New Home

Sigh. This is the last posting I'll be making to Twitch Pitas. I have moved to a new home. Sometime tonight (provided my ISP comes back - I'm posting this from the community library) I'll be archiving this page. It's been fun - remembering those heady early days March/April has been a trip. Good ol Bomb the suburbs, good ol' 'Threat of Machine Intelligence' rant. Anyway - I hope you all enjoy the new domain - there's plenty of stuff inside. ^^

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Blue people update: Dan-O-Bacon (or maybe that's ElectroDan) sent a clue on my search for blue people, Maynard James Keenan of Tool does shows where he paints himself blue. Aha, a pic. And Another. Their whole 'Life Feeds on Life" song from the end of Undertow was all over my senior year of highschool, so for me anyway the Tool reference fits right in with all of this writing about bacteria and parasites and stuff.^^

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Another Cross-Posting

Two Things -
Yesterday during lunch I heard an interview on NPR with the Pakastani ambassador to the UN and he was talking about Internet access (what else) and said that the UN already had an inexpensive computer that was powered by a windmill and had a cellular uplink that would allow for Internet access 'in even the deepest desert.' (A Dune fan, or is that just an Arab catch phrase?).
But I'm thinking - sign me up! Wilderness posts to my weblog? Awesome. I guess I was assuming that the UN alread had some kind of UNIXCEF package - a little sub-notepad that would give a family of 4 in sudan 300 megs of data transfer every month for 50 cents - but I couldn't find anything about it online.
This Slashdot Thread mentions some stuff about non-plugin computers.

Also -
I didn't like the movie 'The Matrix' - mostly because I thought it was grabbing too many sci fi stories (VALIS, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream) for the purpose of being a stylish blockbuster movie instead of being a commentary on them or really advancing (as in examining their points further) any of the arguments in those (and a host of other) stories. The motivation didn't work either (if life is a prison but nobody is aware of it, so what? It's not like Earth was some utopia before the robots took over. And why even bother giving their human batteries a functional consciousness? Why not just leave them in a state of dissociative infantile bliss?) And also, I thought the premise was way, way weak - robots that ran on flesh? Really, if they're smart enough to take over the world, they should be smart enough to harness the power of mitochondria directly. (Okay, I probably looked too deeply into this one to enjoy it for the Industrial-Chic Kung-Fu blockbuster it was trying to be).
Then Mary Chen's pita pointed out this New Scientist Article about a robot that runs on meat. That picture is really creepy, and as anybody who went to New College knows, USF is an evil institution.
This is like the hallucination I kept having my whole first (and only) year at college - that humans were being incorporated into their cities after technology poisoned thier environment the same way bacteria became incorporated into the intestines of mammals after their environment was poised by photosynthetic lifeforms (life evolved first in the absence of oxygen. Oxygen is toxic to bacteria - it destroys their cell walls.) I thought about that a lot again after watching the Matrix and I think it's a point of reference that everybody (except maybe Madeline L'Engle and James Lovelock) is missing.

P.S. -

The Valis Group fucks with your reality.
Really, no kidding.
The VALIS.COM server isn't going to fucking with much of anything.
^^

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Evil Pupil

via Barbelith.^^

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No More Prisons

Upski's got a weblog! The first thing I saw when I came out of the DuPont Circle Metro station (hello, 5-minute escalator ride) was graffiti by the curb that said No More Prisons. I saw some in Wrigleyville a few weeks ago too. Check out his book tour diary here. (cross-posted on the glossosaurus. ^^

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Anybody else ever notice that CSS has a problem with line breaks (for example in this pita)? My link:hovers should be orange but that only works on IE/Mac...
Or maybe I'm dyslexic and I misspelled something in my code.^^

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This is cool.
It generates bitmapped text with HTML tables. That's right - hundreds and hundreds of 1 x 1 tables. Wow.^^

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Just for fun, I'm posting this here and on my domain.
I was reading While You Were Sleeping (which seems to have more about porn and less about graffiti than it did last year, which is too bad because there's plenty of places to read about porn but few places to read about grafitti) last night and saw this interview with L.A.'s Blue Girl (not to be confused with the anime-porn LA Blue Girl or the uqbiquitous Blue Man Group (well, maybe only ubiquitous in Chicago and other select cities)).
The Blue Girl is a fertility goddess from the 16th dimension. She also plays the violin, like Laurie Anderson, and has some mp3's, which sound like hard techno with ooh-ahh singing.
Blue people are prevalent a lot in Hindu art - that's something to look up in the future...
A search on "people painted blue" reveals -
Blue People in San Francisco.
And this interesting link from the Global Ideas Bank (it's too bad how many people with good ideas uderstand the Internet of 1995 but don't understand the Internet of 2000) which definitely deserves a more thorough look-through. ^^

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Coming Soon...

