Egged on a punch bowl filled with colt 45, my acquaintance slowly loses his grip on sobriety. The final straw was space, the last frontier as he put it... "SPACE!" he screams. The tv in the living room is playing a porno from the 80s, and the irony is giving me a half-erection, or "chub" as I have recently learned. You can use a double b if you choose, and frankly I am inclined to do so from now on. Turning to the latest acquiantance we have acquired, a four foot tall girl from either concordia or mcgill, "HAVE YOU EVER SEEN THOSE PAINTINGS? TJE ONE WITH THE RIVER AND ROTATING SPACE STATIIIIIIIIIIIN? ARTIFICIAL GRAIVITY?" I feel like a giant amongst these people, the tallest girl I have met so far is a foot shorter than me. My friend is losing his grip, he can no longer maintain, and with his absence comes my social uprooting. I am an awkward carrot in the corner.

finally a decent temperatured day in this god forsaken town. The first real day of spring: a friday, no responsibilities except to show your face at the local park and play some frisbee. There's something comforting in the idea of walking through a public place on any given day and having a high chance of running into an acquiantance. I feel like I belong in this neighborhood of students, starving artists, bums, and middle class families.

The warm weather means that the the park has been taken back by the citizenry; from the dope dealers, the creepy hooded folk who occupied the area over the winter months. Whole sections of this city are periodically surrendered from all form of law and order because it's just too damn cold, and goddamn it, I forgot to wear my longjohns today. So know the grassy plains are occupied by more common activities: The perpetual pickup soccer game, the casual frisbee triangle, the token protugese family barbecue, filling the air with meat lust. But the majority of the people in the park today are the young folk. Students sitting in circles, getting high, drunk, and generally twisted.

It is from these circles that spontaneous matches of hackey sack and frisbee erupt, expending any pent up energy the group has acquired, then collapsing onto itself in the form of one perfectly rolled joint. In fast motion it resembles a Conway game of life, and you can watch it all happen from top of the mountain if that's your bag.

These groups participating in the park's usage are broken in to clear factions. The students occupy the slope nearest to the esplanade, while the families choose to gather around the central path leading up to the mountain. The homeless gather on a trodden patch of yellow grass along rue parc, and are joined by any sympathetic hippies that may come across the sad scene, some sort of grunge solidarity that I do not understand.

Goddamnit it is so warm out that you are just compelled to do something crazy. "Get laid or fight someone" as fred always says.

Open faced sandwiches are patently offensive and will not longer be tolerated by this organization.

Wake up, blow the bloody snot from your nose and get off the couch, it's president's day for chrissake! You've been asleep for the last 8 months! Get dressed and help your father choose which big screen TV to buy.

I can see the spotlight from club 737 out my window, fishing about in the skies, a bat signal for douchebags. Where are our heroes when we need them? Very ominous. Whenever I venture to the top of the mountain at night, I like to watch the light dance through the clouds, waiting for that careless alien, drunk on nitrogen, to accidently place herself in the path of the beam and blow its cover. Then I shout, "Hey! You goddamn aliens better stop that!" What a spectacular waste of energy.

People need to get their fucking acts together.

This is a call to arms
To live,
And love,
And sleep together

So love and peace have finally declared war on one another. Straight to blu ray.

This guy on the metro was holding an empty Vickie's bag, studying the nutritional information with great interest. "And I suppose you expect me to believe that you ate that bag all by yourself, do you? You goddamn phony." This is what I wanted to say. It was silent on the car, but I could tell it was on everyone's mind. My warped notion of society urged me to call this man out. Waving the bag like that in everyone's face like a badge. Goddamn mass transit.

Quote of the year:

As Jim Morrison would say, THIS is the trip.

Prediction:

Fast food restaurants continue to co-opt breakfast as the ultimate, any-time-of-day meal, much to the chagrin of Taco Bell's burgeoning 4th Meal™ lobby.

Man, shit went down last year. All the best to your pets and friends, but not you, I have special plans for you. We're gonna tear it up; we're gonna bust it out; we're gonna have a fucking reality TV show made after us, man; Just follow me, I am TELLING you, just do it.

Lets see... what was I talking about before? Oh right, research. Yeah, that all went well, we wrote the paper and gave a presentation at the HAVE08 workshop in Ottawa, which was pretty awesome. I will try to put up the video of the project we showed off to people; it's really neat.

We got a tour of UOttawa's haptics lab which was really fun... 20 or so people geeking out with these extremely wonky bionic arms and 3D glasses and such. Got a little smelly though; hygiene, people!

Some current events? Well, this past semester I was at the McGill Daily doing their graphics, basically my job was to draw and have fun, aka fucking fantastic. Definitely the best job I have ever had, and has made me reevaluate the extent whih art plays in my life force.

Can we just pause for a moment and reflect on the fact that there are practicing Jedis out there, evaluating their life force?

k.

I am starting up an internship at EA Montreal this coming semester. I am stoked like a boyscout's first campfire right now; cannot wait to begin, but also sad to leave my comrades at the Daily behind.

Zees ees all I say now. Expect things to appear in this space, soon. ish.

With apologies to the deceased.

Massive art dump today. I feel like 5 pounds lighter right now. Finally got around to using my new camera to capture some paintings/doodles.

Art productivity has been off and on this summer. I go a week without putting pen to paper, then all of a sudden stay up all night fiendishly gripping my tablet pen. FIEND ISH LEEE!

I am writing a conference paper for my project. The conference is the "Haptic Audio Video Environments and their Applications," which translates loosely to "The only place on this planet where anyone gives half a shit about what you have been spending your precious life pursuing." In any case I am fucking STOKED at the possibility of being published. I have found that I absolutely love computers, like as in I wanna make meta-babies with them. These babies will infect the planet and realize my imagination into reality. It will be a blast, trust me.

