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-- Jorge Luis Borges, "The Library of Babel" |
sábado, febrero 03, 2001
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linkydink The last piece of chocolate ... mmmmm Okay, so i'm not actually posting my own words, just funny/cool stories.
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linkydink Unity Kinkaid is the grandmother of the Dream Vortex. I just wanted to drop in and say that I haven't forgotten you kids. I wanted to run something by you all... How many of you have read salon for a good long time? I used to read it all of the time when I was like a sophomore in college. I was thinking about it the other day, and I realized that for the most part, they've gotten really lame. Perhaps the biggest example of this for me was that they haven't done album reviews very consistently, which used to be one of my favorite things about them. The last one I remember was about Yo La Tengo's "And then nothing turned itself inside out", which was released a year ago. Thoughts?
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linkydink "The thing about boxing is, you can give up. You drop your arms and you lay down and it's over. Sure, you've lost the fight, but at least you're not getting beaten up anymore. Life, though... You drop your arms and you lay down and the son of a bitch just keeps pummling you."
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linkydink maybe i was just at the right place in my life for Owen Meany. who am i? i'm a former smithie (and i hope to be again one day). that's how cmoore and i met.
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linkydink I didnt get into Owen Meaney too much for some reason, but The World According to Garp was fantastic. Who are you, Unity Kinkaid?
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linkydink as an irvingophile myself, my suggestions would be: The Hotel New Hampshire, Cider House Rules, or The World According To Garp. i'd steer you away from A Son of the Circus, which i couldn't even get through. and there are many i haven't read yet, too.
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linkydink article. has anyone read any john irving? i've never even seen The Cider House Rules or Hotel New Hampshire, let alone read them. but i just finished A Prayer for Owen Meany, which has to be one of the most amazing books i've ever read. everyone go read. it's the only attempt i've ever seen at linking God with vietnam. what should i read next?
viernes, febrero 02, 2001
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linkydink Funny in a sort of where-has-my-youth-gone kind of way, a reponse to a query on Slashdot for non-zero-sum games.
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linkydink For better or for worse, the Social Heuristic web page is never going to be as authoritative as Miss Manner's Basic Training. For more practical advice, I reccomend eHow.com, where one can learn (among many other things, of course) how to take action after a car accident and how to determine damages after a car accident.
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linkydink Caroline's Social Heuristics link reminds me of a similar link that was in Memepool some time back: Aspects of American Society That May Be New to You, a cultural handbook for foreign students spending time in America. It's less specific, more verbose, and similarly interesting.
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linkydink ARRRGGHH. Evil foul mean people make me miserable. A week and a half ago a woman named Jessica Greenleaf scraped into the side of my car in Middletown. It was completely her fault, which she acknowledged in a very tired pathetic whining way and gave me her name and phone number. I didn't get an estimate for the repairs until just this afternoon; the body shop guy told me $833 for full repairs, but then confided that I could probably get it done very cheaply if I did some of the work myself. I took his advice to heart, bought some touch-up paint for myself, got the rear lamp replaced, and prepared to patch my torn decal with an old bumper-sticker. I called Jessica up and told her that the repairs were estimated at $833, but I'd settle for $250, which I thought was incredibly generous. Instead of expressing any gratitude whatsoever for my settling for a halfassed repair job to save her almost $600, she filibustered about things and told me she'd call me back on Monday. Then (here's the kicker) she called me back a few minutes later and claimed that the accident had never happened. She demanded to know if I remembered what her car looked like (which I didn't exactly) and claimed I must have her confused with someone else. I told her I definitely did not; I recognized her voice and she had agreed that we had had an accident just a few minutes before. She talked to my Dad (who owns the car) and he said we'd call the police and let them sort it out. Of course, the Middletown Police officer I talked to all but laughed at me when I told him I wanted to take legal action against a woman who I had been in an accident with a week and a half ago that I didn't report to the police at the time. Even if I had written down her lisence and registration (which I foolishly hadn't), he said there was nothing he could do if we hadn't filed a report. So, unless my Dad's lawyer thinks of something miracuous, that is that. I can survive a $90 debt for paint and a new brakelight, and I can survive spending my afternoon driving back and forth around town and making ridiculous phone calls. I can certainly survive this woman being a bitch... in fact, I know I can survive all of it. It just fucking hurts, and it's horrible. I go out on a limb to make someone's life easier and get fucked over for my trouble!! There is a part of me that is very cynical, hateful, alienated and lonely, and currently feeling very vindicated. Yeah, I know I'm making a big deal out of one tired unscrupulous woman short on cash. I just needed to vent... and to let y'all know that next time you get in an accident, make sure to get a full confession signed in blood with every ID number you can think of, and hopefully a Polaroid. And their home adress. And a shotgun.
