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Four of Spades: What Jane Knew
Posted in 52 ways to say I love you, Alcatraz Rules and Regulations, Hunde der Welt, Writing Cards and Letters on April 1, 2012
Jane knew she wasn’t supposed to feed chocolate to the lizard. That’s why she did it. She knew Mrs. Beagle always gave a chocolate to whoever got the best score in the maths quiz. That’s why she studied. She knew Mrs. Beagle always left straight after school on Wednesdays. That’s why she chose that day to sneak back into the classroom where the class lizard was kept.
What Jane did not know was what would happen to the lizard when it ate the chocolate.
Jane also did not know that Mrs. Beagle had left her keys behind. That’s why she jumped and dropped the lizard when Mrs. Beagle opened the classroom door. Jane did not know where the lizard went when she dropped it. That’s why she was surprised when it bit her on the ankle a few minutes later, while she was writing out ‘I will not feed chocolate to the lizard’ 100 times on the blackboard. Jane did not know that the chocolate lizard bite would make whatever she wrote come true. That’s why she kept writing. She did not know why she was writing it, since she had never fed chocolate to the lizard, and she wouldn’t, even though she wanted to. That’s why she stopped writing. Jane did not know what to do next. That’s why she started writing a story on the blackboard:
Once upon a time, there was a girl named Jane who knew everything and didn’t need to go to school.
And Jane knew everything. That’s why she wrote that some cake would appear. Jane knew that everything she wrote would come true, and stay true until the bite from the chocolate-fed lizard healed an hour later. That’s why she was worried. She knew that she would have to feed more chocolate to the lizard and let it bite her again when that happened. That’s one of the reasons she wrote that a lot of chocolate appeared. But she knew that she could not feed chocolate to the lizard after writing that she wouldn’t. That’s why she lived out her wildest dreams until the spell wore out just before Mrs. Beagle returned.
Mrs. Beagle still knew what Jane had done. That’s why she came to make sure she’d completed her punishment, even though she’d rather have gone to her mathematics society meeting. Mrs. Beagle did not know what the chocolate-fed-lizard bite had done. That’s why she was surprised by the faint smell of ponies and chocolate cake that disappeared just quickly enough to make her wonder whether she’d ever smelt it. Mrs. Beagle did not know that Jane wanted to feed the lizard again. That’s why she dismissed the girl and left.
Jane knew that Mrs. Beagle would write a disciplinary report detailing everything she’d done. That’s why she put the lizard in Mrs. Beagle’s bag, with her chocolates.
*
Mrs. Beagle knew that something was up when she saw what happened as she wrote about Jane feeding chocolate to the lizard. That’s why she wrote that Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem could be disproven.
Three of Spades: mp<3
Posted in 52 ways to say I love you, Writing Cards and Letters on March 25, 2012
Note: The whole time I was writing this, I was rapping it in my head in the voice of Devo Spice, or maybe Luke Ski. Feel free to do the same. I guess I can’t really blame them for it, though.
Are you the kind of person with a song in your heart?
Well, how about a thousand? This is state of the art!
Only Auricle will do, that’s A-U-R-I-C-L-E,
bringing hearts and ears together with the m-p-less-than-three.
With Langendorff technology to keep alive each atrium
and keep the heart cells pumping that potassium and natrium,
Introducing Beat Box, it’s a heart drive full of fun,
a briefcase full of rabbit hearts, a song in every one.
Well, I’m that kind of person, and so when I saw that ad,
I wanted that new Beat Box really really really bad!
but I didn’t have the money and I didn’t have the doe,
so I waited for the copycats to give it a go.
The Tucson Diagnostics artificial heart looked nice,
but how could processed tofu go for such a meaty price?
The chicken hearts were cheap, and beats per minute were comparable,
but animal rights groups said the battery life was terrible.
Well how about this earthworm with its five aortic arches?
It fits straight into the ear and plays imperial death marches.
My hacker friend said he could make a second one for free,
so we pooled our cash to get him one and he made one for me.
