Cory Doctorow at 8:53 am • 
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The Goodness lavishly photo-documents a Minecraft-themed wedding:
Matt and Asia are simply the most perfect couple ever. They met through their church (Matt said he fell for her watching her dance, awww) but they truly bonded over the game of Minecraft. They built a house together in the digital world and have been inseparable ever since, both in the game and in real life. Matt even proposed to Asia up on stage at MineCon with the help of the game’s creators. So it was no surprise that Matt and Asia would plan a Minecraft themed wedding, and wow, did they ever. They worked hard and put together an incredible event, which truly reflected their love for Minecraft, ahem, each other! We felt so lucky to capture such an awesome day, both in photos and with a wedding film (at the end of this post). It was a labor of love with lots of DIY and help from some fellow Minecraft lovers. Matt, Asia and friends created the pixel-trees from cardboard boxes and used them to decorate the structural pillars, genius!
They even got custom Minecraft-themed Jones Soda flavors.
Matt and Asia’s Minecraft wedding | The Goodness | Sacramento Wedding Photographer
(via The Mary Sue)
Cory Doctorow at 12:02 pm • •
Mike sez, "Photographed a wedding reception in upstate NY this weekend -- the cake was awesome! The couple are both geeks and have three geeky teenaged daughters who helped design it.... Take a look at the cell phone video!"
Cameraphone MP4 video
(Thanks, Mike!)
Cory Doctorow at 6:16 am • •
Isaac wanted to propose to his girlfriend, so he enlisted over 60 friends to stage a Busby Berkeley street-show lip-dub extravaganza ambush. What follows is five minutes of heart-stoppingly sweet and romantic wedding proposal. I mean: Z. O. M. F.G.
On Wednesday, May 23rd, 2012, I told my girlfriend to meet me at my parent's house for dinner. When she arrived I had stationed my brother to sit her in the back of an open Honda CRV and give her some headphones. He "wanted to play her a song"...
What she got instead was the world's first Live Lip-Dub Proposal.
Isaac's Live Lip-Dub Proposal
(via Waxy)
Cory Doctorow at 5:49 am • •
Cecil Castellucci -- indie-rock star, young adult author, and all round cool-ass polymath -- has joined forces with illustrator Nate Powell (Swallow Me Whole) to produce The Year of the Beasts, an extraordinary hybrid of young adult novel and graphic novel. Beasts is the story of Tessa and her younger sister Lulu, townie girls in a place where holidaymakers come for the summer, and the year they discovered boys. The carnival comes to town every June, and Tessa and Lulu go, and it is young Lulu, not Tessa, who finds herself kissing Charlie, the boy that Tessa has had a crush on forever. The summer yawns before them, as the sisters and their friends navigate the stormy, irrational seas of romance and hormones and coming of age, in a prose narrative that lays its characters' hearts raw and bare in that way that Castellucci is so good at.
Interleaved with these prose chapters are chapters from an allegorical graphical story, a comic about a girl who has become an avatar of Medusa and must attend high-school, despite the fact that when the scarf covering her snake-hair slips, she turns her schoolmates to stone, just as she has done to her parents. These comic-book chapters are a mystery to be solved by the riddle, which comes together in the final chapter.
Year of the Beasts is one of those stories whose earlier chapters are a kind of greased slide that makes the reader hurtle faster and faster toward an unseen landing, hinting at different possibilities until the climax is revealed in a thunderbolt, and it is at once inevitable, unforeseen, and terrible.
Year of the Beasts
Cory Doctorow at 3:50 pm • •
The first-ever wedding sanctioned by the Church of Kopimism (an officially Swedish church that reifies copying and characterizes file-sharing as a sacred act) was convened last weekend. It was a beautiful and awfully funny and joyous occasion, judging from the video. Here's Torrentfreak's Ernesto with more:
It was only a matter of time before the first Kopimist couple would become married, and last weekend this joyful union took place at the Share conference in Belgrade.
On stage, a Romanian woman and an Italian man were joined in a holy Kopimist act. Both promised to share the rest of their lives together and to uphold the highest sharing standards.
The Church was delighted to bring the news and commented: “We are very happy today. Love is all about sharing. A married couple share everything with each other.”
Like any other matrimony, a Kopimism marriage is bound by rules. The Church of Kopimism allows the couple to share their love with others, as long as those others don’t steal it. Most importantly, however, they have to copy and remix themselves.
“Hopefully, they will copy and remix some DNA-cells and create a new human being. That is the spirit of Kopimism. Feel the love and share that information. Copy all of its holiness.”
Or to put it in the words of another famous religion: “Be fruitful and multiply, teem on the earth and multiply in it.”
File-Sharing Church Weds First Couple
Cory Doctorow at 8:00 am • •
If you're looking for serving suggestions to accompany yesterday's post on how to bake a Death Star cake, have a look at this groom's cake that @paulblomdahl's wife made for him.
Cory Doctorow at 1:20 pm • •
Buzzblog sez, "Ten years ago today, at 9:25 a.m., Slashdot founder Rob 'CmdrTaco' Malda, used his insider access to the homepage of one of the tech world’s most popular forums to send a very public Valentine’s Day marriage proposal to Kathleen Fent. Fifteen minutes later she said yes -- and then called him a dork -- an exchange that would generate more than 2,000 comments and make news on other tech sites. As the 10th anniversary of the proposal approached, Network World asked the couple to share their memories of that day and thoughts about it since, as a kind of case study on how this type of public proposal – be it on Slashdot or the stadium Jumbotron – holds up over the years. Would they recommend it? … Seems there is disagreement on that score."
