A Story From Derek
Saturday, April 29, 2000 - 03:59 a.m.

Read how Derek Powazek pissed off Robin Leach at last year's Cool Site awards. Great Story.

Teens Not Disturbed by Sexual Violence
Thursday, April 27, 2000 - 12:04 p.m.

I yanked this from Rebekah - The headline says 'Dating Violence' but whatever. I'm glad this is finally getting some kind of press since it's been going on probably forever but I remember a lot of it from when I was in highschool. And teachers had a big problem with talking about this in school since I guess it makes them look dumb and powerless - I ran a semi-underground newspaper in highschool (printed w/ school copiers, not endorsed by the administration but subject to censorship) which mostly stuck to brainiac satire ('Students Against Glaciers') but once in a whlie I would get pissed and do a serious article - one was about girls in my class were prone to having black eyes - it was one of two stories that the dean had me pull before printing (the other one was where I declared myself Interim False Messaih until the ressurection of Koresh [Okay, I censored myself on some things - anorexia was a fucking underground varsity sport at my highschool but by my senior year I knew better than to try to get people to talk about it]) A sort of anecdote about this - this one jock scumbag who everbody knew had hit his girlfriend was cornered afterschool by the girlfriend's best friend (a girl) and punched in the face and knocked down a whole flight of stairs (kids think about it - guys who beat up girls are the biggest fucking cowards on the planet - yelling at them will make them cry). It was the day before class pictures and he didn't show up for his picture because of it - so the Yearbook editor stuck and older picture of him in the yearbook with a big Spuds McKenzie black eye drawn on his face. Not that I'm saying that kids can always handle their peer problems effectively (although school administrators have a real knack for making things worse - I was a Black Trenchcoat in Highschool, and harassed relentlessly for it. All of my friends were harassed too - the typical low-level day to day torture of suburban highschool - tripped going down stairs, being spit on, randomly shoved in the hallways [not to mention hate letters, vandalism of cars and lockers, etc]. When about five of us complained privately to the Dean naming names and specific incidents, he wanted to treat it as some kind of 'gang related' trouble and wanted to have a 'summit' so we could work out our differences, I guess my friends and I would have to cease our antagonistic behavior of dressing differently and having opinions. Ahhh, highschool. So many years later and it still hasn't worn off.) but kids are aware that this stuff is going on and a lot of them do know it's wrong. The clique structure of highschool and the relentless denial of teachers and school administrators that highschool isn't a brute microcosm of their own dream-society (and suburbia really is a sociological experiment perpetrated by a particular generation of urban exiles (a non-viable abberation in our civilization, (like building colossal death-monuments for our rulers) as opposed to an evolutionary outgrowth of urban developemnt) that promotes crap like this - 17yearold guys who beat up their girlfriends, and 17yearold girls who believe they deserve it.

I guess it's typical of America that it would take a mass murder in an affluent suburban school to make adults take kids emotions seriously - but the analysis leads to crap like this article about 13yearolds having sex. Nothing new here, except maybe to clueless conservatives like Mona Charen or Dr. Laura ("'physiologist' kind of looks like 'psychologist'" Schlessinger.

So: I don't know. Highschool = fucked up. Adults = getting a clue. I could go on and on about this. I'll save it for my novel.

Kvetch
Thursday, April 27, 2000 - 11:34 a.m.

"Living in suburbia is like sticking my head in a blender and hitting liquify." – Chookie

! ! !
Wednesday, April 26, 2000 - 07:12 p.m.

So there's this guy proven who I found out about from mop because he and mop have some kind of doomed webcrush and proven calls his diaryland thing a weblog only because he doesn't like diaries and it doesn't matter that he's only got like 1 offsite link every other day because it's shit like this which is like the funniest multiply-derivative media joke I've seen in like forever. Everybody will probably know it by friday - but remember - you heard it from me third.

Our Greatest Living Word Nerd
Tuesday, April 25, 2000 - 11:41 a.m.

Nicholson Baker's really something - he writes novels about things like buying shoelaces, phone sex, and the ability to freeze time. His book 'U and I' is a must for any writer who's ever worried that they've compromised their integrity by liking another writer too much - it's all about how Baker is a superfan of John Updike and I don't even like Updike but Baker's self-analysis (especially the passage on young writers who begin in their thoughts to refer to themselves in the third person) is priceless.

