Archive for 2010
« Older Entries | Newer Entries »Sick & Tired Of The Government? Become One Yourself!
[ Comments Off ]Posted on May 14, 2010 by admin in Politics
Friday, May 14th, 2010But you’ll still get arrested by the one you’re rejecting when you present the passport you printed on the crappy inkjet printer in your “embassy” office.
 This seal accompanies the bizarre terms of use mentioned in the article. |
Remember when you were in grade school and you would insult somebody, and say “no takebacks“, and they’d say “I’m in a no ‘no takebacks’ zone, so your ‘no takeback’ doesn’t count!” and it would perpetually escalate into an absurdly recursive game of making a rule about a rule that didn’t exist? Well, apparently some people have trouble outgrowing this behaviour. Back in March I saw this piece about a flurry of arrests in Indiana involving Sovereign Citizens, who – among other things – claimed they weren’t US citizens, but rather diplomats living in embassies, and would produce documents they’d made themselves to back it all up. I kind of wrote them off as typical rural Midwestern loonies; there are areas in just about every one of the United States where you might wanna turn down the Cat Stevens as you drive through if you don’t wanna get shot. But it turns out these people are for real, and as ginormously high-larious as their proclamations are, their deranged and misinformed logic has already caused one of the greatest tragedies on American soil, the Oklahoma City bombing. Yes, Terry Nichols, friend and accomplice of Oklahoma City Federal Building bomber Timothy McVeigh was one of them. More recently, you may have read about how the group Guardians of the Free Republics sent letters to 30 state governors demanding their resignations. Well, as my grandpa would say, “their elevators don’t seem to go to the top floor” either. Their site has a deadline of March 31 of this year for the bizarre actions they ramble about on this page. And all the pages of the site have a weird seal at the bottom that says “Private web site under non-corporate venue. This seal conveys immunity from public scrutiny, discretion, regulation or trespass. Trespassers beware. Co-claimant fee applies to impairment.” I’m sure if you stop by their embassy they’ll be glad to explain what that means. If you can find the bomb shelter it’s located in.
Life After Facebook – The Open Source Project “Diaspora”?
[ Comments Off ]Posted on May 13, 2010 by admin in Technology
Thursday, May 13th, 2010Yes, Facebook is beginning to show the signs of a dying culture. But does a brand that evokes images of translocated, beleaguered refugees stand a chance as a replacement?
If you’re at all in touch with the evolution of web trends, you can probably sense change in the air. One of the really great things about the web is that when something is really cool, people gravitate to it, and when it develops a high “suck quotient”, people just walk away and find the next cool thing. Google, for instance, has repeatedly done a masterful job of keeping the cool quotient just slightly ahead of the suck curve. Facebook? Not so much. The “information highway” is strewn with the debris of discarded innovation. Like the term “information highway”, for instance. And I’m confident that Facebook will soon be joining MySpace and Napster and IM and mp3.com and e-cards and a million other once-popular web doodads in that great wasteland on the web. So what’s next? Personally, I think it will still be a form of networked sharing, but someone’s going to figure out a way to make it work without constantly tinkering with it to try to monetize every user interaction. The browser you’re using to read this was free. Wikipedia is free. Your email program is probably free. So why not social networking? And by “free” I mean free of advertising. Or fees. Or freakish privacy issues. A project that’s generated considerable buzz in the tech press the last few weeks is Diaspora, an “open source Facebook”. These young developers are definitely on to something, but in spite of exposure that has reached even the New York Times and raising over 120 grand (and growing) in startup capital in just a couple of weeks, they may be missing it on a few beats. First of all, their idea requires the user to download software to connect. Maybe they can sell the idea that being a “seed” is somehow desirable, but this is the kind of territory that’s usually only broached by fairly tech-savvy users. Another biggy is the name. Do you really want a brand that references a permanently displaced and relocated collective? Who knows. Maybe it could work. One more significant hurdle is actually operating within the terms of use of all the sites (Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) that they plan to integrate into their idea. Whether this particular bunch of youngsters pulls it off or not, I wish them well, because they’re at least tapping us all on the shoulder and reminding us that there were fun times before Facebook, and there will be fun times after as well. Read the rest of this entry »
Upset About The Gulf Spill? Maybe You Should Kick Your Oil Habit
[ Comments Off ]Posted on May 12, 2010 by admin in Clean & Green
Wednesday, May 12th, 2010Blaming BP for the oil spill is like a Detroit crackhead blaming the Peruvian coca farmer for his financial problems.
