A read of this thread at MetaTalk just might reveal to those of good faith something of significance for weblogging and for journalism, being born all a-squall. It’s an exciting idea, and an inspired way to leverage the enormous number of Smart People who are connected to one degree or another to Metafilter (and kuro5hin), and if it really does amount to something, will be a great gift from MeFi to the wired world to commemorate The Mothership’s upcoming fourth birthday.
About a year ago, I squeezed out the following brainfart
And today, as weblogorrhea reaches epidemic proportions, Dr Pepper’s soulless, clue-deficient marketing shills are actually giving it a go, boys and girls.
*Takes off tinfoil helmet*
Doc Searls is quoted as saying in response to this : “In my view blogs are the antidote to viral marketing.”
In my view, this clumsy teentastic attempt at manipulation – more likely to attract attention to itself (which, let’s face it, has got to be the real goal here, rather any genuine attempt at marketing juice thanks to the efforts of some cadre of hiphop dipsh-t teend00d bloggers pimping their avatars for some gear – it’s a metacampaign, kids!) and spawn subtle and inventive imitations as a result of the MSNBC article and other media attention – is the first salvo in a coming war of web words. Blogs aren’t the antidote to viral marketing, they’re the petri dish where the virulent brain-colonizing memetic equivalent of Ebola will be grown. Call it wEbola, and reach for the mental prophylactic of your choice. At stake are our very souls!
That’s complete bullsh-t, of course. I’m just flinging hyperbole around to make this all seem a little more interesting, you know, ’cause I can. The truth is, even if I do disagree with Doc’s quotable quote there, if I should happen across a weblog pimping some craptacular, pointless and inevitably unnecessary new product (“Buy this crap! Buy it you f–kers, or we’ll lose our jobs and have to whore out our children!” – now that’s a marketing campaign I could respect), well, *click*
Heck, I even refuse to read weblogs that perfunctorily link to Amazon, for christ’s sakes, never mind ones that are busy flogging some sh-tty sugar drink. But this sort of thing is going to get more sophisticated, mark my words, brothers and sisters, and more insidious. The marketrons will continue to colonize the new frontier. I have seen the enemy and he is us.
via boingboing, a library of George Orwell’s work, online.
Things like this make me happy.
After much screwing about, I had this layout working flawlessly in Mozilla, near as I have been able to tell, but I just downloaded 1.4a, and the sidebar over on the right looks very weird indeed.
Does anyone else see some weird font sizing with the new (or older, for that matter) builds of Mozilla? I’d appreciate any feedback you can give…
Edit : Fixed, with thanks for the feedback. Repeat 100 times : I must not edit templates while drinking. I must not edit templates while drinking.
A reasonably complete and brief summary from Molly Ivins of how we got to where we are, with North Korea getting ready to rain bombs on my chicken-little head. Not, as I’ve said before, that I actually think that’ll happen, of course.
Summary of the summary : f–k Mr Bush, nice and slow.
Friend Adam Greenfield has been doing some thinking about emergent democracy, and has come up with a ‘conversation starter’ called “The minimal compact: An open-source constitution for post-national states“.
Essential reading, and packed full of ideas that resonate very deeply with this particular wonderchicken.
Edit : I am both honoured and pleased that Adam has told me via email that “a lot of this was catalyzed by reading what you wrote about Rick. As a former NYer, I shall know 09.11 in the bone for the rest of my days, but when I read about Rick on MeFi it was my most immediate experience yet of…of…of everything to which I want to offer future generations an alternative.”
I believe Rick would have loved these ideas, and it’s a beautiful thing if the tragedy of his loss may in any way have helped this kind of dream reach more people.
Go, read, think.
As you must have guessed, our apartment move was a success, and all the essential systems are hooked up once again. We’re still trying to figure out how to gracefully shoehorn all our aquired crap (which is really a lot less than most couples I know) into the considerably smaller digs, but we’ll manage. The new house is closer to the university, and brand new (we’re the first people to move in to the building, a low-rise with 10 apartments), and it’s much quieter. The perpetually-busy highway 50 metres from our old place is rapidly-fading bad memory. The new neighbourhood couldn’t be described as upscale, but it’s nicer than the Land Of The Lost we’ve been in for the last 18 months, and has all the amenities steps from our door, including a supermarket that delivers beer (…er, and food, too).
