Vajrabot Error Log

Me (looking around the room): Didn't we used to have a baby?
vampyrecat: She's on your arm. You're holding her.
Me (surprised): !
vampyrecat: Are you joking?
Me: No, I seriously had no idea where the baby was.

Hmm, the content of my post seems to be deleted.

Lessee... there was an embed of the video from this page:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/261

Which was followed by some commentary by myself where I talked about Taoism and the internet and new technologies, which was so brilliant that anyone who read it would have instantly achieved enlightenment, but I refuse to retype it on principle because stupid livejournal deleted my post. ;(

Life sized picture of a blue whale:
http://www.wdcs.co.uk/media/flash/whalebanner/content_pub_en.html

7 Insane Conspiracies That Actually Happened
http://www.cracked.com/article_15974_7-insane-conspiracies-that-actually-happened.html

Neuroscience of Orgasms
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-orgasmic-mind

Mine was a quiet Victorian office, with the smell of wood and leather and warm sunlight pouring in from high, yellowed windows. The thick wood door opened and a pretty young woman floated in, large butterfly wings on her back buzzing. Her hair was bright pink and she had a long golden sword in a scabbard on her belt. As she approached, the wind from her wings upset the papers on my mahogany desk, and I put my hand on them to keep from loosing them. Her wings slowed until her bare feet touched the floor, and then they stopped. She looked nervous.

“Um, hi… are you body support?”

“Yes ma’am,” I said with a smile, “how may I help you?”

( a short story by me behind the cut )

This British band performed in front of a load of CCTV cameras (the big-brother-is-watching-you cameras they have in prodigious numbers over there) and then used the British version of Freedom of Information Act to request the video that was recorded, which they they made into a music video.



(Yoinked from boing boing).

I finally figured out this billboard I’ve been trying to figure out for months. It turns out it’s an ad for some big haunted house called 13th Door. I’ve seen the billboard about 50 times and only just figured out what it’s an advertisement for. I finally cracked it when I managed to make out the URL: 13thdoor.com.

The reason it took me so long to figure out is that it’s a motorized billboard: made up of many triangular columns, so it stays on one image for a while, then switches to another. The ad in question, however, it just goes right past, so you only get to see it for a split second. It’s not a well-designed ad: there’s too much stuff going on, all in a hard to read font, so it’s hard to know what to look at for the split second you have. I see the billboard at least twice every day, and I started methodically looking at different parts trying to find something that would explain what it was all about. Finally, the other day, I managed to make out the web URL over in the corner.

At first I thought it was some sort of clever marketing trick: flash it by quickly, make people curious, get people interested. I don’t think that’s the case though: it would be silly to pay for a billboard that 1 percent of viewers or less will ever decipher. My current theory is that they paid for this billboard back in October, when the haunted house was running, and then when they stopped paying the billboard company didn’t have anything up in its place, so instead of giving them free advertising, they just programmed the billboard to flash right past this ad.

Anyway, it looks like a fun haunted house. Hopefully they’ll be open next Halloween.

On a related note, I think why viral marketing works is this: when a piece of information comes to you and you either had to work for it or you know that you are one of only a small group of people who got the message, then it feels more special, more valuable to you, and so you are more likely to be interested in the product/service than you would if you knew everyone had heard about it.

Makes me think of the Androgynes from In Dark Alleys.

(From Sociological Images)

( behind the cut )

Some other people have done some really good ones:
http://davario.livejournal.com/30861.html#cutid1

At work they put me in charge of this iTunes U project (free iTunes hosting for educational institutions) and gave me a loaner-iPod. I've been listening to a lot of lectures and talks that I've downloaded from iTunes U. Some of them are very good.

Cory Doctorow: From Myspace to Homeland Security
http://deimos3.apple.com/WebObjects/Core.woa/Browse/new.duke.edu.1312244245?i=1954460351
An impassioned call to arms: will information technology be used by us or against us?
(Unfortunately, you have to have iTunes installed to have anything happen when you click the link).

Tim Wise on the invention of the concept of whiteness
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3Xe1kX7Wsc
I've enjoyed pretty much all of hsi stuff that I've heard so far.

We watched the Pianist this weekend, which was a scary movie.

It made me think about history education. Most other disciplines young people are taught focus on "what is most important to know" and making sure students get that. History doesn't have that kind of focus, it just sort of meanders around.

