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RIP two of my favorite sets of headphones - Skull Candy Navigator (with distinctive tortoise shell coloring) and V-Moda Crossfade M-80 with its snazzy red chevron.

Both have earcups where the black vinyl-ish cover of ear cushions leaves bits of itself on your face...

I still think no wireless headphone or earbud has the dignity of something with a cord. Headphones look like earmuffs, airpods look like you're sticking cigarettes in your ear, the semi-wireless buds I prefer (that turn into magetic-front-claspe necklace when not in use) look like a librarian's eyeglass chain.

Hello everyone, this is Donald Trump, hopefully your favorite president of all time, better than Lincoln, better than Washington, with an important announcement to make. I'm doing my first official Donald J Trump NFT collection, right here, right now.

I know folks on the left don't get how wink and nodding and in on the joke Trump fans like to be, but man, that's still fucking rich.

China is basically just a huge company, AFAICT

(in response to China is paying U.S. social media influencers to promote Beijing Winter Olympics and "good China-US relations")

"The past is gone, and cannot harm you anymore. And while the future is fast coming for you, it always flinches first and settles in as the gentle present" _are you kidding me_ this quote has propelled me through at least three emotional crises

I'm not usually a food glamour shot person but it seemed to make sense to do a log of the most interesting meals we ate in New Orleans... we tried to make our own food tour in terms of hitting most of New Orlean's most well-known specialties. I did a bit of devblogging about a mobile game I liked a lot lately, "I'm Ping Pong King". The other game I recently finished is at the other end of the complexity spectrum - "Just Cause 4" definitely feels rushed, has very repetitive missions, super-fiddly systems of territory take over and weapon configuration, and is mostly inferior to 3, but I had a good time with it. No other series I know equals the beautiful sense of motion granted by the protagonists combination of grappling hook, parachute, and "Squirrel Suit" gliding (skimming near the ground, shooting the grapple forward and then yanking back to get a bit more speed is straight out of a flying dream - assuming you don't comically misjudge and pull yourself headfirst into the ground or a tree or something.) Combine that with a ton of fun to steer and shoot vehicles, lots of props that explode in absurdly gratifying ways, and a new mechanic letting you strap a lifting balloon and/or a rocket booster to ANYTHING (or anybody) with often hilarious results, and it's a solid holiday game. (It also has one of the greatest easter eggs ever for any a-ha fan) It was interesting comparing Just Cause 4's Rico's abilities with the web-slinging in Spider-Man. The latter is set in a much more realized urban world, but you don't really control where you're firing your webs, just kind of steering around it. Plus I never used enough to get really comfortable with the combat...

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Another random rant nobody cares about: I've never been a huge fan of the Playstation controllers, while I admire the symmetry the thumbsticks never seemed super-comfortably placed and triangle/square/X/circle never stuck in my mind. In particular, I heard that in Japan, "O" means (roughly) "OK" and "X" means wrong, but when they regionalized it for the USA they made "X" be the default OK. For me, that will always feel badly placed, since X is on the bottom of the cross the buttons make, and I think "yes, approve, go" should be on the right side, indicating "forward" progress (in cultures that read left to right)

Also, it feels wrong to me that the L1/R1 are the smaller shoulder buttons, while L2/R2 are the bigger buttons - the bigger buttons are much more primary, I think, so the numbering will always feel backwards to me (in the same way I function better when my car and house keys are placed to make a kind of semantic sense with the layout of the doors.)

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@ademklevy :

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This page offers some variants of that last diagram... The Atlantic on how China is leading the way in listening out ofr extraterrestrial intelligence. With the powers that be in the USA demonstrating spectacular disinterest in the scientific way of understanding the world, we're ceding so much to the rest of the world.

Donald Trump's call for a moonshot not withstanding- to my biased eye it sounds like an unfunded mandate, and I also understand that the conservatives are much more interested in retrograde "Put America In Space" ambition than NASA's attempts to understand what we're doing on the planet all but 536 of us have been stuck on, lest they suggest it might be premature to screw this place over.

I guess the American model is putting all our eggs in the Tony Stark / Ayn Rand-hero type genius who manages to have big long-shot ambition despite the capitalist desire for quarterly profit, the most notable example being Elon Musk.

The Atlantic piece came out before word of `Oumuamua, an intringuingly shaped interstellar asteroid swinging our way. So far efforts to detect any sign of intelligent construction or signal have come to nothing, but it's one of the more provocative things we've seen, shades of Arthur C Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama...

