I gotta wonder---do I sound like this when I'm geeking out about discovering a whole nifty set of panorama-stitching tools, going on about Laplacian pyramids, control points, barrel distortion and such?
No wonder the non-dorks I talk to get such a glazed look in their eyes when I tell them what I'm currently interested in.
The first one, I think, says what you mean by bugs in your breakfast: The text piece in Cerebus # 226 made me feel physically unwell; made me feel as if I'd been kicked in the stomach; actually spoiled my whole afternoon. When the drunken John Lennon beat up a waitress, she is reported as having said 'What really hurts is finding out that your idol is a complete asshole.'
I haven't reached the part of the series when Sim goes mad yet. I suppose it'll be... enlightening. (I finished "Jaka's Story" recently, and am scouting for "Melmoth".)
There are people on Wikipedia who remind me of you. Back in the early days (I wasn't there then; I just remember reading some talk pages from that era), there were complaints of the nature, "We have articles about Bart Simpson but not the Amazon Rainforest! Clearly, we need to delete Bart Simpson to show where our priorities are!".
This idea misunderstands the nature of the internet. It's not like a book. There's not a limited amount of space. (Well, there is. But it's not limited enough to matter if you're just talking about text.) And it's not accessed by reading front to back. One does not "flip through" the internet and say, "Damn it! There's too much about Bart Simpson on here! Where's the Amazon Rainforest?" No, one googles "amazon rainforest" and gets the results. Simple, huh?
Now, blogging has its own benefits. Besides the amateur porn (how I love it so), I can keep tabs on how my friends are doing, catch up on an acquaintance I haven't seen in months, or publish a rant that I think really says something worthwhile. (Doesn't mean anyone has to agree, but it's up there, and that makes me feel better.)
And it's such a better alternative to forwarding email. Now, when someone I know has an annoying chain-letter to spread, they can just paste it on their blog, and I can ignore it. People only email me if they actually have something to say. Isn't that innovative?
I do agree, however, that "blog" is a stupid fucking word, used by stupid fucking people. Ugh. Like those twits who said "cyberspace" and "information superhighway" in the nineties.
ideas that reproduce and self propogate in a malignant way
Totally offtopic question. This idea, stated as such, seems really... really... off-putting. Who believes that there are ideas, ideas, that we mustn't be exposed to, because they'll do something evil. Sounds like a standard censorship argument, with a blank into which can be written "Porn", "Scientology" or "Jesus". Is this what memetics is about? What a disappointment, if it is.
And we all remember how bulging spandesticles look, right? Right?... I still have flashbacks, and my friends don't trust random things I IM them any more...
A number of my friends kept journals there a few years ago. I started one so I could keep up with some people who are long-distance from me, and so I'd have an outlet for writing. Those are the main reasons, I suppose. Sure, hitting 'random journal' brings you to unadulterated crap nine times of ten, but there are a fewdecentwriters on there.
Oh, and the 18+ communities, with their gobs, gobs and gobs of amateur porn. (If you LJ, go check out kaizersoze125. It's full of porn.)
That's not the worst of it. Over at Livejournal, the word "meme" has taken on the definition of "annoyingly colorful randomly-generated crap that you copy and paste into your journal". Every time I see someone calling some memegen crap a "meme", I die a little inside.
(For the lucky uninitiated, these things work by taking some random input, hashing it and picking random elements from sets of answers.)
modern SLR viewfinders aint what they used to be thanks to AF. Gone are most of the focus aids.
A-men!
I had (well, was borrowing) a Nikon FE-2 that's currently in the shop due to a munged shutter. Manual focus, but the (I don't know the words for any of these things) focusing screen with the split circle in the middle, where if it was in-focus the two halves would line up, and the ring around the central circle would be absolutely usable, even in low light.
I recently got a Canon EOS Rebel GII. The autofocus is dodgy when not in direct sunlight. The focusing screen contains three little boxes to represent the AF points, which blink when they read as in-focus. That's it. Manually focusing is absolutely unassisted.
A decent viewfinder screen can't be that expensive. Some of us still like to focus manually.
I'm surprised no one else has mentioned this, but the Internet Archive has the debates, along with plenty of other political stuff. See the Election 2004 video collection. The third debate isn't up yet, but, for instance, the second one is available in MPEG-4 streaming, MPEG-1, or MPEG-2 formats.
the spice channel [...] with anal sex and cumshots
Clearly you've never actually seen the "Spice Channel". It's non-porn porn. When I was younger, and porn-deprived, I stayed up all night watching it, from 10 PM to 6 AM or so, at a friend's house.
