+ People speaking foreign languages other than Spanish
+ Cold wind
- The terrifying cross-section of friend/co-worker/sex partner that I see everywhere in my industry, thanks mostly to Burning Man.
+ Adam
+ Living near my brother Simon
+ Museums that have more than one exhibit at a time
- Assless chaps, and seeing them when I don’t expect to.
- Giant billboards on top of everything
- Internet parties
- South Park
+ Our secret weekly Yoga practice in a dusty warehouse filled with Russian quasi-criminals
- “Internet Culture”
- Thinking about money
+ Water
+ Fog
+ Mist
+ Bridges
- Stairs, and being up them
+ Tiny flowers growing out of every nook and every cranny
- Pavement everywhere else
- Nightmarish homeless people lurking in dark holes waiting to burst forward and give me leprosy
+ German food
+ Japantown and Kabuki Springs and schvitzing.
+ Fresh bread
- Douche Nozzles

Hey, look at that! I will miss more things than I won’t miss. I guess SF isn’t so bad after all. Except for all the people.

The Super Pixel Obama teeshirts have begun arriving in the wild, and reports are they look awesome.  On boy boobies or girl boobies, Super Pixel Obama is 8-bits of political inspiration.  The shirts are printed on American Apparel tees, and Jason (pictured above on the left) compared the printing quality to the average quality of band merch, which says to me QUAL-I-TEE.

If you bought one, take a picture of yourself looking sexy and upload it to Flickr with the tag “superpixelobama”

In other news, Katie and I have just over a week to pack our entire house in preparation for our move back to Austin.  We will officially be residents of Texas again by July 4th, once again residing in the Home for Wayward Boys. Though I am extremely excited to (once again) be moving back to Austin, I will miss my neighborhood here in San Francisco.  Bernal Heights is like an enchanted mountain village, high above the hustle and bustle of crappy, crowded deeb-filled downtown.  All of the restaurants are great, the grocery store is close to perfect, and my second-favorite yoga class ever is right down the block.

Tonight, after a great yoga practice followed by a delicious burrito, I decided to bust my Yelp cherry and write a few actual reviews while my experiences were still fresh in my mind.    I highly recommend both of these places, especially together!  Tacos Los Altos and Bernal Yoga - 5 stars up!

Oh look!  Someone shared a Google Map of all the awesome in Bernal. San Francisco, get off your lazy deeb ass and head up Courtland for a pot pie, some Hawaiian sushi, or just go up to visit the owls and coyotes on the hill while soaking up the beuna vistas.

Barack Obama will be the next President of the United States of America, AND he can FLY LIKE SUPERMAN!

You’ve seen the image, now buy the teeshirt!

I feel very lucky that I was one of the beta testers for the just-released Dino Run videogame. I have been playing it obsessively for a few weeks (ask Katie), building up my dinosaur’s rank by racing over and over and over again. Now that the game is public, my rank has been reset, and I’ve got to spend a few more weeks building his stats back up.

Oh darn!

In the game, you are a dinosaur on the last day of the dinos. As the first stage opens, a giant comet crashes into earth. From then on, your goal is to outrun the WALL OF DOOM. There are 6 stages, each with different hidden secrets and cool landscapes. You can collect “super eggs” and bones of other dinosaurs to unlock things like different skins for your dinosaur and some cool game options (like having a constant rain of meteors that destroy everything in their path). In the later levels, things get really crazy as volcanoes start exploding and the ground rips itself apart as you are dodging meteors and leaping over dinosaurs stuck in tar.

And amazingly, there is a multiplayer mode where you can race dinosaurs against other people all over the world. The online lobby system is roughly equivalent to Halo’s lobby system, which is saying a lot. You can chat with other players while waiting for a game to start, host private and custom games, and of course compare your scores against other players.

My two favorite parts of the game, though, are the 8-bit-style pixel graphics, and the electrorocking soundtrack. I can’t wait to collect enough bones to download the MP3s. I also can’t wait for this game to be picked up by the Xbox Live or WiiWare game download systems so I can play it full screen on my giant TV. Dinosaurs. Pixels. WALL OF DOOM. Can there possibly be anything better than this?

I DOUBT IT!

Look for me in the multiplayer mode! I’m benbrown666, of course. If you get an account, post a comment here, and maybe we can wrangle up a game or two.

Play Dino Run Now!

(The video above is me running through the first level. See also this video of a crazy but awesome bug I encountered while I was testing the game. Also, definitely check out the other Pixeljam games, because they are almost as awesome as Dino Run. But not quite!)

