December 27, 2023

2023.12.27
A piece on Usenet's the September That Never Ended mentioned Google Groups will be dropping Usenet support, which makes me sad. I haven't really used Usenet for twenty years, but for the ten years before it was really important to me, and I liked seeing it was still going on and to be able to look up the odd half remembered post.

Usenet really had a good vibe; the idea of bring your own client and use it across a variety of topic rooms, each forming their own community was great - my favorites were rec.games.video.classic, alt.folklore.computer, alt.fan.cecil-adams, and comp.sys.palmtops.pilot. (A friend of mine has a conspiracy theory that Usenet was too distributed and uncontrollable and so was repressed by the Powers That Be in favor of more centralized forms of social media...)

It made me think about social media forums I've lived in over the years. Each tends to encourage a certain style / length of post, has different types of message continuity (threads, etc), makes it easier or harder to recognizing recurring authors, and has different styles of if you rely more on following people or sipping from the main firehose.

I had a weirdly geeky urge to categorize what I've most used over the years... (my current favorite in blue) These are all based on my judgements of how I or most people use it:
Forum Post Lengths Crowd Size Author Identity Follow or Commons text vs image
Usenet Long Many Medium Groups .Sig Commons (per Group) Text
Livejournal Very Long Friends List Avatar Follow Text
Blog Comments Short Private-ish Name Commons Text
Slashdot Short Large (Geeks) .Sig Commons Text
Atari Age Forums Medium Medium-Small (Gamers) Avatar + .Sig Commons (in Topics) Text
Facebook Medium-Short Real Life (+Algorithmy) Name + Avatar Follow (+ Algo) Mixed
Twitter Very Short Very Algorithmy Avatar Follow (+ Algo) Mixed
Reddit Short Many Medium Channels Username Commons (per Channel) Text
Tumblr Medium Medium ("Mutuals") Avatar Follow Images
WhatsApp Short Private Avatar Commons Text
Slack Medium-Short Private Avatar Commons (in Topics) Text
Discord Short Private Avatar Commons (in Topics) Text
Facebook connects me with a wider range of people from all parts of my life, and despite the privacy concerns and what not, I appreciate how easy its been to share as many photos as I'd ever want, and get them in front of folks, abeit in a haphazard way.

I love the community of tumblr and it's my favorite source of stuff to repost on my blog - but I haven't figured out how to get "followed", so it's mostly a read-only medium for me so far.

Slack closed-garden is my favorite community types now - if you find the right bunch of people (that balance of people who post a lot, and maybe some people who mostly lurk but chime in) it's fantastic. (On paper Discord has the same potential, and is a bit more hip, but somehow the UI for threading and private messaging is horribly confusing, and the whole things gives me Reddit-ish "I can't follow things" vibes.
My dad's Ohio cousins are legit farmers - Adrian, George (the doggo), Red, Kathy

My dad romanticized rural life, but I think more from his experience with the cousins farm than his small town county seat life in Coshocton

an ode to LiveJournal

2022.12.27
Man, what happened to the community of LiveJournal?

They just sent me a kind of pathos-laden "hey happy 19th anniversary of starting on LJ!"

For those who don't know, it was a fairly popular (at pre-Twitter, pre-FB, pre-YouTube levels of "popular") site that let people have their own blogs, and you could see and comment on the posts of your friends aggregated on a "feed" page.

I didn't post there, since I had already started my own blog (and had just added a comments board that was the nucleus of its own little community - in fact I had a sidebar microblog for other people to write on the front page...) so my LJ account was for following others and participating in comment threads.

It's notable that many of the final-ish entries of my friends (many in 2010, then more in 2016) mention twitter which is where I assume most of that energy left. Actually, to make a Just-So story: 2010 is when folks who were fonder of the community of folks they know in real life jumped off for Facebook, and 2016 is when folks aspiring to get a wider audience and maybe go viral left for Twitter.

