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Never forget it was the Patriot movements that took down the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma, killing 168 including 19 kids.

That night he dreamed of Hettie, and like he often did in the evenings when she was alive, he told her the titles of sermons he planned to preach one day, which usually amused her, since he always had the titles but never the content: "God Bless the Cow," and "I Thank Him for the Corn," and "'Boo!' Said the Chicken."

Read in my Antiracism Reading Group. Very Damon Runyon-like energy in the first part: lots of action but told in a third hand kind of way, among a broadly painted community with brilliant nicknames.

At one particularly fraught point there's another bit where the main character, a Black man, talks about how the white man sought to crush minds and assert power over other's minds as well as bodies, but then says “But then again, I can’t rightly say that if a colored man was in a position of power, he wouldn’t be the same.” Now, that alternate universe isn't one we actually live in, and we can't stop fighting racism just because we suspect things might also be bad were the "Guns, Germs, & Steel" type-tables turned.

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Boston Pride is disbanding itself.

Pride For The People has been after them with rallying a boycott for a while, a note from them from this past February to a band I help manage that have marched with them said:

"A growing coalition of LGBTQ+ groups, including Trans Resistance, Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition, Urban Pride, the Center for Black Equity, Boston Black Pride, Boston Dyke March, and Pride for the People are calling for a boycott of Boston Pride 2021. We are asking that LGBTQ+ organizations who are committed to taking concrete action to end structural racism and white-centeredness stand in solidarity with us during this historic moment."

Torn as usual. My concerns for representation for all is balanced by a fear of Liberal Circular Firing Squads, where a potential ally becomes an enemy because it's not as strong of an ally on a particular theme as other groups think it could/should be.

It's easier to kick a barn down than to build one up. (not to disparage the thoughtfulness and organization that applied pressure in this case) But we should also celebrate when an entrenched structure is razed. I hope something good rises from it.

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Scottish distillery tour guide doesn't give a fuck pic.twitter.com/WpxiuaywBz

— Eleanor Morton (@EleanorMorton) July 6, 2021

A decade and a half ago, Lego's "Spybotics" line sponsored Gamelab in making "Spybotics: The Nightfall Incident". I really liked this game, and even made a FAQ for it.

The other week a person named Patrick Pan contacted me - he made a loving and detailed recreation called "The Nightfall Incident". (It was pretty easy to remove the Lego/Spybotics connection which was extremely superficial)

The game is great - as I described it back then

It's a simple wargame in a puzzle game's clothing, with elements of Intellivision's SNAFU (kind of like "Tron Lightcycle") and Pokemon's collecting and battles to boot.

He gifted me a copy in appreciation of my FAQ, but having played through it again I know it's well worth the $5!

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Walking takes longer...than any other known form of locomotion except crawling. Thus it stretches time and prolongs life. Life is already too short to waste on speed.

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Humans might forget their dreams so quickly in order to not mix them up with real memories

That's a pretty good point! Two decades in, I'm in a retrospective mood and I've been thinking about what blogging means...

The term "weblog" was coined by Jorn Barger on 17 December 1997. The short form, "blog," was coined by Peter Merholz, who jokingly broke the word weblog into the phrase we blog in the sidebar of his blog Peterme.com in April or May 1999.

Thinking about it, I guess "blogging" can encapsulate many or all of many different kind of activities:

