bestof/convos
This is an old attempt to gather the most interesting bits of kirk.is in an easy-to-browse format.
If you like kirk.is mostly for the quotes and links, it might not be the "best of" per se, but overall these pages represent a big part of my creative output so far in the 21st century. The "best of" parts are shown in their natural habitat, often accompanied by the typical quotes and links and asides.
I've divided the work into various categories, and tried to sort each page into roughly descending order of "interestingness". Sometimes there's a particularly chosen closing entry.
2001.04.08
Exchange of the Moment
ranjit: i scanned some raw fish on my brand new scanner earlier. Gotta start it off with a bang.
kirk: wouldn't that make your later scanee items smell like raw fish?
ranjit: if only there were some way to clean objects!
kirk: this is why you should rely on restaurants for fish
kirk: I extend this philosophy to cooking in general
ranjit: Maybe someday someone will invent a spray for cleaning glass. They should make it blue!
kirk: the power of producing streak free glass pales compared to the olfactory force of the dark side of the fish.
--Kirk and Ranjit on AOL-IM. Screen names changed to protect the innocent.
Slashdot Scavenged Link of the Moment
There was an interesting read posted on slashdot, William Gibson on Japanese and British culture.
2004.04.08
Conversation of the Moment
sarah: You know, if you truly enjoy a crazy italian fiesta in your mouth you might enjoy the crazy polish mexican mouth fiesta that Wes calls "Ross Pierogies"
sarah: Pierogies, cooked with Salsa on top!
sarah: Yummy!
kirk: Buying and cooking pierogies is completely foreign to my experience.
sarah: really?
kirk: I think i mighta bought some in NYC from a vendor
sarah: If you enjoy good stodgy potato-filled pasta things, then you'll love pierogies
sarah: I think that was actually the slogan of the Pierogie Council for a while
(Obviously based on yesterday's journal entry that I asked Sarah to preview. Man, I miss having her and Dylan around for snarky kitchen table conversations.)
Article of the Moment
More neurosis fodder, but interesting The Ends of the Earth, 5 odd phenomena. I really like how scientists have no idea why the rotation of the earth is speeding up...
Toy of the Moment
Speaking of things science can't hope to understand: Burger King's online Subservient Chicken. (UPDATE: Actually, science seems to have it down...here are all the things you can get it to do.)
Music of the Moment
BoingBoing linked to this lovely Electronica cover of "Man of Constant Sorrow" from "O Brother Where Art Thou". Jeez, I love electronica covers of almost anything. I really am most delighted with music when it's just a melange of rhythm and "hooks".
Photo of the Moment
--There is this excellent stone wall near the Big Yellow House where Mo, Peterman, Sarah, myself, et al. used to live. This kind of wall where they work on stacking the stones by shape is so much cooler than when they just slather it all together with concrete or whatever. A fullsize version of this has been added to my desktop wallpaper page.
2001.10.11
Chat Excerpt of the Moment
kirk: time to stairmaster...with good eatin' and exercise I'm back down to the 170s! Haven't been their til sometime right after highschool. Of course, I'm monitoring my weight like a teenage girl, but you know.
ranjit: Monitoring your weight like two teenage girls!
ranjit: Sorry, couldn't resist...
It's good to have friends who can knock softballs like that out of the park. (Previous prize went to Peterman...way back when I had been experimenting with having a Slimfast for breakfast he said "damn bitch, better drink two, that shit ain't working!")
Web Culture of the Moment
Currently making the rounds is the tale of how an image of Bert (of Bert and Ernie fame...my parent's remembered which one is which via the phrase "Ernie is Er-range") got onto posters carried by protesters in the Middle East. A while back (possibly before September 11?) someone added an image of Bert to one of Osama bin Laden. (This was a continuation of an earlier to a general Bert is Evil web meme.) And it seems that somehow the photo of the two of them made it into a collage carried by the protesters! The photos of the posters seem legit, although it seems like a later batch was made sans Muppet. The best investigation seems to be the lindqvist.com but Wired and FOX are both reporting on it. And here's another example of the poster in action from Reuters.
Man, that's really funny.
2001.11.11
AIM Conversation of the Moment
ranjit: my dog gets an application of flea&tick killer once a month-- you squirt it on the back of his neck and it soaks through his skin into his blood.
ranjit: I always get a tiny bit on my fingers, and then I taste it for an hour.
kirk: bleck
ranjit: at least I am somewhat flea-resistant!
kirk: "thanks to a pet care incident gone horribly awry, mild mannered ranjit discovers he has developed one of the world's most trivial superpowers...mild resistance to fleas" Fortunately, with small power comes only small responsibility
Link of the Moment
With all these terrorist related troubles, it might be hard to remember that environmental concerns still linger. Ban Dihydrogen Monoxide Now!
