thisiswhyimbroke.com

My little brother, in preparation for the holidays, introduced me to thisiswhyimbroke.com

It's one of those frustrating web sites that has some awesome shit, the best thing you've ever seen, right next to an item that represents everything unholy, stupid, and disturbing about commerce.

Come along and see!


Snuggle Pillow

Uh, this pillow was invented to give one the illusion of snuggling with a human man. A human man in a button-up shirt who was sawed in half at some point. Frankly, I'd rather buy a fuck doll because getting caught snuggling a fuck doll seems somehow less embarrassing than snuggling this thing. I'm a sad guy, but I have my limits.

R2-D2 Trash Can

This is the first I'm hearing that R2-D2 was not originally intended to be a trash receptacle.



Novelty Monopoly Money Tie

Can someone explain to me the situation where it is appropriate to wear a novelty tie? Because if you're supposed to wear a tie to something, that means it's formal. But if you wear a novelty tie, it's now informal. It's the worst thing to happen to fashion since the tuxedo t-shirt worn to a rock show.



Glass-Bottom Canoe

I'm not so much opposed to this item as I am the way in which it's being sold to me. How come every water craft or floaty or whatever has to be advertised by a babe in a bikini? I don't need to be hard when I'm picking out water wings. I really don't. I've gone over the exhaustive list I made of times when it is crucial for me to be hard, and purchasing pool shit is not one of them.



Corn Dog Machine

I already have a corn dog machine. It's called the Carnival. And the great thing about the carnival is I don't have to keep it in my cabinets.



Futon Bunk Bed

A couch that converts into not one, but TWO beds? I never thought you could turn a couch into two shitty beds, but you did it. And maybe the futon is a lost cause in terms of quality, but this is at least a step forward in quantity. It's never been easier to have two drunken friends stay over, one sleeping while the other one lies awake in sheer terror, waiting for his buddy to fall through and crush him.


Baby Carrying Jacket

Yeah, why buy you and your baby separate jackets when you can horrify me by buying this single jacket that makes you look like that dummy who turned into a blueberry on Willy Wonka plus the added terror of a baby head emerging from her stomach?



Labyrinth Aquarium

This would be kind of cool, but I think after a while I would start to feel bad for the fish. They don't seem to be the sharpest creatures in the sea. I don't know that fish can cry, but watching a fish weep seven months into the search for the particular bubble he's adopted as home would be bad times all around.


The Water Jet Pack

....

It's about fucking time.

This thing is two-fold the best thing that has happened in our time.

First, having any sort of jetpack is a win for science in my eyes, and science wins are pretty rare these days.

Second, even if I never use it, I can already feel the rumblings of a belly laugh when I read the headline "Sophmore on spring break killed by jetpack malfunction at Lake Havasu."

Lytro Camera: What's the Point of Photography?

So this little box is the next thing that is transforming photography from the art of capturing a moment to the art of pointing a thing at a thing and then fooling around with it on the computer.

It's very scientific and all that, which you could probably guess by the description that starts, "The very first light fields were captrued at Stanford University over 15 years ago..."

Really, all you need to know is that this little bugger captures a very full image, which means that you can change it in ways that were not possible before. If you want to understand the difference, look off at an object 5 feet away from you. While still focusing on that object, you can see that everything between you and that object and beyond that object is blurry. This is what we call depth of field.

The way cameras worked traditionally is similar to the way an eye works in that you would capture an image, and the depth of field was set, permanent. It was what your eye was seeing in that moment in time.

This camera, however, is a little different. You can experiment on their web site, but here's a sample of how this would look:

Here's picture A:

In picture A you can see that the can in the foreground is crystal clear, and the clarity fades as the row gets further and further away.

Let's look at picture B:

In this image, the first can in blurry while the middle cans are clear.

Okay, so this is Photo 101, but the difference is that before, with film and digital, you had to decide what to include in your depth of field beforehand, as you took the picture. Once you took the picture, it was difficult to sharpen some parts while blurring others to create this effect. If you took picture A, it would take enough work to warp it into picture B that it was prohibitive. With the Lytro, you just click with the mouse. That's it.

So this is awesome, technologically. But what about for photography?

To be honest, I think it must be harder and harder to be a professional photographer anymore. Even ten years ago, there was enough technique and practice that you could see a huge difference between an amateur and a pro. But now you can make up a lot of that difference with money and software.