• Keeping a commonplace book - a place to jot down quotes with commentary. On the web this can expand to images, videos, and links. (Though external URLs are sadly prone to going defunct over time.) This is the single most important task of my blog, and for 4 years before my blog I kept one on my palm pilot. Currently I really enjoy how I can dig up the exact wording and correct attribution of any half-remembered quote.
• Scrapbooking - this is me, this my life, here are some photos.. Months slip into years slip into decades, and this is an excellent way of countering some of that. (Probably the best of this for my site is at tag/photos)
• Journaling - in the writing of essays sense. In my twenties I was aware there was a lot about my motivations I didn't grasp - to quote a coworker teasing me: "Kirk is his own Enigma- 'I just don't understand myself'" Decades later, I've figured some of that out. (A lot of that stuff, and other general interest stuff, at /tag/ramble)
• Gallery Making - for creative folk, it's nice to have a place to show off your stuff, and if you do it on the regular, a blog might make sense. (I don't, so I tend to put stuff at alienbill.com, though often I would put the same stuff I post at toys.alienbill.com embedded as blog entries.)
• Social Clubbing - before the rise of social media, blogs' comment sections were a place to hang out. From 2004-2010 or so my site was a bit of a community hub. Also for a while I had a sidebar mini-blog for my friend Dylan, later opened up to be the sidebar of the people.
• "Dear Diary"-ing - I have a private diary webpage I keep to myself, but it's super-boring anyway. (Folks like David Sedaris or Carrie Fisher have published excerpts from their journals, and they are much better at that kind of experience-based writing than I am.)
• Topical Writing - of course many blogs have a single theme, like tech or cars or what their company is up to or what not. I have a separate "developer blog" Kirkdev - the voice there is "notes to my future self that others may find useful", but other blogs take a more authoritative stance.

There's a lot of overlap there, but it's amazing how versatile a medium "Blogging" is.

Social Media covers many of those same outlets for many people. A while back I wrote on The Facebook:

But Facebook banks on one brilliant idea, one other sites leverage as well: empowering users to assemble a collated page/wall/feed of content from people the user finds interesting. Sites using this trick -- Tumblr, LiveJournal, Twitter, Instagram and FB all had different hooks (visual collectors, diarists, pithy bon mot makers, snapshotters, and people you know, respectively) and of all of those FB's "people you know in real life" seems to be the most compelling in a universal kind of way.

Those are all legit outlets, but I am wary at having my content potentially lost to corporate mishandling or malfeasance . I come from the DIY oldschool - a group privileged enough to have the knowledge and freetime and funds to build the tools we use to post stuff. The barrier to entry is high there, but there's almost total control over the results. But then again I end up mirroring nearly everything I post on my blog on Facebook, because that's the only way I have of getting feedback. (And it hurts when you realize how few people any individual post gets put in front of... feels weird to have to sort-of go viral just to get a piece of content in front of the majority of your friends and family)

The other element is the private/public aspect. For many folks, many of those categories list, especially "Dear-Diarying", Commonplace Booking, and Scrapbooking, might be better served with private tools - maybe even paper! Personally I've always been more interested in attention and knowledge sharing than privacy, but I know different people manage that balance differently.

(Last year kottke collected 3 interesting essays, Did blogs ruin the web? Or did the web ruin blogs? - worth checking out.) RIP Ross Perot. I sometimes wonder if his 1992 campaign denied re-election to the elder Bush, and if the backlash about losing what was "rightfully" theirs spurred the "Contract With America" (brilliant piece of propaganda, that) and from there it's all been more and more unlikely extreme swings. Also in a day and age where executives seem unworldly tall, a 5'5" guy becoming a self-made billionaire is a good story.

I didn't realize until today that 'Weird' Al was a parody of normal ('Norm' Al). I'm 31 years old.

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"You can tell when a film was made by how its hero handles a hat. Actors from a hat generation tend to take off their hats on the appropriate occasions, and if they don't, there's usually an implication, like an implication of purpose."
"Whenever an actor from a hat generation sets his hat on a table or a chair, he does so with the crown facing down, so as not to bend the brim. Whenever an actor sets his hat brim down, crown up, I can tell he's from a no-hat generation, I can tell he's young, and I get depressed. I don't like being reminded that an actor's an actor."

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Via work Slack, Lara Hogan on First One on One Questions

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Is it impossible to imagine a loud noise so well that it hurts your ears?

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My comment on this tumblr post (I hardly ever comment on tumblr)
Having true AI and knowing if we should give it the rights we give other sentient creatures is going to be problematic! Such a big chunk of the assumptions we make about where the value of human life comes from will likely not be true (like a being is unique, and can't be duplicated; a being is mortal; a being takes a lot resources to make and to sustain and therefore is a "sunk cost", a being is somewhere in this bell curve of general problem solving intelligence...) Apropos of nearly nothing, I was thinking about how way back in sixth grade (so, like, 1986 or so) one of my fellow students taught me this "class song" - he might have signed a yearbook or something with it...

Party hardy / Rock and Roll
Drink a bottle / Smoke a bowl
Love is fun / Sex is too
We're the Class of '92!