At the twenty-somethingth segment he proceeded to hack,
and we waited three long weeks for both the halves to grow back.
I loaded mine with compost and I put it in my ear
heard the music starting up as it climbed into my cochlea.
After that it wouldn’t budge and the controls were disconnected,
and every twenty seconds it screamed ‘Copy protected!’
Well I really should have paid to get an Auricle instead,
’cause now my earworm’s in a loop and I’ve a song stuck in my head.
Well I really should have paid to get an Auricle instead,
’cause now my earworm’s in a loop and I’ve a Copy protected! head.
Well I really should have paid to get an Auricle instead,
’cause now my earworm’s Copy protected! I’ve a song stuck in my head.
Like this:
Two of Spades: Trichosis Psychosis
Posted in Guinness World Records, Writing Cards and Letters on March 18, 2012
There’s a fashion I’ve seen, or a ‘hair-brained’ psychosis,
To treat hair that is not on the head as trichosis.
The women think men have bizarre expectations
that they shave all their hair and pretend they’re cetaceans.
Then men too naïve to be sure it’s not true,
don’t know women have hair like all land mammals do,
so that both parties hip to the trend may belab’r us
if we dare to reveal that our skin is not glabrous.
Yet even though terminal hair’s ‘androgenic’
that isn’t because it’s exclusive to men; it
occurs in all grownups from here to Kerblayvit,
and by the way, women out there wouldn’t shave it.
The fashion is merely a localised norm
that’s invented and strengthened by those who conform
while the women who leave all their natural hair
have the pleasure of knowing that men do not care.
Like this:
Ace of spades: It’s not a (real) heart
Posted in 52 ways to say I love you, Flowers and Animals, St James's Gate, Writing Cards and Letters on March 11, 2012
I told you I wouldn’t just be writing this time. Here’s a music video for Jonathan Coulton’s Dissolve, using footage from my unboxing of the level 4 bundle for the album Artificial Heart, which this song is on, and some from JoCo Cruise Crazy and the things I did in Florida before that. I really hope you like it.
Long before I received the package in the mail, I heard that simply opening the box was quite an experience. I carefully avoided reading about what exactly was in the mysterious box, and decided to turn my unboxing into a music video for this song about a mysterious box. As it turned out, a lyric from the song was on the lid of the box. Clearly somebody had to create this video. Maybe somebody else has already done it; I still haven’t watched anyone else’s unboxing videos. If you want to understand what I’m doing, search for level 4 unboxing videos online. Some of them probably include the instructions we’re following.
I eventually received the box just four days before I flew to Florida to visit Universal, Kennedy Space Center, my very first standalone Paul and Storm show, and of course, JoCo Cruise Crazy 2, so I used some footage of those things in the last part of the video. Victory in the warm sun!
If I’d thought about it, I’d have started on the ace of hearts this week instead of the ace of spades. But a spade looks a lot like a heart when upside down, and there were a few other references to hearts on my aces of spades. It’s not a real heart, but it is a real artificial heart.
I filmed this using my new camera, a Canon PowerShot S100, which shoots in full HD and autofocusses while filming. My favourite moment is when I open the box and the camera automatically focusses on the lid of the box, then focusses back on me just as I start smiling. That was quite a lovely fluke. There’s also some nice changes of focus wile the nostalgia device moves around. Everything in this video was shot only once with no rehearsal, while I was opening my level 4 box, or in Florida, or on JoCo Cruise Crazy. This is new for me; usually I spend far too long getting the footage exactly right. There is a small mistake on the calendar part; I did not do the KSC Close-Up tour two days in a row. I also left in another clip which I think I intended to replace by something else, but if I don’t tell you which it is it’s not bad enough that you’ll notice it.
In case you’re wondering, this video contains 11 ‘dissolve’ transitions, but the transitions that occur when Jonathan sings ‘dissolve’ are actually ‘fade to white’ transitions. Also, the yellow country you can see when he sings ‘here’ of ‘If you need me, I’ll be anywhere but here’ is Jamaica. That’s on a big globe at Geneva airport which I filmed as I was on my way to fly to Orlando.
