September 2005 News

A really clever idea with some really funny bits... Stalin, Hitler, Eisenhower, Churchill and the rest of the gang have an in game chat. 

Stop me if you've heard this....

Pixen is like Photoshop for pixel artists. It is clearly designed by people who know the needs of those working with sprites, icons and such. The tiny format of graphics demands a certain precision, and Pixen delivers that precision on tiny-format artwork.

http://www.opensword.org/Pixen/

The recent Spider-Man 3 villain rumors are apparently grounded in reality... Kirsten Dunst spilled that Venom and Sandman will indeed be the antagonists to our favorite web-slinger. 

What me worry? Sorry, I just had to throw that in there. Some nut has scanned every Mad Magazine cover going all the way back to 1952.  Found on the ultra-nifty drawn illustration blog.

I couldn't stop laughing at this hilarious (and sadistic) site and wanted to make sure all of you suckas got a taste.  Many thanks to the sick and twisted pixelblink for sharing it with us.

I am better than your kids.

Check out this handy five page tutorial including source code on how to create a simple platform game in Flash.  This is perfect for those of you who (like me) are too lazy to program games in "real" languages like C++ and Java.

The wait is now over. Today, Activision has released the first single player demo of its upcoming World War II-themed shooter, Call of Duty 2 for the PC. The demo clocks in at 656MB and is available immediately from:

Call of Duty 2 Demo

Let's take a stroll down memory lane when dinosaurs weren't just confined to zoos. Check out these beautiful interpretations of classic video game characters...

• Mario and Princess 
• Mario and Donkey Kong
• Pacman in Hospice
• Mega Man and Punchout?
• Luigi and Yoshi

There's a whole bunch more over at the eatpoo retrogame fanart thread.

I know this is probably old news, but I honestly had no idea just how elegantly the QRIO could move.  Check out this robot ballet video to see the future of exotic dancing.

There's a ton of videos of robots doing various wholesome activities at onlyrobots.com.

I usually don't like celebrity chatter, but this was just too damn funny. I heard a clip on the radio this morning that had me in stitches. On Tyra Bank's unquestionably awful talkshow she choked back tears while revealing the anguish she goes through when people suggest her breasts are fake. 

"By no means am I against plastic surgery," Banks says. "But it's just not a choice that I made. ... It's something that a lot of people think I have - and that is so frustrating to me."

Let me remind you, she was on the verge of tears the whole time. 

Click here to learn more about the shallowest person on Earth.

I wouldn't call myself a "Mac" person (although I do like Apple products for the most part), but I have to give Apple CEO Steve Jobs major props.  Jobs publicly hammered the RIAA for suggesting raising online download prices above one dollar a song.  

The music industry has been losing tons of money to illegal downloading for years because of their arrogance and their absolute refusal to listen to what customers actually want. Now they have legit music downloads finally working (in no small part because of Apple products) and they want to screw their customers almost immediately.  Greedy pigs.

This goes out to all of you who have always wanted to turn your hamster into a fighting machine. 

I love seeing what other people's favorites are. I guess that's why I'm such a sucker for "top lists" and AFI (American Film Institute) has a slew of them.

• Top 100 Movies (PDF)
• Top 50 Stars (PDF)
• Top 100 Heroes and Villains (PDF)
• Top 100 Movie Quotes (PDF)
• And more...

Please note that XXX films are not very well represented on these lists.  Sorry Ripped Monkey.   

Found this really amusing site and thought I'd share... Enjoy http://www.crazythoughts.com

We're so screwed.

 Jil Lee put 500 empty speech bubbles in the streets and took pictures of what people wrote in.  Some funny stuff.

[ Via Ozone Asylum ]

 The first part of this article describes it better then I could:

"Star Wars fans Web hunting for a downloadable game of the sci-fi flick are unknowingly infecting their computers with a worm that gives them rogue Google results authored by hackers.

Detected in the wild last week, the P2Load.A worm lies in wait in the free version of “Knights of the Old Republic II,” and spreads through the peer-to-peer file sharing programs Shareaza and Imesh.

