Emptybottle.org

Well, it only took 7 months, but my Web 2.0 Bullshit Generator™ toy from January got dugg, and seemed to inspire much jocularity.

It's been interesting, because the page has been one of the most-linked bits of the site for the last 6 months, almost exclusively amongst weblogs in Europe and Asia, for some reason. Then, a few days ago, (near as I can trace it), after I dropped it into a comments thread at Metafilter, it was picked up by milov.nl, then automatically showed up on Hot Links, then Daring Fireball (kablooie went the visits), then Reddit and Digg almost simultaneously.

Happily, the server shows absolutely no signs of melting down (er, so far). Like I said recently, Dreamhost has treated me well.

Share and enjoy.

Update: Whoops, now Techcrunch and de.licio.us and Blue's News and Dvorak and O'Reilly Radar, too. Memetastic! Now it just needs posting on the front page of Metafilter, and the circle of life will be complete.

[Note: should not be posted to the front page of Metafilter]

5:13 PM | 28 comments

OK, it took about a month longer than I thought it would, what with my back going kablooie and the summer doldrums setting in and me just generally not working all that hard on it, but OutsideInKorea is finally open for business.

The dust is still settling, and I've dropped my tools and cracked a beer to celebrate, but most of the stuff I wanted to do is in place. There are lots of features and content yet to come, but I think it's ready to pull back the curtain and hope that people like what I've done. Some things are probably broken, or look weird, but I've tested in Firefox and IE and Opera on Windows, and it looks pretty good to me. If you have problems, it'll help me if you drop a comment here or there and tell me what's busted.

The only content other than the welcome message is repurposed essays about Korea from this very site, but I promise that I will be writing regularly and frequently. I've done a lot of work on the design (and I'm no designer, and it probably shows), and now it's time to start filling the bucket with words, Roxanne, words. If you're interested in Korea, I hope you'll bookmark the site, and pass the URL on to friends and neighbours, ex-lovers and therapists, your mom and the guy who sells you your drugs.

I've decided to put ads on the site -- though there will never be ads here on the 'bottle -- and in my Welcome! post over there, I talk about why. It may seem hypocritical of me given my stance about advertising in the past, and I'm willing to accept that criticism. If I can make some money from the site, though, I'll be well-pleased. It's not my only reason for building it, but it'll certainly help me to keep up my enthusiasm, if it happens.

So. Go, and I hope you like. Help me out, my scattered blog tribe, and spread the word.

This site won't die, I promise, but I'll be writing about Korea over there from now on.

6:47 PM | 4 comments

The Web 2.0 horse is pretty much dead already from all the flogging it's been taking, I know, and it's probably just cruel to take another swing at the poor bugger.

Nonetheless, I had an irresistable brainfart and an urge to play, so I put together the Web 2.0 Bullshit Generator, a ripoff of homage to the legendary dack.com Web Economy Bullshit Generator.

Share and enjoy, tag and remix, monetarize and sell out to Yahoo†!

† selling out to Yahoo! is not compulsory.

4:40 PM | 3 comments

This is a nice idea, actually. Whack a slider up there at the top of the search results, help you to filter out the omnipresent webshill crud. Shopping versus research, the infotainment revenue-generation cage-match of our times.

One of the things that annoys me greatly, every time I search for some information on an author or a book, is the way that Amazon (and the dense cloud of parasite associate gnats it trails behind it, all buzzing and jostling for a sip of the great beast's blood) pops to the top, without fail.

Sometimes I even sigh quietly to myself, give in, and click through, hating myself for letting the shopping mall win.

So this Yahoo thing seemed like it might be right up my alley. Until, of course, I noticed that even with the bar slid hard a-starboard, pedal to the research-metal, the first (paid, placed-ad) result, helpfully highlighted, was for E-bay.

Ahhh, go screw yourself, Yahoo.

The irony of using a Yahoo-owned service to host the image I'm showing you is delicious, though. So there's that.