Third Joker: Back in Time
Posted in Writing Cards and Letters on March 1, 2012
This work is dedicated to a general report of ideas relating to books and documents, and to the considered use of the elements which make up documentation. One should always read the documentation, especially when operating a time machine…
*
Between March 21 and 27, 1984, theorists, experimentalists, accelerator physicists, and experts in superconducting magnets gathered for a workshop in Lausanne and Geneva. This isn’t TRIUMF, the polite Canadian physics lab where all the best pictures have canoes in them. This is CERN, planning the most powerful particle collider ever built: The Juratron. Leptons and sleptons and quarks and gluinos, positrons, Higgs bosons, muon neutrinos. You might think that we’re just doing science with a hadron collider so large, but it’s more than that. If you pine for the mystery before Noah’s ark, we’ve remade prehistory at Juratron Park.
Did you miss the CERN Open Day? She who did miss day complains she never knows why her boyfriend…
At the CERN Open Day
A lad at a fair who was lacking directions, found a booth which was offering temporal projections.
“I need to relax,” said Bob to the boy behind the counter.
“Come right in.”
And there was Alice, the girl he had had a crush on back in school. The girl who had mocked him and broken his heart.
“I gave a note to Isaac meant for you, but Marvin changed my message to a curse.“
“What?“
“I didn’t mean to be mean to you. Here’s what I actually said.” She pulled out an ancient cellphone and read aloud:
I’m really glad to meet ya, you seem just right to me. You’re not like all those other tools, fond only of their wieners. A mental syntonicity one day, a gentle hint of what we two could be lit just enough my life so I could see that trust in love just might bring rhapsody. Come have a char with me, my dear, let’s turn the night to day. Join the few, couple, two.
“Well, it’s too late now. You broke me. I moved away. I finally built up my life again. I have a new girlfriend…” he stopped talking so he wouldn’t cry.
“Did you read the sign in front of this booth? It’s practically a time machine. We can go back. Go back to before Marvin messed up the message, and start again.”
And so they did.
*
Once upon a time a queen was blessed with twin sons, which she named Nosch and Amiaivel. She skipped from stone to stone across the stream, each stepping stone subsiding with her stride. A few things went wrong in the beginning, when Nosch fell through a time vortex opened up by the time projection chamber of the a detector named ATLAS nearly a century into the future, when the particle collider known as the Juratron suffered a cooling leak (as usual, when Titans weren’t successful in a coup, ‘Twas ATLAS who was made to hold up Heaven.) Not much happened in the middle. This is the story of the happy ending.
As autumn comes I breathe your sanguine red, and tremble at the falling of each leaf. I lean against the wall of the corridor and close my eyes for a few moments; trying to take it all in, trying not to let the tears out. Just over twelve hours to write something. I am the master of my environment. I find the words…
It was not until my twelfth birthday that I realised the face I saw in the mirror was not mine. Not until my ninety-eighth birthday, when I was given one of those newfangled cellphones and recognised it from my youth, that I realised It was yours. Nosch, my brother, a pseudo-time-travel incarnation of Bob, my lover, trapped in the mirror world. When it’s hard to cope, don’t leave me. I am old. I’m ninety eight years old, and I am dying. You feel my quickening heart. It’s getting far too close to the end.
Don’t stop breathing; it’s necessary to go on living.
I hear your voice from the mirror, like mine, but not.
The mirror cracks a little as you strain to tame your mirror speech.
“Nitrogen, we breathe and we ignore.“
In English? I can breathe, like, air.
The mirror breaks and the air and water on either side of it switch places. Don’t stop breathing…
A cellphone vibrates ineffectually against unfeeling skin.
*
A flutter of butterflies flies, aflutter in sumptuous skies, dancing between rise and fall forming a quivering rainbow. I look up to the sky in search of you, to sunlight that you hide your soul above.