There's not much about him on the Net - the best I could find besides the fan page was this word search for all of the dirty words in 'The Fermata' Have fun.

Field Trip
Friday, April 21, 2000 - 11:49 a.m.

Going to Fermilab today. "Fermilab is a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory for research exploring the fundamental nature of matter and energy. The bird's eye view of Fermilab, above, shows the four-mile circle of the Tevatron, the world's most powerful particle accelerator, and the smaller oval of the Main Injector. Particle beamlines reach out from the Tevatron to the northeast." There's some crazy isomorphism going on with that overhead shot - it looks just like the patterns that charged particles make in a bubble chamber.

Looking for "bubble chamber" I found this blog. Neat.

And of course - toys. This thing from CERN looks cool. Maybe too cool for casual use.

Three and a Half Tons of Mad Crazy Original Content
Thursday, April 20, 2000 - 08:18 a.m.

So I started posting all of the stories I've ever written - at least on a computer. We're going back to like 1987 here. Don't ever do this if you're not in for day-swallowing introspection. I turn 24 tomorrow which is yadda-yadda 18 and 30(what's up with all these April B-days?) so I've been re-reading all this stuff I wrote in like 1994.

The last novel I attempted was in 1996 and early 1997 - and looking back I think writing a topical novel can be a bad thing _if you don't finish it_ quickly - all those Spice Girls jokes and Prodigy references seem so dated. And if I want to finish this book (4 chapters posted, with a bunch more half-written) I'll either have to update the whole thing (painful) or make sure I never use anachronistic words like 'fishbulb' anywhere in the story.

(You know what the one lasting effect 'Infinite Jest' has had on me? I use 'like' so much more in my writing than I ever did before I read the book. Also - it made me quit that last book I was writing after 150 pages because I kept thinking I was just plagarizing Wallace's structures and themes. Uh. Right.)

Yes.
Wednesday, April 19, 2000 - 08:28 a.m.

The 'Words About Words' site. A searchable index of a bazillion quotes about words.

Deconstructing Webster's
Tuesday, April 18, 2000 - 06:55 p.m.

Seriously. I knew that Noah Webster was not to be trusted because he was a notorious cat-hater (his original entry on 'cat' went something like 'domesticated feline - jealous and spiteful.') but I must have just gone too long without serious dictionary diving (you know, like when you haven't watched any TV but the Simpson's for months or years and then suddenly find yourself watching Sally Jessie and asking - has TV always been this bad or am I just less naive?)

Anyway I just sent off an email using the word 'assuage' in it - the context was something like 'knowing that glamorous people can have dental problems perversely assuages the resentment I have for my own poverty and obscurity.' (okay the syntax was way weaker in the original (and is it resentment _for_ or resentment _of?), but I can't stand to write a bad sentence twice.

But I was only like 95% sure that I was using 'assuage' correctly ('to relieve') so I looked it up (Websters Third New International) - the examples were really telling -

'Stroking her right wrist with her left hand as though to assuage the ache' - Jean Stafford.

'Forgetting her own sorrow in an effort to assuage his' - B.A. Williams.

'She found herself pleasantly assuaged by the sense of anonymity which surrounded her' - Helen Howe.

- 'His social inadequacies led him to the assuagements of anti-semitism and a superpatriotism' - (source given as 'Time' but I can't imagine any Time Magazine in the last 30 years saying something that complicated.)

I'm sure there's a good Nicholson Baker or Lingua Franca article to tie all this together - later, after class.

It's 1997 and the Paperless Novel is HERE
Tuesday, April 18, 2000 - 08:49 a.m.

Memories of DROP CITY

Society for the Betterment of Mankind

The Cat Through the Looking Glass

HEAVEAN'S GATES HELL'S FURY

Melanie Jensen's Secrets of the Universe

The Roar of Destiny Emanated from the Refrigerator

PROVOCATIVE AND HIGHLY ORIGINAL NOVELS, STORIES, POETRY by Philip Goddard

The Keepers of Forever

The Night of the Quantum Brothers

Sacrosanct Bob and the Pornographers

The Suicide Club

Planet of the Ravers

Things Fall Apart

Urban Shocker

Adventures of a Youth Choir

Smart, Simple
Friday, April 14, 2000 - 03:22 p.m.

