furtive explorations

Of course, I'm trying to cut down on sugary stuff since both my parents are now officially diabetic. So I pouted and said that I might bring the fixings but it was cruel to ask since I would't be able to have any. =) It might have sounded pathetic if the prior conversation wasn't about where to go to dinner.

So then we quickly brain stormed on what kind of diet smores you could make and came up with this winning combination:

<========================>   Half a rice cake
  /____________________/          Tasty sugar/fat free super Carob
   [##################]
   [##################]             Tofu
   [##################]     
<========================>   Other half of rice cake

Then we laughed like idiots. =)

Perhaps even more frightening than the ease with which these malicious users will soon be able to bring the 'Net to its knees is the total lack of concern on the part of majour ISPs that Steve found when he tried to work with them to track down the children attacking him and work to implement a fix on their own compromised systems. A must read for everyone who uses the 'Net, but especially for anyone running an ISP or using a cable modem.

I expect every one who reads this page will find themselves typing

netstat -an | find ":6667"

into an MS-DOS window before they're through. Thankfully, I'm clean.

The president of a Fairfax company that is the industry leader in the emerging field of wearable computing says it is a trillion dollar market and will quickly replace the Palm Pilot and other personal digital assistants that have become popular in recent years. You know, if it fits in your pocket or clips to your belt then technically... *sigh* never mind."

"People say, 'Well, you wouldn't wear it to a cocktail party.' That's true, but you wouldn't wear a welding mask to a cocktail party either. It's a work tool, and for the next year or two years, that's where the market is at," Newman said. You sir, are clearly going to the wrong cocktail parties. In fact, I'd be the fucking hit of the party if you could build a wearable computer into a welding mask for me.

British Airways recently completed a pilot program in which agents used wearable computers to try to speed up the check-in process. I think "pilot program" may have been a bad turn of phrase there. It might just be me, though.

What has thrown my entire day's happiness into a dark hole full of spikes and snakes and acid (ew, half-dissolved, pierced snakes.) and slammed the lid shut is this quote:

Wilga became obsessed with sharks after moving from Kodiak, Alaska, to the University of South Florida in Tampa, where pioneering research was underway to try to decipher just how these mythical creatures function in the water. Emphasis is mine, however, I wish vengeance was, too

See, if you call your column DyeHard Science, you reallly need to understand that sharks aren't mythical. Chimera are mythical. Unicorns are mythical. The phoenix was mythical. The current "energy crisis" is mythical. Women who are both sane and attractive are mythical. Sharks are very much real.

I think the word he was thumbing through the thesaurus for was legendary. Here are some more words for mythical and here are some for If you are reading this in my archive the likelyhood is you will have to dig in the column's past for the article.

I don't know if I can take another 3.5 years of ass-backwards anti-logic. Another great idea from the Asshole In Chief and his Merry Turds! *sigh*

1. I am so glad that someone in this country has the guts to do what is right no matter what the regulations say! That is one smart sheriff.
2. Those poor, poor deprived kids. They need the internet and computers so'd they will learn to take out that "get the guns" aggression in a healthy manner. Access to the internet would have assured that they take guns to school like the other kids rather than leaving them around the house...
3. At 16, if my dad was dead and mom hauled off to jail for felony spanking (or whatever) and the police at the door, I'd have had my dad's guns out too!
4. Jesus, send a neighbor they know over with some food and tell em to stay outta trouble and let em know where to go when they need help. You know millions of people did just fine before we invented social workers...

To put it bluntly
anything else is just wrong
you fucking morons.

the browser loading
sites of unholy poems
I spared you the link!

=)

I think that I may be in love: <shes> is a fine startup blog. Fine for three very important reasons. One: she picked "underwhelmed" as the site name. Two: she said this "but dumber than a sack of hammers". Three: her nickname is "rose death" the same week I started to consider "floramuerte.com" or some variation as a good domain for a site about not being really goth. Also, reason zero is, of course, that she inexplicably picked my site as "some things that don't suck" along with real sites like Whatever-Dude, Emily Strange, Planet Sucks (damn I wish I'd thought of that domain), TheHip and the amusing Toxic Pink. TP has a cast of three women blogging, 19, 29, and 39 which has to be one heck of a story by itself.