LiveJournal encouraged thoughtful writing in paragraphs; I guess medium now has most that vibe. Maybe substack, but they seem to lean on individual newsletter-y bits. But neither medium nor substack emphasize the "shared feed"/wall/stream that twitter, tumblr, instagram, FB etc have, where posts from a variety of people you find (or The Algorithm hopes you will find) interesting will be on a single scrollable page.

As far as I know LiveJournal was the strongest attempt to encourage longer length writing with entries that were then blended onto feed pages. (Standalone blogs had RSS to collate from sites, but Google embraced and then extinguished the most promising attempts to make that friendly to less technical users. I never got into reading via RSS, frankly, because extracting just the text out of the visual context of its home site made me feel something was lost.)

I think that "are you encouraged (by the UI, or the community vibe) write in paragraphs or sentences" - that's a big part of what separated LJ from Twitter (and also old Usenet (which I used to love) from Reddit, which has never really clicked for me.)

And it's just that short-form mojo Twitter that has, (or a visual, easily digestible image-based approach that Instagram, Tumblr, and even FB) which lends itself to The Algorithm mixing and matching and letting you find new people based on what people you already follow are also digging. Which when I write it out, does sound rather herdish, or redolent of the maddening crowd. Finding new interesting people on LJ was slower, and more organic, generally by following up co-commentators on mutual friends, because going through someone's LJ entries was a longer-attention-span thing.

I've been leaning into tumblr more lately, which (like twitter) I'd mostly been using as an information consumer and not a contributor. Sometimes I wonder if I had started reposting my blog content there years ago like I have been on FB, if I might be have found an even stronger community there (or a set of "mutuals" as they're called). Tumblr has cultural space for both long paragraphs and for quick hit images, and a unique style of additive reblogging that keeps contact with the original post while still getting people to riff.
I was kirkjerk on LJ - Here are the people I was connected with on LJ:
apm, archmage, ayun, bookdork, brooklyngirl, c1, candipox, comicnrrd, felisdemens, halfabee, harveyjames, jimbocomics, katwinx, km_515, littlesam, m0xiee, madamluna, metalweb, mkb_technologie, morecake, munitionsship, pentomino, pfarley, probertson, rhysara, rivqah, sauergeek, snobahr, thehippiespeaks, therosser, towersfalldown, tropigalia, trunkbutt, we_happy_few

And these communities: a_year_to_live, gameclub, grunthunt, thesketchy

December 27, 2021

2021.12.27
times are starting to feel precedented

I can't think of anyone who has had a better year than the QR code. What a comeback.

Individual commitment to a group effort - that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.
Vince Lombardi
(noticed on a sign outside the New Jersey test stop named for him by the meadowlands)





So, School of Honk decided to mandate bell covers for all brass... and I only have one blank cover (currently with me having drawn in School of Honk with washable markers) so I had to use my (Steve-O inspired?) goofball cover.



December 27, 2020

2020.12.27

proto-garfield

2019.12.27
"Quinton Reviews" made an amazing discovery - "Gnorm the Gnat" wasn't the only predecessor to "Garfield" - there was a first run called "Jon" that used a lot of the same gags... here's what Garfield looked like:

You can see the newspaper pages here or here's a video giving the background:

It Was a Total Lack of Planning That Killed Star Wars -
Some spoilers for the new movie, but overall a measured amount of criticism about the see-saw we got, with the first sequel being a bit of a slavish copy of A New Hope, the second sequel being a rebut of that approach, and the third going back to squash the second. (and honestly kind of just remaking Return of the Jedi) Honestly I wish we had taken that second movie approach from the outset, but putting the whole series under one vision would have been a less whiplash-y trip.

December 27, 2018

2018.12.27
Hah! When I was briefly hanging out w/ UU on Sundays I was always surprised at how flat a reading people gave to these - I usually felt compelled to try and make it sound more like regular speech than monotone reading...

