sweasel.com

Like all legacy media concerns, The Atlantic is a business first and foremost and will operate their businesses in terms of profit, first and foremost.

Problem is, people have a habit of looking at the media as altruistic, or at least somewhat objective. The media in turn goes out of its way to culture this belief as a means of attracting a wider audience – again, a business decision.

Question: in an age where cynicism is the de facto emotional response to cultural institutions like religion, morality, and patriotism, why are so many of those who adopt this response willing to unquestioningly consume what they’re handed by the exact sort of faceless, impersonal institution they’d otherwise damn?

completely unrelated, via David Thompson: this is cool.

The tastiness of this situation is, Sullivan’s unhinged nuttiness has got to be annoying the shit of of the self-regarding snoots on the editorial side of the Atlantic.

I love the new media, and I’ve been chasing it and expecting big things from it since USENET days. But as much as we like to see it as a Darwinian steel cage match, where the best float to the top, it isn’t. by far th most important quality in this brave new world is not being best, it’s being first.

We all could do what Drudge does, particularly now that he seldom posts original content. In fact, most of us DO what Drudge does: graze the innernets all day looking for the good shit. He was in first with the portal idea, so he owns it.

It’s like we’re all European nations scrambling around the New World planting flags. I claim this putting-funny- captions-on-pictures-of-cats for the Queen of Spain! You know?

I’m often struck by how really very…mediocre a lot of the top blogs are. The good ones are very good, but many of them are up in the top tiers simply because they got in on the game early.

It’s not just blogging, either. All the big ‘net ideas: eBay and Amazon and Craig’s List. For many of those, you can certainly credit someone with having a good idea and the guts to back it up by wangling loans and convincing investors and building a business the old fashioned way. I’m not saying they don’t deserve the success. I’m saying the internet is an environment that uniquely rewards early adopters.

Holy shit, apotheosis! That is COMPLETELY cool! I’d love to see it in its large-screen incarnation.

That gave me goosebumps in spots.

With the exception of the Oracle newsgroups (oh, the rapture of actually conversing with a legend like Tom Kyte ! He rly rly answered me!1!!) I never looked at USENET as much more than an entertainment venue.

Back in the beginning it did have the marginal benefit of a comparatively steep learning curve, so at least it kept most of the incorrigible doorknobs away. Then like everything else, AOL went and ruined that, too.

Ah, yes Assholes On Line….

Them were the days.

And yes, deep coolth in that link.

There was a drought in the Midwest in…I’m going to say the late ’80s. I don’t remember for sure. This woman on some USENET alt group described how rabbits were coming out of the woods to eat laundry off the line, to get at the moisture. I remember being struck by how vividly that told the story, compared to the boring news reports.

During the attempted coup in the Soviet Union in ’91, some guy in talk.politics.russia claimed his flat looked out over Kremlin Square. He gave running eyewitness reports and uploaded them via phone link.

There was no way to prove he was who he said he was, as I fully realized at the time. But it was hard to escape the idea that millions of eyewitnesses with access to the world’s ear were going to transform news as we knew it.

I must have been a complete bore in the early Nineties, always grabbing people by the lapels and shouting, “DON’T YOU SEE WHAT’S COMING????”

On the other hand, I totally cheated myself out of being an early adopter of blogging, by being a stuck-up snot bag. I had nothing but contempt for blogs at first; I regarded them as personal websites for people too stupid to master HTML (let’s face it, too stupid to master HTML is pretty fucking stupid).

I didn’t get how the easiness of posting — even for enlightened beings who know HTML — facilitates the process (not to mention trackbacks and blogrolls and all the other accoutrements that make it an enclosed ecosystem).

Kibo knew what was coming a loooooong time ago.

And He warned us.

Heh. I hadn’t thought of alt.religion.kibology in a thousand years.

Well, twenty, anyhow.

And don’t feel bad about the “early adopter of blogging” thing – I’d almost talked myself out of a career in web development altogether by clinging tenaciously to my beloved BBS.

