I do advertise my shoes as "Free shoes", but what does it really mean?

I doesn't mean that I give them away...not all of them.

I give away the brand, the design and pretty much all the rights the the products.  No brand, no patent, no retrictive licence.
That's what I mean by free.
You can take it, sell it, put your brand on it, make money out of it, as long as my name is on it.

Reference my blog, my deviantart page, contact me to get my full name, the choice is yours!

As far as I know, even if this concept is pretty new in the sofware industry, that's a first when it comes to goods, even moreso when it comes to clothes.

Here is the first model, I'll upload much much more about how everything is done.
Contact me if you like them, want to buy them, or donate for the project.

And yes, that's a French design!

Posted via web from Free Shoes - Open source, creative common, unbranded shoes.

When a meal tastes good, don't mess with the recipe.

That's why I like Karate Kid.
The storyline is the same. Take a kid, a bully, an obscure dude that can actually kick ass, make them interact through an unlikely training program, break the kid's leg and finish the bully with a snake move (actually crane, but, hey, snake and crane go well together).
There, actually, the movie adds some salt by putting the said kid in China. We get a glimpse of the scary training kids get in these parts of the globe, and the feeling of not belonging experienced by Dre is pretty well rendered.
In short, it's the same movie in a different context. There nothing new, but it's refreshing. And you get to see Beijing.

Now Prince Of Persia.
I'm a fan of the game. Not that I have much time to play it, but I love it. It's the best platformer around.
If you don't know yet, PoP has revolutionized the world of video games when the first opus came out.

The game is all about acrobatics and wicked 5 vs 1 fights against sand monsters, a scimitar in one hand and the sand dagger as a "main gauche".
The Prince volts around, rolls on the ground, flips over his opponents and bounces against the walls.
Spectacular.

Now, the plot is is twisted. The Prince likes the Vizier's niece, the Vizier's a wicked warlock, who screws pretty bad with the fabric of time.
Result: Prince and Princess fight together to bring back time normal. It ends in an epic rewind, where they haven't done anything together, at all, and the only thing the Prince can do to remind the Princess is remind her of her secret childhood password: Kakulukian.
It does remotely resemble the movie's plot. Remotely.

But where are the epic fights, the sand monsters (the real ones, the legions, not the pathetic Persian remake of Inspector Gadget), the 'run on the wall, jump, swing around a pole while beheading evil fiends' ?
Nowhere. So much wasted potential makes me cry.

References are good, recycling is bad

As said earlier, Karate Kid kept all the right references to keep the storyline consistent. That's the least the movie could do. But it did more: adding some real background, building some real atmosphere. You hear people speaking mandarin, and no, no subtitles thanks. You're as lost as Dre and you wonder all the same what in the world they mean by *some funny monosyllabic noises*.

Babylon? COME ON!
Tantrum time. This movie has nothing to do with Aladdin! Stop throwing apples and making benevolent thieves appear out of nowhere.
Seriously, the next thing I was expecting while watching the movie is a bloody flying carpet, powered by a (I'll say it) BLUE DJINN (I said it).
And what about the beautiful Persian language? When is it heard?
That's what I mean, you don't just take some bits and kludge them together, you have to build around it, and PoP just doesn't.

Don't improvise

Karate kid does it, a minimum, to keep the storyline believable. The mountain village is a bit overdone to my taste. But it correspond to another magical place in the original movie.

PoP does it all the time.
Most frustrating points:

The Princess' name. For Enlil's sake, her name is FARAH! Not Tabitanitavinalina or whatever. The only other female character in the game is called Kayleena, and that's still pretty far from Tibitinatitalita or whatever.

The button on the dagger. Now COME ON, we know, there are no blue prints for the damned knife. But a button? Does it also send text messages or does it need a plug in? Most importantly, can I go fish with it if I bring my own sinker?
What about the spiritual binding between the dagger and the bearer, wouldn't it be enough? And spare the cost for a button?

The Prince's siblings. Oh, now, there's the happy family yes? The prince is a loner. When he escaped from his first adventure, the first thing he does is, out of despair from losing Farah, go to the Island Of Time, and face the tentacle-heavy-shadow-Minotaur (you'd expect it in a Japanese shonen, but there it is) called the Dahaka, and go as far as free the Empress Of Time herself. Just. Because. He's. Pissed.
No brotherly love here.

Then another thing KK does well and PoP screws like never: the fighting.
KK did actually cast kids who COULD fight.
PoP, not so much. "Ok take a scary stance, try punching while looking as Persian as you can and the steady cam will make them forget you can't do jack." Yeah. Main gauche.

12 years-old and blood sports are not compatible

There, PoP actually stops at apple throwing.

Karate Kid, though, drives such a high amount of violence through mere kids it almost becomes pornographic.
The movie Kick Ass did trigger the same feeling of disgusts.
Kids and violence should never match for our entertainment. They should actually never match at all. Ever.

