For those up for something on the harsh side of Christmas, why not login or sign up and then follow this link to download my Xmas story? But please do let me know what you think, and please don’t distribute it without my approval. By the way, the link does work, but only if you are logged in. Otherwise it looks like a dead link within the site. The power of privacy… which, if I upgrade to WordPress 2.0, I may have to give up (temporarily, anyway).
Month: December 2005
What To Do With Snake Oil Salesmen (and Other Spammers)
Another day, another wave of spam in my inbox. It’s very easy to pick out, for me, but my webmail provider doesn’t seem to have a system sophisticated enough to catch only the bad stuff; as soon as it starts blocking spam, it also starts blocking everything else along with it. My first instinct, like that of many people, is to think up and appeal for highly punitive responses to spam. After all, spammers — at least, the ones who’re pushing viagra and seething malware through unsolicited email, and through comments and trackbacks on blogs — are committing a much …
ET = 1337 h4x0r?
Remember in Independence Day, where Will Smith hacked an alien computer system with an iMac? Someone out there is concerned that the reverse might be far more possible. What if aliens were malicious hackers? The source for the above link, mssv.net, doesn’t seem to find the idea as outlandish as I do. I mean, what are the chances their virus would even work on our Networks? I just don’t buy it. If it were to happen, you’d need more than just data being captured by the SETI@home system; you’d need a malicious hacker somehow present, say, an AI orbiting earth …
Checkin’ Out Mr. Lee
One of the difficult things about living in Korea is that quality film just rarely makes it over here. For example, I don’t think a Spike Lee movie since Malcolm X has made it into cinemas in anyplace except maybe Seoul. A friend and I were talking last night about Lars von Trier, and she and I agreed that probably the next film he puts out won’t get released here because, well, someone made the mistake of putting Dogville in cinemas in Korea. Dogville — an experimental movie with no sets, just chalk lines on the wooden floorboards. Putting that …
Racism shock therapy
The author of the site American Pictures bills his work as “Racism shock therapy”. It’s a fascinating, and rather saddening, collection of photos by a Dane named Jacob Holdt who traveled as a vagabond among the poor classes in America back in the early 1970s. The thematic focus is systemic racial oppression. Worth a look.
ECLEXYS SAGL – Homepage
I was thinking of getting a second web url registered to forward to my own site, but when I did some googling, I discovered something funny. Weirdly enough, there’s a company that seems to be using the name eclexys, if you can believe that. Why they’d choose anything as unpronounceable as that is beyond me. Too bad I won’t be able to register the url, but whatever… the name is mine, just the same, and I bet I’ll hold onto it longer than their business exists. If indeed it is a business and not just a holding page or something.
Lunar New Year “Read” #35: Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Creativity, by Lawrence Lessig
As I’ve mentioned in recent posts , I’ve been listening to the free & legal mp3 set that makes up the audiobook distribution of Lawrence Lessig’s very important book Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Creativity. Now, I know some people will have trouble counting it as a “book”, or my interaction with it as “reading”, since it’s an audiobook. However, I want to note a couple of things: As an unabridged audiobook, it took me longer to get through all the audio than it would to get through a printed …
Lunar New Year Reads, Book #34: A Series of Unfortunate Events, Book 1 — The Bad Beginning, by Lemony Snicket
From the moment I saw the movie Lemony Snickets’ A Series of Unfortunate Events, I realized that these books had to be well-written. Dark, brooding novels for children aren’t really the norm — though I think this has more to do with the way adults think about children than anything, and I think it also reflects the changes in how we think about kids over the last few hundred years. It’s not as if the Grimm’s tales were written for businessmen or housewives seeking “the edgy”, after all — and the fact that the movie was so wonderfully interesting boded …
Lunar New Year Reads, #33: Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk
“A shock writer”. “A weirdo”. “That Fight Club guy.” These are the kinds of things that are said not altogether praisefully about Chuck Palahniuk, but I am not sure I can really agree… or disagree. I’m not sure I can agree with the pejorative use of a term like “shock writer” because, well, it’s pretty clear that Palahniuk values the shocking, the gut-wrenching, the revolting. It’d be one thing if he was publishing books full of snuff photography, or writing simply sadistic fantasies; in other words, it’d be one thing if he weren’t very clearly working at constructing texts of …
Hate torture? Consider boot camp – Los Angeles Times
Yes, the premise of the article I just read is as bad as you think from the title of this post. It’s that bad. What the difficulties of boot camp do to justify torturing Iraqis and other “suspected terrorists” — and let’s remember that in America now, a feminist T-shirt is enough to place you under enough suspicion to block you from attending a Presidential speech — is beyond me. Yet this is, well, at least for a little while, the thrust of Max Boot’s “opinion” piece in the L.A. Times, titled “Hate torture? Consider boot camp”. Oh, wait, there’s …