Intelligent Artifice

Some things that have nothing to do with games January 12, 2008

Filed under: Fun, Music — Jurie @ 3:19

This blog post has nothing to do with games, just with some things I found fun to read or listen to.

Patton Oswalt has written about his experiences with KFC’s ‘Famous Bowl’. I know neither Mr. Oswald nor this bowl, but this is some darn funny writing, starting off and ending in authentic H.P. Lovecraft style.

The franchise I visited, on Hollywood Boulevard near my old apartment, looked like it had withstood assault by bullets, flamethrowers, Baseball Furies, and a hundred hook-handed whores. Everything inside the store—including the employees and customers—looked like it had been rubbed with sad ham.

‘Rubbed with sad ham’ is my favorite phrase right now.

If that destroyed your belief in restaurant food, why not read about the awe-inspiring breakfast at Thomas Keller’s Bouchon (the one in Vegas) as described by Liz Upton? (Yes, that’s the Thomas Keller that
worked on Ratatouille.) Delectable as that sounds, I was most impressed by this:

But for French fry perfection in Las Vegas I recommend that you visit Stripsteak, a Michael Mina restaurant at Mandalay Bay, where the trio of duck fat fries (always served as an amuse bouche, and also available as a side dish) - one pot with paprika dusting and a barbecue sauce, one with truffles and a truffle aïoli, and one with herbs and a home-made ketchup - are far and away the best I’ve ever eaten.

Hmmmmmmmm… duck fat *smacks lips* I have been this close to starting a food/cooking blog last year, can you tell?

Finally, I recommend that you go over to Bootie and grab their Best of Bootie 2005, 2006 and 2007. The finest in mash-ups, totally free! And technically illegal. But where else can you listen to the Chemical Brothers’ Galvanize and John Williams’ Death Star Theme mixed together by Party Ben, or The Rolling Stones’ Sympathy for the Devil, Queen’s Another One Bites The Dust and Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit, mashed up by DJ Moule? Hours of fun for the whole family. Soon, like me, you’ll have trouble remembering a time when Bon Jovi’s Wanted Dead or Alive and George Michael’s Careless Whisper were not one song.

Let me know what you think.

Vocaloid 2: Yamaha’s anime song generator September 21, 2007

Filed under: Fun, Music, Technology — Jurie @ 10:51

Here is an interesting article about Vocaloid 2, a program developed by Yamaha that, given lyrics and a melody, generates anime-style singing.

The singing sounds like a normal human voice modified by digital effects, such as one can hear in some of the music kids listen to these days (and I am assuming here that those songs do not use synthesized singing). Apparently the software is a big hit in Japan (go go user-generated content - the Innovator’s Dilemma at work again).

I wonder if singing is easier to synthesize than speech. I wonder if this is related to the fact that accents are harder to make out in singing than in speech. Further restraining the problem domain to the kind of singing one hears in anime-style songs probably makes things even easier.

Still, a promising step on the way to usable text-to-speech. I can easily imagine an anime-style game using this technology.

(Via Boing Boing.)