I just couldn’t for the life of me imagine everyone would want to go through all that mess and trouble of setting up “Trumpet Winsock” and this silly “netscape” thingamadoohickey, instead of just opening Procomm or Telix and calling someone in their very…own…neighborhood! Sixteen lines, at the blazing speed of 14.4k! Tradewars doors! Textfile archives! Custom-designed ASCII menus in sixteen glorious colors!

Really, what’s not to love?

I totally remember the first time I saw the Web. I think it was around ’94. I was like, “and…?” Of course, it didn’t help that early web pages were so simple and ugly and horrible that plain text on a black background actually looked better. And until the Web got some serious content — which took YEARS — it was utterly useless.

I just got a teaser email from Adobe — something big is coming 09 . 23 . 08. Ugh. Adobe Creative Suite 4. Speaking of useless, Photoshop is getting morbidly obese 🙁

Heh. This has turned into one of Those Threads, hasn’t it? My boss didn’t call me Queen of the Geeks for nothin’.

why are so many of those who adopt this response willing to unquestioningly consume what they’re handed by the exact sort of faceless, impersonal institution they’d otherwise damn?

I read that television ratings are now tallied using the viewers actual time on the station.

The cable/satellite/whatever box/ generates these numbers and are used to determine ad rates .

I have deleted CNN from my television as a result of this information.

Money is speech. Lack of my money is less of their speech!

They can have my Photoshop 6 when they pry it from my cold, dead hard drive.

I read that television ratings are now tallied using the viewers actual time on the station.

The cable/satellite/whatever box/ generates these numbers and are used to determine ad rates .

I’ve often wondered how much usage data (if any) those boxes sent back to the cable companies. I’d sorta dismissed those thoughts as borderline paranoia, but recently I’m not so sure.

In a way, I hope they do. I’d love to have my late night Science Channel and History Channel viewing not be interrupted by commercials for whatever that screaming bearded buttmunch Billy Mays is hawking this week. Hopefully my finely-tuned, ninja-like reflexes on the mute button are being relayed to and making an impression on The Deciders.

Or those insultingly stupid “crazy fox” commercials. I note they keep changing the URL of their site…I like to imagine it’s because the FTC keeps on shutting them down one by one.

Guilty geek admission du jour: I miss the sound of modems handshaking. It was an expression of reaching out to the world, something more visceral than the “bang, it’s there” of a broadband connection.

Sometimes I call fax machines just for that pang of nostalgia.

That last part might be a lie.

ok – this is boring. Let’s make fun of something.
http://www.comedycentral.com/videos/index.jhtml?videoId=35868

For those of you who missed it last night and in a format that sweasel can see?

I hear you apotheosis. That sound was so connected to connecting online. I do miss it.

Ms. Weasel: Don’t feel bad about not jumping on the blog bandwagon. I dismissed blogs at first because most of them seemed to be personal diaries of self-important pissant punters. “O woe is me! I ran out of black guyliner!” etc.

At least, that was my impression.

“guyliner” is a real word?

I thought my daughter made that crap up to legitimize the appearance of that My Chemical Romance doofus.

Teeheehee. You scientific people will get a kick out of this.

Your Ladyship, and others who may be interested, Harry Hutton of Chase Me Ladies and Noreen of Emerald Bile have new posts up.

BTW, apotheosis, it seems to me that guyliner is a real word after all. At least it’s in wide current use among the youth.

Hahaha…loved the first link. That was totally worth the cost of registering the domain name.

I’m so very, very busy today. My goofing off chickensssss are coming home to deadline roooossssssst.

However, I’m getting a tiny measure of evil pleasure. I’m using McCain’s font in the client’s interface. A teeny, tiny easter egg.

Get a load of this one……. 🙂

http ://www.weeklyworldnews.com/?p=2605

Palin bags a bigfoot……… LOL

Man, I just read an article about Obama and his teleprompter. I guess they are wedded at the hip now. He was delivering a speech and they had it set up for him in a rodeo ring.

Maybe I’m just bitterly clinging to my horses, but a teleprompter in a rodeo ring? That’s a violation of some natural law.

Hey, I remember the early web days. My wife was all over it. She told me she could make money at it. Me, meh. So she developed web sites for real estate companies back in the early 90’s. Yeah, she made a few shekels off it. So, yeah, I admit it, I was a total loser on the idea.

