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Content Warning: Men's Undies.

I think there comes a time in most young men's life when they turn from the underwear of their youth (often from their parents just buying smaller versions of whatever their father wears) to whatever is modern at that point. For me in the early 90s that was a critical pivot from tighty-whities to boxers. Preferably, boxers with playful iconography.

The thing is, I'm worried they're going away. Boxer briefs seem to be taking over, and the selection at the Old Navy/Gap/Banana Republic triopoly and other places has been notably worse the past few years.

The thing is even though the goofy designs should make these boxers "more" childish than almost any other alternative, to me all snug undies seem... I dunno, weirdly juvenile or vaguely feminine, even though I understand they flatter a lot of guys in a lot of shapes.

And like, if someone sees an amusing pair of boxers peeking over your jeans, it seems more intentional somehow and less embarrassing then other forms of undies.

Anyway. At least these style of boxers never have the manufacturer's name being on the waistband for advertising purposes. It wasn't great when Calvin Klein did it, and do you really want to be a human billboard for Fruit of the Loom or Haines or whoever?

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From my devblog - Humane's AI Pin vs the movie Her... also Marques Brownlee with the clapback of the year...

diffusionBee, "a cat with black and white features and tentacles from a snake's body rising out of water in a photorealistic style" The logic of aging human bodies: ok, sure, you'll heal more slowly in general but at least we can get your fingernails growing at an ever increasing clip. Oh, also lets divert some of that energy to keep growing your ears and nose.

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an angel would fuck a streetlamp and it would be nothing. it would be like a dog thoughtlessly rutting against a couch: pure instinctual pleasure chasing with something that may elicit but not share in your libido. but if an angel fucked a cell tower then viable offspring could very well result

Resuming my daily constitutional walks - living near a river is kind of sweet!
Dan Ariely on procrastination - he's been through a lot of harsh stuff, and he's an advocate for "reward substitution", giving yourself immediate rewards when having to toil at a project with a payoff that is far-off or uncertain.

Of course it takes a lot of discipline to do that; you're making semi-arbitrary pairings, rewards that don't directly come from the effort, and you have to be in control enough to not just gobble the reward without the work.

I am somewhere in the middle of the bellcurve of economic suck - a curve that has slid suckwards for nearly everyone. I'm between the folks who really feel the wolf at the door on one end, where rent and bills are absolutely looming on one side, and maybe with work experience that only makes sense in social times - and my peers who are muddling through, adapting to work from home but with something like stability, collaborating with people they know from the before times. Hopefully closer to the latter group, but we'll see.

(And that's the bellcurve for people who have stayed healthy, or muddled through a mild or medium case- but with 33K deaths in the US alone, how many of those people wish they had the luxury of fretting about the economics of it.)

I miss the goal structure of the workday - the fuzziness between worklife and homelife still got a little weird, but I could knock off at the end of a day and then think about what else I wanted to do. And I can still do that a bit, but it's always under the spectre of how maybe by not grinding more, I'm going to make my life worse for myself and loved ones.

And in the shadow of the religiosity I brewed for myself as a kid, that guilt feels a ton like a great example of the consequences of sin; in this case the sin of not going at 100% all day long, all weekend long. Trying to go flat out all the time is a bad idea for a number of reasons - among them, a denial that some large percentage of the final outcome will be the result of luck or good or bad poor decisions I made "in the before times"

Tangent: I found this poster on tumblr:

As one commentator said - "Farm equipment association going hard w the truisms". But also a reminder that things are bigger than we are, and our own efforts are necessary but not guaranteed sufficient to the outcomes we most want.

The work/relax decisions remind me of why I'm not much of an entrepreneur - unless you're wildly successful at making bank, able to turn on the cash spigot whenever you need it, life is always going to feel full of these tradeoffs of work and play. I guess good entrepreneurs enjoy the hustle, the chance to make the big win and know they did it themselves. (It's akin to why I don't have to worry about becoming a gambling addict, the rush of the win doesn't feel better to me than the grind of the losing.)

I'm (as always) a bit full of myself but I feel like I would be a productive, creating person even without having to find channels that still pay the bills. (Which is why I still permit these idle daydreams of some unsuspected rich benefactor swooping in and granting me early semi-retirement, freeing me to make porchfest websites and band stuff and teaching people to program and make virtual toys and also more comics about coping with death, and maybe even coping with the stuff that comes along before...)

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Im sorry if I am wrong. My feeling and this is just my opinion : is if people are losing their businesses and homes after only a few weeks then were they actually thriving in the first place. If they were so strong they should be able to survive. Just saying.

I think it's a great point on the fragility of our economic lives. As much as I question his wisdom on the economy and pretty much everything else, Trump was keeping the slope he inherited from the Obama-era recovery going - but there's a superficiality to so much of that. There are so many problems we haven't worked out - how to make a society that blends and balances capitalism's "Freedom To" and democratic-socialism's "Freedom From" so that we try to iron out some of the more egregious instances of bad fortune (being born in the wrong neighborhood, to poor parents, or coping with being in/of a subculture that is discriminated against) while keeping the incentives alive, the connection between hard, smart work and better results intact.

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The risk of getting sick from handling mail or packages is extremely low and, at this point, only theoretical. There are no documented cases of someone getting sick from opening a package or reading a newspaper.

But that doesn't mean you shouldn't take precautions. After handling mail or packages or reading the newspaper, dispose of the packaging and wash your hands. If you still feel especially anxious about it, take guidance from the New England Journal study and just let mail and packages sit for 24 hours before handling them.

TL:DR; far and away the biggest threats seem to be proximity to infected folks (whether they are showing symptoms or not)

Also, clothing isn't so likely to carry contamination away, the way air flows around us and not into us means that most particles are ending up on the floors etc.

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Facetimed with Cora. We co-played for some of it, her with her kinetic sand on her end and me with my Lego on mine... wasn't super interactive but probably pretty par for the course for two only children :-D

Working the message of embracing challenges, or as she put it's "pushing herself" - going for multiple layers with sand, or a snake complete with head and hissing tail etc.

Of course, having watched the end of "Lego Masters" - humbling. Though it makes me think it must be a very different experience playing with a vast supply of well-sorted Lego - for most kids, it's a resource management game (actually reading the interviews with some of the contestants, you could notice that some had much more Lego Privilege than others...) Semi-serious Kondo/Shinto question: when you thank something for its service and then discard it - what happens to it? Like, she talks of the unhappiness objects have when they're sitting, being unused and being clutter, but when you thank it to let it go, then what? Does it reflect a kind of animism that is basically a reflection of the human's life energy, and so when you move an object out, that spirit goes away? Or maybe the more nostalgic idea is that the object becomes inanimate and the spirit it held is free to go off? Or is that spirit just trapped in there, moldering away in some landfill? Tonight I'll be leading a discussion at my UU reading group based on Sam Harris' Waking Up Podcast #119: Hidden Motives, a conversation with Robin Hanson.

One quote I remember liking was this:

Try to live your lives so that you don't have to rely TOO much on things that might not be true. One way, is honestly, just have fewer opinions on things. We're in a society where there's this norm that you're supposed to have an opinion on half of everything you hear. And just don't do that. Just be agnostic about things you haven't looked into, pick your specialty, learn about a few things and know that well, and then tell other people what you know and find somebody you can roughly trust on the other things, but stop having so many opinions.

(around 1:14:30)

That appeals to my desire for equanimity- living a life of constant helpless outrage is rough on a system, and I'm sad at seeing so much of that among my friends. On the other hand I contrast this stance with the adage "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."

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NY Times on the Restaurant Expediter as a criticial role - I've never worked in a restaurant, and sometimes I get reminded it must be so much more complex than I realize. I've never really cooked, but I've seen people try to time out multiple dishes for a Thanksgiving meal, say - this must be that times a dozen. Plus, the need to keep calm and collected during times if crazy stress reminds me of the airline pilot / flight controller thing I posted the other day...

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I love the graphic design of the names on this...

Yeesh, pretty bleak talk for a mattress store

(I enjoy macabre humor, but I was saw this looking up from Mindy Fried's book about getting appropriate assisted living care for her 90-something father- so I think I also got a subtext "so if you care about your elderly parent at all YOU'LL BUY BERNIE AND PHYLS YOU JERK")

"You know- I do understand that I'm not a real bear. "
"Mm-hmm"
"But I am - I know what I am... I am what I am!"
"Well, that's true. We all are, what we are."
"But I'm a real puppet!"

From this 1979 camera test for the Muppet Movie with Frank Oz and Jim Henson riffing existentially. (Later it's Miss Piggy instead of Kermit.)

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Real World Bulldozer Fight.:

These seems like it would be an awesome sport, or videogame.

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Boston's Old Combat Zone-- and I thought that Times Square was the model for getting boring and Disney-fied... A plus sign + is two minus signs - - stuck together. Which makes sense, because X - (-Y) is the same as X + Y. I tend to be an "angsty" programmer... I get up and walk around and think a lot, and absent-mindedly, or semi-compulsively, drink whatever beverage is at hand. For this reason it occurs to me that having cans of lite beer at said hand might not be such a great idea for continued programming. In other news, yesterday I made the call to bring Emma's discomfort and weakness to an end. It was sad but less wrenching than in previous weeks when the right course of action was less obvious; even though she seemed to perk up a few days ago (probably a side effect of not making her take meds), yesterday she couldn't even hold up her head properly, though she enjoyed a bowl of tuna I gave her an hour before her final trip to the vet.

Emma was a fine cat. I really appreciate that she liked being pet but wasn't really a lap cat, so she'd keep company and then enjoy the petting and attention when the human was willing/able to give it. (I never knew her during her fat cat days with Amber and Karen and David -- too me she was always a skinny old lady.)

This photo, the final photo with her, tries to show off another one of her lovely features: she had terrific two tone fur, darker grey towards the end, lighter towards the roots. It made it so pretty!

RIP Emma. You were a sweet old cat.

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I'm kind of worried this will bring Russia and the USA closer together, in a shared populist loathing of Chechnya.

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Again to paraphrase some dude on twitter- the Elvis impersonator who tried to poison the President is the 10th craziest story this week

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Meet the 28-Year-Old Grad Student Who Just Shook the Global Austerity Movement This is an awesome story. Go Evergreen and UMass Amherset!!! Sometimes just paying attention is enough. (I guess economics is pretty far from being sufficiently "peer reviewed")

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We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it -- and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again -- and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.

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Getting iTunes to keep ratings and metadata when moving to a new machine is like pulling teeth. Hack the XML-- maybe THAT will "just work" So Anna Anthropy has written a book, Rise of the Videogame Zinesters. As you might guess from the subtitle ("How Freaks, Normals, Amateurs, Artists, Dreamers, Drop-outs, Queers, Housewives, and People Like You Are Taking Back an Art Form") the book is a rallying cry for the idea that everyone should make games.

I liked the book a lot, but there was a point of emphasis that didn't resonate for me, and I decided to try to put my response into game form. Actually, I was inspired to write not one, not two, but THREE games! I present the "Pr3vent Trilogy: DESPERADO DORIS, PEACEMAKER, and NERD NEEDS IDEA, BADLY". You can play any one you want, and I hope you pay attention to its message, whichever one you choose:


OK, so what's this about?

In her book Anthropy writes about the game: Calamity Annie (which is terrific btw, and you should go download and play it immediately)

There's a videogame about a dyke who convinces her girlfriend to stop drinking. Mainstream gamer culture by and large does not know about this game. I know about this game because I made it.

The thing is I was lucky enough to be a playtester for this game (though admittedly never hunkered down to get good enough at it to see the plot conclude) but if someone asked me what it was "about", I would have said it was about gunfighting (the primary "play mechanic" is a very clever translation of the good 'ol Western gunduel into mouse-and-screen form, where you have to keep your mouse-driven crosshairs holstered 'til it's time to draw.) The story was a nice touch, but at the time I considered it mere "flavor text", the stuff that often adds layers of meaning to a game, but could be taken away or radically modified without changing the game's core.

In the book though Anthropy emphasizes the story-telling aspect of game-making and she has lead by example (her very personal dys4ia- another game you should play online right now, and this one you don't even have to download, just play online) but as a gamemaker, I just want to say: it's ok if the story is an afterthought, and it's valid when the purpose of making a game is to explore gameplay rather than to model to an external theme. My impression from reading the book, especially the lovely and poetic section What to Make a Game About? which begins

Your dog, your cat, your child, your boyfriend, your girlfriend, your mother, your father, your grandmother, your friends, your imaginary friends, your summer vacation, your winter in the mountains, your childhood home, your current home, your future home, your first job, your worst job, the job you wish you had.

and continues for 10 more paragraphs and well over 100 more suggestions, is that she considers this central to the gamemaking mandate, and I'd just like to remind folks: it's ok if your game isn't "about" much of anything at all. (Personally, this is why I think videogames are interesting-- you can tell stories in many media, but only with videogames can you make real time, viscerally pleasing interactions.)

So, that off my chest, I want to ramble about one more thing: this book talks a lot about how gamemaking is a possibility for nearly everyone, and that you can make many fine games and tell many crucial stories as a lone auteur, or with the help of a few friends-- and I know the author's disdain for most big-budget "AAA" titles. But still, I have to grapple with the limitations of the tools the amateur has... there are certain kinds of game experience that are still far removed from what an individual can make on their own. In particular, there is a certain thrill and meaning present in games that strive for "living breathing worlds", ones that can put a player in a world close enough to our own that the empowerment ("I can fly!", for example) and differences (the permission to have a casual disregard for life and limb and property, for example) have greater resonance. These games have something you can feel in your gut in a way you won't with a retro, 2D, or otherwise iconically presented game.

I was trying to think of where the worlds of what an amateur can do and full, rich worlds overlap. The mod-ing community comes to mind: people who rip into the binary guts of, say, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and make it more their own. If I try to envision a more general purpose "gameworld construction kit", something with the open-ness of ZZT but a world more like our own, it ends up looking a bit like "Second Life" which as far as I can tell is the most dedicated attempt to make Cyberspace and VR as presented in 80s and 90s cyberpunk a reality. I've never gotten into that realm, though I appreciate how it has been open to people creating in it, and sometimes even being financially rewarded for their creative efforts. (Though in practice I think the appeal is more for people who really dig creating an alternate persona for themselves than for 3D-physics junkies like me.)

Anyway, go get this book, and then go make some games!

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Life is an illusion, but an illusion we must take seriously.

-Most recent addition to my music collection. I like the lowrent goofy fun of the video

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Reminder that rich plutocracy is 3rd world sign- RT @screwjaw U.S. Downgraded to 3rd World Nation

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A great walk through the odds and awesomes of Javascript. Some clumsy examples, but worthwhile: JavaScript Garden http://j.mp/f0Hbed

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I hope that the sequel to Scribblenauts lets me write "A better game than this" so I can create the Game Singularity.

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me in 2001: I wonder what kind of graphics games will have in 10 years! me in 2011: I wonder what kind of graphics games have these days...

3 flavors of geekness:
C=64 retro game geeks! What makes it kind of cool is if you think of it as "The Matrix" of the C=64 -- being able to peek at all the numbers behind the world of the game, in real time...


Disney Geeks!

Finally for the gadget geeks... what's thought to be the next iPhone... (more videos and details at the link)

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http://www.slate.com/id/2250663/ - the odd parallels between tampon and cigarette ads...

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http://www.mycareercloud.com - my new team is beta-ing an app to help kids 13-18 think about career options...let me know what you think!

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From Cultivated Play: Farmville :

Even Zynga's designers seem well aware that their game is repetitive and shallow. As you advance through Farmville, you begin earning rewards that allow you to play Farmville less. Harvesting machines let you click four squares at once, and barns and coops let you manage groups of animals simultaneously, saving you hundreds of tedious mouse-clicks. In other words, the more you play Farmville the less you have to play Farmville. For such a popular game, this seems suspicious.

Heh. Wish I understood the draw of this kind of game better, maybe I could make money.

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You know, Dunkin Donuts iced tea is really good and fresh-tasting. Trying to get away from gunky sweeteners, this might be the stuff.

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"I solved all the girls," he whispered at me, wide-eyed, nostrils flaring, "by induction."

Yesterday I made a Java Toy in honor of the Klik of the Month Klub #22:

SMASHENFREUDE The Joy of Smashing

Knock the pyramid of bricks down (each brick beneath the level of the table) in order to... get a bigger pyramid of bricks to knock down! I didn't have time to add in a timer or score system, or the arrows showing where bricks might still by flying through the air.

This drew heavily on my experience at the OLPC Physics Game Jam, and the code itself is mostly ripped up and remixed JBox2D demo code...

(I can't believe the word didn't exist on Google before now! I might have to make more and more extensive toys and games around the concept.)

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Quidditch tourney with BU, Middlebury, UMass, Emerson tomorrow? They do know it's imaginary? Or at least, damn difficult to get flying brooms.

