I learned about the Rasterbator recently and was immediately intrigued. I knew that we were moving soon at work when I first found out about it so I immediately started thinking about how I could rasterbate all over the place.

For those of you who are too lazy to follow the link above and are wondering what the Rasterbator is and what it does it’s quite simple. With the Rasterbator you can take any picture you want and blow it up to any size that you want; you can make them HUGE. What the program actually does it blows the image up to whatever size you want and then spits out a PDF file. This PDF has however many pages that you specified for the size of your image, you then print the pages of this PDF on your every day computer printer, you can do either color or black and white, on regular 8 1/2″ by 11″ paper and once everything is printed you put all the pieces together to make a much bigger image.

While I had all sorts of ideas of what I wanted to do at work I knew that I had to be a bit careful if I wanted to be able to keep it up and not get in any trouble. I narrowed my choices down to about 5 but I finally ended up going with an image from The Shining. Below is a picture of it from about 15 feet away.

It turned out good, not great but good. I learned a lot doing my first Rasterbation. Tip 1: Use the highest resolution source image you can find, the bigger the better is the deal here. Mine looks good but I know it would look better if I had used a higher resolution source image. Tip 2: if you are going to cut out all the white parts between the sheets of paper you want to make sure that you cut your lines as straight as possible and keep all of your pieces of paper a uniform size. I had no problem keeping my cuts straight thanks do this awesome little toy that a woman at work let me borrow, this thing was a life saver. my problem was that I didn’t keep the pieces of paper the same exact size. Even if the pieces of paper are just a bit different in size it will screw you up when you tape everything back together, mine were close by my finished rasterbation has some little errors and doesn’t exactly lie flat against the wall.

Here is a close up of my image, you can click the image for a larger version.

And here is a real close up to show you what the image looks like up close (where it loses it’s magic).

Pretty cool huh? I am thinking I am going to leave it up at work for a month or two and then make a new one and try and keep the cycle going. That is assuming that work doesn’t make me take it down which I hope they don’t.

You should check out the gallery at the official Rasterbator web page, they have some really cool images.

I recently became a member of the somethingawful forums and recently there was this thread (you may have to be a member to read it) which taught me something that I find weirdly disturbing. It turns out that some people actually stand up to wipe their ass. I find this highly disturbing and it really has shaken my faith in humanity.

I thought for sure that only really weird people on the internet are standers so I brought this up to my friend, Donkey boy and it turns out that he is a godless heathen who stands to wipe his ass. Serious, what the fuck is up with that?

Thankfully, there was a poll held at somethingawful and it was found that the majority of people are sitters and not standers which helped to restore my faith in humanity.

I did find out something even more disturbing. Not only are there people who stand up to wipe their ass, there are also people who reach between their legs to wipe. There were a couple of people who stood up as well as reached between their legs to wipe, I think those people are the antichrist.

On a lighter note, I highly recommend joining and reading the somethingawful forums. It costs ten bucks but it is really worth it. This tale of 4th grade masterbation gave me ten dollars worth of entertainment alone.

The original

Fun

I can’t stop watching.

EDIT: I learned a bit more about this pic. It’s from some show called “So you think you can dance?”. I found a video showing his amazing skills.

Back in early June I was stumbling around the net and came across www.robogames.net. I remember back when they showed these fights on Comedy Central and really getting a kick out of it. I also remembered that they took place in San Francisco so on a lark I decided to see if it was going to be taking place anytime soon. I was in luck, as it turned out they were happening in just a couple of weeks and they were going to take place on the same weekend that my father was going to be in town from FL (fathers day weekend).

The event took place over three days, Friday, Saturday and Sunday, we went on Saturday. It was $20 to get in and that was for the entire day from noon till 11PM. Three day passes were also available for $55. We only stayed for a few hours but I still feel as though we got our moneys worth.

As we walked in there was a piece of the bulletproof lexan that is used to line the ring on display. This piece of lexan was half an inch thick and as I mentioned, bulletproof. The night before one of the robots had hit this lexan and put a six inch long gash in it that almost pierced all the way through it, this can give you an idea of just how powerful these bad boys are.

There are quite a few things going on. There are sumo battles where little tiny robots that are completely autonomous that try and push each other out of the ring.

Sumo ring

There was a ton of Just display robots that I don’t have any pictures of. There was a, roughly, 6′X6′ ring for the super lightweight robots (weighing just ounces and up to a couple pounds) which were a lot of fun to watch fight and then of course there is the big ring which is the main attraction. At 50′X50′ and lined with bulletproof lexan the main ring is quite impressive. There are lots of different weight classes that fight, from bots weighing just a few pounds up to the super heavy weights that weigh in at up to 340 pounds. All of the different weight classes were fun to watch but it’s the super heavy weights that really are the most impressive.

I do have to talk about one of the lightweight bouts that we saw. The first bot was one with a vertical blade the second was a plastic buck with a stick attached to it. I am not sure of the story behind this, I have a feeling that some team just threw it together out of spare parts so that the weight division would have an even amount of contestants or something along those lines. Regardless of the reason, it was hilarious. The bucket actually didn’t do too bad in the beginning due to some good driving skills, but once the other bot started hitting him it was no contest. By the end of the fight the bucket bot was in about 1,000 pieces scattered about the ring. It was silly but the crowd loved it. Here are a couple pictures from the bucket fight.

There are also bots with flamethrowers. They look awfully cool and are crowd pleasers but they don’t really seem to be very effective. The bots are metal and metal doesn’t exactly burn, either way, they are fun to watch.

As I stated earlier the real fun is with the super heavy weights. These bots are very impressive. Watching a bot throw another bot, that weighs in excess of 300lbs, into the air a good 6 feet or striking another and sending it flying across the fifty foot ring as if it weighed nothing is really something to see. My favorite style bot was what is known as a spinner. These are just dome shaped bots that spin really fast and then strike the other bot. They can do insane amounts of damage and are really fun to watch. My favorite bot and fight that we saw was between a bot called Super Megabyte and Devil’s Plunger, Megabyte is a super heavy weight spinner and is simply awesome.

Super Megabyte

Here is a video of the fight between Super Megabyte and Devil’s Plunger. The video really doesn’t do the fight justice. No matter how you look at it, it was a one sided fight, what the video doesn’t really convey is the sheer power of Super Megabyte, it was really impressive.

Here is another video demonstrating just how strong these bots are, watch how one bot just tosses the other one out of the ring, the height that it tosses the bot is amazing when you consider these bots weigh over 300 pounds.

Here is an image that shows how big these bots are in relation to a human. The bot pictured is the same bot that tossed the other out of the ring in the previous video.

We had a great time at robowars, if you ever have the opportunity to check it out I highly recommend it. I can’t wait till they come back, I plan on spending much more than a couple hours there next time.

Have I seen it all now?

I must admit, I kind of want one.

linkity