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For both of our Mexico big side trips (Akumal Monkey Sanctuary and cenote + snorkle with Ruta Maya) we shelled out for the photography package - (more important for the monkeys, plus the sanctuary seems like a better cause)

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an oral history of reno 911 Heh, just had a thought that seems so blatantly obvious in retrospect.
Like I'd long heard of the overlap between programmers and musicians.
And with programmers, there are coders who are very into precision and isolation: unit tests and formal typing. And there are other coders who are more interested in context and are comfortable with duck-typing.
And with musicians, there are many players who love the precision, and aren't comfortable without sheet music in front of them. And there are group musicians who, while usually following forms (not talking jam bands, more like street bands) are comfortable doing more by ear, and emphasize interaction.

It's probably not a coincidence that I'm in the latter category of both, and I think the spectrums tend to run parallel.

As always, the best answers are somewhere between, but probably more on one side than the other.

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I do love a good - or bad - Sisyphus joke!
via perry bible fellowship


by Seth Fleishman

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Mature Content from tumblr (just words not pictures)

	I WANNA BE YOUR SLAVE Måneskin	genderqueer etc pop rock I think they were on SNL.
★ ★ ★ ★	Life Goes On OMGkellz	Kinda gospel-twinged hiphop. On an epsidode of Awkwafina is Nora from Queens.
	Shotgun Junior Walker & The All Stars	Awesome R+B. An article about where did the high pitch sample used in K Pop / that "Jump Around" song come from cited this as a possibility.
	New Orleans The Blues Brothers & Louisiana Gator Boys	From the Blues Brothers 2000 sequel... an all star band. During the Beatles Get Back documentary, I wanted to learn more about Billy Preston, I guess he made this song?
★ ★ ★ ★	Come Back Home Seotaiji and Boys	Classic K Pop... super strong Cypress Hill influence... Watched a video "K Pop Explained" (was disappointed the video didn't get into KPop fans rallying as a force for social justice online...)
	Goodnight, Sweetheart, Goodnight Sha Na Na	Sha Na Na was such a weird bid of 50s/60s greaser nostalgia of the late 70s/early 80s... I remembered this song randomly saying goodnight to Melissa.
	Surfin' Safari The Beach Boys	Classic surf song. I am kind of obsessed with why every version I can find is "some honeys will be coming along" and "singing our song" instead of the version on the McDonalds promotional tape I grew up, "some honeys will be making the seen" / "put on my faded blue jeans"...
	It's Not My Fault Princess Nokia	I got to thinking about her old song "Tomboy", looked to see what she was up to.
★ ★ ★ ★	Rock Tonight Altitude Music & MC Justo	Hiphop from the Ronny Cheng youtube special
	Let It Be Aretha Franklin	Melissa really likes this cover. The original of the song is pretty important to me.
	Gotta Move Barbra Streisand	via a Bud Light Ad during the Superbowl
	Eleanor Rigby Ray Charles	Not quite the same version from this Strong Covers Vol 1 episode of Strong Songs, a great podcast breaking down music and showing how the sausage was made...
	Master Kohga Battle Manaka Kataoka	Videogame music from this video about fooling around in Breath of the Wild
	Bah Bah Conniff Sprach (Zarathustra) [Single Version] Ray Conniff	This weird 2001-cover was used in a Superbowl ad
★ ★ ★ ★	Mary, Mary Run-DMC	One of those songs I heard quoted a LOT in the 80s/early 90s ("Mary Mary, Why you Buggin?") but maybe never heard? Sought it out after I read about the Amen Break - this beat from the Monkees was on a small record of reusable beats
	California Love 2Pac featuring Dr. Dre & Roger Troutman	One of the songs I didn't know much about from the Superbowl show...
★ ★ ★ ★	Amen "Break" The Winstons	The original beat that launched 1,000 hip hop songs, as seen on this cracked article on the Amen Break
	Moanin' Charles Mingus	Eze is arranging this song for JP Honk to cover.
	Dark Eyes Stanley Black and His Orchestra	Another song JP Honk is experimenting with... though we're not trying it as a Tango, like this is...

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Your life's continual task is to build your death. You are *in* death while you are *in* life: when you are no more *in* life you are after death. Or if you prefer it thus: after life you are dead, but during life you are dying: and death touches the dying more harshly than the dead, in a more lively a fashion and more essentially.

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The law is not science, it's jazz. It's a series of iterations based off a few consistent beats.

As Kottke points out, Conservative originalists know this, but they hide their prejudices behind the notion that the text is immutable.

