Flyleaf – Fully Alive / Down the Rabbit Hole

Oddly in my list of Youtube videos that are recommended to me on a daily basis happened to be an old song from a band called Flyleaf called “Fully Alive”. This was one of many songs from my youth that I had forgotten about and was overly ambitious to listen to the second I had seen it.

After enjoying the 2.5 minutes of high-pitched vocals and hard rock I had a brief epiphany: “Fly + Leaf = Flyleaf” How difficult would it be to attach an insect and a plant together and create a new band name? Whipping out the programmings I had found 3 solid references and let the computers do their workings and posted the results up on github, and further hosted it here for maximum clickability.

Alas, my curiosity of this song and the immediate conception of the “band name” program did not stop there. The lyrics needed a bit of attention to as they seemed unusually specific:

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Brandon J Matjoulis, b. 3/Nov/1984, d. 25/Mar/2007

Brandon J. Matjoulis, 22, of 181 Mud Creek Road, Kennedy, died unexpectedly Sunday (March 25, 2007).

He was born November 3, 1984 in Jamestown the son of Laurence A. Matjoulis and Marla Brown.

Surviving are his mother Marla Brown with whom he made his home, his step father Curtis L. Southwick of Falconer, his father Laurence A. Matjoulis and his step mother Terry Matjoulis both of Bangor, Michigan, two brothers Taylor and Mitchel Southwick both at home, his maternal grandparents Maurice and Carol Baker Brown of Ellington, his paternal grandmother Bonnie Cannon of Jamestown, his step paternal grandmother Marita Ekberg of Falconer, his paternal great grandmother Julia Matjoulis of Jamestown. He is also survived by his girlfriend of 5 years Jessica Lipphard of Lakewood.

Brandon was a 2002 graduate of Falconer Central School and was currently the lead singer and lyricist for the band Aniasin. He had also been employed as assistant manager of Rex T.V and worked at the Geer- Dunn Company with his uncle Kyle. Brandon had a love of computers and enjoyed working on and building them. He also was family oriented and took great pride in the work he did in the family’s home. Brandon enjoyed the serenity of the country where he could spend time with his pride and joy, his dog Charlotte.

The funeral service will be held at 11 a.m. Friday in the Falconer Funeral Home. Rev. Dayle Keefer of the Fluvanna Community Church will officiate. Burial will be in the Valley View Cemetery, Ellington. Friends will be received by the family from 2 to 4 and 7 to 9 p.m. Thursday in the funeral home.

Memorials may be made to the Matjoulis Family Benefit Fund at The Greater Chautauqua FCU 220 West Main Street Falconer NY 14733.

Sourced from: http://falconerfuneralhome.net/tribute/details/317/Brandon-Matjoulis/obituary.html

Satterfield28 Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCt5VhZmS5w_xxhsU2GjQW0g

Sethbling, Sethbling, wherefore art thou Mario

This has been quite an interesting series of Youtube videos. Allow me to explain:

It started off with a Fark article lovingly entitled Guy creates an artificial intelligence that learns how to play and beat a Super Mario Bros. level, of which the guy was the one and only Sethbling. Sethbling has been an amazing staple in the Minecraft community, and previously unknown to me is also a Super Mario Brothers speed runner.

He explains MarI/O (Mar + I/O, for those keeping up), in which he uses an emulator, some LUA, and a method of artificial intelligence to play and finish the first level of Super Mario Brothers.

The actual article from the University of Texas and the subsequently linked Wikipedia Pages (NeuroevolutionEvolutionary Algorithm, and Artificial Neural Network) are excellent readings.

This led me to the Credits Warp method. For speed runners, their goal is to finish the game as soon as possible, and with the Credits Warp this method is now the fastest.

The whole “Credits Warp” got me thinking about how this was actually done, so I found an amazing explanatory video on this specifically.

Rewriting a SNES using the console controller sounded amazing, and led to the next video on the list from tasvideos (the explanation) and the tasvideo where arbitrary code was executed for an amazing result (Starts at 32:00):

So, now i’m chilling with an amazing TAS execution of Super Mario World being fully run, and it’s pretty cool to see how people could just let computers do their thing.