This could be fun…

August 1, 2002 / / 4 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…

Ghost in the Machine

July 31, 2002 / / 1 Comment

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. )

The First AI Blog

July 26, 2002 / / 2 Comments

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.

Mathematics

July 25, 2002 / / 12 Comments

This + This = This

“It is highly likely that the US launch attacks which start the war with Iraq within the next 75 days, and probably between August 15 and October 5.
It is not necessary to be a military strategist to figure this out. It won’t be based on a preparatory build up of US and allied troops, nor initiated because of any particular actions by the Iraqis which require a military response. There may a fabricated “story” the Bush administration uses to try to “sell” the war. But it’s pretty obvious what the real reason is.
The time range described above is optimal for influencing the November US Congressional elections. With Bush’s popularity plummeting as millions of Americans discover that their life savings and retirement funds have shriveled to a fraction of what they were, the Bush administration has but one trump card left to try to turn the tide– start the war with Iraq.”
[more…]

Suit Up!

July 25, 2002 / / No 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.

We've Got Blog

July 21, 2002 / / 9 Comments

I got my comp copy of ‘We’ve Got Blog: How Weblogs Are Changing Our Culture’ in the mail today, and have had a quick look through it. It’s the first actual book I’ve ever held in my hands that talks about web sh-t, other than HTML textbooks and such.
It terrifies me, the physical presence of the damn thing. And seeing my comments at Metafilter in a serif font, in black on a white background? Disorienting to say the least.
The last thing in the book is a reprint of this conversation, initiated by dogmatic (who memorably described the thread as a ‘stumbling, chortling abortion of a discussion’), in which I played a fairly pivotal part, in tried-and-true wonderchicken style : seriously addressing the question posed, while simultaneously setting up a straight man to aid the inevitable descent into silliness and self-referential tomfoolery.
My take on the conversation is a little more philosophical, perhaps. As I mentioned in dogmatic’s comments : ‘it really did encapsulate in a single thread so many things that MeFi is, or was at that point : self-absorbed MetaTalking, self-referentiality, high-seriousness, utter silliness, a sense of community, an appearance from the admin (Matt), some cross-cultural banter courtesy of Miguel… and more. Taken as an artifact of sorts, removed from its context, I think it’s a fascinating little document.’
rodii, who has since departed from the MetaPlayground, perhaps forever, ably played my straight man. He was also one of the people who did not give permission for their comments in that thread to be used in the book. These people have now annoyed the piss out of me (well, a little), as the publishers decided to include the thread anyway, with the parts of the conversation contributed by those who opted not to play along simply excised.
The result of this is that I come off looking a bit goofy, I think, and even though that’s nothing new, I prefer when I look dumb to do it deliberately. But I’m enough of an attention-whore (and that’s in large part what this blogging thing often is, if we are to be honest — attention-whoring) not to care too much, pleased as I am to see my Meta-Antics captured in print.
The tenor and taste of the words change so completely, for me at least, when they are between hard covers, though.
I’ve enjoyed what I’ve read of the book so far – I plan to dip into it in small measures. It is, however, spurring some thoughts of rebuilding and refocussing this wee site here into something different. What, I’m not quite sure. Certainly another monument to my towering ego (or salve for my deep feelings of inadequacy – Fork! Spoon!), of course (see also : whoring, attention-). That goes without saying.
It strikes me as amusing (and predictable, if you know me at all) that the first book I’ve read praising and proselytizing the weblog has led almost immediately to thoughts of getting the hell out of weblogging.

Read

July 20, 2002 / / No Comments

In my wanderings today, I noticed some things that were said recently and that I found interesting, and may well be worth your time, from Jeff :

This delineation of introspection as constitutive of feeling and more significantly, that the feelings which come from memory are the most powerful ones of all, has colored Western society— feeling is taken as a private rather than public, reflective rather than reactive, individual rather than collectively consitituted response. This is deeply at odds with human appetites. Humanity is far more social than that. Coleridge, no matter how much he agreed with Wordsworth in theory, subverted it in practice. He was loquacious, providing a great deal of his introspection in public. Thinking of the contradictions of publicly generated privacy gave me a headache, and I really needed to soak my head.
[more…]

and from Steve :

Blogging, then, is like my mental scratch pad made visible: it’s much more stream-of-conscious, though still composed and relatively controlled. I think about what I’m going to post for a few minutes or a few hours, then pretty much just write it as I type. Along the way, ideas I hadn’t expected pop up and make themselves known, screaming for attention, and often they turn into other ideas, other posts, or even other projects. I actually, ideally, become more productive in my offline writing because of blogging—in effect, the impermanent work, the scratch pad, feeds what is intended as ‘finished’, lasting work.
[more… (and more from Jeff on this too.)]

Just thought I’d point, and nod.

Link Dump

July 20, 2002 / / 4 Comments

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.

