting reasons I have moved the actual details of the method to this page. I’d love to post it here like before, but it was literally breaking WordPress. I guess there was just too much HTML in there and all the formatting got used up for the rest of the page.

Feel free to leave comments if you figure out how to do these any better, for other sites, or if you just want to tell me something.


I think I’ll occasionally take up rating movies and shows that I come across which I find to be interesting enough to rate. Some titles I may consider from recent samplings include Toki wo Kakeru Shoujo, Vexille, Gurren Lagann, and perhaps Appleseed Ex Machina.

Hereuntoforthward, I shall rate stuff on a scale from 0 to 7, like I do in my personal records. You probably won’t see a lot of things below 5, since I generally don’t get worked up about mediocre stuff and lame stuff enough to really rate it or even finish watching it.

Now, I don’t necessarily want to be bound to using numbers and such, condemning subjective material to one fixed value forever. I often change ratings I’ve made in the past to reflect… whatever reason it is I’m changing it, I don’t know. Just keep in mind, these are indications of how well it struck me personally, not a rigorously computed sum graven in stone.

And before we delve into numbers, why zero to seven? Isn’t that just downright weird? Well, no. Professional reviewers use 1-4 with half-stars; halves never made much sense to me. 1-5 without halves isn’t quite enough levels, and 10 is honestly too many to make a decision easily, plus it’s a strange number. So, I found that from 0 to 7 it’s quite easy to pick out a number without too much unnecessary deliberation of whether you should choose seven or seven and a half… or even eight? Maybe six and a half? Anyway.

Here’s a general rundown of overall scoring: 4 is mediocre—nothing really special—and I wouldn’t particularly care whether you watched it or not, but it wasn’t really a total waste of time. 5 is decent, worth watching and probably a recommendation to most people. 6 means good stuff, which I enjoyed indeed, and almost certainly a recommendation. The great 7 is reserved for those things which truly belong on my favorites list; if brought up or reminded of in a conversation with me, you could easily find yourself confronted with a long string of praises and somewhat fevered insistence that you go off immediately to watch said movie or show.

If given a 3, it’s definitely listing into the deep and ugly bay of ‘you really shouldn’t waste your time.’ A 2 indicates it was pretty definitely missing some very important features such as entertainment and redeeming qualities; once we get to 1 it barely qualifies as the type of media it is purported to be. 0 is actually reserved for things that don’t even attempt to be, and really weren’t intended to be, anything like you would watch or enjoy normally. Maybe like a video that tells you how to operate a vacuum cleaner; you get the picture.

For individual categories, it goes:

7 is awesome, almost flawless;
6 is solidly well done;
5 is just fine for pretty much everything;
4 is here and there;
3 is not really featured much or poorly done;
2 is unimportant or terribly done;
1 is almost irrelevant or abominable;
and 0 means intentionally not a part of anything you see here.

I’ve experimented a bit with the various categories of rating that I use and have generally settled on humor, awesomeness, drama, story, and then the overall score (which is not an average). Stuff that makes you smile or laugh often is humorous, and something that is just depressing and leaves you feeling empty is not. Giant robots fighting with exploding drills is very awesome; sword fights are usually quite awesome, and slice-of-life is rarely awesome. (Think what makes you say ‘hey, cool…’ or just ‘awesome.’) Something that pulls you to the edge of your seat and pulls you into the characters’ situations and emotional state is dramatic; something that is just casual entertainment. (Think the stuff that has really good romance or does a good job of pulling you in emotionally.) Something that has a really well written storyline and keeps things moving without frequent fillers and plot holes has great story; something more like Azumanga Daioh, Excel Saga or even Robot Chicken have little to no story and are in fact largely completely random.