Everything of interest happened *just* offscreen. They didn't even show bush. It may have been the most disappointing eight hours I've ever had.
Hmm. I thought Canadians owned guns just like Americans did, but happened not to murder each other nearly as often because they're so gosh-darned polite.
'Course, I'm just vaguely remembering "Bowling for Columbine" at this point.
You know, discreet.asstr.org is designed to be safe-for-work. Neat, eh?
But, eh, I don't think plots should be terribly necessary. I mean, why would we watch real people just to see them act? I'd rather toss them all in a comfy, well-lit space, say "Fuck!" and tape it.
Plus, if amateurs were so great the flood of high quality home-made porno would be a ton better than what Vivid puts out. Personally, I'd rather watch the oversized men fuck women with over-sized Nip/Tuck'd boobs and airbrushed looking bodies than watching a fat, hairy, man fuck some underaged looking dark-circle eyed skank on the floor of a Super8 hotel room. That's me though;)
'kay, I'll reply to this because I'm so fond of amateur porn. I believe that there's a certain barrier to entry for real, full, media production. For decent photography, one needs at minimum a $200 digital camera (as opposed to the shitty one on a cell phone---wait, things have suddenly gotten cheaper, you can get a Powershot A75 for $160 or so) and to spend five or ten minutes setting up some lights. For the extraordinarily cheap (that's me!), those clamp lights you can get for a few bucks at the hardware store work. Yeah, the lighting is uneven, but it's better than available room light.
Still, too many amateurs don't really put the basic kind of effort required to make their pictures Not Suck. Oh, the content itself may be good, but it's frequently noisy and underexposed.
As for video, I really do think the cost is generally prohibitive. Still cameras that also capture bits of video tend to, let's face it, suck horribly. A decent miniDV cam is around $250 (though this is surprising to me; when I got mine a few years ago, it was bottom-of-the-barrel at $550). Then there's tapes, time and effort to be expended.
Capture and encoding requires a dorky level of interest in learning how to use Virtualdub (or transcode, I suppose), do deinterlacing and muxing, etc.) to even work then. Too much time and effort, I guess.
Which really does disappoint me, because despite my complaints, amateur porn really is the best porn. Whether it be one or another LJ community, or a mostly-free picture post (getting original-resolution images requires a membership), there's a lot of good stuff out there.
'Course, that's really just my opinion. Mileage may vary.
Sure---any Communist nation. Cuba, North Korea, China, the former Soviet Union and its satellite states.
The political 'spectrum' is more of a circle. Farthest left and farthest right meet in a fusion of totalitarianism. Because what they want, even more than their own ideologies, is control. And that's what dictatorships are about.
If you believe Alan Moore, the disease used in War of the Worlds was human-created---a biowarfare hybrid weapon created by Dr. Moreau. The freemasons covered it all up, of course.
You know, really doubt being poor is easy. I also doubt being in prison trying not to get raped every six hours is easy. And I would hesitate to label people in those situations as "lazy leeches", despite the alliterative allure of the phrase.
My point is that it's better to educate and train people before they turn into criminals than it is to endlessly lock up criminals and throw up our hands, crying that, man, a lot of people just seem to be born as Lazy Leeches.
And in what reality does imprisoning people have a positive effect? And in what reality does education and training not have a positive effect?
Admit it---you just have a deep-grained fear and loathing of poor people, or at least the image you have of them.
Slashdot Mirror
I gotta wonder---do I sound like this when I'm geeking out about discovering a whole nifty set of panorama-stitching tools, going on about Laplacian pyramids, control points, barrel distortion and such?
No wonder the non-dorks I talk to get such a glazed look in their eyes when I tell them what I'm currently interested in.
--grendel drago
I'm still trying to figure out your sex from your sig. It could be either, I suppose. I think.
Or you just found a pithy one-liner and I'm reading too far into it. Could be.
--grendel drago
Sounds like Google used to troll here for new hires.
--grendel drago
Sheesh. Maybe you and Sim should get together for tea some time.
--grendel drago
Andrew Rilstone, who's a hell of a lot smarter than me, wrote a number of essays about this, which are frickin' brilliant.
Cerebus the Aardvark: An Obituary
Cerebus the Aardvark: An Obituary (2)
Is Dave Sim Mad?
Is Dave Sim Mad? (Update)
Does Dave Sim Have Occasional Moments of Lucidity?
The first one, I think, says what you mean by bugs in your breakfast: The text piece in Cerebus # 226 made me feel physically unwell; made me feel as if I'd been kicked in the stomach; actually spoiled my whole afternoon. When the drunken John Lennon beat up a waitress, she is reported as having said 'What really hurts is finding out that your idol is a complete asshole.'
I haven't reached the part of the series when Sim goes mad yet. I suppose it'll be... enlightening. (I finished "Jaka's Story" recently, and am scouting for "Melmoth".)
--grendel drago
There are people on Wikipedia who remind me of you. Back in the early days (I wasn't there then; I just remember reading some talk pages from that era), there were complaints of the nature, "We have articles about Bart Simpson but not the Amazon Rainforest! Clearly, we need to delete Bart Simpson to show where our priorities are!".
This idea misunderstands the nature of the internet. It's not like a book. There's not a limited amount of space. (Well, there is. But it's not limited enough to matter if you're just talking about text.) And it's not accessed by reading front to back. One does not "flip through" the internet and say, "Damn it! There's too much about Bart Simpson on here! Where's the Amazon Rainforest?" No, one googles "amazon rainforest" and gets the results. Simple, huh?
Now, blogging has its own benefits. Besides the amateur porn (how I love it so), I can keep tabs on how my friends are doing, catch up on an acquaintance I haven't seen in months, or publish a rant that I think really says something worthwhile. (Doesn't mean anyone has to agree, but it's up there, and that makes me feel better.)
And it's such a better alternative to forwarding email. Now, when someone I know has an annoying chain-letter to spread, they can just paste it on their blog, and I can ignore it. People only email me if they actually have something to say. Isn't that innovative?
I do agree, however, that "blog" is a stupid fucking word, used by stupid fucking people. Ugh. Like those twits who said "cyberspace" and "information superhighway" in the nineties.
--grendel drago
They have ignored the Genova Convention...
Too much FF7, eh?
--grendel drago
Wasn't that Tammany Hall, in New York, that was the real home of the Democratic Machine? Or did you just mean in post-Depression times?
--grendel drago
ideas that reproduce and self propogate in a malignant way
Totally offtopic question. This idea, stated as such, seems really... really... off-putting. Who believes that there are ideas, ideas, that we mustn't be exposed to, because they'll do something evil. Sounds like a standard censorship argument, with a blank into which can be written "Porn", "Scientology" or "Jesus". Is this what memetics is about? What a disappointment, if it is.
--grendel drago
And we all remember how bulging spandesticles look, right? Right? ... I still have flashbacks, and my friends don't trust random things I IM them any more...
--grendel drago
A number of my friends kept journals there a few years ago. I started one so I could keep up with some people who are long-distance from me, and so I'd have an outlet for writing. Those are the main reasons, I suppose. Sure, hitting 'random journal' brings you to unadulterated crap nine times of ten, but there are a few decent writers on there.
Oh, and the 18+ communities, with their gobs, gobs and gobs of amateur porn. (If you LJ, go check out kaizersoze125. It's full of porn.)
--grendel drago
That's not the worst of it. Over at Livejournal, the word "meme" has taken on the definition of "annoyingly colorful randomly-generated crap that you copy and paste into your journal". Every time I see someone calling some memegen crap a "meme", I die a little inside.
(For the lucky uninitiated, these things work by taking some random input, hashing it and picking random elements from sets of answers.)
--grendel drago
modern SLR viewfinders aint what they used to be thanks to AF. Gone are most of the focus aids.
A-men!
I had (well, was borrowing) a Nikon FE-2 that's currently in the shop due to a munged shutter. Manual focus, but the (I don't know the words for any of these things) focusing screen with the split circle in the middle, where if it was in-focus the two halves would line up, and the ring around the central circle would be
absolutely usable, even in low light.
I recently got a Canon EOS Rebel GII. The autofocus is dodgy when not in direct sunlight. The focusing screen contains three little boxes to represent the AF points, which blink when they read as in-focus. That's it. Manually focusing is absolutely unassisted.
A decent viewfinder screen can't be that expensive. Some of us still like to focus manually.
--grendel drago
I'm surprised no one else has mentioned this, but the Internet Archive has the debates, along with plenty of other political stuff. See the Election 2004 video collection. The third debate isn't up yet, but, for instance, the second one is available in MPEG-4 streaming, MPEG-1, or MPEG-2 formats.