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linkydink a woman on a females-in-IT mailing list i'm a member of created a Social Heuristics website which lays out a lot of American social customs for geeks and people from other countries who mightn't know such things. she wants to know how useful it is, if anything should be added or changed, that sort of thing. it's an interesting idea, since while most of us grew up learning social customs through cultural osmosis, many people from different backgrounds didn't. there's no way of gaining this cultural capital as good as growing up immersed in it, but perhaps having it laid out to read is a good runner-up option. what say ye?
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linkydink this one's especially for y'all who don't live in dorms: reduce your trash output (and thus not only your impact on the earth but also your trash bill) by composting. yes, even if you live in an apartment. perhaps especially so, since cities have the least leeway for solving their trash problems.
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linkydink matt created two websites for a company called Icosystem: first this one, which was rejected in favor of this one. why is it so hard for companies to accept that they need decently designed and organized websites? argh.
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linkydink Whoops, I didn't mean to come across as mean, just extremely cynical. I'd be the last person to blame The Media for everything, really. Since companies are "whores", it's pointless to suggest that we create educated companies, because it won't make a difference to uneducated consumers. Even more so, it'd be pointless for me to suggest that we create educated consumers, because consumers don't want to be educated. It strikes me as wishful thinking on two levels, Jimmy. Firstly, I don't believe in "spirit", though I could agree to "culture". Secondly, artists lead only so far as they have distribution, and thus it isn't even the artists who are really leading, but the the distribution companies who let them a "voice". For my money, I think Saul Williams is definitely inspirational and perhaps revolutionary, to the extent that he reminds us that at every moment we have a choice as to what we do and/or what we say and that that choice is not only going to effect other people, but it's also going to effect ourselves. It has a lot to do with my first paragraph; if it lasts for a minute, it's inspirational, but if it'll last for a lifetime, it's revolutionary.
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linkydink J- Yeah, I know I forgot the endquote. Blogger's interface did a weird thing and wouldn't let me edit my post. All fixed now. Also, thanks for the Kagou Anti-kro$oft advice. re. Saul Williams on Jesse Jackson: Point taken. What struck me about that quote was the idea that the spiritual leaders of our generation are the artists and poets, rather than the politicians and philosophers. Do you agree, or is this wishful thinking? Do we even have spiritual leaders? Sometimes I find Saul Williams' prose revolutionary and inspirational, other times it seems like obsessive ranting. Maybe it's all of the above. Read the interview and/or listen to Penny For A Thought and tell me what you think.
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linkydink ooh, no need to be mean, jrandom. just because the media supports those who'll make it money doesn't mean we should brush it off without further comment. also, it's useless to blame the media for everything, when really any company selling a product is pretty much a whore to the consumer. sure, they manipulate us to think we want what they're pushing, but if we don't buy it (figuratively and literally), they're up shit creek. the real question is: is there any way to effectively catalyze change in the media or Evil Corporations when people obviously don't care enough to vote with their dollars?
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linkydink I'm not clued-in enough to know why stamp sales declined in Hong Kong after the British left, but I'm pretty sure that celebrity endorsement is nothing new to the country (or any country, at this point, really). <gasp>You mean mainstream media is more interested in the celebrities that will make it money?</gasp> C'mon, the last time Jesse Jackson got front-page was when it was discovered he fathered a child out of wedlock. Among other things, Symantec has this to say: The worm utilizes a known Microsoft Outlook Express security hole, Scriptlet.Typelib, so that a viral file is created on the system without having to run any attachment. Simply reading the received email message will cause the virus to be placed on the system.P.S., Jimmy: Blogger didn't eat your post, you just forgot the endquote in the URL.
jueves, febrero 01, 2001
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linkydink If I hadn't watched at least part of the Super Bowl, I woudn't have seen the awesome Cingular Wireless ad, which I think is my favorite in a while. If it weren't for AdCritic, I wouldn't have seen the very cool (except for the horrid themesong at the end) Gary Kasparov pepsi ad. Wargames references in commercials are always very good. Sidenote: Adcritic's video-hosting is incredible; I have the whole Quicktime file almost immediately on my cable modem! Props to DVLabs, whose server also tells jokes.
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linkydink "Kagou Anti-Kro$oft says not today!" Ha-ha! My brother's computer doesn't have virus protection of any sort, nor would it matter to the Wscript.KAKworm that's been playing games with me all day! If I previously needed convincing that Windows is heinously insecure, I now do not.
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linkydink i think it's ineffective and in pretty poor taste to use a man who can't talk to sell phone service. [7:39pm: now points to the correct ad. thanks jimmy tones.] i did find pepsi's bob dole ad pretty humorous, and i liked budweiser's self-parodying "what are you doing?" ad. and i love adcritic for eliminating the last reason i could ever have had to watch the superbowl.