Sorry - there hasn't been much going on in my brain this past week. Waste time and gain insight here:

lemonyellow.
syntheticzero.
evacuate & flush.
alamut.
mop.

Showdown With The Pinkertons
Thursday, April 13, 2000 - 10:56 p.m.

Things like this make me wish I was still in highschool so I could have an easy target for my free-floating rage. Remember that after-school movie (and book) called 'The Wave?' About a history teacher who starts a school spirit club and then makes it into a fascist goon squad to prove that a Nazi-like political movement could happen to regular, smart, American Kids? Well, its here, sponsored by our favorite strike-breakers the Pinkerton Corporation. (title article via baylink.)

Brain Opera
Thursday, April 13, 2000 - 03:28 p.m.

I found this awhile ago looking poking around for infor on Tod Machover. He wrote an opera based on P.K. Dick's VALIS which used some pretty advanced mid 1980's interactive computer stuff to create intelligent counterpoint to what a person was playing. His latest creations are environmental compositions like this one.

Selected Telephone Conversations Concerning the Special Commission to Investigate the Assassination of JFK
Thursday, April 13, 2000 - 07:02 a.m.

RealAudio files of LBJ's phone conversations after Kennedy's assassination. The one w/ Hoover where Hoover explains what they do and don't have proof for is especially creepy. Linked off Brasscheck (linked from a page of links about WTO/Seattle on Exquisite Corpse (via Andrew and Pam's 18 Wheels of Justice)).

The Invisible Audioscapes of Police Broadcasts
Wednesday, April 12, 2000 - 09:13 p.m.

From the Bad Subjects website, which looks like it rocks all around.

Free Screeching Noises and Drunken Jabbering with Beats
Tuesday, April 11, 2000 - 05:46 p.m.

So the computer's been occupied all weekend with encoding mp3's and burning CD's. I had a really great concert in Ron's Living Room where we rocked out with a bunch of kids Ron picked up at a Taco Bell - the show was attended by one amyl-sniffing loser who sat on the couch all night while the rest of his 'friends' played. Some of the sounds of this guy arguing with his girlfriend are picked up through the acoustic guitar. Unfortunately, the sounds of him getting his head dunked in the toilet or of his screams as he was dangled off the balcony were not picked up because they didn't actually happen. But they should have.

If anybody wants to host around 300 megs of large mp3 files (40-80 megs each) - drop me a line. I've got four of the Ron's Living Room shows digitized now, about 6 hours of music.

Um - I'll be putting a frontpage up for the stuff on the 8-bit site since the last Ignorant Music page got shut down. So yeah, drum 'n' bass, noise guitar, Brechtian angst-poetry, tragic end of a 5 month relationship: Rock and Roll.

Solar Powered Airships
Friday, April 7, 2000 - 02:06 p.m.

Cool. And a great mascot too!

Dorothy Day
Friday, April 7, 2000 - 01:53 p.m.

So we'll quit confusing her with Doris Day once and for all.

I'm Glad Somebody is Working on This.
Friday, April 7, 2000 - 01:44 p.m.

I mean, besides Niven and Pournelle.

House Ok's Methane Exploration Funds: Risks Seen in Tapping Enormous Reserves
Friday, April 7, 2000 - 01:19 p.m.

I don't know about this - it sounds like the same kind of junkie behavior as sifting through your vacuum cleaner bag for the dope you know spilled last month.

Basically The House of Reps has approved a bill allocating $50 million for speculative research into extracting methane hydrates from the bottom of the ocean. Basiclly these are natural gas crystals that have been frozen into blocks of ice - there may be as much as twice as much natural gas available at the bottom of the ocean than through all other sources.

Of course, getting it could be problematic - besides the fact that methane hydrates only form under like 12,000 feet of sub-freezing water, they evaporate quickly and explosive releases of methane from such sources may have caused ecosystem-trashing climate changes in the past. In "In the Ghost from the Grand Banks," Arthur C. Clarke describes the possibility of such a seismic catastrophe occuring from undersea mineral prospecting. You can scare yourself with other scenarios here.