Anyway, the piece ends with a musing on what evidence of alien intelligence would mean for humanity in a spiritual sense:

Even if no geopolitical strife ensued, humans would certainly experience a radical cultural transformation, as every belief system on Earth grappled with the bare fact of first contact. Buddhists would get off easy: Their faith already assumes an infinite universe of untold antiquity, its every corner alive with the vibrating energies of living beings. The Hindu cosmos is similarly grand and teeming. The Koran references Allah's "creation of the heavens and the earth, and the living creatures that He has scattered through them." Jews believe that God's power has no limits, certainly none that would restrain his creative powers to this planet's cosmically small surface.

Christianity might have it tougher. There is a debate in contemporary Christian theology as to whether Christ's salvation extends to every soul that exists in the wider universe, or whether the sin-tainted inhabitants of distant planets require their own divine interventions. The Vatican is especially keen to massage extraterrestrial life into its doctrine, perhaps sensing that another scientific revolution may be imminent. The shameful persecution of Galileo is still fresh in its long institutional memory.

Secular humanists won't be spared a sobering intellectual reckoning with first contact. Copernicus removed Earth from the center of the universe, and Darwin yanked humans down into the muck with the rest of the animal kingdom. But even within this framework, human beings have continued to regard ourselves as nature's pinnacle. We have continued treating "lower" creatures with great cruelty. We have marveled that existence itself was authored in such a way as to generate, from the simplest materials and axioms, beings like us. We have flattered ourselves that we are, in the words of Carl Sagan, "the universe's way of knowing itself." These are secular ways of saying we are made in the image of God.

The author is painting all these belief systems with an awfully wide brush! But I disagree especially with the take on humanism. I think the modern humanist views humans not as a pinnacle and certainly not as a goal - we take pride in seeming to be the only thing *in this neighborhood* capable of constructing complex culture and a model of the universe, but it has been a long dream of the science fiction that has inspired so many of us - our secular inspiring fables - that the universe has rolled the dice better elsewhere. And maybe those more advanced ones can help us out! (The secular view isn't that we're created in the image of God, unless maybe you say that we're all a hodge podge of steadily selecting beneficial traits from a chaotic, unpredictable blend.... hmm, that might be sort of true, after all...)

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In the wake of "Team Magic Unicorn" (the nextgen UI team) us stragglers formed "Team Cardboard Manatee" and today I decided to demarcate our territory with handcrafted wall art...

An artisanal authentic cardboard manatee. we don't know if there's real magic in the magic unicorn but the cardboard in the manatee is 100%

advent day 15

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New work laptop. A little larger than would be my preference but- more for stickers!

Admittedly it's cooler when stickers get acquired over time, but as I said yesterday "I fear I am akin to a tween when it comes to stickers"
advent day 15

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Tonight we had our last UU Covenant Group of the season/year, and I'm given my participation a rest, at least for a while.

Covenant groups are a special type of discussion group some UU churches run... they meet on a monthly basis, and often have a "check in", a reading, and then a go-round and discussion. I've been participating in my group for about a decade! And led it for maybe half of that (sometimes in a co-leader role) so letting go is a tough thing for me.

And appropriately, the final topic (as picked by one of the leaders of the other groups) was "Change". Purposeful change can be difficult for me, because it feels like it has to be either A. a refutation of my past self ("boy what was I thinking? good thing I'm so much smarter now") or B. Just a bad idea in general. (But of course, this is symptomatic of the all too human tendency to try to squish the grand diversity of life into a single spectrum of better/worse, and so be unable accept "different: better in some regards, worse in others".)

Several people in my group had a negative reaction to tonight's opening reading/quote:

We can't be afraid of change. You may feel very secure in the pond that you are in, but if you never venture out of it, you will never know that there is such a thing as an ocean, a sea. Holding onto something that is good for you now, may be the very reason why you don't have something better.

I was thinking about why that seems so problematic. Some of it is it's just insulting to one's personal history, like too much embracing of that "refutation of my past self" -- oh, stop digging here and start digging there - there's probably a whole gold mine right there you've just been too afraid to dig there, or stupid, or something.

So why is that gold mine so unlikely?

There's a kind of parody rap artist called MC Hawking, using a copy of physicist Stephen Hawking's electronic voice something to deliver science-related hiphop. His song entropy Entropy has this verse:

You ever drop an egg and on the floor you see it break?
You go and get a mop so you can clean up your mistake.
But did you ever stop to ponder why we know it's true,
if you drop a broken egg you will not get an egg that's new.

