Some Words

So, K and I have moved to Portland, and I had the obligatory ‘revelation’ that I was totally hooked to the internet and get a little lost when I don’t have a connection to it. I also learned that there is no DSL available for my apartment. It actually ends on the other side of the street, so I’ve got a cable modem now, which I don’t know how to feel about. It’s not that I think cable modems are bad, but 1.5 mbps for about $33 a month is the price point and speed that I feel suits my needs. I don’t really need the 4-6 mbps that cable modems provide and I don’t want to pay $20 more to get it.

Today was the first significant interaction I had with fellow first year law students at Lewis and Clark. Two of them were from Montana, which seemed pretty impressively against the odds, as the whole state has a population of under a million. It also brought back memories of the trip through Montana, which seemed like it would never end. We drove from Bismark, ND to the edge of Idaho in one day and the Montana part dominated that. It was also flat, and pretty boring, getting really pretty only at the end, when things were getting dark.

The highlight of that was when I got to shout, “Look honey! A testicle festivle!” I got to shout this because we were driving by a billboard for a testicle festival. The billboard had a bull holding the spot from which some enterprising individual had stolen his nuts. At first we couldn’t believe the thing existed, but the signs kept coming. I was unable to snap a picture and worried that without one I would have no proof that people had such a thing as a testicle festival. The internet did not disappoint me though. Kudos to Rock Creek Lodge for having one of those small town festivals, but coming up with something better than another damn cherry festival or something.

First: This is not good when you are a candidate who has been getting mocked for a lack of knowledge about the internet. Blocking ‘net’ in words hardly seems a sensible filtering policy.

Second: Twin Cities Public Television has a channel for children, which I don’t get as I don’t have cable (yeah…). At 12:30 in the A.M. they are showing Curious George, which seems to me to be more than tacit admission that they think of the channel a the stoner at night. I’m probably reading into this too much, but while I’ll buy that kids want to see the adventures of a curious monkey, I don’t think they do it after midnight.

Extra bonus side association: Has anyone fed George after midnight? I’d be interested in the results, though he probably just flings poo.

Twitter!

I’m late to the party again. This post I’m linking is old. Thankfully most of this party, the twitter part, is not one that I want anything to do with. If twitter really does take off, it might just be a sign that we should let global warming or a meteor strike step back in, so that nature can go back to the drawing board.

Seriously, are people that insecure about their own actions? I know I post some banal stuff on this blog, but at least I take the time to think through the banality. And does someone really need to know if I’m doing my laundry? If they did, wouldn’t it be faster to just call me? I have a cell phone, now.

The perceived utility of this thing is such that even if it did only what it was supposed to, and human nature will make sure it won’t, it would still be destructive. We don’t need to make the cultural signal to noise ratio worse.

Q: “Did you hear what Bush said he would fight the subpoenaing his aides?”

A: “No! I was reading that one of my friends was going to the store to buy cat food, and another was going to see 300, and another had a strange pain in his left side that he didn’t think was serious. He probably pulled a muscle. Oh! And my roommate just twittered that he’s leaving the apartment…”

Dear God. Please, all of my friends, do not use this thing. I will write you a letter, I will read your blog/myspace/live journal page. I promise. I’m only half lying.

And since that last post touched on sex, there were a couple of interesting articles on sex in Second Life that I saw this week.

Toothpaste for dinner took the game for a ride, and didn’t much like it.

Warren Ellis sees a lot of sex on Second Life, which he acknowledges isn’t surprising, but gets glossed over.

Every now and then I think of trying out Second Life, and then I read things lke this, and it seems like the place is a little too much of a second life. All the problems of your real life exist in the fictional world. They just take less time, because you get drawn away to do chores in First Life. I can hardly contain my excitement. And then a little part of me says, but didn’t you love Snow Crash?

Well, thank God I’m not in college any more, I don’t know that my heard could handle all those tazerings, and the threats of tazerings. I have a fragile constitution. I mean, I know they’re for my safety, but after my doctor ordered three martini lunches, I just don’t know how my system would respond. The saddest thing is that this story is the second time I’ve found myself ACTUALLY THINKING that L.A. would be better off with vigilante justice. Here’s an article on it from people closer to the source. I’m not going to link the video from YouTube, as it makes me sick to watch. No one I am related to will ever go to UCLA, or maybe even vacation in L.A., if I can help it.

It was a nasty looking day outside. I went and bought four kinds of bitters from the liquor store. I had intended to buy six or more, but they didn’t have all the brands that I wanted to try. It’s sad when you don’t have all the bitters you want for winter.

Mark went with me, and he bought some lillet. When we both got home we mixed drinks, 20th Century coctail, Sazerac, and Manhattans. It was good, except for the drink I mixed with amaretto. I don’t know why I bought that. It really did seem like a good thing to get. Then I wasted scotch mixing it into this horrible drink called a godfather. Mark poured it down the sink when I wasn’t looking. That man saved my life.

I also went to see Stranger Than Fiction, which was pretty good. It didn’t change my life, but I did enjoy it. I was a little intoxicated while I was watching it, see the previous paragraphs, and there were a couple of moments where I had ideas for things of my own to write, but alcohol swept them away in the great mass of other thoughts, that probably weren’t worth writing in the first place. I was frustrated for a moment when I was walking out of the theater. That was followed by me remembering how many of my ideas I did remember had not been fully written yet.

I did at one point lean in and chat with a friend of mine who’s at the University of MN for creative writing. We agreed that the movie made writers and publishers look hunormously more wealthy than was realistic. I wish I lived in a huge apartment with wood flooring and modern furniture. No, wait, I like my apartment. It’s cozy.

