Easter Eggs: The Hunt

Alright so I'm like 6 years late with this...but as I was doing my late night wired crawling, and I happened upon people talking about "Star Wars" and ASCII coding... My interest being piqued, I looked into it...so if you guys even have XP any more you can try this out. Go to Start, click Run, and type in: Telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl


If done correctly you should be seeing a DOS window open...enjoy the movie! You ladies and gentleman by now probably have either heard of this or don't even have XP anymore...but its pretty cool. Can anyone out there tell me if this works for Vista, or Windows 7? Speaking of Easter eggs, and hidden goodies, does any one else get a thrill at finding these? Also for all you lain fans out there, if you have the DVD of the TV series, theres definitely a few hidden surprises on there. I won't give them away if your curious.

One of my favorite "hidden" messages is actually hidden in plain sight. If any of you own or owned a Zune 1st gen MP3 player, on the back where all the technical jargen is, is the words, "Hello, From Seattle". Obviously a salutations from Mircosoft which is based in Seattle. Yes I will admit I do get a bit giddy and excited when discovering easter eggs.

I believe the first Easter Egg that I recognized and was aware of was then I was playing Quake III, waaaay back on the Dreamcast. I was walking 'n stalking all normal like, when in the shadows I saw something in the corner of the screen. Thinking it was ammo or some goodies that I missed, I was pretty surprised to see a head lying there. My first reaction was that it was just a fraged body. but it looked way to rendered to be an ingame sprite. Later on I realized that the head was put there by the developers,Eric Webb. I was intrigued to say the least.

Later on (that same year I believe...probably around 2001) I was playing Donkey Kong 64, on my N64. Right in the beginning to your right, you see a big painting of a dolphin. And I got it! I had just been reading about how Nintendo's 'new' system was going to be called the Dolphin! Of course we all know that the name "Dolphin" was scrapped for a less marine name. The GameCube. But all the same, that painting, I knew was there because of the new game system! I loved it..

There's something about finding what others miss, thats pretty rewarding. Alot of earlier games I know where loaded with easter eggs. Not so much anymore which is a shame. It really makes the game in my opinion that more enthralling. Even if its nothing but the names of the developers, or a sort message, all the same, finding something hidden like that, to me is what cyber culture is all about. If any of you guys have your own Easter egg stories, and hidden secrets post them here. Especially if any of you guys know any hidden stuff on Windows 7.

If you wanna check out your own easter eggs, or see which ones you can discover or rediscover, check out here: http://www.eeggs.com/

Droste Effect

As discussed earlier last week, the idea of a picture, referencing itself over and over again, really intrigues me. I love looking at a picture and it having a picture of its own product on the picture! Here's a few I found. I can't really tell if the morton salt girl is holding a box of herself...but I can only assume so...
If anyone else has any additional Droste Effect products and ads, send them to Damnthemachine09@aol.com and I'll post them here.

Benoit Mandelbrot R.I.P

I know I said my next update was going to include more Droste effect, but over the last week, a very important figure passed away. Benoit Mandelbrot, father of the Mandelbrot set, died at the age of 85. Coining the term "fractal" he set into motion an idea that changed chaos math as we know it.
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Benoit's main complaint was that in general math treated the world as a very smooth, made up of spheres and planes. While as we know nothing can be a perfect plane. Theses fractals that mandelbrot brought to life showed that chaos does actually have a sort of order to it. Fractals are circular in nature. And they're math equations demonstrate this. When you get an answer, you plug it into the first equation and you can do this infinitely. He proposed that everything in human nature, including patterns in nature itself are never smooth and perfect. Upon close inspection, everything is made of jagged edges, ups and downs and unique patterns. Even the cosmo's and the gathering of galaxies, and clusters of stars, Mandelbrot explained through his theory. What I love about fractals, is that the more you zoom in on the it, the deeper it goes. There's quite a few Youtube video's that display pretty cool Fractals. In Douglass Rushkoff's book "Cyberia" He describes how the Fractal is sort of the 'symbol' for the hacker, and cyber culture community. He leaves behind his iconic Mandelbrot set and the Julia set, which changed Geometry for the better.
Check out a few links to his biography and some fractals

http://aleph0.clarku.edu/~djoyce/cgi-bin/expl.cgi

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_GBwuYuOOs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ES-yKOYaXq0

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/us/17mandelbrot.html?_r=1

"Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line."

Land 'O Lakes Butter

Upon watching the latest episode of the TV show Mad Men, I was struck by a curiously over looked loop! I noticed that one of the younger characters on the show, a daughter of one of the Ad men, was talking to young boy. She says to him that the Indian girl on the Land 'O Lakes box, is holding a box with her on it, holding a box with her on it... and so on. My ears perked up, so much so I had to rewind it! ( I was watching on SurftheChannel.com) Sure enough, I went to Google, typed in the Land 'O lakes logo, and presto... There she was holding a box with her on it, holding a box. It was great, I had never even noticed this one! The morton salt girl was pretty recursive, but this is really in your face. After doing some research, this effect of Morton Salt, and Land 'O lakes is called the Droste Effect. Look for another update within the week, spotlighting the Droste effect. Until then, enjoy the Self Referencing!