And why is that? The answer is entropy - I'm not qualified to explain it well, but the whole egg has more order; and in general, you have to put energy into something in order to counteract the tendency towards disorder and randomness.

And that's what the JoyBell quote is leaving out: all sorts of change IS possible- and it's important to remember that. But almost every change represents some kind of tradeoff, some kind of sacrifice: if anything was an obvious no-strings-attached win, we'd have been doing that already. But all these changes reflect some kind of sacrifice, some kind of cost. Which isn't saying net improvement isn't possible - but - the entropic universe being what it is - it will absolutely take the mindful application of effort and energy.

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Why can't I shake this image of a person with one of those zen garden desk toys, furiously scraping the tiny rake through the sand, shoving around the little rocks and muttering "Peace! Tranquility! Peace! Tranquility! GAH!" (2019 UPDATE: was I thinking of "TRANQUILITY NOW! TRANQUILITY NOW!" from Seinfeld?)
advent day 15

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I think snow-shoveling mornings are some of when I feel being a single guy the most, with neither the camaraderie of two people out there against the elements, nor someone welcoming you back in and maybe handing you something warm to drink.
advent day 15

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Ah, sweet alcohol. Like a true friend, you replace the anger with better, louder anger.

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When the process isn't good, the product is suspect.

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On my devblog: Image Magick, Notepad++ Macros, and a batch file for super quick bulk image trimming!

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Between NDAA and SOPA, everything kinda sucks.

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SOPA *AND* NDAA? DOESN'T CONGRESS REALIZE THE INTERNET IS FULL OF OUTRAGE?

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"Look, there's a chipotle."
"That used to be a Buck-A-Book."
"People don't read any more. They just eat burritos."

So, as promised (not that it's very interesting): thoughts on the Google Chrome Cr-48.

This is the main review I've read. Conceptually I dig the stark, uber-minimalist no-stickers-whatsoever case, but beside that, this thing seems as boring as possible. To quote the review:

I have to keep reminding myself of the OS' fundamental concept: a Chrome OS notebook is absolutely zero-percent different from any Windows, Mac OS, or Linux notebook running Google Chrome in fullscreen mode.

So, if my disdain for the Cr-48 is shortsighted, it would probably be because I'm downplaying the potential coolness of the Chrome App Store -- is it possible that this could become as intriguing as the Apple App Store? My guess is no... iDevice apps get a boost because they are touchscreen at their heart, and based on what I was saying yesterday, I think that's an important difference that will last even after the novelty has worn off.

So we have a boring, browser-only laptop: the difference is, this laptop is an experiment in Life on the Cloud: none of your files are stored locally, they live on the 'Net.

This seems like yet another attempt to make dumb terminals cool. And that is a misguided effort. To quote that review again:

But without a connection to the Internet, this cutting-edge machine had become little more than a Notebook-Shaped Object. The six or seven open browser tabs in front of me were just ghosts of webapps that joined the choir invisible as soon as they lost contact with their servers.

In other words, you have nothing with you. And not to sounds like a luddite, but people like to own things. Even with ebooks, your books feel like you kind of own them in a physical format. Thanks to DRM this a bit of an illusion, remember the uproar when Amazon "took back" copies of 1984? But there is something to it -- even offline in a tunnel, your titles are there for the reading.

(Similar with movies and shows -- now, through the relatively brief history of audio/visual entertainment, the time we've been "owning" shows is pretty brief - people went out to see "Gone with the Wind", waited at home for "I Love Lucy". In the '80s and '90s they could own a VHS of "Ferris Bueller Days Off", tape "Friends", DVR "Lost", and get a DVD of "Amelie"... with the rise of Netflix, we've regressed a bit, and streaming might become the preferred way of watching movies, but still, I think stuff like Blu-Ray will have a place as people want to own some physical thing.)

I dunno, maybe I'm overplaying the ownership aspect. I agree with Richard Stallman that it might be Careless Computing -- you are REALLY trusting these companies with your stuff. But when I think of the bulky stuff I keep on my main PC -- photos and music, I guess I could see a life depending on a Picassa and/or that long awaited "Cloud iTunes", and it would be livable -- though I think the absolute dependency on a robust connection is foolhardy. You know, for AT+T and other reasons there are many places my iPhone has no 'net connection. And my iPad is offline on the subway, and still fun.