And I mean, I have always considered what I do on here, on the tubes, to be more art than technology, more play than business. Bad art with ugly colors and lots of cuss words, but still. So, it pleases me greatly to post this news.

My friend Ari Y Kelman (the Y is important for purposes of disambiguation between faculty at the same university) and I are working on an art project for the grand opening of the new Contemporary Jewish Museum, because we are contemporary Jews, and because an organization we are part of is sponsoring the party. Booya! The project is called (Re)velation, and it will be at the museum during the DAWN 2008 ALL NIGHT OPENING PARTY / CELEBRATION OF SHAVUOT / DENGUE FEVER CONCERT on JUNE 7 BUY TICKETS NOW. Contemporary! Jewish!

I always thought there were only 10 commandments, the ones carried by Moses down from his conversation with THE BURNING BUSH. OMG!

I don’t strictly believe any of this, but it is a pretty awesome story, you have to admit. I mean, I have totally talked to burning bushes before.

But there are way more than 10 commandments. There are 613 commandments, or “mitzvah,” and they cover everything from how to salt your sacrificial offerings to rules for tribal warfare. It totally freaks me out, because you get a pretty clear view of how different times were when these laws were first thought up and put down on the books. And it freaks me out more when I think about how all of our laws and rules and society basically grew out of this stuff, like it or not.

My theory is, each one of these rules has a more modern interpretation, something that digs out the core nugget of wisdom from the “original” version and turns it on its head, makes it relevant today, for me, right now. A new translation, one that doesn’t involve blood sacrifices and slave trading.

Now, don’t get me wrong, there is a long, long, long tradition of interpreting and reinterpreting these things, and what we have now, these 613 rules, are the result of that tradition. I humbly submit that (Re)velation attempts to be a continuation of that tradition. Different! Possibly much more stupid! But definitely funnier.

You can visit (Re)velation right now, and browse through the 613 mitzvah. And if you see some nugget of wisdom in there that would make more sense if it referenced Super Mario Brothers or Seinfeld, you can submit your own version right there. That’s the magic Ben Brown sauce. It’s a web 2.0 style remix of ancient religious tradition! Tada! We’re also collecting audio submissions of people delivering their own versions of the mitzvah - eventually they’ll be mixed together to become THE VOICE OF GOD at the Dawn party.

Our friends at Jewcy have kindly rehosted the project. See, I am totally a legitimate artist! We really need your help, your creativity, and your insight to mix these laws up so we don’t look like boobs at the opening! Click one of those links and put on your virtual yarmulke!

If I can actually pull this off, I will be amazed.

(Here are the iPhone versions of the pixel Moses and Burning Bush that I posted a few days ago.)

Saw it here first.

Our podcast turned 21! Everyone has to chug a beer in its honor. I think we are getting pretty good at this whole thing. Once we move back to Austin, oh yes, did I mention we’re moving back to Austin in June? We are. FU, SF! Once we move back to Austin, Katie is going to be putting a lot more time into I want to see that!, and we’ve got some cool new features coming out that I think will make the site more useful and more fun to use. (Right now, its kind of boring, especially when there are no good movies coming out.)

But I think that you must admit, right now this very second, that our podcast is GREAT and that we are the cutest podcast couple in the history of podcasts, especially Katie.

As part of building the web site, I recreated a few scenes from the ol’ Torah in oldskool 8-bit pixel-styles. Because I am not satisfied with only having my iconic icons of religious history be seen on a web site by nerdy media Jews, I have created iPhone wallpaper versions of Sweet Fancy Moses and God popping out of a burning bush. Enjoy!

My brother Alex is the coolest cat on planet. He works at home and on the road with Ghostland Observatory who have just self-produced their third kick ass record, and who are virtually constantly on the road putting on crazy laser-powered shows.

When the band was here in San Francisco a few weeks ago, I set Alex’s iPhone up to post his photos to Flickr. He’ll be posting behind-the-scenes photos as he travels with the band to concerts, festivals, and SECRET INTERNATIONAL GIGS.

I am super excited, not only because Alex always takes cool shots of the giant crowds getting crazy underneath insane laser shows, but because he also gets to see the band off hours, when they’re just hanging out with each other, having fun on the road, or waiting around for hours and hours and hours in the back of a dusty club, waiting to go on.

I miss the road! (I traveled with Ghostland on their first tour out of Texas.)

Alex isn’t “documenting” the band. He’s just shooting pictures of his life and his friends and his job. I think its better this way - an unbiased look at the experience of touring with a band, something that’s probably a lot different than people imagine. Also, lasers.