Was hanging out with Leonard "Robot Finds Kitten" Richardson, he's decluttering and I grabbed his series of "Gamespite Quarterly" Reminded me "New Games Journalism" and specifically "The Gamers Quarter" and how some of the more interesting and creative people I know are from there, namely Anna Anthropy, Jeremy Penner, James Harvey. I'm not saying it was Paris in the 20s but I can't think of many vibrantly creative online communities I've been heavily involved with since.
Got my mom a new laptop for Christmas - the 4 year old HP Stream it's replacing had a pretty good run, but 20Gb (for storage, not just memory) meant she was having a bad time with it. But she's letting me grab that old machine, which for a four year old thing ain't so bad - I figure it might help me get out of the Apple bubble and start testing with IE a bit anyway.

It's funny, just a bit of using it and already long-buried habits of reaching for the ctrl key instead of cmd while back on my Mac are rearing their ugly head.

I honestly haven't used Windows much since 2013. Do geeks looking to ssh still just fire up PuTTY or what?

December 27, 2017

2017.12.27
Finished up "Blaster Master Zero" last night, a Switch remake of the NES original - thoughtfully modernized, and without the hockey-stick difficulty curve of the original's last level. The tank based rolling and jumping sections - jump, then press back to check your inertia and stop from rolling off the next platform - remains one of the most satisfying bit of physics in all 2D gaming.

Also, the Switch with its "play the same game on a TV or a mini-tablet-with-thumbsticks" is pure genius - I wonder how powerful it is? Mario Odyssey was so impressive, but could it play, say, GTA5? If not, that means it's not as powerful as a 12-year-old Xbox 360 (But also reinforces my idea that the 2001 GameCube was the time when Nintendo got enough power to do most of the games it wanted to make, and 360/PS3 for everyone else, since we had all those PS3/PS4, 360/Xbox One dual ports.)
The Daily Routines of Various Famous and Productive People. Rhythm is key.

December 27, 2016

2016.12.27
We are such insistent storymakers that we tend to find intention and purpose in every damn thing... It is ridiculous that so many of us, for me example, have a hard time not taking traffic personally.
Be Princess Leia in 2017. Fight on the front lines. Strangle fascists with the chains they would have you wear. Be a motherfuckin' general.

December 27, 2015

2015.12.27
The new look and feel of kirk.is! Still a little bit of a work in progress...
Post from the Future! Using the wayback machine here are some snapshots about the look and feel of my blog:
2002:


2008:


2014:


2016:

December 27, 2014

2014.12.27

December 27, 2013

2013.12.27
Le Sigh.

December 27, 2012

2012.12.27
I'd rather need an umbrella than a shovel any time -- rain flows! snow blows!
So Windows 7 has a "Windows Experience Score". I dig the simplification, but having the aggregate score be the lowest subscore is cheesy.

playlist: season_2011 3 fall

(2 comments)
2011.12.27
This year's advent calendar caused me to delay my seasonal music summary... not that there's so much of a clamor for it, but people who like this kind of music will find this a good collection of the music they like.

(Actually my tastes are a bit eclectic, but still, there's some fun stuff here.)

So, the one five star song in the fall was Might Like You Better by Amanda Blank, an incredibly fun and EXTREMELY raunchy song. Another great one was the cover of Addicted To Love by Florence + The Machine. (It was used on the ad for some TV show.)

Other songs by category:

Energetic Electronic or Mashup Hip-Hop Indie/Softer Retro 90s Leftovers from Video Games Funny/Novelty/Misc
A robot walks into a bar and says, 'I'll have a screwdriver.'
New York Times

snowmegeddon

2010.12.27
So, this picture of the NYC snowpocalypse is making the rounds:


But they don't hold a candle to what my folks are dealing with in Ocean Grove New Jersey...

(I feel a little guilty that we skedaddled ahead of the storm...)

Still, as Gizmodo explains (and has even more pictures of), Japan might just have us beat:

Man. Admittedly that's like, their Alps, but still.
http://www.cracked.com/article_18929_where-arent-they-now-13-overlooked-deaths-2010.html - surprisingly touching capsule obituaries.

holiday photos day 2!