Something that does an exceptionally good job on any one of these things can conceivably get away with a good rating without much attention to the other elements (with the possible exception of drama, classically depending on story to make it relevant).

gauss chariot

I think it would be fun to make a map in Hammer (the Source engine map editing kit) where the people who work on it just add a few things per day, slowly expanding the contents of the map until there is a gigantic building filling up the entire 0.5×0.5×0.25 mile space. Then we could go around trying to finish it off and compile it (haha, it would probably take about a week to compile on a regular machine). I figure we could just rule out moving parts and map triggers, since stuff like that would just overwhelm the engine, plus they’re one of the hardest things to do when you’re mapping. I think getting the cubemaps right would be overwhelming enough, if it’s even possible.

Either way, I think I’d be willing to work on something like that.

Important things I left out of the last post:

Someone actually developed a volumetric 3d display that displays dots on thin air. I must be frank, I totally did not see this coming. It can display about a hundred dots per second so far, and can actually display two to three meters away from the projector. That’s right. Just the projector, and empty air.

You might laugh when you hear how they do it though. It’s kind of like a humorous mockery of Ye Olde Starre Warse holograms, because it actually superheats tiny pockets of air with a focused infrared laser, creating a flash of light and a small plasma explosion. (Here’s an article about it, and the official press release translated into english). So it totally works and everything, but it’s really loud.

Something that will delight fans of technology and newer user interfaces: Johnny Lee has done a number of really neat projects which save hundreds and hundreds of dollars off of expensive equipment by merely using a wii-mote to do the same thing. (Specifically: using the wiimote for 3d head tracking, multipoint interface with your fingertips in the air rather like Minority Report, a digital white-board you can put pretty much anywhere…) It’s extremely impressive, and you need to check it out.

Among all the weird things that happen to city wildlife, I think this particular link in the food chain ranks rather high up on the scale of the weird and unexpected. I mean, pelicans eat FISH, not… certainly not that.

My room mate signed me up for a 440 gloss page magazine called Bridal Guide… I got in my mailbox and had no idea what to think. Then he put up bald-faced lies about it for almost a day before casually bringing up that it was totally his fault and on purpose. I encourage you to do this as well, it’s a great prank; you can get free magazine subscriptions right here, with no commitment. Seriously, it does work. Just… well, this is better for doing in dorms where you’re not going to be living there the next ten or twenty years; if you’re too concerned about causing them bulk mail problems, you could always just double check to make sure that they don’t distribute the addresses to anyone.

One of the more silly brainchildren of the half of my brain devoted entirely to ludicrous engineering (the part that will forever be deeply enamored with the Space Fountain) is the house heated by bulk mail. The idea is, get yourself signed up for as many cupon newspapers, thick magazines, and free, worthless publications as you can, then stockpile them and use them to heat your house via a clean paper-burning stove, which should also include a catalytic converter in the chimney stack to cut down on any nasty chemical emissions due to weird inks or plastics that get burned along with it. (Mind you, I’m not really overly concerned about emissions in general, but seriously, it’s coming out right over your house.) If it worked, you’d basically be heating your house to free, with fuel being delivered to you sporadically by the national mail service.

That shit would be so cache.


Danger! New intelligence indicate angry anti-establishment ranting off the starboard bow!

entertainment count
























feedback = hiatus break

Comment something here if you want me to write about it. Comment something here if you want me to write at all, for that matter. I just noticed that a) I don’t always feel like having the time to write it and b) I get like, 2 page views, doubtless from web spiders, every day.

In conclusion, all sentient lifeforms are hereby required to produce feedback if they wish to continue receiving my twisted wisdom. I have some 30 hilarious things which you should see in my temporary links folder, and if I’m going to even put them here, I’m going to need at least… say, one actual carbon-based-lifeform reader. If that’s not too ambitious.

Not to say I don’t often enjoy ranting about science and society here, but that it’s easier to just rant in my head than to inscribe it in these undying octets for your viewing pleasure.

If you want me to write every single day for at least a year, buy me a Penta top hat as pictured, perhaps from this site. Let me know if this is your plan so that proper arrangements can be made.