TV Tropes is the biggest timesink I have ever encountered. I recommend starting with shout outs or Jossed or, perhaps, a favourite show.

I’ve done just about nothing in the last two days but read this damned site. It even references Girl Genius!

Seen on thursday evening in a restaurant: A little boy, probably a bit over one year old, starts to do that high-pitched attention-getter crying bit, and after a token effort at calming him by his father, the mother pulls out a portable DVD player and sets it up on the table so that he can watch a TV show and shut the hell up.

Overheard this morning in a Starbucks: A couple having coffee together, both looking modern, professional, and stereotypically ‘starbucky’… Talking about playing online RPGs, power-leveling, and gold farming.

In the news: A film, Fitna, that is — as do so many things these days — enraging the religious of the eastern world to the point of sputtering threats. Please note, “The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”

What I get out of this is a low-level sense of fear that the reportage we get on the subject of scientology — or the lack thereof, more accurately — is a reflection of a more thorough penetration of the media by this very media-savvy organization.

And then I accuse myself of being paranoid and move on… but never completely without a care.

Scientology is the one and only thing that makes me glad it is impossible to be elected in the US or Canada without professing to some christian belief system.

This post brought to you as a tiny, tiny shot from the Internet’s side of Scientology vs. The Internet.

Ain’t it Cool News has a long series consisting of fans asking Sly questions, and some of the answers are just comedy gold, and not because I’m laughing at him, because I’m laughing with him, at the questioners.

You’ll have to check out the whole set, but here’s a sample answer:

Please reconsider writing your autobiography! If not, would you consider writing a sequel to ‘Sly Moves’ which would focus primarily on mental health & attitude instead of physical health? I’m picturing a Stallone version of ‘The Power of Positive Thinking’ - what do you think?

curiousvinnie Mahwah, NJ

Thank you very much. I’m flattered that you think I’m a candidate for stable mental health. But the truth be known, I am insane with long, horrible fits of sanity. Now, if you can make insanity work for you, that’s actually called creativity. If you can’t, that’s called a menace to society. Thank you.

Find the rest:

Round One
Round Two
Round Three
Round Four
Round Five
Round Six
Round Seven
Round Eight
Rounds Nine and Ten
Round Eleven
Round Twelve
Round Thirteen

Can’t say that you’ll read them all, but there are some gems in there.

(PS - apologies for the silly quote layout; I’ll be fixing that sometime soon)

What I’m actually posting on is an excellent interview with Maynard James Keenan (of Tool) at the Onion AV Club.

The quote that really got me is this one:

All I can do is say I smell a rat. I don’t know where it is or what kind of rat it is, but as an artist, I can express how [I feel about it]. But I couldn’t responsibly stand up and tell people which way to go, because then I’m just as guilty as the people who are telling everybody else what to do and where to go.

He’s quite a guy, one with whom I’ve no doubt that I could argue for days.

It’s video, so don’t bother, on a slow connection.

Update:

The file at the original location was moved, so this Youtube link has it. If I find the better version again, I’ll upload it and host it here.

Justice vs. Simian: We Are Your Friends

Update again

The link is fixed, it’s a local file now. Will work ‘til doomsday.

The next two weeks, I’ll be posting unadorned links of interest. Enjoy!

Well, it really doesn’t matter, of course. However, there’s a neat app called Tangerine that tickles my music-lovin’ soul. It scans iTunes for songs with similar beat patterns and groups them into playlists so that you get automagical mood-based playlists.

It’s tough to say how much mileage I’ll get out of this; I have an extensive and complex set of automatic playlists that may or may not be eclipsed by this. Still, it’s got promise.

And, they claim they’ll give me a free license for shilling for them. How can that possibly be bad?

Some favourites:

This is the scary one — it should probably be posted in most banks, office buildings, my building, and Britain.

Perhaps those times when you’ve got a project due the next morning “all of a sudden” even though you never let things sit that long?

My life, according to Shaw, some days.

I can just picture this hanging in an effete coffee shop, over books by Sartre, being studiedly ignored by a gaggle of pseudo-intellectual first-year philosophy students.

Seen over the magazine rack containing US, Cosmo, and Maxim.

I think I should get a shirt with this one on it

That sewer system is cyclopean. Talk about a sense of insignificance, when you realize that the effluent of a megacity like Tokyo requires structures that bring to mind the caves at the gates of hades.

