The other day, I saw this xkcd webcomic someplace: I was reminded of it when, going through some old posts and tidying up some messed-up Youtube embed code (from a plugin long dead and gone), I saw a little manifesto I wrote about culture, art, and creativity, “Pearls Before Swine, Or, The Time Has Come To Saw Off The Brakes”:
Mrs. Jiwaku and I are currently watching (for me, re-watching) the TV series Dead Like Me. I have to say, the writing is pretty good, especially after the first few episodes. In the first season’s penultimate episode, the characters are sorting through a ton of paperwork, inputting the last thoughts of the souls they’ve reaped into a database. Daisy Adair, a sort of Hollywood cynic type turned grim reaper, has been fending off the sexual advances a British druggie reaper who is really not her type. They end up working together, and data entry ends up being something more like …
A spray of links and goodies. I’ve been saving up. The Shining: Since watching Room 237: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHE5YUNkssQ … and then rewatching The Shining, I’ve been a little fascinated with the film, and a lot fascinated with others’ (often slightly-to-very-crazy) fascination with it: Staircases to Nowhere: a documentary on the making of the film, with interviews of the crew: The Overlook Hotel is a tumblr dedicated to ephemera from the film’s production/promotion/etc. STANLEY KUBRICK’S MASTERPIECE, “THE SHINING”: Basically a book-length reading of the film in the form of a blog, which I have yet to read though I’ve read fascinating reviews. Apparently this …
So: if you’re like me, and you started your blog a long, long time ago, and you’re having trouble with CPU Minutes usage? Don’t do what I did. I did a million other things, including all the things my hosting company suggested. And then, at wit’s end, I noticed some php script being called by something in the database that shouldn’t be there. Plugin authors have gotten a lot better about this, but in the old days? They designed plugins that didn’t delete the stuff from the database that they created. Whole tables and tables of crap, just sitting there, …
A post announcing the publication of a memorial website for a band I played in back in Korea… plus photos from back in those days, and some reminiscences.
A snippet: All around the world, but particularly in our great Republic, inventors and professors set about applying the universal intrinsic principle. Some worked with formless Unchangeables in their seance lounges, others with religious Notions, and a rare few, such as our Mr. Edison, with bulldog Actualities. The way he looked at it, if your calculations showed you couldn’t do something, then you went ahead and did it without the calculations. Here was one for whom the forces of electricity had been waiting! –from You Bright and Risen Angels, by William T. Vollmann A huge book, left behind by a …
I posted earlier today on Facebook regarding the topic of ratings collection design systems for beer ratings websites like BrewAdvocate (below, referred to as “BA”), based on my experience designing grading rubrics for teaching and student evaluation purposes. I was posting in the context of others arguing that the ratings systems on various enthusiast rating websites were relatively less meaningful in the fine gradations; that a been with a 97% quality rating may not be “better” than a beer of a 95% rating. I responded as follows: Yeah, also because people’s rankings are affected by others’ rankings, and by reputation. I …
I’ve been tidying up my Feedly subscriptions, trying to cut things down to the bare minimum so I can start following blogs I actually like and keep up with news from friends. I’m making an effort not to subscribe to (or keep up subscriptions to) every damned thing, because that was how I stopped following feeds in the first place. So anyway: the ominous. The death of a blog isn’t really ominous in itself. Lots of people have migrated to other social media platforms, though I feel sad about that in some ways: blogs work as a nice reservoir of …
Tyler Cowen (at Marginal Revolution) linked an interesting and pertinent article on the cultural dimension of development and “success” in South Korea:, which sounds a lot like what I’ve been saying over the years: South Korea’s success has been deep but not wide. Almost half of its population lives, works and competes in Seoul. Its occupational structure is also narrow. The number of professions in South Korea is only two-thirds of the number in Japan and only 38% of that in America. This striking statistic is not lost on the South Korean government (few are). It has appointed a task force …
I’m still busy sorting out the CPU minutes/spammer problems on my website, though I’m getting closer by the day to sorting it all out. Part of sorting it out has involved converting a bunch of old installations of WordPress that I’d set up for students into static html webpages, so that I could delete the WordPress installations, which is time consuming and, if I didn’t want to keep the blogs for the sheer point of keeping them up–later I can say, “See, I hosted blogs for my students!”–then I would have just deleted them. But, well… I didn’t. All that …