And of course now conservative activist judges turn it into something like free jazz, breaking whatever precedent in order to enforce their vision of how authoritarians think the world should be.

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I wish people had a 30 second trailer so I could see what I'm getting myself into.

Stockton's Basic-Income Experiment Pays Off - "A new study of the city's program that sent cash to struggling individuals finds dramatic changes."

When I posted this on facebook, a conservative friend pointed out this is a pretty small sample size, like 125 folks, my response:

There are definitely questions on how it would scale. But my dislike of “Go Fund Me” healthcare and similar makes me think it’s worth looking into. since the 80s, productivity has kept going up, but the benefits have been skewing more and more north as well. This is bad for a capitalist economy; the health of an economy is measured by the throughput of spending. 35 people buying a new car does a lot more good for the economy than 1 dude buying a yacht.

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My friend Sophie got on Boston.com for She's nearly done with her pandemic project: Walking every single street of Cambridge

"Photo by Kirk Israel" ;-)

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Why was Yoda afraid of 7

Because 9 7 8

Pretty good month for music! One 5 star even...

	Concrete Pony Ghostpoet	Dark and cool but kind of weird similarity to Rock Me Now in terms of the piano chords... Michael at the work Slack #music channel said he was addicted to this...
	Get Up (DJ Premier Edit) Vernon Burch	70s funk Deee-lite sampled from... got it from the "who sampled" page for Groove is in the Heart, some of the beat and the slide whistle...
★ ★ ★ ★	Happy Valentine's Day Outkast	Great 2000s funk, lot of neat influences well used. Played over the credits to the Netflix series "Big Mouth"
	Take Me to the River Al Green	Classic soul Saw the Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense... they cover this song but this is the original.
	Hungry Eyes (Remix Edit) Paris Encore	80s cheese redone as 90s club cheese... I recorded a few songs with local indie band "Sound Down Cellar", they have a song by the same title as this one...
	Mi T-Shirt De La Nasa Mexican Institute of Sound	Spanish pop! Matthew G. was talking about this song at a superbowl party we were at, I think I was wearing a NASA hoodie.
★ ★ ★ ★	WTF (feat. Amber Van Day) HUGEL	Are they sampling "bitter/sweet"? Came up when I was googline "nightwave" music
★ ★ ★ ★	She's Not There The Zombies	Classic rock. This was caught in my band buddy Sophie's ear for no good reason.
★ ★ ★ ★	Homegrown Haux	So sorrowful sounding. A season finale of Super Store had this shown with Mateo in ICE custody.
★ ★ ★ ★	All My People Say Atomica Music	Totally studio, but great and pop-y bubblegum... From a Kay diamond commercial.
	Grandmother's Song Steve Martin	Novelty goofiness. Band buddy Matt Morin mentioned he played this song as a novelty number..
★ ★ ★ ★	Pompeii Bastille	Good song but I think it's like begging for college a cappella groups to cover it. Not in a good way. Superstore mentioned this as a song the young'uns would like
★ ★ ★ ★	Birthday Cake Rihanna	Very sex. Also I like the middle eastern minor key. Played in the movie "Hustlers"
	The Weight The Band	Classic rock again. Richard in JP Honk suggested we play this song.
★ ★ ★ ★	Number One Tove Styrke	Lot of nice influences, like both the Nikki Minaj sound and the old girl band "hey" shouts. Played in the movie "Brittany Runs a Marathon"
	Round Here Buzz Eric Church	Country. Do like the line about driving that preacher's daughter crazy. Mentioned in the book "In Defense of Elitism: Why I'm Better Than You and You are Better Than Someone Who Didn't Buy This Book"
★ ★ ★ ★ ★	Du mouvement social La fanfare invisible	Protest song - super great energy! Love this a lot. At an anti-alt-right counter rally, something like this came up.
★ ★ ★ ★	Stand Up (feat. Shawnna) Ludacris	Raucous hiphop. People at the daily stand up meeting said this song got caught in their head, for obvious reasons...
	Enola Gay Orchestral Manoeuvres In the Dark	Anti-war New Wave School of Honk has started playing this song.
	Always (Original Mix) Tin Tin Out	Club remix, very 90s. On a trip to the British Isles with my family, I bought a CD "Dance Heat 95"- I think the rips of some of the songs got corrupted, so I got this one to replace the old one.

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The fear is greater than the danger.

Musical tempo varies, but it does so roughly within the range of the human heartbeat.

Love is a human religion in which another person is believed in.

