It's where I talk to myself. Gaming, politics, and links I don't want to forget about.
I got my first piece of spam offering copies of the Iraqi Most Wanted playing cards today. Some yobbo’s selling the PDF on Ebay. You can download it for free from the DoD, of course. Here’s someone who printed out the PDF onto card stock, and is selling the results for 16 bucks a pop; he’s also claiming that you can’t print from the PDFs others are selling.
Just amazing.
There’s a new Safari beta out. I won’t be able to try it out until late tonight, but it includes tabbed browsing and autofill for forms. I’ve been using Camino lately because Safari was crashing on me a lot, but Camino’s pop-up blocking happens to block pop-ups on one’s bookmark bar. This includes the Movable Type bookmarklet. Total pain. Hopefully this Safari build will be a little less crashy.
Hopefully the various bugfixes mentioned by Dave Hyatt are included, too. I am particularly hot for the cookie fix and I’m crossing my fingers for the title attribute fix.
Masanori Murakawa, better known as the Great Sasuke, won a seat in the Iwate Prefectural Assembly today. By special arrangement, he was permitted to run and will be permitted to take his seat masked; also, he was allowed to use his wrestling nom de plume on the ballots.
Well, he’s not the first wrestler ever to be elected to a government, but he’s probably the first one to do so masked. Also probably the best of them all (sorry, Jesse). In fact, you could make a decent argument for him as the best athlete ever to reach elected office.
Frontline ran an excellent piece on North Korea tonight. As usual, they stuck all the good stuff up on their Web site. Gotta love it.
And, since (as we all know) PBS is hopelessly liberal and biased, they made sure to include an interview with the highest ranking North Korean ever to defect in which he praises Bush to the skies. Cunning, those liberals.
My cynicism aside, I particularly liked the Ashton Carter interview. He has lots of good insights, and he takes a pretty rational appearing line on the implications of a war on the Korean peninsula. Also, he has the quote of the entire piece:
I remember in 1994, when we were dealing with North Korea, the intelligence experts would come in, and they would say, “That’s a very interesting statement by the North Koreans. It’s rather conciliatory.” I’d say, “How can you tell that’s conciliatory?” And they would say, in effect, “Well, you know, it doesn’t say anything about your mother.”
My brother’s tres hip internationally acclaimed (really!) design group, Release1 (warning: Flash site, but it’s cool, and it’s my family, so don’t complain), opened the McDonald’s Project tonight. I just got back. Awesome opening — the place was packed, quite literally. There was a line of people outside waiting for people to leave, cause the gallery was over capacity. It’s down at the Berwick Research Project, in Boston, and runs through next weekend. It’ll be in New York in August.
It’s cool stuff. The intention is not culturejamming, although there’s a bit of that — it’s a light-hearted look at ways to use the McDonald’s brand. I’d recommend going on down and taking a look if you’re in Boston.
There’s wide-spread looting in Iraq today. Not very surprisingly, the social structure of the country is in chaos. Hospitals are being looted; suspected looters are being killed in the street. On the BBC this morning, a reporter talked about seeing a man beat to death in front of him. The killers said “He wasn’t from this neighborhood.” Was he a looter? Maybe, maybe not. But man, it’s getting rough out there.
This is about as indicative of the future of Iraq as the cheering was yesterday. The fact that Iraqis cheered Americans yesterday does not mean that they will be cheering six months from now. The fact that there is widespread looting today does not mean that there will be looting six months from now.
And that’s why I feel we while we should not be saying “Sure, but…” (an excellent post by Philippe de Croy, btw), I feel we should all be saying “Let’s wait till things have stabilized.”
Philippe de Croy of the Volokh Conspiracy provides guidelines for conservative commentators who want to talk about Iraq’s chemical weapons. It’s a nice public service, really.
(Or anyhow, I assume that’s what he means when he says “Talk a lot about things that ‘aren’t clear’ or that ‘remain to be seen.’ These sorts of assertions are good because they are hard to falsify.”)
Sauce for the goose…
As always, one of the most fascinating things about the Internet is all the little subcommunities that spring up here and there. My latest discovery is Pyroto Mountain, which is a fascinating little web game unlike anything else I’ve seen. The framework is an escalating series of trivia questions, but it’s way more complex than that.
You start at level 0. It’s really easy to work up to level 6, but then when you try to answer another question you find out that you have to chat a little on the bulletin boards before you can try and climb any more. OK, so you go and post. Sometimes the game tells you that your posts are good — and sometimes it doesn’t. It has standards of spelling and punctuation. Eventually you get to go up some more.
At level 8 or so, you get access to a new bulletin board, and the conversation there is a little more interesting — it’s not the newbie board. You still have to post to get the OK to go much further. It turns out that there are 512 levels, and you pretty much have to cooperate to get to the top. People talk about completely mysterious stuff. You get more things to do at high levels. The boards are, in fact, player moderated… sufficiently high level players can kick posts off the boards.
Hey, and they can kick people in the teeth and force them back down a bunch of levels! There are politics. The rate at which you regain manna (it takes manna to do anything) slows. Side effect: you want to be more careful about your posts, because that costs manna too, and if you don’t post smart things you won’t get to keep climbing.
The trivia gets harder as you go, of course. I’m betting that towards the top, the questions will be specifically checked for ease of research. I hear that high level wizards get to make up questions, too.
The not very hidden agenda of the game is creating community. It seems to work pretty well. I’m kind of hooked.
Kurdish forces have occupied Kirkuk; according to NPR this morning, there are about 20,000 Kurdish soldiers in the city along with a fairly token US presence. This is supposedly a trigger point for a Turkish invasion, so we’ll soon see if Turkey and/or the US are bluffing or not. Abdullah Gul, the Turkish Foreign Minister, said Colin Powell agreed to allow Turkish military observers to go to Kirkuk, and that US forces would arrive “within a few hours” to take control of the situation.
Alas, but it’s true: Nick Urfe’s “…inexplicably fancy trash” has shut its doors. Well, not shut, precisely. More that the store at which one found those interesting little intellectually pornographic tidbits has stopped getting in new stock. You can still browse the old stuff, and it’s still entirely worthwhile to do so.
I stumbled across the place early in what I might laughably call my blogging career, and it is still the touchstone I return to when I really badly need to remind myself that there’s more to write about beyond the war and politics. It offered, in cupped hands, the possibility of litrachur in this new mode of expression. Mindbending stuff.
Also, of course, it offered some really impressively good erotica. I still want more of the James Sisters, damn it.