fling93 loves fishies

My Balloon Fish Hat

Well, I doubt any of my readers were there, but if you saw Astral Projection (or rather, @$tr@L pR0j3cTi0n — a kick-ass psytrance group by any other name) at 550 Barneveld in San Francisco last night and noticed a silly guy with a balloon hat with a cute orange balloon fishy on top (thanks to the lovely Missy!), well, that was me.

Yeah, I seemed to think the hat had special powers.

I might post some more details later (if they aren’t too incriminating), but for now, Cormac has a bit of a rundown (and you might be able to pry some more embarrassingly humorous tidbits from Sylvia).

Update 11/17/04

Don’t know why I didn’t mention this before (I suppose I was saving it for a future post that I never got around to writing). But reading about how Buzz noticed iTunes being used at a Vegas nightclub reminded me that the DJs at this thing were using visualizations up on big screens (trippy visual effects for tripped out dancers, go figure), and I recognized some screens using no other than Andy O’Meara’s G-Force, and as my blog post on such continues to be one of my highest-trafficked posts (after the Bush one), and as my… um… mixed poisons gave me a heightened sense of self-importance, I assumed they found out about it from my blog. Wackiness ensued.

And yes, this was part of how I came to the conclusion that I was Neo, sent here to lead everybody to write in Tyler Cowen for President in the last election. Well, by now you know how that worked out.

Testing Meme Propagation In Blogspace: Add Your Blog!

Update 8/27/04: This experiment is now finished. I didn’t add my own explanation to the original post because I didn’t know you could add intro text without distorting the experiment. So this whole post was pretty much copied from Nova Spivack’s original meme post. Apologies if that confused anybody. If you’re interested in seeing the results of the meme experiment, check out here and here. Also, I now have a more interesting meme involving a free signed comic book.

This posting is a community experiment that tests how a meme, represented by this blog posting, spreads across blogspace, physical space and time. It will help to show how ideas travel across blogs in space and time and how blogs are connected. It may also help to show which blogs are most influential in the propagation of memes. The dataset from this experiment will be public, and can be located via Google (or Technorati) by doing a search for the GUID for this meme (below).

The original posting for this experiment is located at: Minding the Planet — results and commentary will appear there in the future.

Please join the test by adding your blog (see instructions, below) and inviting your friends to participate — the more the better. The data from this test will be public and open; others may use it to visualize and study the connectedness of blogspace and the propagation of memes across blogs.

Blogging vs. Journalism

With bloggers (that are not me) invited to the Democratic Convention and Technorati working with CNN to cover political blogs, the field of journalism seems to be getting awful nervous about the whole blogging revolution (and they have been for some time). Not surprisingly, when traditional print media has covered blogging, they’ve been rather dismissive.

Do You Want to Feel My Pain (such as it is)?

I originally started this blog to share my thoughts with the world, partially in the hopes of influencing it, but mostly because I figured my thoughts were interesting enough to be worth sharing. Over time, I realized it was also a handy way to organize my thoughts and ideas. And since I have a tendency to try and research things before I post them (so that I don’t ever embarrass myself), it’s also served as a useful tool to help remind me to not jump to conclusions.

I’d decided to refrain from posting too many personal snippets of my life (indeed, as I look back, it seems this blog has been getting less personal over time) because I figured the main reason some people hate blogs is because a lot of them are little more than self-indulgent personal diaries (and yes, many done by teenage girls), which opens the medium up to the derision and dismissal from mainstream traditional media, as I previously discussed. And I also figured most of my readers probably couldn’t care less what goes on in my life, since (as you might have noticed from my blogroll) I really don’t read any personal blogs myself except from people I’ve personally met. And I figured my life is currently a picture of domestic tranquility most of the time, which’d bore most of you to death.

However, I’m beginning to reconsider this decision after reading an absolutely heart wrenching post by getupgrrl at Chez Miscarriage (just go read the whole thing), and Allison Kaplan’s reaction to it:

This Land Was Made for You to Sue

Well, you have to be living in a cave if you haven’t seen this yet, and if you’re living in a cave, you’re probably not going to be reading this site. Nevertheless, just in case you’re the last souls in the country to miss this, you definitely have to check out JibJab’s absolutely hilarious parody of Dubya and Kerry to the tune of the late Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land.” If you haven’t seen it, check it out. You’ll enjoy it no matter which side of the aisle you’re on.

Of course, this being America, the copyright owner of “This Land Is Your Land” (The Richmond Organization) is suing JibJab, and according to Eugene Volokh, they have a strong case.

You Should Vote for...

Update 10/21/04: Okay, I’m seeing a lot of Google hits from people searching on “you should vote for.” If you want a serious answer, I have a much more substantive post here. This post itself is somewhat of a joke. For those of you looking for an answer of why you should vote, maybe I’ll write up something later (I figured the answer is obvious, but I guess not), but a short snarky answer is so that you can then have the right to complain about whomever wins. And complaining about politics is fun.

