You can either look at this as version six of the blog, or version seven of the whole site. Like it matters. :) Everything has been polished in some way. Feel free to poke and prod and break things, if you promise to tell me what.

And yeah, okay, maybe it will get kind of journally sometimes. We’ll figure it all out together.

I too am one of those possessed of the mania to leave the Earth at some point in my life. (There really should be a term for us. Probably a medical one.) But $20 million? Can’t we arrange a better deal than that? England gave out free tickets to Australia, a spot almost exactly on the opposite side of the globe at a time when such travel was extremely costly, for free. All you had to do was be a criminal. Why not translate the idea to the modern day? I mean, I’d gladly assemble a few domes on Mars, even without the incentive of getting out of a traffic ticket.

Pepsi debuted a new, more heavily caffinated Mountain Dew variant on May 1st. Do I lose geek points if I reveal that Mountain Dew makes me physically ill? Do I get any back by drinking, on average, two mugfuls (or 28 ounces, or approximately 3360mg of caffeine, or the equivalent of 61 cans of Mountain Dew) a day? Does conducting a study of my own caffeine intake then actually lead to a net gain in geek points? :)

Earlier tonight, I was in the middle of writing a piece about how I’ve sworn off community sites in general, and have instead found myself drawn more toward personal narratives above anything else since returning from my little web sabbatical. I was going to claim that people have to form their own communities out of overlapping one-to-one relationships, that conversations between more than two people had to eventually break down given the online medium.

A little history: starting with the discovery of Metafilter, all of the other sites I regularly visited which purported to be a community slowly fell out of my browsing patterns. Slashdot was the most notable casualty of this culling. Then, over the last few months, remembering how much time it actually takes to successfully follow Metafilter (insert meta-Metafilter joke here), and how less rewarding the effort was becoming with each day, I had stopped reading it entirely.

I was going through all of this in my head, trying to find some way of justifying my own belief in the death of online community when the claim had been made and disproven many times before. But in the middle off all this death-knell-sounding, I decided to pop in on Metafilter and give the whole thing one more go. And, naturally, I got sucked in for four hours and changed my mind completely.

The moral of the story: the next time someone declares something dead, check for their coroner’s license first, and then be gentle when you don’t find one. They may just be confused.

Tangentially related fact: I first discovered Metafilter almost a year ago. (Wow.)

Well, so much for the spectre of a WGA strike. Those hoping for a television landscape composed entirely of Survivor clones have June 30th, the date that SAG’s contract expires, to look forward to.

Scottish scientists create molecular-scale tractor beam. This one development puts us that much closer to working nanotech, and has implications on space travel once the technology is refined. Yummy. As an aside, considering all the shit that has come out of Scotland in recent years (starting with Dolly the sheep), how long do you think until we’re all wearing kilts? (via MeFi)

Bellsouth raises DSL rates. Oh, yay. Considering that my only other option as far as broadband is concerned would be @Home—the licensed, bonded, and certified spawn of Satan—this leaves me, to use the technical term, screwed. (via MeFi)