Fortuny, looking at Craigslist, observed this, and made a decision that is — at best — unethical, and at worst actively sociopathic. He posted an explicit ad to a casual encounters section of a Craigslist site (a section devoted to hooking up for no-strings-attached sex) and waited for responses. Those, he got in spades. Having accumulated a fair number of responses from all walks of life, containing personal information such as phone numbers, names, e-mail addresses, and photos — many of which consisted of nude or semi-nude shots — he proceeded to post this information to the web.

At waxy.org, there are at the very least two fairly serious potential legal ramifications to Fortuny’s actions (Sex Baiting Prank on Craigslist), having to do with the exposure of private information, and deliberate attempts to cause distress. These pale, however, beside the ethical and moral ramifications. Fortuny’s stated aim with this was to “push buttons”, and at this he’s succeeded. He’s also succeeded in causing at least one separation (no citation, sadly, except a peripheral mention in the Waxy article) and no small amount of distress to parties involved. Moreover, he’s spawned a copycat already.

So, the question that’s worth asking — and is well asked at the Wired blog that pointed me at this — is, for those who are thinking… “well, they got what they deserved, trolling for sex on the internet”, is this thought experiment:

What if it the Craig’s List posting was about:

• A 25 year-old woman looking for a sugar daddy?
• A depressed woman looking for a fellow depressed guy?
• A dom woman looking for submissive men to humiliate?
• A gay man looking for ‘straight’ guys?
• A ‘straight’ woman looking for a butch lesbian?
• A butch lesbian looking for a ‘straight’ woman?
• A lesbian looking for a lesbian?
• A closeted gay man looking for another closeted, discreet man?
• An overweight, not attractive straight guy looking for a date?
• A 21-year-old hipster looking for another hipster into?
• A goth woman looking for a goth guy into leather and trenchcoats?
• A couple looking for a third person to watch them have sex?
• A Christian woman looking for a Christian man?
• A furry looking for another furry?
• A Cos-Player looking for someone to dress up with them?
• A middle aged woman who doesn’t know she has terrible taste in poetry looking for a man who will buy her flowers, take her for walks on beaches and compose saccharine poems that rhyme?

Which of these do you feel superior enough to that you would want to see their private notes and photos displayed illegally on the internet? And what’s your justification for choosing what kind of people are reprehensible enough to you that their private lives should be splayed on the internet for anyone, from family to friends to co-workers to acquaintances to their bosses, to see?

—from Wired 27B Stroke 6

So, tempest in a teapot? Violation on a par with rape? Just short of? Sadistic action of a man-child? Sociopathic cruelty?

What do you think? There’s a fair number of starting points for thought on Metafilter, where this is presently being hotly debated.

I have not been so enamoured of it, I have to regretfully confess, and I have — reluctantly, since I paid for it — returned to the arms of Camino.

OmniWeb is pretty decent, with more than a few nice features built in: It’s tabbed browser model includes a thumbnail-sized preview of the page in the tab, so that you can see where you’re going. It uses a modified version of the Apple WebKit, which means that it behaves in ways very similar to Safari, including using true Cocoa widgets for web page input. This is a selling point because much of OSX’s user experience stems from the system-wide integration of applications and services, all of which depend on the builtin behaviour of the UI widgets.

OmniWeb’s flaws, however, made themselves known to me throughout the beta. I was more than willing to wait for them to resolve themselves during the beta process, but at this point, they have released the final version of 5.5, and still they’re not fixed.

One problem was stability. With a great many tabs open, containing images or pages, OmniWeb slows to a crawl. This isn’t too surprising, because RAM ain’t cheap, but it could be smarter about keeping tabs in memory or allowing them to be paged. Add into this mix a high likelihood of crashing when under load, and you have a very irritating situation.

The worst problem, however, seems to be the fault of WebKit, not OmniWeb itself, although their claim that they use a modified version suggests improvements, when I have a sneaking suspicion it means “older version”. If you use Gmail, and who doesn’t these days, then you’ve noticed that when you create a mail message and press ‘tab, enter’ from the edit box it sends the message. Kind of a reflex by now.

That doesn’t work in OmniWeb, not at all.

Now, there’s a tradeoff to be made, here, of course — OmniWeb and Safari have native widgets, which means that — for example — the keystrokes I use in editing text elsewhere on the system work consistently, a bit of polish that does not apply to Camino or Firefox. It’s features are many and fabulous, but it shouldn’t be final with that set of issues.