Cosmic Beauty

As we all know, the Hubble Space Telescope has unlocked the cosmos for human eyes to behold. Never before have humans been able to see so deep into space in such a clear, beautiful way. This is best demonstrated in the following pictures of the Eagle Nebula. The columns are pillars of hydrogen gas acting as incubators for new stars. They're artificially colored, but they're still awesome pictures. Even though they look like "artist's renditions," they're the real thing. The top image is the entire nebula, and the bottom image is closer up. Imagine how other things in our great universe would look. Just...beautiful.

Run!!! Run Awaaaaaay!!!

Haven't you always just wanted to drop a snowball down a hill and watch it grow and eat up everything in its path? Well, now you can, and you even get points for it!
This is a game I found on AddictingGames, and the great thing about it is you're put into a group with other players and try to break each other's records. And rolling over little kids with a two-ton snowball and listening to the resulting crunch is oh so satisfying. I've spent hours on this beautifully simple game!
Here you go:

Snowball 2008

My personal best is currently 5800 pounds. Beat that!

Is it this card? Or that card...?

All right, here's a sweet magic trick called "This'n'That." I watched it like 10 times trying to figure out how he did it. And I still couldn't see it.



If you want, the explanation is here. Even after knowing how it's done and learning the trick, I'm still amazed at how well nicepaul does it here.

Download Online Videos!

We all have seen a video online that we want so bad, but there's no way do download it. Like, say, if you wanted to put one of the YouTube videos I showed you on your iPod, what would you do?

Well, here's the answer: You'd put the URL into the blue bar at the top of the page of Keepvid.com. The awesome thing about Keepvid is that it automatically converts the video into a number of formats, including MP4, which is compatible with most portable video players. Finally, something that makes it easy to download all the best videos online!

But it Looks so Real...

Hey, guys. Me again.

Here's another great video on YouTube, this one credited for its extreme realism. It is meant to imitate the silent-film style and feel of the 1920s, and it does so beautifully. It's an amazing piece of video editing:

My favorite scene is the last one, with the fat manager. Love the music!
Until next time...Fire

It Breathes Just Like We Do!

Until recently, gas was upwards of $4 a gallon. People were going nuts about buying hybrids, smaller cars, and walking or riding bikes. Now that the economy's committed sucicide, however, that recently changed, but oil is sure to go up again sometime. And when it does...MDI will be there.
Check this out. MDI, a French company, has developed a motor capable of what a normal internal-combustion engine can do, that runs on compressed air.
Yes, you read that right.
Compressed air! Imagine pulling into your garage after a day at work, pulling an extension cord out of your glove compartment, and plugging it into the wall outlet of your garage. You come out the next day and the air tank is full and ready to go. You take out the cord, and off to work you go. And this fantasy is only a year or two from now.
In 2009, MDI plans to release the CityFlowAIR, the first in a line of cars that run on a mix of a tiny amount of fuel of some kind (many are available) and a lot of compressed air. It will be sold for around $17,000. Not bad for a car you don't need gas for.

Below are two pictures, courtesy of MDI, that show these new cars.

Personally, I can't wait for these to come out and am deeply interested in them. See more info and more pictures at MDI's website.

Boot to the Head

For those of you unfamiliar with Phoenix Wright (like myself), it's a courtroom-lawyer-stuff game for the Nintendo DS where you are a lawyer and defend people in court cases. It's a visual-novel-type adventure game, where you gather evidence and then use it to defend people in court (Wikipedia, God praise thee).
Now that you're aware of the game, let me present you another awesome (and this time, funny) installment of my YouTube series: Boot to the Head.



Kinda speaks for itself, doesn't it?

Until next time...umm...bye?

Everything--Answered

Have you ever had a really strange question that you can't seem to find the answer to anywhere? I recently discovered Yahoo! Answers, a site where Yahoo! members can ask any question they want and the answer is up, often in minutes, but by a day you'll have the answer you're looking for. All answers are written by other Yahoo! members. It's a great place to find the answer to your question or to share your knowledge (because we all know how fun that is) with someone else. You can ask questions on anything, too, and it's all well organized. It's a pretty cool place. Try it out sometime.

The Wonders of YouTube

YouTube is a great source for tons of cool junk on the internet. The problem is that it can be quite hard to find. The solution to the problem is me (drastic exaggeration here). Whenever I see something awesome on YouTube, I'll post it here next chance I get. If you find something crazy cool on YouTube and want me to see it or post it here, go ahead and feel free to email it to me (firemastrr@gmail.com) or post a reply to this topic or any other topic with YouTube videos. If it's good enough, I'll post it.

