And you can play God Games too! The SIMS are nice, but limit your godhood to a single environment on a single planet. To get into the game from a Universal level, try Discover’s Star Formation. You start with a dust cloud, and set up conditions to optimize star creation as gravity nodes gather mass. Another fun one is the Universe Sandbox, where again you start with the basic laws of physics, and modify the parameters to create your desired results. For a Gods-Eye view of the universe, you can try World Wide Telescope, the Windoze ripoff of the classic Open Source monster Celestia. And if you like the Open Source version better, be sure to visit Celestia Motherload, with a ton of upgrades and plugins, including the Selden Ball data.
If Ashton hits 1 Meg viewers at UStream, and beats CNN for numbers, he is going to buy 10,000 anti-malaria mosquito nets and distribute them where they are needed. Support this effort! If you login live, you can also hear a great rant about how the media will evolve (or already has), and you too can build your own chunk of the future with it! And he made it, the celebration is starting now. Which means we all made it; we are all creating the future for which this is just an example. You don’t have to be famous to pull this off; you just have to have an idea you want to spread, an attitude you need to get out there, and/or the desire to create something of your own.
After watching the Smashing Pumpkins Steampunk song yesterday, I had to track down the original 1902 French movie that inspired the video segment. Based on the 1865 story From The Earth To The Moon by Jules Verne, it was cutting-edge film making, with never-before seen special effects and production values. You can download the book to read on your computer or portable device, or read it online. You can also listen to the story online or download it for your portable media player (or burn it to CD) thanks to the good folks at Librivox. They remade the movie in 1958, but the original is the best. You can download your own copy for your permanent collection or just watch it online at Archive.Org.
A few entries for this category… The Category being SteamPunk. There was one song that had embedding disabled, but you can still watch it here. Smashing Pumpkins Steampunk… what could be better? The tribute to the 1902 Jules Verne classic movie was just the icing on the cake.
A few videos worth checking out, from Nerdcore master MC Frontalot. If you don’t already know what Nerdcore is, this should help you figure it out. This is not my first or last posting on the topic; the most recent was about real nerds at the Large Hadron facility.
You gotta love Nerdcore, if you are even a little Geeky!
When those in the US finish filing their taxes, here is an event to help you relax; Beer Wars. The movie will be showing at a few hundred theaters across the country, another of the Fathom Events series. Besides the documentary itself, there will be a live panel discussion by some of the leaders of the craft brewing scene. A little later in the month the same group will be running Death Note: Change the World, the third live action installment to the franchise. The presentation will be on the 29th of April for those who prefer original-audio subtitled, and the 30th for people who prefer an English dubbed soundtrack. These live action films join the Manga and Anime collections to give you more choices on how to enjoy the series. If you are not already familier with the story, you can watch the anime online at Joost for free to bring you up to speed before the event.