There’s no joy quite like discovering a new quality web comic. First there was Perry Bible Fellowship, then Cyanide and Happiness, and today I discovered the magic of Married to the Sea. Like the other comics I listed it is (I think) pretty edgy, so tends to be hit and miss. But I think the good ones are really good.

In addition to the above, refer to comics dealing with geocaching, old photographs, cheating at Facebook games, furries, and why cigarettes are stupid.

It’s easy to get down, to conclude that maybe we as a species are pretty worthless and doomed to failure. Any number of things can inspire such thoughts: some random examples being the existence of an oppressive North Korean regime, people in Africa hacking each other up with machetes, or bankers in the US ripping off hundreds of billions of dollars. Then there is the smaller stuff: isolated incidences of violence, hatred, or whatnot. It can make one pretty dejected.

But then you run across something like this video of a guy named Rodney Mullen skateboarding, and you have to conclude that no, we are not hopeless. No matter how much evil there is in the world there remain great people who focus on bettering themselves, on creation rather than destruction, and expression rather than oppression. These people accomplish fantastic and beautiful things. We are not animals, and that which separates us from animals is evident in this video. Rodney Mullen, I salute you.

Today I wanted to listen to Glenn Gould’s “So You Want to Write a Fugue.” I fired up Google and the first result was a link to YouTube. Sweet. I click over and there is the dreaded message: “This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.” Dang.

But fear not. The second Google result goes directly to a page on the CBC website, where a video of a performance has been embedded. A video linked from YouTube. The same video that doesn’t exist because the CBC demanded it be taken down.

This Saturday a bunch of us from the lab went to Gifu prefecture. The occasion was the finals of IVRC 2008, a contest where different students come up with crazy ideas mixing the virtual and the real. A team from my lab had advanced to the finals, facing four other teams from various universities. The emphasis in this contest seems to be on creativity over practicality, which is fine by me.

Going back a few months, when I arrived in Japan, the team members described their idea to me. The idea is called “Funbrella” or asobrella in Japanese (I think. Maybe ansobrella). It is an umbrella that can record and play back the umbrella experience. There is a magnet and coil (basically a microphone/speaker) built into the structure of the umbrella, and if you go outside when it is raining it will record the vibrations of the rain hitting the umbrella. Then later on you can replay the tactile experience of holding an umbrella in the rain. Or, you can hook two umbrellas together over a network and “feel” the other person’s umbrella experience. Pretty crazy I think, and cool.

What I thought at the time, however, in addition to the idea being crazy and cool, was that there was no way it could work. The vibrations caused by the raindrops are far too small to be picked up by the microphone. You simply won’t be able to record anything meaningful. So, I wished the team members the best of luck, and hoped that if things didn’t work they would at least be able to learn from the experience.

Well, it turns out that I was totally wrong. I went to Gifu, tried out the funbrella, and the thing is freaking amazing. It works shockingly well. You hold onto the thing, they press a button on an iPod, and you feel the rain hitting the funbrella. Or they press another button and you feel marbles. They press a different one and you feel natto hitting it (natto doesn’t feel like much). The other demo is the networked funbrellas. You can hold one funbrella, hit the other one on the top, and it feels like you are hitting your own funbrella. Spooky, and excellent.

So, I was wrong. The team members were right, and I applaud them for having the vision and perserverence to carry the project through. Unfortunately they didn’t win the grand prize. That went to another excellent project, Yotaro, a virtual baby made out of rubber that has a genuine runny nose and wriggles around.

Had a bit of a strange dream the other night. The theme is a common one, namely dreaming that I am living again in a place I used to live. Most often this is my childhood home, but this time instead I decided to move back to Newman House on Queen’s campus. I had the usual confusion, trying to figure out how exactly I’m going to commute between Ontario and BC, and did I stop renting the place in Vancouver? And am I still a UBC student, or did I switch to Queen’s?

Anyway the dream itself wasn’t really that fascinating, but it got me thinking about good old Newman House. I ended up in this place during my 4th year, because I got kicked out of my awesome pad from 2nd and 3rd year, and had to find some place on short notice. A Catholic friend of mine pointed out that Newman House rented a few rooms out, and one was empty. The thing about Newman House is it’s very, very Catholic. Everybody else who lived there was Catholic, the people who would come and hang out and do bible readings were, well, Catholic as well. The priest, too. Me, not so much. So that was an interesting year of living as an outsider with a group of people who were really doing their very best to be friendly to me.

I think the best example of my outsider status involves the Christmas party, where we played a thrilling game of “Guess the Saint.” Each person had a name of a Saint pinned to their back, where they couldn’t see. Then they would ask questions to other people, who could see their Saint name. The goal was to guess your Saint in as few questions as possible. I was not good at this game. It progressed something like this:

Catholic guy: Did my Saint know Jesus?
<I look at his back, it says “Saint Appollonius the Apologist”>
Me: I don’t know.

Or, me trying to guess my Saint:

Me: Is my Saint, um, Jesus?
Catholic guy: Jesus isn’t really a Saint. He’s Jesus.
Me: Ok, umm. How about Paul? He’s a Saint, right? Am I Paul?
Catholic guy: No.
Me: I’m all out.

So I sucked at that game. Thanks, Mom and Dad, for raising me as an uneducated yokel.

The year passed fairly well, anyway. After I left Queen’s Newman House sent me newsletters for a year or so afterwards. I was browsing one of these which had the minutes of the executive board meeting. One resolution they passed shortly after I left was something along the lines of “In the future it will be a goal that residents of Newman House will have views and attitudes consistent with the rest of the Newman House community.” So yeah, I think I was singlehandedly responsible for Newman House officially adopting the policy of rejecting heathens.