Duke2 Rigelatin overlord: "We'd kill you, you see, but our religion prevents the interruption of suffering."
Okay, first, let's get the really horrible link over with.

...

The rest of it is not horrible I promise.

"How is it wrong that they are dead? A brand new insight, no. A good reminder, yes.

As is this. If I can get to this point before age forty it will have been a non-failure.
(an OP is fine too (like, go read it and stuff))

I want a version of this for a men's suit blazer. For blindingly obvious reasons.

This however is something I want, let's just say, somewhat less. D8
A stylized navy blue anarchy sign juxtaposed with a pixellated chaos symbol made to resemble a snowflake.
Jonathan Coulton on the whole paranoid security-theater freedom-hating racket that's got the government by the balls these days, albeit in a much more rhetorically balanced and fact-checkable way than I usually so it.
Is it really as dire as all that? It’s an emergency is it? Tim points out that he and a lot of other content creators have been happily coexisting with piracy all this time, and I’m certainly one of them. Make good stuff, then make it easy for people to buy it. There’s your anti-piracy plan. The big content companies are TERRIBLE at doing both of these things, so it’s no wonder they’re not doing so well in the current environment. And right now everyone’s fighting to control distribution channels, which is why I can’t watch Star Wars on Netflix or iTunes. It’s fine if you want to have that fight, but don’t yell and scream about how you’re losing business to piracy when your stuff isn’t even available in the box I have on top of my TV. A lot of us have figured out how to do this.
Which is seconded by a commenter:
The real trick is making the content available to consumers. A great example of this is Valve’s digital distribution platform. Before Steam came along there were lots of games you simply could not get without pirating them. Now, you can legally obtain almost the entire last decade of PC video games from Steam AND the publishers get a cut, unlike the used games market. I can honestly say that I haven’t pirated a game since Steam started having summer/winter sales. It just isn’t worth the trouble to pirate when its so easy to get what I want legitimately.
What I did not quote was the part where he drives home the fact that the threat this anti-Internet legislation is supposed to fight has not been demonstrated to cause any measurable harm.

Heh.

January 20th, 2012 12:20 am
The blocky spiral motif based on the golden ratio that I use for various ID icons, ending with a red centre.
(I’m working the cash register at an arcade. This arcade is known for having an animatronic band that performs.)

Me: "Hi, can I help you?"

Customer: "Medium pizza, pepperoni on half…" *mumbles and trails off*

Me: "Can you please repeat that last part?"

Customer: *mumbles*

Me: "I’m sorry, a medium pizza with pepperoni on half and what else?"

Customer, to his son: "Now look at how cheap this technology is. It can’t even tell what I’m saying! D*** robots."

Me: "Um...sir? Is there a problem?"

[Customer], to his son: "Look! It can tell I’m a man. Maybe this hunk of metal isn’t that bad. It does look pretty real. I just wonder why they didn’t make it thinner and cuter."

Me: "Oh, thanks. Maybe it’s ’cause I’m not a robot?"

Customer: "Sure you’re not."

(He later gets into an argument with a manager and accuses him of being a robot. He then tries to "ruin the scrap metal" by throwing a glass of water at him.)

In other news, anyone panicking about "omgz they don't even need SOPA to fuck us all to death with their copyrakes" usw., please go to the indictment and skip to page 30 and read from there. If the allegations are true, the prosecution is not unjust unless you believe all copyright law to be unjust (which is a whole new discussion of very different scope, albeit one I am not disinclined to sympathize with this day and age).

Anyone panicking about having lost their uploaded file, though... I am sorry for your loss.


EDIT: Does anyone know what happened to RIAA Radar?
A stylized navy blue anarchy sign juxtaposed with a pixellated chaos symbol made to resemble a snowflake.
Some random sullivanic obamaphilia.
[Obamacare] does not have a public option; it gives a huge new client base to the drug and insurance companies; its health-insurance exchanges were also pioneered by the right. It’s to the right of the Clintons’ monstrosity in 1993, and remarkably similar to Nixon’s 1974 proposal. Its passage did not preempt recovery efforts; it followed them. It needs improvement in many ways, but the administration is open to further reform and has agreed to allow states to experiment in different ways to achieve the same result. It is not, as Romney insists, a one-model, top-down prescription. Like Obama’s Race to the Top education initiative, it sets standards, grants incentives, and then allows individual states to experiment. Embedded in it are also a slew of cost-reduction pilot schemes to slow health-care spending. Yes, it crosses the Rubicon of universal access to private health care. But since federal law mandates that hospitals accept all emergency-room cases requiring treatment anyway, we already obey that socialist principle—but in the most inefficient way possible. Making 44 million current free-riders pay into the system is not fiscally reckless; it is fiscally prudent. It is, dare I say it, conservative.
A little bit too much over that way (and anyone who says they say it as it is sets of my bullshit detector), but tone down the rhetoric and it more or less matches what I've been seeing.

