Happy 18th (you can buy beer in Quebec and Alberta now!) to Josiah “Si” Adam! Also, happy birthday to Richard “crysflame” Soderberg (who has forgotten more Perl than I will ever learn)!
Categories
Month: February 2005
David “Ranting and Roaring” Janes reminded me that there’s a gathering of Accordion City’s and elsewhere in Canada’s more right-leaning bloggers tonight at The Bishop and Belcher (361 Queen Street West, between Peter and John Streets). Things get started at about 8 p.m.
The “Belcher” is a mere couple of blocks from my house, but come that time, I’ll be settling down to dinner with Wendy in Boston, so I must send my regrets.
I believe these folks will be among those in attendance:
- Bob “Let It Bleed” Tarantino
- Rick “Boomer Deathwatch” McGinnis
- special out-of-province guest Damian “Daimnation!” Penny
Next time, folks, but have a drink for me!
[via Jamie Zawinski]
You’ve probably seen those adapters which have a 1/8″ stereo audio jack
at one end leading to a cable leading to a cassette-shaped thingy at
the other end. They’re handy for situations in which you have a
portable MP3 player that you want to hook up to your non-MP3-playing
car stereo or the old-school ghetto blaster at the cottage.
Here’s an interesting twist on that theme: Mobiblu’s DAH-220…
The MP3 player is built into the cassette-shaped shell.
The best thing about this player is its interface: it’s shaped like a
cassette and goes into to your cassette player, but it also behaves
like a cassette, user-interface-wise. It has sensors in the spindles so
you can use your cassette player’s “fast forword” and “rewind controls”
to jump from song to song. Want to record? Click the “record” button on
your cassette player, and it records audio data coming into your
cassette recorder.
Clever!
[via stridingcloud and xophylia] This is what the subway map of Accordion City actually looks like (click to see a larger image):
A good chunk of the city — particularly the north end — is underserved by it. Here’s what it probably should look like (once again, click to see a larger image):
Xophylia has also created a scalable PDF version of the dream subway map for you fantasy cartographers to study in detail.
The gold-coloured line’s east-west stretch would be nice, but it doesn’t serve a very population-dense area. If I had to pick one line from the dream map to add to the subway, I’d add the Sheppard-Etobicoke line (the purple line that spans the north end of the city). That entire line would serve a population-dense part of town bristling with high-rises that’s currently served by buses. It would also give us what a proper city has: an airport subway stop!
Accordion City locals: your comments, please!
While most things happen in New York City in the Marvel Universe (the milieu of most Marvel Comics), its superheroes often go to other cities. I’ve only recently read Wolverine/Doop (Wolverine’s the most popular X-Man, and Doop is a green mutant blob — kind of like Slimer from Ghostbusters — from the X-Men spinoff comic X-Statix), which takes place here in Accordion City — and features a lot of my local haunts in the backgrounds…
College Street West, Compressed. Note the locations: Cafe Diplomatico, The Orbit Room, the Royal Cinema, the Lava Lounge (which sadly, is closed as it’s being turned into a condo) and Dragon Lady Comics.
All are on College Street West, but not this close together — and the
street would have to run northwest/southeast for the financial district
building and the CN Tower to be visible. Still, it’s nifty seeing
places where I hang out depicted in an X-Men spinoff comic book.
Doop and Wolvie Racing Down the Annex. Featured in this Panel are Suspect Video and renowned comic book store The Beguiling.
That’s Ontario Place’s Cinesphere in the background.
I haven’t been to the Brunswick House since they remodelled and stopped being such a dive.
“Nooooooooooo-body!” You’d have to be from Toronto to get that joke. That’s former mayor (and a bit of a joke, at that) Mel Lastman. The proper honorific for the mayor here is “His Worship”, but we tended to refer to him as “His Washup”. And yes, CityTV is a local station (here’s its glowing write-up in Wired) a couple of blocks from my house.
Racing Down Spadina! The Silver Dollar Room is the home of a few of my misadventures and a couple of Meryle’s burlesque numbers. Remember Adventures in Babysitting — “Nobody leave dis place until dey sing dee blues?” That’s the Silver Dollar Room.
Categories
Signs of Life at IndieGameDev
Yup, new articles (finally!) posted to one of the blogs I get paid to
write, IndieGameDev, a blog for independent game developers. There are
three articles today:
- Digger: A “Boulderdash”-Style Game Implemented in .NET
- The Women’s Game Conference, which takes place in Austin, Texas on October 26th – 27th
- The cheapest book on game authoring for Mac OS X you’ll ever find: Cocoa Game Programming Workshop — US$9.95
Spacing magazine and the Toronto Free Gallery are presenting PUBLICity,
a five-week photo exhibit featuring the work of the city’s top photobloggers:
- Jonathan Day-Reiner
- Sam Javanrouh
- Adam Krawesky
- Davin Risk
- Matt O’Sullivan
- Gayla Trail
- Rannie Turingan
The exhibit will show their photos of Accordion City’s “urban landscape and
public spaces” and “showcase the variety of life that arises from our unique city”. If you were at the last GTABloggers Christmas party, you probably some many of these photobloggers’ works in the slideshow projected on my living room wall.
The exhibit will start with a launch party on Thursday March 17 from 7 to 10 p.m. at the Toronto Free Gallery (660 Queen Street West). The exhibit will be at the Toronto Free Gallery from March 16th through April 23rd.