2003.03.11
Talking about Internet Porn Ads, raunch filter engaged, highlight text with your mouse to read, or hit Ctrl-A:
kirk: You know, maybe I'm jaded, but "girls who crave giant cock" catches my attention less than would a "girls who are hoping for a 4 to 6 inch dick...just like yours!"
ranjit: heh -- i never thought of that!
ranjit: on the other hand, how many people would pay to see "BARELY LEGAL GIRLS FUCK PASTY NEBBISHES?"
kirk: "horny sluts want it in their face...from self-effacing pseudo-literati guys who did ok on their SATs!"
ranjit: SEXY RUSSIAN LADIES COME TO USA SEEKING PORN ADDICTS!
Ramble of the Moment
(This Ramble enhanced with selections from Presidents Day coloring pages from whitehouse.gov/kids.)
So, yesterday was the 3 year anniversary of the highpoint of the Nasdaq. By coincidence, in trying to use Google to spellcheck "Schadenfreude", which was the May 10 2000 Dictionary.com Word of the Day with this example of ussage:
If self-replicating e-commerce baby tycoons get on your nerves, it's schadenfreude time. It's true that the Nasdaq rebounded after its staggering loss Tuesday. Nonetheless, what AP described as "the most volatile day ever for U.S. stocks" left a distinctly bearish aftertaste.Man, what an understatement. Another year of this crap, and I'll have been employed in bad times for as long as I was in good. Unless of course you believe this is the aftermath of a 20 year boom, or even of a 200 year one, in which case things have been good for so long who knows how bad they can get.
Chester Arthur |
Warren Harding |
John Kennedy |
Whatever happened to having a "humble foreign policy"? Oh right, 9/11 changes everything.
2003.06.16
kirk: man, thank goodness bruce banner has such flexible pants
brooke: hahaha
kirk: "HULK STOMP! HULK SMASH! HULK- er -- go cover privates..."
brooke: HAHA
brooke: I laughed out loud at that one
News of the Moment
Wired.com reports that people are falling in love with their robovacs (in the "it's ok to love your pets" kind of way...I hope.)
Image of the Moment
This English rotary-in-a-rotary is the most amazing traffic thing I've ever seen. The call it the "Magic Roundabout" after an old kid's tv show (Originally French, but a new, smarter version overdubbed into English, with lots of supposed sly drug references.) I wish I could see some video of cars on it; even with the traffic sign that link provides, I still don't quite get how it works out.
2003.07.18
(Tikko is Ranjit's dog, a cute tiny pomeranian)
ranjit: poor tikko! learning more english would save him so much humiliation.
ranjit: I called him over, saying TIKKO! I WANT TO SQUEEZE YOUR NOSE.
ranjit: He came over, and I squeezed his nose.
kirk: heheheh
Critter of the Moment
Nine dwarf chameleons born in UK. As Ranjit put it, "OMIGOD SO CUUUUUUUTE!" I really respect guys who aren't afraid to squeal like little girls. Like me, for instance. |
Quote of the Moment
If a triangle could speak, it would say, that God is eminently triangular, while a circle would say that the divine nature is eminently circular.
2003.12.20
Toy of the Moment
| --"Alien Bill Horde". (You can make 'em run the other way with the mouse...but you might need a recent Java plugin installed.) In meetings, sometimes I'd draw a huge swarm of Alien Bills, but the computer is so much better at it...(source) |
AIM chat of the Moment
kirk: So I'm watching the 60s Batman movie
kirk: man, modern day Ronald McDonald looks a lot like oldschool Joker
LAN3: hahah.
kirk: of course, Ronald is pretty scary these days
kirk: his commercials imply he has fantastic magical powers
kirk: he's moved way beyond visual tricks like outlining goldenarches with his two index fingers
kirk: in one, he can freeze time for like, the entire world except for him and some minion kids
LAN3: One can only hope the Hamburgler doesn't get this power.
kirk: or else, entires cities would be flattened into "rubble, rubble"...
kirk: get it??
LAN3: hahaha, awful!
Link of the Moment
A geeky cataloging of almost 200 particles of Star Trek. (Includes energy waves and the like as well.) "So tiny, you can't tell it's a deus ex machina!" It's not just all dilithium any more!
2004.01.21
Oddly, the glitch I thought I was responsible for on the bottom of the skeleton animation turns out to be an IE thing.