It's a fairly close analogue to hunting. Bow hunting is pretty challenging, and you have to be good at shooting, patient, and have some sort of skill to get close enough. If you were allowed to use top military technology, you could blow up a deer with a missile that you pilot, and you could screencap the entire event.

But on the other hand, I think bow hunting is kind of silly when one considers that you're really just handicapping yourself for the sport of it. I mean, I sort of get it, but couldn't you just start forcing sprinters to smoke cigars while they ran? Or why not hunt with only a knife?

What I'm getting at here is that there is, to me, a disappointing and sad devaluing of the photographic image because an image is no longer what it once was, which is a moment of time captured for others to see (at the least) and an artistic interpretation of that moment (at best). Whereas before the photographer had to do both of those things at once, now all that is required is to point and shoot. You can worry about the rest later.

These improvements in technology can have an upside. For example, the fact that someone can now make a feature-quality film with equipment that can be purchased at Best Buy is pretty awesome in that it allows people with ideas to create and make something that maybe would not have been made if it had to go through a studio. But the downside is that all of this equipment being available means that it's also available to dummies who have no ideas and figure the good ideas will just come to them at some point.

The technology also gets rid of something that we don't talk about a lot in art: the complete fuck-up.

Take this A and B example, also from the Lytro web site:

Okay, artistic license and all that, but I think most people would agree that photo A is a fuck-up. You've captured an interesting background, but with a blob in the foreground that's way more interesting than what you focused on. Alright, so you fucked up.

But fucking up is how you learn to do things right. When you develop this picture, that's the moment when you say, Okay, next time I need to make a different aperture adjustment to capture exactly what I want.

And fucking up is important because if every photo is edited to be perfect, then a good photo really has no value anymore.

Celebrity Doppleganger

The other night a couple friends and I were having an argument/discussion/boozefest where we all discussed celebrity look-a-likes. This happens a lot in my circle of friends, the question, "If you were casting a movie of your life, a biopic, who would you cast to play so-and-so?"

There was much discussion. Names were thrown around, everything from the lovely and talented Nancy Kerrigan to the less lovely and less talented (at least in the ice skating world) Danny Devito.

So, to see if I could find an unbiased answer, I turned to the internet.

I found a celebrity lookalike generator at this address: http://celebrity.picadilo.com/

There are certainly others out there, but this is the only one I found that doesn't require any email address, logging in, or any other nonsense. I try not to do that whenever possible. Giving up your email to find a celebrity lookalike is like telling someone your phone number to buy batteries.

Let's take a look at the results, starting with myself:

Hmm...okay, some awesome ones mixed in with some...Jay Leno. I see a couple problems with this right off. For starters, if I match Jay Leno 59% and Pierce Brosnan 58%, does that suggest that there's only about a 1% difference between the faces of these two men? Because I think people with the use of their eyes worldwide would disagree.

The other big problem I see is that looking like David Bowie could be pretty great. He had some handsome times. However, looking like the pale, vampiric version of David Bowie above is slightly less complimentary.

In order to see how much difference it makes depending on the picture, I tried a second one as well:

This makes absolutely no sense to me. I should get some extra points for getting 2 of 3 male Friends, and the two best, in my opinion. But if I looked 93% like Matt Damon, I would be far, FAR too busy working my way through trim to write blogs. And clearly, that is not the case.

Let's move on to friend #1:

Now, while the idea that my white male friend in his late 20's looks like Queen Latifah (my mom's favorite "rapper"), a black middle-aged woman, is hilarious, it doesn't really help me cast the movie so much. And again, a 1% difference between Queen Latifah and Owen Wilson? This shit ain't working. And though I feel like Ellen is funny, I don't know if the world is ready for that gender-bending role. So another picture was absolutely necessary.

A guy could do a lot worse than this. Denzel and the white Denzel (who could be Richard Gere OR Harrison Ford, depending on how you feel about cinema).

So how about a female friend?

What's interesting is that, of the three of us, she most often hears that she looks like different celebrities. None of THESE, but others of equal quality or better.

And though I respect what JK Rowling has done, I think seeing her as a celebrity look-alike is a stretch. She's a lot more famous for inventing a game where people straddle brooms than for having some kind of a face.

Second try:

Sooo....this is a little all over the map for my liking. Julianne Moore and Mariah Carey, both very beautiful. And Roman Polanski. Maybe this thing is really advanced, and maybe this particular friend has mannish hands.

