http://www.youtube.com/user/AfterworldTV

it’s a computer-animated show about a guy who wakes up one day to find that 99.9% of the population gone, and all ‘technology’ that runs on anything more sophisticated than a DC battery is broken.

now he’s trying to figure out what happened and walk across the country in case some of his family survived.
adventures ensue.

it’s being posted in 3 minute installments on youtube.
there is a new one EVERY SINGLE DAY!

ack!

there are already more than 150 episodes, and i’m only on episode 45 so i guess it could all go to crap but so far it’s addictive.
they are pausing for a few weeks now to let people catch up and then spread crazy theories on message boards while simultaneously debunking the other crazy theories that all the STUPID people are coming up with because, srsly?! WTF are they thinking and why can’t they spell?
;)

so far i am abstaining from spreading my half-baked theories and complaining about plot twists because i would rather just laugh at the comments and eat popcorn.

though i will say that if I wake up tomorrow and the apocalypse came in my sleep and my car won’t start and i want to go 3,000 miles for kicks?
i’m making friends with a horse.

Powell endorses Obama and speaks out against the blatant bigotry inherent in the “I’m worried he might be Muslim” argument.

go read rice boy now.
so simple, so nuanced, so gorgeous.
i’m hooked.

but it’s the best one i encountered this year by far.
i mean damn, that’s cool.

no, i don’t know the dude. the pic is immortalized on flickr.

thanks to the ReadyMade magazine blog for pointing the way.

that’s what i really meant to say.

miyazaki is the best there is.

i know i make a lot of references to stuff i want to post about but don’t, and you may or may not know that i think and scribble about many things that i don’t even manage to refer to obliquely in what survives the grueling gauntlet of distraction to make it into post form, but, fwiw, if you want a fun introduction to one of the concepts (arguably The concept) that drives the distribution of my interests across the worlds of design, the internet, cognitive science, developmental psychology, consciousness, mysticism, drugs, public health, and politics, have a listen to this radiolab episode on emergence.

it’s an hour long, but do what i do: listen while you wash the dishes. or eat. or put together a jigsaw puzzle of warholesque popart lips. ok maybe that last one’s not on your list, but tif and i had fun at the toy store the other day, so the gauntlet lengthens. :)

and sign up for their podcast while you’re at it, eh? folks do a damn fine bit of radio programming. even if the ideas aren’t new to you, i bet it’ll make you smile, and think a bit, and maybe ask me a question. and thus the march of progress continues. ;)

i’m purging my old drafts and i found this, which isn’t really a draft, and to which i really don’t need to add much.
it was copied from post secret.

—–Email Message—–
Subject: It’s not a secret any more

Dear Frank,

I recently sent you a postcard with one of my secrets on it, and having told the whole internet it didn’t seem like such a big deal any more. Last week I told one of my friends and I feel so much better. I think from now on I might send all my postcards to my friends rather than you.

Here’s hoping you never get another postcard from me.

and by unannotated i just mean “don’t worry; no spoilers.” ;)

• things that draw and hold your interest are rarely random.
• it is impossible to reveal (or understand) everything at once.
• it is never wise to believe that you are doing anything on your own.
• to consider the opinions of those you love is to plumb the depths of the lessons you are trying to learn yourself.
• sometimes you must choose to believe based on trust, but this does not mean that you are closing yourself down to new information.
• a willingness to believe in extraordinary things is often defensively dismissed as foolishness or danger by those who would rather not be bothered.
• “the last enemy that shall be destroyed is death” does not mean that worthy adversaries seek immortality.
• the only true path to the greater good is to pursue your own good so deeply that you understand your whole self to be only one piece of a much larger whole.
• love will always see more than fear, for it gazes upon the world with eyes fully open.

nothing new, it’s true, but all well played, so a step forward, i believe, in the struggle that inspires all stories of good vs. evil.
which is to say, all stories.
which is to say, life.

so well met, ms. rowling.
may your characters rest in peace, but their powers live on.

i installed a captcha plugin on my blog.

this means that when you want to comment, you get to play one of those little games where you type in letters to prove that you are not a robot (sorry victor ;).

i have been thinking of doing this for a while, but never got around to it, until today when i was pushed over the edge by the discovery of the cleverest distributed computing idea since seti@home. and maybe even cleverer. cuz aliens? they might already be here kicking back with some watermelon while they wait for us to wise up a bit. did you see my pictures from last weekend?

the captcha program i found, however, is all about the improvement of our earthly existence. it is called recaptcha, and it works by fusing two pieces of tedious data entry - captcha verification and OCR proofreading - into one handy package. in short, every time you comment on my site, you are helping to create a more complete digital library for us all. as the recaptcha site explains:

About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that’s not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into “reading” books.

this is so unbelievably clever that i cannot get over it. and since it took about ten minutes to sign up and pimp my website with the already built wordpress plugin that handles all the computer talky talk, well… let’s just say i can already check “further the revolution in some small way before lunch” off my todo list for the day.

and that just makes a body feel good, ya know?
:)

thanks, as often, to lifehacker for the heads up.

now back to saturday blogroll catchup. fun, ain’t it?

rock on, blue monster.
you won me back.