The author of this article, though, would think I Just Don't Get It. John Brownlee writes:

Think of what Chrome OS represents: the bare minimum operating system necessary for tapping into the living ebb of the Internet. Google has polished this window thoroughly. Chrome OS is mindless to administer. The UI is uniform. Legacy support has been thrown out the window. It's immune to malware. Battery life is extreme. It's even immune to system failure; if your computer breaks, your operating system corrupts, all you've lost is the glass and a frame, and the world it conveys still exists outside it. All you need to do is find another window.

It's kind of a cool idea, but you know? I kind of do the same thing already. All the files I'm concerned with on my laptop, I keep in a folder: C:\data\ -- that's the folder that makes it "my" laptop, that's the directory I backup, and when I upgrade, or if something happened to that laptop, all I would have to do is go to that backup, and suddenly it's "my" machine again.

Brownlee is wicked enthusiastic about the idea of "Nothin' but Net". The most interesting part of his article was quoting Beatrice Warde's broadside: THIS IS
A PRINTING OFFICE
CROSSROADS OF CIVILIZATION
REFUGE OF ALL THE ARTS
AGAINST THE RAVAGES OF TIME
ARMOURY OF FEARLESS TRUTH
AGAINST WHISPERING RUMOUR
INCESSANT TRUMPET OF TRADE
FROM THIS PLACE WORDS MAY FLY ABROAD
NOT TO PERISH ON WAVES OF SOUND
NOT TO VARY WITH THE WRITER'S HAND
BUT FIXED IN TIME HAVING BEEN VERIFIED IN PROOF
FRIEND YOU STAND ON SACRED GROUND
THIS IS A PRINTING OFFICE
Stirring words! Brownlee makes a hackish paraphrase of to conclude his piece, substituting "Internet" for "Printing Office". But I thought one of the comments (by "hello") rephrased it in a much more realistic way: THIS IS
THE INTERNET
CROSSROADS OF CIVILIZATION
CO-OPTER OF ALL THE ARTS
ACCELERATING THE RAVAGES OF TIME
ARMOURY OF BASELESS SPECULATION
FURTHERING WHISPERING RUMOUR
INCESSANT DEGRADER OF LABOR
FROM THIS PLACE WORDS FLY ABROAD
TO PERISH ON FIREWALLS
VARYING WITH THE BROWSER AND STYLESHEET
UNFIXED IN TIME, DYNAMICALLY GENERATED, UNDEFINED BY PROOF
FRIEND YOU STAND ON SHIFTING SANDS
THIS IS THE INTERNET
I love the internet, but you need to take it with a grain of salt the size of Pittsburgh.

Anyway, the potential ephemerality of our bits is a big problem for our tech-dependent civilization in general... another commentator wrote:

To put it another way, the archaeological value of a cr-48 is roughly that of a stone knife; it will tell our descendants that we had a culture, but (except what they can glean from the silkscreening on parts) will leave them no direct artifacts of it other than the machine itself. A long-dead computer might harbor something readable on a hard disk; a partially recoverable song, some text, perhaps, possibly more. The cr-48 is a tombstone and nothing more the moment it loses the cloud.

I used to get nightmares about "the giant EMP pulse" that takes down our society, and it still bugs me somewhat -- you kind of hope some not-to-radically-nutso survivalist-minded folks are taking steps to, say, know how to build a primitive by today's standard PC and other things that would have a chance of reading material we insist on making electronic only -- and while they're add it, store some useful technology-and-society-rebooting books as well.

And that note, to make up for a long and boring article, here is an interesting photo of a ship cut in half:

via

(Maybe my fears about ChromeOS taking off are moot anyway)

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http://www.slate.com/id/2237640/ - guy decides to give up sports fandom. Somehow I guessed he was a Boston fan. Courage, brothers! Though I guess I'm coming to terms with my own fair-weatherness.

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http://www.slate.com/id/2238342/entry/2238343/ - and YOW, pre-Victorian british sex clubs... never heard the term "posture moll" before.

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I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.

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Totally digging the DJ Santa outside of Macy's at Downtown Crossing- big beats against Christmas tunes...

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Random Family Lore: my dad and grandma's joke that the hygiene product "FDS" stood for "Fur Der Schnapper"

found on 4chan.org

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Just put on a memory foam mattress top, gift from EB. Will it revolutionize sleeping? At least makes it feel like a more expensive mattress.

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Now that's the kind of shoe bombing I can get behind.

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Huh. Paul Graham et al talk about the advantage of web apps; improvements all the time. But iPhone and firefox do that through easy upgrades

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stopping by the Japanese import market kotobukiya at porter exchange for a little nostalgia for my trip last march. plus, calpis. So, sports talk is all about the Mitchell Report, about baseball players who were using performance enhancing drugs. (But is it sketchy that he's also a Red Sox director?)

