Tag Archives: linky-links

Parties, angry spammers, and linky goodness

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The House Not Found housewarming party was a great deal of fun, so much so that we’re thinking about turning on the webcam on a semi-regular basis, just for the benefit of all you voyeurs out there. If I get another Mac laptop in the next few months, I may even dedicate my current laptop, which is running OS X Server, to being a QuickTime Streaming Server for the camera so i can stream live video. 🙂

In other news, I’ve recently started receiving death threats from a well-known spammer and software pirate named Art Schwartz. These threats are, in their own particular way, far too funny not to share, and Art’s even been reading my LiveJournal lately. So I’ve put ’em online here. I particularly like the one about how he’s going to expose my child-pornography ways to my wealthy parents so they’ll quit supporting me. 🙂 One wonders what color the sky in his world is.

And now the linky goodness:

Dog Available. Read the description BEFORE you look at the picture.

LoveChess: Chess as a sex game. And people think I’m a pervert.

Courtesy of ladytabitha: The Myth of Unconditional Love.

In the Department of Homeland Stupidity department of the Axis of Asshat: Brown Equals Terrorist. The thing about this story that most strikes me is that it reveals the same flaw the writers of Star Trek often have. The Star trek writers don’t actually know anything about research and have never met any research scientists, so the Star Trek version of a research scientists is cartoonishly distorted; local cops have never met any terrorists and have never been trained in terrorist tactics, so their imagination of what a terrorist would act like is also cartoonish and unrealistic. Hint; Terrorists blend in. They don’t stand out. The 9/11 hijackers were instructed to shave their beards, wear cologne, and forego traditional Muslim garb in favor of casual American attire, remember? A terrorist who wanted a photograph of a bridge would not stand out by the bridge, exposed, with a tripod, day after day. He’d be in a pack of tourists inconspicously with a digital camera, fools! Assuming, of course, he needed a photograph at all…

Link o’ the day

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Why Nerds are Unpopular

A lot of people seem to think it’s good for smart kids to be thrown together with “normal” kids at this stage of their lives. Perhaps. But in at least some cases the reason the nerds don’t fit in really is that everyone else is crazy. I remember sitting in the audience at a “pep rally” at my high school, watching as the cheerleaders threw an effigy of an opposing player into the audience to be torn to pieces. I felt like an explorer witnessing some bizarre tribal ritual.

If I could go back and give my thirteen year old self some advice, the main thing I’d tell him would be to stick his head up and look around. I didn’t really grasp it at the time, but the whole world we lived in was as fake as a Twinkie. Not just school, but the entire town. Why do people move to suburbia? To have kids! So no wonder it seemed boring and sterile. The whole place was a giant nursery, an artificial town created explicitly for the purpose of breeding children…

And as for the schools, they were just holding pens within this fake world. Officially the purpose of schools is to teach kids. In fact their primary purpose is to keep kids locked up in one place for a big chunk of the day so adults can get things done…

What bothers me is not that the kids are kept in prisons, but that (a) they aren’t told about it, and (b) the prisons are run mostly by the inmates. Kids are sent off to spend six years memorizing meaningless facts in a world ruled by a caste of giants who run after an oblong brown ball, as if this were the most natural thing in the world. And if they balk at this surreal cocktail, they’re called misfits.

An interesting essay, with a few sideswipes on school, surburbia, and the nature of popularity (“Popularity is only partially about individual attractiveness. It’s much more about alliances. To become more popular, you need to be constantly doing things that bring you close to other popular people, and nothing brings people closer than a common enemy.”).

Got a pointy hat with bells? Need a job?

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The British government is now advertising for the position of court jester, a position which has been unfilled since 1649.

I wonder if the job comes with all the traditional perks–and risks. I can just picture Prince Charles beheading a jester who fails to amuse…

Chock full o’ gothy goodness…and Extropians as modern-day necromancers

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We’re just back from an evening at the goth club…ran into a bunch of friends we hadn’t expected to see, including one friend I haven’t seen in months, which was totally r0x0r, and the DJ was playing all kinds of old-school goth, which was r0x0r almost as much. (And just for the record, if there’s a better song to dance to than Front 242’s Headhunter v1.0 it doesn’t exist in this plane of reality. Which is not to say that it’s goth, but… just sayin’.)

On the way, we stopped at a couple of places to price out a corset piercing for Shelly, which, as it turns out, most piercers are reluctant to do… seems like they tend not to last very long. Which sucks. She commented, though, that she’d like to get a Giger tattoo instead, like one of the aliens from the Alien movie series…which is an interesting idea, but there seems to be some weird karma around doing something like that. Considering H. R. Giger is probably the closest thing to a living necromancer anyone is likely to find, putting his artwork on one’s body just kinda seems to be inviting all manner of chaos into one’s life…

…but then, I though, when you really get down to it, isn’t that what the whole biomedical nanotech/life extension/destructive uploading thing is all about? Life out of death, transforming the dead into biomechanical versions of the living…seems somehow appropriate.

Transhumanism and extropianism are necromancy given a new twist. Or perhaps, transhumanism is to necromancy what white magic is to black magic. Same tools, different philosophy.

Just sayin’.

Hacking the Segway: Cool Link o’ the Day

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So, you’ve always wanted one of those dorky uber-cool Segway scooter things, but you don’t want to spend five grand on an electric scooter? There’s an answer for you!

Using off-the-shelf components and a little electronic know-how, you can build your own self-balancing scooter for a fraction of the cost of a real Segway unit. It makes me wonder, really, if there’s not a market for a gizmo like the Segway with a more reasonable price tag.

The only thing the prototype is missing is blue LEDs and maybe some spikes. Oh, and some barbed wire–it needs barbed wire. A Mad max version of a Segway just sounds like a lot of fun.

(Thanks to enoelie for the link…)

Link o’ the day

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How NOT to talk

A catalog of rhetorical errors, cheap shots, and other poor argumentative techniques that’re altogether common. Rush Limbaugh really needs to read this site.

Gaaaah! And geeky fun stuff

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First, the Gaaaah! Updated my Red Hat 9 system to Fedora Core 2 a couple nights ago. It works, buuuuuuut…..

…it won’t start X if I boot from the newest Fedora kernel. It says it can’t locate the mouse–even when I use a generic PS/2 mouse, a USB mouse, and a serial mouse. The mouse is configured right (I’ve run the configuration several times), and the mouse works fine in console mode. It also works fine when I boot using the earlier kernel from the RedHat 9 install. The X error log complains it can’t open /dev/psaux, even though the correct file is in /dev. Anyone know what gives?

And the geeky fun stuff: An archived screen capture of Google’s main search engine page, circa 1960.

And now for something completely different.

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In the “things that make you go ‘huh’ category…it’s long been postulated that an infinite number of monkeys typing on an infinitie number of typewriters will produce the works of Shakespeare, but I suspect they’d be more likely to produce something like this.

“Place a 100 people within this Cubic like room and they will not increase the number of corners anymore than 6 billion people on Earth will increase the 4 corners of Earth. It is dumb, stupid, evil and unworthy of life on Earth to claim that this Creation Cube has 6 sides –  or no top and bottom.
Academia equates to a deadly plague.”

…uh, yeah. What he said.

Back home…

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…from what may easily be the Least productive Business Trip Ever.

Still, it could easily be worse…choose your path wisely, sex drone! (work-safe, funny)