1:16 PM | 15 comments

Because I am a bad person, I have not been scouring the permalinkosphere for nuggets of excellence with my usual steely-eyed vigor this week.

Despair not, though, gentle readers, for I have nonetheless come up with a Single Link of such Power and Glory that it will make up for the notable lack of the Other Four, and quite possibly melt your Snatch Hairs.

Smoke 'em if you got 'em.

And so [drum roll please] I give you... the Friday One! Do not operate heavy machinery while using this blog.

9:58 AM

Yes, it's Friday again in Korea -- the first time it's been Friday in, like, a couple of months, thanks to new legislation outlawing Friday in Korea in favour of having Thursday twice to reduce alcohol consumption (you read it here first!) -- and so time for the Other! Friday! Five! in which I provide precisely 5 hard-won links to some things that I quite enjoy, and you click on them, and everybody's happy.

Some of our lovely contestants you may know, some you may not. It's all good.

So without further ado, join me down in the government yard in Trenchtown, friends, and revel in the linky goodness.

• John Scalzi
• Long story, short pier
• Ludic Kid
• Ming the Mechanic

and, because I'm an old-school geek at heart,

• tinyapps.org

[Post postscript : I've been daydreaming about The Before Times (™DV Polymedia) lately, and if the delicious frosty beverages I plan to consume this evening treat me right, I may have a tale or two to tell of those times when I should have (in the immortal words of Moe Berg) ended up dead in a ditch somewhere with a mind full of chemicals like some cheese-eating highschool boy. But didn't.

What's the point of doing stupid things unless you get at least a few amusing anecdotes out of it, right? Stay tuned to this channel!]

4:41 PM | 1 Comment

Yes, friends, I've actually done something I said I was going to do, and on time as well. It's the dawning of a new era, I tell you, and nothing on God's green earth can stop me now! I'm bristling with barely contained power, the sparks are fair flying off me -- his floating eyes, his flashing hair! -- and the very earth beneath my feet trembles and groans and heaves in fast thick pants. Dearly beloved, it's time once again to unleash the chthonic power of this internet, and reveal unto you : The Other Friday Five. These are things I like, and I am showing them to you.

• Strip mining for whimsy
• Satan's Laundromat
• Yule Heibel's Post Studio
• Laughing Knees
• My Korean Language Study Journey

Share and Enjoy.

1:51 PM | 2 comments

Yes, I actually remembered something from one week to the next, it's Friday in Korea, and so it's time for another pulse-pounding, axle-snapping, gear-grinding installment of the Other Friday Five. So here are some personal websites of which you may or many not be aware, but you should be, by golly, if you're not. A mixed bag this time, with a little something for everyone. Line on the left, one cross each.

• Snarkout
• Ed Rants
• The Marmot's Hole
• Number One Hit Song
• Whiskey River

Share and Enjoy.

Bonus link : All this blog-reading I've been able to do lately has been entirely thanks to the most excellent Bloglines. I never thought I'd be an aggregator user (and I wish there were some way to tell how many people are reading my feeds), but I am now a convert. Hoopla!

[Postscript : it would make my world that much closer to perfect if everyone would be more free with their content, and include full text of their posts in their feeds, rather than a parsimonious little excerpt. There's probably some good reason not to, but I don't know what it is. Pretty please?]

8:36 AM | 14 comments

In the first of what may become a hallowed 'bottle tradition, universally praised and flatteringly imitated all around this mighty net of inters on which we play†, I offer you five links to five Most Excellent Personal Websites, Containing High Quality Words, Sentences, And Paragraphs, With the Added Attraction of Amusing Anecdotes‡, websites of whose existence you may or may not be aware, but nonetheless websites you should bookmark and enjoy on a daily basis if you have a shred of human decency left in your souls, you bastards*.

• Dong Resin's Joint
• Izzle! Izzle pfaff!
• Letters From A Strip of Dirt
• Geese Aplenty
• Pure Land Mountain

Share and enjoy.

† ...or may, on the other hand, be a caffeine-fueled one-off. You never know.

