Category: Found

So much misery, so much fun

This has been around on the interwubs quite a lot: America Online managed to spill three months worth of search logs from aol.com, and people were quite quick to parse the search strings for everyone’s amusement.

The fun part is that all searches are related to individual users – you can’t really tell who’s who (unless of course they use that as a search string), but individuals are linked to a user number.

There are a couple of searchable thingies that have sprung up around the aol-fappa, but by far the best one I’ve seen is this one: http://czern.homeip.net/aolsearch/.

Something Awful made quite a scary summery of some of the searches.

People often call me a sick and perverted bastard odd, cause I keep telling them about strange things I find online. Thing is, most of my friends don’t spend as much time online as I do, nor do they follow strange links to dark and murky corners of the internets. I don’t fear to plod along those paths, and I see it as a public service when I inform my friends about the things that I find there; if that happens to be dog-on-cat interracial bondage, can I really be blamed for it? I say not, and if you follow the link to Something Awful, you’ll be convinced that whatever I might dreg up, I’m not in the same league as some of these puppies..

Ad lib 101

Found this on boingboing.net this morning, and it’s making it’s rounds on the Internets. An unknown cab driver was mistaken for the guy he was driving and was interviewed live on BBC in regards to the lawsuit Apple (the old Beatles record company) had brough against Apple (the computer company). The video isn’t fun unless you know this, and now you know this.

inspired by this, i used up all of five minutes of my employers time to do this:

*Update*

Ok ok, so the guy turned out not to be a cab driver but a guy looking for work at the BBC. Still a case of mistaken identity though, and his initial reaction is golden. Doesn’t matter really, he’ll be “that BBC cab driver guy” and people will argue in bars going “nuh-uh, he wasn’t a cabdriver” “was to”, etc.

More info here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/4774429.stm.

Bruce Springsteen and I; An unaknowledged love affair

I haven’t been listening to new music lately. Apart from browsing the rather slim IDM vaults of 15megsoffame.com, I’ve been dedicating myself to Terry Pratchett most of the time. That, or recorded lectures (the teaching company is a favourite) on topics I can’t even recall at the moment, although I’m sure I’ve become a better and more confused person as a result.

As it turns out, my hampstering has lead me to have more music on my computer & iPod than I’ve had time to listen to, cause I found thunder road by Tortoise, sung by Will Oldham (aka bonnie ‘prince’ billy), and I really liked it. like, I am almost certain that there was a hint of a tear poking it’s head out of one of my eyes at some point. And that’s quite a lot.

Today I looked for the lyrics to the song, and was only slightly pertubed when it turns out that the song was originally written by Bruce Springsteen of all people. (Wikipedia article on the song here, and the lyrics to it are on this here fan-page.) I’ve always branded myself as someone who doesn’t like Bruce Springsteen, but this sounds false when compared to another statement I tend to do, which is that it’s content, not form that’s important. Since the song was written thirty years ago, I must’ve heard it somewhere before. The only reason I don’t recall it must be cause it sucked.

Then will oldham sings it, and it makes perfect sense. Form over content, indeed.

[audio:Thunder_Road.mp3]

Another brilliant track from the same album is another cover: Love is love by Lungfish. That’s about it from the album though – just get those two. The rest is rather bleak, if not outright crappy (the album is The Brave and the Bold, btw)

The hazards of being a download hampster

One of my more endearing character traits is that I’m always trying to download the internets. If you’d like to learn how to program in Pascal for paper-mill machinery, I probably have the documents and compilers lying around somewhere.

Before I had a computer with a connection I would go to the library once a week and walk among the shelves and pick out whatever books caught my fancy; When it comes to dedication to books I’m quite the polybookamist – I’d end up having twenty books on different topics at any given time. The only Dewey decimals I wasn’t into were the ones between 796 & 798. (sports)

Now, every time I get my hands on a connection I end up downloading everything that either 1) interests me, or 2) I don’t know what it is but it sounds interesting.

This has of course some drawbacks. For example, I should have looked up what ephebophilia meant before downloading a 200 mb zip-file named epheb with the description “ephebophilia junk“. I end up with a couple of hundred images of some post-pubescent girl looking slightly amused. What the fuck. Although there wasn’t any porn involved (well, I only looked at five or so of the images, so I can’t tell) the sheer volume of images taken from someone who’s obviously taller than the girl is kinda twisted my head a bit; I can see this being sort of gateway-erotica to more overt kiddie porn.

Can’t fucking believe I’ve tainted my hard drive downloading it, and since it was over Bittorrent, I’ve actually helped others downloading it as well. Next time, I’m either looking up any words I don’t understand, or reading the info-page before downloading anything.

The torrent’s info-page is here: http://thepiratebay.org/details.php?id=3457951, and actually describes what he torrent contains. For fucks sake; I honestly thought they were body-modification files. Like, gross piercings and subdermal implants.

In the previous episode…

Or, let me list the ways in which I am displeased about my life.

* The MFA course i’m doing right now is cancelled. I will be able to finish the MFA, but I don’t know who’s gonna be responsible for it, or if we’re gonna get shuffled around and lose our studios or what the budget is going to be. The course I’m doing has always seemed to be the retarded stepchild of the art academy, but it still pisses me off no end that I found out about the cancellation of my program through the fucking web page of the fucking university instead of maybe, oh I don’t know, an email gently informing us about it? At all?. Or why not when I applied to the course. A short sentence like “oh, btw, we might cancel your education on a whim“.

* Anna is looking to sell her place, which means that I will have to start looking for something new. And it’s the second last thing that i like to be thinking of.

* The last thing that i want to be thinking about is money. It’s not original, it’s not a fun conversational topic, but for hells sake I need to straighten my “economy” out in some way. Preferably not a way that includes robberies or lottery tickets.

On a lighter side, there’s been a lot of hubbub about people doing remixes of subway maps. The transit authority in London has ordered shutdown of this page because the maps that the site is hosting are breaking trademark rules or somesuch. Which of course is a crock of shit, so I’ve put up a mirror of the site here.

Enjoy it while it lasts; Don’t know the university stance on these kinds of things, but even with the relative laxness of copyright law enforcement here in Sweden, I wouldn’t bet much on any spine existing within the university administration – it’s just not the point of administrators…

The 13 virtues of Benjamin Franklin

I’ve never known much about Benjamin Franklin, and frankly (yes, another pün) still don’t. boingboing.net had an item about him today, and how he compiled a list of 13 virtues which he tried to live by – each day ticking off what he’d done wrong.

ben franklin

I thought the idea was cute, and it fits very well into my own obsessive list-making. So of course I had to make one myself.
He lists chastity as one of the virtues (as he puts it “rarely use venery but for health or offspring“) and I really don’t agree on that, but am in fact abiding by that rule by default, which of course just goes to show how the remaining years of my no-i’m-not-thirty-yet!-age are going to waste…

Anywho. I made three different versions of it, and they are all here:

1 Pdf for 1 week (233kb)

2 Same as above, but I’ve crammed three weeks onto one sheet (300kb)

3 And this one is slightly different, with four columns on one page, more intended to be pasted into a A5-sized notebook or somesuch (237kb). Also, it doesn’t contain the definitions of the virtues.

And you could of course grab all three of the above by downloading all three pdfs in one zip-file (616kb)