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linkydink "The people that are famous in this day and age are MCs, singers - there are no famous philosophers, there are no famous politicians. You talk to a high school student today they're gonna spout the philosophy of a Fiona Apple, an Ani Difranco, a Jay-Z, a Tupac... You gotta realize MTV has a larger demographic than CNN. I repeat, there's nothing more powerful than hip hop. You put Jesse Jackson next to fuckin any MC and people will tune into that MC before they'll tune into Jesse Jackson and that's a fuckin shame cause Jesse Jackson has more stuff to say and has a better cadence and a better flow and a better rhyme style too. When you rhyme you get people's attention and if you have all the peoples' attention and all you can do with that is say, 'Yo, put yo hands up', you just fuckin wasted that fuckin moment! You wasted it! Do you realize what you could have done?" -Saul Williams. I say wow. Listen.
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linkydink re. Chow Yun-Fat: I feel like making some insightful observation about the fall in Hong Kong stamp-sales coinciding with the Brits' departure from the place, and Hong Kong Post adopting celebrity endorsement (a very Western way of doing things, no?) in an attempt to salvage the situation... but I'd really be bullshitting if I did. Why is Hong Kong jocking stamps produced in Guyana?
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linkydink i don't know what the hell happened to those 2 weeks on blogger's database, but i've got them on sophia, so i manually added them into the archive list for now. i should point out that ev isn't doing this as "one man alone". (he's got meg, for instance.) however, point taken. i think slashcode is a bit much for me to muck through and customize and maintain right now. perhaps someday when i've more time to play with these things. or perhaps i'll start playing now and eventually we'll have a working product. either way, it'd be fun to do it ourselves.
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linkydink "Things have not been working great with the product for quite a while..." sez Ev. Case in point: does anybody know where our archived posts for 12/10/00 - 12/23/00 have got to? I like the idea of creating our own. It'll give me another motivation to learn PERL. Of course, I may be singing a different tune when I'm in the middle of classes. (Unless I take Databases, in which case it might work out nicely...)
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linkydink This talk of old videogames reminds me of something I had meant to post; 75 Ark is a record company that releases weird dark "futuristic" hip-hop, like Dr. Octagon, Anti-Pop Consortium and Deltron 3030. They're most recent promotional gimmick is register-to-win an authentic full-sized TRON arcade game signed by Del Tha Funkee Homosapien, Dan the Automator, and Kid Koala, which is like holy shit. They've also got some MP3s to check out if you're just curious, though unfortunately, IMHO, the quality of 75Ark's music doesn't live up to the quality of the talent behind it. Plus they keep their MP3s in ZIPs, which is never a good sign...
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linkydink "I can tell you, at this point, I definitely plan to keep Blogger going. If you're a Blogger user, you know that things have not been working great with the product for quite a while. I'm not going to make excuses about that. But I'm not walking away. The good thing is, I have relatively low costs (though, I still need to bring in more cash than we have been), adequate server power for a while (thank you!), and the ability to focus on what I'm good at: Creating Things." I, however, am not so optimistic that one man alone can keep an operation like Blogger afloat. What d'you guys think? Is it time to investigate another server, or perhaps set-up our own?
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linkydink  For volunteer work, cmoore, I'd reccomend United Nations Volunteers and/or VolunteerMatch. Man, Altered Beast was the shit.
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linkydink Checkout the rough draft of my homepage's menu/interface thingy. It's ugly and don't work to well yet, but let me know what you think anyway.
miércoles, enero 31, 2001
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linkydink Sopwith! O, the memories. I have yet to find a videogame of comparable quality. Of course, for me, "quality" is any game in which you can turn your plane upside down and drop a bomb on yourself. In other news, I have discovered via dilligent research that Melbourne is a Thugz Paradise, and that I should be making plans to kick it large. In other news, I think I have a strangely shaped dent in my righthand cheekbone. Hmmm.
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linkydink from the first chapter of Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser: "The McDonald’s Corporation is the largest owner of retail property in the world. Indeed, the company earns the majority of its profits not from selling food but from collecting rent. McDonald’s spends more money on advertising and marketing than any other brand. As a result it has replaced Coca-Cola as the world’s most famous brand. McDonald’s operates more playgrounds than any other private entity in the United States. It is one of the nation’s largest distributors of toys. A survey of American schoolchildren found that 96 percent could identify Ronald McDonald. The only fictional character with a higher degree of recognition was Santa Claus. The impact of McDonald’s on the way we live today is hard to overstate. The Golden Arches are now more widely recognized than the Christian cross." funny how these things have infiltrated our lives. i've read reviews by people saying this book convinced them never to eat fast food again, and others which compare it to Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. it reminds me of Neal Stephenson's description of the ubiquitous three-ring binder franchises in Snow Crash. scary stuff. it's definitely on my "to read" list.
