February | 2009 | Juice The Blog

That’s how long I’ve been running on the same boot before finally succumbing to the incessant bounce of Software Update.

Stuck in My Head – Wednsday, 11:30 PM EST, 2/18/09

By: kyle

19-02-2009

It’s so coooold in the D, how the f*ck we suppose to keep peace?

This is my birthday jam this year fo realz.

Girl Scout Cookie Time

By: BLin

18-02-2009

I might eat all of these in one sitting…

Will Work For Food: Eggplant Lasagna

By: brad

18-02-2009

So I borrowed Brian’s title, no big deal.

This is a recipe that I made yesterday, which I thoroughly enjoyed for dinner last night and lunch today. it’s pretty easy, and involves almost no actual cooking skills. The recipe looks much longer than it is. Before I begin, I want to briefly explain my cooking methodology.

First, I don’t always have everything in the recipe (unless I’m baking, when the recipie is crucial). This is good sometimes, because it allows me to be devious and experiment. Secondly, I am cooking for myself and will be forced to eat whatever I make, or starve. This has quickly improved my ability to tell whether or not a devious experiment is worth it. I highly suggest playing with your recipes, even if it’s just because you’re on a time (or monetary) budget. Thirdly, I like to stay stocked with the basics, just in case I’m feeling spontaneous and would like to cook. It also forces me to eat healthy food before it spoils. I usually like to keep milk, eggs, bread, garlic, bell peppers, onions, potatoes, and some fruit (oranges and bananas, normally) available at all times. Oh, and fresh produce please.

Quick Stats:

Total Cooking Time: ~1.5 Hours

Serves: 3 to infinity, depending on how much you make and how many eggplants exist in the universe.

Cost: $7-$15 depending on the ingredients you choose to add

Difficulty: If you can fry eggs, you can make this no problem.

The Crisis of Credit

By: fil

18-02-2009

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

Luster On The Mac

By: choof

18-02-2009

Yep, that’s the Luster Editor on my Dock. Luster & the Luster Editor are well on their way to being on the Mac! This is huge news and I am too excited not to share it with you all. Woot!

Big props are in order for Scott Flynn, he’s a certified badass.

Warship Armada / Army Ants Music

By: colin

18-02-2009

Hey guys. Just an update to when a will have videos online of Army Ants and Warship Armada: We are getting a new image set up on a single computer in the lab soon that will have Fraps on it (Fraps doesn’t offer a site license which has been our hold up this whole time …) so I will eventually have videos of both games up soon. Also, we will be showing Army Ants at GDC for the whole week of GDC (the week before Mayercraft) in case anyone is there.

Until then, I have decided to post the music I wrote for each game. BLin, Adam, Choof and Beej may recognize most of them, as they were around during most of the writing of the songs (BLin and Adam during Warship Armada)

So here they are. They are tagged up for iTunes, but I will warn you that they aren’t balanced very well with the audio levels, so some songs may come out quiet and others may come out loud… I hope that is okay. Feel free to use them for whatever you want, commercial or not. If anyone actually tries to use these songs for commercial use, well … good luck. They aren’t that great. Feel free.

WARSHIP ARMADA

Warship Armada was a naval battle game that takes place during the 1600′s, so the songs are all very instrumental. The game was developed in the Spring of 2008.

[DOWNLOAD] WARSHIP ARMADA – MAIN THEME: This song came out pretty cool. I was really happy with the movement that the song had. Had some variety to it. Also was happy with the way the instruments blended together. It is the music that plays during the menu sequences and when the game boots up.
[DOWNLOAD] WARSHIP ARMADA – BATTLE THEME: This song is more ambient and loops with less of a melody. It was supposed to be tense and “battle like.” It is the music that plays while playing the game.
[DOWNLOAD] WARSHIP ARMADA – ENDING CREDITS (MAGGIE SONG): This song is a little goofy. It’s also called the Maggie Song because it was written in about 10 minutes while on the phone with Maggie. I wrote it as a joke, but when we came down to the last minute, we realized that we wanted a song to play when the end game statistics were being shown. It’s not even really an ending credits song at all. Short and weird. Also had input from Choof and BLin and maybe Adam and Beej for the tuba farts at the end.

ARMY ANTS

Army Ants was a game that was a little less “serious” than Warship Armada. It was exaggerated and modern, highly fictional and action oriented. When writing the music, I was aiming for “epic”, to basically not only excite the player but also to poke fun at the whole thing. The game centered around turn based real time battle in a dynamic environment.

[DOWNLOAD] ARMY ANTS – ITS GAME TIME: I have never worked with e-guitar sounds before, simply because they are much more work on the digital end than other instruments. This guitar patch was created by actually filtering a basic noise through several channels and hooking up separate damping tracks and the like. So technically I was happy with the way it came out. I also liked the sound in general and thought it was pretty over-the-top “epic.” This song plays during the menu sequences and during the game itself.
[DOWNLOAD] ARMY ANTS – END THEME: The end theme to army ants was completely out of place, but I still love it. One of my favorite songs is John Murphy’s “Sunshine” track from the movie Sunshine (also in the beginning of the X-Men trailer) because it is so ridiculously epic. After toying with ideas, I decided to literally rearrange that song. This version is shorter, sped up and incorperates more percussion and other instruments. I wanted it to be epic. It plays during the credits of the game after a match is won.