Even though you can't really claim this is an effect of bacteria or plants regulating atmospheric makeup, there's probably a good reason that all of this methane is at the bottom of the ocean encased in ice and not like floating around in places where it can be easily tapped and released into the atmosphere. A way less risky way of getting fuel for electric power would be to get one of those solar-collecting satellites like in SimCity 2000.

i'm tired of suffering for my art, it's your turn.
Thursday, April 6, 2000 - 09:08 a.m.

Andrew's songs. I recommend "when the robot claps his hands."

McDonald's Tests Shantytown Market
Wednesday, April 5, 2000 - 12:09 p.m.

#include < stdanticorporaterant.h, stdsnideremarks.h >

Recursive Irony as a form of Nirvana
Wednesday, April 5, 2000 - 11:39 a.m.

I found this linked off This Modern World. Like Seinfeld, I have a problem with the way Dilbert has gotten so popular - We laugh at the stupidity of our jobs but are left with no hope of improvement in what is after all just another organization in a democratic society. That and what Scott McCloud says about Dilbert not deserving the critical praise it gets because it's an artistically poor comic.

The Geography of Nowhere
Wednesday, April 5, 2000 - 11:29 a.m.

"I've been to Littleton, and this is what you get there: a place with no sense of a past, no hope of a future, and a spiritually degrading present...Not only is everything the same in Littleton as in thousands of other anti-places created in the name of prosperity and economic expansion, but the components of this massive sameness have in common their nature as a massive cultural swindle, resulting in an ecology of lies. The chief lie concerns our relation to the passage of time." -James Howard Kunstler.

State to Spend $10 Billion on Dan Ryan Expressway and Other Roads
Wednesday, April 5, 2000 - 10:30 a.m.

Ten billion dollars. Ten. Billion. Dollars. Do we need further proof that cars are the suburban crack epidemic? Ten billion dollars to resurface and widen highways, which will only encourage more people to live further from their jobs and drive more. It is an election year kids. The Illinois Tollway Authority needs to realize that more roads and even more public transportation aren't the solution to this mess. The solution is to stop the scorched earth real estate developement and build livable, integrated communities. Otherwise:

Bomb the Suburbs.
Bomb the Suburbs.
Bomb the Suburbs.
Bomb the Suburbs.
Bomb the Suburbs.
Bomb the Suburbs.

A Good Experience
Wednesday, April 5, 2000 - 08:16 a.m.

I like this site. A weblog about making the web simple and useful - of course we're not all e-businesses out here - but these are some really good ideas - anybody who believes Flash is just a more bloated version of annoying .gif animations is on the right track.

Let's get more effectiveness from less technology. Not a bunch of buzzwords or futuristic laughing computers. Just get the bits to do what the user wants them to do, and then make the bits go away.

Bonus - from Dack, the BS Generator.

Ignorant Rambling
Tuesday, April 4, 2000 - 01:53 p.m.

So I was reading Metagrrrl's Thesis and that got me thinking about design standards and about how hyperlinking is sometimes _so_ inadequate for pointing somebody at specific information - particurlarly if you want to point somebody at a particular paragraph or line within a big, scrolling document. It would be nice if people put an anchor at every paragraph so (like the permanent url links for individual entries that are popping up w/ bloggers) you could # link it, but I don't know how many 10+ page docs I've seen that have no internal bookmarks in them at all...and it would be impossible to adapt all of the existing pages to this standard (now there's Y2K mentality)...

So - how about some kind of script that would execute a browser "Find" command on a given phrase (heck, you could give the whole sentence to be sure) that would automatically zap the reader to the exact line in the text that you wanted them to see. The only other way I could see around this is to hack some kind of meta-footnote in the ALT or OnMouseOver of the hyperlink and hope that the reader is actually going to hover over the link for 2 seconds to read what's there before they click - and who actually hovers over links before they click?

