Blog : Favorite YouTube Videos (Volume 12)

This volume of my Favorite YouTube Videos is a mix of interesting vlogs and childhood memories.

• The first video is another vlogbrothers video (and there's going to be a lot of these for the next little bit). John's discussion of Healthcare reform is interesting on its own, but I really like the visuals added by ThoughtBubble.
• The second video is the theme to Today's Special, which I think was my favorite television show as a kid. I don't have much to say about the intro, but it makes me happy.
• The third video is from another favorite show from my childhood, Under the Umbrella Tree. It's interesting in that the show's producer (Noreen Young) managed to get some of the rights back for the show and begin selling the dvds (sadly the shop is now closed) and posting the episdoes to YouTube. Unfortunately I don't remember why I've favorited the second part (rather than the first), but all of the episodes are still pretty cool, even when viewed as an adult.
• The fourth video is another from the Hank's songs that were at a few times a weekly (or bi-weekly) feature of the vlogbrothers. This one was originally released for father's day (as the topic might make you guess). I think (although I'm not sure), that the animation was done by Hank's business partner Alan Distro.
•  The fifth video is one of my all time favorite vlogbrothers' videos in which Hank describes to us the 13 movie canon arm removals of Star Wars.

Blog : Cool Things on September 21, 2012

So I found some more cool things this week (and I even got some of my own work done). I'm please to share the cool things I found below.

Lectures

While I'm not able to find video from the talk (although it may materialize), this week I attended the seventh Richard and Louise Guy Lecture which this year was on the Mathematics of Doodling.

A view of the 7th Richard and Louise Guy Lecture.

The Department of Mathematics at University of Calgary has hosted this talk for several years now (arranged by Louise as a 90th birthday gift for Richard) and it is always informative and interesting without being bogged down. In pervious years the topic has ranged including areas such as knot theory and the mathematics of music and they have always left me more excited to explore than I was going in.

Sadly Louise passed away several years ago, but Richard continues to attend the lectures (and others, including some classes each year) and it is always encouraging to see his life long love of learning. (If one may be so hokey as to say it that way).

I hope the lectures serve as a model and that we can see more and more interesting talks that continue to inspire us to be better question askers and answer finders.

Blogs

One cool thing I found this week is Day[9]'s blog. Day[9] or Sean Plott (as the non-gaming world knows him), is a former pro Starcraft player and now pro Starcraft II shout caster (and host of the Day[9] Daily). Whether or not you're interested in e-sports and better ways to play Starcraft II, it's still worth taking the time to take a look at the blog. Day[9]'s interests go well beyond the realm of video games and he is a very astute and interesting speaker and writer. (Also you can watch him making a perfume with Felica Day on her Flog this week.)

Video

You might have seen this already given the names involved, but this week, for reasons only known to the deepest oldest minds of the universe the Nerdist manage to revive two things people haven't seen in a long time. Ben Folds Five and the Fraggles. Got something you don't want to do? "Do it anyway!" (Then watch the video.)

Former Five Awesome Girls Monday Kristina Horner and her housemates/co-star launched a new gaming channel called TeamHypercube. They're doing a mix of table-top gaming and video games and the first video game they've tackled Dokapon Kingdom is ... interesting to say the least.

Over the last few months the sports racers (are the viewers even still called that, duck fans maybe now) of a show have been working with Ze and Mr.Norman to put together a song and a video ... and this is it:

Wrap-up

Wanna know how Chris Hardwick managed to make muppetty goodness for us this year? Well now you will:

Project 5 : SNES Geek Coasters

One of the problems I face on a semi-regular basis (at least whenever I host a D & D session) is that I don't have enough coasters and that the coasters I do have are just not cool enough. Fortunately the Internet has reminded me that this doesn't need to be an on-going problem and that I can do something cool to fix it.

As such, my next big project is going to be SNES Geek Coasters made from pearler beads.

I was inspired to this idea from two sources, one is a mario coin I bought at the Calgary Comic Expo this year and the other is a set of fridge magnets I saw on Pinterest (which were mis-labeled as coasters).

The coin over my desk. From my photo-project with a friend Seven-Fifty-Two-by-Two.

Fridge Magnets with retro style - found on Pinterest sourced from gadgetsin.com

Pearler beads work well with retro-video game concept because it's easy to put beads in for each pixel. This means that all I have to do to find plans is to hunt down the sprite sheets for any game I'm looking for. Then all I have to do is match the beads to the pixels, load them onto a hedgehog tray and iron. Or not, this may prove to be harder than I've imagined, but I do have my childhood memories saying this is pretty easy and it may be harder to get the sprites that I want.

My first thought was to go with the question mark blocks from Super Mario World, but the more I've been thinking the more I'm interested in trying for some RPGs of the era (Secret of Mana especially) since they're likely to get hauled out during RPG session most often.

My goal is to have at least a prototype version of these up and running by November 1, 2012.

Project 2: The Ogre Manager : Update

You may have noticed that the second project I started, The Ogre Manager, has gone unmentioned for a very long time. There are three main reasons for this, the fact that I fell behind doing everything with the blog is the first, the second is that I didn't give myself a deadline to finish by and the third (and most interesting) is that I don't know that I really want the Ogre Manager in the way I outlined it in the first post.

As I mentioned in the first post is that the origin of the Ogre Manager was a sketch pad which I kept track of all my unit levels on and I did the math using my old high-school Casio calculator. I really enjoyed the "meditative" nature and the hand-made nature of doing it this way. I always felt like I was losing that when I used the spreadsheet and that the Ogre Manager was also going to be a little to "technical".

So, I'm re-organizing the project and introducing The Paper Ogre Manager. 

I decided to make this as nice as possible, so I started by getting a set of large moleskine cahier with ruled squares. I'm going to include 4 graphs which outline the average level for each unit, the average front-attack (or best-attack) power for each unit, the average alignment, and the accumulated experience (or possibly percentage of calculated experience). I will also track these in a table as well.

It's still probably a month or so before it really feels like Ogre Battle time to me (I think I may be a type of reverse plant I can only play Ogre Battle once I'm not getting enough light), but now that I have this set up I'll be ready. I may still tackle the software version at some point, mostly for the programming practice