Other things that convinced me I'm in love: "Went through a breif hommicidal phase where i wanted to kill all of my friends." creative spelling actually makes this work, "i wanted to go see shrek last night.", "i dont know if any of you have ever been woken up by a very pissed off kitty cat... but it is fairly unpleasent...", " have you ever noticed how people will get this idea of you in their heads. An image of how they think you are. The real you is usually so disapointing." Also, her email address is misDOTanthropyATantisocialDOTcom which rocks. Damn shame that a domain like antisocial.com got sucked into the vanity email business tho, even if it does provide my new love with email.

I found her site by ego-surfing. Nothing like plugging in your own domain name and seeing who links you. hostile.org is still used as the example in some network documentation as the "bad guy". Gotta love that.

My link on her site is followed by "this just happens to be the start of my shameless promotion". First off, promotion means linking sites that have more traffic that drunken people who mis-type hostel.org. Secondly, you don't know from shameless, I'm fawning over a 23 year-old girl I have no hope of ever meeting based on liking 6 phrases out of fewer than 200 sentences and who would surely reel back in horror if she ever saw my fat 32 year-old ass even heading in her direction. =)

BTW, I liked the cat quote about waking up to evil cats because I've woken up with one bedding down to sleep on my face. I got a mouthful of fur and paw, he got a free ride to the far side of the room, I had nightmares about smothering under-cat for days, he licked his own asshole on the stairs and deliberately hated me from across the room.

David's note was about Off The Mark which scores points with me immediately thanks to a fine pun on my own name. SciFi and common culture related single-panel funnies with fair-to-middlin' art will keep me coming back. Did I mention you can send me more like that, too?) The press release annoys me with a needless reference to Gary Larson. Just being single panel and a off-kilter doesn't immediately require a call out to the demi-gods. The guy is good on his own and his humor is rather different from GL's. Anyhoo, enough bitching on trivia, both get stuck with links in the "Daily" section and I added Plan 9 to the "Community" section. Go there and buy stuff! For me, or for yourself. for me! for me! all for me! I want any sluggy, kev'n'kell or ozy&millie stuff, for a first round. Then start on BOFH and the rest, thanks. =)

And while I'm at it, I suppose I should add in PLIF to the weekly's as a "W" (how did I forget them last time? They did this!), and move Checkerboard Nightmare up to the "MWF" section since I'm pretty much reading it every day. (Shame about that dang long name... =) Oh yeah, and Thanks For Nuthin' in as a M-F (even tho he's a bit spotty at it. =) and DPad (MWF) gets added to the ever growing and shrinking watching list.

This is just a test of the emergency fucking with windows settings system. If this had been a real emergency you would have had to screw with the settings from DOS. Thank you and good night.

I have no idea what the fuck I was doing, not the slightest... There isn't anything in the archives from that day to give me any clue, either...

This spam complaint would wind up being different. The person who was spammed was a "nanny" type who feels every spam is a direct, one-way ticket to jail for somebody, if only the proper authorities were made aware of the horiffic crime. (as you can tell, I'm completely able to hit delete once and be happy and if I note a pattern, I fire up ye olde tyme mail client and manfully type in a filter.) So the person nails just about everybody who might possibly care, meaning the addresses of the spammer and the abuse/postmaster/hostmaster trio on every provider that every came in contact with the spam or the website it off-handedly mentioned. (It wasn't direct advo mail.)

Of course, we are used to getting spammed with three copies of every spam a spam-nanny gets so that isn't surprising. And we are used to mildly snide or huffy return mails from weblist administrators saying "Ok ok, I removed them, all you had to do was ask, don't get your panties in a bunch." or some such thing. So that didn't suprise any of us either. I also wasn't too amazed at the chutzpah the spammer showed when he proceeded to mail-bomb the poor nanny with huge mail after mail until his mailbox was full. There are nasty little people all over and a lot of them think that being allowed to shout in people's ears is a god-given right, by golly.

What is unique in this case is that our moron spammer then proceeded to sign up all the administrator accounts at all of the service providers involved onto his spam list. Yep, no quicker way to to draw fire than to piss off the people who control your website, your website's network and your home connection than to send spam to the abuse addresses directly.

