"Here's what you should take away. Get the Slanket if you're serious about staying warm while lying on your couch, the Freedom Blanket if you're not. Nobody anywhere should buy the Snuggie. The Blankoat is for rich people who can afford Icelandic wool. Bathrobes do not work, no matter how much you wish them to."
crimson soaked horizon
girdle of sunset marking time
between tick and tock
advancing half again to night
and the whitewater rush
across the sky a river of stars
never stepped in twice
in the same place shore to shore
or aethereal water flowing
between humans and divinity
dancing around watchtowers
in the shape of infinity
from fractals of fate and fortune
ritual weapons of stardust
made and consecrated
she’s a glimpse fresh and bright
sunlight sneaking in after a rain storm
momentary in an instant everything
changing the season into spring
reminding with just a touch
how much plants newly green
grow envious of evolved senses
knowing the stuff that rabbits do
even when the innocent are looking
free to be and love one another
dancing of a kind anyway
away from any ballrooms
still apart from practical things
there’s romance under the trees
find falling cherry blossom petals
secret goddess picking daffodils
sneaking suspicion she’s a real girl
but maybe with just a little
super-hero back story to tell
I wonder what her one weakness is
"Open Journal Systems (OJS) is a journal management and publishing system that has been developed by the Public Knowledge Project through its federally funded efforts to expand and improve access to research."
"Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC) is an online-only Gold Open Access international peer-reviewed journal published by the Organization for Transformative Works copyrighted under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License."
"This essay examines how tensions between work and play for video game developers shape the worlds they create. The worlds of game developers, whose daily activity is linked to larger systems of experimentation and technoscientific practice, provide insights that transcend video game development work. … I argue that the daily activity of game development embodies skills fundamental to creative collaborative practice and that these capabilities represent fundamental aspects of critical thought. Simultaneously, numerous interests have begun to intervene in ways that endanger these foundations of creative collaborative practice."
"LOEX is a self-supporting, non-profit educational clearinghouse for library instruction and information literacy information. Founded in 1971 after the "First Annual Conference on Library Orientation" at Eastern Michigan University, LOEX (Library Orientation Exchange) has grown from a lending repository of library instruction materials and host of an annual conference on the subject to an internationally known organization that serves as a conduit for those working in the field. We provide information on all aspects of instruction and information literacy to libraries and librarians who are institutional members."
@plutopsyche Just, you know, keep it inside a Faraday-cage? Or, have a party and invite everyone over to have a look and see what comes up? in reply to plutopsyche#
@plutopsyche I remember finding a vendor with Masala Chai in Ireland and being so happy. Happy I’d found some, and happy ’cause the name. in reply to plutopsyche#
@plutopsyche Just to be fair, Oregon Chai and Tazo, the commonest syrups in the states, both have brewed black tea in them. in reply to plutopsyche#
@plutopsyche Thai iced tea is often made from prepared concentrated tea too, even if it’s some gross icky non-dairy thing. in reply to plutopsyche#
@plutopsyche Ben & Jerry’s had a limited edition Chai ice cream for a while in … um, ’04-ish. (I admit I loved it a lot.) in reply to plutopsyche#
@plutopsyche The names that places like Starbucks picks have a lot to do with what they can “protect” in the market, too. in reply to plutopsyche#
"Recent evidence that Druids possibly committed cannibalism and ritual human sacrifice—perhaps on a massive scale—add weight to ancient Roman accounts of Druidic savagery, archaeologists say."
"For centuries it's been said that the crusading Knights of Malta constructed an underground city on the Mediterranean island of Malta, sparking rumors of secret carriageways and military labyrinths.
Now a tunnel network has been uncovered beneath the historic heart of the Maltese capital of Valletta, researchers say. But the tunnels—likely from an ahead-of-its-time water system—may render previous theories all wet."
"Kitezh is something of a Russian Shangri-la–a city saved by the Tartar hordes by a miraculous mist. It is said to exist in the depths of a lake, by whose shores the faithful can ever so faintly hear the sound of bells. In the apocalyptic years around the 1905 revolution, many intellectuals, in a spirit not unlike Tolstoy's, went on pilgrimages to the site."
"Though it was once dubbed 'the Russian Parsifal,' Kitezh is in many ways Mahlerian rather than Wagnerian."
"Establish something as a 'pseudoscience' and you dismiss the evidence offered out of hand. The processes to which pseudoscience refers are very modern: expert communities, institutional truth, public discourse, and the body of scientific thinking. Twentieth-century philosophers of science like Karl Popper of course fashioned us the tool, discerning communities of disciplinary inquiry, methods, and paradigm shifts as the symptom of science an its distance from its opposite, pseudoscience, where evidence could be marshaled into the simulacrum of established knowledge without the actuality of the same authority."
"I suppose I’m attracted to things labeled pseudoscience in part because they represent communities whose thinking is out-of-time or out-of-place, and twenty-first-century interlocutors frequently have problems determining which and why."
"Storyworlds are a new form of computer entertainment developed by Storytron, Inc. Using our free authoring tool, SWAT, creative individuals with a story to tell can script their own sets of Actors, Stages, Props, and a web of potential interactions known as Verbs. Players seeking a unique new form of computer entertainment can play those storyworlds, engage with the Actors, and explore a wide range of choices and behavior in the dramatically rich environment developed by the author of that world.
"What I think is more insidious, though, than wingnut dentists’ cutting back their hours or Mrs. Instapundit cutting back on whatever it is that she normally does, is the widespread belief among elites that they and their colleagues are indispensable men."
"If you're basing your lifestyle, your belief system, or even the name of one of your pets on Atlas Shrugged or anything else written by Ayn Rand, you are a tool.
This isn't even the cranky asshole left-wing liberal in me telling you this, this is the cranky asshole English-lit minor: Atlas Shrugged sucks. It sucks as both a political allegory and a work of fiction. It sucks hard."
I got an evite to a little used e-mail address, and instantly started to get orders of magnitude more spam there. #
@ursonate That movie is a super cult-classic. I actually saw it in the cinema when I was single digits old. It’s so good-bad-good! in reply to ursonate#
"The International Language can be easily and accurately written in Gregg Shorthand with a few modifications. It is assumed that the student, before working through this little book, is conversant with the rules and principles given in the Gregg Shorthand Manual. This being the case, he or she will have but little trouble in applying his knowledge to Esperanto."
"Built on vision and engineering these handcrafted spheres are suspended like pendants from a web of rope. They occupy a truly unique place in the world while providing a habitat for the un-tamed spirit that exists in us all.
If it suits your un-tamed spirit you may wish to purchase a sphere or components to build your own. Uses for these spheres are limited only by ones imagination. Healing, meditation, photography, canopy research, leisure and game watching are just some of the things you can do."
Time to recover Starseige #Tribes for its noble purpose as a sublime game not some silly book about, pshaw, community leadership! As if. #
After all, what’s “community leadership” if not being on a team capturing and holding an enemy checkpoint? That’s community a la #Tribes#
@joguldi I wonder how many friends I could get together to buy $100 houses in the same neighborhood somewhere? Instant intent’l community. in reply to joguldi#
Sure, there’s $100 houses in Detroit, but I can’t get Kentucky Fried Movie’s “NO! NOT DETROIT! ANYTHING BUT DETROIT!” outta my mind … #
Yeah, priorities are important. Short duration intentional community online playing #Tribes must be up somewhere near “Bread” & “Water”. #
Really struck by this Timbers Army crest, with a rosy cross in front and a Woodcraft sunrise in back … http://tinyurl.com/dht48v#
@xenijardin restart is warm startup (no BIOS), reboot is cold (w/ BIOS), reset is an unclean shutdown then a cold startup (w/ BIOS) in reply to xenijardin#
@xenijardin Er, and by BIOS, I really mean POST. #
The link for the “more” button on a twitter profile includes “&twttr=true” but manually using “&twttr=false” doesn’t change anything #
Neither does setting it to something else nor removing it from the URL … so, why’s it there? #
The problem w/ hashtags are that people aren’t consistent, or don’t use them. Needs to be more seamless. iwantsandy-like autodetection … #
There are more than twice as many results for GDC than for #GDC for example … #
@xiojason seems like any term based on a certain user-config’d threshold should be linked to a search for that term automatically, like GDC in reply to xiojason#
@xiojason Except for a way to determine that threshold, that’s a client issue. The API should have some way to query for interesting terms. in reply to xiojason#
@xiojason Ignore stopwords, then have a back-channel stream non-uniq w/ a +term msg or -term msg … then let a client aggregate on the fly #
@xiojason a runtime thesaurus! or, you know, simpler to just let the folk do their onomy … #
"It is that magical moment we live for: an unwieldy, unyielding data set is transformed into an image on the screen, and suddenly the user can perceive an unexpected pattern. As visualization designers we have witnessed and experienced many of those wondrous sparks. But in recent years, we have become acutely aware that the visualizations and the sparks they generate, take on new value in a social setting. Visualization is a catalyst for discussion and collective insight about data.
We all deal with data that we'd like to understand better. It may be as straightforward as a sales spreadsheet or fantasy football stats chart, or as vague as a cluttered email inbox. But a remarkable amount of it has social meaning beyond ourselves. When we share it and discuss it, we understand it in new ways."
"Human beings are social creatures. We are social not just in the trivial sense that we like company, and not just in the obvious sense that we each depend on others. We are social in a more elemental way: simply to exist as a normal human being requires interaction with other people."
"placethings is a mobile media platform and iPhone application that allows you to create and interact with place based media from your mobile device.
placethings lets you create, place, and view photos, audio and text right where you are. There are loads of possibilities: reviews, messages, directions, games, location information, advertising & coupons, histories, memories, "secret" messages.
Each message becomes a hub for further place based conversation. You can respond to an image with another image, a voice recording, or with text. Any combination is possible.
Where other similar applications are focused on disposable, temporary messaging, placethings emphasizes creating a persistent layer of media accessible via your iPhone."
"Subdivided is a documentary film about life in contemporary suburbia: a personal study of isolation and the struggle to find and maintain community in an era of careless development, the uninspired design of the modern subdivision, urban sprawl, and the invasion of the McMansion.
American life is more divisive than ever, and poorly designed neighborhoods further encourage isolation and separation. With no sense of place or belonging, is this the new American Dream?"
"The written probe here is evidence of a conscious attempt to create motion-glyphs out of seemingly mundane and unrelated forms, signs and symbols of two continental systems. In essence a primer for a new form of visual cognition, The Shining eschews all formal genre conditions of horror crafting a vastly unseeable new genre, one that has yet to be fully integrated into our culture as re-cognition. Your memory is consistently being tested as well as your powers of observation, not unlike a test we would administer to an ape to see relevance and awareness. Our consciousness as thinkers that utilize the visual cortex to connect motor and sense areas requires that we evolve beyond our liminal trappings. The Shining, though primitive, represents a revolution awaiting the brain, dormant in many ways but suprisingly it remains and even grows more attractive as it grows older. Its greatest tools and tests remain hidden from a vast majority of viewers and await discovery."
"An emblem book is a collection of images with adjoining text. In an emblem there is a dialog or tension between image and word. Emblems are frequently allegorical in theme.
Emblem books are a form of text not altogether familiar to us today. An emblem book represents a particular kind of reading. Unlike today, the eye is not intended to move rapidly from page to page. The emblem is meant to arrest the sense, to lead into the text, to the richness of its associations. An emblem is something like a riddle, a "hieroglyph" in the Renaissance vocabulary — what many readers considered to be a form of natural language."
"Many of you may know of the Internet phenomenon that is LOLCats. Slightly less of you may know how crazy/awesome early modern woodcut illustrations and frontispieces can be. But what joins these two disparate worlds? Well, it may surprise you to know how popular LOL-ing was in the Renaissance."
"Derringer is the neo-classical interpretation of a 1920's era board track racing motorcycle, but that's not all.
This revolutionary moto-hybrid was conceived as an exciting new option in highly-efficient transportation. Derringers can be pedaled as a traditional bicycle, propelled via engine power, or pedaled with the assistance of engine power."
"Most experts now blame a lack of regulation and oversight for this madness. Or they point to misguided incentive programs associated with the push for shareholder value that tied executive rewards to a firm's share price. These factors are surely important, but they ignore the terrifying human breakdown at the heart of this crisis."
"We're fools, protagonists in a kind of gruesome comedy about the marriage of greed and stupidity. And the worst part about it is that we're still in denial — we still think this is some kind of unfortunate accident, not something that was created by the group of psychopaths on Wall Street whom we allowed to gang-rape the American Dream."
"Chicago became the “Hobo Capital of America” during the late nineteenth century, as migratory workers hopped freight trains headed to and from the nation's busiest railroad hub. By the 1910s, authorities estimated that 300,000–500,000 transients passed through the city annually, with 30,000–70,000 of them present on any particular day.
Comprising primarily native-born single white men, this mobile community established a “hobohemian” district in Chicago."
