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because coffee that's why
Apr. 19th, 2012 03:29 pmAAAHYAAAAHYAAAAHYAAAH!! I AM SPOCKHOLIO! I NEED PON FARR FOR MY BUNGHOLE! ARE YOU THREATENING ME? YOU DO NOT WANT TO FACE THE WRATH OF MY VULCAN NECK PINCH! GIVE ME ALL YOUR EARTH WOMEN!
it's not the crime, it's the coverage
Apr. 9th, 2012 04:41 pmSo Om Malik wrote this thing about what impelled Facebook to buy Instagram. First off, i can't get past Malik's assertion of "Facebook's achilles heel"[sic] being "mobile photo sharing". Seriously? Mobile photo sharing is a hard-driving revenue stream for anyone in this world? Is there any evidence that this was considered a weakness by anyone at Facebook? I can lean on my experience and tell you that sharing photos from my Android phone is stone easy to Facebook, because my phone came with the Facebook app installed. I couldn't've done it on Instagram at all until very recently. Facebook was worried about Instagram's mobile photo sharing mojo? I call bullshit.
And calling Instagram "a platform built on emotion"... what the hell is that about? I wonder if he's an advance Facebook stock share owner, because it sure as hell sounds like he's trying to talk himself into the deal, which is no less than ludicrous. Who drops $1B, even if most of it is fake money, on an emotion-based platform? Emotion fades.
Some are comparing it to Google buying YouTube, but others are comparing it to eBay buying Skype. I think that it's far more likely to be closer to the latter, except worse. Bottom line: even if, somehow, this turns out to be a good deal for Facebook, it won't be because of them addressing their supposed "Achilles heel", or because of the strength of Instagram's "emotion".
Bonus cluebie: some "business leader" thinks that Twitter "F$($#@ UP in somehow letting Instagram ended up inside of Facebook"[sic], because nothing says "mobile business advisor" than someone playing with ginned-up valuation numbers.
We don't have a quote-unquote dominant team...JESUS CHRIST ON A VT100. It's bad enough when people actually say "quote-unquote" (as opposed to saying "quote, this is a quote, unquote", or in this case, the more correct "so-called" or the pretentious but accurate "soi-disant"), but when someone writes it instead of using, you know, quote marks, it's just another paving brick on the road to hell.
If you've set theory problems, i feel bad for you, son
I got ℵ0 problems but ∞ ain't one
who knew fry knew how to speak swedish?
Mar. 25th, 2012 09:31 am
Google Translate tells me that "bajsnödig" in Swedish means "poop NECESSARY". Yes, with the capitals. Swedish must be a more expressive language than i thought. Can any Swedes in the audience confirm this? Especially the ALL-CAPS part.
life after soccer
Mar. 23rd, 2012 01:45 pmI played my last organized soccer game yesterday (assuming i don't pull a Favre in six months). Many have asked why i'm retiring. There are a few reasons:
- About six or seven months ago, i landed hard on my right knee and that turned out to be what was likely a meniscus tear. Given that this only bothered me when i kneeled, i only skipped a couple of games before getting back to it; playing was occasionally quite painful but not the "shit, i should stop right now" sort of pain. The structural pain subsided eventually but the surrounding muscles are still a mess, stressing the joint in sporadically unexpected ways. My right shoulder has also been giving me shit, with some rotator cuff issues that limit my range of motion.
- I had also started playing outdoor soccer in November and in our second or third game, the other team started a fight and their "fans" came onto the field, looking for trouble. That one really sucked the joy out of the game for me.
- I've been paying the team fees for nearly five years and having people just walk away from the team without letting me know, requiring finding a replacement (or just absorbing the expense), was getting old (as well as dunning my teammates).
the joy formidable @ the independent
Mar. 19th, 2012 05:46 pmAlthough this is the first gig review since the failed Battles concert, i have actually attended one other gig since then: Soundgarden at the Bill Graham Civic Center. Opening band: the Mars Volta, who were far better and tighter than i expected, and played stuff from an upcoming release (it's probably out by now, i should look for it...). Soundgarden sounded like they'd barely missed a step; it was fantastic to hear Kim Thayil shredding again (even though, for some goddamn reason, the sound guy screwed us all by mixing Kim in at a very low volume). Chris Cornell couldn't quite belt it out as before, but it wasn't much of a loss. Matt Cameron was the usual pro's pro behind the kit, and Ben Shepherd was flat-out nuts, torturing amazing sounds out of his bass. Short summary: fucking awesome.