So that’s it! I hope you all enjoy it. I would love to post more music. Eric and I wrote a song back in the UC days called Cumulorockin or something like that that I would love to throw up here.

UPDATE (by eric): Here’s some Cumulolyrical action. Everybody rock out please.

Will Work For Food

By: BLin

18-02-2009

Yglesias highlights what I think are the two main reasons Americans are fat:

More broadly, though, when discussing this issue it’s important to recall that vegetables are not expensive. I went to the farmer’s market over the weekend and mixed root vegetables (sweet potatoes, carrots, turnips, various kinds of onions and potatoes, etc.) were available for $1 a pound and all these are, needless to say, for sale for less money at a regular supermarket. Indeed, it’s the relative abundance of vegetables that gets us in trouble. Having evolved in an environment where plants are plentiful but meat and sweets and refined grains are rare, we’re programmed to act as if we’ll be eating plenty of vegetables out of necessity and had better grab the other stuff while we have a chance. So any policy to turn these habits around will run into some difficulties as it’s literally going against human nature.

But the bigger issue than price for most people is almost certainly convenience. We’ve created a society where people work longer hours than they used to, where parenting expectations have gotten higher, and where fewer and fewer families have mom serving as a full-time unpaid housekeeper/cook/nanny. Ezra observes that most people “live closer to a McDonald’s than a grocery store.” And, indeed, looking back on it I’ve been struck by how rapid and dramatic the change in my eating habits has been since I moved from being near many takeout food options but far from a grocery store to living closer to a supermarket than a takeout spot.

Since reading In Defense of Food and The Omnivore’s Dilemma, I’ve taken a slightly extreme position on my food intake. I don’t eat anything that has ingredients I would never use. So anything with soy lecithin and modified food starch is out. There are the occasional exceptions, and the chronic ones (can’t seem to go without a soda at lunch time), but for the most part I stick to it. I never buy anything from the freezer section of the supermarket, hardly anything from the snack aisle, and absolutely nothing from the prepared food aisle.

The one thing about doing this, though, is that it’s a lot of work. I typically spend a good 1-2 hours in the kitchen after work, counting clean-up. This means that on a typical day, I have about enough time to cook dinner, clean up, make a couple blog posts and then go to bed.

To me, though, it’s worth it. I love my food. And the thing is, I don’t even eat “healthy” in the pop science sense. I eat a lot of cheese, and a ton of carbs. I probably eat a lot of fat, too. But I also eat a lot of vegetables. I also don’t exercise much. I typically walk about 1/2 mile 3 times a week after lunch.

The thing is, I’ve lost 5 pounds since last year. So go figure that out.

Personally, I’d much rather spend a lot of time in the kitchen, eat great food, and not get fat, than spend more time on my Wii, eat quick “healthy” meals full of calcium diglutamate, and have to run 6-miles a week to stay thin.

That’s just me though.

Nate’s Manifesto

By: BLin

18-02-2009

Go check it out.

Manbaby

By: chad

18-02-2009

Mutha Truckas from Manbaby on Vimeo.

I meant to post this a while ago for Eric. I like this fella’s use of motion.

Also, his reel:

2009 Reel from Manbaby on Vimeo.

George Will: Scientists don’t know shit.

By: BLin

18-02-2009

World-Renowned Climate Scientist Columnist George Frederick Will:

Chu recently told the Los Angeles Times that global warming might melt 90 percent of California’s snowpack, which stores much of the water needed for agriculture. This, Chu said, would mean “no more agriculture in California,” the nation’s leading food producer. Chu added: “I don’t actually see how they can keep their cities going.”

No more lettuce for Los Angeles? Chu likes predictions, so here is another: Nine decades hence, our great-great-grandchildren will add the disappearance of California artichokes to the list of predicted planetary calamities that did not happen. Global cooling recently joined that lengthening list.

In the 1970s, “a major cooling of the planet” was “widely considered inevitable” because it was “well established” that the Northern Hemisphere’s climate “has been getting cooler since about 1950″ (New York Times, May 21, 1975).

Just about every blogger I read penned a takedown of this column, but personally I like Nate Silver’s the best. Why? He uses graphs. I like those. Also, there’s this:

And yet, according to George F. Will, many scientists were convinced in the 1970s that global cooling was a significant threat to the planet. And if those scientists were so wrong before, why should we trust them when they say that global warming is a threat now?

There’s just one little problem with this story, which reappears every so often in conservative discourse on the environment. Specifically, it’s a crock of shit.

There’s two graphs in particular I like to show when talking about climate change (both of which I lifted from this sweet free pamphlet from the National Academies). FIrst, there’s this one, showing current atmospheric CO2 concentrations are at the highest levels ever seen by humans:

And then there’s the much more recent graph of the outlined section above:

So to all those deniers out there: you see how that graph goes straight up? How could that possibly be normal? Furthermore, seeing as every scientist on earth acknowledges that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, how could this possibly be no big deal? Seriously, it goes straight fucking up. Through the god damn roof. It’s also an amazing coincidence that this ridiculous skyrocketing of CO2 concentrations just happens to coincide with the exact same time that we started burning a lot of carbon.

Get a fucking clue.

I had the red tie on.

By: chad

17-02-2009

I had lice in my chest hairs.

25 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis

By: fil

17-02-2009

I am sad to report that I haven’t had time to go through the whole list, but I think this is a rather interesting look at whose responsible for whats going on now.

Read about it here.

Website Review: Pandora Radio

By: colin

17-02-2009