Security experts at Panda Software rate the potential damage of the infection at four stars, the highest level, based on the worm’s two attacking features both enabled through modifying the HOSTS file on a user’s computer."

Two words people...  VIRUS SCAN.

This webcomic was actually started in 2002 by Chris Dlugosz.  It is a comic about the lives of pixels.  I thought you all might get a kick out of browsing these comics.  Enjoy!

http://pixelcomic.net/000.shtml

Hell yes!  While you won't have access to luxuries like a campus, a degree or the faculty you will have access to MIT course materials.  I've always felt that schools are too driven by money so this really was a pleasant suprise.

What are you waiting for?  Smarten up Einstein.

Katrina's got nothing on Bush... this picture of Bush would've made such a great campaign poster for Kerry. 

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Scared-stiff astronomers have detected a mysterious mass they've dubbed a "chaos cloud" that dissolves everything in its path, including comets, asteroids, planets and entire stars -- and it's headed directly toward Earth!

Discovered April 6 by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, the swirling, 10 million-mile- wide cosmic dust cloud has been likened to an "acid nebula" and is hurtling toward us at close to the speed of light -- making its estimated time of arrival 9:15 a.m. EDT on June 1, 2014.

"The good news is that this finding confirms several cutting- edge ideas in theoretical physics," announced Dr. Albert Sherwinski, a Cambridge based astrophysicist with close ties to NASA.

"The bad news is that the total annihilation of our solar system is imminent."

Read the full article.

Ricky Gervais, the comedic genius behind 'The Office', has another BBC show out and it's coming to HBO this Sunday (Sept. 25th). It's a show about extras (the background people in movies and TV shows) and you can see a few clips from season one on the Ricky Gervais website and the official Extras HBO site here.

The researchers were able to take several 10-minute sound recordings of users typing at a keyboard, feed the audio into a computer, and use an algorithm to recover up to 96 percent of the characters entered. The algorithm distinguishes the acoustical nuances in each of the keyboard’s buttons and uses statistical algorithms to weed out unlikely letter combinations. 

Check it out.

The 2005 Tokyo Game Show just started a few hours ago and the highly anticipated trailer for Metal Gear Solid 4 is now playing at the Konami booth. You are not prepared for what you are just going to see! This game looks so freaking awesome that Sony fanboys are now going to invade every 360 forum out there just to rub it in.

Check it out!

Added the following link in the upper right corner of pixel art detail pages so you can keep rating/commenting from piece to piece quickly.  Thanks to Helm for the suggestion!

Random Unrated Pixel Art

Added a couple new filters to the gallery search so you can find which pieces in the gallery are available for PixelTees purchase and Pixel Joint avatar. Thanks to Ripped Monkey for the suggestions!

Also added birthday field to the gallery site (instead of just the forum) and modified the members page so you can search for members by birth month.  Kind of fun to see if other members have the same birthday as you.

Another reason why having too much money can make anyone sell out. I used to like Napoleon Dynamite. They need to break up Bill Gates like they did Ma Bell... Check out the ultimate dumbass!

Turns out what makes the Nintendo Revolution's controller so revolutionary is that it sports a pointer where you are able to point the controller at the TV, turn it a bit to the side, and so will you in the game. The controller is broken in to two parts, one having a joystick the and the other which has all the other buttons and resembles a TV controller.

Click here for more info

When I log in this morning (to WordPress) I notice alot of feeds about Google Blog Search.  The first thing that comes to mind is that Google is adding another button in their searches (Like the web, feeling lucky, and image), but no, it is a whole new feature from Google.  As if Gmail, Google Talk, Google Maps, Google Desktop, Google Suggest, and the other countless features weren't enough.  I don't see why Google couldn't add this as an extra feature on their search engine, why another BETA release?  Show me one feature that has gone out of BETA.

Other than that, let me tell some of you who haven't heard what it does exactly what it does.  It searches blogs, just blogs, and nothing else.  When Googlebots are crawling over the WWW, it reads your meta data and goes through your RSS and Atom feeds, if it identifies your site as a blog, it indexes the information it finds and puts it into the blog search database.  This is all done from your feed data.  That's it.  Not really an amazing feature, all it really is is a huge aggregator with a search feature.