If you don't really feel like buying tons of soda and breath mints and making some crazy chain reaction (or cleaning up the resulting mess), then here's an experiment to try at home. It's reletively easy and inexpensive. Make your Mountain Dew glow!




Check back periodically for more YouTube coolness!

Oh, by the way, if you like this blog but don't want to spend every day looking at it to see if I wrote more wisdom for you guys to read, consider making a Google account and following this blog using the "Follow this blog" link on the top of the right-hand column of the page after signing in to Blogger with your Google account. It really supports the blog and shows me that you're reading this! Thanks!

Hidden Gem

If you happened to look in a specialty-game store, such as GameStop or such (or maybe even a generalized store like Wal-Mart), five years ago, you might have noticed a small game in a cute little CD case with the title "The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind." And you would've taken one look at the $15 price tag and thought, "Well, it must be no good if it's that cheap," and you go on to buy Battlefront or some other game that comes in a big, shiny box for $40 or $50. And you might have been attracted by the tan and brown cover or the low price to pick up the case and check out the back. Noticing that it's a supposedly massive and engrossing RPG, you might decide to pay the 15 bucks, pass up SWBF for now, and see how it plays. Then you get home, pop the CD into your computer, and realize an important fact:

Buying Morrowind was the best choice you have ever made.

The beautiful, integrated scenery; the complicated, in-depth and very important character choices; the full skill lists; the free-roam style gameplay, with thousands of possible storylines along with the main quest; a huge, interactive world with many different cultures to meet and befriend...the list goes on, and on, and on. The game is undoubtedly the best computer game, heck, the best game, that I've ever played. It never gets old, and I find myself always coming back for more, trying to play the game a different way. The only game that could possibly be better would be The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, the sequel to Morrowind. I have never played it (Parental Reasons... :P ) but I hear it's even better.

The thing that makes this game so awesome is not just all the stuff mentioned above, but that it was all for so little money (soon, customers discovered the greatness of the game, and the price skyrocketed to $50). A hidden gem like this is very rare, and it was and still is the best fun one can have on a computer. The game is a must-have for all gamers.

The following pictures are all from ESIII: Morrowind, and they are, of course, not mine. Google Images, people. Try it!

Just Diet Coke and Mentos...

For those of you that don't know, Diet Coke + Mentos = Fun. Why it happens, I don't know, but who cares? It's awesome. Check out the following video made by two guys who have waaaaay too much free time.



That would be so fun, if only I could figure out how to do it and find the two days it must've took to set it up.

On a related note, I hear that if you fit the Mento into the cap of a Diet Coke bottle (all the way up, so it gets stuck in the top of the cap) and then screw the cap on all the way, shake the bottle, then set it on its side, it shoots off like a rocket. I haven't tried this yet, but I really want to. A friend of mine was the one who did it.

Well, that's it for now. Happy Thanksgiving!

Play God

If there's any video game that almost anyone can relate to, it's the games where you get to play god. The reason for this is simple: you create the game. Recently, a new god-game has emerged, and it's sweeping the gaming world. From the man that brought you The Sims, introducing:
SPORE.
In SPORE, you create damn near everything: from the creatures to the buildings to your interplanetary spaceship. All of the controls are intuitive, and when put together, any combination looks beautiful and moves very naturally. The entire game is you guiding your creature from a single cell in the tide pools of your planet to the envy of the galaxy, controlling your full animal, its tribe, and its sophisticated city along the way. The game combines RPG with RTS, with a unique play that leaves no two games ever the same. As your species evolves from microbe to space tyrant, the choices you make along the way determine its traits, characteristics, and special "powers," or abilities. It's all excellent fun, even if the end, the space stage of the game, gets monotonous after a while. All in all, the game's well worth its $50.

Now for a small taste of SPORE:

Team up with other members of your species to take down rival animals in the Creature Stage.


Take over rival factions' cities through economic, religious, or (in this case) military means.

Create animals and machines using the intuitive creator.

Well, that's about it for now. Don't forget to put SPORE on your Christmas list!

Note: None of the pictures in the above post were actually taken by myself or anyone else of my SPORE game. I simply went to Google Images and typed in "spore." NONE OF THESE IMAGES ARE MY OWN!!!

Beer and Money!

This is slick...

I stumbled upon this just now, and the first thing that popped into my head was, "put it on the blog!" So here it is:

HOW TO OPEN A BEER BOTTLE USING ONLY A DOLLAR BILL

1. Fold the bill in half, "hamburger-style."
2. Roll up the bill as tightly as possible.
3. Bend the rolled bill in half to maximize strength at the end.
4. Make your hand into a fist, as if you were flipping a coin, and place the bill between your thumb and index finger, with the bent part extending just past your knuckle.
5. Grab the neck of the bottle with your other hand and push up under the cap with the dollar bill until the cap pops off.