Maybe if this idea snowballs it can get incorporated into the next version of HTML - so you could just say HREF="blah blah url / Christine's SXSW recollections FIND "12-year old Canadian Designer" or HREF="blah blah url / methane hydrates" FIND "Bacterial regulation of atmospheric content." And then Netscape and Microsoft could both choose to implement it in contradictory ways (like, for example, the way their current browsers do background graphics in tables (weak, Netscape. Weak and pathetic...))) It just seems like there should be a way to implement this at least w/ Javascript - and since I know like nothing of Javascript - I'm just asking for suggestions.

RoboWhiz said something about adopting a robust hyperlink practice that I thought of while writing this entry but darned if I could find the entry on his blog now that I want it.

Natural Nuclear Reactors
Tuesday, April 4, 2000 - 12:11 p.m.

This blew my mind when I first read about it - bacteria two billion years ago that filtered uranium out of river and maintained a stable fission reaction underwater. From James Lovelock's 'Ages of Gaia.'

Tuesday, April 4, 2000 - 08:30 a.m.

Leave it to Chicago...three weeks ago I was going to the beach. It's snowing right now.

I'm Touching My Brain
Monday, April 3, 2000 - 04:37 p.m.

I'll have more to say about that whole burden-of-private-experience thing soon. I have a C exam and I've been feeling kind of woozy in my stomach all day though - lacking coherence to put together a 1,500 word entry that wouldn't all be junk - but it's been on my mind alot since when I wrote that article. For now, here's some thoughts from Henry Flynt a conceptual artist and philosopher on Meta-technology. "Meta-technology is a technology whose field of action is the determination of reality." Yeah, he wrote it back in '79, way before the post-meta era of today when 'meta' is like the favorite prefix to make anything seem more cool. He alludes to an incident in the paper on depth psychology where Sartre takes a 'clinically supervised' injection of mescaline. Simone de Beauvoir was on hand to record the experience - but I couldn't find anymore details.

Microwaving CD's
Monday, April 3, 2000 - 04:38 a.m.

So here's your legacy, Mr. Wizard. I guess this meme has been floating around for awhile. Make any unwanted CD into art. It's a great 3 second light show too - but I've heard all kinds of nasty things about the smoke produced.

Supposedly there's a movie of this phenomenon online but the Slashdot Effect killed the guy's ISP. In lieu - the University of Wisconsin has actually conducted experiments on "Temporal and Spatial Aspects of Microwave Excitation of Compact Disks." These guys actually tried to predict the burn patterns as part of the experiment. Way cool.

Original link via dinette (via maganda).

Wasabi Sneaker
Monday, April 3, 2000 - 04:29 a.m.

Austrailian personal site w/ snazzy design. Looks like flash-only though, so it might not be so snazzy on a dialup.

Permanent Brain Damage
Sunday, April 2, 2000 - 06:36 p.m.

Not only am I a lightweight, but I'm also a hypochondiraic. Everytime I get a hangover I'm convinced I've given myself irreperable brain damage. (I know I _have_ to a small degree, but I'm talking like forgetting-how-to-do-multiplication sized brain-damage). Red wine headaches are the worst. Scientists think this is caused by flavinoids (isn't it great that that's a real word), which are the chemicals that give red grape skins their colors. If you take a pain killer - (any Non-Steroidal Anti-Inflammatory, like tylenol,ibuprofen, alleve) you are doomed.

Dissociative drugs (so called for the dissociative state they produce) such as Ketamine, DXM (like Robutussin) and MDMA do cause brain damage - and big even big slobbering brain damage. Okay, I'm _so_ against War-on-Drugs crap and so is the guy who wrote this article but you should know that for the knowledge you gain, you're going to lose a chunk of your computing capacity.

If you want to do more reading-up on brain damage, the Traumatic Brain Injury Bookstore is a masterpiece of affiliate scheming that would have made my former employer proud.

But What About Orange?
Sunday, April 2, 2000 - 12:59 p.m.

"The Blue and the Green" = Nice article on A List Apart about color trends in bidness web design. The swirl and swoosh commentary are nice extras.

Nice. My first grade teacher said she would not acccept any paper (paper - they weren't called _papers_ in 1st grade. Writing things. On big 3 lined manilla paper.) that had the word "nice" in it because it she said it was descriptively uselesss. She was not nice.

Last Month on Twitch Pitas
Sunday, April 2, 2000 - 08:08 a.m.

So yeah, I redesigned. Here is the archive page.