50,000 Monkeys at 50,000 Typewriters Can't Be Wrong
Years from now, our kids are going to ask us about the Wolf Shirt and Keyboard Cat memes and wonder why in the world we cared about them so much. When that day comes, some of us will reach into our dressers, pull out this shirt, and tell our children, "We needed them, so we could have this."
My brother had one of the coolest cats in the world. We called him Freddy Snowpants, because he had furry fat hind legs that looked like he was wearing snowpants when he walked. One of my favorite things to do was stand behind him and make the "zip zip zip" noise, which always resulted in much mirth and laughter.
Jeremy just e-mailed me that Freddy's cancer finally was too much for him, and they had to put him down today.
This picture tells you everything you need to know about him, why I loved him so much, and is the way I'll remember him:
When I was a kid, I read this cool book from National Geographic called Let's Go To The Moon. It was, as you may have figured out, all about the Apollo program, but mostly focused on Apollo 11.
I already liked science fiction and astronomy (well, the little-kid-without-a-telescope version of astronomy, which was mostly limited to finding constellations and planets, but we all have to start somewhere) so I spent a lot of time with that book, imagining what it would be like to fly to the moon, walk around on it, and come home.
This week is the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, and I've found a few things that I thought I'd share, if for no other reason than 9-year-old me would think they're cool:
SomaFM has a really cool station Mission Control:
Did you see the LRO photos of the Apollo mission sites?
I'm kind of Pink Floyd super fan number one, but I didn't know that the band was invited by BBC to improvise a soundtrack to the moon landing. Can you imagine something like that happening today? If it had been post-Meddle, I bet they'd just have played some epic version of Echoes.
We Choose The Moon is the kind of multimedia experience I always hoped the Internet would provide, back in the olden days when digital watches were a pretty neat idea.
In one of the more clever uses of Twitter that I've seen, there are three Twitter accounts recreating the mission communications: @AP11_CAPCOM, @AP11_SPACECRAFT, and @AP11_EAGLE.
NASA has newly-released mission audio, restored Apollo 11 video, and a real-time replay of the mission that you can stream online if you have Windows Media Player. Mac and *nix users should be able to use the audio player at We Choose The Moon (powered by Shoutcast, FTW) to hear it. I've been listening to it for almost an hour, and it's more compelling than I expected.
Tor.com is celebrating the Apollo anniversary (and their own) by asking authors, artists, critics, and fans in the science fiction community to
send their stories of what they were doing when the LEM landed on
the lunar surface, and to relate how it informed their relationship
with science fiction. (The blog post I've linked is awesome. You should really go read it.)
Even if you only get a couple of minutes, and you can only look at some of this stuff, I hope you will, and I hope find it as inspiring as I do. To steal a phrase from Torie at Tor:
We can touch the sky.
Read in reverse order for maximum silliness and WTFosity.
Maybe it's just me, but this was the hardest I've laughed in a long time. Thanks, Gabe.
Gabe:
In my day we didn't have awesome sculpted terrain and hand-painted miniature figures! We had graph paper and our imagination, and we liked it!
Well, except for when we started playing Warhammer 40K, and we had shoeboxes filled with terrain, and foam-filled suitcases to carry our Chaos Marine armies.
…man, now I want to play D&D, and I want to paint minis.