Well, you know, we wouldn’t play Sun City when we were asked. And we were the only ones who were asked to play Sun City. No one in the video that said, “We ain’t gonna play Sun City” was asked!
— Penn JilletteDear San Francisco Asian Art Museum,
What tone-deaf idiot wrote this?
A Brand New Brand
We've been eager to share something exciting with you, and now it's time:
Your Asian Art Museum sports a new vision, a new brand promise, and a new logo unveiled this week. We're reinventing ourselves to engage a broader audience.
Our Vision is to spark connections across cultures and through time, and our brand promises to: Awaken the Past, Inspire the Next. We'll use art to unlock the past and bring it to life, and act as a catalyst for new art, new creativity, and new thinking. We'll feature more contemporary art, often drawing connections to historic art in our collection. We invite you to experience the beauty and depth of Asian art and cultures, and to be inspired.
Our new logo reflects our Vision. It says we have a new perspective. It's bold and confident. And, it invites all to engage. (Did you know an upside-down A is a mathematic symbol for for all?)
Come see how we're starting to live our new brand.
...
It honestly reads like a letter to shareholders after a corporate takeover, not a museum newsletter sent to members and patrons. And the logo itself? Eh. Not bad if you’re making add-ons for Adobe products, I suppose.
Ranma 1/2 live-action TV movie
Coming in December, 2011.
AsoIku 11: still not done, still WTF
Several times now I’ve had to slow down and re-read sections of this one, because of either vocabulary overload or a grammatical dogpile that blocked understanding of a scene.
That is, after Arkamatsu (elderly Catian Earth-culture scholar with a special interest in crime, illicitly exploring Earth with the help of his old-fashioned assistoroid Igor) rescues Black Amarylis (teenage goth-loli secret agent with a cybernetic heart that gives her bursts of super-speed) from other spies, he requests her assistance in robbing a bank. Suddenly, they’re joined by “veteran bank robber” Annie (who looks precisely like the richest girl in the world wearing a domino mask, down to the cat-ear headband), whose partner (a child-sized figure wearing a paper bag over its head) rescues them all from an incredibly lethal attack by spies wielding Metalstorm launchers. Annie then leads them to a secure hideout (Ichika’s home and studio) to relax and plot their crime, gleefully incorporating late arrival Sara, who had finally stopped panicking when she realized that she could track down her wayward mistress by getting another assistoroid to locate Heihon.
The teenage cyborg goth-loli secret agent is the most normal person in the room.
Japan photos
For fun, I’ve been playing with Google+ recently. I remain invisible on Facebook, but the Circles design makes organized sharing more practical, and the various Google services also integrate nicely with my shiny new Android device, the Sony Tablet.
(oh, did I forget to mention the new toy? Full review soon, but the short version is that the most negative thing I can say about it is that you need tiny little fingers to retrieve the full-sized SD card; otherwise, it’s great)
Anyway, I ended up copying a bunch of the pictures from my 2007 Japan trip into Picasa, for when I get the urge to share a random picture.
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| Japan, November 2007 |
This version was exported directly from Aperture, so it didn’t pick up the geotagging I did before Apple supported that properly. I still haven’t tinkered with merging existing geolocation data into existing albums, but maybe soon.
Shorter Elizabeth Warren quote
“Bend over, taxpayer.”
AsoIku book 11: progress, still WTF
Finally had time to do some more reading, and the story remains chaotic. I’m currently about halfway through chapter 5 of 10.
Note to self...
Never order the “taco hamburger” in Japan.
…because it’s made with tako.
(actually, it looked pretty good on the cooking show, basically a small okonomiyaki patty, but I can’t vouch for the texture)
Tokyo Surfing
[Note: this is one of those “braindump so I don’t miss a step when I tell someone how to do it” posts]
Let's say that you've come across a web site that refuses to serve up its content to people located outside of a certain geographical region. For instance, "Japan" (or UK for BBC streams, etc).
There are two basic ways to go about this: pointing your web browser at an HTTP/HTTPS proxy service that's located in Japan, or opening a VPN connection to a server in Japan. I chose the second method, in part because it isn't limited to web traffic (allowing you to do things like bypass your ISP's outgoing SMTP blocking), and in part because I already knew how.
My weapons of choice were Amazon EC2, OpenVPN (free Community Edition, easy-rsa, OpenVPN GUI for Windows, and Tunnelblick for Mac), and DynDNS plus ddclient.