Now by these presents let me assure you that you are not only in my heart, but my veins, this morning. I turn from you half abashed--yet you haunt me, and some look, word or touch thrills through my whole frame--yes, at the very moment when I am labouring to think of something, if not somebody, else. Get ye gone Intruder! though I am forced to add dear--which is a call back--

The pleasures of love are always in proportion to the fear.

Oh Love! Thou bane of the most generous souls! Thou doubtful pleasure, and thou certain pain.

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Harvard has a giant tuba

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Man, how long-running was the Opportunity Mars Mission? Old enough to have its own Livejournal!

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Nothing is just one thing.

I just remembered Esquire has this What I've Learned series that's quite brilliant and generous.

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Truth is like poetry. And most people fucking hate poetry.

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I remember reading about how humans are uniquely well adapted for throwing things but reading NFL draft defensive backs talk about what animals would be hardest to cover... I can't think of many animals that would be great at catching a football. Somehow it seems like a different problem than catching flies or mice or other prey, you know?

Blender of Love

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Damnit Mark Hamill the line mighta worked if you said "droid discrimination" not "robot discrimination" 4-star songs in read, listing things in rough descending order of "you gotta hear this"ness.

• You Can't Catch Me (Chuck Berry) I REALLY like magical realism of his airplane car. Also interesting is how Lennon borrowed/stole "Here comes Flat-top Comin' up Slowly" for "Come Together".
• Good as Hell (Lizzo) Super happy hiphop. Some really nice beats in parts.
• Let's Go Get 'Em (Rebirth Brass Band) My favorite of the School of Honk "easy" songs.
• Behind Closed Doors (Otis McDonald) Funky modern piece.
• Are We All Hardwired? (Christine Lavin) - great mini political quiz, but at over 7 minutes, I skip it now.
• Can't Help Falling in Love (Haley Reinhart) Beautiful cover. Almost but not quite over the line of schmaltz.
• The Sound of Silence (Nouela) The other "gentle female vocalist cover". Video here is black and white-ified clips of people crying from a wide range of movies.
• Pretend (Seinabo Sey) Background from a trailer for "Girls"
• Barefootin' (Wilson Pickett) Straight forward R+B
• You Haven't Done Nothin' (Stevie Wonder) Read an article that some 70s Stevie Wonder is really political and smart
• Stacy’s Mom (feat. Casey Abrams) (Scott Bradlee's Postmodern Jukebox) Goofy retro cover (Kind of amazed that the original of this is from 2003 - like The Killer's, Fountains of Wayne nailed that 80s vibe)
• Toothbrush and My Table (Grace Potter & The Nocturnals) - This shuffle was on a playlist from Melissa, good little groove
• One (Harry Nilsson) Didn't realize the 3 Dog Night version was a cover. This one has a smoother, almost Beach Boys aspect.
• Down With the Sickness (Disturbed) Amused that you can just google "Ooh was ah ah ah" to get this song.
• Wiggle Wop (feat. Keno) (Party Favor) Is this booty music? I think this is booty music.

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I made a tutorial page about the blues scale and the 12 bar blues. Random thought I had the other day...

I place a lot of my own self-worth in being valuable to others.

I get a lot more engaged in a group if I feel I'm critical to that group. For example: on summer I started attending Sunday services at my local UU church. Its scraggly, sparsely-attended meeting felt kind of familiar to me, and I thought I might find a home there, take up a common cause. Then fall arrived, and I found out that many New England churches kind of "pause" for the summer, but in autumn the spigots get turned back on full blast. Much of my urge to go to church left me. (Also: lazy Sunday mornings are kind of fantastic.) In part, I felt lost in the crowd. But I also felt like I would be "needed", was unlikely to be critical to the group.

(Another example: switching to tuba from the smaller baritone horn in the sixth grade, because a trumpet player had switched to baritone, and I liked the nature of being the only player of an instrument in a group.)

So I tend to be very reliable with this kind of thing, stalwart, which is a good thing but it comes from two weird places: the first is, maybe I don't feel like I have a ton of intrinsic value. (Conversely: do I feel most people do have intrinsic, part of the human birthright? It's a pretty basic humanistic tenant but I'm not sure it's one that I've perfectly embraced.) The second is: if a group doesn't NEED me, then why should I bother? (I mean, except in the ways that it's entertaining for me.) Life is full of a lot of potential demands for my precious time!