Just tuning in, apotheosis. NICE link! One of the owners of my company is a bigwig solar sciences guy and he’ll love this. The sections where it appears that magnetic lines are actually breaking… that represents so much energy it’s spooky.

I’m all gooseybumpelly all overish. Thanks!

I wonder if he says ro-DAY-o?

I’m sure I’ve posted this before, but I read Tim Berners-Lee’s white paper proposing the World Wide Web in 1990 and I thought to myself, “pff! Stupid hippies! Who in their right mind would give away all their content for free? And that cross-linking thing? Who’s going to control it?”

Of course, did you see Beners-Lee in the news yesterday? Stupid bastard is proposing some way of ranking web sites for their truthiness, to prevent the spread of misinformation.

Yeah. I can’t see any way that’s going to be a problem.

Why, wasn’t Wikipedia meant to combat that very problem? (mock sincerity… oozing)

Weasel, he says it ro-DAY-um-o. I’m looking for the photo-op with him in a cowboy hat. That should be delicious.

I can’t believe I was so stupid on the web and real estate. My wife said oh yeah it’s going to take off, people can look at properties without having to actually go there. One of the first sites she developed was for a real estate operation in Ireland. It saw an uptick in business of about 40% in the first year. Doh!

I think I liked the audio almost as much as the video. The images are powerful but the staticky, disjointed audio gives that air of the eerie or unearthly…sorta like those CONET recordings, or the puzzles on ThisIsNotP*rn (if anyone rememebers that site).

I remember a few years back someone assembled a collection of the various radio signals emitted by the planets from Voyager 1 and 2 recordings, and turned them into an album of weird, ambient white noise with just enough pattern to make it seem like more was at work than just natural processes. It was neat stuff. This kinda reminds me of that.

[edit: found it. Out of print? Drat.]

I remember my late ex-fiancee and I having a debate about having a home computer. This was probably 1994 or so. He was adamant in his belief that he could see no legitimate reason to have a home computer. And he was a computer programmer.

So I killed him.

(no, not really)

Allen: http://roadkillrefugee.files.wordpress.com/2008/02/obama-cowboy-hat.png

Jill, that’s a great picture. The hat fits him well.

In the Eighties and Nineties, our professional Information Services people bragged that they didn’t own home computers. Because PC’s were toys, you see, and they knew about Real Computers. The ones that were the size of walk-in freezers and lived in the basement.

Problem was, at the time they were bragging, they were charged with running our PC-based networks. Hoo! What a mess they made.

I remember the Publications Department network, which booted right to a word processing program. I hit F9 to drop down to DOS, got a directory listing, and there was a file called passwds.txt. Yep. It was a plain text file listing the name, password of every person in the department.

I’m not a fan of the argument that hackers do everyone a favor by probing the weaknesses of the system, but shit. Who could resist?

Heh, a whole new bunch of names: Wordstar DOShacker

Heh. The Story of Menstruation as told by Disney and Kotex.

Ah, well that does explain a lot. I couldn’t work out why on earth Sullivan was getting so many hits but this does tell the tale. Drudge generates tremendous traffic (for some reason) and a permanent link on the site will throw a bunch at you.

And Obama looks good in a cowboy hat, actually.

Ummm…Uncle B, can you explain this?

Hey, you linked me!

And, Ace just linked you. So there.

So Jill, where did you not really hide his body? 🙂

That story was… surreal. I am sitting here, my daughter playing over on the carpet next to my father-in-law, and four paces away are her grandmother and mother working on a puzzle. And here I sit listening to a story about menses from *Disney*.

That 2-7 day range they quote is wrong. It is *forever*.

I’m left with two burning questions:

Why did the narrator’s voice sound familiar?
What, exactly, is a man-lesbian?

I thought I must be lesbian ’cause I like women, too, but “man-lesbian” (in the comments section) has this poor geek confused. Oh wait, is this another one of those Wizard of Oz references that I’m just not going to get again?

Rosetta is a man-lesbian. He is the man-lesbian from the Hostages.

Y’all know we had a near death experience just then, right? The blog went white, with “database error” and when I checked my BlueHost control panel, it said, “database? What database? You don’t have no databases, lady.”

Then it all came back.

I thought repairing the DB would do it, but I suspect BlueHost is having ongoing problems. I’ve gotten intermittent errors for some time…but, then, I have ISP errors on my end, too, which makes it hard to know what’s up.

The problem is intermittent, guessing it’s the host.

Is there any way you can back up all your shi… I mean, stuff on your system, Weas? Sort of a “Yeah I trust y’all but all the same I’m still going to keep a copy just humor me” kind of thing?

Ok. I was confused when pajama momma was asked if she was man-lesbian and well… sheesh.

Yes, I’ve done backups. Though I’m unclear how to do complete ones (a regular backup doesn’t include images, for example, which would gut this site). Databases have scared me from day one, so I never learned much about them.

On a happier note, I’m the #1 Google hit for “baculum raccoon penis cocktail stirring.”

Ewwwwwwwww.

Wow, and you were #5 for “baculum raccoon penis cocktail stirring” last week when I checked. Good job!

🙂

I bet you are #1 for cat butt flute too.

I wanted to put my two cents in on what I thought Obama looked like in a cowboy hat.
FAKE!
and a little….well you know…

I dunno. In that particular shot, I think he looks damn good in it.

My mother (who was a very talented portrait artist) used to say that a stetson hat was the hardest thing in the world to draw. All those subtle curves, and they shift and move from different angles.

Huh. You know, surprisingly Christopher, with or without quotation marks…I’m not even on the first page for cat butt flute.

I really need to pull some more catsophone music out of my hindquarters.

Well here’s a REAL cowboy!

http://www.mensvogue.com/images/clothing/2008/02/threads_regan.jpg

Anyone from the west knows that was truly Dukakis of Obama to wear a cowboy hat.

Badgers in the hair?

Fleas. We like the taste of fleas.

Lice are nicer to crunch, but – hey! – you get what you’re given.

Meanwhile, talking of stuff-wot-grosses-people-out, guess what Uncle B is having for dinner tonight? 🙂

Yes… it’s steak and kidney pie!

That’s a recipe (along with the one for fruit cake) that didn’t make it across on the Mayflower, isn’t it?

Poor Goodie Merryweather has a lot to answer for, dropping her fambly cookbook over the side as they quit Plymouth Sound….

My god, how many times can there possibly be a hit on “cat butt flute”? And why?

I mean, PICTURE IT. Just picture puckering up to that fuzzy butt and blowing for all you’re worth. Ewwwwwww. So how can there be lots of google hits? Riddle me that. Huh?

I know… ease down… ease down… busted the transaxle… ease down…

Raise your hand if you have googled “cat butt flute” in the last 24 hours.

Phew! I’m in teh clear.

All I googled was “cat butt lute”.

Completely different kind of “musical” instrument.

Actually what the Obama in a hat reminded me of was Blazing Saddles. Hope that makes me an idiotic movie buff rather than racist. 🙂

And damn you all. Now I have to google cat butt flute. Just to see.

A recent manicure is in order if you’re prone to play the catbutt lute. There’s nothing worse than trying to tune an angry cattbutt.

(I so made myself laugh out loud on that second sentence)

“And what’s a dazzling urbanite like you doing in a rustic seeting like this?” – The Waco Kid

Goodie Merryweather was PUSHED!

Yes… it’s steak and kidney pie!

I can’t remember if I have asked this before, but does weasel eats her some piss filters? Or does she pile them to the side like I would peas if I ever lost my mind and brought them into the house?

Uh, that would be setting, not seeting.

Time for sleeps. Night, all.

Hmm, I wonder if Spotted Dick would be a good followon to a main course of steak and kidney pie…..

No, I don’t eat kidneys. Or liver (I tasted a bite of Uncle B’s fried liver in a cafe in South London, and damn near taught it to fly). That’s the stuff we scooped out and gave to the dawgs, where I come from. Days Uncle B eats offal, I eat something that grosses him out. Like pasta. (Yeah. I know. He has a really weird grossout threshold).

Spotted dick, however, is reasonably nice.