Has everyone forgotten that our vice president is named DICK cheney?!?! is that so fucking weird or what? it’s like what if the first lady was named clitoris bush or the press secretary was named buttcheeks snow?

So I just installed google gears in the hopes that I might be able to run gmail offline. Turns out it’s not that beta yet. I noticed this funny little message when I uninstalled gears from firefox, heheheh

:: Those are your civil liberties drowning via PressESC ::

“This doesn’t taste anything like chocolate OR milk!”

Bye Bye Planet

/sigh

I discovered Domestic Tension, a performance art piece about the psychology of violence, this morning. The artist, Wafaa Bilal, is spending a month living in a room in an art gallery that has a webcam mounted on a servo that users can control on the project’s website. The camera has a paintball gun attached to it that users can choose to shoot at their leisure. The artist has been shot tens of thousands of times and has sat, through it all, chatting with the users on his website as they decide whether to let the bullets fly. The psychology of it is fucked up. I couldn’t help cursing like crazy at an individual screaming in the chatroom about nuking baghdad and “push button wars” that kept trying to zero in for a shot. I ended up moving the camera to a far wall and emptying out some ammunition, harmlessly, against it to give Bilal a few more minutes of peace. I felt victorious, until my arch-nemesis in the chat began rambling about Dahmer and the Oklahoma city bomber loving to eat meat the color of Bilal. What the fuck is wrong with (some) people!

The artist, incidentally, eats only food given to him as a gift. I might have to send him some spirulina to help him heal after all those paintball hits.

Check it out: Domestic Tension

Neal Cassady at the Helm of Further, the merry pranksters bus.

“Charm is a way of getting the answer ‘yes’ without asking any clear question” - Camus

Cassady was a fairly amazing fellow, Ken Kesey wrote a poem about his death called The Day After Superman Died.

Don’t kick a dead horse while it’s down.

:: Via Alcohol ::

from: Eric Nguyen 8:09 pm (4 hours ago)
to: TitaniumDreads
date: May 22, 2007 8:09 PM
subject: Fwd: World Without Oil - Update for Heroes

To my various, cross-posted peeps:

So, I’ve been following this ambitious experiment called World
Without Oil. It’s ostensibly a game (a new kind, called an “alternate
reality game”), where players collectively imagine and create their
neighborhoods, work, relationships, etc. in a world where oil is
running out.

The month-long game is almost half over, but I have a really good
idea about how a bunch of us can play as a team for the last ten
days. Instead of creating the horror stories of that future (which a
lot of other players are focusing on), I want to be the team that
thinks up the solutions. The duct-tape-and-shoestring innovation that
happens when the world grinds to a halt. Those of you installing
solar panels with me this weekend may be involved, already :)

Email me if you’re interested. More info and a taste of WWO, below.

~e

> From: mPathytest
> Date: May 16, 2007 9:02:32 PM PDT
> To: “Netizen Heroes”
> Subject: {SPAM 03.6} World Without Oil - Update for Heroes
> Reply-To: mPathytest
>
> The oil shock hit on April 30 – and today, life is different
> everywhere.
>
> It’s not just that so many people have stopped driving. There are
> widespread power outages, food shortages, and airline passengers have
> been stranded around the world. More and more people are
> telecommuting,
> home schooling, and only going places they can walk or bike. It’s a
> reality we never could have imagined – until now.
>
> But since the shock hit, heroes like you from around the world have
> been documenting this new, strange reality with videos, blog posts,
> web
> comics, podcasts, photo sets, animations, and even games. We’ve
> collected over 1000 of your stories – and counting.
>
> It looks like the crisis is reaching a critical point – maybe even a
> turning point? We won’t know for sure until you tell us.
>
> If you haven’t told YOUR story yet, now is the time. Here are 3 easy
> ways you can get involved right now, in five minutes or less.
>
> 1) Walk somewhere instead of driving. While you’re walking, call the
> WWO hotline to hear news and leave us a message: 1-866-WWO-TSOC

> going, how far you’re walking, and any other news from your corner of
> the crisis.
>
> 2) Gas is now over $7 a gallon. How many miles can you afford to drive
> a week at this rate? What will you cut out of your life to cut back on
> gas? Send us an email about it at wwo@worldwithoutoil.org
>
> 3) It’s not all bad, is it? If you have a blog or journal, write about
> one unexpected way your life is better in a world without oil. We bet
> you can really surprise us with this one. Submit the link to us at
> http://www.worldwithoutoil.org/addstory.aspx
>
> Of course, you can be creative - show us your new reality however you
> want. For inspiration, check out some of the most creative stories so
> far: http://www.worldwithoutoil.org/awards.aspx
>
> As always, you can catch up on gas prices, fuel availability and news
> headlines at http://www.worldwithoutoil.org
>
> That’s all for now. Thanks for helping us tell this story.
>
> - mPathytest, for the 8TSOC gang
>
>
>
> WORLD WITHOUT OIL will be live for two more weeks only! The story
> concludes on June 1, 2007.
>
> WORLD WITHOUT OIL is a month-long collaborative alternate reality that
> invites you to help simulate a global oil shock. It is produced by
> WRITERGUY, presented by ITVS Interactive (Independent Television
> Service), and funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. An
> Independent Lens Web-exclusive presentation (PBS), it is an ELECTRIC
> SHADOWS project (ITVS).
> ———————————————-
> World Without Oil. > (1-866-996-8762). In your message, tell us where you are, where you’re

If you ever surf around on the “blogosphere” or the “blagosphere” or whatever the kids are calling it these days you’ll notice that nothing ever blows up from a myspace blog. I’m not familiar with someone posting something so trenchantly insightful or fall off your keyboard hilarious on a myspace blog that it’s gotten 10s of thousands of incoming links in 48 hours. I’ve never seen slashdot, digg, or reddit link to myspace.

This doesn’t really make a lot of sense to me, it seems like at least a few of the millions of myspace blogs should be saying something diggworthy. The first thing that comes to mind is that the highly personalized nature of blog posts has a limited appeal to any sort of greater audience (ie omg drama with the bf!!). That doesn’t really fly though because LiveJournal is also personalized but there are still fairly common blog explosions on the major aggregators. Given that Myspace has the largest userbase of any of the social networking sites (it’s the #5 most accessed english website on the internet according to alexa as of this writing) I have a hard time believing that myspacers aren’t writing brilliant and incisive blog posts about the state of the world. As the tagline of technorati says “70 Million blogs out there…some of them have to be good.” A view of technorati’s top 100 blogs shows that a few are hosted in blogger, typepad and wordpress the rest have dedicated domains but not a single one is hosted on myspace.

Closer inspection of my own blog on myspace may reveal the reason why. If you start at my myspace profile(myspace.com/titaniumdreads) and click on [view all blog entries] your taken to my blog page. the nonsensically long uri is

http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.ListAll&friendID
=10085330&MyToken=5acd4cbd-b0f5-46e3-96bc-03d97574275cML

I did some logical inference hacking and discovered that I could get to the same page by going to
http://blog.myspace.com/titaniumdreads. However, there is no indication anywhere on the page that it can be accessed with a simplified uri. In fact there isn’t even a permalink the permalink is disguised as a link in the time I made the post.

The permalink is the mainstay of the blogger. If you expect to have people link to your posts you have to have a clear and concise uri. the permalink for my last entry is

http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID


676-A9DD4FCF97E8C98552665480 =10085330&blogID=231822843&Mytoken=DF89AAC4-40C9-4

There is no fucking way that someone could type that. I believe that myspace is losing millions of dollars because they haven’t programmed their namespaces properly. If you could access my myspace blog through http://blog.myspace.com/titaniumdreads/?p=162 I might not have gone to the trouble to set up this website. Something this simple would be easy to forward around in email and on comments to other users. If you think that this isn’t a big deal you’re wrong. The weblogs inc network was the first to make over a million dollars in advertising with only a handful of blogs, myspace has at least 200 million users growing at a rate of 230,000 per fucking day (although most of those are probably like my friend ruthie). The creators of myspace sold it for 327 million dollars. Not long afterwards google paid 900 million for exclusive search rights. Myspace is currently working on expanding into the chinese market. this minor usability error is costing myspace hundreds of millions of dollars.

