My good friends, band Cock and Swan (Johnny Goss and Ola Hungerford), are my go to reserve tank of general technology cliff notes.
Johnny created this simple robot drummer to assist them during their shows because they are only two people and each play about 50 different instruments. Sometimes you need a little helping hand. While Johnny’s prowess for playing drums (he sets a ¾ full glass of iced cola purely for sound alteration on his kit) is not to be missed, I am besotted with the concept of this little assistant he’s developed. Here’s a simple example video of the robot baterista below:
How Does it Work?
What Johnny’s done is taken a power amplifier (basically like a PA system) and plugged some speakers in. Instead of the speakers pushing air with their paper cones, he’s cut the paper cones off and built a cylinder that comes off of the center of the speaker where the coil is.
We are living in the future is a common and often lazy sentiment about the modern world. When I read stories like this in the newspaper I am however forced to agree. This is an outbreak of science fiction in the fun and not bloody terrifying way. While in a café caffeinating my brain and reading The Independent yesterday morning this put a much needed smile on my face.
Tomohiro Shibata and Satoko Inoue tied the knot yesterday under the watchful eye of a 1.5m android known as I-Fairy, in what the machine’s manufacturer, Kokoro, said was the first robot-led wedding in the world.
Wires led from the bottom of the robot, bolted to a chair in front of 50 guests at a rooftop restaurant in central Tokyo, to a black curtain a few metres away behind which a man crouched, using a computer to operate the electronic wedding conductor’s movement and utterances.
The robot, wearing a wreath of bright flowers and speaking in a tinny voice, waved its arms as it asked the groom to “Please lift the bride’s veil”, before inviting the newly-weds to kiss.
The happy couple chose this unique angle to their nuptials because they were keen to showcase an example of the new generation of androids. “This was a lot of fun,” Satoko Inoue, the 36-year-old bride who works at Kokoro, told the Associated Press. “I think that Japanese have a strong sense that robots are our friends. Those in the robot industry mostly understand this, but people mainly want robots near them that serve some purpose.”
I was in recon – you know, one of those guys the troops liked to make fun of. They all said we were pussies because we hid behind computers while the real soldiers went to fight. We had our own version of that line too, of course… let them be the meat shields this time, and we’ll hide behind our computers just fine, thanks. Don’t matter how manly you are — you ain’t dodging no laser, kid.
My job was to deal with tracking down the fucking Google-Droids. Nobody had a clue back before the war that they could move so fast, spread so quickly across the solar system, but they did, and once they were there you had to root ‘em out in a hurry or they’d start to replicate. They’d replicate so fast you couldn’t spit without shorting out a fucking droid. They all seem nice and all, yeah, and they had that adorable little paint that said “Don’t Be Evil” on it, but without the original company leadership anymore, they forgot what good was. We were the evil, and they wanted us to not “be” anymore.
I called out coordinates to the meat shields, and they got to be the ones getting shot at. Was a pretty good deal for the paycheck, I’d say.
You know the funniest part of it all, to us reconners? All we did was look up the bots on Google Spacecharts to find ‘em all. Even after you meatshields shot ‘em all to dust, it’s Google that went and won the war for ya.
Over the past few days, I have been running a call-in Twitter show in which I quickly (or slowly) sketch up pictures based on ideas sent in by the audience. I call it the Sweatshop, and there have been two rounds so far.
Round 1 was simple: I asked the people for a pair of words.
Kevin Doran sent in “This is why you’re told never to flush used condoms down the toilet.”
I’ve been asked to do another round on Monday night, around 8pm PST, to be streamed live to the DNA Lounge in San Francisco. Which may mean I’ll need to draw less nipples and robot twat, but we’ll see.
Hit the jump to see the rest of the horrors (some are not work safe), and latch onto me at Twitter to leech valuable nutrients from my skin.
I know Ectomo is usually not for gaming news. Regardless, all of my mucusy compatriots are varying levels of Gamer, with Ross boasting a Best Sportsmanship title for Puzzle Fighter HD two years running, John chairing a successful Chinese gold farm, and Qais barely moving his arms at all anymore when he takes corners in Wipeout. Me, I’m known throughout the No Mutants Allowed forums as “a Baba Yaga-like wisewoman who speaks only in tangled truths” (props to my dawg mutiejewz44).
So it was with great excitement that I reveal on Ectomo, as a worldwide exclusive, the leaked title sequence for Crackdown 2. I seriously cannot wait to play this.
In sheer defiance of the World Wide Web Consortium's will, Ectomo was designed using a non-web-standard font. Luckily, it is included in the excellent font pack released by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, which can be freely downloaded in Mac and PC formats here. Ectomo should still look fine without it, though.
