RobotSkirts

My friend Matt Lewis has spent the last two weeks in the hospital and was recently diagnosed with PNH. It’s a very rare blood disease (1-2 cases annually per million) and has necessitated him receiving regular blood transfusions. He will be placed on the world’s most expensive drug to managed the condition but will eventually need a bone marrow transplant.

What you can do to help:

• Donate blood You can give an offset blood donation at a facility local to you. Just tell them it’s for Matt Lewis 11/4/1979 Kaiser Permanente Hospital in Los Angeles.
• Be the match A bone marrow transplant is the only way to cure PNH and it can be very difficult to find a match—a sibling has a 30% chance of being a match. By signing up for the National Marrow Donor Program, you have the chance of helping Matt or saving the life of someone in a similar situation. Once signed up, they send you a cheek swab kit to complete your registration. The more people we register, the greater the odds for everyone.

Thank you for taking the time to read this and I hope you consider giving.

You can watch the web series Video Game Reunion that Matt created/directed on Atom.

Aside: The photo above was taken by Erin right before Matt and I completed a SRS BZNS deal at Ninja Penguin 4.

Update: Regular updates on barkode’s condition are being posted here.

Update: Now with soundtrack!

My twin sister currently lives in Tokyo and this is her most recent email.

Konnichiwa Everyone,

Apologies for the silence on this end; it is difficult to gauge the true status of things, and I am not particularly interested in unnecessarily filling heads–my own included–with worrying remarks.

On early Friday afternoon (your laaaate Thursday night/wee hours Friday), I was at a conference in Nagoya (250km from home, 550km from earthquake epicenter) and rode out the earthquake in the lecture hall of a very modern building. Basically ALL trains stopped on Honshu and I was unable to return home, but able to contact a former frisbee teammate and stay with her. Luckily, I had planned to go straight from the conference to a frisbee tournament, so had toiletries and changes of clothes with me.  (more…)

We celebrated my 30th birthday at Hacker Drinkup on Wednesday. Today is the 6th anniversary of RobotSkirts.com. Current life status: Working as a producer at Tecca.com on the beach in Venice, CA.

Happy Father’s day, dad!
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Last night was the 100th Hacker Drinkup. We’ve been meeting almost every Wednesday in Santa Monica for the last two years. For the centennial, Chris and Pinguino decided to build a fun demo: augmented reality mustaches. We had all seen Mike Clare’s AR Cookies last week so we started by making fiducial cookies. Chris wrote a processing app that would identify the image of the marker and then place an image of a mustache over it in the live video feed. Right before you took a bite of the cookie, one of the mustaches Pinguino had drawn would appear. I’m actually holding an onigiri (rice ball) in the photo above. Pinguino carved the fiduciary marker into a piece of nori (seaweed) on its face. It was a neat toy and it captured photos in the background which you can find here.

No, it’s not a real holiday; just a fun excuse to grow a stupid mustache once a year. Here are photos of years passed: (more…)

I, and I’m sure many people under 30, received a letter from the AARP today encouraging membership. I’ve received many of these letters telling me to “get the most out of life over 50″. The AARP is apparently so opposed to ageism that they encourage young people to join their 50+ organization. In 2007, at the age of 26, I joined. (more…)

Last night we celebrated my birthday at Hacker Drinkup. It was a massive turnout with a lot of fun surprises. I quipped on Twitter, “Things that should be denim: jeans. Things that shouldn’t: everything else. #denimbustiersrsly?!” Pictured above is the denim hat Pinguino made me in response (my mannequin is wearing it now). You may remember that this isn’t the first time a tweet has generated an unexpected gift. Erin and Pinguino decorated cupcakes with fondant so they looked like our crew (they’ve made hacker cookies before). The final treat was a pair of functional frosted laser boobs inspired by my flyer. In addition, I got a new tshirt, some ALF trading cards, and some sweet socks.

Like last year, I recorded a short podcast for my birthday. I’ve been sick lately so there’s a lot of weird breathyness from me trying not to cough.