I really liked reading about Jake Berendes’s neo-discovery of headphones and what it’s like to have a soundtrack all the time. I wear headphones pretty constantly when I’m outside my apartment, and his description of that experience is one with which I identify well.
Category: Digital Neighbors
Maria and I were discussing the increasingly esoteric and convoluted nature of spam, just now, including the fact that much of bulk email no longer serves a discernible purpose. I frequently receive spam from nonsense names, advertising nothing, free of hyperlinks or parsible sentences.
I pointed out that one reason it’s gotten so complicated is the constant, high-speed arms race between spammer and anti-spam software vendor; as new regular expressions are devised and new efforts made to beat them, whole fields of technique can be created and discarded in a week. And then Maria said something that chilled me to my very bones.
“What if,” she said, “the vendors are putting spam out there just to keep selling their software?”
I’m terrified, now, that she might be right.
Anyway, read Spam As Folk Art.
I’ve been meaning to post both of these things forever. First, even though Jon and Amanda abandoned their blogs, they do have a homey little site now. It’s even got Lucy’s cell number on it! Watch out for those “for a good time” calls, Lucy.
Second, Mister Munson found my posts about him and wrote me! He seems like he’s having a great time, especially in his new science fiction class; as part of that, he says he finally taught Ender’s Game, which I badgered him to do for about half of my junior year of high school. I’m pretty sure that means I win. Or really, that they win.
This makes two people I know (Sumana being the other) who have taught a sci-fi literature class. I’ve never even had the opportunity to take one! Injustice!
Kris Straub is the April Foolmaster, so much so that he can get away with doing his prank on March 31. Go look at Checkerboard Nightmare right now!
Hey, heads up. In case you syndicate NFD via its RSS feed, you should be aware that the feed address has changed (as linked right there). But then, of course, if you do read this thing only by syndication, you… won’t ever get this message. Um.
A lot of addresses have changed, actually, including the permalink format, but Leonard somehow managed not to break backward compatibility with old links. So they’ll still work, and the original NFD Lite permalinks (which redirect to the original NB permalinks) will still work, but the whole situation is just getting increasingly meta. One of these days the whole thing’s gonna go critical. Metacritical!
Seth David Schoen’s latest entry features a mention of the EFF and the CBLDF in the same section. It’s Seth David Schoen: Brendan’s Pet Issues Edition!
Seth also writes a great little story-essay about confabulation, the practice of making up reasonable, untrue explanations for events and then completely believing them. Some people believe “that confabulation is actually our normal method of thinking,” he says. This is not too far off the mark for me–I constantly catch myself coming up with perfectly sensible stories for actions (being in the theater building late at night, say, or buying snack cakes) for which ordinary reasons already exist. It’s a bad habit, but when you have a memory as bad as mine, it comes in kind of handy. There is, after all, the distinct possibility that the explanation I just made up (to apply to an action for which I’ve forgotten my original reasoning) is actually the real one.
It’s also good for explaining bizarre trivia. I have a good stock of facts in that category, but precious little background on them when challenged. If you ever ask me something you really need to know, and I give you a strange answer, you should probably call me out on it. (I’m usually right, but even so.)
Actually, the reason I started my running commentary on this vitanuova entry is because of the first section. It describes his brilliant exploit of the Southwest LAX-OAK commuter flight system, which is like something you’d see pop up in BlogNomic. Seth and I actually discussed LAX-OAK commuter flights on the day I got to hang out at the EFF offices, since Maria and I (and maybe Monica) will be taking advantage of them this summer.
Do you read vitanuova? You really should. Not only will it make you smarter, it will also free Dmitry! Vitanuova: Freeing Dmitry since March 2001.
Oh, sure, Leonard may have 81 pictures of the trip, and sure, I have like, ten. But does he have himself in the plastic mullet? Well, he probably could. Pretty easily.
Post Road Trip Day Something
I cleaned a lot of plates in Berkeley, pumped a lot of pain in the EFF offices. But I never saw the good side of the city… until I played Illuminati with Leonard, Seth and Zack while Sumana danced to songs about shell accounts.
Actually I saw several very neat sides of the city, including BART (which beats the tar out of TARC, I’m afraid, leaving it with one measly C) and Salon Central. I missed out on the party at City Hall, but I sure heard a lot about it. The weather was gorgeous, and I made new friends (Jacob from Alaska is three, and he and I played hide-and-seek from O’Hare to Louisville).
Recent excursions into Powellian hyperbole notwithstanding, I had a freaking great time in California, thanks entirely to my kind and generous hosts. Even though I’ve been up for about 30 hours trying to grab the tail end of all the work I missed, I don’t regret a thing, and I can’t wait to go back. Maria and I spent a good chunk of yesterday (when I should have been, um, grabbing the aforementioned work-tail) making the first real arrangements for this summer’s Calicomicon journey. The Five Lords of the Texas Eagle will sow terror and reap, um, comic books!
Road Trip Day 6
Picked up one of Leonard’s dozens of backup clone-bodies in Sin City, so the parity of Leonard:Brendan was restored to full efficiency. We attempted to employ a magnet-gun scheme to make millions at the roulette table, but were defeated when they wouldn’t accept our bets in Berendes Bucks.
We thoroughly rocked Bakersfield, as assisted by Leonard’s mom Frances Whitney, Three-Time Champion of the World. Yesterday, we limped at last into San Fran, Destination City, where I had dinner with a conspiracy of interwebbian luminaries whose URLs I don’t have time to look up right now. Fortunately, I managed to pick the hay out of my teeth before my beef ‘n’ rice ‘n’ plantains arrived.
Today, maybe Berkeley, certainly Salon, then dinner and who knows what.
So I’m gonna have to jump!