Whatever happened to generics at the grocery store? No, I don't mean store brands. I mean the plain white boxes/cans that just said "CHEESE" or "CORN", for example.

Seems like the last time I saw them was around the same time as I first started to see Wal-Mart and their store brand(s). So I wonder if the "Sam's Choice" and "Member's Mark", etc., foods are the same stuff they used to put in the white boxes, and Wal-Mart's influence is so great that the whole industry started branding even the cheapest foodstuffs with some kind of basic marketing.

I recently lost my cellphone and had to recplace it with a new one. This sucks for two reasons:

1. The only new phone that I could get for (nearly) free, is not a camera phone. So no more pictures on here for a while. I promise to get a real digital camera soon.

2. I lost all my saved phone numbers. If you think I'm supposed to have your phone number, send it to me.

The current Flvxxvm Florvm project represents me finally jumping on a bandwagon that Lee Whatley had the sense to get off of about 5 years ago. I am talking about the bandwagon of 8-bit videogame music being reinterpreted by current artists.

You can find all kinds of remixes of old Nintendo music out there, that are much fancier than anything I can come up with. My idea is much simpler:

Using the actual game music as a karaoke-like backdrop, layer on my own vocals and intruments, with lyrics that have nothing to do with the game. The lyrics will be dead straight, not humorous, although they are allowed to be overly dramatic.

Yes, the "name that game" quiz I posted last week was just to whet your appetite for this!

The first fruits is http://www.cba.ua.edu/~matt2/flvxx/8bit/kissed_your_ruby_lips.mp3. This is the music from the "Muda" level of Super Mario Land, with these lyrics:

Who can know what's in another's heart?
Words can't say; there's no use to even try.
But all at once I kissed your ruby lips,
And I'll never be the same again.

Spent my life out on the lonely road.
Trying to find something that once was mine.
Only once I kissed your ruby lips,
And I can never love that way again.

As I face the end of my earthly life,
all my thoughts go back to that place and time.
Only once I kissed your ruby lips,
and I'll never feel that way again.

Please try to imagine Neil Diamond singing it. That's who was singing it in my head when I wrote it.

Yes, I am aware that Nintendo could sue me for this. Bring it on, Wario! Make me famous!

Work related. Re: cross site request forgery (CSRF)

I'm going to see if I can find one that some one has marked up to show what scenes were cut from the movie, etc.

I can go back and read all the spoilers I avoided before. Including pages going all the way back to AOTC days, with stuff that people thought was going to be in ROTS. Some of it is pretty interesting.

..that the Wikipedia articles for over the counter drugs tend to focus on the recreational uses of said drugs, almost to the point where you'd wonder what else they were good for.

You find interesting things when you can't sleep at night so you start googling the generic names of over-the-counter drugs.

"Media criticism, consumer culture, and Brooklyn curiosities"

We drove down to Bayou La Batre to visit my folks, in the face of tropical storm Arlene. Friday night, we went to ROTS and there were only two other people in the theater.

Saturday, the weather people started to use the "H" word so we left town. Dammit, I drove through half of Alabama in the driving rain for no reason; we'd have been safer just staying in BLB as it blew over.

Now, about ROTS. Finally, after I actually stopped wanting to see it, I get to see it. It has some of the flaws of the other prequels: too many times where the CGI characters steal the scene by being more lifelike than the human actors. And this can't be the fault of the actors, since the same actors don't suck when they are in other movies, only in Star Wars movies.

For the 3 people out there who actually waited longer than me to see this movie,

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The movie opens with the most intricate space fighter sequence in Star Wars or any other movie. Anakin and Obi-Wan unfortunately seem bored or at most slightly annoyed by what is happening to them, though, so I can only assume that the action we are witnessing is mundane by clone wars standards.

You seriously expect me to believe that out of all the Jedi in the galaxy, only Yoda is strong enough in the Force to be able to sense that his clone troopers is about to shoot him in the back? What good is the Force if it doesn't give you more spider sense than that?

Exactly what percentage of the Republic's military forces only came into existence for the clone wars? We know that "the army" of clone troopers was created at that time, but did they have a "navy" before that? And what percentage of the non-Jedi forces were clones, anyway? All of them? This obviously changes by the time of the classic films, since the stormtrooper voices heard in them do not sound like Temura Morrison. Really what I'm asking is, at what point did the officers start dressing like Nazis?

The star fighters used by the Republic forces appear to be the common ancestor of both the X-Wing and the TIE fighter. Nice touch.

Still, considering how little technological advancement there is in general in the Star Wars universe, I think the hardware of the Clone Wars and that of the Civil Wars (or whatever Lucas currently calls the conflict depicted in the original trilogy) should have been nearly identical.

Listen to these samples of classic 8-bit video game music, and name the game, system (NES, Gameboy, etc.), and if you're really geeky, what part of the game the music was from.

You can't just guess "Mario!", you have to say exactly which Mario-related game it was. (SMB 1, 2, 3, etc..).

Hints:
- There are 7 NES, 2 Gameboy, and one C64 game here.
- Every sample is from a different game, but there are two different pairs from games that are related.
- There are exactly two "Mario" games represented, which takes care of one such pair.

Note that I don't remember all the correct answers myself, so for some of these I won't be able to say if you're right or wrong.

Lee Whatley is disqualified from competition.

Winamp plugin for playing NES, Gameboy, etc. sound files. For use with the files on the previous thing I blogged. Also home of "NSF2WAV" which does just what it says.

I'm sure I've blogged this before, but lately I seem to be unable to search my own archives so I had to find it again.

The blurb:

The Internet Encyclopedia is my attempt to take the Internet tradition of open, free protocol specifications, merge it with a 1990s Web presentation, and produce a readable and useful reference to the technical operation of the Internet.

"1990s Web presentation" is apparently not a self-deprecating joke about the writer's web design skills; this truly appears to consist almost entirely of content written in the 1990s, with scant updates since.

Still looks like an interesting and useful site, though.