Anyway, this strikes me as a good tool for determining celebrity lookalikes for two reasons:

1. It does not in any way take into account personality, which doesn't matter. If someone is going to play you in a movie, they learn your mannerisms, not the other way around.

2. Arguing about it is kind of pointless because if I say, "You look like Richard Dreyfuss," and you say, "No I don't. I'm a woman" we'll reach an impasse very quickly. But if you feed it into the machine, and everyone uses the same machine, you get what you get. And when it comes back with Jay Leno, you can walk away assuming that it's a programming issue instead of standing in front of the mirror for forty minutes, doing bits on newspaper typos while studying your chin.

New Oregon Trail

Today I learned that there is a new Oregon Trail game coming out for the Wii.

First there was excitement. Then dysentery.

Because after the initial excitement wore off and I wiped up, I remembered that there was the AWESOME Oregon Trail (1992-ish) that I came to know and love in elementary school, and the shitty version (1995-ish) that had better graphics, but was mouse-dependent and everything else about it was total shit.

The new game just didn't have the same appeal. So what were the appeal factors of the O.G.O.T. (Original Gangsta Oregon Trail)?

1. Naming


Before you could hitch up your wagons, you had to name your family. This small customization is endless fun and can add so much to a game.

I started by naming the characters cool shit. Optimus Prime and his son Galactus were the only ones to make the ford across the first river. Their daughter/sister, Rainbow Brite, unfortunately didn't make it.

Then, when I got smart, it was time to put in teacher names. This didn't pay off right away, but when the message "Mrs. Pesja has died of a snake bite" hit the screen, you'd say, Damn right she has. Serves her right for making me MEMORIZE times tables. Barbaric practices, barbaric death.

Of course, then you also hit on the idea of swears. "Shithead has died." "Fuckface has starved to death."

And finally, in case you are like me and enjoy giggling in your apartment alone, adding racial epithets to any game adds a bizarre element to any gameplay scenario. All of a sudden it appears as though this friendly shopkeeper has a bad case of the Klansies. OR, if that doesn't push your button, just add "Goddamn cocksucking" to the front of every character name, transforming every video game into Deadwood: the game.

2. You were in charge


Being a kid, it was like role reversal. All of a sudden, you were like the dad on the road trip, making all the decisions with disregard to this dumb family that don't really even exist to you off paper. One of the kids wants to stop because he's ill? Too bad. We're making good time. Someone needs to be buried? Great, we'll bury him right here and get on the road. Good thing we were hauling all these tombstones. And if I wanna try and just drive straight through a river, maybe a couple people don't make it out. Oh well. All part of the adventure!

You also decided to set the pace. Though I didn't really understand the meaning of the word fully, "grueling" was always the obvious choice. It's called the Gold Rush, not the Gold Get There When We Get There.

You also got to pick your career. You could be a carpenter (if you were an idiot), a farmer (if you were a bigger idiot) or a banker (which was the obvious choice because you started with GODDAMN MONEY).

3. Hunting


Clearly the best part of this adventure was shooting. I'm certain that we must have been the last generation to grow up in schools that PAID MONEY for a video game that featured the use of GUNS.

Anyway, even a 3rd grader can appreciate the hilariousness of standing in a field with 7 downed buffalo, 4 squirrels, and a couple rabbits, more meat than a family could ever hope to eat or carry. It was enough to make a Native American man shed a single, badly pixellated tear.

4. The Rafting Endgame


The last sequence of the game involved piloting your wagon, transformered into a raft, down a raging river. It was awesome, and all of a sudden you were playing what appeared to be AN ACTUAL VIDEO GAME.

5. It Was Played At School

Probably the most important point.

I'm not sure how schools were tricked into thinking this game was educational, but they were suckers, man. It must have been before people understood what video games were, because I learned a hell of a lot more (almost nothing) from Metal Gear Solid than I did Oregon Trail.

I learned the word "typhoid" but still had no idea what it was beyond the fact that it was fatal to ShitBitchHell, my only son. I still have no fucking idea what a wagon tongue is, nor what effect it's breaking may have on a traveler.

Oregon Trail was far from a great, great game. But compared to doing anything remotely resembling work, I'd be happy to march pioneers to their grueling deaths, squashing the spirit of American westward expansion one family of unfortunately named travelers at a time.




See Also:

Organ Trail (zombie version)
Thule Trail (roadtrip to a music fest, scroll down to middle of page to play)