On "Anachronism"

I posit: The only way anachronism can exist in humans is if what is being done is in direct and explicit homage to an earlier time.

anachronism
n 1: something located at a time when it could not have existed
or occurred [syn: {mistiming}, {misdating}]
2: an artifact that belongs to another time
3: a person who seems to be displaced in time; who belongs to another age

Some people tell me that I was born in the wrong time, that I am an "anachronism." I do not believe this really, because I do not consciously pay tribute to any other eras. My aesthetic draws on what is aesthetically pleasing to me. I think the problem is that most people are very wrapped up in the idea of progress, and they think that whatever is modern/current shows the most progress. Me, I am not consumed with this idea, and so I feel free to do what I like. Sometimes this seems to coincide with what people liked decades ago; sorry old and dead people, it isn't really intentional!

In short, the term anachronism can only be applied to people who are trying to approximate a "look" or aesthetic that is clearly taken from another age. It isn't like I'm walking around wearing a monocle and a stove pipe hat.

In spite of everything that I've written here, I must admit that I do, at times, feel "out of time." Who can say whether or not I'd have been happier in another era?

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Added...

Added some "social web|bookmarking|e-onanism" links to the bottom of each post.



Why does this query turn up so much porn?

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Dog Penis Medicine

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Robin Williams delivers impromptu standup routine at TED 2008, uses own material instead of stealing jokes

That's when a voice behind me spoke up, presumably a heckler, and began speaking loudly as if he were conducting a live news feed, joking that he was reporting live from TED but "couldn't understand a fucking word" and was "wondering why at a technology conference everything is running so shittily" (at least that's the word I think he used; it was hard to hear the last word through the audience's laughter).

The crowd by then had realized it was Williams. Encouraged by their reaction, he continued reporting to some unseen BBC anchorman from his seat: "Well, they said they found the wire, but it's not plugged in."

Williams was then invited to take the stage and the crowd roared. He spent the next ten minutes or so riffing on Stephen Hawking (who spoke at TED earlier in the day from Cambridge, England) and the end of the universe -- which will take place "exactly in one hour," he said, looking at his watch.

He joked again about the technical glitch, indicating that although the BBC wasn't working, audience members "with their phones are going, 'I'm getting all of this!'" And it was true. Dozens of people were capturing the stand-up act on their phones.

He riffed about a new Apple product called the "iWhy?" and a few seconds later said he had just one question about the British royal family: "All that money and no dental plan," he deadpanned, which got a lot of laughs and a few sympathetic nods toward the BBC presenter sitting behind him (who appeared to have perfectly fine dental hygiene).

He didn't spare panelist Brin and Google, noting that if you walk into Google you see everyone in front of their computer sitting on exercise balls, "which I think is how they're hatching new employees."

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Everyone wants to make my penis larger

Do you want more ACTION?

Be a tiger in bed with a monster size weapon between your legs.

Websense Security Labs has discovered that Google’s popular web mail service Gmail is being targeted in recent spammer tactics. Spammers in these attacks managed to created bots that are capable of signing up and creating random Gmail accounts for spamming purposes.

Websense believes that from the spammers’ perspective, there are four main advantages to this approach. First, signing up for an account with Google allows access to its wide portfolio of services. Second, Google’s domains are unlikely to be blacklisted. Third, they are free to sign up. And fourth, it may be hard to keep track of them as millions of users worldwide are using various Google services on a regular basis.

...

Observation*: On average, only 1 in every 5 CAPTCHA breaking requests are successfully including both algorithms used by the bot, approximating a success rate of 20%. The second algorithm (segmentation) has very poor performance that sometimes totally fails and returns garbage or incorrect answers.

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Shell.FM: The console-based Linux last.fm client

I imagine that most of you know about last.fm, the audio scrobbling service. Some of you probably even know that you can use their player after you've built a decent profile and it will play full tracks to you that it has calculated to be similar to your tastes. Fewer of you are aware that there are third party clients that do the same thing but with less bloat and no advertisements. A good graphical client that does this for Linux is Last Exit. I'm not talking about Last Exit though. I'm talking about Shell.FM. It's a very simple, very usable, very fast CLI program that plays tracks from last.fm.

It's my audio player of choice when I want to listen to a somewhat random directed subset of music that isn't on my computer.

Here's a screenshot of it:



Ugly? Maybe. But I like it.



Shell.FM Homepage

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Pete Doherty (ex-The Libertines, one of my favorite bands for a few years now) is on the cover of this month's SPIN magazine.

Noah: if he gets clean though he could be a big deal
Noah: because of his force of personality
Useff: or maybe he'll become boring
Noah: oh definitely
Noah: boring but mainstream
Noah: libertines come back in our late 20s and make punk mainstream for people like ********


...

