helen-louise's journal

Shop Vac - Jonathan Coulton. Kinetic typography animation by jmheather.
So ridiculously clever and geeky. Amazing use of fonts and clip art. Really worth watching!


( See below for Muppets, and new Eureka Machines. )

Hey! Hello! - How I Survived The Punk Wars (Official Video)
The first video from Ginger Wildheart's new Hey! Hello! "pop" music project. Very sweary and quite hilarious:


You can tell it's a Ginger song because I was singing along to the chorus halfway through the first listen :) And it amuses me greatly since the chorus could, very easily, be adopted by campaigners for Real Science against Psuedoscientific Bollocks.

Yesterday my Mac suddenly lost the ability to connect to the internet. I thought this meant that our ADSL was down, or the router had crashed (we've been having fairly lousy connectivity the past few days), but rebooting the router didn't help. It later transpired that I had perfectly fine connectivity from the eeePC. After trying various sensible things myself, I waited for Richard to get home - and it turned out the Mac's keychain had randomly corrupted itself. People who know about Macs say this is a Bad Thing.

The thing is, I'm sure that usually when users go to tech support people and say "I haven't done anything to the computer, it just stopped working", usually they have changed something and forgotten about it. In this case, I hadn't done anything at all. Half an hour previously, it worked. Then suddenly, it didn't. Huh.

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I really need to clear out some of the tabs that are sitting around in my browser waiting for me to write about them. But I still don't have a lot of energy, so anything I say will be brief.

Videos:
Topless Robot: I Would Not Like to Fight 300 Naked Orcs, Personally. A load of level 1 characters in World of Warcraft teamed up to attack one of the toughest bosses in the game. The video is hilarious even if you don't know anything about WoW (as long as you're vaguely aware of video games in general, I suppose).

Sparkfun: Yarn Monster. Richard found this on Sparkfun's site and told me I should link it for all my knitting friends. It's a robot that turns messy yarn into neat balls. Awesome!

Storycorps: Q & A. Animation drawn over a real-life soundtrack of a 12 year-old boy with Asperger's syndrome interviewing his mother. May require tissues, may be triggery (e.g. if you are on the autistic spectrum and do not have such a loving, accepting parent).

Top Five Panda Cheese commercials. Very odd TV adverts for an Egyptian cheese, featuring an utterly adorable panda. Or is he?

Articles:
Fire and Ice on a Platter. I can't remember quite how I found this, but it's an article about the science behind the dessert Baked Alaska. It's very interesting for cooks and science-types alike.

Autism's First Child. Article about/interview with the first person ever to be diagnosed as autistic.

BBC News: A Real Good Samaritan and Your Good Samaritan stories. It made me cry.

Bad Science: Putting a number in its context. The rebuttal to the rather scary recent news story that 600 women had become pregnant despite the contraceptive implant. On a similar note, A new and interesting form of wrong. What's wrong with the recent Stonewall report that “the average coming out age has fallen by over 20 years”.

Silliness:
WALRUS ALLERGIES ARE A SERIOUS ISSUE. From sherlockbbc_fic.

A video in which OK Go (them of the treadmills and Heath Robinson contraptions) play with DOGS and IKEA FURNITURE! (Seriously, everything they use is from IKEA. I worry about the fact I recognised this).

Very silly song. No subtitles, unfortunately - but the video might be worth watching regardless:


Sorry that all I seem to be doing these days is popping in, posting a weird video and going away again. Currently in too much pain to type and have some sort of throat infection. Am too lacking in spoons for coherent content. Bah!

I'm having a great degree of neophobia because it's all new and strange, so I've been downloading Mac versions of all of my existing software. OpenOffice for Mac turns out to be absolutely identical to OpenOffice for Windows and for the eeePC (whatever linux that is), so I'm delighted with that. Firefox too seems identical. Less happy with Opera, which doesn't quite behave the same way - that could be an Opera 9 versus Opera 10 issue, though.

I can now GET WORK DONE from home!! I actually logged in to the server at college and dumped X windows back onto the display here, and rotated molecules about on the screen. Oooh. Actually doing work would be easier if I had a mouse, however. The mouse that's supposed to be provided was out of stock so I've got to wait for it to turn up.

Also, there is a video making program called Photo Booth which could well be the biggest time sink EVER...



The subtitles on that video get out of sync with the speech in the middle but then sort themselves out again by the end. Very odd! I did them using YouTube's automatic English subtitler, and I guess I should have inserted a few more line breaks when I was going 'Er' and moving around. Not bad for automatic though, is it?

Wish it was possible to customise the GUI of a Mac like you can other unix-based OSes. I'll get used to it, of course - it'll just take more than a couple of hours to get comfortable.

Just finished that email. That would be, er, 8 hours that I've spent dealing with this issue, which is basically a normal working day. Great. An entire day of possible productivity lost.

Going to try to go to the doctor in the morning, which will be interesting as I haven't gone to bed yet. Need to get some help with the many and varied symptoms of stress that my body is showing, as well as updating him about my current medication status. (I upped my dose of carbamazepine from 400 to 450 mg two weeks ago, and I need advice about what to do next.)