Now about that whole SOPA thing...
Duke2 Rigelatin overlord: "We'd kill you, you see, but our religion prevents the interruption of suffering."
The man who will improve the place is the man who loves it without a reason. If a man loves some feature of Pimlico (which seems unlikely), he may find himself defending that feature against Pimlico itself. But if he simply loves Pimlico itself, he may lay it waste and turn it into the New Jerusalem. I do not deny that reform may be excessive; I only say that it is the mystic patriot who reforms. Mere jingo self-contentment is commonest among those who have some pedantic reason for their patriotism. The worst jingoes do not love England, but a theory of England. If we love England for being an empire, we may overrate the success with which we rule the Hindoos. But if we love it only for being a nation, we can face all events: for it would be a nation even if the Hindoos ruled us. Thus also only those will permit their patriotism to falsify history whose patriotism depends on history. A man who loves England for being English will not mind how she arose. But a man who loves England for being Anglo-Saxon may go against all facts for his fancy. He may end (like Carlyle and Freeman) by maintaining that the Norman Conquest was a Saxon Conquest. He may end in utter unreason--because he has a reason.

The number of strings with length not more than 10 over the roman letters a to z plus the apostrophe is 2710 = 205,891,132,094,649 — about 200 trillion. The total number of words in the workaday word list traditionally found on Unix systems (usually in /usr/share/dict/words) is about 25,000, and even the much larger (and less useful) augmented list found on newer systems is under 250,000. Six or seven orders of magnitude difference. What I'm saying is that English could easily have a distinct letter sequence for every different meaning, using letter sequences much shorter than the present ones. It doesn't because the language in general shows no signs of being the slightest bit interested in that. ...

I'll accept it as a statement of personal affection if anyone wants to say they love English the way it is, but people who say that the ridiculous orthographic mess we have inherited is a finely tuned system for clear communication and avoidance of ambiguity are simply fools.


And now some linkdumpery.

Modern Doom fare.


NEW FPS!

Warning: has no function for customizing your character's implicit snazzy faux-classic fall outfits.

Isn't Internet advertising basically this in slow motion?

And now, the single most blasphemous thing I have seen all day:
a crude scrawl of a grinning, blazing yellow sun.
http://mosex.wordpress.com/2011/11/30/the-internal-clitoris/
In 1953, Kinsey wrote: “The vagina walls are quite insensitive in the great majority of females … There is no evidence that the vagina is ever the sole source of arousal, or even the primary source of erotic arousal in any female.”

Then in 1970, Germaine Greer published The Female Eunuch, which scoffed at Kinsey’s theory. She wrote, “It is nonsense to say that a woman feels nothing when a man is moving his penis inside her vagina. The orgasm is qualitatively different when the vagina can undulate around the penis instead of a vacancy.”

Interestingly, they’re both right.

Spoiler as to why: The clitoris in the very first illustration in this article is in yellow.
(hat tip: [personal profile] conuly
Duke2 Rigelatin overlord: "We'd kill you, you see, but our religion prevents the interruption of suffering."
The poppies are wild, they are only beautiful and tall
so long as you do not cut them,
they are like the feral cat who purrs and rubs against your leg
but will scratch you if you touch back.
Love is letting the world be half-tamed.
That’s how the rain comes, softly and attentively, then

with unstoppable force. If you
stare upwards as it falls, you will see
they are falling sparks that light nothing only because
the ground interrupts them. You can hear the way they’d burn,
the smoldering sound they make falling into the grass.

Also I am using this icon in a way I had never intended, but in creating suspected might have been true.
A stylized navy blue anarchy sign juxtaposed with a pixellated chaos symbol made to resemble a snowflake.
First: a doctor on dying. Almost perversely I find myself feeling much more sympathetic to the unreasonable family members than I have normally been in these discussions - the care may be futile, perhaps, but if I were in that room could I walk away having said no and forever guessing?

Certainly a thing to be read which is about people.

Or, conversely, the slave owners of our history were and are parasites upon their fellow human beings. I despair at this issue being resolved to anyone's satisfaction.