Some of it's just the binary thinking problem - oversimplifying, binary thinking is one of the biggest issues I see in the world, and I'm dismayed that I'm plagued by it too. People don't want a multidimensional way of taking things in, acknowledging that everything has parts that are good, less good, great, terrible - we want a single spectrum of "good" or "bad", and we don't even want a spectrum, we want to say good OR bad.

It muddles my thinking. It's just hard to wrap my head around ideas like "this effort - where I'm useful now - would be ok without me, but different".

(Of course a while ago I wrestled in a variation of this, the "If you 'can't live without me' why aren't you dead yet?" type thing. The best answer I remember coming for that was that - well, they wouldn't DIE die, but you're critical to them being the best selves that they are now, that at least in that sense the person they are now wouldn't be around.)

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One part of humanity's moral growth will be the recognition and acceptance of people determining the timeline for their own ends.

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Sometimes it's easy to forget that Alewife, the station I arrive at nearly every day to begin my day's journey, is ultimately named after a type of herring. From Pratchett, Stewart, and Cohen, "The Science of Discworld":

This was turning out to be the longest winter in living memory - so long, in fact, that living memory itself was being shortened as some of the older citizens succumbed.

As Joni Mitchell sang at Woodstock: 'We Are Stardust". Scientists like quoting this line, because it sounds as though they were young once.

Trying to find any deep meaning to events was like trying to find reflections in a mirror: you always succeeded, but you didn't learn anything new.

Science certainly does not claim to get things right, but it has a good record of ruling out ways to get things wrong.

All religions are true, for a given value of 'truth'

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We are the curators of our own lives. Curators make choices. Like when I was 21, 22 years old, I was selling vacuum cleaners, and probably making $125 to $150 a week. But when an opportunity came along to act in a play in Hollywood making $50 a week, I took it readily. That's a curator's choice. I felt my selling vacuum cleaners wouldn't do anything for me as an artist.

Internet Explorer 4.0 was perfection incarnate in a browser. It had Active Desktop. It had Channels. It had motherfucking Channels, the coolest technology that never reached market adoption ever not even a little bit. IE4, in general, was so good that you were going to have it installed on your PC whether you liked it or not.

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'That could be the motto for heaven,' said Tim. 'Almost too perfect.'

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CONFUCIUS SAY: NOT EVERYTHING IS A THING

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The one silver lining to life with eyes full of floaters - I don't really mind that my glasses can get smudgy, I'm well trained at not really seeing the things I'm not focused on. (Of course, writing about said floaters puts them in "don't think about a pink elephant" territory) February is a short month, but it's a particularly short new playlist... as always, 4-stars in red, exclamation points mark interesting videos.

Retro

• Got to Get It Over (The Bamboos) Awesome Motown-tinged stylings.
• !Glowworm (The Mills Brothers) Old time, nice.
• When Yuba Plays the Rhumba On the Tuba (Rudy Vallée) A childhood song I just recalled... nice tuba work!
• The Bare Necessities (Bruce Reitherman & Phil Harris) The Disney Classic... happy to hear the tuba here too.
• What a Difference a Day Makes (Dinah Washington) The standard

Pop

• Hey World (Remote Control Version) (Michael Franti & Spearhead) Thanks to EB.
• Heartbeats (The Knife) Kind of like the Killers, this sounds like new wave but came out 20 years later.
• Tightrope (Janelle Monáe) Heard a good DJ at the Bryant Park's hotel cellar
• Harlem Shake (Baauer) I like the fad based on this song.
• The Chosen (Scott & Brendo) Dubstep to a very odd video -- funny if you know the game, or even if not

Indy/Alt

• Last Words (The Real Tuesday Weld) from Nick + Nora's Infinite Playlist
• Ho Hey (The Lumineers) Excellent bare bones romantic song.
• Tighten Up (The Black Keys) Lotta percussion

We lost Ralph McQuarrie, who made so much of the awesome Star Wars concept art...


More great stuff of his at the Concept Ships blog. (Cool header there, not McQ but still, it probably bears the imprint of his influence...)

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It isn't all fun, but it is all games

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I know, I know. It's just that... well, I don't know... I just should have been there and I wasn't. Aaanyway, I'm just gonna bottle this back up until it explodes in my future therapist's face.

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Man... am I just totally disconnected from the media, or have Republicans totally written off Massachusetts primary-wise?

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Had a nice time hanging out with @SpindleyQ today. Doritos Dash of Destruction and Crosstown are both very good Xbox games.