Also, they have the older SIGGRAPH Electronic Theater stuff. Pardon me while I binge.
--grendel drago
Have you ever read Henry Ford's writings on business organization? He was a far more ardent critic of international finance than me.
From what I know of Ford, I can only assume that "international finance" is a code-word for "The Jews".
--grendel drago
the spice channel [...] with anal sex and cumshots
Clearly you've never actually seen the "Spice Channel". It's non-porn porn. When I was younger, and porn-deprived, I stayed up all night watching it, from 10 PM to 6 AM or so, at a friend's house.
Everything of interest happened *just* offscreen. They didn't even show bush. It may have been the most disappointing eight hours I've ever had.
--grendel drago
Hmm. I thought Canadians owned guns just like Americans did, but happened not to murder each other nearly as often because they're so gosh-darned polite.
'Course, I'm just vaguely remembering "Bowling for Columbine" at this point.
--grendel drago
You know, discreet.asstr.org is designed to be safe-for-work. Neat, eh?
But, eh, I don't think plots should be terribly necessary. I mean, why would we watch real people just to see them act? I'd rather toss them all in a comfy, well-lit space, say "Fuck!" and tape it.
--grendel drago
Plus, if amateurs were so great the flood of high quality home-made porno would be a ton better than what Vivid puts out. Personally, I'd rather watch the oversized men fuck women with over-sized Nip/Tuck'd boobs and airbrushed looking bodies than watching a fat, hairy, man fuck some underaged looking dark-circle eyed skank on the floor of a Super8 hotel room. That's me though ;)
'kay, I'll reply to this because I'm so fond of amateur porn. I believe that there's a certain barrier to entry for real, full, media production. For decent photography, one needs at minimum a $200 digital camera (as opposed to the shitty one on a cell phone---wait, things have suddenly gotten cheaper, you can get a Powershot A75 for $160 or so) and to spend five or ten minutes setting up some lights. For the extraordinarily cheap (that's me!), those clamp lights you can get for a few bucks at the hardware store work. Yeah, the lighting is uneven, but it's better than available room light.
Still, too many amateurs don't really put the basic kind of effort required to make their pictures Not Suck. Oh, the content itself may be good, but it's frequently noisy and underexposed.
As for video, I really do think the cost is generally prohibitive. Still cameras that also capture bits of video tend to, let's face it, suck horribly. A decent miniDV cam is around $250 (though this is surprising to me; when I got mine a few years ago, it was bottom-of-the-barrel at $550). Then there's tapes, time and effort to be expended.
Capture and encoding requires a dorky level of interest in learning how to use Virtualdub (or transcode, I suppose), do deinterlacing and muxing, etc.) to even work then. Too much time and effort, I guess.
Which really does disappoint me, because despite my complaints, amateur porn really is the best porn. Whether it be one or another LJ community, or a mostly-free picture post (getting original-resolution images requires a membership), there's a lot of good stuff out there.
'Course, that's really just my opinion. Mileage may vary.
--grendel drago
Sure---any Communist nation. Cuba, North Korea, China, the former Soviet Union and its satellite states.
The political 'spectrum' is more of a circle. Farthest left and farthest right meet in a fusion of totalitarianism. Because what they want, even more than their own ideologies, is control. And that's what dictatorships are about.
--grendel drago
Don't get so cocky. Dictatorships are available in new crunchy Right-Wing Flavor (tm) as well.
--grendel drago
If you believe Alan Moore, the disease used in War of the Worlds was human-created---a biowarfare hybrid weapon created by Dr. Moreau. The freemasons covered it all up, of course.
--grendel drago
"Officially, the Martians died of the common cold. Any Londoners died of Martians."
Anyone else remember that? The secret Masonic society using Alphonse Moreau's anthrax-smallpox hybrid to poison the Martians?
Anyone?
--grendel drago
You know, really doubt being poor is easy. I also doubt being in prison trying not to get raped every six hours is easy. And I would hesitate to label people in those situations as "lazy leeches", despite the alliterative allure of the phrase.
My point is that it's better to educate and train people before they turn into criminals than it is to endlessly lock up criminals and throw up our hands, crying that, man, a lot of people just seem to be born as Lazy Leeches.
And in what reality does imprisoning people have a positive effect? And in what reality does education and training not have a positive effect?
Admit it---you just have a deep-grained fear and loathing of poor people, or at least the image you have of them.
--grendel drago
If the worst they do is smoke weed in their spare time, I'd say we don't really have a problem.
--grendel drago