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What Iggy Said

I'll tell you about punk rock: punk rock is a word used by dilettantes and, uh... and, uh... heartless manipulators, about music... that takes up the energies, and the bodies, and the hearts and the souls and the time and the minds, of young men, who give what they have to it, and give everything they have to it. And it's a... it's a term that's based on contempt; it's a term that's based on fashion, style, elitism, satanism, and, everything that's rotten about rock 'n' roll.

I don't know Johnny Rotten... but I'm sure, I'm sure he puts as much blood and sweat into what he does as Sigmund Freud did. You see, what, what sounds to you like a big load of trashy old noise... is in fact... the brilliant music of a genius... myself. And that music is so powerful, that it's quite beyond my control. And, ah... when I'm in the grips of it, I don't feel pleasure and I don't feel pain, either physically or emotionally. Do you understand what I'm talking about? Have you ever, have you ever felt like that? When you just, when you just, you couldn't feel anything, and you didn't want to either. You know, like that? Do you understand what I'm saying, sir?
--Iggy Pop

More info on the image available at the links at the bottom. It was hand embroidered by an artist named Jenny Hart.

Here's the interview that the above quote was taken from (March 11, 1977):




Related Link

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lvl 8 ogre mage seeks moon queen or druid

I am a lvl 8 warrior seeking my adventuring companion for game play and fornication. I partake in only adventure/fantasy role play, no creepy goth stuff, it’s too weird.

More at the bottom of the post.

2, 2.5:

Desktop:

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You can't make this shit up

Well actually you can but it's far more entertaining in real life.

"Girl" at school was 39-year-old man
Fri Feb 22, 2008 10:58am EST

TOKYO (Reuters) - A Japanese man was arrested for trespassing this week after turning up at a high school dressed in a girl's uniform and a long wig, local police said.

Thirty-nine-year-old Tetsunori Nanpei told police he had bought the uniform over the Internet and put it on to take a stroll near the school in Saitama, north of Tokyo, on Wednesday, the daily Asahi Shimbun said.

When students standing outside the gates started to scream at the sight of him, he dashed inside the school grounds, hoping to blend in with the crowds of teenagers, the paper said.

They also screamed, forcing the man to flee, losing his wig in the process. A school clerk pursued him and stopped him at a nearby riverbank, the paper said.

Police confirmed the arrest of the man in school uniform and wig but declined to give further details.

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Ubuntu 8.10: Intrepid Ibex

During the 8.10 cycle we will be venturing into interesting new territory, and we'll need the rugged adventurousness of a mountain goat to navigate tricky terrain.
-- Mark Shuttleworth

Cool. An Ibex is in the same family as the Gnu -- which is also related to the GNU if you catch my drift.

Clever work.

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National News + Injoke

Boldness and italicization added for emphasis.

Researchers have sequenced the gene map of corn, also known as maize, a key crop across much of the world and a source of food, oil and products ranging from shoe polish to ethanol.

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What Heinlein Said

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently and die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
— Robert A. Heinlein

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"A Prosthetic Suit For Stephen Hawking w/ Japanese Steel" 2007 wood, rope, pink foam

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"What oxygen is to the lungs, such is hope to the meaning of life"

A passenger returning home to New York from Haiti collapsed and died aboard an American Airlines flight after a flight attendant first told her that he could not give her any oxygen, and then brought her an oxygen tank that was empty, a relative said on Sunday.

American Airlines confirmed the flight death and said medical professionals had tried to save the passenger, Carine Desir, 44, of Brooklyn.

Ms. Desir, who had heart disease, died of natural causes, a spokeswoman for the New York City medical examiner’s office, Ellen S. Borakove, said on Sunday.

Ms. Desir complained of illness and extreme thirst on the flight from Port-au-Prince on Friday after she had eaten a meal, according to Antonio Oliver, a cousin who was traveling with her and her brother Joel Desir. A flight attendant gave her water, Mr. Oliver said.

A few minutes later, Ms. Desir said she was having trouble breathing and asked for oxygen, but a flight attendant twice refused her request, Mr. Oliver said in a telephone interview.

After the flight attendant refused to administer oxygen to Ms. Desir, she became distressed, pleading, “Don’t let me die,” Mr. Oliver recalled.

He said other passengers aboard Flight 896 became agitated over the situation, and the flight attendant, apparently after phone consultation with the cockpit, tried to administer oxygen from a portable tank and mask, but the tank was empty.

Mr. Oliver said two doctors and two nurses who were aboard tried to administer oxygen from a second tank, which was also empty.

Sonja Whitemon, a spokeswoman for American Airlines, would not comment on Mr. Oliver’s claims of faulty medical equipment aboard the plane.

