Do Something This Weekend of August 15, 2008
“There are two kinds of people in the world, my friend. Those who have a loaded gun and those who dig. You dig!”1
Geek Out
Dig it. After perusing the ads for booze, trade school, and dental surgery, many subway riders have wondered, “How do they dig the tunnels for these things?” The modern-day answer is, “With huge, awesome machines.” The city uses tunnel boring machines like the one pictured above to dig tunnels for the East Side Access project, only the second NYC project to use TBM tech. Every day at 2:00 p.m. until the end of August, the MTA Museum in Brooklyn heights (map) screens a film of the TBM doing its dirty work. And now for the joke you’ve all been waiting for: I”m sure you’ll find the film incredibly boring!!!!!2
Rock on, mathematically speaking. The music scene is not my strong suit, but my better half insisted that Battles, a rising star on the math-rock scene, would appeal to my readers. I listened to a few tracks and concluded that she was right. The “math” label apparently stems from the band’s layering of complex tempos in unorthodox (at least for rock) meters, a task that presumably involves some long division, and slide rules may also come into play. This is what Bach would be listening to if he were a raver in 2008. Battles will appear at the Central Park SummerStage Saturday afternoon from 3 to 7.
Geek In
Rock on, Mega Manically speaking. If you’ve ever played video games and you’re not excited for the release of Rockman 9/Mega Man 9, you do not have a soul. It’s the first all-new 8-bit Mega Man since Mega Man 6 came out 15 years ago. One can only hope this sparks a trend of game creators returning to the classic 8-bit canvas instead of relying on re-releases of their old stuff.
Number 9 goes up for sale as Wiiware in September, which means you don’t have much time to revisit numbers 1-8 and brush up on your Dr. Wily-fighting skills. If you don’t already have them, I recommend the Mega Man Anniversary Collection for PlayStation 2 as a quick way to collect the earlier entries in the series. (It’s not perfect, but it’ll do.) No time to play them all? Go with Mega Man 2, widely accepted as the best in the series, with good reason. Mega Man 9 producer Hironobu Takeshita told Gamasutra that the game is intended as a follow-up to Mega Man 2 in spirit.
All contents copyright © 2007-2010 John Teti.