I'm a little amused that the primary snitch is an ex-batboy/clubhouse employee named "Kirk". (Radomski, though I guess he has a nickname Murdock.)

One annoying bit was the assumption that if people now don't get on Roger Clemens' case they way they did on Barry Bonds, it proves it's all about personality, or maybe racism. I don't think that's fair... Bonds was going after more cherished records, and he was still working his way up to that after the scandal had broke, he was still grinding his way to the career HR title after everyone could see something was rotten in Denmark.

Another commentator was claiming HGH was not actually proven to enhance athletic performance, and that baseball was going to spend bajillions trying to come up with a test for something that doesn't need testing for.

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Bad Idea of the Moment
A friend linked to this "Slave" Princess Leia costume for Dogs. As she says "several layers of wrong". Or as I said... "It's OK to collar your dog. Just don't... collar... your dog."

I use gmail now. Because I direct all mail from all of my domains to the same account, a lot of spam leaks through. But after looking at a few spam messages on my work's Outlook, I realize that gmail makes spam look less appealing by not showing the images inline... it shows a thumbnail and you have to click to see full. So just on the level of being attention grabbing, spam has an easier time with Outlook.

Tim at work thinks Outlook is much more widely used, even by home users, than the various webmail programs. I'm not sure.

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Passage of the Moment

I had always heard your entire life flashes in front of your eyes the second before you die. First of all, that one second isn't a second at all, it stretches on forever, like an ocean of time... For me, it was lying on my back at Boy Scout camp, watching falling stars... And yellow leaves, from the maple trees, that lined my street... Or my grandmother's hands, and the way her skin seemed like paper... And the first time I saw my cousin Tony's brand new Firebird... And Janie... And Janie... And... Carolyn. I guess I could be pretty pissed off about what happened to me... but it's hard to stay mad, when there's so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I'm seeing it all at once, and it's too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that's about to burst... And then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain and I can't feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life... You have no idea what I'm talking about, I'm sure. But don't worry... you will someday.

Surprised it hadn't made it into any of my journals before; I love this passage.

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Showerhead of the Moment
I just wanted to mention that this is the oddest, most techno-organic looking showerhead I remember using. I thouught that on certain settings the middle shower was actually undulating, but it turns out it was just spinning. Still... weird. But it had a nice shaving mirror attached, so there was that.

So I was in yoga class tonight. Class always ends with the instructor walking us through "the corpse pose", a step-by-step walk-through all the parts of our body, letting each relax in turn. He urges us that if we have a thought to just let it go, it will be there when we're done. Also, he says we should try not to fall asleep, which is pretty easy to do when getting that relaxed...ideally the pose requires as much focus as any of the more difficult twists and bends and what not.

Of course, neither of these instructions are particularly easy for me to follow... I mean, I really like those little thoughts I have, I find them very interesting and ultimately a very rewarding pat of my life. (Sleep ain't that bad itself, come to think of it, though realizing you were just snoring is kind of embarrassing.) So last night during the corpse pose I had a thought (which I tried not to dwell too much on)... that I could use some kind of admonishment, like this:

This time doesn't belong to those little thoughts.
This time belongs to your body, for it to relax.
This is not the time for your mind to relax into sleep;
Your mind is needed to guide the body's relaxation.

Well, the first two lines are stronger than the last two, and it's a bit corny, but still...I think the idea of "ownership" is powerful in this case. I know to often in life I take my body, such as it is, totally for granted. I'm totally dependent on it, but because I wish I wasn't, I'm usually reluctant to give it some of the attention it really deserves.

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Link of the Moment
The Movie Spoiler just discusses the happenings of many movies. Good if you think you'll never see the film anyway, but are kind of curious to know what it's about.

Science of the Moment

Men tend to have squarer jaws than women, and they shave to highlight this. If so, this would explain the trend for emphasising the edge of the jawline with a fringe of hair. But moustaches are a mystery, to evolutionary biologists and to practically everyone else.

Like the article mentions, we ARE pretty hungup on hair, especially in this country. There are so many places we don't want it, but if a guy starts losing the stuff on his head, watch out. The article mentions 3 interesting theories: my favorite (if not neccesarily the most likely) is the "aquatic ape" idea, the "parasite load" one is ok too, the "it's too hot" is just too mundane. And then there's always the chance that it's just a weird sexual selection thing.