AIM Chat of the Moment
LAN3 (5:28:01 PM): Hmm, I've got half a club sammich left from lunch, but I'm hungry now. What to do?
kirk: (5:28:29 PM): I'm not seeing the dilemna here.
--LAN3 and me (times adjusted to Seattle time). Immediately after the exchange he said he that if he had a blog he would post that, and I thought--wait--I have a blog...
Link of the Moment
Heard this on the radio, but LAN3 gave me the link with the following headline: F*** THE NAZIS, SAYS CHURCHILL'S PARROT...turns out Churchill's parrot is still alive, and still does the Nazi-cursing that the former prime minister taught her. What I want to know is, how did he teach her to swear in asterisks?
You know, if I was part of some tribe that had parrots around, naturally, and they picked up my tribe's speech...man, that would really freak me out. You wonder what kind of model "primitive" tribes have of animal intelligence vs. us city dwellers.
News of the Moment
Slate has some decent and cutting analysis of the last night's State of the Union speech, as well as some thoughts about the official and unofficial responses to it.
Fetish of the Moment
Odd fetish, or just a parody? You decide...it's Girls Eating Sandwiches! Interesting to note that it's links all over the place, not a localized collection.
2004.03.27
albert: you.
kirk: me?
albert: yes, you.
kirk: me!
kirk: what about me
albert: not much.
albert: just you.
kirk: i can't hear enough about me
kirk: me, me, me
Albert: no comment
kirk: it's the me show!
kirk: starring: me!
kirk: guest-starring: albert!
albert: haha
--Albert of AtariAge and myself. I thought this was a very appropriate dialog to have on the day of my birthday party. Any comments about the further appropriateness of this dialog to my entire life will be politely ignored.
2005.07.11
candi: i have a random question for you
kirk: ok, i'll give you a random answer
kirk: actually you dont even need the question
kirk: the answer is "dolphins"
kirk: ok, my cleverness here is done.
--Candi and me, June 5, 2005. Aliases changed to protect the guilty.
Quote of the Moment
Engineers aren't boring people; we just get excited over boring things.
Link of the Moment
Boingboing linked to some Carny Lingo. Cool stuff.
Webgeek Tool of the Moment
Note to self: (and everyone else) I used to rely on (the now defunct?) domainsurfer.com to do partial string searches on registered domains, but it seems like namedroppers.com is doing a better job of it.
2006.07.12
Looking at the previous recepients, I'd say he's head and shoulders above most of them, especially the ones whose memory will be tainted by their likely steroid use.
AIM Dialog of the Moment
atomicobie:*JUDO KICK*
kirkjerk: HASSAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN CHOP!
atomicobie: HUNAN BEEF!
kirkjerk: M....S.........G!!!!!!
atomicobie: *dies*
atomicobie: you win
kirkjerk: !umami victory!
atomicobie: *still in throes of death twitching*
atomicobie: *going to be a minute*
kirkjerk: Man, I never expected my Loony Tunes plus bad chinese restaurant mojo to be so strong!
atomicobie: *still twitching*
atomicobie: *glares at watch*
kirkjerk: twitching...deliciously
atomicobie: *man, msg takes a while*
kirkjerk: Yeah, we should have tried instant msg-ing
atomicobie: *comes back to life to throttle you*
--Miller and myself. For the record, Hassan Chop is explained here, and umami was previously kisrael'd
Hedbergism of the Moment
I went to the Home Depot, which was unnecessary. I need to go to the Apartment Depot, which is just a big warehouse with a whole lot of people standing around saying, "We don't have to fix shit."
2006.12.02
IM of the Moment
FoSO: is delaware worth visiting?
kirk:let me ask you this: do you like the business sense of connecticut, the small-shore state feel of rhode island, and the black urban sensibility of the non-political parts of washington dc?
FoSO: wow, yes! sounds really nice...
kirk: huh, that sounds a lot better than I meant it to now that i read it
Toy of the Season
--I linked to this snowflake construction kit toy before, but it bears repeating. Still has some oddities, every once in a while you'll be making an elaborate creation, then go to cut off a little near the left-edge center, and then suddenly everything drops off except for that little bit you meant to remove... fortunately there's an Undo button. (Be warned I had poor results with the "Email This Flake" function.)