‡ Apologies for the Comedy Capitalization. Cheap, I know, but I'm Feeling Whimsical.

* Just choking around, as we used to say in my crypto-racist hometown. Most of you aren't bastards at all!

2:01 PM | 5 comments

Item the First : Anne Craig is going through some surgery for cancer. I join Rageboy in encouraging you to send her a note of support. He says : 'I have personally seen pure concentrated freak power save a life,' and I say if you're reading this weblog, you are a freak of some kind, clearly, and you've got to come to terms with that, damn it! Now let your freak flag fly and go do something constructive with the unholy power with which you've been blessed†.

Item the Second : In lieu of reading any new rantings and ravings (rockings or rollings, babblings or banterings (somewhere between Bantu warrior and post-Bruce Banner hulk-smashology)) from yours truly, I offer you this tale of bitterness and disappointment and the inexorable deterioration of mental health from a new arrival to the ESL Mines Of Korea. It's long, but well worth the read.

Sad and a little horrible to watch it unfold - an old battle-scarred vet like me can predict most of the hammerfalls this poor guy endures - but hilarious nonetheless.

Reminds me in many ways of my first six months here. It is in no way an exaggeration, I should note - if you're thinking of coming to Korea to teach, and this gives you pause, well, good.

Enjoy.

†Well, OK, you don't have to, but it would be a nice thing to do.

Edit : Something's gone goofy with comments on this post. I'm trying to track it down. Please do not adjust your set.

Update : Fixed. Comment away!

11:45 PM | 5 comments and 1 trackback

Stupidity : The Documentary.

Any clip that can juxtapose interview footage from Drew Curtis (el Farko Supremo) and Noam Chomsky, and manage to poke Dubya with a stick while including both nudity and senseless violence....

...well, that's a keeper.

See also : 'you begin to realize that there is no hope.' But who gives a sh-t? It's a riot!

12:11 PM | 3 comments and 1 trackback

[this is good], inaccuracies and all.

The price of, uh, somef--kingthing... is eternal something else, man. But you know, whatever. Hey, you see that episode of Lions and Christians last night? f--kin' A! That totally kicks ass when they, like, die and stuff!

[via MeFi]

12:58 AM

Though most people know of them already, I'm sure : like The Memory Hole, the deliberately unbloglike UnderReported is a good way to try and keep track of the sh-tstorm of lies and propaganda howling around our heads, as of course is the excellent and more weblogesque cursor.org. These sites invite you to draw your own conclusions, an invitation we too rarely receive these days.

Though undeniably entertaining, reading the ranting of bloggers is less rewarding, perhaps. Your mileage, as they say, may vary. Which is not to say that I'm going to stop ranting any time soon, but rather to note that you, dear reader, should most assuredly take it for what it is worth, which is bugger-all other than a bit of (hopefully) amusing wordplay.

It must be said, too, that there are times when one has to stand back and point, with some small measure of humility, at some of the diamond-bullet stuff bloggers are pulling out of their hats, ranty or otherwise, like this little juxtapotato from a certain maniacal South African down the block :

5:09 PM | 3 comments

Here are some neat things you may not have seen before :

The Kostnice Ossuary. BIT-101. Tom Vu says if you have no money or no credit to buy property, don't worry about it! It's Time To Bone! (Edit : contains nasty Lego Porn and is not at all safe for Eeksy-Peeky to watch at work or anywhere else that freaky animated porn disguised as 'art' might be unwelcome.)

Share and enjoy.

3:00 AM | 3 comments

You know, I keep wandering back to iconomy's site every once in a while, going 'Holy bugeyed monstertruck whiplash-inducing lemur crap, batman, this r0x0rs my b0x0rs!' every darn time and then forgetting to link thataway, and share the goodness.

Today, I have broken the cycle. I am proud, no, humbled to offer you this link to some Really Cool sh-t. Enjoy.

11:53 PM

Last week every second thread at the 'filter seemed to have at least one mention of Neal Pollack, and how he's tastier than pre-sliced cheese and better looking than that guy on the infomercial, you know, the one with the hair, and may or may not be America's Greatest Living Writer. Me, I had no idea who this guy was.

