Been raining hard occasionally, quite late at night. I’ve drawn close to the end of the first of three papers, which is pretty good considering all the crazy grading stuff I had to finalize last week, and some other stuff that came up over the weekend. I have some editing to do, I have a story on the go, I have some references to look up. I have a movie to go watch, maybe. We’ll see. But mostly? I have some serious laundry to do. And brewing of beer, but I have to find some place to crush my grains …
Category: GENERAL
Rikki-Tikki-Tavi & Stephen Harper’s Unceremonious Assrape of Toronto
Rikki-Tikki-Tavi | Viral/Other | SPIKE.com As I mentioned to some friends, my dad once let me stay up late to watch this on CBC. I have no idea why it aired so late, though I suspect we were getting shows on Toronto time — thus an hour or two later in our timezone, which was a constant annoyance. I wasn’t supposed to tell my sisters, as they had gone to bed and would be mad if they knew I was allowed to stay up… even though I was older than them. But I figure after recounting so many of Kipling’s …
Communication is So Important
A friend was bringing me up-to-date on his life, and for reasons I won’t get into, this story came to mind. Parts of it are second-hand, but I’m going to just tell it the way I’d tell it verbally, that is, without differentiating the bits that I know are true and the bits that are hearsay. And of course, because I’m doing that, I’ll leave out the real names, and take some liberties. I think the couple of people might be able to guess who I’m talking about already know the story, so it’s not like I’m ruining someone’s reputation. …
Pascal at the Horse Races…
This video, which I found at The Bronze Blog, is a very insightful and entertaining evisceration of Pascal’s wager. (Read the amusing comments section, too.)
Oxytocin and Social Networking
This article is interesting, though its title, “Social Networking Affects Brains Like Falling in Love,” should have a question mark at the end, since the experiment (with Twitter) was a simple one-off. I’d be very curious to see studies of people who use Social Media professionally. (Like, say, someone like pro SF authors twittering like mad at a science fiction convention, or low-level political candidates using Twitter.) I’d also be very curious to see how mediated interaction works compared to non-mediated interaction — how much difference in oxytocin do we see in couples talking on the phone a few hours …
Back on my feet (sorta)
All the posts that have gone up in the past four or five days have been prewritten, in fact were pre-scheduled a week or more ahead of time. Why am I mentioning this? Because anyone following along on my blog might think I was okay the past weekend, when in fact I had the worst case of food poisoning I’ve had since Jakarta. Unfortunately, I think I know where I got it. I wish I could say it was my own fault… well, maybe it was, but I don’t know. I will say this: whenever I eat anything at Times …
BP, Chickens, Roosts
I’ve been reading about the BP Oil Spill down in the Gulf of Mexico, about how people discussing where in the litany of biggest single oil spills ever the current one fits in [1], about how it might hit the Gulf Stream and spread all around the Atlantic, about how painful it is to see it. Well, I’ve held my tongue, but I’ll be honest, folks. When Malcolm X said that thing about chickens coming home to roost, maybe it was impolitic. It’s probably impolitic for me to use his words now… but that’s because it’s true. This is what …
Random Linkage
I didn’t know until this week, but both Corey Haim and Gary Coleman died this year. Which means little to me, except that when I was searching for other things, these two cases came up in Google again and again. Zenkimchi on the internationalization of Korean food, and how the guys claiming to spearhead it are going wrong… all a case of not knowing their market, and having things backwards. My rule about Korean restaurants isn’t quite the opposite of his title — the best Korean restaurants aren’t always the cheapest, though he’s right that the worst are usually the …
Hotlinking Bastard Scum Retaliation… What Do You Think?
So, I just got myself a hotlink blocker, after noticing a few websites that have been pirating bandwidth off this site. (I got busy/lazy, and didn’t update, and the old plugin didn’t do enough, I guess.) Should I display this image (which I’m currentl using)? Or should I get the old goaste.cx JPG and add a caption about how only assholes hotlink? What do you think? On the one hand, it’s a punishment to the hootlinker that seems fitting — but on the other hand, I guess it punisher’s that hotlinker’s readers more… especially, for example, in forums where the …
For Neda
One of the comments to this post included a link to this video documentary “For Neda”… about a woman who was murdered (along with so many others) during the recent post-election crackdown in Iran last year, about a year ago now. I said that the video deserved its own post, and it does. Watch it!