Well, not to disclose too much, but at this particular event, I did… um… mix my poisons, which led my mind on some rather strange paths (when I wasn’t busy dancing to the cool music and tripping out to all the visuals). One of the unexpected effects was that my sense of self-importance was greatly inflated (especially when I got my cute fishy balloon hat).

I think I’ll save the details for later (or maybe just for myself), but for one, I thought everyone there would see the hat and then go find my blog the next morning, because I was Neo, the chosen one. And thus I’d have the power to influence everybody to vote for the candidate of my choosing in November (somehow ignoring the tiny little detail that I’m in California, which is not exactly a swing state).

And furthermore, due to my blogging about the flaws of e-voting and the need for a voter-verifiable paper trail, I could now pick anybody I wanted as a write-in candidate — because you can write on paper (somehow ignoring, among many other things, the fact that H.R.2239 and S.1980 have not yet passed). So all I had to do was choose the right person for the job…

Suburban Nation

It was actually sometime last year that I read Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck. I was just browsing through City Lights, and it caught my eye, so I leafed through it. I don’t really know why (aside from the fact that it was prominently displayed). Sprawl has never really been an issue I cared about, since I had always assumed it was an issue for extreme environmentalists who want us all to live in sustainable communes, or rabid liberals who hate Wal-Mart and Starbucks.

But this book, which I very highly recommend, was very non-political and pragmatic in explaining why suburbia is simply not laid out in a way that’s very convenient or healthy for people. And it depicted sprawl, not as an issue of fighting growth (which is inevitable), or moving everybody back into the cities (which is unrealistic — people fled them for a reason), but more of a problem of how to design neighborhoods (in both urban and suburban settings) in an efficient and scaleable manner.

Show Me the Money!

This morning, I was listening to Forum with Michael Krasny on KQED discussing the issue of campaign finance reform. This was brought up by the controversy surrounding Secretary of State Kevin Shelley, which I’m not too familiar with (although I was glad to see him endorse a voter-verifiable paper trail). But as you might have guessed, campaign finance reform is one of my biggest issues.

Unfortunately, I don’t have time to cover the entire issue in my usual level of detail right now, so this is not as well-researched as many of my other posts, and I’m not going to be able to address some of the key points, like the free speech implications and the blind trust idea. But I wanted to cover some of the bases and announce a couple of events this week that you can attend if you’re in California, so bear with me.

Lobbying hinders libertarianism

Campaign finance is a pet issue of mine partly because of obvious results of lobbying that have resulted in outcomes that were not in the best interests of the American people, like sprawl, copyright law, tariffs, tax deductions, and subsidies. But more importantly, I see it as one of the two main obstacles to libertarianism (the other one being the plurality electoral system which discourages and marginalizes third parties). Yet most libertarians dismiss attempts at campaign finance reform. A common sound-byte I hear is that, “you can’t take money out of politics, so take politics out of money instead,” implying that people and corporations wouldn’t bother lobbying the government if it didn’t intervene so much in the economy.

Busy Week

Update 8/24/04: Whoops, I’d left out a bunch of stuff on Sunday I meant to mention. Added that, plus a few other odds and ends.

Well, apologies for yet another slow blogging week, but this time I had an excuse, since it’s been a fast and furious week out in meatspace (uh, that’s the “real world”, for you people not addicted to blogging). Let me recap it.

Philosophy of the Sims

Okay, last week was a slow blogging week cuz I was unusually busy. What explains all of June and July? Well, it was partly due to blogging burnout, but a big reason was because I’ve been playing “The Sims.” And it’s not just a mindless game, but quite a thought-provoking experience, actually.

It all started when I was reading some Slashdot thread several months ago about videogames taking too much time away from significant others (sorry, I don’t remember the link). Many people responded indignantly that they play videogames with their significant others, and “The Sims” was often mentioned as an example.

Meming for a Free Signed Comic Book!

Yes, this is a meme, but wait! You can get a free comic book and raise your Google PageRank, all without leaving the comfort of your own home! So read on to find out more!

I generally don’t like posting memes because they feel like a cheat. You don’t really write much of anything, but just pass on something that you found on someone else’s blog. Yet a couple of memes have gotten me a surprising amount of traffic. The first one was Rain Songs, where I just listed my favorite songs about rain. That silly post has persistently been one of my most visited posts in the past several months. I have no idea why, but I’m grateful to David for starting it.

The other one was the meme propagation experiment by Nova Spivack. Indeed, I didn’t write anything in that post, merely reproducing the original meme content. That kinda bothered me, but from the instructions it sounded like he want the original text untouched (although I later found out that it was okay to add intro text). I normally wouldn’t have bothered participating, but it sounded like an interesting experiment (plus Spivack was the one who wrote the excellent piece on the blogosphere becoming a global brain, that I linked to earlier). And despite not including any original content, the meme post got a lot of hits.