Mediascope - Space Scientologists Must Die!!1!

40 minutes of Dead Space 2 gameplay via Giantbomb.com.

Teh Weekly Podcast Hoedown!

Yeehoo buckaroo! I've decided to start a new feature here at Astromen! called 'Teh Weekly Podcast Hoedown' in-which I, Mr. Alex, will provide a digest of the best-est, rootin-est, and tootin-est syndicated sound recordings I've allowed to pass into my mind-holes over the course of the past week (or so). As one of our three regular Astromen! readers, I'm sure you'll really appreciate it. Behold!

'Cyber-Lynching the Troublemakers' via Dan Carlin's unfortunately named Common Sense (rss). Dan delivers a monologue about the revisionist de-radicalization of Martin Luther King and flips the popularly accepted definition of the term 'conspiracy theory' on its head.

'On Death In Tolkien's World' via Corey Olsen's The Tolkien Professor (rss). A fascinating conversation about mortality and immortality in JRR Tolkien's Middle Earth, which explains both the current spiritual state of Dick Cheney and makes elves much more interesting than they ever deserved to be.

'Temperate Rice Permaculture' via The Agroinnovations Podcast (rss). Learn how the future of sustainable food is eel meat harvested from a duck-filled rice paddy grown with your own urine. Onward hippie soldiers!

Axe Cop

Rediscover your inner hyper-active five year old . . .

Axe Cop knew that they would need to chase the Boss to Zombie World.

"We are going to need to change Wexter into a dragon so that he can fly us to Zombie World."

"But he is already a giant lizard that can fly."

"To get to Zombie World you need a dragon with rocket wings. Plus, dragons are awesome."

This web comic was created by a five year old and his 29 year old brother.

Flowspace- Interactive Swarm

Also a curious show about mapping that i probably won't get to see because its in new york
http://www.bitforms.com/current.html#id=144&num=1

Humble Indie Bundle 2

Five games. Pay what you want. You can't lose.
The bundle is available for this week only.

Ghost Diagrams

If you click the 'random' button of this tile assembler repeatedly, you will be rewarded with moments of unique beauty. (Link.) I was pleasantly surprised to find out that its author also wrote the "Resynthesizer" texture synthesis script for the GIMP, which I've found tremendously useful in the past.

Also, this is fun to scribble on.

Pachinko and forgetting

This poetic film-excerpt about pachinko parlors reminds me of one of my favorite films, Sans Soleil. I have not seen the documentary this is from. I believe I might need to travel to Japan to be a kogichi for several years in order to master my art. Link. Via.
Also: This tour of Tokyo's electronics shops circulated a month or two ago. I found it really fascinating.

Meshes in Art History

A few of the more analytic artists of the Renaissance sometimes modeled with geometric meshes. Coincidentally, this is one of the fundamental techniques of computer graphics. Its appearance in the Renaissance shows a playful reductionism at work.

Here is a rudimentary primer on the concepts of mesh modeling. The challenge of this technique is managing your edge loops and poles.

Albrecht Durer
Paulo Uccello

Much of Paulo Uccello's work is bound up in the technical demonstration of mechanical perspective. This was before the technique of perspective became ossified and pedantic. A checkered torus sometimes appears in his murals and drawings as a show of technical mastery. They look like invaders from another plane of reality.

Pure Data

Alex, I think you probably know about this already. But you really should if you don't, because it might be a useful addition to your musical work-flow:

Pure Data is a visual programming environment for (mainly) sound and music. It was the musical back-end to Spore. Visual programming, in itself, is really fascinating, but I've found it's never quite practical. The patch cable is the metaphor to which it seems best suited. Blender also utilizes the node-and-noodle processing scheme quite a lot, mainly for post-processing of rendered frames, but also for texture synthesis, and, experimentally, for parametric meshes. I first heard about Pure Data watching this python talk.

Below is the talking piano...

Ruminations on Brazil

A couple weeks ago, Thomas Gideon, of the Command Line Podcast, posted a thoughtful appreciation of Terry Gilliam's movie, from a programmer's point-of-view. -> Link.