Ms. Desir was placed on the floor and a nurse tried to resuscitate her, but to no avail, Mr. Oliver said. “I cannot believe what is happening on the plane,” he said, sobbing. “She cannot get up, and nothing on the plane works.”

Mr. Oliver said he then asked for the plane to land right away, and the pilot agreed to land in Miami, 45 minutes away. But before the plane could land, Ms. Desir collapsed and died, he said.

“Her last words were, ‘I cannot breathe,’ ” he said.

Ms. Desir was pronounced dead by one of the doctors, Joel Shulkin, and the flight continued on to John F. Kennedy International Airport. Her body was moved to the floor of the first-class section and covered with a blanket, Mr. Oliver said.

From NYTimes

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A Site People Shouldn't Bother Inviting Me To

Today (what I think was) a total stranger invited me to a website. Why a stranger would invite me to a social networking site is a little beyond me, but that stands beside the point.




Goodreads: the titular site.

Will I sign up? No! Will I read book reviews where the reviewers might be more diverse and less corrupt? Yes!

The stated purpose of the site, according to CrunchBase:

GoodReads is a social networking site for book lovers. The site is intended to serve as an easy way to review books and get recommendations from friends, based on founder Otis Chandler’s belief that recommendations from friends are more valuable than referrals from algorithms or bestseller lists.

The site claims more than 600,000 users. That means good advertising revenue, especially given that the main topic of the website is books; I imagine many people just click ad links to take them to retailers that are selling the books they want to buy.

March Update: Never used this web site, it has been a month.

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Archie Bell And The Drells - Tighten Up (1968)

Excellent, fun dance song that is relatively simple with a lot of what seems like improvisation on a variety of instruments. Below are two videos. The first is the hit recording of the song with a photograph montage. The second is a live performance with terrible video quality and sort of bad audio, but it's all I could find. It's still pretty cool because you get to see the dance they invented.





Supposedly, Archie Bell went to Vietnam shortly after the song was recorded and the line "We dance just as good as we walk" was highly ironic because he was shot in the leg in 'Nam.

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When We Die, Perhaps Our Perception Of The World Breaks Down Into Mathematical Equations and Colors...

Insert pics of golden ratio stuff, other fractals/mandelbrot sets/etc

Beautiful and simple in their elegant depiction of what we might call "God." It doesn't take a human brain to appreciate these things. That feeling of calmness, final peace, resting -- whatever you'd like to call it -- it all stems from becoming one with ideas so simple that they can be explicitly written down and described in mathematical language, yet so complex that they, in some cases, have taken thousands of years to scribe, and some (many?) are not even known yet.

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Captain Midnight and the decline of the big-ass satellite dish

Remember huge satellite dishes in people's front yards? When I was a kid I distinctly remember certain neighborhoods in Baltimore county where you could see dishes at least 10 feet in diameter happily planted in a front yard. Those days are long gone, but we have relics. Here's some real pirate shit from the 1980s:



More info about Captain Midnight at the Wikipedia article here. There used to be a better quality video on YouTube that wasn't just a news story and was the actual footage as it happened, but it is now private so I can't see it. I'd love to see that one again.

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Mostly Apolitical But Digging This Data

See more here

And luckily, there is no data (and perhaps by extension, little interest) for either of these trends.

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New Content

Click here for some new/different content

I actually just wrote a post about Hershey at another blog and there's a bunch of content there that might be "new" to readers here. The focus of the blog is corporations in Delaware. Many businesses are incorporated in Delaware.

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Just a search

http://images.google.com/images?q=leg+calipers

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New Shit On Sunday

expect to see some new content on or around sunday

~

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"Say Bill, do you think you could rub some of this powder on my lips?"

Naked Lunch - 1991.
Directed by David Cronenberg



Still images do not do justice to the insanity of this movie, but they're a start. In addition to adapting William Burroughs's novel Naked Lunch for film, David Cronenberg has directed other films with incredibly graphic and real (surreal) special effects such as The Fly (1986 remake with Jeff Goldblum), Scanners (1981, a cult classic -- get familiar with the concept at the very least), and recently, A History of Violence (2005, Viggo Mortensen). I haven't seen his other new movie, Eastern Promises (2007), but visually it's probably just as intense as his other films.



















oth _______ers

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"Today, We're Still Downloading MUD Clients"

"Today we're still downloading MUD clients. They just come with a really, really large graphic cache."
-- Ralph Koster

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Great Potential Google Logo

I think this is good enough to be Google's actual logo. Note that the way the text is divided makes it read "Go ogle." (You want me to go ogle what? Anything I want on the Internet at all? Ok.) Anyone want to write up the GreaseMonkey script that makes the Google homepage look and act like this?