Kathleen, what was your reaction the moment you read your name in that headline and realized what was happening?
I knew something was afoot when I left for work and Rob said "See you soon!" I decided to check Slashdot right away when I got to work to see what was going on. When I saw my name in the proposal, I slammed my hand down on the desk and screamed, "Oh my god!" before I could even read the entire article. I started to hyperventilate.
Everyone rushed back to my cubicle to see what was the matter. I had to resist the urge to phone Rob at home, knowing that an email reply was much more fitting for the eventual story we'd tell. This was long before texting was commonplace, or I would have texted him the answer.
Rob, what did you think of the outpouring of well wishes -- and snark -- from the Slashdot community?
There was some pretty witty stuff in there. Kathleen pointed out a few random comments that she thought were funny. She read every single comment, but I was thankful for the moderation system that day because it was a (popular) story and it had its fair share of mean in it that I was able to skip. But mostly it was very positive: The vast majority of the Slashdot community strongly supported me throughout my time there, and this story might be the single loudest example of that.
10 years after famous Slashdot marriage proposal, couple discusses wisdom of 'popping the question' in public
(Thanks, Buzzblog!)
Cory Doctorow at 12:00 pm • •
Further to Mark's bizarre old Valentines post from yesterday: Flickr user Page of Bats has assembled a marvellous and often inexplicable collection of tasteless, gross and weird vintage V-day cards. I can't figure out of some of these were from the likes of MAD magazine, or if they were all created in earnest by clueless card companies.
pageofbats' photostream / Tags / vintagevalentine
(via How to Be a Retronaut)
Cory Doctorow at 7:39 am • •
Here's DIYHacksandHowTos's great Instructables for making duct tape roses. The method is simple and produces a really beautiful (and romantically geeky) end-product.
Realistic Duct Tape Rose
(via Craft)
Cory Doctorow at 6:00 am • •
Here's a handsome Blue Screen of Death Valentine's heart. Kathrn Cramer calls it, "A stick-on icon for relationships with a blown motherboard: how to say its over on Valentine's Day."
Heart Sticker
(Thanks, Kathryn!)
Cory Doctorow at 3:00 pm • •
Austin's astoundingly great Alamo Drafthouse cinema is hosting a Valentine's Night "Princess Bride Quote-Along & Feast" with Rodents of Unusual Size on the menu, and special Inconceivable wine.
We love this movie every bit as deeply as Westley loves his Buttercup, and so when we discussed launching our very own Alamo Signature Wine collection, we immediately knew that we had to start by featuring none other than THE PRINCESS BRIDE. We partnered with the good people at Helms Workshop to produce artwork for two varietals, and this February we are pleased to introduce the world to The Bottle of Wits, featuring an Inconceivable Cab and the As You Wish White!
THE PRINCESS BRIDE QUOTE-ALONG & FEAST
(
via Neatorama)
Cory Doctorow at 11:16 am • •
In celebration of the new Makerbot Replicator 3D printer, a stop-motion animation that depicts the birth-by-printer of a sweet girl and the heartbreak she experiences thereafter.
This all new stop-animation music video was made with Michael Curry’s playset characters and a number of other MakerBot-made pieces! The princesses story was written by MakerBot CEO and co-founder Bre Pettis and the song was written and performed by local Brooklyn musicians Scary Car (Bryan Scary and Giulio Carmassi). It’s fun, it’s catchy, and incredibly awesome!
The Replicator Stop Motion Music Video
(via Wonderland)
Cory Doctorow at 5:24 am • •
Amy Harmon, who wrote in September about Justin Canha, an autistic high school student, has returned with another long, incisive, moving piece about young autistic adults striving to forge romantic relationships with one another:
From the beginning, their physical relationship was governed by the peculiar ways their respective brains processed sensory messages. Like many people with autism, each had uncomfortable sensitivities to types of touch or texture, and they came in different combinations.
Jack recoiled when Kirsten tried to give him a back massage, pushing deeply with her palms.
“Pet me,” he said, showing her, his fingers grazing her skin. But Kirsten, who had always hated the feeling of light touch, shrank from his caress.
“Only deep pressure,” she showed him, hugging herself.
He tried to kiss her, but it was hard for her to enjoy it, so obvious was his aversion. To him, kissing felt like what it was, he told her: mashing your face against someone else’s. Neither did he like the sweaty feeling of hand-holding, a sensation that seemed to dominate all others whenever they tried it.
“I’m sorry,” he said helplessly.
Navigating Love and Autism
(Thanks, Scott!)
Cory Doctorow at 8:08 am • •
Gary Hudston wanted to propose to his girlfriend, so (naturally) he contracted with a skilled level-developer to make a custom Portal 2 level that led to a wedding chapel in which GLaDOS (the AI villain of the series) popped the question. And naturally, once Valve (the company that makes Portal) got wind of the project, they authorized the production of custom audio from Ellen McLain, the voice actor who does GLaDOS in the game. And naturally, the developer made the level available so that you could play it too (but that doesn't mean you're getting married to Gary). Ah, romance!
Proposal by Portals! (youtube.com)
(via Waxy)