Here we are. Let’s sing together in our own harmonic; let’s cry out all the words we need to say. When you’re filled with song but you just can’t sing, sing up, you’ve gotta be happy!
*
Gareth lies still for a minute listening to the music before reluctantly opening his eyes. A fair-haired man enters and plays a flashlight over the room.
“Urrghh,” says Gareth.
“Urrghh? You wake to a choir of angels and all you have to say is ‘Urrghh’?” says the fair-haired man.
“Look, I’m not in the mood for this. One ev’ning I went to the pub for a beer. ‘Two vodka oranges ’cause now I’ve got the blues,’ I said. The first, I landed right-side up. The next… Eyeballs are red, water is blue. Why are there poodles? Why can’t I just once, upon a perchloric acid trip of a hangover, wake up in the same Higgsdamn universe I went to bed in? Why is my lazy mucker of a roommate colliding soulmates for a morning concert when there’s a metabetaphysics exam to study for?”
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Three’s a jolly good fallow
Posted in News, Writing Cards and Letters on February 4, 2012
Do you remember last February 29, when I decided to get back into creative writing by writing something each week for a year, inspired by souvenir playing cards and letters of the alphabet? Probably not; I didn’t publicise it much. But it worked; I did, in fact, get back into writing, and although some of the things were hurried and disastrous and a lot of them were not very good, a lot of them were passable and some were very good. One was published in Offshoots and another in a Valentine’s Day chapbook. I’ve made videos of a few of the shorter ones I liked. Some were such surprising ideas that I’d never have thought of them without the playing card prompts, and would never have done anything with those thoughts without the deadline. In most cases, I’m glad I did. I also unexpectedly ended up with a MIDI keyboard, a hastily-coded program that will make rhyming parody ‘lyrics’ given a rhyme scheme, syllable counts, and a list of words, and a hastily-coded add-on to that which would get my Mac to sing. All in all, it was a huge success.
Anyway, my writing side has lain fallow for nearly three years. I’ve accumulated more playing cards, and more ideas. This weekend is another Geneva Writer’s Conference, and another February 29th is coming up. So I’m going to do it again. I’ll start by posting a ‘joker’ on February 29th, and then do a playing card each weekend, perhaps skipping the weekend immediately after the joker. I will make the deadline Sunday noon rather than midnight this time, so I don’t end up tired at work on Monday morning, and I have Sunday afternoon free. I also won’t limit myself to writing; if I happen to be able to finish a video or some software or an interesting diagram one week, I’ll publish that instead. This will probably happen less often, since these things take longer to do, but I’ll leave it as an option.
I have an idea for something to write about other than playing cards, so I’m not certain the cards will always be relevant. Perhaps I’ll do the other thing on the side, or perhaps I’ll use the cards and letters as additional inspiration, or a way of selecting which part of the other idea to tackle on a given week.
The post on the 29th will be a Joker Game like the two I did during the last series, involving sticking together 52 unrelated sentences into a coherent story. It will be not long after I get back from the second JoCo Cruise Crazy, so I’m going to have to think about it a bit while I’m on board. Luckily, I’ve come up with a way to carry the sentences around with me. I already have the sentences, so there’s no need to tweet any at me.
Like this:
A new video! A new video! A new video! A new video!
Posted in Holiday Highlights on January 2, 2012
My boss gave me a new car for Christmas, the very day that I got my new camera, which can take high-speed video. So it seemed natural to combine the two. The soundtrack is ‘A New Car’ from the album ‘Brontosaurus’ by Da Vinci’s Notebook. Paul and Storm (the comedy music duo formed from roughly half of Da Vinci’s Notebook) said they wouldn’t sue me for using it.
The new camera is a Canon PowerShot S100, in case you’re wondering. Most of setup at the beginning was shot with my Canon PowerShot G9 in time-lapse mode, and the rest is shot with the S100 at 240 frames per second, 320×240 pixels. The domino shot looks a bit dim because I tried to do it in natural light, since the flickering of fluorescent light is too noticeable at high speed. The rest was lit with a halogen lamp.