So using the all the tools at my command, at great personal risk and expense, and by the grace of GOD, I tracked down his own Personal Website.

And he's a pretty funny f--ker, you know?

1:31 AM | 4 comments

...and not coincidentally fuque the Oil Industry barons who run America (and its foreign policy (yeah yeah, I know, No Blood For Oil is dipsh-t-lefty oversimplification)).

How? Here.

10:02 PM | 2 comments

Now I know the Patriot Act (quite possibly to be extended indefinitely, is the word on the streets) is Bad, and the Bend Over And Feel Our Power Act (also known as Patriot II - The Second Coming) is Worse, but this, friends and neighbours, this is Insupportable.

Courtesy of the excellent Modern Drunkard Magazine.

12:51 AM | 5 comments and 1 trackback

The excellent Y0ung-Hae Chang Heavy Industries has come up with a new and very disturbing piece

0PERATI0N NUK0REA

which describes in horrible detail the death of Seoul under a storm of North Korean missiles. If it comes to that, I wonder if my wife and I will live through it, and if we will want to. Terrifying and unflinching.

Still, not to be missed.

4:41 AM | 6 comments

Sure, it's memetic, and as I've mentioned before, deliberate meme-propagation makes my sphincter itch, but it's a (marginally) interesting idea, this bloggo-pollo-zeitgeistical stuff. A little penicillin'll clear that up, yeah?

Blogpoll : Have your say -- The War on Iraq

Also : Current results - strongly against, at the moment.

2:58 AM | 6 comments

Lostintransit.org is a new site written by expatriates of which I've been asked to be a part, and for which I look forward with great anticipation to writing faux-intolerant screeds about Korea (and other Lovely and Welcoming Exotic Locales).

Once I get this pickaxe out of my forehead, that is.

An interesting and diverse group of people there, nicely rounded out by the presence of some Miraculous Poultry, if I do say so myself...

3:41 AM | 1 Comment

I've been casting my nets a little wider today, looking for some meaty and delicious commentary on The War on Terra Iraq Everyone, and found this weblog. Thought I'd share, as I'd never run across it before.

Well worth reading, whatever your take on the dark days in which we find ourselves.

8:33 PM | 1 Comment

Kittenfilter. SportsFilter. FreeFilter. Musicfilter.
BookFilter. MetaPhilter. GamesFilter. MojoFilter. phpilfer. Warfilter. Geekfilter. Humorfilter.

MetafilterFilter

2:35 AM | 3 comments and 2 trackbacks.

Feeling a need to feel like a kid again, if only for a few minutes? Do this now!

3:14 AM

Let us hope that Saddam is gone by the end of next month — and George W. Bush by the end of next year.

Don't idealise the soldiers fighting this unjust war.

Giant dildos.

3:04 AM | 4 comments

via boingboing, a library of George Orwell's work, online.

Things like this make me happy.

7:56 AM | 2 comments and 2 trackbacks.

I'd never heard of this guy before today, but trust me, [this is good].

[via Boing Boing]

6:53 AM | 5 comments

It's strange, but at precisely the same moment as I'm pointing to this

I have this eerie and slightly unpleasant feeling that some ex-girlfriend of mine somewhere is pointing to this

It's a world wide web! Neat!

5:36 AM | 1 Comment

I keep linking to Fishrush, because I love it. You know, in a manly way.

It's a floor wax and a dessert topping, and can be enjoyed equally with either spoon or fork. And it makes me laugh, which in these dark times is a be-yoo-tiful thing.

10:52 PM

This guy's on a trip around the planet, and his travel diaries (full of the tales like this latest of difficult defecations, hiking hardships, and all manner of mad and unpleasant things one puts oneself through on a daily basis when backpacking around the world) make me feel like hitting the road again.

Also : "lots of nice pictures too, including penis gourds and big stone penises at a fertility temple, the big jars of Laos, the big heads of Easter Island, dog eating and dried llama foetuses."