I know this is kind of hard to follow, but luckily there was this video as well:

The great thing about this is you can earn money in bars: "If I open this beer with your twenty, can I keep it?" I can't wait to try this! Good luck to all of you! See you in a few days. Firemastrr out! (That's fun to say...)

Awesome Pics

Okay, first, lemme apologize it took so long to get these up, but this past week has been really busy, what with school, sports, an occasional date, etc. So I figure I'll post two pictures today instead of the one I've planned, and you all will forget about my lack of new posts. Or maybe you'll just forgive me. Anyway, here goes...

Have you ever played with sidewalk chalk? Like, remember those warm, sunny summer afternoons spent scribbling all over the sidewalk in front of your house, filling it with colorful gibberish or making outlines of your body and then coloring them in? Well, this guy takes all that one step further:
This is crazy. It's so realistic, it's strange to look at the top of the picture and imagine that the drawing is really just flat, solid concrete. That guy must have a lot of time on his hands...

You've heard of the expression "man's best friend" to refer to a dog? Well, I'm not sure there's a picture out there that better depicts that than this one. It's one of the saddest but most moving pictures I've ever seen, and that's what makes it cool.

That's it for now. Hope you liked these pics. Pending some strange, unforeseen...thing, I'll have an awesome game to show you next! See ya!

All Your Base--In Civilization III?!?

All right, time to get to the thing that really gave me the whole idea for this blog. This is a great hybrid of two really, really cool things that were combined to make an awesome thing that nobody but me has ever seen before. Or at least, no one's ever put it online before. Behold, Sid Meier integrates All Your Base into his best-selling Civilization series:And you're thinking, "That's it? Some weird blurry picture?" Sorry for the horrible quality, but it was the best I could do at the moment. I couldn't believe it when I saw this. All right, here's the background for those of you who don't know about All Your Base Are Belong To Us:
When the Japanese game Zero Wing came out for the Sega Genesis in Europe, Toaplan rushed the translation of the opening scene to meet the deadline, and the result was a terribly butchered English cut scene. In 2001, Zero Wing was rediscovered and resulted in an internet phenomenon with the flagship phrase, "All Your Base Are Belong To Us." The resulting Flash animation sporting the title, created by Bad-CRC, swept the internet. And it is awesome. Here it is:

Apart from Japanese game companies butchering the English language, this photo up here also depicts another of the coolest things ever, made right here in the US. (Sorry if you're from another country; didn't mean it that way.) Anyway, it's Sid Meier's Civilization III for the PC. The game is regarded as the best strategy game ever made. That is, until Civ IV came out a couple years ago. Sid Meier is the god of strategy games, and the Civilization series is amazing. You need to try it if you haven't yet. It's well worth the money.

Well, that's all for now. Sorry this took so long to come out with...I ran into some trouble getting the video. But it's here now, and that's all that matters. See ya in a few days.

Sarah Palin Rap

All right, so I figure I'll change my plans for my first real "cool" thing on this blog to accommodate recent events and happenings. For those of you who don't know of this, Amy Poehler of SNL was kind enough to preform this lovely rap for the world in front of the real Governor of Alaska herself! Just listen to the words here, it's hilarious:

I apologize for the whole FOX News format thing, but it was the best I could get. It's kind of better this way anyway, as I don't have to worry as much about copyright stuff. You can find the original SNL version (same thing, but slightly different camera work and no NBC reporters) here.

We Have Liftoff!

All right, first post, here we go...

Hey everyone! So this is my new blog, Ravings of a Madman - It's Just That Cool. Now, I know this is kind of a strange title, and believe me, it took me awhile to come up with, but it makes the most sense of anything I could think of. This blog is more or less a bunch of random posts on random stuff that pops into my head, or that I've found in the past week that seems mildly interesting and/or that I can make fun of. The "It's Just That Cool" part comes in now: I'll try my best to find the best of the internet or the real world that is just painfully awesome. We'll see how far I can go with this. I'll guarantee nothing, but I doubt there'll be many of you that will be totally disappointed.

Now for the general, technical info: I'm Firemastrr. Want to know other stuff about me? It'll be revealed in due time. (I'm a guy, too.) Firemastrr is my name for everything online. If you see that name, rest assured it's me. As far as posting, I'll definitely get something up for you guys every week, but I'll try my best to put stuff up more often than that. With school (first clue to additional info! I won't point it out like this all the time though, try and pick them out for yourselves. Fun game, no?) and all, though, you never know what'll come up.

Well, I should get going. Lots to do :P. Bear with me these first few weeks as I get a feel for this Blogger stuff, and figure out all it can do. Expect the first real post later this week!