Recent events have reminded me of the importance of early detection when dealing with alien invaders. You can’t just let them land in your yard and promise not to take over the earth. Aliens don’t value yards the way we do, so you can forget about them valuing human life. With this circuit, you can remain aware of exactly how much sunlight is being blocked by an approaching alien warship. Ignore the radio broadcasts. The mind-controlled announcers will claim it is a medical supply vessel, but we know an unimaginably futuristic, alien, and complex warship when we see one.

Bottom Line: LEDs + piezo buzzer = not dead from alien attack.

In the spirit of ghost hunters everywhere, I give you the DarknessScan 2.0. It not only detects rising and falling light levels (and therefore red flags the presence of beings that thrive on darkness…hint, hint…ghosts) but tells the user about it with convenient LEDs.

You want to create a mythos to accompany your compositions. Parliament had the mothership. Zepplin had the hedgerow infested with bustles. Egyptian Lover had his house on the Nile. Bootsy had 14 carat funk, ya’ll. Similarly, the electronic duo La Bionda have whatever this is. Behold: “I wanna be your lover.” You had me at spaceship, guys.

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P.S. Yes those are a bunch of kids they are singing to.

What we know about the rest of the party has been pieced together from partially recovered security footage:  Science stumbled into the study and demanded that Words behave themselves in the presence of a lady. Presumably he meant Pictures, the only other guest nearby.  Later, Words cancelled a parcheesi tournament because Technology had eaten all the guacamole.  Then the kissing.  Lord a’Mercy the kissing.

Anyhoo, long story short they all got pregnant, regardless of gender, and had a litter of hybrid science/lit/art/tech striplings.  The first of these cross-breeds was introduced to us over breakfast in the atrium.  His name was Robin Sloan.  He arrived without invitation, but will not be asked to leave until we hear all that he has to say.

He is using some scroll sniffers to track how readers navigate his texts.  Super interesting, right?   He is also using graphing utilities to visualize the data.  Also interesting.  Go check it out: Robin Sloan’s code is watching you read Robin Sloan’s code.

More on Sloan and the new generation of hypertext lit later…chapter one: Does subliminal content have to be evil?

Many, many more await you at sortakinda.com.

I thought tilt shift photography had reached some kind of limiting value of cool. Not that other cool projects wouldn’t appear, but the human mind can only withstand so much awesome. That’s what I thought, in my adorable, pre-rickflair innocence. Behold…Rick Flair versus Hulk Hogan in a tilt-shift match for the ages. If this happened in savannah, georgia, refereed by Carl Furgy, I could shuffle off this mortal coil a completed person.

For more info and to give credit to Keith Loutit (supergenius), visit his site: Keith Loutit PhotoBlog.

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