Back to TJF: i hadn't secured a ticket for last week's show, which later sold out; luckily, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
lammah had bought tickets for both Monday and Tuesday, but then decided he didn't want to go to both shows, so i got to pick up the slack. I ate at Tsunami (good but overpriced, except for a fantastic cocktail called The Cloister, of which i had two) with one of Sam's friends and his cousin, then walked two blocks to the Independent. The two opening bands were Big Black Delta, who had some songs with potential, and a good drummer with style, but an annoying frontman; and A Place to Bury Strangers, who were technically adept but whose songs were dull, and the guitarist (who looked like Nicolas Cage in "Raising Arizona") and drummer looked like they hadn't showered all year.
The Joy Formidable was everything i'd hoped they'd be, with two tiny and one small complaints: the setlist shows that they neglected to play "Chapter 2", and also that they fake-ended their set after a mere 9 tracks, which is pretty damn horseshit in my book for the main attraction. But they know they can get away with it because the music's so good, they have so much damn fun on the stage, and look genuinely happy to be playing in front of the crowd and with each other (and unlike APtBS, are all so handsome and well-dressed). They were augmented by a harpist named Stephanie on "Llaw = Wall" and "Whirring", and that worked out pretty damn well. I look forward to a subsequent tour after they have another album under their belt, so the set isn't so short.
maybe i need to slow down on the sugar
Mar. 7th, 2012 11:29 am"Beginnings are important. Our births are the starting point for our lives, and so will this birth. That's why tonight we will begin to take over the birthing ground for our new nation."
The crowd cheered.
"You know what i was told? I was told that that you can't be born or raised in a place that doesn't exist. But true inspiration is not constrained by the artificiality of borders imposed by men of narrow vision. We must never stop believing in a better world, a world promised to us in our national anthem, a song handed down across the generations, waiting for the chosen sons and daughters to embrace its message. You rode into this train depot, and at midnight, we will walk into the promised land, and the streetlights will be our witness!"
The cheers exploded. The clock struck twelve. The invasion of Windsor had begun.
[ronebofh, 2wanda, and elmuchacho are cleaning out the garage at their old house in order to hand over a clean garage with the rest of the clean house to the new tenants. WAYNE, a douchebag neighbor who looks like Wilford Brimley with a shit-eating grin, walks across the street.]
WAYNE: Hey! How's it going?
RONE: Going all right. We got tenants for the house, so we have to finish cleaning up the garage before they move in.
WAYNE: Tenants, huh? Good! Is it a white man?
RONE: What's that?
WAYNE: White man?
RONE: [pauses, somewhat incredulous, then smiles] No.
[WAYNE laughs and walks away. Suddenly, his head explodes, Scanners-style. RONE rubs his forehead.]
RONE: [sotto voce, to himself] Shoulda done that years ago.
this is all g.r.r.m.'s fault, anyway
Feb. 20th, 2012 10:22 pmLet's be clear: i don't like The Oatmeal. I found Matthew Inman's humor juvenile but inoffensive at first; even in the cartoons that had material that i liked, his delivery seemed off in the way that the dorkiest of nerds have when they overtell or overexplain a joke. He finally lost me with his issues-revealing Utilikilts cartoon, and that's colored everything else that i've had the misfortune to witness (and you'd call me an idiot for continuing to follow links there, and you'd be right). His approach to things in his life is relentlessly adolescent, and his current comic about how HBO has forced him to torrent the "Game of Thrones" series, which has been pounded across my social network with much delight by my so-called friends, is a prime example of this: entitlement and rationalization in the face of unenlightened self-harm (and, yes, the fact that it's about the much overrated "Game of Thrones", which book many of my friends inexplicably love and consequently turned them into morbidly obsessed fans of the HBO series, doesn't help).
