jwz: 23-Jul-2013 (Tue)

DNA Lounge: Wherein it's almost Kickstarter Time.

Hopefully we'll be launching a kickstarter to pay for our parklet soon! Our architect has been ridiculously generous and donated all of his design and engineering work, but the materials are still going to run us almost $10k.

It's a really cool design, too! You'll see.

Parklets are weird in that, while we have to pay for it, it's not really ours. They exist in that gray area of sidewalks: you don't really own your sidewalk, though you're responsible for it, so the bargain you make with the City in order to take back some parking spaces and turn them into something nice is that you have to foot the construction bill, even though the thing you build is technically a public park.

Anyway, we've got a pretty cool list of Kickstarter incentives that we've come up with, but if you have any good ideas, please suggest them now! We'll probably be launching it in a week or two, depending on how quickly Steen gets finished shooting our video.

One of the obvious-but-good ones is a Golden Ticket: free admission for you and a friend to every show for a year.

Meanwhile I've been putting in extremely long hours down at the Vertex Mines, obsessing over the 3D models of this thing. "Working on my dollhouse", I usually call it.

Recent photo galleries:

Western SOMA Plan

Bootie

A Dying Sun

Gram Rabbit

Atlas Obscura

8 Bit Weapon

Comment at DNA Lounge

Tags: dnalounge

Location: 37° 46' 15.63" N, 122° 24' 45.70" W

Some recent Kickstarters

10 years ago

These look cool:

Tangiers - Stealth gameplay meets the darker avant-garde of the 20th century.

Reality here is a fragile place. Your interactions with the world cause it to fall apart. In homage to Burrough's cut-up technique, the world collapses and rebuilds itself the more you interact with it - future areas rebuilt with the fragments and personality of places you mistreated. From this every play-through will, subtly or drastically, be unique to you.
The fragile state is inherent in the entire setting. The spoken words of its inhabitants materialize physically - collect the frustrations of a guard unable to locate you and use them to distract, mislead and spread disinformation. Gather the intimate words of an illicit conversation and use them to unveil secrets, hidden pockets within the city. Turn them into reality - a character mentions rats and you can turn his words into a devouring swarm of them.

He Took His Skin Off For Me - a Practical SFX short film.

It's the small things. The stains. She has to wash the sheets every day. At night he gets cold, so they have to turn up the heat. This means more bills. And gas isn't cheap...
In fact, money is more of a problem than ever. He's losing clients at work and they begin to fight about it. She tells him they're the wrong clients anyway.
Old friends come over for dinner, but the party does not go well. He is quiet and withdrawn. The house is covered in stains - more than she can possibly clean.

Jill Tracy's new video for her old song, Pulling My Insides Out.

After winning several film festival awards, grand prizes, and accolades, Ice Cream Ants is slated to be released to the public for the first time with a new director's cut. "Pulling Your Insides Out" is the end title song to the film, so Jeremy thought it befitting to create a new music video to coincide with its online release.

Previously, previously.

Tags: art, firstperson, movies, music, parts, toys

Numbers Stations: Always Awesome.

10 years ago

"Turn off the lights. And drink a cold glass of water. Something is going to happen. In sixty-five days."

Since 2010, a YouTube channel called Pronunciation Book has regularly posted videos with a simple white background and a word in black font. Over it, a voice teaches non-English speakers how to say certain words and phrases in English -- "Sausage McMuffin" or "yield." The young male voice also teaches viewers how to have simple English interactions like "How to State an Unpleasant Fact" and "How to Politely End a Business Meeting."
In the past three years, this channel has posted more than 700 videos, gained 27,000 subscribers, and even inspired a parody account. But a week ago Pronunciation Book abruptly stopped what it'd been doing and started posting one creepy, cryptic video a day, counting down from "77" until Sept. 24, 2013. The videos show the number and then the same voice delivers a couple of seemingly random sentences and then ominously concludes, "Something is going to happen in X days."

It's an unexpected and bizarre about-face that makes little sense and is a little bit scary.
The only people that seem to be dissecting this weirdness is 4chan's /x/ board, devoted to conspiracy theories and the paranormal. /x/ has compiled the "77 Days Research Document," a 36-page Google Doc where the members of the board have pooled their information about Pronunciation Book. They're trying to uncover who is behind the channel, what the cryptic messages mean, and anything else they can find to make sense of the channel's abrupt change.
The messages in the countdown videos thus far have been:
77: "Something is going to happen in 77 days."
76: "I've been trying to tell you something for 1,183 days."
75: "I'm awake now. Things are clearing up. I'm not saying the words anymore."
74: "I've got a minute, let me tell you what I think is going on."
73: "Tension between the districts has spiked in the last few months."
72: "You can see it in the markets. Everyone's ready for a storm."
69: "No one is ready. He watches the market."
68: "I'm not talking about a disaster, I'm talking about a love triangle."
67: "We fell into the jungle for a summer of dollar crime."
66: "We were young heroes, gorgeous liars."
65: "Turn off the lights, and drink a cold glass of water."
64: "No one is singing. Every day is the same."