gonna close some more tabs.
why? because i have a backlog of things i need to open up and play with so i can either show you or not.
music! weird music! weird AWESOME music!
first, i'd like to introduce you (have you met?) to the Princeton Laptop Orchestra, or PLOrk, as it is affectionately called. their webpage is kinda dry, but there's a nice little piece about them in the NPR archive, and one of their photo sets works like a gallery and is interesting. they don't look like they're really set up for hotlinking, but if you're looking at those pictures, please notice the exit sign in the auditorium. ooooh. talk nerdy to me.
and then there's the vegetable orchestra. not only is this a concept that i am in love with, but their website is rich with images and words and sound samples, so you should go. then, if you're like me, you will buy their album "onionoise"and you will look for the nearest venue and wait until you can go there and see them live. mmmm, soup.
(and speaking of soup, here is a really good soup i made yesterday. i played fast and loose with the recipe, both changing the quantity of things in it and adding potatoes to the roast, but it is whoa-nellie-i-can't-talk-to-you-now-i'm-eating-soup! good.)
soup? how did we get there? is it non-sequitur hour? were you READING the website, or did you just skim through, hmmm?
ok, NOW we're just going to jump topics, but it's ok; it still involves sound files. if you've known me for more than ten minutes, you know i'm a big language fan. so naturally i was interested to hear the story of the three little pigs as told in new guinea pidgin, which is a creole.
for a neat look at the evolution of alphabets, look here.
a lot of the world speaks english, though. me, i'm learning OLD english (more accurately west saxon literary dialect), but one of the things that interests me in the world of english speakers is accent. so it's super cool that there's a game you can play to try to guess where a person is from based on his or her accent when reading a passage in english. it's harder than i thought it would be at the outset, because while me ear can distinguish the accent of a native german speaker, i'm not good enough to know if it's swiss german. and what if the speaker is, say a native french speaker, but was taught english by australians? oh, man. it gets complex...
anyway, you can play can you guess where my accent is from?
and then as long as you're playing games, you might as well play this clever little old-school favicon-sized game: tinyhack.
or maybe you just want to play with movement and sound: balldroppings. it's s chrome experiment, but it seems to work just fine in firefox.
and if you like your games more cerebral, there's a whole playground here.
and just for good measure, last night i heard about this race: run for your lives! ha. that's funny.
2 comments:
Thanks! I'm going to try the soup recipe. I like soup and this looks like a good one.
The alphabet link is a good one. What happened to the letters that we don't have anymore but we used to have?
I didn't do well on the intelligence test. My initial test score was 68 for an unregistered test. But then I'm not all that bright, so that's to be expected.
mj- part of what happened to letters we don't use anymore was moveable type.
for instance, the letters "thorn" and "eth" were not included in typesets that came from europe, and they fell out of use.
you still see thorn sometimes, though: that annoying "ye olde shoppe" kind of thing. thorn looked a lot like a y. "ye olde" is properly pronounced "the OLD-eh".
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