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Man I am sad Doritos Dash of Destruction is no longer on Xbox Live- best advergame ever- changed scale for T.Rex vs Van, and very Rampage-y
--from Cracked.com's 19 Ads For Products That Apparently Exist In Movies. The "whatever you have in your pocket" line is good, NO TIME FOR MAKING CHANGE IN MOVIE LAND!

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http://thanksfortrumpetwinsock.com/ To view this content, you need to install Java from java.com
rocketdorkicus - source - built with processing
So, yeah, this is just the "grab all the blocks" 2-player-only fun of Dorkicus with a new control scheme. Actually it predates regular Dorkicus, except I went back and added rocktes, since driving paddles like they were rocketships didn't make much visual sense.

With both versions of Dorkicus, it's interesting how it feels like it would be a very different game if the goal was stated as "shove blocks at your opponents side" vs "bring blocks to your own side". (I didn't have a good idea for the color coding for the former case, so I went with the latter... also it feels like more complex of a goal somehow.)

Made for THE 371-IN-1 KLIK & PLAY PIRATE KART II: KLIK HARDER.

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[photo: 2 'Clearblue' tests w/ 'Pregnant']
"Your crazy! Very happy 4 u!!!!
R u having twins????"

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http://www.cracked.com/article_18443_6-famous-movie-wisemen-who-were-totally-full-shit.html - Cracked on would be gurus.

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@burntbythesun RE: "Admiral Akbar: fish or mollusk? Discuss." - Admiral Ackbar vs Admiral Adama in a knife fight - who wins?

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Wow. #ATT 3G service is so crap in Boston the iPhone just knocked itself down to Edge.

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Left thumb is starting to ache- violated my usual rule about not reconfiguring keyboards and remapping Caps Lock to Ctrl. Feels pretty good!

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http://www.cracked.com/blog/your-3rd-grade-science-textbook-as-written-by-gary-busey - the URL pretty much says it all.
--Wow. That was the most nightmarish ad for Kinder Surprise Eggs I could possibly have hoped for.

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http://www.slate.com/id/2212616/ - David Plotz bogged the Bible. "I began the Bible as a hopeful, but indifferent, agnostic. I wished for a God, but I didn't really care. I leave the Bible as a hopeless and angry agnostic. I'm brokenhearted about God."

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"Your true value depends entirely on what you are compared with."

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"For the boy I was, the book I could not find"

I think my dad was touched by that turn of phrase. Also, FUN book!

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http://alwaysblack.com/blackbox/bownigger.html - pardon the slur in the link but it's a tale of triumph, real life cyberpunk.

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I really hope it's illegal or something to start putting "Important Tax Document Enclosed" on junkmail. Or not put it on tax documents.

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I miss OK Soda. "Things are going to be OK." Why is "parallels" such a more popular word than "perpendicularities"?

Oddly, I suppose you could probably substitute "one point of intersection is" for "one parallel is"

This is probably not as profound as I first thought.

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Costume of the Moment

--Been watching "Project Runway" again. Was bummed to see Chris March, the snarky, queeny rotund costume genius with a huge laugh just miss the final four... cmg used some of her googlemojo to dig up his website that has TONS of fabulous design fun.

A friend recommended Orbit's "Mint Mojito" flavored gum and you know what... it is pretty darn good.

The whole "things flavored like booze" thing is a bit odd though. Evil B had Newman's "Tequila and Lime" salsa, and I thought it was startlingly tequila-ish.

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Mascot of the Moment

--Japanese "cute" extends even to their defense force... Bill the Splut linked to his Sadly No piece on "Prince Pickles", cuddly mascot of a Japanese force anxious to get away from its imperialistic and militaristic roots. (I think he's the guy on the left.)

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Quote of the Moment

"Everyone has a purpose in life. Perhaps yours is watching television."

Wow Jon Stewart hosting the Oscars? This is the first time I remember seeing the host as a reason to watch... anyone planning an Oscar party?

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Boobies of the Moment
Boingboing (heheh) linked to this amazing Breast Bounce simulator. Choose a cupsize, activity level, and see how much better their shockabsorbing bra is at reducing the motion. Includes geek-friendly 3D Wireframe views. Reminds me a bit of the quotes I kisrael'd on this day...

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Equal Opportunity Offender of the Moment
So my ELAS was a bit offended by the above link, which you, is kind of just soft core boobly porn. But she said it could possibly be counterbalanced by flying jockstraps, so, and luckily boingboing had an equally (if not more) [in]approrpriate link: aren't basketball players supposed to wear jockstraps or something? The newspaper claims it's an "unfortunate optical illusion", but that is a mighty meaty looking "illusion".