Domesticity is wearisome, some days. Particularly on those days you find yourself bickering with your spouse about everything and nothing. Oh, to be sh-tting in a trench latrine with snowflakes swirling around your tender bits on the side of a mountain somewhere...

10:13 PM | 2 comments

Hey, while I'm at it, Exploding Dog is really good and stuff, too. But you probably already knew that.

I could learn to like this linking without the commentary schtick... Emptybottle Lite! Now with even more sh-t that you don't care about!

10:50 PM | 4 comments

Occasionally I find stuff that I want to share, and this almost resembles a weblog for a minute or two.

Go look at some American pictures, if you're so inclined. I don't know a damn thing about photography, but I know what I like.

6:17 AM | 2 comments

Like quonsar said, not necessarily Metafilter at it's best, but certainly at it's most interesting, in some ways. When the WTC was hit, when the bomb went off in Bali, and today, to offer some examples : all have been moments when it was fascinating to read the raw responses of people to tragedy, to watch how the community dealt with it, to see the both the maudlin sentimentality and the black humour, the heartfelt grief and the political opportunism, the whole sweep of emotion that folks feel when they are hammered by unexpected loss, all packaged up in one neat blue thread.

8:28 PM | 11 comments

Go pass on some felicitations to one of the good ones, won't you? Happy Birthday, Jonathon, ya bastard†!






† Aussie-style camaraderie. Use only as directed. Void where prohibited by law.

7:50 AM

Dong! Resin! Speaks!

[May not be suitable for children. Void where prohibited by law. Do not operate heavy machinery while taking dong_resin.]

Also : ARE WAR PROTESTS UNPATRIOTIC?

I voted yes, yes it is unpatriotic to protest against killing, just 'cause I like to play the irredeemable asshole. Apparently about a thousand other wacky funsters had voted the same way. Oh those effervescent yanks, full of happy hijinks. God bless 'em, eh?

When I actually tried to leave a comment about how patently undemocratic (if predictable) the very implications of posing a question like that were, I got this :

That's about right.

2:30 AM | 1 Comment and 1 trackback

'Hurt' : Johnny Cash covering NIN. Gorgeous. Quicktime, 42 Mb.

[via MeFi]

12:35 AM | 6 comments

In the comments attached to this post (made while feeling no pain whatsoever last night, but I'm a great believer in blogging verité, so it stands), fellow 9622.net monkeyshiner readymade links to a Real Life Tale of beat poet encounters, drugs, and nudity. Some of my favorite things, those. Hooray! Go, read!

10:30 PM

If for some reason you're not reading cursor.org each and every ever-lovin' day, well, I respectfully recommend that you start. Knowledge is power. Stoke the fires of your righteous resentment, then get the heck out there and try and make a difference, you big silly, you!

Or not. It's your call. I'm just sayin'.

Also, this, I like.

And : I want one of these. I'd love to see peoples' faces as I arachno-commute to the university every morning driving that sucker... Almost enough to make me want to move back to my sh-tty little logging-industry hometown. Almost.

1:47 AM | 5 comments

Today's Metafilter must-read : cultural relativism and Lisbon architecture, amongst other things.

Edit : Also, I finally managed to articulate what annoys me about conversations about 'blogging and journalism'. My usual Philosophy 101 maunderings, and I may well be talking crap, as usual, but I think it makes some sense.

8:42 PM

Some of this, in a glass, with some soda.

Watch them be born, watch them die.

Repeat as necessary.

4:33 AM | 3 comments

It reminds me, at this early stage, of a hardboiled Chandleresque quantum-physics detective novel (yeah, before Dirk Gently) that me and a couple of guys I lived with in university were writing (and erasing) in installments on the messageboard of my dorm room. That was fun, and so is this.

But I had no idea what to do with Bea Arthur suddenly appearing...

2:25 AM | 4 comments

Via robot wisdom, this prophetic bit of japery from January 2001. One of those 'tears of laughter or just tears?' kinda things.