I have been on the lookout for a good project to work on during my free time. If you have any great ideas, drop me a line. I have one idea of apply my research to a game, perhaps I will elaborate later once this idea has somewhat materialized more. Until then, cheers!

Boy howdy ladies and gentlemen! How goes it?? I am swell. Today is the list edition of my usual posts.

Ways to slowly corrupt society:

• Work as quality assurance at a puzzle factory, and remove one piece from every puzzle you inspect.

Some things most girls will not experience:

• The unholy warmth of your own pee as it strikes the urinal
• Attempting to maintain your aim mid-sneeze

that's all I have for now; most of these were thought of on the toilet.

So I went home for the July 4 weekend, and that was nice. I saw some fireworks in the bus on the highway home, was a very apple pie moment. Speaking of which, my mother had an apple crisp ready for me on my arrival. What a wonderful woman. Not that you have to be a good cook in order to be a wonderful woman or anything.

Argh, I am looking at the picture below this post and the girl's left arm is too short!

Twenty years in this life! Most of it on this planet even. The rest? My secret place? All I know is that it sure as hell ain't here.

You spend a lot of time pooping and putting shampoo in your hair. My goal is by the end of my life to have spent more time reading than pooping. We shall see. The Supreme court ruled in favor of handgun laws the other day... man it is a fantastic time to be a people hater these days, am i rite am i rite!??

Rain is one of the most fantastic things in the world. Today it started raining and I tried to stick my feet out the window to feel it and almost spilled my brains all over the sidewalk. I miss running around in le rain barefoot.

I really enjoy getting my hair cut. Something about someone mussing around with my hair for half an hour is so pleasant.

I really like spending my time here in summer. It is quite different from a typical New Hampshire summer. It is like living in any other US city, except we all occupy some alternate universe in which the drinking laws are relaxed, everyone has decided to be pleasant towards one another, and the Susan B. Anthony dollar was a success. That is Canada in a nutshell to me: They have a fucking dollar coin.

You know what my new favorite phrase is? "I started to get The Fear." What a great phrase. THE FEAR!! What is it? And yet everyone knows what is meant when you say, "The Fear." I have yet to find an appropriate setting to use it; of course I will keep you all posted. The capitalization of the "The" is what gets me I think.

HEY! someone yells, WHERE'S YOUR BODY WASH? they're yelling this into the street. I am hearing it from the window. IT'S IN MY DRESSER, someone replies, IN THE TOP DRAWER. IT'S GREEN. oh metropolis. Today I thought I heard gun shots but it was the just Portuguese celebrating their Euro 2008 win. I don't know if they had guns or what the deal was with the explosions. Bad carburetors perhaps? All their cars had giant flags across the hoods and very healthy horns.

So I am back in Montreal to work on my summer research project in the Shared Reality Lab at McGill. What are you doing you ask? Well, the project I am contributing to, called "Haptic Snow" is a system created for simulating different ground textures such as, well, snow, sand, mud, etc. This is done using a special tile and some fancy signal processing that reacts to the pressure that a person exerts on the tile.

I have tried it myself, and it's really cool! It feels just like you are placing a foot into a mound of snow. So anyways, where I come in is I am creating a graphical simulation of the ground environment to project onto the floor tiles so that when someone steps in mud, a foot print is left behind, and so on. I will try keeping an updated journal about my progress on the project on the projects page.

In other news, I was had this song stuck in my head for the longest time, and after a fruitless series of google searches, I came across this gem. You tap in the rhythm of the song and it gives you a list of possible hits to choose from. I tried it and the site got the song on the first try. Ahh, technology.

So I am done with classes. Woo!

I saw Speed Racer last night, it was absolutely AMAZING how well they captured the original cartoon: absolutely no plot, just random events which force Speed Racer to perform the hottest shit ever done with four wheels EVER.

Seriously though, by the time I left the theater I was so over-stimulated I had to shove lollipops into my eye sockets to avoid withdrawal. Just disregard the total lack of a comprehensible plot, ignore the ridiculous costume the guy from Lost is wearing, and sit back and wish your car had a flip button.

P.S. It's supposed to be DOKTAH JONES!!

Mario is NOT impressed with the amount of posting going on here. Sorry mario. Some news: finals are kicking my ass, and I got that position to do research in the lab for the summer! Andddd, I am going to serve as the graphics editor for the McGill Daily next year! I am super excited to work with all the extremely talented people down there and sacrifice my social life to drawing.

I have a lot of art that isn't digital that I would like to put up as soon as I can get a hold of a decent camera, so keep a keen I out.

I am in a break period between exams, which is why you are reading this, but it also means I get to visit my old friend called reading. I devoured Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in a couple days; quite delectable, and made me want to do vicious amounts of drugs.

Well, school is certainly back in session, that's for sure! Nothing to hamper self-indulgent website updates like responsibilities, no sir.

Bit of news: I am trying to get a research position at my school in the Shared Reality Lab, working on a project called "Haptic Snow". It's a really cool project, involving simulating different ground textures using simple signal processing technologies. So all I'll say is that hopefully it works out... how awesome i would be to stay in Montreal for the summer.

Cheers!

Hi folks! Well, there's been quite a bit of progress to the site lately, namely the PHP-ization of lots of stuff, including this very page here! Also added: art page! Yes'm, we here at BenPeck.MarshallPeck.com are all about the web 1.5. (Maybe some web 2.0 next update.) :)

Hey folks! Welcome to my new website!

Basically I plan for this to be a collecting area for any wacky ideas I may have, including drawings, programs, and whatever inane prose I can fit in these posts before anybody realizes it's too late!.

Man, it's tought to fill out these posts with text to fit the picture!

...LALALALALA