slag_mag: Wow, some scientist discovered a caffeine free coffee plant in Africa. WHAT A HORRIFYING FUCKING DISCOVERY.

aedison: Ask not what your country can do for you. Because it’s a landmass.

Twitter is like friend ESP, a portable zeitgeist. [.,.] Because Twitter is so short, so quick, so instant, [...] it’s the closest thing we have to direct brain monitoring.

Gods dammit @seldo, I don’t have room for another internet-mediated nerd crush in my life right now. *sigh*

This kind of sociopathic behavior—treating people like things—is one of the most horrifying aspects of online interactions, and something that its very nature promotes.

I’ve read this 4 times now, and still I don’t agree with a single word of it. Is it not simpler to assume that the people acting like sociopaths are sociopaths? Anonymous environments allow people to be judged via their contributions to a community and nothing else, and this aspect of net culture has always been one of its most vital attributes. In 1997, I would not have written any of the things online that I did, were it not anonymous. Had I not been able to share them with other people—because I certainly never would have been able to share them with people I knew AFK—well, I don’t care to speculate what would have happened, but the fact is that I did find a supportive community online that was a great help to me. Anonymity is not the problem, the problem (Ms Fake and other entrepreneurs have) is that human social groups do not scale to the thousands of individuals required to make a community profitable instead of, merely, a community.

via http://www.flickr.com/photos/blackbeltjones/3365682994/sizes/o/

This post on Iowa’s recent marriage equality ruling from Nate Silver, the guy who called the 2008 election with eerie accuracy, seems to be good news on its face. “While you might not know it from Proposition 8’s victory last year, voter initiatives to ban gay marriage are becoming harder and harder to pass every year.” The bad news is that, according to his projections, I’ll be somewhere north of 40 before I’ll be able to marry without picking up my entire life and moving hundreds of miles from everyone and everything I know. And that’s really just fucking unacceptable. This is the sound of me slowly becoming radicalized.

I want to render something metabolically challenged. The situation is this—and bear with me, because it sounds ridiculous: every time it rains for more than two hours, I have to manually reset my router every 10-20 minutes to keep my internet working. And yes, this makes absolutely no sense, there is no reason this should ever happen, much less why it should be tied to precipitation. I have looked everywhere, read incredibly boring and esoteric technical literature, and come to the conclusion that this is not possible; categorically, it just cannot be. And yet it’s been happening for the entire three years we’ve lived in this building. All possible permutations of two different modems and three different routers have displayed this behavior.

And now, well. Frankly, something must die. BRB.

“Snyder hasn’t so much made a film of Watchmen as he’s performed taxidermy on it.”

“When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. […] They are demanding to be lied to.

There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.”

The baselines do not deal well with change.[via balk]

The boredom of existence explains our going astray in nine cases out of 10, whether we fall into bad personal habits, keep unsuitable company, wield knives, shoot guns, or join a terrorist organisation that enables us to do all these things simultaneously.

“Journalism is something that someone somewhere doesn’t want published. Everything else is advertising.” ― Lord Northcliffe

I’m convinced the LDS made up Scientology, just so they’d no longer be the craziest motherfuckers on the planet.

It is sickeningly gorgeous outside. My plans include not getting out of this deck chair until the sun goes down, and then, possibly, a nap.

I can’t remember the last time somebody under the age of 30 said something that didn’t make me want to slap them. This means I’m old, yes?

Judging by the weather, somewhere a dame with great pins is stumbling into the office of a down & out private dick, bawling her eyes out.