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Pastime of the Moment
(Warning, some there might be some pornographic thumbnail images linked to here, depending on your settings at Google) images.google.com provides a great way to burn time in tiny little portions, without too much risk of being sucked in for hours... I just think of random things to type in and see what images there are associated with them...of course, if you turn of "SafeSearch" it's surprising just how many keywords lead to porn.

And then you can think of metagames to play with this...like, find out which ex-girlfriends' first names have the best image selection...for me, some are hot, and then some are not.

Of course, there's always the Random Personal Picture Finder^(tm) from diddly.com -- it uses the fact that many people don't bother renaming photos from whatever name/number the camera comes up with before dumping them to the web to come up with big semi-random selections of snapshots. When I read the CNN bullet item "600 U.S. troops staged lightning raid on rural hiding place" regarding the capture of Saddam, I got this unlikely but irresistable image that it was like the penultimate scene of the Blues Brothers movie: 600 soldiers, the safeties on their rifles all being unlocked in rapid succession (klaklaklaklaklaklaklak), 600 barrels pointed at this little hole in the wall, Saddam peeking out...

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Literary Passage of the Moment

I can believe that things are true and I can believe things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen — I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkledy lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of casual chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.

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Link of the Moment
Although the update schedule has been very spotty lately, I always enjoy The Comics I Don't Understand Page. This update they feature a special page of some of the best of 'Frazz', a comic some people think is supposed to answer 'what happened to Calvin when he grew up?'. (A bit more pleasant than the Fight Club answer to that question.) You can also check out the official Frazz site.

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Personal Milestone of the Moment
Sigh. Mo and I didn't have an exact date to mark the start of our relationship, so we settled on December 15th, at my urging 'cause it was easy to remember and around the right time. This is (would've been? Not sure of the right tense these days) the 6 year anniversary. Of course, that date tends to decline in importance once there's a wedding anniversary to observe, but still.

• So MAME is a program that lets you run all those old arcade games (though the ROMs are a bit harder to come by once mame.dk got shutdown) and MAMED is a version that runs on Dreamcast. Nice to run these things on a TV, and I know a guy who stuck a DC in a fullsize arcade cabinet. The emulation isn't quite as on a PC good though.
• Vintage Labels has all these cool Hotel and Travel stickers, like they used to put on luggage. I have a small suitcase that has a ton of cool stickers on it, I keep trying to think of a way of displaying it.
• While the grossness and PG13ness of this Penny Arcade cartoon led me to put off posting it, it's really funny.
• Melodyhound is a cool tune search engine, based on the fact that most melodies can be identified by the pattern of "note is higher/lower/the same as previous" for the first few notes.
• The revisions of the NPR All Things Considered theme music. Now because I hate you all, I'll tell you this: you can sing the words "I like ice cream, it's sooooo tast-eee, I like ice cream, tastes so GOOD!" to this tune. And this fact might not ever leave your head.
• Salon on online dating. I fool myself by thinking if I hadn't managed to woo Mo I'd have found somebody by the power of online personals, but I dunno.

• Any five-paragraph essay that claims to be able to end any problem that's been around for more than a three years has no more worth than a program that fills the screen with the sentence 'I TOOK MY PARENTS' PRAISE TOO SERIOUSLY.' And God help me, if you ever create a section titled 'Rants' I'm going to come over there and kick your ass.

  (Neither Brunching nor the Blog have seen many updates lately, alas.)
• LEGO - BUILD has some cool stuff, including Ranjit's Junkbot game. (previously kisrael'd)
• Snot is my Copilot, an old Usenet posting. I have no idea why I thought I should link to this, maybe the title?
• Some people are very interested in historically inaccurate fonts as seen in movies. I got bugged when an actor is too blatantly faking playing a musical instrument, this guy is on the lookout for fonts. (And I guess he can identify many many at a glance.)

Idea of the Moment
I've started keeping a cheap digital voice recorder by my bed so that I can record dreams before dream amnesia sets in. Recording dreams is a way of getting something more out of sleep, since otherwise it feels like such a waste of a third of my life. So far it's worked out pretty well, I'm two for two for having something to write down the next morning. The image on the right is from the first evening, I was in some kind of thrill ride at the Eiffel Tower, you went to the top, got into a capsule with windows attached to the peak via bungee, and then they hauled you down to the bottom and let go, sending you zinging around Paris...

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Link of the Moment
This guy really, sincerely likes gum. Or he's pretending to. I'm not sure.

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Quote of the Moment

There are 27O million Americans. The US is filthy with one-in-a-million events.