2009.12.27

Sherlock Holmes: the rootin-tootinest episode of "Scooby Doo" set in Victorian England ever! (Not bad, actually, but unjelled in parts.)
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/12/07/mobius-bagel-interlo.html - MOBIUS STRIP BAGLE OMG (Catching up on like, a month of Boingboing)
Saw a guy playing a Hurdy-Gurdy at Harvard Square. Kind of like a mechanical stringed bagpipes - I thought it was just an adjective!

the cowboy and the chainlink fence

2008.12.27
Once upon a time I went to Germany and bought a VIVA ChartXpress CD (VIVA is the German music channel) It might have been a McDondalds promotional item. (I never go to McDonalds here, but it's an interesting cultural reference point when I'm trying to figure out what other countries are all about.)

Driving back from New Jersey, a song from the album, "Maschen-Draht-Zaun", bubbled up on the iTunes dump:


(2019 Update: this video actually gives more of a sense of the background than what I posted before...) Veronika said it meant "Wire Mesh Fence" and that it was kind of hard to explain. But now, Wikipedia expalains it all! A little meaner than I might have hoped, but still pleasingly random. (I have an inordinate interest in regional biases and stereotypes I have never heard of before.... also the German take on cowboys.)


Did the guy who made the sideart for the original Pac-Man arcade game actually play the game? Maybe he assumed was too primitive for "legs"?
Jam bands, like college a-capella, is (possibly) for doing, not for listening to.
Got "Strangers with Candy Vol.2". Great in a "wow they went there" way, but I think my fav. bit is the dance party w/ the credits every ep.
A lot of beautiful and melancholy torch songs are track 12 of their respective CDs.

dude wheres your feet lol

(2 comments)
2007.12.27
Thursday already? Wow. The holidays really mess with your sense of time.

I'd like to start paying back some of my usual sleep deficit, but thanks (I think in part) to a cold I'm still getting up at 7.


Bad Comic Art of the Moment
--Bill pointed out The 40 Worst Rob Liefeld Drawings- Liefeld was this insanely popular artist in the 90s, but technically he's pretty bad. And cannot draw a foot, and seems to go out of his way to avoid drawing them, like in this example. I admit I wouldn't notice have the gaffs the article points out... maybe some of it works as a "style"?


Quote of the Moment
I think it's much better to be a good cartoonist than a terrible minister
Charles Schulz.
And Rob Liefeld is neither! ZING!

spin, think, dance

(3 comments)
2006.12.27
The other week I had trouble with my projector, the bulb blew out. In checking out the situation I got reminded that DLP projectors use spinning disks to apply the colors to the greyscale image being shown through.

That concept sounded familiar, and I realized that some of the early TV prototypes also used rapdidly spinning disks. When I first heard that factoid, years ago, the idea of a spinning disk in a television seemed absolutely corny, but it would seem my scoffing was misplaced, and forms the foundation of the lovely big video image I enjoy in my living room now.


Articles of the Moment
I guess I'm supersticious enough to think that if I see two seperate pieces on the same subject in unrelated places, that's a bit of synchronicity that should pop them to the top of my kisrael queue.

So while waiting for a haircut yesterday I read this Time magazine debate between Richard Dawkins, stalwart atheist, and Francis Collins, genetic researcher and Christian convert from atheism.

Shortly before that, Bill the Splut had posted 10 myths -- and 10 truths -- about atheism. I thought they were pretty thoughtful responses to some common complaints about a lack of belief in the divine.


Video of the Moment

--Strangely sweet video of this one guy doing the same goofy little dance all over the world, via Break.com. The one downside is it reminds me what a craptastic taker of vacations I am.

glug!

(3 comments)
2005.12.27
Article of the Moment
CNN reports that people are easily fooled by how much more a wider glass holds...I've noticed this myself, a full to the brim "short glass" fills the majority of one of the much taller glasses. No wonder kids are so readily duped by that "Law of Conservation" experiment. (Which is easier than I thought, for some reason I thought the kid had to guess which actually held more, which really would be tough.) (thanks FoSO...she has a better feel than most for what seems like a "Kirk Article")


Poem of the Moment
Seduced, shaggy Samson snored.
She scissored short. Sorely shorn,
Soon shackled slave, Samson sighed,
Silently scheming,
Sightlessly seeking
Some savage, spectacular suicide.
from a Stanislaw Lem "Cyberiad" story, as translated by Michael Kandel.
In story, the poem is by Trurl's mechanical poet, after Klapaucius challenges him to compose "a poem about a haircut! But lofty, noble, tragic, timeless, full of love, treachery, retribution, quiet heroism in the face of certain doom! Six lines, cleverly rhymed, and every word beginning with the letter s!!."

snowstormyweather

(3 comments)
2004.12.27
So, anyone got any cool holiday stories?

