Spotted from the street in the vicinity of 1413 2nd Street, Santa Fe NM was this wonderful metal dragon. (Photo is copyright 2011 MDH and appears here with his permission.) Unfortunately, I don’t have any further information about the dragon itself or who created it.
Author: dhenke
Email: dhenke@mythopoeic.org
LBP2: Tags and Tag Sensors
Little Big Planet 2 is a video game for the Sony Playstation 3 console. One of its most interesting features is a robust set of tools for users to build and share new levels. This article contains a detailed discussion of the tag and sensor components available within the LBP2 level creator. It will be of interest chiefly to readers who have some experience creating LBP2 levels, and who have at the very least completed the in-game level creation tutorials.
What Is This I Don’t Even
I got a great gift recently, and I’m really not sure what it is.
Here’s what I do know: There are three of them. They’re sized per the picture, and weigh between 126g and 132g each. I like them, and will use them to Make Things.
Appreciate a Dragon Day: Sunday, 16 January 2011
Sunday, January 16th, 2011 is the eighth annual Appreciate a Dragon Day.
I assure you, dear reader, that I share your complete disdain for silly made-up holidays synthesized by a committee and fabricated from some unholy admixture of boredom and profit motive. In this particular case, however, 1) Dragons, 2) the holiday was invented by an actual person, to promote a book (and not to enrich a greeting card company), plus 3) Dragons.
Dawn Treader
Some brief musings on the latest vaguely Narnia-themed theatrical treacle:
If you happen to like any linear combination of dragons and/or Art Nouveau, you should probably go see it. Treat it as a slide-show of visual wonders, occasionally interrupted by boring people talking.
I regard it as pretty absurd to talk about “spoilers” in the context of a work (ostensibly) based on a book that’s over fifty years old, and I don’t think I commit any. Nevertheless, here’s a cut:
Sintel
I’ve just watched a movie that is my strong favorite of all those I’ve seen this year, and which has earned a place in my lifetime top ten. It’s animated, it’s only fifteen minutes long (of which two are credits) and it’s free. It’s called Sintel, and you should stop what you’re doing and go watch it right now. (While you can see the whole thing on YouTube, it is well worth the download of one of the full-res versions. If you must go the YouTube route, at the very least choose one of the higher resolutions.)
More spoiler-free images and discussions after the jump.
Chiefest and Greatest of Calamities
A little over a year ago, I posted regarding the dragon as represented in the medium of cake. While I didn’t have any plans to revisit that topic, the recent Smaug cake by Maria Campos instantly made me reconsider. My first encounter with this work was via Cake Wrecks (in the Sunday Sweets section, of course!), which linked additional images in Sugar Madness’ Flickr photostream. More details of construction can be found on the artist’s blog, The Cakerator.
Additional images after the jump.
Sous-vide Cooking
My love of gadgets is, I think, already well-established on these pages. I love food just as well, so it was probably inevitable that I’d decide to take some food and Do Science to It. And takes pictures of myself doing it. And put up a blog post about it.
Say you want a steak cooked perfectly, edge to edge. That means bringing the internal temperature of the entire thing to exactly the right point. It’s hard to do with a grill or a pan or a broiler, since those heat the outside more and the middle less, and you have to tightly control both time and temperature vs. the cut of meat.
The idea of sous-vide cooking is really simple: put the meat in an airtight, watertight vacuum bag. Plunge it into a water bath that’s exactly the temperature you want. Leave it there for a few hours — an hour plus or minus makes no difference. The devil, as usual, lies in the details — after the jump.
MediaWiki: Creating a Private Wiki
This article is obsolete. The instructions given will not work with current MediaWiki versions. Please refer to the updated version of this article.
MediaWiki is the software behind Wikipedia, but you can use it to create your own special-purpose sites. I’ve used it at work to build an internal company knowledge base, and I’m using it at home to make a Wiki for the fictional world of a roleplaying game I’m in.
It’s a pretty polished software package, but out of the box it tends to assume that you are creating something like Wikipedia that is visible to (and editable by) the whole wide world. If that’s not what you want, it requires some tuning, which I’ll describe in detail after the jump.
Dragon Populations Holding Steady
Comparing 2008 to 2009, we’ve seen catastrophic declines in castles, glowy magic and swords. Unicorns have seemingly disappeared, and even formerly sizable populations of elves, wolves and horses are in sharp decline.
Dragons, obviously made from sterner stuff, remain unscathed.
Context? Fantasy novel covers. This news courtesy of Orbit Books (via Making Light). Their handy comparison chart is reproduced to the right, but really: go read the original article. Sample quote: “The number of dragons on covers held steady this year. The dragon population seems to be in perfect balance – but we can’t tell if that’s because new dragons are being born to replace old ones, or if last year’s dragons are just really healthy.”