Added seven new themes to the Pixel Joint theme gallery including one by neota. To change your theme you need to be logged in...

My Profile >> Edit Profile >> Change Site Theme field >> Submit

If you have a theme you would like to submit simply download the template CSS file, edit the colors and send sedgemonkey your new code.  Altering graphics and borders is optional.

The title says it all. Check out this amazing artist's chiaroscuro work. Oooooh, chiaroscuro... that's the kind of vocabulary a couple of years of art school will buy. Money well spent. 

Attention all ye scurvy pixel artists... sign up for Dogmeat's nifty Pirate Challenge over at Pixelopolis or I'll run ya through (it's not as kinky as it sounds).

Go now! 

I never know what to believe on these movie gossip sites, but it looks like the villain lineup for Spider-Man 3 is set: Venom, Sandman and Hobgoblin.

Sounds like it could be a crowded movie. 

Just a notice that AOE3 demo is ready for ya. 365 MB and you'll be on your way to conquering the New World with the cooperation of the Native Americans.  

I'm a huge fan of the first two "Age" games... I sure hope the new game doesn't escalate the difficulty beyond my feeble brain's reach.

As some of you may have noticed there's a new Pixel Joint layout up today. If everything looks totally out of whack you might need to flush your cache or use the ultra-handy Ctrl+F5 for a quick remedy.

We've added some links to community resources right into the design (Pixelation, Pixelation IRC and Pixel-Arts.org) and we've added a fun little chatterbox page where we can yak away about this and that. One of the other major additions to this new design is a "lighter" feel and a more accessible (hopefully) front page.  We're still working on improving the design (including skinning support and member submitted header graphics), but you probably won't notice any other design changes for at least another few weeks.

Oh yeah, many thanks to Peppermint Pig for his awesome colors, design tips and Pixel Joint header text and iSTVAN for the first PJ header graphic!

Some guy has a a whole rationale on why just diverting telemarketers isn't good enough -- we have to strike back.  After you've read about this guy's personal vendetta check out this funny Flash cartoon of the device in action. (keep in mind that the telemarketer is speaking to a set of prerecorded wave files).

By the way, I find the most effective way to deal with telemarketers is to simply say nothing and scratch yourself with the phone.  You'll kill two birds with one stone!

Borat's certainly got a lot in store for us this upcoming season... first he gets thrown out of a rodeo and then he crashes Pamela Anderson's dog wedding?  Gotta love da Ali G.

Dog wedding info found on chrisdiclerico.com.

Such a great concept executed perfectly... endlessly amusing videos using every day objects for props, special effects and actors. That is the world of PES.  Who needs ILM when you've got a paper clip and a tape dispenser?

PES did the bobblehead campaign for the Los Angeles Dodgers and a beautiful CoinStar ad.  There's also a fantastic Bacardi set of ads using only items you would find in a bar. Great stuff.

We've had a few issues with OS X and Linux internet browsers not being able to post comments on the site since the last update and we are working to correct it as quickly as possible. If you are having issues please report them via PM or the contact form and check back soon! Sorry for the inconvenience.

Added messenger fields (AIM, ICQ, MSN, YIM) for the member profile pages.  Also organized the profile layout a little bit so it should be easier to find relevant links.

Also added a couple admin reports that will make it easier to spot people who like to create multiple accounts to inflate ratings, comment spam or just be world-class assholes. It certainly won't put a stop to abusers, but at least we can keep the damage under control.

Sooooo, anyone remember the US is still fighting a war in Iraq (and Afghanistan) right now?  Americans and Iraqis are still fighting and dying and we're all just pissed that gas prices keep getting higher.  

Anyway, here's a preview of the upcoming flick Jarhead which takes place in that other Iraq war.  I'm really excited for the release of Jarhead mostly because Sam Mendes is directing. His last two movies were American Beauty and Road to Perdition -- both great flicks in my humble opinion.