Gluemeat

Forget the Segway. Give me a Hermes for Christmas.

Not a car, not a motorcyle, and not ever going to be made. Conceived as a student project.

This may come as a shock to some of you who aren’t up-and-up on your gamer lore, but Nintendo hasn’t always been about mushroom-popping plumbers and androgynous elf-like warriors. In fact, the company’s origins date back to the late XIXth century as a producer of hand-made hanafuda playing cards. Yes, just regular, run-of-the-mill playing cards.

After trying its hand at producing many different products (such as vacuums and taxi companies), Nintendo settled into toymaking, churning out all sorts of great little goodies for great little Japanese boys and girls. And one lucky toy collector has accumulated a little hoard of these rare pieces of Nintendo memorabilia, all of which pre-date the big arcade era which would define Nintendo till this very day. It’s quite a fascinating exhibit.
Oh, and those of you who are familiar with the Wario Ware series of games will recognise the Custom Gunman and the Ultra Hand toys, both of which are proudly brandished in their respective micro-games.

(Via Joystiq)

Fellow friends and well-wishers, Gluemeaties of all walks of life, I wish to take an instant of your time to remind you that there are ways to make your time spent here on Gluemeat even more valuable than it already is. Sure, there are already outstanding additions like Gabbly and the handy Comment Subsciption feature that make this webiste a virtual zen garden of oneness with the joys of cyberdom. But there is, still, another way for you to really take your Gluemeat experience to the next level.

Boggles the mind, doesn’t it? Yet, it is possible! I know what some of you are thinking right now: “Gluemeat is already so great, it would be hard for me to believe that there is a way to render my overall Gluemeat experience even more pleasurable without tearing through the very fabric of reality.”

Yet it is there. It’s called Gravatar.

Perhaps some of you have noticed, when you comment, that a little silhouetted icon that appears next to your writings. Perhaps you have even noticed that a different icon appears next to certain commenters. Favouritism on my part? Hardly; those who have an icon which isn’t the anonymous silhouette dude are people who have signed up for a Gravatar. In fact, these folks are recognised across the worlds of comment-dom as unique individuals, shining beacons of individuality across a sea of generic icons! So why could this not be you? Why don’t you stand out from the pack of silhouettes? Don’t you deserve that? Don’t you deserve to be unique?

This is all you have to do is get yourself a Gravatar: First, you need an image. It can be any square image you like, representing just about anything. Head on over to gravatar.com and sign-up. The Gravatar staff will then approve and rate your icon, and inform you of it by email. Congratulations! You have a Gravatar!

Getting it to work is simple: whenever you come over to Gluemeat to comment (or any other website that enables the use of Gravatars, for that matter) make sure you type in the email field of the comments section the same address you used to sign up for your Gravatar. Your own personalized icon will appear right before everybody’s eyes the minute you hit the “Submit Comment” button.

So come on. Get a Gravatar. You deserve it.

UPDATE: Turns out the Gravatar service is down for major server rehabilitation and sign-up has been disabled.  Could be for weeks.  Well, that’ll teach me to pimp out someone else’s good idea.  From now on, I’ll only pimp my own.  MINIVAN CABARET, PEOPLE!!!

Okay, so yesterday our illustrious Prime Minister Stephen Harper, flanked by a bunch of his cabinet ministers, spoke in Vancouver, the Green capital of the country, about the government’s proposals to help improve the environment. Yeah, there was no talk about that Kyoto accord thing, which the Tories are hoping we’ll just all forget about, so there’s no use to start chitter-chatter about that again.  It’d really suck to remember that our country committed to making it work.
Anyhoo, the details of this plan, this “Made in Canada” plan (as Harper likes to call it), have started attracting ire from environmental groups, which, in turn, has put Environment Minister Rona Ambrose on the defensive. The reason? The emission restrictions will be “intensity based,” meaning that a company’s emission targets will fluctuate accordingly to said company’s economic activity. As the article at the CBC explains, “even though individual emission limits for each barrel of oil or piece of coal could be lowered, if production increases, the overall amount of greenhouse gas emissions and air pollutants could grow.” Thus, your targets grow with your company’s growth. Or, as Odiyya at The Conscious Earth puts it:

current pollution - small per unit reduction in emissions x BIG increase in production =
BIG F@#!IN’ INCREASE IN SMOG!!!

So I can’t really blame Rona for being on the defensive, with such dunderhead reasoning coming up with this stuff.  Then again, Ambrose is just setting herself up to look like a disconnected moron, what with hiring a global warming skeptic as her chief of staff and all.