Practically everything went wrong during the making of this video. I learnt:
- Either my dominoes are bad quality (they were from the $2 shop), I’m terrible at setting them up, or dominoes in general are more difficult to set up in a line than one would think. I ended up putting them on their sides.
- Natural light after spending far too long setting up dominoes on a winter afternoon is not bright enough for high-speed video.
- I’m not as good at building houses of cards as I used to be. Or they don’t make playing cards like they used to.
- Natural light after spending far too long setting up dominoes and then spending far too long setting up playing cards on a winter afternoon is not bright enough for high-speed video.
- Halogen lamps don’t flicker at 50Hz.
- A container of glitter hit by a toy car goes a long way.
- When dealing with piles of shaving cream, always know where your towel is.
Maybe I should make a blooper video.
Edit: Oh, alright. I made a blooper video. It uses ‘Incompetent’s Lament‘ by Paul and Storm as the soundtrack, which contains the F word, so if you don’t want to hear it, just turn the sound off.
A video, full of sound and light, signifying Christmas
Posted in Holiday Highlights on December 25, 2011
Last weekend I was on my way to a concert in Lausanne when I came across a building with a light show projected onto it. I stopped to film it in high resolution with my fancy new camera. Later I added appropriate music to the different scenes, to make it a bit more interesting. Here is the result:
Most of this music is explicitly released under a Creative Commons license, and most can be downloaded for free (there are links below), and most comes from artists who generally don’t mind people using their music and don’t have labels that are likely to sue me, but there are a few tracks I didn’t make 100% sure I was allowed to use, so I hope those artists don’t mind being included.
I tried to include as many different artists as possible so that people will discover someone new. The only ones I used twice are Jonathan Coulton (well, he only got a short bit at the beginning) Jonathan Mann (I planned from the beginning to use Penguins Having a Party, not suspecting that he’d written a song in which he said ‘building’ over and over, which is the perfect space-filler in a video of a building) and The Cow Exchange (I had many possibilities for the last song, but this one followed better musically from the one before it.)
I did this fairly quickly, to get it ready by Christmas, so most of the time I just searched my music library for keywords relating to a scene and picked the first song I found that seemed to fit. There may be better matches in songs which don’t happen to have the right keywords in the title, or which I don’t have yet, or which I ignored because I didn’t know what the artist’s or their label’s policy on reuse was.
You can get most of the songs for free, but I encourage you to support the artists if you can, and if you like what they do, of course. The songs are: Read the rest of this entry »
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If I Made Adverts for Hair Gel, Part Two
Posted in The Afterlife on December 24, 2011
This is a mash-up of my first ad for hair gel and the picture Len drew for my video about Jonathan Coulton’s Thing a Week project. I imagine that the two parts would be on sequential odd-numbered pages.
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Video: Anniversary Cards Redux
Posted in The Afterlife on December 3, 2011
Do you remember Anniversary Cards, in which I wrote a ‘Roses are Red’-style poem for each of the songs Jonathan Coulton wrote for his Thing a Week project? Well, recently Jonathan ran a Thing a Week Redux in which he reposted each of the Thing a Week blog entries five years after the original, with some new commentary. Just like during the original Thing a Week, I didn’t get around to reading it very often. However, as I was catching up with it around five weeks from the end, I got the idea of revisiting those Roses are Red rhymes and turning them into a video to celebrate the end of Thing a Week Redux. I didn’t get it done in time, so I saved it for Jonathan’s birthday (December 1) instead. Here’s the video:
That was not specifically made for his birthday, but this other video I was involved with (mostly on ridiculous percussion that didn’t make the cut, and robot choir in the final few verses) was:
It’s based on A Talk With George, which Jonathan has said was his favourite Thing a Week, and rewritten, sung, strummed, mixed, filmed and cut by the great people on Jonathan Coulton’s forums, most of which I have met or will meet in real life at concerts in the UK or on JoCo Cruise Crazy.
And now back to overexplaining the first video.