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I'm getting jaded - a new desktop PC is barely worth a twitter now not like http://kirk.is/2006/05/02/ - worried that with a fastish PC I'll now code java toys for computers that are as fast... One idea springing from a greekish outlook is that communication channels should be as permanent as possible... you never know who you might forget to tell about a new email address or phone number, or what old one someone researching how to contact you might find. (And there is a certain delight in finding an old email address on some forgotten website or Usenet posting that gets a response.)

So it's with a heavy heart that I'm dropping "catchall"s for my domains. For over a decade, I've been happy to be able to cavalierly say "anything @ kisrael.com gets to me, so use whatever you like". Dylan is the only one I know who tried playing with that, but in practice it was harder to explain than just giving a normal email address, so I gave it up.

For a long time, I've weathered a storm of spam, since if they tried a "dictionary" style attack, sending to host of random usernames at my domain hoping to get a match, they all went to the same place. More troublesome are those moral-less, scuzzball, vile, scabrous, cowardly greedmonkeys who make their Spam look like it came from my domain, since then I would also get a host of bounces, and even the occasional plaintive handcrafted "please don't send spam here" message. (The scary part of this change is knowing that this will still go on, I just won't see it.)

The problem with this is the number of email aliases I've used. For a while I thought of trying to track spam by using a special address for every site, like if I posted to "msn.com" (not that I would) I would use the address "msn.com@alienbill.com". I never extracted much useful information from doing this (except that newyorkerforum seems to have been harvested by the spammers pretty badly) and now it means there might be some accounts I won't hear from again. (The other problem was talking to people on the phone, when I tried to tell someone from the company "Foobar" that my email address was "Foobar.com at alienbill.com", it would sound like I was confused about how email works.)

So, starting fairly soon, these are the only email usernames that will work for me:

kirk
k
KirkIsrael
kisrael
kirkjerk
kli
kirkles

web

loveblender.com
myspace.com
evite.com
netflix.com
paypal.com
wheresgeorge.com
phpwebhosting.com

Le Sigh. I hate Spammers so very much.

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Game History of the Moment
Making the rounds is some insider information about the planned Sequels to the Hitchhiker's Guide text adventure. There are some objections to the publication of private, in-company email but it's still fascinating to read, and the site includes a semi-playable prototype of the game.

Ah, the joy of Liberal Guilt: I've started taking my daily coffee without milk, just to see if I feel better with less dairy. But if the Dunkin Donuts worker is African-American, I have to admit I catch myself before asking for it "black".

The sweetener issue comes into play too. "Black with sugar" sounds like a pickup line. Maybe "Black, an Equal" is a more positive message.

Or I'll just stick with saying "no milk".

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Newsquote and Links of the Moment

But defining the current surge as a "Plan A" is a dangerously dishonest move that ignores the history of the Iraq war to date. In fact, since 2003, we have run through at least six plans, none of which has succeeded. The Petraeus plan is something more akin to Plan F—truly, the last Hail Mary play in the fourth quarter. And if it fails, then we better start considering Plan G, also known as "Get out of Iraq."

Slate has had some interesting stuff lately. I enjoyed the gusto Blogging the Bible displayed for the book of Solomon, and today's meditation on the SkyMall's SnacDaddy product as a message about American culture is not to be missed. (In response to the SnacDaddy's promise to hide the discarded bones and how "your mess is kept out of sight while the wings keep coming.": "Thank God, because as everyone knows, looking at chicken bones after having eaten chicken parts can result in devastating moments of existential doubt: I too will become nothing more than bare wing bones someday. Kinda Beckett-like.")

Game and Map of the Moment

--I made this map playing through INVADER... you play a little lost Space Invader trying to get home, with only John Wu-style dual-wielded laser guns for protection. It's a lovely short story of a homebrew retrogame, a great way to spend an evening. It has an interesting mechanic where you can only shoot sideways, sports finely-tuned boards where you can just barely squeak by, and a forgiving nature where you can keep trying a level 'til you get it. It's Windows-only (and a few PCs seem to have trouble with it and its DirectX nature... plus sometimes it take a bit to load after you start it up) but it's a great download (headed by the same gal who did the Crossroads page I linked to a few days back...she may also be plotting a sequel to that.)