FoSO also pointed out Zefrank's Kaleidoscope-y variant
2001.09.09
kirk: Hah, if YOU had tv you could watch Feng Shui: Creating Environments for Success on tv along with me
kirk: that's gonna get me super pumped for my stairmaster workout
lee: thats WRONG dude
lee: feng shui and a stairmaster... yikes
kirk: ARE YOU TOUGH ENOUGH-- TO ARRANGE YOUR FURNITURE IN ACCORDANCE WITH PRINCIPLES OF YING AND YANG??????
kirk: FEEL THE BURN OF PROPER ALIGNMENT OF EARTH AND HEAVEN!!!!!!
kirk: CONFUCIOUS SAY: I'M GONNA KICK YER ASS!
Link of the Moment
A long time ago, I remember seeing this one very bizarre story about a man who has a girlfriend who has a fetish of farting on cakes. I'm not making this up. In fact, a quick google search shows slight variations of the same sordid tale (this and that) so someone is paying attention to this stuff. And it even has its very own website with a memorable splash page image and little else.
2001.12.17
ranjit: Some people can say "you know what I'm saying" in just two syllables, nome sane?
kirk: we laugh because it's funny, we laugh because it's true
ranjit: we laugh because of the electrodes inserted into our cerebellums
Link of the Moment
The results of the Great Bellybutton Lint Survey are in. And the conclusion is, that ain't just clothing lint. I object to their use of the term "Snail Trail" for the hair trailing from the belly button on down...that implies that it's slimy or slippery, and hopefully it's neither of these things. "Happy Trail" is a much better term.
Quote of the Moment
Not all of us who drink are poets. Some of us drink because we're not poets.Not as bad a movie as I had feared, but I don't see why people praise it quite so much as they do.
2002.04.09
Also, the Blender Message Board was attacked by multiple postings of this hundred-line rant/posting of private correspondence. I had to take more severe security measures for the first time.
What a suck day!
Link of a Past Moment
An interesting Salon article from 1997, Sliced Off by the Cutting Edge, about a techworker who finally was falling behind the technological curve. I have small hopes but that my own independent interest will help keep me current, but you know. I already think anything can be done in 20 lines of Perl...
The Fun of Online Only Friends
ranjit: it's Spring Cleaning day! I need distraction from my imaginary internet friends so I don't actually have to clean.
kirk: I'm imaginary now?
kirk: I can live with that.
ranjit: Well, as far as I know.
ranjit: it's my new philosophy of e-solipsism.
2002.04.12
Image of the Moment
Wild turkeys in the parking lot of my soon to be previous company.
I'll pause a moment to let the metaphor sink in...
...err, or something.
|
AIM Exchange of the Moment
kirk: I was going to say something like "man, cleaning out your desk must be one of the most depressing activities in the world" but then I thought no, that would be "burying the members of your own family"
kirk: or some such
ranjit: worst is when it's both at the same time.
2001.03.06
I am a d____d ODD animal
Inappropriate AOL-IM Chat of the Moment
(On the San Diego School Shooting)
kirk: Oh, I was just going to say, so I'm watching the breaking coverage on CNN, and you know, I'm feeling pretty bad for them, it's a hell of a thing to go through, but damn it, I'm in a protoblizzard and these jerkies are in shortsleeves
brooke: lucky little traumatized shits
History of the Moment
While stairmastering I was watching "Wartime Deceptions" on the History Channel. Kind of neat stuff, but I was struck at how blatantly pro-American it was. Good cover of Operation Bodyguard (misleading the Nazis about where D-day was going to happen), and plenty about faking amphibious landings to fool Saddam during Desert Storm, but nothing about how he's run circles around us, or how Milosovich and friends totally fooled us with some really basic tricks-- we bombed a hell of a lot of fake tanks.
2001.12.10
Geek Chat of the Moment
kirk: I've found another nugget of wisdom to add to my regular expressions arsenalYou might have to be a bit of a programmer to get this. Regular Expressions are a tricky-ish tool to process text in a program, and one thing programmers do is "comment out" lines of code (i.e. turn them from program code to mere non-code commentary) when they're poking around, trying to figure out what's going wrong. Hmm. For a non-geek this joke probably doesn't work at all. But Who Says Java Programmers Don't Have A Sense Of Humor?
john: mmm???
kirk: they work better when not commented out
PG-13 Link of the Moment
This tale of the Worst Job in Singapore (At a zoo sperm bank--you figure it out...) sets off my BS detector, but it's still a funny read.
2002.03.30
AOL Chat of the Moment
kirk: what's for lunch?--Maybe you had to be there...oh, wait, John WAS there. Must be just me.
john: whatever
kirk: a big steam plate of indifference it is then
john: sweet!
kirk: sweet, sweet indifference. Where would I be without you? Caring about every damn thing that's what
Link of the Moment
Where do you go for your half-baked ideas? Why, the halfbakery, of course. (Link via a Slashdot article about this NY Times piece with 9 interesting technology ideas.)
