Earth Coincidence Control Office

2011-03-07T21:25:00.000-08:00

Ketsui PCB get!

This game is balls out hardcore. Originally released in 2002 by Cave, MAME emulation for Ketsui was finally completed in December, allowing the greater public a chance to check it out. This is the Cave title that many people have regarded as the best of the best for years.

After spending the last few months playing this game every single day in MAME I concluded that I needed the PCB. Since the game is just that hardcore I decided I would trade my DoDonPachi Daifukkatsu 1.5 kit straight across for it, despite Ketsui being worth slightly less money. I am completely happy with my trade.

Cranking this game up on the cab is pure adrenaline.

2010-03-20T15:30:00.000-07:00

Just got a Sourceforge account for my friend Charlie and my game project Revolude.

I am blown away by how many awesome services SF provides the open source community for free.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/revolude/

2010-03-13T22:50:00.000-08:00

Wow! It has been slightly over 2 years since I posted on ECCO. This blog never quite got any momentum going did it? The last couple years of my live have taken me on a crazy ride. I've had some personal stuff to deal with, worked at 3 different companies (Sony, Namco, nVidia), and moved around a lot. Right now my home base is back in the area where I spent a lot of my childhood, Grass Valley, California. My friend and I are working on a game project which we are going to submit to the Nexon Initiative in hopes to get some funding for an even more robust game.

I was so surprised to see that Dave K from the Shmups community had posted here on my DDP post. Its neat to see someone who is one of the more stand-out members from a community I follow to make their mark on my corner of the digital universe. Hi Dave! I read your blog too!

2008-02-28T20:46:00.000-08:00

I am going to keep track of my progress in DoDonPachi here. I just started playing shmups so I am not that good yet. So far my best score is 5,299,970 and I have gotten up to Stage 1-3.

2/28/2008 - 5,299,970 - STAGE 1-3

2008-02-11T04:10:00.000-08:00

Tokyo cityscape at night. Looks like something out of Snowcrash.

2007-07-24T05:37:00.000-07:00

Remember that old-school screensaver for Mac called Flying Toasters which was an After Dark module by Berkeley Systems? I was just feeling a bit nostalgic tonight so I looked it up on Wikipedia. I remember when all the computers @ my elementary school (the Mac LC's) had Flying Toasters installed...those were the days.

2007-07-19T02:39:00.000-07:00

Video artist J. Michael Deane writes in his statement for lucid.ludic that “situation is a collaboration after all,” and in this installation both he and the artist Sabina Ott take on the “situation” of the show as a site, a conversation, and an opportunity to create new work. “the secret impulses of a becoming-expressive musician bird” is the core of their exchange, a series of takes of caged song birds at a pet store. For Deane, the birds are found objects that he documents and reshoots (two of the monitors show images of the original birds captured off his own television). Ott’s conversation with Deane’s work is to use the language of painting - “color, texture, gesture, rhythm” - to set the stage for Deane’s five-channel video work. Finding objects in the gallery, and colors and rhythms in the video, she has painted the walls a Canary yellow, and created a landscape of colorful pedestals through which the image and sound of the birds resonate.

2007-07-08T19:37:00.000-07:00

I am currently starting a couple of projects, the first being preliminary designs for a new kind of computer operating system. It is basically an offshoot of sorts of what the r3volude project was. I want to create an open-source 3D operating system based on OpenGL and other open-source technologies. The core idea of the OS is that it will require a broadband network connection and current 3D hardware, and that everything you do in the OS will be easily linked to any other thing you do on the computer or over the internet.

My other project is that I am designing my personal house of the future. I am going to design a home that is eco-friendly and loaded with the latest in computer and media technology, as well as integrated home-control systems. Come back later for updates on both of these undertakings.

look girl 'distance'

2007-02-10T21:49:00.000-08:00

look girl 'distance'
Originally uploaded by **sirop.

Oakland Apartment

2007-01-14T17:10:00.000-08:00

Oakland Apartment
Originally uploaded by lonestar30k.

I recently moved to Oakland, Ca again. Now I live over by Lake Merrit. I have comfort, safety, and best of all: data!

2006-11-07T22:29:00.000-08:00

Second Attention hosts an inspiring collection of free video and audio lectures by psychedelic pioneers Alan Watts, Terence McKenna, and bOING bOING patron saints Robert Anton Wilson and Timothy Leary.

2006-10-30T15:05:00.000-08:00

Every Extend Extra

and...

Wikipedia entry - Every Extend Extra

and...an interview with the creator of EEE, "Tetsuya Mizuguchi". Mizuguchi-san is also the creator of famed games Sega Rally, Rez, Lumines, and Space Channel 5.

2006-10-30T13:37:00.000-08:00

Hello, world! - A visual code for Google Earth. A Semacode representation of "Hello, world!" mowed into a field in Germany. Here's the Flickr stream too.

2006-10-25T14:51:00.000-07:00

The shuttle launch as seen from the International Space Station.

(!) - By the way, NASA is getting set to launch their STEREO mission in a few minutes here. The goal of the mission is to stereoscopically image the sun. Countdown to launch...

2006-10-25T13:30:00.000-07:00

The World of Awe (2001) Here the story of the traveler unfolds.
The implication is that s/he has left him/her forever because the beloved's image will change so much in the traveller's head that they wouldn't be able to relate to each other anymore.

2006-10-25T12:30:00.000-07:00

2006-10-12T01:23:00.000-07:00

George Gilder on Cloud Computing, Google's mass takeover, and the future of the the information age.

2006-10-12T00:36:00.000-07:00

ECCO has been on hiatus for a little bit here. I am starting to get back on track. I am currently devouring the oeuvre of Bruce Sterling...I am reading Tomorrow Now (Random House, 2002) at the moment. I am really into all this futurist/futurology stuff right now; it all seems so...so relevant. Funny where life pushes us sometimes. I grew up on computers and information technology and worshipped them on kind of a pedestal; but now the internet and technology are becoming increasingly, well, mundane. *Sigh*. Everything concerning information tech is becoming commodified and advertised and losing some of its sacredness. It only seems like the pattern will continue on with nanotech, genetic engineering, and even intellectual property of any sort. Well, I still have a lot of reading and soaking up to do on the current state of things (I've been slacking, I must admit).

2006-04-11T20:54:00.000-07:00

2006-03-25T21:01:00.000-08:00

The Nintendo Revolution?

I predict that Nintendo will make a huge splash in the coming year as far as the upcoming "console war" is concerned. Nintendo is due for a huge comeback, and the entire videogame industry is seriously in need of a facelift. Nintendo has always stuck to their guns when it comes to making innovative and creative titles, and the industry and development playing field is level enough now that whatever Nintendo does next will be a very welcome breath of fresh air.

Although the new controller may seem a little esoteric at first, I don't see it as that bizzare of an innovation to scare people away from the new system. Imagine a new version of Mario Paint (which it seems pretty likely that they are planning this) which would be built entirely around the freedom of the new input device. I see the Revolution as bringing more creativity into videogames, which is ultimately where the videogame industry has been heading anyways (i.e. user-created mods, MMO worlds & character creation).

2006-02-15T09:04:00.000-08:00

Breaking In To The Elektrobank

Now this is what I have been waiting so long to see: A Palo Alto research scientist is proposing to implant an electrode into his own brain, in order to make emperical connections between collected data, and what he perceives as concious thought. The guy's name is Bill Newsome and he mentions the inherent difficults that he is likely to run into while trying to secure approval to do such experiments. This kind of pioneering spirit harkens back to the work that Dr. Alexander Shulgin has been doing for years, by testing hundreds of custom-made psychedelics on himself, as well as his wife and friends...excellent.

Read the full article/interview over at Technology Review:
"Big Brain Thinking"

"...science and ethics keep one another in check." --Anonymous

2006-02-14T20:07:00.000-08:00

My friend Frederic just said something to me in an instant message that has been on the tip of my tongue for sooooo long...I have been wanting to create a new computer "game" for quite a while now but have not been able to put the concept into words...Fred sums it up:
"...a shared world of dreams and imagined universes forming and unforming."

Basically what I want to create is a "lush internet"...an architecture for universe creation that is scalable to the current computer multimedia technology which is connected by a very high bandwidth internet connection.

Fred elaborates: "...aand the worlds would be of incomprehensible difference. Consider: I could propose to a computer program a certain number of tenets. Like let's say I propose to it my fantasy world I've been developing in context of a novel and RPGs. In one second, it could create that whole universe...I'm assuming incomprehensible processing speed and storage."