Design Is War - a lesson on how to fuck around with visual messages and media. Read it all, no money quotes here lest I have to hotlink an image. (and yes that is how cigarette packs look like in Not-Soviet Canuckistan, it is as horrible as you imagine it is)

A voice of authority for those of us pixel fans out there.
Rule: In order to paper print an icon or a screenshot, you have to simply resize the image with no prior smoothing. If a printing person gets in your way saying: “72 dpi images for printing? Over my dead body,” go ahead and drive in the stake.


And now, fireflies.

And the best cover of this song I've heard yet (and I have looked):
A stylized navy blue anarchy sign juxtaposed with a pixellated chaos symbol made to resemble a snowflake.
Resolutions for this year:

TRIPE.

FRIED.

...actually that could be pretty good as long as you could keep it from getting soggy :o


NYE morning: received text message:

a) from someone I dated and until this message I thought LJBF'd me
b) from someone I dated forever ago, we met once again in the summer, and has taken things far more seriously than she ever let me on
c) from the person I initially thought it was who is now denying it to save face
d) forwarded to me by a client as an example of the things he has to put up with from the other party
e) sent to the wrong person

Need to consider how to word my response, if any, to see if I can politely probe to see which one it is.

And that pretty much sums up my 2011, minus the whole being completely jaded with the regress of the 21st century and praying for global thermonuclear war to save mankind from itself part.
The blocky spiral motif based on the golden ratio that I use for various ID icons, ending with a red centre.
Judging by Mr. Obama’s call on Keystone XL, and kindred energy calls, the great age of capitalist accomplishment in the New World appears to be coming to a close. Exhausted by political gridlock, bureaucratic regulation and progressive populism (which gives everyone a veto on everything), the U.S. seems incapable of imagining, or doing, heroic things. Big business is widely regarded as a criminal enterprise, profits as the proceeds of crime and shareholders as co-conspirators. Sic transit gloria.

Let the Empire State Building serve as an iconic reminder of the America that once was. It was 1930. The architect produced the design plans in two weeks – and 3,400 workers built the world’s highest skyscraper in 410 days. Government didn’t get involved until it cut the ribbon. It would take a decade to complete a comparable project today – as the World Trade Center site attests. Americans appear to live more and more of their lives in the Country of Can’t, in the Age of No.

Where we used to have the personal jetpacks and space station suburbs, our contemporary pop-culture futurisms overwhelmingly favour some manner of collapse of our civilization. Considering my gut reaction to this column (substantial agreement "is", polar opposite "ought"), perhaps these visions are no less utopian.


...


While reading Paleo-Future it occurs to me that there are certain things that are always gotten wrong in futuristic speculation.
In before someone quotes that bit about debunking in The Abolition of Man. )

So what must I keep in mind?
First, that tropes are not necessarily bad, BUT. )


Just a cleaned-up version of some idle notes saved to my thumb drive when I couldn't focus on work. Still no concrete ideas at the moment, though I expect an initial glimmer by Christmas...
A little yellow ant in the grass on a sunny day.
Artist wanted. For what I have seen to be a quite worthy cause.

In other news: it's "watch Matt clear out half the tabs he's left open in the browser" time again! I'm going to deliberately leave out anything that would normally catch the Helm's Deep* tag for my own sanity - the way things are now I'm sure everyone reading this has seen their share of the heads catapaulted into Minas Tirith already.

Time to slow down and sail on the river...

*(that said, speaking of Helm's Deep... which I have just read with this overlaid.)

Note that I list each tag only once in the descriptions below.

On a better empathy )
personal: matt is dumb: many stories, political: sex and gender stuff: manly!, pyxolytical: clothed ape

In which a man is more legitimately sure of his own humanity than most of us can dream )
linkdump: aural masturbation focus, linkdump: death by awesome, political: hoplophilia, pyxolytical: not a vegan, pyxolytical: is-ism

On the everyday life of our everyday lives. )
pyxolytical: evolution, pyxolytical: evolution: ants
a crude scrawl of a grinning, blazing yellow sun.
I am this close || to replacing Buuf-Deuce.
The blocky spiral motif based on the golden ratio that I use for various ID icons, ending with a red centre.
Win7: YOU WIN. YOU PLAY YOUR SILLY BABY GAME. BUT YOU INJURE ME AND NOW EXPLORER CRASH EVERY TIME YOU ATTEMPT TO CUSTOMIZE DESKTOP. THOSE ARE THE TERMS.
Me: FINE.
Bastion: ::is absolutely fucking awesome::
Me: *_*

...