Here's the thing: HBO doesn't owe anyone the "Game of Thrones" series outside of the terms in which they make it available (i.e., pay a shitload of money a month to the local cable monopoly and be glad that they deign to convey their munificence to your hovel). Is Inman truly advocating that we should we bend or break the rules every time an incompetent business doesn't offer us their product in a timely fashion after we've declined to adhere to their idiotic terms and conditions, simply because we really, really want it?
If you're going to torrent it, torrent it, but don't waste time rationalizing it. Just because the MPAA is acting like Javert doesn't mean that you're Valjean, and "Game of Thrones" isn't a piece of bread.
I admit that the idea of buying black water intrigued me sufficiently to incur an expense, despite outrageous claims that i knew would probably be debunked somewhere on the Web (not that i need research to tell me that "a high pH of 9.0+ helps to balance the human body's pH levels" smells like bullshit a mile away). But what does it taste like?
2wanda: "Weird! It tastes just like water. But weird." I think it tastes like vaguely musty dirty water, or perhaps mushroom tea. The bottle says "INGREDIENTS MAY SEPARATE WHEN FROZEN" so i think i'll throw it in the freezer to see what happens.
UPDATE: there's a burning sensation in my stomach and my lips are tingling. Kim says her mouth feels numb. I hope our kids will sue blk. if we die.
It's difficult to convincingly convey the excitement of soccer to doubters when even a die-hard fan says that it's boring. The beauty of soccer is in the Brownian motion of the player-particles using their fundamental forces to try to squeeze a stray quantum from their environment in the right direction; the game is all velocity and zero certainty until that miraculous moment when a goal is scored, a wave function collapse where the path that the ball describes as it crosses the goal line is like the trail left behind by ions in a cloud chamber. The schemes drawn up by the coaches are like Feynman diagrams that describe perfectly the mathematics involved in the behavior of the player-particles, and utterly fail to describe what happens when those player-particles meet a competing set of laws of physics. This is not boring. Yes, goals are rare, but the fact that a goal has not been scored is not proof that nothing is happening. Many seem to like saying that matter is mostly empty space given the huge distance between nucleus and electron cloud, but matter cannot exist without that space; the space is part of the matter. The lulls are part of the game. Soccer is a goat rodeo, a complex system of strange attractors where observing the paths described is as exciting as witnessing their destination.
Select an editor. To change later, run 'select-editor'. 1. /bin/ed 2. /bin/nano <---- easiest 3. /usr/bin/vim.basic 4. /usr/bin/vim.tiny
love can be found in the strangest places
Jan. 15th, 2012 08:06 pmA new reality TV show from TLC, bringing together twenty-something male fans of My Little Pony and pro wrestling: "Bronies & Jabronis"
shaking hands with the man
Jan. 13th, 2012 11:45 am<palecur> some journals you wonder if maybe they think 'peer review' means 'we asked the Duchess of York if it was cool'
<ronebofh> ha
<rone> either that or craning your neck to look at the dude in the next urinal
<palecur> nice
<rone> "excellent dick-holding form, nice steady stream, good stance"
<palecur> "bit of a splatter towards the end, that'll cost him from the Belarussian judge."
<rone> "fingers slipped on the zip-up... hurried it."
<nutrino> too many shakes
open letter to the new york times
Jan. 12th, 2012 01:19 pmIn respose to the latest entry in the Public Editor's Journal: Correcting any falsehood uttered by any public official is a small justice that must be done by any responsible journalist. You ask, "How can the Times do this in a way that is objective and fair?" My answer is: don't sweat it. Any reasonable person who cares about objectivity and fairness will be in the ballpark. If you don't get it right, readers will let you know, and you'll work to improve it. Just start doing it now, because this can't wait any longer.
I am forced to add that i do not care for the phrase "truth vigilante"; it implies that there is an official authority for the truth. There is none. We must all be vigilant of the truth, but whenever a newspaper reports a falsehood, it is failing at its job, which is to inform and not to misinform.
