2 Flat 2 Furious

Now, if you're anything like me you've had no end of trouble visualizing what fourth dimensional figures would look like. Yeah, we've all seen that little animated gif of that spinny tesseract on wikipedia. And if we can model 3D objects in 2D, surely the same can be said of higher dimensions?

But no, I just don't get 4D space. That is, until I read Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, the OG dimensional thought experiment written in 1884 by one Edwin A. Abbot. Now I still don't get 4D space but I understand why and more about how a fourth dimensional being would view three dimensional us. The novella takes place in Flatland, and it's about a square who spends most of the time describing flat society and how they roll. Then, he has a vision of Lineland, and receives a visit from a fantastical sphere, who introduces him to spaceland and beyond.

Really, pick this book up. You can probably even read it for free because I can't imagine a world where it's not in the public domain, and it's very neat and surprisingly readable to the modern eye.

Let's get straight to the point, though. The back cover promised "sex between consenting triangles." Now, the way things work in flatland is that all the figures are male and the women are lines, and the gay sex thing was Not Done back in those days. Needless to say, there is absolutely nothing titillating in any way about this book. Not that that's a bad thing given the subject matter, but it really bothers me when they outright lie to you about the contents on the back of a book.

Pattern Fight, Day One

A package came in the mail! It was none other than my materials for one of the entries in the Pattern Fight, Vogue 2556. Let's open 'er up.

The contents of the mailing envelope oozed forth. I was pretty happy with the colors; I had been a little nervous about ordering them based on the color shown on my laptop monitor. The green is a polyester for the under flap part. It felt about how I expected. The blue is a bamboo/cotton blend and it feels very soft. Both are knits per the pattern requirements. In retrospect, it was really really dumb to get these colors since the winner gets to go to a friend's wedding, and the bride is wearing blue with the wedding party in green. I'm reasonably certain that they're very different shades of blue and green, and the groom has assured me that nothing I wear to this thing is going to be a faux pas, but still. Is this going to be enough to disqualify this dress from the competition?

Magnus, the official cat of Superlemons, was eager to help, as always. There was a hole in the middle of the blue. I was able to place the pieces around it with no trouble. Even so, not cool, fabric.com. Not cool. I cut all the pieces and spent like half an hour putting in tailor's tacks. Now, before I had only encountered them in vintage patterns and quickly dismissed them as overly fastidious old-timey nonsense. However, they have well made up for the effort I put into placing them, and now I am born again tailor's tacker. Hallelujah!

The day ended with the dress partially assembled. It's both more and less complicated then it looks like on the envelope. However, I've reached the point where I need some snap tape to continue, which fabric.com didn't stock and I've had trouble finding locally for a reasonable price. I have a budget to consider and a whole 'nother dress to build, after all.

Pattern Fight!

So my recent trip to Pennsylvania to visit relatives further reinforced a bizarre hypothesis I had first posed in Boone, NC: thrift stores in hick towns have the best haul. Now, I don't know the distribution models, but I have to assume that the items in thrift stores are donated locally, and people in hick towns have limited access to the good stuff, and, to make a terrible generalization, have no taste. And yet there's a high frequency of Banana Republic stuff and one time a tank top from Top Shop down at Ram's Rack.

So we went to this place in a neighboring town (I guess slightly better because it had a movie theater) which had an extremely sweet haul. My limited funds and even more limited closet space prohibited me from stocking up on old bowling shirts, the most ridiculous fur coat in the world (only $10) and some sweet hats, but I did pick up two vintage patterns AND a Vogue Issey Miyake pattern for like two bucks. Awesome!

Which brings us to the bout of the century: Pattern Fight. I'm going to to construct both of these patterns on this very blog. The winner, voted on by MY FAITHFUL READERS (both of you?) gets worn to this wedding I gotta go to. Let's meet the contenders!


Team Simplicity 4944:
This copacetic little bird may be getting up there in years, but we still think it's the berries. It didn't come with the original envelope and there's no date printed on the directions. The company also had two other patterns with the same number which complicates finding information. Judging by the price (65 cents) and the cut I'm going to guess late 60s or 70s. I'm going to go for View 1, but I'll probably revisit 2 in the future if it comes out okay.

Team Vogue 2556:
This pattern is stiff competition, due to the involvement of big name Japanese designer Issey Miyake, who survived the atomic bomb to give the world the Pleats Please collection. But like so much high fashion, is this 2001 pattern too funky for its own good? I say the crazier the better, but I am concerned about the potential waist-negating effect. I'll be doing the dress A, the skirt is not a length that suits me and I can't afford to make a thing AND furnish my own top.