 BP will get all the mud slung their way, but what about YOUR part in all this? |
When I see the devastation being caused by the recent gulf oil spill, I can’t help thinking about all the people driving around in their Volvos listening to NPR and shaking their fists in anger at British Petroleum. Which to me is a lot like the Hollywood celebrity strung out on cocaine blaming the Latin American coca farmer for all his problems. I’m certainly no corporate apologist, but when there are an estimated 210,000 gallons of oil being dumped into the ocean every day, who’s really to blame? The oil company that had the accident? Or the oil addicts that demand the insane quantity of oil that is being sucked from the ground daily so that they can drive to the store for a gallon of milk whenever they feel like it? If you own a car or do any of a million things that demand this mind blowing supply of crude oil, you can hardly deny your complicity in the tragedy occurring off the Louisiana coast right now. Do you feel like you can even begin to visualize how much oil we consume in America? It’s around 378 million gallons daily. That means the daily amount flowing into the gulf is about 5% of how much we consumed that day. I can’t decide which is more apalling, the amount flowing into the ocean, or the amount flowing into our gas tanks. To make these numbers real for you, we’ve found a couple of interesting visuals. Google engineer Paul Rademacher has created an easy-to-use tool that superimposes the spill over any city you specify. See the map image below; I entered Ann Arbor, MI, but as you can see, the spill would easily engulf the entire city of Chicago. To get a picture of ongoing global consumption, there’s a handy waterfall analogy. This guy did the math, and figured out that Jog Falls in India (see clip below) flows at nearly the same rate. Just imaging black sludge instead of frothy water and you’ll get a good feel for things. And lastly, this PBS News Hour page has a “Gulf Leak Meter” that displays the spill on real time (also embedded below). Read the rest of this entry »
The Death Of Meta-Ironic Hipsterism. No Really, I Mean It.
[ 4 Comments ]Posted on May 11, 2010 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Tuesday, May 11th, 2010Do hipsters really even exist? If so, share your definition. We’re drowning in the recursive irony.
 This rather pervasive and uncredited graphic sums up my image of a hipster pretty well. |
Today I ran across one of my favorite pop culture phenomena, the “meta-hipster reference”. It all started with a Village Voice blog post called The Most Epic Hipster Break-Up Text Message, Ever: The Interview!, which, since I don’t live in Williamsburg or Portland or wherever hipsters live these days, I might have found incomprehensible, but instead just found kind of yawn-worthy. But then a friend asked what a hipster was, and I realized that although I had some media-driven sense of what I thought a hipster was, that in fact perhaps no such thing exists, except when some hipster blog entry denies it’s existence, thereby confirming it. So I of course turned to the most trusted source on the internet for this sort of information. No, not Wikipedia – although the entry there amusingly paraphrases this 2007 Time Out New York piece thusly: “hipsterism fetishizes the authentic elements of all of the fringe movements of the postwar era—beat, hippie, punk, even grunge, and draws on the cultural stores of every unmelted ethnicity and gay style, regurgitating it with a winking inauthenticity and a sense of irony“. Which – while a mildly amusing take on hipsters, hardly captures the spirit. I mean, it misses the whole “death of irony thing” caused by the recursive meta-irony of being intentionally ironic while actually just being an educated but utterly unoriginal millennial. No, for a more insightful look into what hipster really means, I turned to Urban Dictionary, which has over 170 entries, featuring such gems as “twenty-something stroketard whose style of clothing conflicts with their demeanor, thus resulting in a spicy pseudo-intellectual with more flavor-of-the-month conversations than a long island prostitute“. Many of the definitions could have only been written by a hipster. I mean, who else would know what a conversation with a Long Island prostitute is like? If you’re not sure if you’re a hipster or not, there is of course a quiz. And to skip the whole hipster phase and become a meta-hipster straight away, familiarize yourself with Look at this Fucking Hipster (often NSFW). And please, for the love of God, if you know what the hell a hipster really is, enlighten us with a comment.
Film Industry Is Only FCCing Itself With New Regulations
[ Comments Off ]Posted on May 10, 2010 by admin in Popular Media
Monday, May 10th, 2010How the film industry’s latest victory in its battle to control how you watch your movies may actually contribute to its demise.
It is with mixed feelings that I bid adieu to the MPAA and the major motion picture companies of America, because although some of the epic films that came out of….oh hell. Who am I kidding. I’m already planning a party. The desperate land grab for your hard-earned CD’s and song files that the RIAA and the established music industry attempted with the Digital Millenium Copyright Act and DRM has spawned one of the most creative decades in pop music, and put more money in more artists’ pockets than ever before. Although smart pop media influencers like Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing are in a tizzy about the admittedly insane new “Selectable Output Control” power that the FCC is handing the film industry, the development should come as no surprise; I can only guess that the reason Cory is so upset is that he must be a cable subscriber. As an avid film lover, this will have little impact for me personally. As just one of the more glaring examples of why this should come as no surprise, one of the people who more recently spun through DC’s revolving doors was Catherine Bohigian, chief of the office of Strategic Planning and Policy Analysis at the FCC, who left in 2008 to take a job with the cable giant Cablevision. To me the most shocking thing about this recent round of nuttiness being promulgated by the in-some-ways shadowy MPAA is that it’s taking so darn long for the movie industry to undermine itself the way the music industry did. It shouldn’t take too long though; although the studios haven’t been aggressively suing their customers on a regular basis like the record companies, they do have a pretty batshit-insane shopping list for how to protect their market. And after witnessing the indy music industry explosion of the last decade, I personally don’t see any reason why this couldn’t happen with film. The film industry is doing exactly the same thing the record companies did; they’re routinely annoying their best customers, and sticking it to a key distribution channel in their maniacal grab for control of intellectual property. The RIAA did it with radio, the MPAA is doing it to theaters. And they’re doing this at a time when professional-quality production and distibution tools are within the reach of just about anyone. In my opinion there would be nothing cooler than a massive movement comprised of small-house indy film venues showing nothing but indy film in intimate settings using HD technology. I say go ahead and FCC yourself, MPAA.