RSS aggregators are going in the wrong direction. Here’s the problem. A good number of my friends use LiveJournal, as do I, mostly to read their journals at this point. One of the coolest things about LJ is the friends list concept, which allows you to interleave the journals of everyone you’ve marked as a friend. Good stuff. Certainly you can do that with the various desktop RSS aggregators. ...

I know everybody says this, but man, there are a metric boatload of pretty badly formed RSS feeds out there. I have most of an application written that trawls a blogrolling.com blogroll for RSS feeds and generates a “friends” page from whatever it finds. I even respect “Last-Modified” headers. Unfortunately, everyone kicks out bad RSS. Some people also have pretty flaky RSS autodiscovery bumpf — Atrios, for example, winds up pointing my l’il robot to an RSS feed containing the last few comments on his blog. Weird. I could work around that, though, although it would kind of kill the glorious automation purity I’ve got now. ...

The Observer has a story on [US war plans](http://web.archive.org/web/20080517120556/http://web.archive.org/web/20080517120556/http://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,610461,00.html (original) “The Observer | International | Secret US plan for Iraq war”) (original): America intends to depose Saddam Hussein by giving armed support to Iraqi opposition forces across the country… the plan, opposed by Tony Blair and other European Union leaders, threatens to blow apart the increasingly shaky international consensus behind the US-led ‘war on terrorism’. It envisages a combined operation with US bombers targeting key military installations while US forces assist opposition groups in the North and South of the country in a stage-managed uprising. One version of the plan would have US forces fighting on the ground. ...

Salon has a little puff piece of a Cronenberg interview on line, of interest probably mostly to the fanatics like me, except for one excerpt which I will provide here. When I did “The Dead Zone,” I was very happy with the film. I was very happy with the experience of mixing my blood with somebody else’s, in this case Stephen King. When you use someone else’s work as the basis, it’s something you would never do on your own, but something you really feel an incredible empathy for and connection with. The two of you mix together — why, it’s just like sex, I suddenly realized! — and you make something that didn’t exist before. ...

What does it take to sell real estate? Brass balls (original). Glengarry Glen Ross. 3.5 minutes. Rip, remix, burn.

Whoops, I missed a WISH. Well, last week was pretty busy. This week, it’s [all about supplements](http://web.archive.org/web/20060924230405/http://web.archive.org/web/20060924230405/http://www.whiterose.org/pam/archives/002982.html (original) “Perverse Access Memory: WISH 36: Supplements”) (original). What do you think about supplements to game systems? Do you like the additional material, or are you just annoyed about spending the money for the additional rules? Name up to three supplements you?ve really enjoyed, and describe why you liked them. I like supplements. I have the gamer fondness for more crunchy stuff, although I’m just as happy without it, but what I really like is cool world material. This bias is about to become utterly apparent when I talk about my three favorite supplements. ...

Think you know when the war’s gonna start? Put your money where your mouth is (original). March To War has a pool; it’s five bucks to buy in. 20% of the pool goes to the player who comes closest in the form of prepaid gas cards; the rest goes to humanitarian activity in Iraq. The agency overseeing this is Boston Mobilization — just the kind of progressive activists the right wing loves to hate. But hey, they’re not planning on keeping the money, they’re planning on funnelling it to relief organizations. ...

Thanks to Jon Carroll (original), I’ve uncovered another incidence of shameful French history. Feast your eyes on this artifact, and be reminded why we must scorn the French and mock their history.

Magpie RSS is a PHP RSS parser. Tagged for later reference.

Does anyone have any thoughts to share on Steven Erikson? As in, has anyone read his books?