Ugh...in retrospect, that's a pretty inane comment, given those horrendous tsunamis in Indonesia...


Game of the Moment
Excellent adicting and challenging flash game...Moebius Syndrome...just click to rotate straight pieces and corner pieces to form loops before the board fills up too much. Good learning curve in this game, at least for the first games (which honestly is as far as I got.)


Poetry of the Moment
I have been Roland, Beowulf, Achilles, Gilgamesh.
I have been called a hundred names and will be called a
thousand more before the world goes dim and cold.
I am hero. She has been nameless since our birth,
a constant adversary caring for nothing but my ruin,
a sword drenched in my blood forever, my greatest and
only love. She is the dark. O Lethe, enemy and lover, without
whom my very existence would be pathetic and vulgar!
Our relationship is complex and perhaps eternal.
We met once in the garden at the beginning of the world
and, unaware of our twin destinies, we matched stares
across a dry fountain. And I recall her smiling at me before
she devoured the lawn and trees with a translucent blue flame
and tore flagstones from the path and hurled them into the
sky, screaming my sins. I powder a granite monument in a
soundless flash, showering the grass with molten drops of
its gold inlay, sending smoking chips of stone
skipping into the fog. She splinters an ancient oak
with a force that takes my breath and hurls me to the ground.
She lea%!CONNECTION TERMINATED
Slashdot had an article on the 10th Anniversary of Marathon, a game that is the ancestor of Halo on the Xbox. I missed out on what is considered a terrific and deeper-than-DOOM adventure because I've never been much of a Mac user. Anyway, that article linked to this page covering connections between Halo and Marathon, which in turn led to this page on a message on a computer terminal in the game...though in the game, there are no spaces or punctuation, so this is the easy-reading version.

with aptitude tests, he's best

(4 comments)
2003.12.27
Old Newspaper Profile of the Moment

With aptitude tests, he's best



Kirk Israel
Residence: Glen Russ Lane
Age: 17
Biggest problem facing teens: Apathy -- kids don't care about getting good grades and don't take school seriously.
Hobbies: Reading, creative writing, video games, computer programs, playing the tuba.
Things no one knows: I'm a compulsive doodler; I hada a Jamaican accent for five years while living on St. Thomas Island in the Bahamas; I love to go barefoot.

By EREN WEBER Staff Writer
     Q: What's smart, wears glasses and moves around a lot?
     A: Euclid High School student and academic whiz kid Kirk Israel.
     It's no joke, though -- even in high school year book pictures Israel, 17, has been spotted wearing glasses. And, as the sone of two Salvation Army church ministers, he's been forced to move from state to state and country to country often.
     Although his teachers, family and friends could have told you Israel was a high scholastic achiever years ago, the recent results of national standardized acheivement tests now prove to the rest of the world that this high school senior has what it takes to get ahead.
     On the Pre-Scholastic Aptitude Test, Israel answered 1,350 of 1,600 questions correctly. About 52,000 high school students take the PSAT in Ohio annually and, this year, Israel was among the top 100.
     He takes the honor modestly and said that, although he's enrolled in advanced placement classes, that doesn't mean he's all that smart.
     All it means to Israel is that he does well on standardized tests.
     "I always thought of myself as being pretty lazy," Israel said. "I guess I get distracted a lot, which means I don't always get my school work done, but I still manage to get good grades."
     College brochures and university applications are big distractions these days for Israel, who has set his sights on attending an ivy league school preferably near Boston.
     Israel is attracted to the old American traditions that abound on the East coast, the museums and the relatives who live close to the city on the Charles River.
     "Over the summer, Harvard sent me an application," he said. "I don't know if it had anything to do with my test scores, but I'm going to send it back anyway.
    
