Rube Goldberg and Heath Robinson

If you ever played the classic '90s 'Incredible Machine' games, you'd already be familiar with the basic principles behind Rube Goldberg and Heath Robinson's work. Rube and Heath were two amazingly talented artists/inventors who drew overly complicated machines designed to accomplish a simple task for the lols. Lol!

Anyway their stuff is really cool and you should check it out instead of focussing on how late this update is. I still have essays and lab reports to write and daily updates are tricky. :(

Other interesting things I learnt today:

• The difference between 'distinctly' and 'distinctively'
• Cotton has a fire point of 210 C
• The rest of lyrics I didn't already know to 'Savages' from Disney's Pocahontas

Gamer Cocktail Bars Exist

Whoa, whoa, whoa.

Whoa.

Needless to say, the general state of internet cafes is a bit dodgy. Sure, you can find a few decent ones around, but by and large you'll get stuck with the dingy greasy hole in the wall whose only menu consists of the output of the nearest malfunctioning coffee machine. I know this as an Irrefutable Fact, because I have been to like, at LEAST three internet cafes in my time, and I'm apparently bad at statistics.

But here, at the Mana Bar in Brisbane (soon Melbourne also!) we have an actual, functioning hub of gamer culture. This is absolutely fascinating. It's almost like a casino, but with games I would actually pay money to play.

That is, it's like a casino, but good.

This is somewhere where I can imagine gamers would actually go to, y'know, hang out on a Saturday night. They might play a few rounds with their friends here and there, but the focus is on the socialising. It's almost as if they got a normal nightclub and replaced the d-floor with the video games (or so I assume, my sole experience with this enterprise being the website and Facebook page).

But wait, my friends, it only gets better.

As it turns out, the Mana Bar is also owned by none other than Yahtzee (et al.), of Zero Punctuation fame, and has plans to spread all over Australia AND THEN THE WORLD. It's as if someone took a good hard look at Australia's inventory and equipment, and made a smart flipping decision for once.

The sheer number of levels on which I support this movement astounds me, which you can probably tell by my jumping around from point to point like a hyperactive flea, who is also blind.

But the level on which I'm most supportive of this is the social (and, yes, 'casual') aspect it brings to gaming. I have lots to say about this, but frankly, that would involve a much more thorough discussion of the material, and therefore, more forethought than I actually put into these posts.

Feel free to let me know what you think of this, though. Does gaming need a physical community? Is this the end for the indie net cafe? If so, is that necessarily a bad thing? Shoot me some thoughts on this. I really do think that games, as a medium, are only just starting to pick up the recognition they deserve, and I think in the years to come we're going to see a lot of gaming paradigms come into play in relation to more traditional media and pastimes. Only time will tell, I suppose.

Other interesting things I learnt today:

• Arbitrarily defined units are often the most relevant to real life (as opposed to real world) applications (compare degrees Celsius with Kelvin, for example)
• The scene in The Lady and the Tramp wherein Lady was given to the lady in a hatbox as a present was based off a real actual event in Walt Disney's life
• Allie Brosh is writing a book and I couldn't be more excited about this

'Full Steam Ahead' is for Boats, Not Trains

Toot toot!

This is another one of those things I always just sort of suspected and assumed but didn't actually for certain know. Well, now I do!

By my reasoning and intimate knowledge of history, at some point in the past, some primitive man-ape creature discovered fire.

Several millenia passed, and finally, mankind was evolved enough to beat two sticks and a rock together to invent the miracle of the steam engine.

Naturally, it was around the same time that everyone started to dress well and the world went monochrome.

Once the steam engine was invented, it was clear what came next: applying to things that we already had. Hamburgers, zombies, and, yes, even boats, now became steam-powered. It wouldn't be for another few years until we thought to apply steam engines to new uses, and a myriad of brilliant new devices were invented: the printing press, lightsabers, and trains.

Since steamboats had such a headstart over any sort of train (the first sort of which was the steam train), it was for the steamboat that the phrase "Full steam ahead!" evolved, meaning, of course, to convert as much heat energy to mechanical energy as was possible to increase the velocity of the vessel and go as fast as one could.

Other interesting things I learnt today:

• The philosopher John Dewey was 92 when he died
• Osama bin Laden has been killed by American troops in Pakistan
• 'Caterpillar' is a particularly delightful word to say!

Zombie-Proof Houses Exist

No, really. They do.

In an unexpected turn of events, I actually feel much safer in my vulnerable not-zombie-proof house knowing that just around the corner could lie an impenetrable bastion against the undead hordes; that somewhere in this world, humanity could be preserved, even if civilisation falls.

On the other hand, I am, of course, now paranoid by the obvious deficiencies in my own home. My house isn't from Cybertron at all, and is therefore not wont to fold in on itself to protect against invasion. My windows are but glass, and I'm afraid that I don't have concrete blocks that are going to flip out in front of them to box them in. Is this a serious flaw in home design?

Is this a serious flaw in home design that has penetrated the deepest circles of architecture for centuries?

My answer is probably not, but maybe! We all know that Freemasonry has been up to something shady for about the same amount of time; maybe the mason symbolism was more than just symbolism, and they've been actively working to make us more vulnerable to zombie attack?

I mean, let's face it. The average home isn't particularly well equipped to deal with a zombie apocalypse. Out in the 'burbs, no one can hear you scream, except for your hundred or so nearest neighbours who have already been zombified.

Most houses -- okay, I don't actually know the statistics, but what seems like a LOT of houses have windows on the ground level through which a zombie could easily stumble, as opposed to a drawbridge on the second level being the only possible entry point. That's commitment on the part of the zombie-proof house designers, and also on the part of the people who live there and who have to go up and down all the bleeding time.

So, in conclusion, we're all pretty poorly equipped for a zombie outbreak, except for the specific few people who live in this verifiable fortress or a home styled off its design, and I guess I don't know much about Freemasonry beyond the insane whisperings of half-baked conspiracy theories.

Other things I've learnt today:

• Montpellier is in the south-east of France
• The fossa, a cat/mongoose creature, is endemic to the island of Madagascar
• It's entirely possibly to be literally standing a hundred metres from a phone tower in a CBD, with full signal and full credit, and still not be able to connect a call. Nice one, Telstra!