true stories, based on lies.

The Rocketeer was my favorite movie growing up. I watched it recently with some friends and it holds up damn well.

this game sucks.

BUT now that dru n i have finally beaten the first 2 Zeldas we can finally move on to the good ones. in fact, up next is A Link To The Past, which is by far my favorite Zelda game, so hell yes to that.

srsly tho zelda 2 is shit and i’ll write an essay if you disagree with me.

Just did my last art critique everrrrrr. I’ve always wanted to create a 3d object entirely from audio, so this is a visualization of a song (Lifeformed - Cider Time off the amazing Dustforce OST). It’s cooler in motion but it won’t run on the web, so here’s a lil screenshot.

this guy does draw something but includes pikachu every time. he is my hero. follow him.

(Source: drawsomepikachus)

mrdiv:

rough_seas

ryannorth:

I feel like the people in charge of user experience for microwaves don’t get very many fan letters, and that is too bad, because they do some good work, so this is mine.

A HISTORY OF MY MICROWAVES AND THEIR USER INTERFACES.

Our first microwave microwaved food well (I remember my dad, an engineer, testing that it was as powerful as it should’ve been with a glass of water and a thermometer, running it for a few seconds and then measuring the temperature change) but the interface was, in retrospect, incredibly crappy. Let’s say you wanted to microwave something for two minutes! You would press:

• COOK TIME
• 2
• 0
• 0
• START

Five keystrokes! SHEESH. What am I, made of keystrokes?  Am I a collection of keystrokes walking around??  Our next microwave came about 10 years later when we moved, and this one I really loved because it had a QUICK MINUTE button.  It was a revelation.  Press that and you don’t have to press COOK TIME or START! So two minutes became

• QUICK MINUTE
• 2

Down to two keystrokes! And though I was legitimately happy that the keystroke burden had been reduced (I was a nerdy kid; I still use a HP 41-CX calculator not just because they WENT TO SPACE, but because it uses Reverse Polish Notation and RPN saves you keystokes which allows for more efficient calculation!) But if you wanted 2:30 of cook time, you’d have to hit

• COOK TIME
• 2
• 3
• 0
• START

which means we’ve made some progress by patching a new interface on top of things, but the old problems still remain.

In our new house *I* got to choose the microwave, and I spent some time looking at the boxes, imagining what sort of interface could be built into them given the options available on their keypads, and only after checking to see if the boxes mentioned how good their UIs were (they didn’t).  And Massive Props to the people at GE who designed my microwave, because it is just about optimally efficient. If you want to cook for two minutes, you press this:

• 2

and you’re off to the races. Yes! Finally a microwave that recognizes that 99% of the time all you’ll be using a microwave for is microwaving things! No ‘cook time’ nonsense. AND, for bonus points, this is entirely intuitive AND could reasonably be discovered by accident by someone who just wants to warm up their food.  NICE.

But what if you want 2:30 of cooking? WELL. You can punch in 2:30 with extra keystrokes but for POWER USERS / UI NERDS like myself, they have a +30 button, which I love for a lot of reasons. So you can type

• 2
• +30

and you’ll get 2:30 of cook time. I have some magical thinking in me that microwave popcorn cooks best when it’s not interrupted while cooking, so +30 is a lifesaver there too: press it at any point in the cooking process and you get 30 more seconds of time. And yes, press it alone and you get 30 seconds of cooking RIGHT OFF THE BAT.

Perfection.

My only quibble is that the kitchen timer function assumes you’ll be timing for 10 or more minutes, and so to time for 7 minutes (which is the perfect amount of time for macaroni and cheese) you have to hit

• KITCHEN TIMER
• 0
• 7
• START

instead of just 7, because if you did that you’d get 70 minutes. BUT I recognize that it’d be hard to allow for 70 minute timing if you did it otherwise, and it only bothers me because I cook macaroni and cheese a lot (ladies).

Anyway. Just about every time I use my microwave I’m sincerely happy to see such a refined, efficient, but still flexible user interface, and I wanted to share. If you’re interested, it’s a GE microwave, but I dunno the model.

THUS CONCLUDES THE NERDIEST TUMBLR POST I HAVE EVER MADE, AND YES, I HAVE REBLOGGED A 16-BIT ANIMATED GIF OF THE ENTERPRISE D BEFORE

beautiful

still frame of a very tiny portion of a generative piece i just finished coding.

cgcgcgcg:

The GoKu is Back! This time is 3D!

(via natazilla)