Month: March 2003

Ready, Steady, Go

More Ready.gov parodies: via email, via mailing lists.

I’m not so much interested in the Department of Homeland Security any more though. I’d rather look into the Department of Cryptogramic Botany, or maybe Invertebrate Zoology. The Senate Department of Urban Development (Berlin) has a wonderful walking-tour page. Maybe I should just go to the Complaints Department.

In the art department, I’m fond of the Dirty Wallpaper site, which has some nifty graffiti and so forth, and Davegraphics. But if you spend too much time in that department, you’ll get an art degree and be poor.

Speaking of poor, my dear friend’s younger sister arrived in town this week, in the company of a gentleman who goes by the name of Dolores. I think it was Dolores, I may have misheard, but it sounded something like that. An odd name for anyone, especially a boy. May be a nome de guerre, or perhaps a mere alias. The two are quite the merry pranksters, though, and their vigor has filled my friend’s week with awkward, silent reproach. You see, the youngsters are youthful swashbucklers for justice and street credibility, and they disapprove of my friend’s lifestyle and line of work as though she were a sodomite. In other words, she’s working for the man and they’re fucking hippies.

Fearmongering Hysteria

“Danger, war, prison disaster, a tide of heartbreak and human misery…”

This past summer there was a nationwide abduction scare. Before that it was sharks. Remember satanic cults and daycare child molestors? This week we’re all about the Elizabeth Smart hubub in the news. (Thought it was Jessica at first…) Before that, the Columbia and Challenger tragedies. Do you remember Heaven’s Gate, the suicidal cult of web developers from the 90s? It’s true that there are very real dangers and very real tragedies, but many of the items that fill the news these days aren’t. And
it’s often hard to tell the difference.

An anonymous reader sent me an essay he wrote shortly after the Heaven’s Gate suicides, addressing differences between real tragedies, from which we can learn, and faux tragedies, which are mere spectacle. It is included, in its entirety, below.
Continue reading “Fearmongering Hysteria”

Stupid, Stupid, Stupid

Conspiracies, junk science, and whatnot: ESP research can still get serious coverage in the news, and oh yes, conspiracy theories are very much in vogue. Whether it’s economic illiteracy among today’s leadership or just plain ignorance among tomorrow’s, people really need to get a global perspective and learn to identify bogosity a hell of a lot better. We’re highly evolved primates here, people, let’s use that capacity for rational thought, OK?

Wiki? Wacky

The Disinfopedia keeps tabs on disinformation campaigns, whether they be lies or “astroturf” pseudo-grassroots marketing such as that whole “right to choose your doctor” campaign. It does for marketing and PR what OpenSecrets does for campaign finance and bias such as Fritz Hollings and his ownership by the infotainment cartels. (Am I getting just a little too polemic here? Yeah…)

Anyway, the site is organized in the form of a Wiki, an online database of stuff created, interlinked, edited, and controlled by its users. A Wiki is like a blog, except with more people and no chronological set of entries. There are even several different varieties of wiki software. Like GNU, GIMP, KDE and , the Wiki is a concept and project that has succeeded despite having an incredibly silly name.

Warez

VersionTracker, meet PerversionTracker. FreshMeat.net, meet RottenFlesh. OK, so the parody sites are funny– I especially like that RottenFlesh is hosted at FreshMeat.

But the subtext behind these parodies is that all the hotfixes and updates are stupid and that the unstable projects are a waste of time. And it’s not true. Everything has an unstable phase. If you don’t want to use it, wait for 1.0.

Sure, there’s a lot of crappy software out there, sometimes overambitious, but more often written for an audience of one or none– an experiment or exercise or tutorial the developer is using to learn new tricks. It’s true that there are a lot of people who are update junkies and want the l33test w4rez or whatever, and that they are annoying. They also help make better software by testing every snapshot and reporting bugs.

In my experience, there are two things customers ask of software vendors: less complexity, and more features. It’s just like at any school cafeteria there are two categories of request: serve more pizza and fries, and make the food healthier. Obviously, it’s not usually the same person asking for both things, but it’s still hard to meet conflicting demands.

It’s a big menu, kids. Pick what you want and recognize that not everyone has the same tastes as you.

ED, Etc.

What’s with my current focus on eating disorders? I guess I’ve always been fascinated by the way people treat their bodies violently, especially the advocates of that behavior. In the past I spent a lot of time researching body modification and drug abuse. But recently it’s been diet and eating disorders.

I’m finding that exercise and diet occupy more of my time recently: I choose my food more carefully than the days when I subsisted on pizza and soda, and I’m a regular gym-goer. My gym membership includes a subscription to Men’s Fitness, and I’ve read that beauty mags are correlated with eating disorders. But it’s not unhealthy, I don’t think, at least not yet. I can feel that pull though. It’s the same one that makes me wonder if my morning OJ would go better with vodka, or if I should just call my ex girlfriend again, and again, and again.

I’m at 158 pounds now, and my goal weight is 160, at which point I’m going to focus on bringing my body fat back down to around 10%, from the approximately 12 percent that it’s at now. I’m muscular now, and it looks good. My shoulders are bigger. I’ve lost an inch from my waist and gained a half-inch at the neck and one in the shoulders. But maybe I’d be better at 165, you know? I see guys with much larger, much better defined shoulders who are about my height, and I think, hey, I could do that. There’s a lot of room to improve my workouts just by actually planning and scheduling them instead of doing whatever I feel like.

I think I can still can distinguish between the guys who are unreasonably large, especially the ones who are juicing, and the guys who are merely bigger and stronger than I am. But at what point does my view of my body begin to diverge from reality? I’ve asked women what they think is “too muscular” and they respond that they aren’t sure, but I’m not it.

To me, it sounds like a challenge.