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Anecdote of the Moment
I gave Ksenia a lift to the T this morning. Since I'm going to my yoga class after work, I was carrying my PJ-style pants I wear for that. She said "Nice Pants". I was going to suggest that she follow that up with the rest of that pick-up line, "bet they'd look great on my bedroom floor!" but then I realized, no, she's already seen these pants on the bedroom floor... along with too many other clothes, especially when we let the laundry go to long, and to be honest they don't look all that great there.

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Video of the Moment
Via boingboing, India Traffic...wow.

Project of the Moment
Lately I've been lax in charging my cellphone, and I realized that that might partially be due to not having a "cradle" for it...it seems like a small thing but being able to plop a phone into a handy little throne for it is a lot easier than fiddling with a wire and plug. So I thought I'd haul out my legos, too long dormant, and get buildin', just a kind of wrapper for the wire I already had.

This is what the table I dumped my Lego bin onto on looks like. I do have a lot of Legos. It looks more impressive in real life, I think, because it's a deep layer for pretty much the whole thing. This is one of the first times I decided to go with a table top as work space rather than the traditional floor...it might've been a mistake. Legos are falling off in all directions. By the way, I'm sure there are Lego lawyers who wish I would call them "Lego bricks" rather than "Legos". Well, nyah, that's not how Lego works, but as long as you keep your quality edge you can still have your niche over junk like Mega Blox even if your name gets "Kleenexed/Xeroxed".

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Funny of the Moment

Q. "How's your wife?"
A. "Compared to what?"

Handyman of the Moment

I was delighted with how well my hacked up closet rod solution came out: rather than the very-breakable wall attachments in the plaster, I put 'em across some modular storage from Bed Bath and Beyond. $45 to make 4 stacks of 3 to put the 2 rods in. Plus, my cousin Ivan and I did SO much yardwork, like 15 or 16 yardbags full.

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Meme of the Moment
Memepool linked to this article on personal ads, as well as this kind of odd Supermodel Personals parody site. "It's so fun when you're pretty and go grocery shopping. You can laugh and make fun of everything, and race the carts the around, and take 100 items to the express lane, and everyone thinks it's cute and endearing instead of obnoxious and stupid."

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Articles of the Moment
Slate with good articles on Osama's "offer of truce": William Saletan argues that it's just a power play, and Lee Smith on how much trouble our government has in moving beyond the Cold War-like "single organization" mentality.

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Enigma of the Moment
Machine of Mystery! How very "Myst" like...

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More Housework of the Moment
So Peterman thought with a title like "Handyman Kirk" more photos were in order.

You know, in general housework isn't quite as bad as I tend to remember, it is relatively satisfying...the trouble is every task goes on longer than you want it to, and it really helps to do it with a buddy. Half of why I bribed Ivan to help out was for the company...

Steps Before

Steps After (still drying) (Thanks Peterman!)

Bags o' Yard Waste Ahoy (Thanks Ivan!)

Joke of the Moment
I've started making my own ice coffee pretty much every morning. (I've already written about my new found admiration for the power of ice...) It saves me a buck or two, and the quality is more consistent. Anyway, lately every morning it makes me think of this joke:

"Waitress, this coffee is awful! It tastes like mud!"
"Well, it was just ground this morning..."

Har!

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Link of the Moment
Block Death: A Museum of Horrors where Lego minifigs meet their untimely demises. Be sure to use the little arrows to view the scenes from different angles (and/or moments in time.) Those poor little yellow dudes hardly ever know what hits 'em.

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Small Business of the Moment
Via Bill, Would you pay a buck to see one million toothpicks? I would! This is a really cool idea.
I remember a book my sixth grade math teacher had, with a thousand pages of a thousand dots each, with many important numeric milestones and world records on the way to a million labeled. But with the toothpicks, you can see every one at once, and that really is something. Quote of the Moment

An astronaut with diarrhea would-- w--... You don't want an astronaut with diarrhea.

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Link of the Moment
Is this our Ranjit, of Wheatish Skin Color and Good Teeth Align? Mmmm, probably not. But if every visitor to this page today followed that link, its hit-counter will double! Decided to try to cut back on my cussing. It's just too easy a mode of speech, and then your swears are less effective when you really need them.

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Link of the Moment
Stick Figure Kung Fu Theater -- really fantastic! I love how there are controls to take it frame by frame as well. Be warned though, the site its on is known for it's raunchy and really horrifying content, and some of the banner ads on that page might not be appropriate for most audiences. (I'll let you figure what audiences is would be appropriate for.)