Poem of the Moment

They say
the first love's most important.
That's very romantic,
but not my experience.

Something was and wasn't there between us,
something went on and went away.

My hands never tremble
when I stumble on silly keepsakes
and a sheaf of letters tied with string--
not even a ribbon.

Our only meeting after years:
the conversation of two chairs
at a chilly table.

Other loves
still breathe deep inside me.
This one's too short of breath even to sigh.

Yet, just exactly as it is,
it does what the others still can't manage:
unremembered,
not even seen in dreams,
it introduces me to death.

Sigh, "KJ"...summer camp, shared "atomic fire balls" by the side of the lake. A few letters, a few disinterested phonecalls, and that was pretty much that. Aargh, I'm going through what I hope is a temporary bachelor boy phase...some of it's just the trauma of my personal life, and the fact that some rooms used to be filled with stuff that turned out to be Mo's. (Though I did bring up the long folding table for the dining room, and move the one-tableish-thing-with-drawers I have to my name out to the front room so it doesn't look so bare) And I have big intentions of doing a massive cleanup but I the atari game is taking up pretty much all of my free time. I'm also willing to cut myself a little slack for a little while...I just have to make sure I don't let myself go too much.

I feel like I'm in the need of a Queer-Eye-for-the-Straight-Guy style makeover. Maybe spend a little money on stuff and not be such a cheapskate. But, I need to see what my living arrangement ends up as first.

Another issue is...I don't know, I feel a lot more apathetic in general since everything is now "just for me". I wasn't expecting that, frankly. But I guess since I'm so easy-going, when I don't have to take someone else's opinion into consideration, my standards might slip because of my inherent laziness. I also miss having a second opinion on everything. My wishy-washiness is coming back to haunt me.

Website of the Moment
GodHatesShrimp, a parody of this ugly site. For a while, I thought the latter crowd had a point that homosexuality was bibically "an abomination" while some of the other things (you know, like polycotton blends) were just smaller sins, but it looks like seafood is right there in the abomination category as well. Yeesh.

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Toy of the Moment
Awesome--PsychoStudio lets you edit your own Psycho shower scene, using Hitchcock's original raw footage!

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Conspiracy Theory of the Moment
Salon.com reporting that Howard Stern thinks it was his Bush-bashing that got him kicked off Clear Channel stations...including in some "swing states". I've started listening to Stern sometimes. It's often really pointless and annoying and juvenile, but sometimes it's really funny, and it's nicely paced, with all the commercials bunched together. The article quotes trade magazine editor Michael Harrison as saying "Howard Stern will be an influential force for the public and for other talk show hosts during the election. Despite the shock jock thing, Stern has credibility. He's looked upon as an honest person" and I think that's right on the money.

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LiveJournal of the Moment
Betcha didn't know the Mars explorer Opportunity has a livejournal...and the personality of a teenage girl to go with it. Got a haircut and a raise yesterday! Dang, if I wasn't such a rationalist, I might think there was something to my good feeling in the morning and my later surprise good news.

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Quote of the Moment

"The rooster was chosen long ago as the national symbol of France. The choice is fortuitous, of course, because of a Latin pun, Gallus, meaning both the courtyard animal and the inhabitant of Gaul. The English pun could probably be considered even more apt."

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Cartoon of the Moment
Salon.com gives us this Tom the Dancing Bug, about the funniest take I've seen on the "ready.gov" site.

Salon's on the verge of going broke again. I'm a member. Are you? Despite all the hogwash about the "liberal media", balanced, sometimes-left leaning reporting is hard to come by. (And I hope if they do go under, they get just enough funds to keep their archive working...)

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Art Exhibit of the Moment
Like I've always said, "Art is what you can get away with." Also, "Selling out is the new sincerity." Just a quick update today...life's getting a bit hectic with all this jobhunting and networking stuff!

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Article of the Moment
"Graying Cyberpunk" Bruce Sterling on how Information Wants to Be Worthless (as opposed to the usual slogan of "wants to be free".) Interesting stuff especially for bloggers (mentions Boingboing.net which I may add to my regular reading schedule)...."Attention" really seems to be the most valid currency on the 'Net.

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Link of the Moment
A VirusScanner for humans, find out your meme exposure...very cool. Supossedly doesn't work with IE4. Dream Quote of the Moment

"I finally had a vision of what life was all about. Even more than just bowls of chocolate ice cream. Also containers, made of plastic. And those same containers with vanilla as well."

(also there was a giant blue atari symbol in lasers, don't know what to make of that)