Some observations on moving house in Korea : moving companies do everything. They showed up, packed everything, emptied and cleaned the fridge, cleaned the house, moved everything to the new place, cleaned the new place, unpacked everything, loaded up the fridge and closets, and went away. I don’t know if this is what happens in North America (I’ve never used movers before), but I suspect it’s not quite as easy. All I had to do was stand around, drink coffee, and point. It cost a bomb, but the university footed the bill, as I had to move at their request. Very low stress, indeed.
The DSL connection is the same 4Mb pipe I had before (She Who Must Be Obeyed ignored my wheedling and nixed the monster broadband), but thanks to the new wiring, I guess, feels snappier. I compare the process to Australia, where it took literally months to get someone to come and install the service after I’d ordered it, and approximately 4 hours onsite to get it working : here, it took 4 hours from calling Korea Telecom for a guy to show up, and after 15 minutes in the house, he bowed and bailed, and I had my connection back. Amazing.
Renting an apartment works differently here than it does anywhere else I’ve ever been. The university provides my accommodation, but I was involved in securing a place (they’ve sold the apartment I lived in before), to make sure that they found something acceptable. Most people do not pay monthly rent – what they do is give the landlord a massive deposit, and pay either nothing or very little on a monthly basis. The university had to pay the equivalent of about C$100,000 to secure this small 3-bedroom place, and there is no rent to pay.
Needless to say, it’s difficult indeed for young people in particular to live apart from their parents, and still quite rare. Whether that’s because of the way apartments are rented, or whether apartments are rented that way in part to discourage young people moving out, I don’t know.
Anyway. I’m back to work at the University on Monday, after about 10 weeks of holiday, and looking forward to it. I really do love my job.
Am I what I write? Should I put it all here, the angelic farts and the chuckleheaded non-sequiteurs, or should I keep the best and worst of me apart somehow? Should I hold back, or should I tell the story of the first time I silently and all amazed erupted in watery semen when I was 12 while ‘It’s A Mad Mad Mad Mad Mad World’ spooled off in all its madcap glory on the console TV on New Year’s Eve, just to pick a semi-random example?
Should I tell all and let the googlecache fall where it may? Should I womb up my Real Stuff in some digital sanctorum somewhere, and just amble and natter and hitch a ride on this familiar hitcount-greased Route 66 down which I’m already walking?
Is it art, or is it socializing? It’s pretty goddamn clear that it’s not journalism, and the proposition that it might be such is just laughable: but what polestar should I steer my ship by, I ask you? Is it real or an illusion? Is it the goddamn tedious old Platonic shadow play on the cave wall, or is it a new way of gripping and tasting the souls of friendlies without the halitosis and clumsy hugs? What do I want to do with this pretty ever-lengthening scroll?
f–ked if I know. I think I’ll have a beer and think about it some more.
We’re moving house, and I’ll be offline for the next few days until I get the new VDSL connection sorted out (I’m begging She Who Must Be Obeyed for a 20Mb connection, which is a mid-range speed in the new xDSL product line offered by Korea Telecom …cross your fingers for me!). In the meantime, why not go have a look at OW™’s new novel?
Keep it between the ditches, amigos. Later.
My folks are looking to sell Tchentlo Lake Lodge, a wilderness fishing lodge they own and run up in northern British Columbia, where I visited them over Christmas. I’ve put up some information about it here, and if you or anyone you know might be interested in buying it either as an investor or owner-operator, please feel free to contact them.
That gave me a mild feeling of accomplishment, throwing that together. It’s rare that I actually feel like a good son.
From Kim Dae-shik, a physics professor at Seoul National University to the head of the US Forces Korea :
Shelley speaks so eloquently on so many other topics, you (well, I) sometimes forget she is also a Geek Goddess without peer. This latest innovation from her is a really cool idea, and one that might help to combat that feeling of impermanence and evancescence of weblog comments. I want one too!
(I find myself remembering the toolset for OLAP analysis of financial data that was a small part of the Swiss Army knife professional practice management product that I (almost, if it hadn’t been for the f–kwits) almost took to market at my last tech job, and wonder when we’ll be able to effortlessly pivot our views of a given weblog against a wide variety of axes, at will. Slice and dice, baby!)
Photographs in pairs by Stuart Isett.
Today, one of the greats exeunted for the last time, took his last curtain call, and left us for that great playhouse in the sky. How could I tell the rollercoaster cinderella story of Skeleton Warrior, the passion and the pain, the sex and the drugs and the necrophiliac nights, better than he could himself :
Tributes are appearing all over the web to this great and underappreciated artist. Ride on, you bony bastard!