2:02 AM and 1 trackback

Is BurningBird back? Sorta, kinda, and this makes me happy all out of proportion to what I might have expected. There's been a disconcerting Shelley-shaped hole in the neighbourhood of late. She asks "Just how real is all of this?" and I haven't really got an answer for that. The first thing that pops into my mind (the first thing being what I usually go with, as you're probably aware if you've been reading my crap for any length of time) : "f--k art, let's dance!"

(I don't know if Shelley is still working on ThreadNeedle, but if she is, here are some very cool blogthread visualization ideas that someone geekier and smarter than myself might like to investigate.

I've been thinking about and researching this a bit today after following David's pointer to Jon.

Have a look at PeopleGarden and WebFan. I find WebFan in particular very intuitive.

The projects at the MIT Social Media Group site are also interesting.

And Warren Sack's Conversation Map Interface for Very Large Scale Conversations is working again on the sample Usenet data, since the last time I checked. Amazing work. )

12:46 AM | 1 Comment

This blog is written by a bot named HAL, a bot that has been infused exclusively with the collected lexical wisdom of the SA Goons. I like it, and I think it may well be the first-ever weblog written by a non-human.

But I think Shelley might have something when she talks about this weblogging thing getting a little over-ripe.

5:50 AM | 2 comments

This strikes me as what text-entry will be like when we get those headgear-and-gauntlet cyberspace rigs that movies keep telling us we're gonna have any time now.

Very freaking cool. And you can download it!

[via sylloge]

Edit : It took my like a minute to 'type' 'Holy Bugsh-t', but man I had fun doing it, and I can see how practice would bring your speed way up. Once again - freaking cool.

12:44 AM

Item The First : the tribulations of being a porn-vid store clerk. "Apparently in the old days it was different - no security cameras and longer dead spells. My manager used to clerk then, and she said that having to clean come out of the corners and off the walls was pretty routine."
[Edit : MeFi discussion here.]

Item The Next : Would it be a bad thing for me to secretly hope that this guy actually is Christ Returned?

Some Other Items : It’s like they aren’t even trying to pretend anymore.

"Bush's job approval rating stands at 72 percent, virtually unchanged from a month ago. An equally large proportion of people still view the president as honest and trustworthy..."

"And this, basically, is the story of the spectacular unfairness with which moneymaking opportunities are lavished on the politically connected. It is the story of a man who has been rewarded for repeated failures by having money shot at him through a fire hose. It is the story of a man who talks with a straight face about having "earned" a fortune of tens of millions of dollars, without having ever done an honest day’s work in his life. "

And now for something completely different : Listen to the 'bottle (or any other web page). No, seriously. I was hoping I'd sound a bit more like, you know, Motorhead or something, but this is pretty cool anyway.

12:44 AM | 4 comments

I don't normally do stuff like this, but I reckon it would be a Good Thing™ to stop by BurningBird's place and give her a little of that downhome weblog-lovin'. If we really are a community (and the recent outpouring of goodwill for Marek and Rageboy in their various hours of need would indicate to me that we are), then when someone is feeling like sh-t, I think it's the right thing to do to go tell 'em some dirty jokes or something.

Scoot!

7:36 PM

Oxford Internet Institute :

A big buncha UBlog wannabes, these folks. Who the hell's ever heard of Oxford?

2:34 AM

Marek is unwell - leave your best wishes for his speedy recovery here. Get well soon, you crazy bastard!

2:47 AM

I'm not sure if it's fiction or memoir, but this piece from Catfish on the Table, a blog I recently found though my recent referrers gizmos down in the righthand sidebar, is well worth your time. Puts me in mind of the memoirs of Frank McCourt, and as well written, 'tis.

Also : "Have you ever tried to get into a girl's pants when her main intellectual influence is Steinbeck?" Mad, hilarious, brilliant sh-t from Alex.

6:28 PM

Joey (aka the Mighty Accordian Guy) has some pics of the fallout (literally) from the garbage strike in Toronto.