It is almost breathtaking. I'm actually looking forward to the conversation I'm going to have with his home DSL provider in the morning when I quote line and verse from their terms and conditions at the abuse person who is looking at the spam from him to their accounts.

In related news, it is now ok with Hormel Foods to say spammer.

This person obviously doesn't understand science-fiction, much less good science fiction. To say that Star Wars (not to be confused with today's less-classic Star Wares...thanks George) and Rollerball are intrinsically better than the classics Logan's Run or Soylent Green is offensive and uninformed.

Certainly, Star Wars was more popular -- its audience spanned generations, classes, and genres. Rollerball didn't suck...or at least that's what the stupid hollywood bastards want us to think. But a pat dismissal of LR and SG is inane.

Star Wars was a space opera...a mish-mash of age-old epics retold with a technology flavor. Logan's Run was true sci-fi...dealing with humanity and its use, interaction with, and trouble with technology. More specfically, Logan's Run was prototypical Cyberpunk. Machines running rampant. Humanity in unrealized servitude to the machinery. Humanity's struggle to remain human.

Soylent Green...same thing. Humanity dealing with the problem's caused by their own actions. The "science" was a wrapper for social commentary. It was a far-flung future evaluation of our present-day trends. Granted, Charleton Heston certainly didn't need to be in the movie...or at least he needed a mess-load of laxative. But the movie still pointed fingers to hard questions. Where's the social commentary in Star Wars, other than the age-old Good Vs. Evil rhetoric? What's the driving human struggle in Rollerball?

Schmucks need to stop comparing apples and oranges. Just because a movie has lasers doesn't mean it is the same as every other movie that has lasers. Sheesh

All in all it is an amusing power-fantasy (in this case, fem-power) story with plenty of room for heroines to do just about anything they desire. And she has amassed quite a collection of powerful images of women, each woven into the back story developed so far.

The problem with such personal imagery is that a great deal of the meaning of the symbols is too deeply woven into the writer's head. A great deal of fanish fiction comes off this way, with a single powerful "author-esque" character running circles around the rest of the universe. Power fantasy is fine in small doses but the trick is to make the character both human and sympathetic to the readership. Getting too deep into your own personal power fantasy blinds you to the key universal elements of shared desire that make a character both leap off the page and help the reader get drawn into the character.

The writer of this stuff would be better served to write in dispassionate third person or tell the story from first person innocent bystander perspective. Living the starring role in your head is fine but tell it from outside so you can see how it all looks for a while. You should only dig into the heads of your power characters for brief moments, when you need to bring them down to earth.

Heck, grab a 3-D renderer and do something wacky like Robot Girls or kooky like Steven Stills, or plain kick ass like Digital Blasphemy. Even Real Doll or Gynoid and Hot Heros, each with their own violent cheese factor, are better. Seriously, I think a cheapo pr0n site, a life-size anti-dildo product, and a crappy fan site beat up on those images.

Nothing like surfing the fringe of a fetish to get me all worked up... with anger! =)

UPDATE: These idiots want you to PAY for stuff worse than the bozo I'm complaining about. Man, pr0n has sunk to new lows, and when you realize I'm talking about pr0n, that means something!
Also, why does this need a panty... there?
Best Japanglish so far? "Refrain from the reproduction without notice such as an image again. Troublesome :)" or "Be more careful of the one that the one with the resistance those descriptions, an idea are different." or even just "INFOMATION"

.net is at least a nice art-fuck site, which I highly approve of in the general sense. .org amusingly redirected me to TribalWar where all your brain-drilling needs can be fulfilled with a good, violent game of Tribes 2. Also, you can feel safe at the site because it is "*protected by Bacchus*", what ever that means. *shrug*

I read every damn one of them.

I get to blame RobotWisdom for this one. I jumped into two of the better articles from his page. And paid the rest no heed by jumping into a couple of odd comics like Rehabilitating Mr. Wiggles which was disappointingly about cats and happily quite gross.

You should jump over there and look for a title or two that catch your eye or resonate in your head. Inside you're likely to find a wonderful echo of the past. Not your past unless there is a great deal more coincidence floating around today than I think but a fine and well written memory that will send you off into your own reverie of childhood summer-music memories. I might even beat out one of mine later and stick it in coredump. If I find the time...