Some New Sites

For your webernetting pleasure, I have launched three websites last week: one for my portfolio and two side projects.

Seeninchicago.com is a photo sharing site with an emphasis on the geography of Chicago, dreamt up by my friend Sarah and me. There's the possibility of a national or international launch later, but for now it's just interesting stuff that people have seen in the city of Chicago. It's still very much a work in progress so be nice and keep checking back to see what kinds of cool stuff we come up with.

Fortunator, currently residing at dangerouscuteness.com is an experiment to see how varied the fortunes in fortune cookies are. If you have fortunes to enter in, please do so and, once I've added support for it, tell me where you got them. The eventual idea is to be able to connect chinese food restaurants across the country using the fortunes they offer. Stay tuned for some support for geocoding and possibly reviews.

My design and development portfolio is now available at max.dangerouscuteness.com. It's still incomplete but some of the more significant stuff from my portfolio can be found there. I'll be adding more to it soon, too. 

Your Next Favourite Band

max thom stahl
2:15 yeah.....
2:16 One of only three or four really famous things to come out of UCSC.
2:16 The others being David Huffman and the Human Genome Project.
2:16 Oh shit. I think I just named my next band.....

alex
2:16 Hahahaha
2:16 AWESOME

max thom stahl
2:16 holy shit.
2:17 All our songs would be written in such a manner that they could compress really well.

alex
2:17 I will totally get in on that, son.

The Protomen Rock; That is All

Ok. So.

The Protomen fucking ROCKED, but let me back up for a second here....

I went to view two apartments today. One of them I was pretty set on but the other one I was kinda so-so on. The second one got shown by this guy Kyle who's just getting into the real estate biz. We got to talking about my Tetris machine and such, and he told me I should go to this Protomen show, so I did. I got there way too early though 'cause the website was all jacked up and said the show started at 7 when it really started at 9.45. So I hung out at the café nearby for a while and overheard people at the table next to me talking about The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, which is a pretty goddamn awesome documentary about Steve Weibe. Steve Weibe now unofficially holds the world's highest score at Donkey Kong (officially second of all time), generally considered the hardest of all arcade games. Pretty impressive.

Anyways so I parted ways with the café crowd but they were at the show later AND they knew Kyle too. So I met up with all of them at the show.

The show was unbelievable. The lead singer wears a motorcycle helmet with a microphone embedded in it and holds an arm cannon made out of PVC pipe. There's a guy with a silver robot mask that occasionally walks through the crowd and gestures at people (and I suspect he was one of the people in the balconies of the church playing the horn). Oh yeah did I mention this was another show at that abandoned church on the south side? Yeah, so there was that level of awesomeness added too. 

Anyways there were about 12 people on stage, including four female vocalists forming a choir. The guy in the megaman helmet played keyboard and sang and all the other people wore crazy silver makeup. The minute the lead singer busted on into a screaming keytar solo, I knew I was in for a show that would tax my ability to handle awesomeness. 

After the show Kyle, his roommates, all the people from the café and I got provisions at a local 7/11 then headed off to Kyle's apartment to watch It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia and get drunk. I ended up spending most of that time talking to a freelance film guy who's also a tremendous comic book geek and also lives in Wicker Park right down the street from me. 

Amazing. It seriously is amazing how unbelievably random life can be and how the sheer randomness of it all produces such symmetry. Seriously once in a while there's an epically random night like that where I think the Universe is just a pretty awesome place to be.