In happier and much more amusing news, here is an absolutely brilliant video! I can't remember who originally linked to it, but I'm pretty sure it's someone who isn't already on all my friends' lists: Video: Stop Sign Designed by Committee. Too true!

It's 4 am. Why am I still up? Evidently I need to post all the videos that I have cluttering up tabs in my browser history.

Nom Nom Nom Nom Nom Nom Nom. Incredibly catchy high-pitched silly song accompanying a video of cute creatures eating. I'm sure you've all seen this before because it was posted on livejournal while I was in Boston a month ago, but just in case you need cheering up and baby animals do it for you...

Again, I think most people have seen this already, but it is both Scientific and Musical, so therefore deserves to be spread some more. World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale (sound essential). Having got the audience to sing two notes of the scale by jumping between positions on the stage, it is amazing when he jumps to a third place (as yet untaught), and the audience intuitively sing the correct note. Some people have argued in the comments on Vimeo that it is Western-scale-centric to assume that this knowledge is innate and that people from other cultures with different tuning patterns would have a different expectation, but it's still really cool to observe.

There are also two videos where Bobby McFerrin improvises "songs", which are really interesting because he uses other parts of his body as well as his voice as musical instruments. He can sing in chords and use his chest as percussion. Song One. Song Two. I like the second song a lot.  

The Worst FanFiction Of All Time: Halos in Space (needs Flash, no subtitles). stellarwind tells me that some of the stories on FanFiction.net are so bad, people made videos with readings of them. This scares me. As does the grammar in the following excerpt: "Joe Chief had to fly fast and go a round tings liek alien ships and things. Then out of no where BOOM happend and the back of the espcape ship fell open n one of the army guys fell out and explodd in space then another one closed it and said "NOOOOO HE WAS MY BROTHER!" and then got tired and slept." My brain hurts now.

Lobster Magnet (needs Flash & has subtitles). A silly pastiche of bad shouty thrash metal, which apparently dates from 2000. Not sure how I've managed to miss it for so long. Features epic lines such as "Magnet's made of iron, lobster made of meat", "Don't put a lobster on a plate. He'll use his magnet to escape!" and "Left claw north, right claw south". Will probably appeal to people who like Homestar Runner and Weebl songs.

Finally, a video I found all by myself: Pok&Watch by MewtwoEx150 on YouTube (sound not necessary). Shows rather amusingly what Pokemon would have looked like if it had come out at the time of the Game & Watch.

Bed now, it's several hours past my bedtime :) Well, you know, I post to livejournal in bursts - nothing for days then 3 or 4 posts all at once...

Linked by aegidian: Surreal song by Lemon Demon: 123456 Pokemon. Video by Neil Cicierega, who I believe is Lemon Demon, so I'm not sure why the song and video are credited separately, but... He still has too much talent, damn him.

Linked by several people: Take On Me: Literal Video Version. If you have seen people on Teh Intarnets saying PIPE WRENCH FIGHT!, it's because of this video. Should be hilarious for all 80s kids (and anyone older who had a secret crush on Morten Harket anyway).

Linked by wild_irises and firecat: McCain Can't Type, but YES WE CAN! People using assistive technology devices (including the very lovely stonebender) point out that "war injuries" are hardly an excuse for not using a computer. Also available with subtitles. Of course, it's pro-Obama.

More US politics, linked by xiphias: Obama as Batman. Not sure who's responsible for the painting, but the video rather makes it.

Linked by clawfoot, and possibly the best of the lot: Vinni Puh Goes Visiting. The Soviet Russian version of Winnie the Pooh cartoons from 1971. I like it so much better than the Disney version. Vinni Puh has CLAWS, like a real bear! And is brown, like a real bear! (Are there any species of bear that are blond?). I'm actually going to check out the rest of the posted Vinni Puh episodes, because it's awesome.

I got distracted and I've forgotten if I was going to post anything else. My computer is having 1:00 again, which means it's probably time for bed.

There are still too many tabs open in my web browser. Unfortunately most of them are pages from the same health-related site, and I still lack sufficient spoons to write about it, so they'll have to stay there. Ugh.

Tor.com blog post: Science that made me smile. About the platypus, and how its genome turns out to be as bizarre as the creature itself. Linked by mactavish, I think.

YouTube video: Protecting and Maintaining Your Heterosexual House of Cards. A short and hilarious "documentary" which explains, among other things, while apparently-straight young men Do Not Make Eye Contact with each other. Linked by rosefox.

Advance Directives/Mad Maps/Plans For Not Getting Too Crazy. Advance directives are "official"-type documents that you give to a doctor while sane and healthy to tell them how you'd like to be treated when insane and unhealthy. Mad maps are more informal documents agreed between you and your friends/support people. Quite an interesting idea, especially from the point of view of preventing yourself getting too bad by having your own checklist of symptoms relevant-to-you. There's some really good stuff on page 2 with a bunch of headings that can be used. Anyway, random linkage in case it's useful for anyone.