That was... pretty foresightful for sixth graders to come up with? Though maybe it was just a response to "Party Hearty, rock and roll, drink bacardi, smoke a bowl, Life if good, lets get our kicks, cuz we're the class of 86!!" (Also, this song but I think it's a lot more recent?

I got to thinking of a few other rhymes like that. Sedaris mentioned a bumpersticker I also remember from way back when:

Bumper to Bumper
Butt to Butt
Get Off My Ass
You Crazy Nut!

.Another one I once saw scratched on a pier at a Cleveland / Lake Erie park:

Eric was here
But now he's gone
His last few words
were "party on!"
Those who knew him,
knew him well.
Those who didn't
can go to hell!

I remember one of my fellow counselors mentioning that was a pretty good one, as far as the genre goes.

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Nice technical breakdown of how Mega Man 2's music does what it does. I only barely have enough mojo to follow the chord stuff, but I was happy as always to see the blues scale there.

I really broke my non-tuba bass clef reading abilities by the way I self-taught transposition, and it's not getting better these days since I'm more likely to be told the name of the chord - but when I see a Bb written in bass clef, I still think of it as "C".

Maybe I should try to pick up guitar or some chord-centric thing to widen my musical understanding.

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Last year for my Commodore 64 Gazette Galore! project I did a line-by-line analysis of Geza Lucz's type-in game Flood. Jim Gerrie ported it to the TRS-80 Micro Color Computer:

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Oh yeah, see you at JP Porchfest! I'm playing with School of Honk, JP Honk, and Porch-i-Oke
Hopefully my website will once again withstand the onslaught! I actually made it so band photos are handled more efficiently. Also the mobile version of the website shows a locator where you are.

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Spent the first two days home kind of free-falling from the meds / lack of meds and the paralyzing realization that nothing matters. Luckily that was followed by the motivating revelation that nothing matters.

June was pretty decent for new music for me. If you check out nothing else, look at Super Spice Bros 2.

• Super Spice Bros 2 (Old Spice) This is advertising turned up to way beyond 11. At least 15 or 16. I love the little touches in it.

Hip Hop / Electronic:

• Danger (Been So Long) (Mystikal featuring Nivea) John Oliver sampled the "DAAAANGER!" refrain. I just love Mystikal's delivery, Louis Armstrong meets Pigmeat Markham meets... I don't even know.
• Run (Radio Edit) [feat. Wretch 32] (Baby Blue) Ah, the appeal of british-accented women rappers.
• House Party (feat. B-Case & U-Jean) (DJ Antoine & Mad Mark) Played on the Atlantic City Board Walk. Like the way the bass kicks in around 1:38.
• Get Busy (Sean Paul) Dance Hall goofiness.

Indie and Country:

• Wicked Ones (DOROTHY) Some of that epic / western-tinged stuff
• Wasp Nest (The National) Mellow, sad song. The refrain "you're a wasp nest" is weirdly visceral and evocative.
• Suite: Judy Blue Eyes (Crosby, Stills & Nash) Years ago I recorded the quote "Fear is the lock, and laughter the key, to your heart". Now I realize this was what Weird Al Was parodying in Mission Statement
• Aw Naw (Chris Young) My Aunt introduced me to this fun dumb country song. Aw Naw != "Aw HELL Nah".
• Default (Django Django) Very Phoenix-like Indie stuff.

Funk and Instrumental:

• Sweet Dreams Are Made of This (The Soul Rebels) My college A cappella group covered this, and the brass version is sweet.
• They Will Know We Are Christians (Mosaic) I think once upon a time I had a cassette with the Star Lake Men's Chorus doing a kick butt version of this song, with a tight drum and piano. This is as close as I could find. I think it's also the best aspiration for Christianity.
• Our God Is an Awesome God (Rich Mullins) Another song from my more religious youth. This isn't the version I grabbed, which also has Organ, but it's short and powerful and fun to harmonize to.
• Solid (Soulive) Instrumental, reminds me a bit of Booker T & The M.G.s - used as bumper music on WNYC
• I Believe In Miracles (Jackson Sisters) I think the Beastie Boys sampled from this... great 70s funk

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via Gizmodo, housing values across the USA. I love how this looks like a beating heart energized by where people want to live.

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Fascinating post-exit interview with a "Blue Man". We've gotten kind of used to them, but they've really assembled an amazing thing.

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In defense of "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. That was a fun show.

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"dont say 'man up' say 'level up' because video games are cooler than gender binary"

2019 update: I think 'power up' would maybe be better. though ambiguous, a bit. 'use a power up'?

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SO IT TURNS OUT Crown Royal on the rocks is kind of gross but Crown Royal neat alternating with Skinny Cow Chocolate Truffle popsicles is sort of awesome. WHO KNEW???

"What did the doctor say?"
"That I'm healthy, and that I should come in for a physical every year from now on."
"He just wants your money."
"That's fine! I don't mind my doctor having a profit motive to keep me alive."

Hindsight is fifty-fifty.

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At a prim and proper public garden named Minnewater Park, courting couples ambled arm in arm between willows, banksia roses, and chaperones. Blind, emaciated fiddler performed for coins. Now he could play. Requested "Bonsoir, Paris" and he performed with such élan I pressed a crisp five-franc note into his hand. He removed his dark glasses, checked the watermark, invoked his pet saint's name, gathered his coppers, and scarpered through the flower beds, laughing like a madcap. Whoever opined "Money can't buy you happiness" obviously had far too much of the stuff.

--via kottke, who points out "the fade out on the tiny Challenger square is surprisingly affecting."

What a bummer that no one has been out of low earth orbit for a loooong time.

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Google "The St. Petersburg Paradox" -- it seems to point out an issue with probability analysis.

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The show Portlandia inspired us to look at maps on iPad-- Amber discovered Portland OR boasts "NW East St". Nice!
--via thepoke.co.uk, "time well wasted"

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The first nonstop flight between New York and Paris was 42 years before man landed on the moon which was 42 years ago this year.

--Not sure if that's *super* slow motion, but still kinda cool as the World Cup builds to its conclusion... (2019 UPDATE: not sure exactly what original video was, maybe something similar to this)

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Sweet, Nike registered the trademark "TEE SHIRT FOR YOUR LEGS" last month. Can't wait! #fashionnews

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Rethinking Reagan - kind of a Dove who knew when (and when not) to sound like a Hawk. The trouble with Neo-cons is they believe the Hawk and plan wars accordingly.

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I must not be understood to mean that [interviewers] ever come consciously to destroy or are aware afterward that they have destroyed; no, I think their attitude is more that of the cyclone, which comes with the gracious purpose of cooling off a sweltering village, and is not aware, afterward, that it has done that village anything but a favor.

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http://jayisgames.com/archives/2009/03/interaction_artist_games.php - forgot about a pretty decent dialog I had w/ Chris "Game-A-Day" DeLeon about games and their domain. --via Bill the Splut

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IS IT SO WRONG TO SNICKER EVERY TIME I HEAR ABOUT THE CHINESE "WIGGER" ETHNIC PROBLEMS?? Probably. Driving down to Virgina tonight to help mama mia move.

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Article of the Moment
Slate's Elizabeth Zierah writing on anosmia, losing your sense of smell. My dad suffered from this when he was hit with spinal meningitis. His first, guy-with-his-RN-degree diagnosis? "When you are struck with spinal meningitis, your farts don't smell!"

The article makes me realize how much I take it for granted, appreciate the ambient tapestry of scents that really form the backdrop of our lives. And the article mentioned how scary it is not to be able to do your own personal "sniff test"... maybe you're reeking but it's really hard to know. (They should sell some kind of gadget...)

Smell is funny, though... nebulous. Our vocabulary for scents is relatively limited, and while a scent can be enormously evocative it's often tough to pin down the pieces-parts of it.

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Logo of a Past Moment

--Old Logo for my current employer NOKIA! Love it.

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Bleh. Taking some photographic composition courses makes me look at some of my older snapshots with a harsher eye.

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IRS just sent me a notice for an upcoming check for $79.10. GWB, color me under-stimulated. So I'm heading to New Jersey for a few days, then I'll be back up here and try to organize my life and declutter a bit more. I'm tearing through my "scratchlog"... this site's editor app has a box, a scratch pad of sorts, that's meant to let me preview HTML before putting it in a real entry but sometimes I tend to leave things for the backlog there, or links that I want to remind myself to check out. So this week will clean that out.