In all seriousness, hoever, there is absolutely no logic in setting environmental standards based on the standards of man-made institutions. Come on, how does that even remotely start to make sense?  The quality of the Earth’s environment doesn’t change to follow regulations we establish for ourselves. The Earth has always determined our standard of life, whether it has been through climate, terrain, or other natural phenomenons (like earthquakes or volcanoes) and we have learned to deal with those obstacles. There are reasons why mankind settled its first major cities around rivers instead of on mountaintops, or why housing constructions in the Yukon differ from those in Melbourne, or how they are both structurally apart from those built in earthquake-prone Japan.

But cooperating wasn’t good enough. We’ve tried to take control of the planet, but Nature can’t compensate us anymore; and it won’t successfully be able to pick up the pace if we allow polluters to continue filling the skies with toxic gases.
This “Made in Canada” plan makes us look like a bunch of, pardon my French, retards.

When I heard about it and hit the net for more information, this is what I found on the front page of CNN.com:

Jesus-Christ, CNN. These events will create more than enough hysteria all by themselves, they don’t need a major media outlet getting into a fear frenzy. I can’t believe I’m actually saying this, but Fox News was actually much more sensible:

“I am, you know, amazed that this is a society which so wants to be free that they’re willing to…you know, that there’s a level of violence that they tolerate.”

- US President George W. Bush commenting on the “courage” of the Iraqi people after reports suggest that 655,000 Iraqis have died since the start of Iraq war.

Quick comment on my part: regardless of the fact the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s report is accurate or not, tens of thousands of Iraqis have lost their lives in this war.  Only someone bolted down in an ivory tower with an ocean separating him from the violence would even consider this situation tolerable.

“[Canadians] want a Canada that reflects their values and interests, and that punches above its weight.”

- Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper in Calgary, Alberta, commenting on what kind of role Canadians want for their country to have in the future.

Quick comment on my part: funny, my values and interests don’t involve punching in any way, nor do they involve sending men and women to die to help us do so.  He doesn’t speak for me, nor does he speak for 63.7% of the country.

Chilean-born Danish artist Marco Evaristti is causing quite a stir in Denmark’s artistic community by adding his own personal touches to 14 original paintings from members of the mid-20th century COBRA collective.

Evaristti purchased the paintings himself, for a total of 2.8 million crowns (the equivalent of $600,000 CDN) and painted his own motifs and additions atop works of the likes of Asger Jorn and Pierre Alichensky. While the COBRA movement’s raison-d’être was to create “semiabstract paintings with brilliant color, violent brushwork, and distorted human figures inspired by primitive and folk art,” Evaristti feels their paintings have lost their relevance in our modern times:

“The COBRA paintings today are trivial and deathly banal, acquired by snobbery. They are just canvases which no longer hold content of value and upon which I have simply painted on to give them life once again.”

If the name of Evaristti rings a bell, this is the same artist who, a few years ago, placed goldfish into working and easily accessible blenders, thus challenging art lovers into deciding the fate of the aquatic animals, hoping to raise questions about life and morality.

Personally, the idea of challenging art and its modern relevance are ideas which make perfect sense to me, thus putting me in a “fence straddling” position.  On one hand, the pure boldness of Evaristti’s move is a call to challenge what has been done and what needs to be done, a thought which can be applied both artistically and socially.  However, one can also argue that while certain works undoutebly remain “period pieces,” they are hallmarks of a period’s relevance and serve to demonstrate the evolution of art.  I wonder what some of you Gluemeaties have to say about it.

As promised I present to you, the viewers, after a long interval, the Linking. But what is this? A Silent Film of a CIT, that is… they’re always silent… so I uh.. A Textless, a Textless film of a CIT, presented not for you to be merely viewing vegetables but to be creative artists. I have always believed in that the beauty of art lays within the community aspect of creation (see: TN is too lazy to import to CS2 add text) and therefore I would like to open up the creation of dialog or subtitles to you precious folk who peruse this hodge-podge of a website. I guess the best one can get some free swag or something. Mike, do we have free swag? If not you can have a free print of the photo if you want. Signed by Mike. Maybe. As long as he’s not a big jerk about it.

“I was disgusted by the revelations and disappointed that he would violate the trust of the citizens that placed him in office.”

- President Bush speaking in the third person on Congressman Mark Foley’s unfolding sex scandal.
Quick, someone get the President a dictionary turned to the entry for Irony.