The misfits.
The rebels.
The troublemakers.
The round pegs in the square holes.
The ones who see things differently.
They’re not fond of rules.
And they have no respect for the status quo.
You can praise them, disagree with them, quote them,
disbelieve them, glorify or vilify them.
About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them.
Because they change things.
They invent. They imagine. They heal.
They explore. They create. They inspire.
They push the human race forward.
Maybe they have to be crazy.
How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art?
Or sit in silence and hear a song that’s never been written?
Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels?
We make tools for these kinds of people.
While some see them as the crazy ones,
we see genius.
Because the people who are crazy enough to think
they can change the world, are the ones who do.
I wish Metro would do something like this for service interruptions here. I especially love how each individual line is laid out, especially in high density Manhattan.
A few years ago, a remix of “Pinball Number Count” made its way through the interwebs. Earlier this week, I stumbled across this visual update to the seminal Sesame Street animated segment.
This clip comes from an animation contest held last year by Aniboom.
That morning, I ran late for work. My TV was set to the news, as it was every morning. I showered, dressed, grabbed my work bag, and headed to turn off the TV. I never did leave the house.
I spent most of the day trying to get hold of family in New York. My efforts were fruitless for hours.
That night, two close friends came over. We ordered Chinese. I finally got a call back from my mother, nearly 12 hours after the second plane hit. She was fine, though shaken and dusty.
There are days when I can’t remember what I did ten minutes ago. But this day ten years ago is as vivid as ever.
Queen frontman Freddie Mercury would have been 65 this week. Google made use of a Doodle to honor his creative genius and showmanship.
This is easily one of the most awesome Doodles to ever grace Google’s home page. I hate to say it, but gives the one honoring Lucille Ball’s 100th birthday early last month a run for its money.
As I looked around for links to beef up my last entry, I found an amazing – if not dizzying – video of Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now” accompanied by video footage from not one but four sessions of Super Mario World. My understanding is that the Mario sessions are played automatically on custom designed game levels to synch with the original song. I can’t read the Japanese text on the video’s YouTube page, so I’m not 100% certain of that.
The music gets a little “noisy” to me at 2:28, but this is still pretty awesome.
Not one to pass up the opportunity to relive my childhood, I gladly accepted my roommate Matt’s offer of one of his recent library books, Super Mario: How Nintendo Conquered America. Typically I’m a slow reader, and true to form I took a week to read through the first two chapters. Given the due date and the fact Matt hadn’t read the book himself yet, I powered my way through the rest of it yesterday and today.
That was easy, actually; for non-fiction, the book was a quick read. Perhaps that was appropriate, given its subject matter – a history of Nintendo and its iconic mascot Mario – and its audience – gamers with short attention spans.
I grew up with Mario, and often put him in peril when I fed quarters into Donkey Kong or blew into the contacts of my Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt cartridge. (I found no cure for the former, but did for the latter when I invested in a Game Genie.) I spent hours forcing Mario to uproot vegetables, toss vitamins, and save princesses for whom getting kidnapped became a de rigueur.
My appreciation for anything Mario-related continued into adulthood with my acquisition of cubicle toys from ThinkGeek, T-shirts referencing him or his cohorts, and even a red baseball cap with his “M”-blem embroidered on front. My colleagues greet me with, “It’s-a Fredo,” mimicking Mario’s self-introduction as voiced by Charles Martinet. Clearly, it’s not just a thing; like millions of gamers worldwide, I have a deep connection to this character.
While not the most thorough history of Nintendo or Mario, Super Mario filled in a few gaps in Mario-lore for me, particularly some insight into Mario’s creator Shigeru Miyamoto and Nintendo’s approach to competing with the likes of Sega, Sony, Microsoft, and a certain company with a fruity name.
More often though, the book made me nostalgic for the late 1980s and early 1990s, a period when Mario mania not only saturated the airwaves…
… but also invaded our mega-multiplexes. I refer of course to the Wizard and the ill-conceived Super Mario Bros. movie, the latter of the two I still haven’t seen.
While I would certainly recommend the book to any Mario fan, it’s not without fault. The copy editor in me couldn’t help notice the glaring spelling and punctuation errors. The monolinguist in me was annoyed with the generous sprinkling of Japanese words without explanation or definition. And in one specific spot, the stickler for accuracy in me points out that Nestlé’s Quik wasn’t rebranded as Nesquik in the US until the late 1990s/early 2000s; read the book and you’ll understand why I bring this up.
Super Mario is truly a tale of how tortoise-like Nintendo manages to keep up with the hares of Sony, Microsoft, et al., without resorting to flashy gimmicks to reel in gamers of all stripes.