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Steam Trek explores what Star Trek in the silent era of films might have been like.

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New York Magazine had a fascinating read The Profit Calculator explaining how various businesses... from cabbies and yoga studios all the way up to the Yankees and the city government... make money, what aspects are most and least profitable, etc.

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My friend Kate wrote a PDF on Best Practices for Web Developers. It's a pretty good read.

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Geektastic... some links to Gary Stasiuk's lovely artificial creature work, including the math behind simple movement and behaviour. I really need to read this more deeply and try to make some more interesting interactions

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--"Thou Shalt Always Kill" Ksenia's grandfather's senior residence has a feature that I am so jealous of: at the end of the hallway is a chute where household trash can be dropped and forgotten about. What a convenience! And just the visceral pleasure of giving your garbage a little bit of freefall before it's out of your life for good.

I've lived in a few houses with laundy chutes. Those were fun too.

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Quote of the Moment

I was in a restaurant and I ordered a chicken sandwich, but I don't think the waitress heard me because she said, "OK, how would you like your eggs, sir?" I tried to answer anyhow: "Incubated. And then raised. And then beheaded. And then plucked. And then cut up. And then put on a grill. And then put on a bun. Shit, it's gonna take a while. I do not have time. Scrambled. You fuckin' confused me."

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Swap of the Moment
So, the one red paperclip guy finally traded for a house, reaching his goal. Personally, I think trading a cube van for a snowmobile trip was a suspiciously good upgrade, and trading a KISS snowglobe for an afternoon with Alice Cooper is suspiciously bad, and that being topped by a speaking part in a Hollywood movie suspiciously good. So there you are.

Blast from the Past of the Moment

"Pierre A. von Kaenel" writes:
> "Simplify, simplify, simplify" - Thoreau

Shouldn't that be just "Simplify"?

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Amusement of the Moment
Yesterday a co-worker pointed out that, with Windows XP at least, you can set the wallpaper to an animated GIF and it will indeed animate. I don't know how long Windows has been doing this. (For some reason it doesn't work if you just right click on a web image and hit use as wallpaper, my usual method.)

Of course, a stretched or tiled animated image can be VERY annoying, and will use up like at least 1/3 of your processor. Still it can be amusing in small doses. Here's the technique:

1. Find a suitable image. For something neat but discrete I'd suggest my own small gif cinema. For big fun, the previously kisrael'd b3ta dicussion has a bunch of cool ones.
2. Right click on the animation and "Save Image As..." to someplace convenient on your local drive.
3. Right click on a blank part of the desktop, hit "Properties" and go to the "Desktop" tab.
4. "Browse" to the image and select it. Make sure to select "Tiled" "Centered" or "Stretched" along with the correct color. (white works well with most of those b3ta animations)

Enjoy! It can be very cool, very annoying, or even both! Cussing of the Moment

You know, Minister, I believe that in the long view of history, the British Empire will be remembered only for two things ... The game of soccer. And the expression 'fuck off.'

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Surfing of the Moment
So after yesterday's post about various car names, I decided to look for some Sluggo images. Not what I was looking for, but this sticker to the right caught my eye. It came from this cafepress page but my wandering mouse really enjoyed the animated Monsters by Kristen. (Also the sticker might be the right size and shape to cover up those stupid "kids might get smooshed by airbags! danger! danger!" warnings. Man, I hate how big and obnoxious and redolent-of-past-lawsuits those things are.)

Anyway, getting back to the "typical" Sluggo of Nancy and Sluggo fame, this is a very attractive page of clips from the comic strip. None of those seemed quite as cool as this cartoon though: Somehow this seemed like a good metaphor for how Mo and I dealt with each other. Live and learn.

Anyway, if I went with Sluggo as the name, I could try seeing if these magnets would stick to the back, put one on at a time 'til it got stolen.

Speaking of possibly stolen, 3 of 4 of the cheap plastic hubcaps I got are missing. Are they that crappy and fall-off-able? (They are just plasticky clip things, and it's not clear that the salesguy knew what he was doing when they put them on.) Or are they too easy to remove and tempting to "collectors"? (I do live near a school...) I actually kind of like the way the wheels look with no covers, but it is a bit on the ghetto side.

Anyway, yesterday's message board has suggested "Tetsuo" as being an appropriately Japanese name...the name is known here for the famous Anime film Akira. While the idea of being able to walk to my car mentally yelling "TETSUO!!!!" like they do in the movie is appealing, I am still worried about how Japanese-fanboi-ish the name might be.

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Random Geekery of the Moment
Thinking about joining the Scion life message board, just to see if, indeed, everyone who bothers joining that kind of board is into modding and pimping out their cars or if there are some utilitarians like me, and I was impressed by the Agreement Terms page...readable bullet items, and you have to click each one. I don't know if it helps, but it's a clever idea and implementation. Slogan of the Moment

Striving for excellence,
like a moth beating itself
to death on the side of a
light bulb.

This has been in the KHftCEA since 1998, but it's been going through my mind lately. Alas, only the "old site" still seems to be around, and it doesn't link to the other pages, like the pretty decent quotes page. I like the orange-tinted art.

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Article of the Moment
A Slate.com piece explains that the cable-shopping network QVC has consitently done better than Amazon.com. Which is a good point, but I disagree with the concluding paragraph "But QVC's advantage also lies in the overall shopping experience. In the end, watching QVC is a far richer and more satisfying event than shopping at Amazon.com". QVC is so...linear. They talk and talk and talk about one thing and if you don't care about that one thing, why the hell would you stick around long enough to see the next thing? Part of the problem, I suppose, is that I'm out of the demographic. I have to admit that a young-male technogadget show would be more likely to hold my attention, but still...I think in general, guys don't want to be sold to, they want to just get stuff. (Which is a long-recognized difference between (most) men and women in retail shopping, guys are much more goal-oriented and gals take more pleasure in the process.) Link of the 'Mo'ment
In honor of our one year anniversary, Mo and I finally got around to compiling all the mishaps and near disasters of our wedding, which is this month's Loveblender Feature. And that leads to the title for today's entry, it's...well, see, there's this roller coaster at Cedar Point in Ohio called "Disaster Transport", and they have this sign, see, pretending that it used to say "Dispatch Master Transport" but it looks like the first part of "Dis" of "Dispatch" and everything but the M of "Master" have fallen together, and that's the name of the coaster, get it? Oh, never mind.

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Quote of the Moment

Love is a feeling you feel when you're about to feel a feeling you never felt before.

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Politics of the Moment
CamWorld had two interesting articles yesterday...one was the National Post (of Canada) thinking that Dubya may be losing the benefit of the doubt. I think people will have to come to terms with the idea that ultimately, he is not a very good president, and having to lead through trying times is not a guarantee of greatness. There was also an Economist piece on a study by Arab cultures on why the Arab world is generally lagging.

I've been thinking that it's time to admit some cultures are broken, and this admission might permit some unpleasant things that we have to. The American culture is certainly broken, we're incredibly full of ourselves and want to dictate policy to the rest of the world. Arab culture is broken in many ways, including some that are dangerous to the rest of the world, and unfortunately I think that's going to justify some level of discrimination against members of it. If I had to guess I'd say the Europeans have it the least broken, but I'm not sure. Back from México... "Gracias, No", don't know how many times I said that to vendors there. Overall it was very good though.

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Quote of the Moment

When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in batallions.

At first I thought of that quote in terms of some of the airline hassles on the trip, but then I got back and found out my grandmother passed away (though that wasn't unexpected, but my mom thought that Grandma wouldn't have wanted us to skip a honeymoon for some old funeral), and another relative has been diagnosed with a tumor. Though the outlook isn't as bad as it could be.

Oy.

Anyway, I've actually collected a lot of quotes and ideas over the trip, so it should be a good next couple of weeks on this blog.

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Quote of the Moment

>Did our prayers shower blessings down?
Well let's see...Sandy prayed for a warm glow and the apt next to Janis went up in flames.

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News of the Moment
Hard to keep on news while in Mexico, but happy to see more people realize Bush just isn't doing a good job. I hope the dems put up a good canidate so we only have four years of this clown, or at least use his antics to improve their leads in the Senate and regain seats in the House.