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linkydink Okay, the only thing worth noting in the mystery post was sopwith which is better known to at least one poster here as The Red Baron In the new, fresher post, Segata Sanshiro, Japanese Sega Saturn mascot. Mentioned in a Sega Salute on ign's dreamcast site, passed on to me by Eric (tekken) Hunter, now brought to you by sega's madness. Watch all the commercials you can stand to watch, esp. this one.
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linkydink jrandom, don't be a dork. i always get a summer job. also, i have an extraordinarily long time off for the summer (about 4 months) and i'd like to do something interesting instead of/in addition to getting a job. i figure in another year i'll have no choice but to get a job, so i might as well do something more interesting while i still have the chance.
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linkydink VirtueTV.com has archived RealVideo of shows in Toronto last spring by Kid Koala and DJ Food. These are two incredible musicians; Kid Koala and another DJ accompany a live 4-piece jamband on turntables while Strictly Kev of DJ Food mixes music and poetry together live on 4 (!) turntables. These two come close to epitomizing what I'm reaching for musically right now, and the recordings are high-quality, so it's definitely worth checking out if you've got some free time and bandwidth.
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linkydink Ah, well, if you insist on independent stores, then your next-next-best-bet is wordsworth.com. "During the 20th century the strength of the labour movement at any given moment has depended largely upon general economic conditions; in times of full employment and rising wages unionism has tended to lose some of its appeal, particularly among younger workers, while in recessionary times it has tended to attract more members." As ridiculous as the legal defintion of "obscene" is, consider: it isn't being defined with you, it is being defined for you!
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linkydink in case you were wondering what, exactly, constitutes obscenity, i'll lay it right out for you: "According to the U.S. Supreme Court, and the Code of Alabama, the test for obscenity is whether material meets each of these tests: Depicts hard-core sexual activity in a manner that is patently offensive according to local community standards." Appeals to a prurient interest, that is, a shameful or morbid interest in sex." Lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value." (from here, whatever this is)
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linkydink my problem with B&N is that it's a Typical Big Corporation (scroll down). but it seems they're pretty inescapable these days.
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linkydink maybe Amazon's business model isn't as wonderful as everyone thought after all. can't someone please do this right?
martes, enero 30, 2001
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linkydink Off topic... but come on people, does it get any worse than this? Darryl Hannah I'm not surprised at... but Tim Curry? Look at all those voice-overs!! *sigh*
lunes, enero 29, 2001
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linkydink Obviously, if you know you can take SF next year but you don't know if you can take urban economics next year, you should take urban economics. At my old school, on December 14, 1992, Wayne Lo, 18, shot and killed a professor (Nacunan Saez, 37) and a student (Galen Gibson, 18), and injured four others (Theresa Beavers, 42; Joshua Faber, 15; Matthew David, 18; Thomas McElderry, 19).
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linkydink question: i'm trying to decide between two classes. i want to be an econ minor, which involves taking four econ classes in the next three semesters. i could take two this semester (i'm already signed up for one, and the second would be Urban Economics) and be well on my way. OR i could take Science Fiction? Speculative Fiction?, which i've wanted to take for three years and which would give me at least one humanities class (my other three are Networks, Linear Algebra, and Environmental Economics). both of the profs are amazing, both of the subjects are extraordinarily interesting. if i don't take SciFi this year, i'll take it next year. i'm not sure if Urban is offered next year. right now i'm leaning toward Urban Econ. any input?
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linkydink Latest reason why I'm psyched for Australia: U-Melbourne 103-005: Cybersociety Topics covered include cybernetics, cyberspace, cyborgs and other 'cybers', virtual lives and virtual communities, the information economy, privacy and surveillance, digital convergence, multimedia and hypermedia, techno-utopian and dystopian visions. Perscribed Texts:
domingo, enero 28, 2001
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linkydink  Queensland's loveable cane toad menace is old news. Now, fear Florida's utterly alien Asian Swamp Eel invasion
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linkydink Ivy-League Porn "The movie's producers are members of a (Yale) student group called Porn 'n Chicken, which gathers regularly to eat fried chicken and watch X- rated films."
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linkydink interesting fact o' the day: battered women's shelters receive more calls on Superbowl Sunday than any other day of the year. what does that tell us about football culture?
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linkydink i find it funny (in a bitter, i-want-to-kill-someone sort of way) that the Republicans want to drill for more oil, but only so long as it's not going to be their eyesore.
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