Three random thoughts that ambled through the wonderchickensian mind this evening, ideas that to be honest I’m just too damn lazy to flesh out into real posts. Quality is therefore not assured.
1) How much do I hate that everytime someone mentions a goddamn book, they have to link to Amazon?† When did a glorified shopping mall become the primary maypole around which our discussion of books must dance? (I tried to like allconsuming.net, but it gives me indigestion.)
2) 8 Mile = Quadrophenia strained through a Rocky Balboa cheesecloth.
3) Before radio and television, we are told, people entertained one another – told stories, sang, did little skits, whatever. Nearly a century of the glass teat and all that, electronic opiate of the masses, yadda yadda, passes. Us bloggy types are just returning to a long-lost tradition of making our own damn entertainment for each other, thank you very much, just amped-up, sped-up and woven from a spectrum of sources so kaleidoscopic as to blow the muttonchopped or maidenly minds of our forebears.
And, for a limited time only, a special bonus thought, free with every purchase : reading a Kerouac biography the last few days – ‘Subterranean Kerouac’ (and no, I’m not going to link to the thrice-cursed Amazon page for it) – I found myself wondering how those Beat types found any time to actually write when they were so busy sucking each other’s dicks all the damn time. Crikey.
† the answer, of course, is ‘one hell of a lot’.
You are being lied to, clumsily.
Pass it on.
Also : Douglas Ord is having his synchronicity fuses blown, and expands on a boggling series of odd coincidences some of which were also noticed by the Bearman recently. The mind can take any set of events, or numbers, or words, and automagically see a serendipitous pattern in them – pattern recognition is what intelligence is, I think, at least in part – but sometimes the random patterns end up looking like the face of the Virgin Mary, and all synaptic hell breaks loose.
[both via wood s lot]
Also, while I’m at it : this is an interesting and quite plausible argument (to me, admittedly undereducated as I am on these matters) that the real reasons behind many of the decisions being made by the Bush administration with regard to throwing their geopolitical weight around is the “goal of preventing further Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) momentum towards the euro as an oil transaction currency standard.”
Not entirely free of spin, by any means, but worth a look. A lot of the dots seem to link up pretty damn well.
I’m not sure why I did this – I don’t even particularly like Jimmy Buffett (other than the pleasant memories he evokes from my days sailing off the Pacific coast of Mexico, when he was required listening amongst the Cortez cruisers.) Sometimes I just get these compulsions, you know?
Update : A quick Googling, which in my fever to finish the doggerel above I neglected to do, shows me that there is (pretty darn groovy) prior art here. Not that that should surprise, I guess.
I’d never heard of this guy before today, but trust me, [this is good].
[via Boing Boing]
This evening I plan to drink approximately 10-12 bottles of cold, excessively fizzy Korean beer, smoke the one cigarette per week that I allow myself these days, and listen to the entire output of the Tragically Hip.
This may result in amusingly cockeyed posts, either ranty or good-natured, or it may mean that I’ll wander off on some little-travelled web byway and forget about the clamorous demands of my sweet readers, for at least one brief glorious moment of boozy freedom.
Wish me luck.
Although until recently I was often actively drawn into discussions about meta stuff, it seems as if that’s no longer the case, and I find myself wondering why. Context in this situation is the new piece by Clay Shirky that seems to have people a-buzz, and around which a sometimes heated conversation is now springing. The aether is a-buzz with talk, but I don’t seem to be invited, which is unusual, and which I can’t quite figure out. No one’s invited me to the prom, mom! I know it’s unspeakably lame to whine about stuff like this, and I don’t mean to, but it’s worrisome, kind of, and on my mind, and has context given the topic of discussion, I think.
I wonder if that f–king Bloggie shortlisting is to blame, actually, and has fostered some sort of ‘well, f–k him, he’s going in some weird famehog direction’ feeling, which is most assuredly not the case. That surprised me as much as it did anyone. I don’t think I’ve gotten any more profane and offensive, lately, that I can see, and I tend to talk in much the same way as I always have, about much the same sort of things. If anything, I get more visitors on a daily basis than I ever have before. But the (smart, good) folks with whom I have felt a sense of neighbourhood in the past seem to have withdrawn. Perhaps I’m just talking more crap than usual, I dunno.
That’s life, I guess. But it leaves me befuddled, a little, and wondering if it really is the case, and if so, why it happened.
Anyway, I posted a few further thoughts over at Jonathon Delacour’s in light of what I’ve been reading about the Shirky piece this morning, which I reproduce here because I’m lazy, even if no one is interested (whine, sniff, pout).