I would love to teach a highschool history class. The first day of class I would say "history is important, because you are going to be voters, and to be good voters you have to know what is possible, and to know what is possible you have to know what's happened."

For the entire year, I would focus entirely on the following:

-The Jewish Holocaust
-Slavery and Jim Crow Segregation in America
-Totalitarian Police/Surveillance State in the USSR
-The Industrial Revolution in America*

*Particularly the parts where men, women and children worked 14 hour shifts 7 days a week at incredibly dangerous, dirty and exhausting jobs, lived in isolated company towns, got no sick leave or disability if injured on the job, were paid in company scrip, were paid so little that they were in unending debt, and were blacklisted or shot if they tried to unionize.

We would watch a lot of movies.

For each of the above I would focus on why and how it happened, how it ended, and then make each student write a paper describing how to prevent it from ever happening again.

I chose those particular historical events, not because they are the worst things that ever happened (there's a lot of tragedies with a legitimate claim to that position) but because they all took place in societies fairly similar to our own. If I taught about witch burnings, for instance, or the Rwandan genocide, the students could just think "well people were ignorant back then" or "well those people were obviously savages" and easily write it off as "something that couldn't happen here." I don't want to give the students an easy out.

victortenzin thinks a question-mark is called "mystery."

My brain finds the concept of "externalities" to be a useful one.

I was too sick to go home for lunch today, so I got a reasonably priced half-sandwich from the deli at the Hank’s Thriftway next to my work. Inside the package that held the sandwich, I found a little thing wrapped in plastic called “ovation.” The packaging said nothing but “ovation” on it (in fact, the name was repeated about a dozen times) so I didn’t know what was in it. I opened it up and found a little chocolate-and-mint-crème stick. I was about to eat it, but then I realized: this is a deliberate and shameless attempt at psychological manipulation. By giving me a desert called “ovation,” they’re trying to trick me into doing something that will make my subconscious believe that I really-really enjoyed the sandwich (after all, it was followed by an ovation, wasn’t it?). I know that all advertising is an attempt to manipulate us at levels we are not normally aware of, but this is the most blatant attempt I’ve seen in quite a while to reach inside my head and flip some switch in my subconscious to make me remember heartily enjoying some product.

So, rather than accept this psychological manipulation, I mentally renamed the “ovation” to “I vomit in your face you manipulative assholes.” I then ate my “I vomit in your face you manipulative assholes” stick.

Damn that was a good sandwich.

As if the internet weren't scary and confusing enough, now kids are pretending to be pedophiles online in order to scare other kids. See: http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/04/30/paedophiles-younger-every-day

Now we'll have to start running commercials that say "Kids, if you meet someone online who claims to be a pedophile, don't talk to them, they might be another kid trying to trick you."

I just put a FWTD animated short online:


Also, I don't think I mentioned on LJ this video which I put up in October of last year:

Drawing! Physics! Trying to move a small ball around! Free! Yay!

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/433935

I'm not really into steampunk, but daaamn, this thing is pretty:





see: http://steampunkworkshop.com/victorian-all-one-pc

The Story so Far: nicked_metal posted a link to an LJ post. In this post, a guy describes his experience at a game convention, where he was drunk and he and his friends started asking women if they could touch their breasts. In his opinion, the women seemed as happy about this as the men. So, he decided that there should be an opt-in system whereby women could broadcast permission to be fondled at other game conventions.

( Boring discussion of the controversy under the cut. I hear you saying 'How can discussion of boobies be boring?' to which I say 'trust me, I can make it boring.' )

Sometimes when I am very tired and sleep deprived I get this delusional feeling that breathing is optional, that I could just stop breathing and I would be perfectly fine, and in fact that it might be easier to not have to constantly be pushing air in and out of my lungs. And often I do stop breathing, and for the first few minutes it feels just fine, but then eventually it starts to feel uncomfortable, and it's a little bit sad to have to say "oh yeah, I really am human and mortal and alive, and the basic rules of biology do apply to me" and to have to take another breath.

My theory, which is mine and is owned by me, is this:

At some point Barack Obama got hit by some gamma-ray radiation, and now when he loses his temper he hulks out and turns into actor/wrestler The Rock. The Rock and Barack Obama are the same person.

Evidence
One:
Both are handsome, young, light-skinned black guys with deep voices and fancy elocution.


Two:
Barack pronounced "Ba-Rock".
Three:


Now some may find this worrisome. However, let's look at the worst case scenario. Say Obama is elected president, then some terrorists attack America and Obama loses his temper and hulks out. He can't just attack terrorists (because you can't just go out and attack terrorists because you want to, by their nature they hide themselves among innocent people, duh!) so he vents his rage by smashing things at random. He pulls up power poles causing a massive power outage, throws a school bus full of kids into the Whitehouse, picks up the Washington Monument and throws it like a javelin, and basically wrecks Washington DC and kills a bunch of people. Even after all that, he wouldn't have fucked up at responding to a terrorist attack worse than George Bush has.

From q99:

Logical Fallacies reviewed:

I just realized what bugs me so much about "post-cyberpunk" as a name for a sub-sub-genre of fiction:

If you're post-something then your emphasis is on what you're not, not what you are. History never remember the post-anything, they only remember those things new and creative enough to be their own entities. Claiming you are "post-cyberpunk" speaks of a certain level of cowardice: you don't have the guts to claim to be something because that invites criticism, only to claim not to be anything. Being "post-cyberpunk" means your work neither has to qualify as good cyberpunk (if a cyberpunk fan doesn't like your stuff, it's because they're "rooted in the old cliches") nor does it have to be original (you can use old tired cyberpunk cliches because, obviously, post-cyberpunk will keep a few things from old-cyberpunk).

Earlier, I've dreamed that Oscar the Grouch was a NYPD homicide detective. Last night I dreamed that I was Oscar the Grouch and I was a psychoanalyst. I was treating a series of cinnamon-toast flavored muppets (made out of the same foam as regular muppets, but impregnated with cinnamon and sugar). I wouldn't actually talk to them, they would come into my office and I would flip them over and check their pants. If their pants were wet, it would indicate that they had been psychologically damaged by bad toilet training as little muppets. To fix this problem, all I had to do was rip out the wet parts of their pants. This would fix them and I would send them on their way and accept the next patient.

My challenge to you: what would Freud say this dream means?

I was helping victortezin update flash on his computer so he could play some game on the PBS page, and PBS had some page warning us that we were leaving the PBS site and that if we should see any page that "worries or scares" us we should hit the back button or log off immediately.

This rankles me. It rankles me that they want to "protect" my kids by trying to make them feel weak and scared, that will try to convince them that they're so fragile that just looking a some webpage might hurt them.

"No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony would be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish."
-David Hume

See also:

Just now, as I was shutting down victortenzin's computer for the evening:

victortenzin: Is that Tenzin's homepage?

Me: Yes. The computer's going to bed. Good night computer.

victortenzin: Don't cry homepage! We love you homepage!

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In other news: This next Thursday is take-your-kid-to-work day. My boss said I could bring victortenzin. I am so excited! It's going to be the best work day ever.

Every day it seems easier to publish music, video and print without actually investing any money. New tools and resources seem to pop up every day. Here are some of my favorites:

Zwei-Stein Video Editor: A freeware video editor. The learning curve is very steep (especially if you've never done video editing before) and it usually takes a lot of monkeying around with codecs to get the video how you want it. However, it's free, and has more features than the simplistic video editors that come with Windows and most webcams.

Flashkit.com has a lovely collection of freeware music loops, nicely sorted into categories. Some of them are good enough that you could just play them over and over again and have a nice soundtrack to your video or presentation of whatever. Others can be combined with some sort of loop-based music composition program to make your own music. Anyone able to recommend a free loop-based-music-maker? I use Acid Music, which was cheap but not free.

The Gimp is a freeware photo editor. It seems to be able to do most everything Photoshop can do, and it's completely free. If you're used to using Photoshop, though, it may take you a while to figure out how to do things in The Gimp.

CutePDF: A freeware pdf creator. It sets itself up as a printer, so any program you can print from can make a pdf.

Flickr.com Creative Commons Photos: The photos here are broken into categories, and you can search for keywords in each one. The category that interest me is the one that's just attribution (so you can use it, change it, make a profit from it, you just have to credit the author). It's the smallest of all the categories (only has 7 million photos in it), but it still has some damn fine stuff on it.

The Prelinger Archive and the NY Public Library Image Collection has a bunch of public domain images and vids.

There's also an expanding market of very high quality stock photography, music and video that is very reasonably priced (think a couple of bucks each, for unlimited, non-exclusive, worldwide usage).

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Punks In Love image by Flickr.com user LordKhan, released under a Creative Commons license.