To me there’s a bigger issue here. AJ Liebling said that
Freedom of the Presses is for those that own one.” This minor programming error is holding back public discourse in a very significant way. The internet is destroying television and newspapers because *anyone* can have a voice not just the media monopolies that thrive on a cheap political system dominated by sound bites, fear-mongering, emotional appeals, and ad hominem attacks.

Myspace has the shittiest user interface but is the most popular social networking site because it gives users the freedom to create their own pages (myspace). Yet they’ve totally missed that most basic of points with their blogs. Give users the basic uri’s and the ability to embed html in blogs and myspace could make billions while invigorating the public sphere.

“‘I think therefore I am’ is a statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches” Milan Kundera

:: via Jane {Congratulations!} ::

New Friend Requests!!!

If the profile no longer exists why do I have to deny their friend request?!?!? Shouldn’t this just disappear? gah!

dear ruthie, I totally think you’re a real person and not a porn fakesters* created by a sophisticated bot. what? you have a cam?!? only 5.99 a minute? I would have never guessed.

*see attack of the smartasses a great article from sf weekly when friendster was considered an “uber-chic” dating site.

To Do lists came up a couple times today in readings and conversation. It’s worth noting that simply having them isn’t always useful, they function best with certain kinds of items. I think these are some useful tips for constructing good to do lists

1. Items involve a physical action
2. Items can be accomplished in a single sitting
3. Make valuable progress towards recognized goals.

but why?!? …

:: Sensational? perhaps ::

So I looked up dragon armor on wikipedia and it seems that dragon skin has actually failed several tests. The article seems sensationalized but I’ve already gone to the trouble of blogging it. the truth is probably somewhere in between.

:: potent via War Nerd ::
:: goodbye via flickr ::

Since moving to Guam I’ve taken up diving, and having scored a wicked job in a dive shop I can pretty much do it as often as I like free of charge. So I’ve been spending a lot of my time underwater. Of all that I’ve experienced in my new habitat there are a couple things I’d especially like to point out:

–Diving a wreck at night is unreal. And creepy in a way that no ghost story could ever match. When the opportunity presents itself.. DO IT.

–When you descend through a bright blue hole in the ocean floor that turns 90 degrees and pops you out of a deep, cobalt-blue cavern about 130ft down the side of an ocean drop-off with no bottom.. as you’re hovering in that warm, crystal-clear water –85degrees, 200ft viz– not only is it the most beautiful, incredible experience of your life but physics and physiology come together at that exact moment to give you a little treat called nitrogen narcosis to enhance your experience. So three cheers to science for being on top of that one.

Lastly, if you’re ever on a large dive boat chances are the captain will let you jump from the upper decks during your surface interval if you just ask them. But they’ll only do it if the engines are off, the conditions are calm, and it’s not going to piss off their other passengers.

First off, if you haven’t been living under a tectonic plate bees are dying en mass and anyone who eats pollinated food is going to be totally fubar’d. Interesting development though…Organic Bee colonies are doing just fine.

and

via Information liberation

also, this came in via email, it’s friday, everybody loves to see things get totally smashed.

I’m pretty impressed with MEND these days, you can read about them here, here and here.  Also the webpage Global Guerrillas delivers the laymans’ sociological news pretty well in terms of late capitalism’s co-developing foes and forces.  There was even a report recently on the page about the rise in copper theft in Texas, although that is nothing new, of course.  Be sure to read the article entitled “Info warfare, Narcocorridors, and Youtube.”

Currently i’m in Tucson, AZ, where it’s unbelievably dry today.  If anyone has friends here or in Flagstaff AZ or anywhere in New Mexico they think I should hang out with, I’d love for you to write me (Titty Dready?).

Presently taking Xiao Yao Wan as an amateur-prescribed traditional Chinese medicine.