Designed by Niraj Sanghvi. Found @ Google Blogoscoped

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Aesthetic/Design Changes: Before and After

This picture is pretty self-explanatory. This is essentially a before/after for how the site looked a few hours ago vs. how it looks now. Along with the addition of the sidebar, I made some other small tweaks that aren't particularly noteworthy and don't appear in the before/after pics.

As far as I can tell, I'm the main consumer of my blog; I, as the main consumer, am very happy with the changes I have implemented.

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Aesthetic/Design Changes: What and Why

I will be trying to implement a change over the next 24 hours. This change will be: a column to the right where I can put some other/different page elements. I like that this site is a list. A list is good for posts, but what about other content I want people to see on the page that isn't a daily post? With my current layout, that stuff is either at the top or the bottom. If it's at the top, it obscures new posts. If it's at the bottom, it never gets read. I want people to be able to read new posts and also have access to some [mostly] static content.

Bear with me



From Silhouette Masterpiece Theatre

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Vladimir Putin

Still pretty bad
when i think about you (putin), i link to myself


I found this pic on FFFFOUND!

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How to act like Rukia from Bleach?

Yahoo! Answers - How to act like Rukia from Bleach?

This is a great question, because it's someone on the Internet asking the rest of the Internet how they can act like a character from a popular anime. Only in America [Only on the Internet].

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Ta-ta

Bye for now

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Some of My Favorite Recent Posts: A Self-Indulgent, Retrospective Post

Top YouTube Videos

Film Directors Named Paul Anderson

Putin is a bad mother fucker

Renoise: Great music production on Linux

On Danzig, The Misfits, and American (youth) Sub Cultures

Geneva Redline Wallpaper

Dudley Moore died half a decade ago; no one cared.

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A Cool Thing That Looks Like It's From The Future And A Future Thing (A Future Post Subject) That Should Be Pretty Cool

1) Found this with socks that I got on December 25 but didn't open until today:

Looks like some perverse music note from another galaxy, right?

2) The stuff I ordered from Amazon a few weeks ago:

Ian Svenonius's book, 'The Psychic Soviet', and the Make-Up's DVD. Note: That label peels off the book and that's the book's backside. The actual title is something like an engraving or bevel that is is also pink (like the color of the book), and thus difficult to read unless you're in ideal lighting conditions, which I did not have while taking the picture.

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Valentine's Day

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Entire lives predicated on feeling rather than reason

This walk right here? It's kinda dangerous cause you gotta smoke angel dust. My boy perfected it; he worked at the gas station. He got minimum wage, but he got all the girls cause he walked like he was in a dream land.

(here at approximately 2:45):

In my opinion, Hollywood actors are easy to convert to Scientology compared to other subsets of the population because a lot of them are very physically attractive. How does this follow? Well, attractive people generally have an easier time in life -- they don't have to work as hard, including while in school. Being that they can sort of get by without studying hard, they don't get a taste of anything complex while in school. Throw something written by a science fiction author at them, and it will probably impress them because it might be the most complex and deepest thing they've ever been exposed to. The issue of whether or not it is valid will never come up.

This argument is based on another argument from somewhere on the Internet that revealed that most of the actors who are very visible in their activism for various causes aren't terribly well educated. I can't find it, can anyone else? If you know what I'm talking about, please leave information in a comment.

In short, a lot of people seem to be worried about the cult of Scientology these days. Scientology is designed to take advantage of rich people who haven't honed their skepticism too well. These people are abundant in Hollywood, but do you think Scientology can work all over the country? I don't think it's a threat. Let them have Hollywood, it's weird enough there already. I want to visit Clearwater, Florida (the headquarters of Scientology). My grandmother says it's surreal.

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The riches of the Internet

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Post in which I attempt to fluff MPD, the Music Player Daemon for Linux

This will be short. I can't promise sweetness, but I believe in my heart of hearts that it isn't an absolute bitterpost.


Screenshot of two MPD clients, Sonata and ncmpc, side by side

Why use MPD and MPD-clients like Sonata and ncmpc?

• much faster than most other music players
• lower memory usage than most music players
  
• you like trying new software (getdeb.net is a great place for this too -- if you use ubuntu or something like debian)
  
• you enjoy (or think you might possibly enjoy) some command line hacking
• you want to be able to access your music through multiple intuitive interfaces whenever you want to change things up a little (gmpc, sonata, ncmpc, MANY others)
  
• simple and unique playlist management
• very polished underlying daemon, some very polished clients

If you're already using Linux and have some free time, you have nothing to lose.

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The Internet isn't driving me crazy, but it's not really helping either

An interesting and challenging set of life circumstances cause a young man to spend a great deal of time reflecting on things he usually barely gives any thought to.

(Hilarity ensues, of course, as we've long known that this is clearly a comedy.)



Found at, uh, FFFFOUND! By Matthew Woodson. His website is ghostco.

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