But is this digital metaverse such a great idea? Imagine humans one day being able to accept the fact that organic existance is no longer necessery (or easily integrated and sustainable within a superior virtual architecture) and being able to integrate completely into such an architecture. Frederic asks: "My question is: Would the body even be there anymore? Or would we just breed pure digital children and keep a stock of bodies for surface exploration?" Or would we have replaced our "traditional" forms with more ideal replacements of some alternate design?

...which brings us to the next issue: "Addicts. Imagine the addiction someone would get being an omnipotent person, able to throw a star with their "strength", moving at a million times the speed of light, conjuring the gravity of a black holes. Every sensation could be simulated. You could feel a whole universe."

Would you ever want to go back?

---

Update @ 9:30AM, Wednesday, Feb. 15, 2006

Just saw this on Slashdot: This Saturday real people will hang out with virtual avatars at a gathering in D.C., combining the online world of Second Life with the real world.

When I was younger there was something quite similar to this set up at the San Jose Tech Museum of Innovation. Big screen monitors, which displayed a locally networked world similar to Second Life, were set up all around the campus. People could come up to a terminal, choose an avatar, and walk around talking to other avatars which were represented by the people using the other terminals. People would gather around these setups and marvel at the fact that somebody right next to them was interacting quite naturally with a "virtual person" (who was really just upstairs or in the adjacent room).

A commenter on /. said that this sounds like a conceptually weird idea...to which a response was given: "...yeah, but your kids will love it."

2006-02-14T17:38:00.000-08:00

The Human Mind is a Bayes Logic Machine

"Back in 1995, when I was at Carnegie Mellon, a researcher did a project in the planetarium at the Carnegie science museum. He had programmed a "joystick" to receive reflections from a set of reflective paddles held by the people in the audience. Each paddle had two different sides (red and green); depending on which side you held up, a different signal got sent back to the main processor (positive or negative, respectively). The overall "direction" taken by the game was determined by the sum of the responses - so if everyone held up "red", it as a 100 ositive; but if everyone held up "green", it was 100 negative; and so on, with straight linear interpretation.

The first game was Pong. Up and down were controlled directly, if cumulatively, by the audience. You would think that control would be spotty, and that controls would overshoot. Instead, the audience was INCREDIBLY accurate in its overall response; even when the game got very fast, the audience played very, very well against the computer.

There were several games presented, but the last was a flight simulator, flying a plane through a set of rings. The left half of the audience controlled up and down; the right half controlled left and right. Again, you would think this would be nearly impossible to control - but the audience never missed a single ring, even when the game got fast.

Individually, it's doubtful that many members of the audience could have played any of the games as well as we saw the group play cumulatively. It was a clear and very effective demonstration that there was some sort of statistical model at play in the interplay of all those minds."

-text by Bob Gregg, as posted on Slashdot.org

Sort reminds me a lot of how the blog world works, especially in relation to how news is disseminated. I remember reading something the other day about how a search on google for current news topics will net you a lot more results from blogs than from the general media or the New York Times...once the information is out, the blog-wide-web starts spinning this news juggernaut that overwhelms most of the conventional outlets. The blog world doesn't miss a thing I tell you...

2006-02-14T16:43:00.000-08:00

Earth Coincidence Control Office

This is the first post here at the Earth Coincidence Control Office (E.C.C.O). If you are wondering where I got the title for this weblog, it was coined by the late Dr. John C. Lilly and detailed in his book "The Dyadic Cyclone". Lilly posited that human experiences were set up as a chain of "coincidences" , being played out here on Earth (and beyond), while being governed by some unexplainable force or set of rules. By defining E.C.C.O.'s existence Lilly was able to give a name to the seeming unfathomable connections and possibilities in the universe that man was, and often still is, incapable of grasping. Being such a scientific mind as he was, I believe that this was John's way of defining his own "god", making the concept into a tangible thing.

With this blog, I hope to discuss a few topics each day, and detail how they are often quite intricately interconnected. Seemingly mundane occurences that happen everyday can be shown in a magical new light once one sees their manifestations and repercussions throughout all of life. It is my goal to honor Dr. Lilly and carry on his ideas into this new age of technology and discovery...an age where his ideas seem all the more applicable each day.

To read about E.C.C.O. in John's own words, please jump over to this page:
"Future Hi - John Lilly - E.C.C.O."

For more info on the life and works of Dr. Lilly, check out the John C. Lilly website:
"John C. Lilly Homepage"