I empathize, cap'n. This is the way my neighbourhood looks all the time. Lovely Bugok, vacationland of the rich and famous. Damn right I'm angry.

10:41 PM

Here's some amusing crap old and new to divert your attention from the fact that WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!!!!

No, really.

Scrollbar racing.

A brief history of the codpiece. (I tried to start a fashion trend (being the trendmonger I am and always have been *snort*) when I was in university to Bring Back the Codpiece. It failed.)

WebCollage: Exterminate All Rational Thought

The power and the beauty of Crazy Drunk Guy. Have you accepted Crazy Drunk Guy as your Personal Saviour?

Hope you enjoyed that. I sure as heck did.

3:18 AM | 5 comments

The sheer grooviness potential of this plus this makes my bits tingle.

8:54 PM

Via Mefi, [this is good] for blowing the carbon out of the old mental valves.

3:04 AM | 1 Comment

Go say hi to Shelley. Why? 'cause.

4:50 PM | 4 comments and 1 trackback

..and I'll say it again : fishrush is a place or an idea or a condition or possibly an affliction where fast fish slow down, or slow fish speed up, or some goddamn thing or other, and I don't claim to understand what the hell is going on, but I tells ya, I sez to ya : I like it.

9:06 AM | 3 comments

The discussion about 'Thread The Needle', a tool to enable tracking of interblog conversations being built by Shelley Powers (aka Burningbird) continues here, and the discussion is an interesting one indeed.

Your two bits are requested.

[Further to this.]

4:35 AM

"How weblogs straddle personal and social spaces and the potential implications for developing new communities."

Tom from Plasticbag.org says some pretty cool stuff about some things. Powerpoint, 2.8 Mb. (That's funny, isn't it? I wonder who the presentees were...)

Anyway, a quote :

No argument here.

1:56 AM

...so don't tell anyone, OK? But this is incredibly cool, particularly for someone, like myself, who has to ride the subway for 90 minutes to get to the nearest English bookstore...

[via wood s lot]

2:10 AM

Via this MeFi thread, this is gripping. I just don't know if it's fiction or not. A lot of groovy stuff here and here.

12:47 AM

I am way keen to see Shelley's new project in action - I've maundered and pondered and arm-waved about something like this for ages (which in blogspace years is about 15 minutes, but still).

I hope she won't mind me referring to it as The Hot Needle of Inquiry, though.

8:08 PM | 2 comments

I hope this turns out to be as interesting as I hope it will be. I'm not sure how it is meant to tie into the book, and I would be very disappointed if it has been created as a promotional tool.

But, given the healthy lack of obsession with commercialism and the teen spirit evinced by the folks in charge, as far as I've seen, anyway, I suspect this will not be the case. I've been checking damn near daily to see what blogroots was going to be since I first heard about it, and I just found out it was up and running from a Metatalk post.

*sigh*

Ah well, I'm happy to have a new place to drone on endlessly about my ever-so-important ideas! Whee! Go go gadget codebase!

9:59 PM

I like this.

2:42 AM

Fishrush is always doing interesting and amusing things. This is pretty super-cool, I reckon. Expect imitations, but accept no substitute!

1:05 AM

This app is, hands-down, about the most amazing thing I've seen this week. Broadband seems to be a prerequisite, but if you've got a fat pipe, download the demo and have a look.

Holy sh-t.

7:27 AM | 2 comments

With thanks to Lia, the Queen of Manila, these two cool things :

Friend snarkout goes off all erudite and produces a fine and fascinating essay about Korea and brainwashing America's understanding of the war that puts me to shame.

"The Ultimate and Authoritative Guide to Life in Korea, as Gleaned from About a Dozen Recent Popular Movies."

7:23 PM

Very clever, very interesting, very short animations at hoogerbrugge.com : two of my favorites are Modern Living #74 and #79, but there are too many slightly bent little pieces of dream-logic art here to point to just a few. Go browse around.

Go on, now.

Shoo!

2:37 AM

Mark Fiore. Good.

2:09 AM | 2 comments