Video Loops: Into the Wild Blue Yonder

After reading Douglas Hofstadters "I am a Strange Loop", I had to put this video loop idea's into play myself. So I picked up a cheap web cam (Creative), fired it up, and let it rip. I got some pretty interesting and cool looking pics with it. What really fascinates me is the implied infinity of the image. While obviously the screen can only show so many windows, the implied amount is infinite. There would always be another window inside the window! I got some nice effects by turning the cam, or by holding it up close to the screen, and then pulling it away quickly. Even by sticking objects like fingers, or pens, infront of the camera, give you a nice spiraling effect. I really like the 4th pic down. Don't know how I got it, but I got the lens to churn out a red glare instead of the blue one that it normally has. I love how some of the pics resemble spiraling staircases to no where. I suggest for all you loopy enthusiaists that you try this experiment yourself. The possibilities are too, infinite. Let me know what you think and send in your own video loop pics. Remember press the "Print scr" button on your keyboard to take a snap shot of whatever's on your screen. Then paste your pic onto Microsoft paint, and send it to me at damnthemachine09@aol.com.

Send in your pics of you're computer set ups!

This is the G3, I got from a thrift store last week. I mentioned it in my last post. Its pretty much stock, nothing fancy done to it. But it reminds me if you have any pictures of your computers that you want to send in, I'll post them up, for the "community" (which looks like its 3 people) to see. Send 'em in to damnthemachine09@aol.com

Alive and Dreaming? Or Dead and Remembering?

I'm not sure what everyone's musical preferences are but mine are pretty varied. While I'm not a big rap, or heavy metal fan, my tastes rest somewhere in between. This isn't a music blog, so I won't go into detail, but I came across a song by the band Metallica called "One". And listening to the video version of the song really made my philisophical nerves tingle. So I did the same thing when I first heard Pink Floyd's Darkside of the Moon, I put on my headphones, turned out all the lights, and listened to the song on repeat for like and hour. If you haven't heard the song or watched the movie that its based on, let me explain... A movie called "Johnny Got His Gun" is about a young guy who's shipped off to go fight in World World I. Leaving his father and girlfriend behind, he promises he'll return and is then carted off. Well in the dark, gritty trenches of WWI, his unit is ambushed by presumably German mortars. They scatter, and Johnny bunkers down in a small fox hole trying to wait out the shelling. Unfortunately a stray shell falls insanely close to him virtually shredding him apart. His broken, burnt, and torn body is taken to a vets hospital, where they over look his condition. Surprisiningly he's still alive, but whats left of his arms, and legs must be cut off. And his face is mangled beyond repair. In short, he's lost his mouth, nose, eyes, and ears. Basically his face is scooped out, with only his mind left. For all purposes he's just now a slab of meat. The doctors, mistakenly suggest to the military that because he's been so badly broken that he can no longer feel anything. Saying that he will be as "Unfeeling, unthinking as the dead, until the day he joins them". Basically they think his mind is lost as well as his senses. But they are obviously mistaken. So, try to picture if you can, being stuck in a hospital bed, no arms or legs, and no way to hear, see, speak or smell. You couldn't communicate your message to anyone, and they couldn't tell if you were even trying to say something. So the whole movie for the most part takes place in Johnny's mind. He travels through his memories, and tries to find a way out of his prison. But when he wakes up, all he see's is blackness anyway, so he soon can't tell when he's sleeping, or awake, it all looks the same. This idea of being trapped in yourself, fascinated me. I couldn't even fathom how frustrating and hard that must be, to have no ability to move, communicate or atleast hear, while strapped to a bed. The movie has some bizarre scenes that make the journey even more surreal. His memories are tampered by desires, and the need to escape himself. He talks with his father (well atleast the memory of his father) and he tells Johnny that he can figure a way out of this prison. He tells him just to use his head. This clever pun, is brought to life, with Johnny, tapping at Morse Code with his head, his only remaining appendage. I won't spoil the ending, for those of you who haven't seen it, because its indeed a powerful ending... But the idea of being only with your brain and more importantly your mind, was seductive. Take a look at the video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WM8bTdBs-cw&ob=av2e

Now this brings me to my point... Lets say this event took place, in the future. Where we had the techonolgy of transplanting human brains. So Johnny gets hit by a mortar, or whatever weapon of the future exists. And instead of keeping him in a hospital bed they give him a new body, that looks completely identical. Would he still be Johnny? Or did the real Johnny die when they removed his brain from his broken old body? Anyway, enjoy the song and I'll see you next week!