kylelibra.com   a blog about what’s on my mind

This post has a great list of eight skills you probably didn’t learn in school. Now that I am a member of the real world, I really would have liked to have learned some of these before now.

I think this was nominated for an Oscar, but I don’t have time to look it up.

In 1969, a 14-year-old Beatle fanatic named Jerry Levitan, armed with a reel-to-reel tape deck, snuck into John Lennon’s hotel room in Toronto and convinced John to do an interview about peace. 38 years later, Jerry has produced a film about it. Using the original interview recording as the soundtrack, director Josh Raskin has woven a visual narrative which tenderly romances Lennon’s every word in a cascading flood of multipronged animation. Raskin marries the terrifyingly genius pen work of James Braithwaite with masterful digital illustration by Alex Kurina, resulting in a spell-binding vessel for Lennon’s boundless wit, and timeless message.

What is Gen Con you might ask? The web site explains the event as “the original, longest running, best attended, gaming convention in the world.” Furthermore, ever year since it has been hosted in Indianapolis more than 25,000 people have attended. Every year. 25,000 people. Wow.

For further insights into how crazy this event I provide the following excerpts from Wikipedia:

The Klingon Jail and Bail are a group of people who dress as Klingons from Star Trek. For a donation to charity they will “arrest” another convention attendee for a short period of time. The Jail and Bail originally appeared at Gen Con in 1994.

Gen Con has also featured a number of events that raise money for a variety of charities. These include Cardhalla, in which donated cards are used to build a large city. Attendees are then invited to throw coins at the city to destroy it. The coins are collected for charity. Cardhalla was first run in 1999.

True Dungeon is an immersive life-sized dungeon crawl live action role-playing game (LARP), run at Gen Con since 2003. It features a challenging series of puzzles and scenarios designed to recreate a D&D environment and session. It emphasizes team work, creative thinking and problem solving, as well as employing a fighting and magic system; furthermore, unlike traditional LARPs, it does not require staying in-character throughout the experience.

I’m pumped and I’m going. If you are interested in swinging into Indy for the weekend, let me know. Below is a picture from Gen Con 2007.

• What happened when Bush and Bill Gates met at the Olympics
• Not even China is safe from the Blue Screen of Death
• Spanish Basketball Team making inappropriate gestures
• Bush’s antics as a spectator
• Russians still destroying Georgia while the world watches the Olympics

Explosm! is a daily online comic strip that I absolutely love. You can definitely waste a ton of time on the web site because there is a button that will bring up a random strip. Sometimes they are a little inappropriate, but there is nothing wrong with that.

I remember hearing about this film a few months back, but apparently I missed the trailer being released because I was in Europe. Check out the trailer here. I am very excited to see this film. If you can stand a little more intense religious humor you should check this site out, which may or may not be officially connected to the film.