In conclusion, PoP sucked like the eye of a sandstorm, full with out of nowhere plot elements and mismatched ambiance. Karata kid did much better, much better, but I'm still grinding my theeth at the idea that kids are fighting on screen just to amuse us.

 

Posted via email from Walking down the dragon's back

Finally!!

Usually, when studies quoting the obvious appear in the papers or in the blogs, I tend to enter 'Fark mode' and sadly think: "and still no cure for cancer".
But today, after years of longing, I stumbled upon this article.
Yes, it says the grumps are good for you.

So, so you are warned, I am a grumpy person. I "complain too much", I "worry too much" and I also happen to be right 90% of the time when it comes to analyzing situations.
Day after day, I find my Twitter timeline and, Facebook activity stream crowded with positive thinking from "The Secret", quoting nonsensical nuggets of unicorn rainbow poop such as "Think about bananas and you'll get bananas" and "A smile is free".
Day after day I find myself thinking "Shall I wrap my mood in caramel marshmallow so luck comes to me?"

Well, good news for me: I don't have to, and I was right. Again.

Just so I give myself the joy of overemphasizing on some points I have probably written before:

• Positive thinking has nothing to do with being positive. Positive thinking is about finding constructive solutions to your problems, solution that make you go forward, thus the "positive"; It has nothing to do with thinking yourself to whatever your target is (except slacking, I'm very good at thinking myself to that)
• When someone comes at you complaining, give their 'bad attitude' a break and try to find out why these persons are complaining, yeah, sometimes people actually complain for a reason
• When someone tells you 'I told you', they probably did tell you. When it happens more than once: try listening, the smart-ass is not who you think

I know I'm not alone in here, to get worried when problems come along, to see where a certain set of bad data can lead a situation (or a company, for what it's worth).

So next time, when this grumpy dude from the IT/Support/Whatever service comes to you and tells you "I don't think that's good", keep in mind that they don't want to ruin your day, they're probably right.

Posted via email from Walking down the dragon's back

Saya tidak mau sok bijaksana, atau sok mengajar hal ini pada kalian semua, tapi menrut saya ada beberapa fakta yan seharusnya sedikit diterangin tentang pendidikan seks.

Kini kita hidup dalam suatu lingkungan di mana seks selalu hadir dangan berbagai bentuk. Internet sudah dipakai secara rutin oleh jutaan orang, dan media-media memang tidak pernah malu membahas seks dengan cara yang sangat bebas. Siapa yang belum pernah dengar lagu yang liriknya "I wanna make love right now, right now" ?
Jadinya, kita tidak boleh tutup mata dan sebaliknya kita harus lebih tahu tentang hal yang ternyata masih sedikit tabu ini.

Saya ambil contoh yang agak aneh, tapi coba kita samakan seks dengan demam berdarah alias DB.
Kalau sifat kita terhadap DB sama dengan sifat kita terhadap seks, yang bisa terjadi adalah:

• Tidak ada orang yang mau mengaku telah terinfeksi DB
• Tidak ada orang yang berani berbagi informasi tentang cara mencegah DB
• Anak-anak dilarang keluar kamar pagi-pagi dan sore-sore, tapi tidak dijelaskan alasannya
• Anak-anak mengucapkan kata "nyamuk" dimarahi orang tuanya
• Orang panik setiap kali digigit serangga apapun (kan belum begitu jelas kenanya dari mana)
• Munculnya banyak obat-obat anti-DB yang ternyata palsu/tidak mempan
• Tentu saja jumlah orang yang meninggal dunia kerena DB setinggi langit

Ya, memang takkan ada video-video nyamuk disebar-luaskan melalui HP, tapi kalian get my point kan?

Nah, sekarang kita lihat, di dunia ini, apalagi dengan rutinisasi pemakaian internet dan social media, anak-anak semakin terekspose dan remaja-remaja bisa semakin sering dijadikan korban skandal-skandal tidak jelas.
Tapi kenapa ya bisa sampai ke situ?

Jawabannya jelas: Kalau saya tahu tentang sesuatu dan kamu tidak tahu akan hal yang sama, saya dapat mamfaatkan ketidaktahuan kamu dan mamfaatkan kamu.
Kalau hal itu mobil, kamu jadi pembeli, kalau hal itu seks...kamu jadi korban.

Makanya solusinya jelas, tidak usah tutup facebook, tidak usah buang hp... tambah ilmu saja tentang seks! Seks itu manusiawi, seks itu sebagian besar dari hidup kita, seks itu bukan teori tapi fakta. Jadi kita anggap saja seks sebagai fakta, dan menjelaskannya kepada adik-adik kita sebagai fakta.
Kenapa harus takut? Mendigan orang tua dans sekola-sekola mulan mengajarkan pendidikan seks, daripada adik-adik kita cari tahu sendiri dengan risiko mendapat jawaban serba salah atau jadi korban, kan?

Posted via email from Walking down the dragon's back