Journal of No. 118

I ignored the RB2 challenges for a long time, but a while back I started backing and filling in odd moments. And now I just beat the Impossible Guitar Challenge. The first three songs soften you up, followed by Battery and Painkiller. Ouch!

#1: dark_of_night's twin sister entered a contest at Design Within Reach. The task was to design a chair composed of materials gleaned from two champagne bottles. Emily (because she is insane) laminated label foil into structural material and processed it to have a brushed metal look.
( pic behind cut )
The official contest will be decided by designers, but go (today only) vote for her chair as the fan favorite. Given the current leader in the poll, I think it's fair to say that ballot stuffing is more common than sincere voting, so go vote insincerely. Or, what the hell, vote your conscience; I'll never know. Poll here.

#2: A detail of the Superbowl party that slipped my mind. In the last set of Rock Band, Aaron forced me to play Painkiller on Expert Guitar. Naturally, I failed. But Aaron idiotically hit the Retry button and damned if I didn't make it through the song without failing once. Now I know how it ends! Thank you, bandmates, for your support.

#3: I know a lot of taxis are retired police interceptors, but I saw one today on the drive to work that still had the driver's side spotlight thingy.

#4: During the month of February, 15 museums are participating in Wikipedia Loves Art. About half are in NYC, but LACMA is among them. Essentially, the museum is throwing open their permanent collections to photography (no flash!), the photos are to be uploaded to flickr (under Creative Commons licensing), and then Wiki may use the images. Each museum is also creating sort of a Scavenger Hunt list for photographers and there are prizes. Sounds like a good way to get 1,000 identical photos of some random crap at the museum, but maybe some of you shutterbugs will be inspired. Teams of up to 10 can register and play.

#5: Now that's a great title for a [self-published] math book.

#6: GaijinSmash discovers his 391,457,927th strange thing about Japan: Mari Mokkori

My new Guitar Hero regimen is to take a business trip, ignore the game for a week, have Becca fix me a cocktail, grill and eat a steak, drink a half bottle of wine, and then fire the game up. I beat both One and Rain of Blood on Expert for the first. time. evar. Lou kicked my ass, but hey.

You may commence fawning.

Oh, and click the image for a few more GH-related flickrs.

For the none of you who are interested, I think I've pretty much reached my level of incompetence. There are maybe a few songs that I can wring one more star out of, but they're pretty few. A recent highlight was 4-starring Institutionalized on Expert. It continues to bug me that I cannot 5-star Woman. I've five starred everything else up to Crazy on You.

In related news, bon vivant and bonniedelight's man of business RB has informed me that MW is also a Guitar Hero ace. RB has called for some sort of "pit fight" for ultimate Guitar Hero supremacy before the end of the year. Details as the story develops.