     "Chances may be slim, but you never know."
     Since then, however, his chances have improved. On the official standardized achievement test taken by more than half a million students in the nation, Israel upped his preliminary score of 1,350 to 1,490.
     With those scores, Israel could be anything he wants to be. For now, though, he's considering a teaching profession, particularly at the high school level.
    
     "The best teachers I've ever had used their creative talents and sense of humor to help me understand things," he said, "There's more to learning than just getting good grades."
     Euclid residents may get a glimpse of Israel's talents on an upcoming episode of Academic Challenge, in which he may star as a contestant or be an alternate.
     It all depends though, because as Israel put it, "I can't memorize answers -- I just know how to learn them."

Euclid, Ohio's "Sun Scoop Journal, November 14, 1991.
Found it while decluttering, decided I have to share it with all of you. Besides the author's misunderstanding of how standardized tests are graded, I'm kind of amused by that "love to go barefoot" line. It reads like it's from a Playboy playmate profile.

What a good kid I was...I'm surprised I didn't get beaten up more often.

he got game

2002.12.27
Got a PS2 yesterday...and there was much rejoicing. Probably won't be a lot of action here on kisrael.com, especially with today's previously scheduled FOKN'A video game group get together.


Game of the Moment
Just so the rest of you don't feel left out, here's a game for you: River City Hacky Sack. Based on the sprite style and some of the moves from the NES classic River City Ransom (that link is to a great Seanbaby review, where this guy on the side is stolen from), RCHS is a challenging game where you try to knock little cherubs down with the bouncing volleyball, and then you can kick them like a hacky sack. The more you prevent stuff from hitting the ground, the longer the game lasts and the more points you get.


Quote of the Moment
I'd rather be the king of dev\null than a mere serf in \root !
Heh, that's pretty funny (in response to yesterday's quote).

booze and advice

2001.12.27
So the other week we had dinner with Lee and MZ at Magnolia's Southern Cuisine. Hot stuff from Mew Orleans, and one of the things on the beer menu was Shandy Carib. This thing tasted wonderful, like ginger ale, very sweet and a bit tangy. My buddy Greg Owen (aka Gowen) tells me that a Shandy is, by definition, beer with a mixer, usually ginger ale or sometimes lemonade. (And that website confirmed it was only 1.2% alc/vol, a "cool, hip, lively, one-of-a kind, contemporary young, sociable, fun loving, 'so-you-stay-in control drink.'") He gave me a link about Shandies in General and how they're really great when it's hot out. I remember some guy saying how ginger ale was his (surprising) beverage of choice for spicy Thai or Indian food, and this kind of goes along with that.


Quote of the Moment
"A uhhh [hits desktop]... a blow, to the head, you have had such a blow?"
"Who hasn't...it was the pills, speed. I'll lay off the speed"
"Yah, do so, Mr. Sutcliffe...and also, do this: slow down. Take your time. Life is..long. You must not be in too much of a hurry."
German Doctor and Stuart Sutcliffe, Backbeat (the story of the early Beatles in Hamburg).
I always thought this was a good outlook to have.

Another useful quote construction from the same movie:
"You know what it is I like about Liverpool, Mr. Sutcliffe?"
"No, what is it you like about Liverpool, Mr. Lennon?"
"I was hoping you'd tell me."

"Rock 'n' roll smells phony and false. It is sung, played, and written by cretinous goons and by means of its almost imbecilic reiteration, and sly, lewd, in plain fact dirty lyrics...it manages to be the martial music of every sideburned deliquent on the face of the earth."
--Frank Sinatra
"You can't knock success."
--Elvis Presley
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I'm thinking about doing a daily update section on kisrael.com. The trouble is I don't know how it should relate to the KHftCEA.  I would like to update the web more often than the palm, with richer media content but with less personal info.  Maybe I should make it so that someday they can be merged?
00-12-27
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How odd. I'm on R's list for new cellphone # updates.
00-12-27
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