The fabric for 2556 has been ordered and construction will begin once it arrives and I track down some elusive snap tape. For 4944 I'll check around the house and see if any of my existing stash is up to the task. Gentlemen, the game is afoot.

Newsy Bits

Sorry it's been a while, I've been a bit lazy lately. I was going to do an exciting theremin build series of posts, but I got my hands on my state income tax refund and it wasn't quite enough. It will buy me college applications though, and that's a whole bunch of adventures waiting to happen. For those not in the know I'm wanting to go back to school for textile engineering. It's a fascinating field and I truly believe that high tech fibers are going to be the next big thing. Also, I wouldn't say no to a job in the fashion industry.

Picked up the first issue of the Doom Patrol relaunch this week. Not only is it Doom Patrol but there's a Metal Men side story in each issue as well! It started out a little slow but I'm going to pick up the next one for sure!

Now, I had a whole host of problems getting my laptop into working order. It's a Toshiba Satellite about six years old and I had stopped using it when I had a hard drive failure a few years ago. I picked up a new hard drive and a power cord to replace the one I lost, but once it was up and running it wouldn't stay on very long. So I had to get some Torx screwdrivers to open up the panel with the CPU and the heatsink (Phillips is good enough for every other panel on the thing) and cleaned it out and put in new thermal grease. In my infinite wisdom I put Ubuntu on it, which is a whole 'nother set of problems, but it's running great now. Unfortunately, no sooner did I get it into shape than the desktop developed a problem. A "won't turn on and smells like burning" problem. I don't have the parts to diagnose it but I suspect it's the power supply. Ah well, at least I have some way of getting my sweet, sweet dose of forums and hilarious videos.

On the gaming front, I resumed my third playthrough of Fatal Frame III, which deserves a post to itself, and realized just how nice it was to have someone in your bed at night after getting molested by the grim specters of sacrifice victims.

The Greatest Auto Dealer Commercial of All Time

To the educated connoisseur of sexy, Kevin McDonald is definitely the hottest Kid in the Hall. Yeah, I mean Dave Foley is all right for the gal who likes vanilla ice cream, but Kevin's right for the chick who digs pink bubble gum. Anyway, this reporter had a huge crush on him in high school.

Today, I was reminded of a lesser-known Kevin appearance. In 2002, he did a series of commercials aired over several months for Thomason Auto Group, a Portland car dealer, in which he played Santo, the mad genius commercial director attempting to make the greatest auto dealer commercial of all time. The ads take you on a roller coaster of emotion, from the auspicious beginning, to Santo's twelve minute walk-out, his touching motivational speech, and finally, the finished product. Well, I'm not going to spoil the big moment for you, but let's just say it's an intellectual tour-de-force of stock footage and car ballet.

I originally saw these on the ad agency's website, but since they no longer seem to exist--a pity because they did some pretty good work--some kind soul has put these up on Youtube. Enjoy!

Welcome!

So they've been running You've Got Mail a lot on cable recently, and I'm always looking for media that I don't really need to pay a lot of attention to while I knit, and hey, it's a movie featuring the internet made in 1998. The other thing is that they are showing this thing so often that I lost interest partway through and the next time I turned on the TV it was on again at the same scene where I left off. Who needs that in demand crap when you have basic cable service like that?

So the premise is that dude and chick are online buddies, and they're both nursing a serious e-crush for each other. IRL she runs a children's bookstore and he is a giant discount bookstore tycoon, who is opening a new location on the same block. They end up meeting and totally hating each other, of course. When they try to meet up as online friends, he finds out that it's her and bails. Despite the fact that she runs a well-established niche bookstore she goes under (how did Black Books end up surviving this scenario? I guess they same way they stay in business at all). Dude realizes he loves her and builds a connection in meatspace, both characters' significant others are conveniently disposed of, he does the big reveal and she is not at all upset that he's been deceiving her for months.

It wasn't quite as funny in the obsolete technology department as I was hoping it would be, although it did bring back a lot of memories. Do you remember where you were on the day you found out that the terrible modem noise it makes when you're dialing up can be disabled? Or wandering into a chatroom and being bombarded with "a/s/l?" I actually had quite a few online friends as a teenager that I'd meet through various games. Now with all this web 2.0 business people don't seem to really connect, they just deposit their commentary and leave. Or maybe that's just because I don't really involve myself in online social circles as much these days. Now all my online friends are my real life ones who I don't live near anymore.