Yes - that's going to be my new all-in-one domain. It's crazy being able to build something w/ directories and non-remotely-sourced images. I'm not ready to put twitch.pitas into suspended animation quite yet - I've got a lot of stuff to work out with design + blogger has lots of features but is kind of crazy w/ the XML stuff.

Lately I feel more like designing stuff than writing. Working more which means that I think more about abstract things (music, programming, programmed music) than I do about experiential things. So Glossosaurus might be a site chock full of DHTML toys and mp3's and sporadic weblog posts.

There is a dream log in there - and I've been having typically crazy dreams that I can actually remember well lately - so that should be fun.

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Is anyone grateful to the canaries as they're hoisted up out of the mine?

My friend is probably going to go to jail for a lot of compounded bullshit (missed court dates, unregistered licence plates, etc). Thanks to Diaryland you can read about the dissolution of his life - that was how I found out about it when I got back from vacation. It's kind of like a Dickens novel, especially the part where the hero confuses self-destruction with integrity. That's what bothers me about all this the most, when smart people get so caught up in the bullshit they learned in highschool that they think that blowing off a court date is somehow sticking it to The Man - or on a more basic level, that not watching out for your own well-being is somehow a form of subversion.

Ugh. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

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Spending too much time with Javascript:
function vacationPacking()
{
Self.mood="anticipation";
Vacation.flight.cancellationWorry="true";
Vacation.flight.destination.airport="BWI";
Vacation.reason.event="Wedding";
Music.nowPlaying.band="flamingLips";
Food.eat(pastaSalad);
return(libraryBooks)} ^^

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So, Like, if You Smoke Pot While You're Nursing, Does Your Baby Get High?

Probably not. The research done could only fine one case, and no effects were reported. What's interesting (though hardly surprising) is how some articles take this single, medically inconclusive, statistically insignificant incident and turn it into a proof that babies would get high from their mothers' breast milk if their mothers are stoners. (Incidentally the transmission of illicit drugs from the blood plasma into mammary tissue differs for each kind of drug, depending on the pH of the drug in question. The Merck Manual explains this in tons of detail.)

Anyway, a fun bit of rhizomatic research - looking for some scientific info and finding out that the research available on the topic (and there seems to be a lot though very little of it is available publicly online - mostly because medical journals are pretty behind the times in terms of business models for distributing their content.) gets severly skewed by anti-drug interests - kind of like those tests that seemed to prove that monkeys that marijuana smoke caused brain damage in monkeys, when later studies showed that it was acutally carbon monoxide poisoning (from being locked in a sealed box pumped full of smoke for 2 months) that caused the brain damage.

('anti-drug interests'...I've been listening to a lot of NPR these last few weeks.)^^

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Real DHTML fun

By people who know a lot more about this stuff than I do (or have access to snazzier design programs than Frontpage Express).

Terrarium (found from this A List Apart article) totally rules. Too bad he's closed it for railsupermedia (linked in the title) which is just an animated business card.


Assembler (via Kottke)has lots of neat 8-bit stuff. All of the code is hand written, but between him and Praystation somebody owes somebody else a debt of gratitude for design inspiraton.

Huge, Inc (via Pantsu-san (via Stephanie)) also has DHTML blocks to play with.

(Cubes! Cubes! Cubes!)

There's always the classic (and non-cubey) Draggable Pals from Melty.

I kind of remember seeing somebody link to somebody else who had DHTML legos to play with.

Or maybe that was done in Flash. ^^

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Sorry

The last design was kind of a Netscape disaster and I don't want it to sit for the rest of the month breaking people's browsers until I learn enough cross-platform DOM stuff to make it work. So - for now you'll be navigating with a chicken sandwich wrapper.
Here are some DHTML/DOM tutorials I've found handy, if you care:

Scripterspad.com gives clear IE, NN, and pan-browser examples.

Javascript Planet's former Webmonkeys are also helpful. ^^

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