OOPS

There is an interview with Keith Gessen of n+1 in the NY Inquirer.

I had been on the fence about subscribing to n+1. I’ve got too many periodicals coming to my house. Gessen may have convinced me though.

Gessen also makes a point in the interview that does not relate to my subscribing or not subscribing. He says that there aren’t enough publishing points that young authors can aspire to. Blogs are not the answer, and he rightly points out that no one reads blogs about writing or literature, with the few exceptions being established authors. The New Yorker has become one of the few places that everyone knows about. It has thus become a barometer of success. If you’ve been in the New Yorker, it can be assumed that you’ve got some chops. The New Yorker, like all publishing ventures, has editors, and those editors have an idea of what is good. They do not cover all that is good, just what the editors like and have space to print.

Gessen says that this is part of the reason he works on n+1. There are other voices out there, voices that The New Yorker can’t cover. It wouldn’t hurt Slate, or other online periodicals like it, to take not of Gessen’s attitude. Just to pick on Slate for a moment, I can find one poem on their page, and that’s about it right now. More please.

George Lucas is engaged in a little fan service right now. He’s sent a cease and desist to R Stevens of Diesel Sweeties.

Three T-shirts are named in the letter (yet not the robot evolution one, which is odd). The art is heavily pixelated in two of them, but there’s no text, which might make it hard to get it through as satire or parody. Then again, at least one of those two shirts barely looks like what Lucasarts says it does. It seems that they have the copyright on two curves and a circle, when joined by two dots? Come on. Chewie is My Co-Pilot is also easy to defend, as it’s clearly satire, a defense that has repeatedly held up in court.

Sadly R Stevens is but a maker of comics, and will likely not have the money to fight this. For what is likely a limited time, you can buy a three pack of the shirts and celebrate a right that copyright law, and the occasional large bank account, is rapidly stripping.

Hockey Pre-Season has started. Today the Wild beat the Wings 2-3. My consolation is that the Wings only dressed something like two members of their team last year. The wild had Demetria and Gaborik on the ice, plus Fernandez in goal. It was frustrating driving to work today, as I had to go past the Xcel Energy Center, where the game was played. There were no broadcasts of the game that I could get either.

Boing Boing seems to have started in on a project using what amounts to micropayments. I was never quite sure I bought into the guys at Goats debunking the idea. Still, I don’t know of anyone making it work very well so far. Good luck to Boing Boing’s Emporium. I would love to think it will be a huge success. It’s a great sounding model when you belive it works.

Old link from Boing Boing in which the entertainment industry calls people who use encryption are pedophiles. Man… I work at an ISP, and by that standard everyone I work with has short eyes. But that’s actually really canny. There’s a history of pedophilia being used to tar things. Think about that. If you hear about pedophiles in the media, the reporter always goes out of their way to underline that they find the activity loathsome. It’s so stigmatized that just reporting on it makes you have to deny that you are one. Painting encryption as the domain of sex offenders may be the entertainment industry’s only way of stopping this otherwise totally sane and sensible thing to do with your data.

Oh and speaking of data, this other Boing Boing post underlines how they want you to give up the right to own it.

The Valve had this little bit about why people like me are posting pointless chunks of our personal lives online.

Matthew Yglesias laments that he likes a band that Pitchfork doesn’t. I feel for you Matt. Maybe not on that band, but for a review site Pitchfork often feels like they’re too worried with being trend setters, or getting caught out liking something dorky. That might harm their indie cred, but it would tell me that they actually cared about the music, or having fun with the stuff. Still, there are times when the reviewer seems to know that music can be about fun more than art or that you don’t have to take yourself seriously all the time. Sometimes they even let on that personal taste or situation might effect you’re like or dislike of an album, not its inherent value as some sort of object of art.

And finally, me wanty, but $30 is a bit high for a t-shirt to me.

P.S. Jewish Priates!

I want to sail the seas in search of booty like my ancestors.

Back in the day I had an incredibly crappy web page, where from time to time I would post thoughts and things I had written. It was like this blog, but without php making things easy, nasty graphics that I had done myself in photo shop, and even less frequently updated. I can tell you’re all wondering why I’m not an internet phenomenon already.

Anyhow one of the things I wrote about back then, was how I wished there was a service, either a little program (the sort of thing that would now go in the OS X dashboard) or an email service, that would aggregate all the bands I wanted to track so I would know when they were coming through town. A lot of bands had sign up lists, but it was not consistent, and usually they would just send out a big tour schedule. I’m lazy and I wanted it to feel personal.

Well, yesterday the good folks of Fabulist let me know that such a thing now exists. Tourfilter, and here I link the Twin Cities portion, but it’s there for a bunch of other cities. Lets you track who’s coming to town. They send you email notices and if you want to, you can post it to your blog. And oh, what’s this I see? It can integrate with iCal and thus end up in your dashboard. Now I have even less excuse for why I don’t go to all those shows I miss.

Aislinn gets it right on the subjecto of Snakes on a Plane. Half the people I know, if asked how much illicitly acquired data they go through in a day would have to give the answer in gigs. I think Tycho once used the phrase “bathing in a sea of illegal data,” but I’m too lazy to look it up. Indeed, I would say that illegal data downloads were the porn of our day, (cheap, easy, often of dubious quality) if not for the fact that 80% of it is probably actually porn. Indeed, the net seems to only support two enterprises right now, porn and T-Shirt companies.