That said, I think I finally "get" chick flicks. Yeah, the appeal should be obvious, but I had never watched one while suffering multiple heart fractures before. They work when you want wholeheartedly to believe that the perfect person will enter your life by astounding coincidence. The thing is though, is that the world really is a magical place and every romance has just as cute a story behind it. Knowing this, these movies don't really have anything to show me.

It also got me thinking that maybe Doug is the only good portrayal of shyness and weird anxiety ever. You know how Doug will encounter a totally normal situation and have all these insane fantasies about how terrible it will turn out and everyone will hate him forever and then it turns out to be totally fine, but he still freaks out about stuff later on? This film features lengthy scenes of typing and deleting, and frantically clicking the send button, and shutting the laptop and leaving. Who thought "that's what I want to watch, people spending hours composing the perfect email!"? I mean, five points for verisimilitude but minus several hundred for being unwatchable.

Better Ed Then Dead

I am so tired of writing about underwear perverts! You'll get to know what else I ended up with at the con, plus a backlog of back issues bought for their silly covers when I'm good and ready. For now, we're going to talk about video games or hactual books with hactual words. Or that theramin I'm gonna build when I get some cash in.

Today, in honor of LucasArts being less dicks (I'm going to reserve "deciding to stop being dicks" until I see the pricing) and releasing their classic adventure games on Steam, which means that the rerelease won't go out of print and be just as big a pain to get my hands on, we're going to go on delightful romp through childhood memories of Maniac Mansion. That was a pretty serious sentence back there. For this article, I'm going to call the statue of limitations on spoilers, because this game is twenty years old at this point.

Maniac Mansion is what I tell people is my favorite game ever. Yeah, it's not exactly the most polished, or sophisticated, or even what I would call the best game, but it occupies a very special place in my heart. In lieu of having cable my parents would let us rent a game or a movie. Now this was back in the day, and I didn't get any game magazines for reviews. So when you were in the store you could either go with a known good game or take a chance on being stuck with a crappy game all weekend, and all you had to go on was the box art. I'd end up renting Maniac Mansion on a fairly regular basis, and I remember owning it at some point--maybe we bought it from the video store when they were paring down their stock at some point. The point is, I logged way more hours on this game then were strictly necessary to beat it. The puzzles were fairly difficult for me, and I only ever managed to get Bernard's Meteor Police ending. The thing is though, I was content to just wander around the mansion, trying to unlock its secrets all on my own. Now all I seem to care about is making progress; I still like to explore but unless each session has a noticeable accomplishment I seem to break out the walkthroughs on the internet. I'm actually kind of bothered by that change in behavior, and even though it means a lot of games ultimately end up unfinished I'm trying not to be such a cheater these days.

At the beginning of the game, if you go into the kitchen immediately Nurse Edna is in there, looking through the fridge, and as soon as she comes into view she sees you, shuts the door and comes chasing after you. That's the first time I can remember something in a game responding to my actions, and not just following their own patterns. I mean, yeah, there was interaction but it was more you reacting to them. And it was terrifying. As a kid I would check the other rooms first and wait to go in the kitchen, afraid that I hadn't let enough time pass. To this day I have this primal fear response to going in there, even if I do it purposefully to get caught and sent to the dungeon. Later on, you can ring the doorbell with one kid to get Weird Ed to come down from his room and have another kid root through his stuff, which was another panic moment for young me. Am I going to have enough time to get the card key and the change? Is he going to come back up and catch me with his precious hamster?

There's more to this game then just nostalgia. It came out in 1987, and it made a ridiculous number of innovations. It was one of the first games to use cut scenes to advance the plot; the manual actually spends a page explaining what a cut scene is. I mean, at this point even having a plot in the game and not just as color in the manual was a pretty big thing. You got a pool of characters with different abilities, and to some extent personalities, to choose from at the beginning, and switched between kids on the fly, which created a teamwork style of gameplay that is rare to see even today.

It has this great genuine horror/humor vibe and, especially given technical limitations, great writing and characterization, from the green tentacle who wants to be a rock star to the evil meteor, whose ambition was to rule the world...one teenager at a time! The meteor turns out to be a big softie if you get his novel published, though. Oh yeah, MULTIPLE ENDINGS. I told you this game was amazingly ahead of its time.

You could be a punk rock chick (or really new wave dude) and microwave a hamster. What's not to love?

Ok, this one's a rambling mess, so I'll let you go here. I'll most likely be picking up Loom and The Dig tomorrow, and even if you're not big on video games normally, but for some reason have read this entire post, I'd advise checking out some LucasArts adventures, but only if you like joy.

Bonus: Howard and Nester go to Maniac Mansion.