Thought Food

July 18, 2002 / / No Comments

via Metafilter, some marvellously ironic TIPS-related info :

Some food for thought about civilians as informers, about a large number of informers… From the book “Republic of Fear, The Politics of Modern Iraq” by Kanan Makiya (originally published under the name Samir al-Khalil, a pseudonym):
“Nothing fragments group solidarity and self-confidence like the gnawing suspicion of having an informer in your midst. Therefore, to the extent that the public polices itself – a function of the number of informers – it inevitably disintegrates as an entity in its own right, separated from those who rule over it. Informer networks invade privacy and choke off all willingness to act in public or reflect upon politics, replacing these urges with a now deeply instilled caution. In so doing they destroy the reality of the public domain, relegating what little remains to a dark and shadowy existence. In such a world the more well-known violence of state institutions – executions, “disappearances”, murders, reprisals, torture – take on a new societal meaning. Nothing is as it seems, and nothing can be taken for granted. (Page 63 – edition 1989.)”
“The Ba’thist [the party in power in Iraq – IB] postulate that society depends for its very existence on having an unbreachable basic moral norm entails as a necessary consequence that all deviance is immediately and directly an act of treason. The new Arab order must be a seamless moral web. This is the fundamental source of the party’s coherence, and its license to violence. (Page 206.)”
“Once political identity is accepted as belief in an absolute moral imperative, and once morality itself is seen as a striving for perfection towards an unrealizable ideal, then no aspect of conduct is in principle outside the purview of the political organization of the state. Moreover, there is no way to avoid the implication that such all-embracing interference is justified. Justice as the problem of arbitrating between claims on society (rights) never arises, and is not expected to rise. (Page 208.)”

fcuk Off, Redux

July 17, 2002 / / 1 Comment

John Pilger argues that ‘war on terror’ is a smokescreen created by the ultimate terrorist … America itself.

…Perhaps the most important taboo is the longevity of the United States as both a terrorist state and a haven for terrorists. That the US is the only state on record to have been condemned by the World Court for international terrorism (in Nicaragua) and has vetoed a UN Security Council resolution calling on governments to observe international law, is unmentionable.
‘In the war against terrorism,’ said Bush from his bunker following 11 September, ‘we’re going to hunt down these evil-doers wherever they are, no matter how long it takes.’
Strictly speaking, it should not take long, as more terrorists are given training and sanctuary in the United States than anywhere on earth. They include mass murderers, torturers, former and future tyrants and assorted international criminals. This is virtually unknown to the American public, thanks to the freest media on earth.
…
General Jose Guillermo Garcia has lived comfortably in Florida since the 1990s. He was head of El Salvador’s military during the 1980s when death squads with ties to the army murdered thousands of people. General Prosper Avril, the Haitian dictator, liked to display the bloodied victims of his torture on television. When he was overthrown, he was flown to Florida by the US Government. Thiounn Prasith, Pol Pot’s henchman and apologist at the United Nations, lives in New York. General Mansour Moharari, who ran the Shah of Iran’s notorious prisons, is wanted in Iran, but untroubled in the United States.
Al-Qaeda’s training camps in Afghanistan were kindergartens compared with the world’s leading university of terrorism at Fort Benning in Georgia. Known until recently as the School of the Americas, it trained tyrants and some 60,000 Latin American special forces, paramilitaries and intelligence agents in the black arts of terrorism.
In 1993, the UN Truth Commission on El Salvador named the army officers who had committed the worst atrocities of the civil war; two-thirds of them had been trained at Fort Benning. In Chile, the school’s graduates ran Pinochet’s secret police and three principal concentration camps. In 1996, the US government was forced to release copies of the school’s training manuals, which recommended blackmail, torture, execution and the arrest of witnesses’ relatives.
[more…]

[via wood_s_lot]

fcuk Off

July 17, 2002 / / No Comments

Hey, my American friends, why not take the sage advice of my friend here…

I made this. If you steal it, please credit me. Not the old native guy, the other stuff. Well, not that stuff either, actually. Some underpaid governmnet employee made that...Ah, f--k it. Steal it if you want.

…and tell the bastards to go f–k themselves!
[Edit : Thanks to the random google-surfing psychos who crapped here, but I’ve closed the thread and deleted the bile, pathetically amusing as it was. Sue me.]

Weblog lovin'

July 16, 2002 / / No 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!

RATS

July 16, 2002 / / 11 Comments

It boggles my mind the things the American people are allowing Shrubya and his cohort of ratbastards to do to their once-great nation. It’s sad, and somehow seems inevitable. Decades ago, when I gleefully predicted the implosion of America as a result of the rot at its very core, I never actually thought my predictions would come true!
Steve invites you to strap on the armband, don the brown shirt, and join in the Happy Fun Fascism Parade. Can I dob myself in for my UnAmerican activities? Will they have McDonalds at the labour camps?

[Background here, and here (thanks, Bb) if you’re lost. The Sydney Morning Herald notes, mildly : “Historically, informant systems have been the tools of non-democratic states.” Now that’s comedy gold.]
Edit : Eeksy-Peeksy spoke recently, in his elegant way, about something tangentially related in Poland, which I was going to mention. Now seems like a good opportunity.

Oxford Internet Institute

July 15, 2002 / / No Comments

Oxford Internet Institute :

The Oxford Internet Institute (OII) is the world’s first truly multidisciplinary Internet institute based in a major university. Exclusively devoted to the study of the impact of the Internet on society, the OII aims to put Oxford, the UK and Europe at the centre of debates about how the Internet could and should develop.

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

Worth Reading

July 10, 2002 / / No Comments

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.

Some amusing crap

July 9, 2002 / / 5 Comments

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.