AH HA HA HA HA Awesome.
Category: Plugs
Perhaps inevitably, Sumana has already gone Hollywood on us.
Now it can be told: Sumana has a column! A real one, in physical newspapers and on the interweb! This makes me very happy for her. You can read her first one today!
“[M]eaningful self-expression is not just a tool for success in the academy and the professional world (though it is that, too), but an essential component of finding and living our call to be human.”
Beautifully written and perfectly described. Sean’s a better diarist than I, and he’s the teacher I’ll never be, but this excerpt from one of his letters says exactly what I try to say whenever I discover a new and interesting human: clear thought and writing are rare, and powerful, and of tremendous value in the world.
If I read your blog or friend your LJ, it’s because I am fascinated by your finding and living of the call to be human.
Embarrassment is anticipated
I finally did what I’ve been threatening to do for over two years: there is now a navigable archive of every single IdiotCam©. I did some horrible things to NewsBruiser’s theme system to make it an image gallery, but it works. You can view things by their post dates or their categories (including the entire Plastic Mullet Series), and you can search for the title text and some other keywords. There’s even an RSS feed, so I don’t have to worry that humans who only subscribe to this site are being deprived of me putting stuff in my nose!
Why GIRLS ARE PRETTY is great
“Last summer, Matt Hohlfienz punched you in the eye pulled down your swim trunks during a swimming lesson at the community Y. Everyone laughed. It’s time to make Matt Hohlfienz scream like a dying animal.”
Why Hitherby Dragons is great
“‘The targets for assassination are chosen by the wisdom of the crystal unicorns,’ Yasha says.”
So I lied. I still don’t trust that my funny-filter is better than yours, but I do think it’s better than Dog Bites Dog’s funny-filter (if not, alas, its funny-generator). It also occurred to me that a DBD weblog has a function other than filtering: I think it’s a good thing to archive and save the best bits for future humans, who won’t understand their context, because the links have rotted. But still.
Relatedly, like most postadolescent males, I have harbored in my gut the desire to start a satirical news publication. Since by far the best part of any such rag is the headlines, though, that’s all I ever bothered to produce. For the last few months, whenever I’ve felt particularly savage about something in popular culture, I’d come up with a headline and archive it. That wasn’t often enough to be a viable source of content on its own. Combined with somebody else’s generated headlines, though, it might be!
It is for these combined purposes that I’ve set up Dog Bites, a weblog in the vein of Spam As Folk Art. It should have new content every day or two, or more often if DBD is on a hot streak and I’m feeling hateful. I hope you like it! (And hey, my SAFA co-maintainers, let me know if you want in on some of this action.)
Ah, damn. Hitherby Dragons has 367 entries today–actually yesterday–which means it’s officially outstripped Anacrusis, with its mere 365. Anacrusis started first (July vs September 2003), but Hitherby posts on Saturdays, so that was guaranteed. By math.
What you have to understand is that Hitherby Dragons and Rebecca Borgstrom are superior to my writing and myself in every possible way. I live in Kentucky; Ms. Borgstrom lives in Seattle. I have nearly completed a Master’s degree in CS; Ms. Borgstrom has her doctorate. I took AP classes; she registered at UCLA when she was 12. I want to design games someday; she writes for White Wolf, and already wrote Nobilis, the greatest damn game I’ve ever read. Her daily fiction work is usually about ten times as long as mine, without feeling like it, and every one is invested with the kind of psychotic whimsy I’d love to capture once a month. Anacrusis has 40 subscribers to its LJ feed; Hitherby Dragons has 161. It was described as “a webcomic without words” before I even thought of Anacrusis that way.
So I nurse just this tiny little coal of envy in my heart for Ms. Borgstrom and her extraordinary stories. In case you can’t tell!
You should be reading Hitherby Dragons. I have run out of words trying to find superlatives for it. I will steal them instead, by quoting Penny Arcade’s Tycho (in reference to Checkerboard Nightmare): “It’s so good that it’s depressing for me to read it. I don’t really want to talk about it anymore. How am I supposed to stand out against that level of quality?”
Little epiphany
It occurs to me that I finally have a use for that old iMac on which I installed Yellow Dog Linux over a year ago: the Ultra Gleeper.
Also, check out this hilarious graph from Leonard’s official Gleeper paper, on methods of obtaining new links to recommend:
| Method | Link quality | Limitations |
|---|---|---|
| Stumbling upon incoming links while following outgoing
links |
Pretty good | Depends on serendipity |
| Google Web API (link: queries) | Not good: ordered by
PageRank instead of recentness |
1000 queries/user/day |
| Technorati web API (Cosmos query) | Excellent | 500 queries/user/day, frequently down |
| del.icio.us screen scraping | Excellent | I tried this and Joshua Schachter got mad at me |