2002.11.02
ranjit: i wonder if pong could be made into a real game? using ' - and , for ball, or something, P b and þ for paddles...
kirk: what the hell is that last letter?
ranjit: Icelandic lowercase thorn.
kirk: sounds like the name of an art band
ranjit: heh heh
Link and Ramble of the Moment
Geeks and the Online Aliases they choose. If you're in a hurry, just check out mrcurtain's story or the story of the Dans from crisper's tale.
I've never been big into choosing evocative aliases. Most often I stick with my unix username "kisrael"...for example, this site.
On AIM I use "kirkjerk" (a name that I started using in 1997 on a great online car-race-with-guns Death Rally...it fit the style of that game as well as its 8-character limit.) though I've also used "kirkamundo" and "thegreatkirkini". In videogames now I'll use "kirkles" if there's enough room, or "KRK" if it's just initials(I used to always sign games "Z", which now strikes me as pretentious)..."Kirkles" has a history of its own, in high school, friends would tease me and my then girlfriend Lynn by imagining us murmuring "Oh Lynnie-Poo" "Oh Kirkles". (I was always bummed that that friend Mike "Woodchuck" Witczak ended up with the more pedestrian nickname "Mookie" when he went to college.)
There are many interesting names used on the loveblender, though there I'm just "Kirk, Blender-Keeper". I have to admit I remember people who post good stuff and have an interesting alias more than people who just post good stuff.
2003.02.18
Watched Joe Millionaire...impressed myself with my ability to totally call the surprise ending where they gave 'em a million bucks.
AIM Snippet of the Moment
kirk: Ah, such a fun terrible weather game, watch the poor sap "on the spot" tv reporter out in the middle of it
ranjit: what's that word, shadenfreude? This is like freezenfreude
(The other great Freezenfreude: all the SUVs in snowbanks on the side of the highway. Represented way out of proportion to their percentage of the driving population.)
Current Events of the Moment
Via Bill the Splut, The 50 Most Ridiculous Things About the Upcoming War in Iraq.
Link of the Moment
Inner-Childish (in a good way) fun with science. Fun and sort of educational! Some of them even deal with my newer thoughts on what consciousness is and isn't, search for "Burst of flavor", "Un SELF -ishness", "Make your 'self' vanish", and "THE NULL ZONE".
Funny of the Moment
You know, everyone seems to think being on hold is a bad thing. Let's re-examine this, shall we? Don't look at it as being on hold. Look at it as being held! Because we all like to be held -- don't we?
2003.11.08
EGM presenting Kids Say The Darndest Things about the Video Games of our youth. Whipper Snappers! Back in my day we had 4 colors, and 10 pixels...and we liked it!
AIM Exchange of the Moment
LAN3: Lunar eclipse tonight-- natural occultation, or NASA coverup of renewed solar activity? Makes you wonder!
kirk: I thought it was just the moon saying "hmmm...mind if I stand just on this side of you for a bit? thanks"
--LAN3 had previous expressed amusement at my solar flare paranoia...
Toy of the Moment
Lovely...Ranjit point me to a Virtual Paper Snowflake Construction Kit. The interface seems a little funny at first...you can only start cutting at the edge of the paper, for instance. But nicely done, and unlike the real thing, it has an "undo" button.
2003.12.11
You have to be into some obscure bits of literary geek culture to get this, but what if Jack Chick wrote on the Cthulhu mythos?
AIM Chat of the Moment
sarah: I can understand wanting to be younger again, or rather wanting to live out the freedom of singledom in the college years... we all probably feel that from time to time, but I think that I only feel that way because I forget all the crap that went along with it... the grass is always greener scenarioDon't know if this is nice to post, but it feels good at this difficult time in my life. Plus I thought it was a little funny (Sarah did immediately say she was being facetious about the "lonely slut" remark, or rather "fecissuoaos... fecisous ...phecishus? Facicious?" ) and I do like the phrase "highway to crochetyness". Sarah and Dylan are great for snarky IMing with, except Dylan's never online.
kirk: well, she doth protest that she's never really lived alone, except maybe a very brief time in college, and barely that, just doing the whole serial monogomy shtick
sarah: So she wants to go be a lonely slut?
kirk: well, that's certainly how I'd put it, yes.
kirk: well, no.
sarah: well... what's so great about living alone anyway... the longer you live alone the harder it becomes to accomodate living with another person... it's just the highway to crotchetyness if you ask me