Me: Why aren't my updates downloading?
#!: It works fine! You can even post on Dreamwidth!
Me: ..... ::looks::
Me: Oh god, you installed exactly the wrong driver.
#!: It's the correct driver! In fact the other one isn't even installed or on any my repositories!
Me: ...
#!: ENJOY YOUR MODEM KID LOLOLOLOL

[EDIT as of the morning of December 5, 2011: It seems that [citation needed, have window open in other computer] Ubuntu has completely dropped the old manufacturer's driver I was using ("rt2870sta") in favour of the community-based "rt2x00" builds. In light of how much support for the damn driver I was able to find on Ralink's site (they were unavailable for download) or the readme files (which are fine provided you are perfectly comfortable with compiling drivers and modifying code while reading bad Engrish) this may well be for the better in the long run.

Having installed the updates (which required downloading several hundred megs over this gimpy late-Alzheimer's-with-sudden-random-moments-of-lucidity connection at my slightly-less-than-old-normal max rate of 120k/s) seems to be helping things... let's hope this lasts.]
The blocky spiral motif based on the golden ratio that I use for various ID icons, ending with a red centre.
Me: Hello Crunchbang. You booted earlier than I thought.
Crunchbang: Oh hello. What a nice computer you have! I can run so quickly and easily on it.
Me: Why thank you! You're not looking so bad yourself, and I see your default options look quite reasonable! Is that a tiny unobtrusive IME switcher up there?
Crunchbang: Looks like it. You can try it further after the install. Oh, by the way, I've set up that wireless adapter that's given you a headache every time you've installed a Linux distro, it works perfectly fine now, go ahead and connec--um, please stop crying and laughing hysterically at once.

...

Me: Okay, that's enough. I've got to install Windows 7 first so I can play all these games I bought. See you in a bit!

And then. )

...at this rate I may be better off waiting for WINE to advance enough to be compatible with the games I have in mind.
A round squishy plush lobster bursts out of the blue.
\:D/
a crude scrawl of a grinning, blazing yellow sun.
Global warming has left more energy in the weather system during the winter months, counterintuitively leading to an increased rate of more aggressive snowstorms.
The infamous cartoon of Darwin's head on a chimp's body, superimposed with a MSPainted Nazi armband.
Cost of Living Increasingly a Struggle for China's Poor
BEIJING — China’s poor are being hit hard as the cost of putting dinner on the table soars, sharpening resentment and highlighting a fast-growing gap between rich and poor.

Vegetable prices are up anywhere from a third to double over the same time last year. Cooking oil, fruit and some meats are also up, according to surveys, official figures and testimonies from food sellers and shoppers.

The upshot is that China’s poor — though not its rich — are struggling.


In pictures: China's Wealth Gap
"The agricultural tax is high. Government officials say they are going to reduce the rural taxes, but they haven't and we don't know when they will.

If they did reduce our taxes, that would really change our lives. We are so poor because there is no development here.

The government does give aid but for some reason there is hardly any allocated to this area. I have no way to buy fertilizer. We need economic help."


and a smattering of cyberpunk dystopia goes here. )

Now, in the context of the foregoing:

Michele Bachmann: Look To China On Social Program Cuts
Bachmann said that Lyndon Johnson's Great Society has "not worked, and it's put us into the modern welfare state...If you look at China, they don't have food stamps."

She continued, "They save for their own retirement security, they don't have AFDC (Aid to Families With Dependent Children), they don't have the modern welfare state, and China's growing...and so what I would do is look at the programs that LBJ gave us, with the Great Society, and they'd be gone."


Cain Would 'Overturn the Supreme Court If They Overturned DOMA'
"If the Perry case or a DOMA case gets to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court were to overturn DOMA or to find a -- quote -- unquote -- constitutional -- a U.S. Constitutional right to same sex marriage, if you were president, what would you do?" Brown asked.

"I would lead the charge to overturn the Supreme Court if they overturned DOMA," Cain insisted. "Whether that was new legislation coming out of the Congress like Rep. [Michele] Bachmann said. The United States Congress is supposed to pass laws so if they did overturn DOMA, that charge, I would lead to reverse that."


(hat tip for original link that started this: [personal profile] flemco)

I know this

if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content.

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Style Credit

Base style:
[personal profile] branchandroot
Theme:
[personal profile] forthwritten

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated January 28th, 2012 10:50 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios