Excuse me, there’s a weasel in the ballpit
That’s what the web reminds me of. It’s nothing like a super highway, it doesn’t hugely feel like an interconnected web. The way I do it, it’s more like swimming in a big, colorful, bobbly pit of information balls.
I’ve never actually been in a ballpit, for I am old. Wikipedia tells me they have hygeine issues — they’re full of children and unwashed balls. Bad stuff floats to the bottom and stays there. So, see, the comparison is perfect.
Anyhow…like so: click on a link in your own blogroll, then click on a link in his blogroll, then click on a link in her blogroll…and keep clicking links until you find yourself someplace utterly strange. I do that a lot. I was hoping to come up with a cool name for this activity, but I failed.
I am also (you may have noticed) a gigantic consumer of Wikipedia (not everything hippies do is stupid). I frequent link collecting sites like Fazed and Portent. I keep a whole page of international newspaper links that I add to (and occasionally remove from).
Here’s the problem: I use Opera, the original tabbed browser. And I drink. And I leave my desktop machine on all the time. So when I come down most mornings, I am confronted with twenty cool open Web pages and no earthly idea how I got to any of them. I think it’s important to attribute stuff properly. But then, life is full of important things I don’t do.
So please, share some of my colorful balls of unknown provenance…
Did you know there was a Daily Photo Blog community? Here’s a map of current participants. I got in through Milano Daily Photo. Bath and Budapest were good, too. I only really got to the B’s before I began to skip around. Some are better about updating than others, but I enjoyed the lot of ’em.
I really love ideas like this. They feed my sick delusional yearning for godlike powers of vision and…eavesdropping. Oh, yeah, like you wouldn’t eavesdrop if you were a god.
And so continues our proven interest in all things deer anus — behold, the Butt Out Tool.
This tool is the fastest, easiest way to disconnect the anal alimentary canal from deer or similar-sized game. Immediately after harvesting game, insert the Butt-Out Tool into the anal canal and twist until it grabs the membrane. Continue twisting another half turn, then steadily pull the Butt-Out Tool out of the canal. Extract 10″ of membrane, tie the membrane off and cut.
There’s video. (I definitely got this one from Fazed).
This tattoo artist apparently specializes in bulldogs and serial killers. Okay, I don’t recognize that very last one, but the one before that is Albert Fish, Eater of Children, and the one before that is Richard Ramirez. Not just serial killers, but badly drawn, especially losery serial killers. Would it be better if these tats were all on one guy, or spread out among several scary people with bad taste? I can’t make up my mind.
This one’s almost a year old, so you’ve probably seen it if you’re into gaming. I’m not and I hadn’t. It’s 1K Project II, a thousand cars racing through a game called Trackmania. I tried a couple of different addresses for the kid who made it, in case he had any remarks, with no luck. Then I found a page explaining how he did it — in French. My French, she is not so good — but I gather he cut together multiple walkthroughs to achieve the effect. This explains why the cars seem to have collision detection in some cases and not in others.
It’s very well done and seriously cool. Sometimes they look like shoals of fish and sometimes flocks of birds and sometimes swarms of bugs and sometimes bitchin’ cars.
Finally, this guy: Tim Knowles. He’s an artist in London of the kind that does stupid shit like ink up pine trees and put paper under them and let them draw pictures in the breeze. I know, I know…I can’t help myself. I went to a poncy art school. They polluted my mind.
Like, check out this drawing, which was made by this huge seismography thing in the back of a station wagon on the way to its own exhibition. Or the slideshow he made by mailing a box rigged with a digital camera to take a picture of its journey every ten seconds for 6,994 pictures (sadly, the whole slideshow is not online). Or these surprisingly evocative pictures of the full moon reflected in water.
Or you could, you know, bite me.
July 6, 2007 — 4:36 pm
Comments: 10
Islamic Rage Boy: the interview
Look what JW found: an interview with Shakeel Bhat, the Islamic Rage Boy. Who is, in fact, 31 and a “full-time demonstrator” (how do you say “lives in moms’ basement” in…whatever dialect they speak in Kashmir?)
Apart from drawing ridicule from bloggers, Bhat has even inspired one American neoconservative website to push “Rage Boy” merchandise — including T-shirts, beer mugs, mouse pads.
“I don’t believe this! I have no knowledge about all this. Why do they do it?” demanded Bhat, who says he has no idea how to use a computer and the Internet. [You don’t say? – ed]
Bhat also shrugged off his rather unflattering “Rage Boy” nickname.
“I don’t need any titles. I am a simple Muslim. Yes, I get enraged if someone, somewhere makes derogatory remarks about our religion or Prophet,” he said.
“Titles”? I wonder if he thinks he’s being honored in some way. It would really mean a lot to me if I knew he knew we were laughing at him.
Update: Oooo! And look at the cool picture Dawn found. Which I might possibly have tweaked just a little teeny bit. How does one get a nostril injury, anyhow?
July 5, 2007 — 3:27 pm
Comments: 54
“Everybody loves cats and banjos”
— Old Mama Weasel, deceased
Cats and banjos. Pure blogging gold.
It was the day before 4th of July, and the minions were frolicking, happy and congenial. I just couldn’t bear to post some angsty political think piece and ruin the mood.
Okay, you know what? I had nothing on my mind today. Enjoy!
July 3, 2007 — 5:00 pm
Comments: 10
Last Friday in June
June 29, 2007 — 5:06 pm
Comments: 45
Friday again?
Did I make my deadline? Oh, yes. I did. But I’ve got to hit one just like it every Friday for the next umpty-ump weeks. And this was a small one.
So screw me, really.
June 22, 2007 — 11:25 pm
Comments: 69
Down and out in Visitorville
Anybody else notice the ad for this thing on Sitemeter? It’s a program that takes your usage logs and turns them into a Second Life for deaf mutes. They call it Visitorville. Your web site is rendered as a city, incoming queries from search engines are drawn as buses, and you guys shuffle off the buses — a bunch of unshaven zombie retards sunk in existential gloom with IP addresses floating over your heads — and drift around not interacting with each other. So, no change there.
It’s supposed to be a way of better visualizing website flow: rooms and buildings correspond to sections and pages. Repeat visitors have special little things floating over their heads, buyers little something elses floating over their heads, and repeat buyers are served with sticks up their backsides like all-day suckers (not true, but my posts are required by law to have at least one butt reference per).
Reminds me of the game Black & White — the last (but not the first) game I bought a whole new computer to be able to play. You’re God, and you make these little people, and they walk around doing stuff with their thoughts floating over their heads like, “I have to pee” or “I’m sad” or “I have a disease” or “I’m lonely” and I’m, like, “look, there are millions of you and you all look alike to me — needy, high-mainenance bastards, every one of you. I’m only a god here.” I got bored with it real quick. But I learned an awful lot about theology.
We must be in another wave of 3D visualization marketing ideas. Microsoft is trying it on again, with Photosynth (which I saw at Enas Yorl‘s place) and Surface (which I’m sure you’ve seen, unless you live in a yurt on the windy steppes milking horses).
I have to admit, Microsoft hater that I am, Surface is very cool. Watch some of the videos, if you haven’t. I love the idea of setting cameras and phones on the table and pulling data onto or off of them with your fingers.
But I saw prototypes of these things — not these literal things, but ones very like them — twenty years ago. I saw (and lusted after) a drafting table that was a giant pressure-sensitive tablet combined with rear projection video. I saw high-def and 3D screens and 6D mice and visualized worlds. I saw all this at a Siggraph show in…1990?
By the time we got videophones (backhandedly, via webcams) we were bored with the idea. Too much time elapsed between the tease and the release.
I damn well better still have a license when they roll out the rocketcar.
June 21, 2007 — 5:49 pm
Comments: 40
Tulsarama 1957 Plymouth Belvedere Sport Coupe Buried Car!
We all watched the unveiling together on the live video stream last night and it was very sad and Weasel got drunk and sang 1957 Tulsarama Time Capsule Buried Car songs and everything. Then we had a stalking and a flamewar and wrote haiku about boogers. I felt better after that. “Haiku” is both singular and plural. Isn’t that interesting?
Some people cynically manipulate their Google search ranking by repeating keywords over and over, but I would never do that to my friends in the 1957 Plymouth Belvedere Buried Car community. I’m different from all the others. I bet you’re different, too. So we have that in common.
You know what else we have in common? Weasel likes cookies. And gin. Not together. Except maybe if the gin comes first because, whoa! after that I’ll eat anything. Please don’t be making Weasel prove it.
So you can see we were meant to be.
Visit again. This special 1957 Plymouth Belvedere Buried Car
bond we forged, it would be a terrible thing to break.
June 16, 2007 — 4:22 pm
Comments: 79
Friday, June 15
Because the other thread went to the swirly place, tune in here to see if Weasel stays sober enough long enough to learn what happened to the 1957 Plymouth Belvedere that’s been a-molderin’ in the grave for five decades. Me, I’m guessing the tranquilizers in that lady’s purse went bad and the ticket is WAY overdue.
June 15, 2007 — 6:12 pm
Comments: 26
The few, the loud, the 1%
Somebody blew his or her Friskies on the hood of the Weaselmobile last night. I should probably wash that off, huh?
This reminded me of something I read recently about ‘participation inequality’ on the internet. It flows from the stuff about online communities: 90% of the people who use the internet do nothing but lurk, 9% contribute a bit, and 1% are pretty much carrying the whole thing. And by “carrying” I mean “will not shut-the-fuck-up.” On blogs, it’s even more skewed; more like 95%/5%/.1%.
I am, I confess, completely mystified by this. That’s the whole dealio for me: I FINALLY get to talk back to the book/newspaper/TV program. I’ve been rustling newsprint and waving books around in the air, screaming at televisions and giving lectures to my car radio for decades. Now, it’s my turn. Back up, folks! The internet is Preparation H for the burning, itching soul.
If you don’t talk back, how is browsing the Web any different than channel-flipping cable? Not counting the abundant free hardcore porn. I don’t get what you’re getting here.
See, this is hard. I’m trying to ask a question of a group of people whose signal characteristic is that they don’t answer questions. I want to know why you Lurkie Lous and Silent Sams won’t talk to me, but it’s like asking a blind man his favorite color: it’s pointless and cruel at the same time.
So…why won’t you blind bastards talk to me?
June 13, 2007 — 5:32 pm
Comments: 34
Testing, testing
Seeing if this fixes the STUPID pagination problem on STINKY OLD Internet Explorer.
Update: No, it doesn’t. What the hell is this bug? It just appears out of nowhere, shoves the main page below the right-hand sidebar for a few hours, then disappears again. I have IE at work, and it looked fine before I left. Meh.
On a related note…twenty two years of brain dead software: screen caps of all the Windows versions beginning with 1.01. I’m not sure if that’s where I came in, but we had a 1985 Windows machine. It drove our camera, I think.
Update: got it. Or it went away by itself. I put an
overflow:hidden;
tag in the CSS for the right sidebar just as it vanished, so maybe that did it. Good thing; I was just going to take up strong drink. As a last resort, that fixes everything. Now I can celebrate with a dram of spirits.
June 12, 2007 — 4:26 pm
Comments: 12