Tuesday, September 30, 2003

Textfiles.com - Knock that broadband connection down to 300 baud [Boing] ... and let's get started, shall we? Jason Scott runs textfiles.com, a collection of BBS-era textfiles that have turned from a side project into a foundation for about dozen other computer history related sites. Besides the original project he has also been maintaining a list of all North American BBSes in history and has spent the last two and a half years filming and editing a documentary about BBSes. Throughout his journey into the past, he's unearthed some pretty interesting stuff. via [Boing Boing] Does this ever take me back... permanent link #     ^ TOP ^  what is this place?

Maggot Art and "maggots" via [Memepool] Back in April I had some email to-and-fro with an old best buddy from my early teen years. We used to call many people "maggots" back then. I can't do better than to quote a couple of his emails: 1. Indeed, we spoke often of maggots. Let me refresh. Maggots all look alike and all do essentially the same useless thing, that is, they hang around shit all day, eat shit, wallow in shit and grow in shit. "Shit" is simply another name for useless waste product. So maggots spend their entire existence involved with, immersed in, and becoming absolute masters of useless waste product. This attribute describes 99% of human beings in the world today. They spend their lives engaged in pointless drivel and they don't care. The other 1% spend their lives avoiding drivel, doing what they think is good and useful and valuable, because they care what they do. However, they themselves are involved in useless waste product as well. It is just that they are more intelligent than maggots. They go the extra steps (which qualifies them as intelligent) of first recognizing maggots and their useless activity, rejecting them and what they do, and then skillfully argue themselves into believing that what they do is, in fact, useful and wonderful. Of course, all the while they are embroiled in swill as well. Only they are better at lying to themselves about it. They give it names like "professional", or "art", or "science", and let us not forget the granddaddie of all bullshit, "politics and religion", which are the same thing. 2. It was a term that you introduced to delineate those beer swilling Madras wearing kids who were the party boys of the time. Their favorite music was "Surfer" music. They used to consume gallons of beer and then proceed to beat each other senseless, thinking that they would impress the girls. Unfortunately, many girls got stuck with these assholes and spent their entire marriages married to a guy whose entire life revolves around football and hockey games, with occasional visits to strip clubs. These same type of guys carry on their adolescent boyhood friendships well past middle age and need their one night out during the week with "the Boys" so they can "Howl". Their sexual interaction with their wives is from the the most adolescent standpoint, and they are perpetually terrified that the wife is screwing around with the boss, mainly because they themselves have hired prostitutes during their wive's pregnancy or periods. In fact, their whole lives are consumed with infantile sexual innuendo that is astounding. Indeed, the backbone of America. Kind of like what George Bush and the rest of his chimpanzee cabinet were in their youth. Well maybe except for Powell. permanent link #     ^ TOP ^  what is this place?

Our Summer Vacation: 20,000 Dead [AlterNet] Each extreme summer that passes inches us closer to the precipice of catastrophic environmental change. The overall European death toll is probably the equivalent to five or more World Trade Centers: at least 20,000 victims and probably more. ... The nightmare part is not rising sea levels since ice already displaces its water volume. Rather it is the radical change in "albedo," the amount of solar energy reflected from the surface. Right now Arctic ice is a huge mirror sending heat back to space; remove the ice, however, and the clear blue sea absorbs immense additional amounts of solar energy. Warming, as a result, will suddenly accelerate. via [AlterNet] I dunno about "ice already displaces its water volume"... I mean, sure, but a lot of that ice is sitting up on land. permanent link #     ^ TOP ^  what is this place?

Oh, it's nothing... This post is about nothing. Zip. Zero. Nada. via [MetaFilter] If you spend your day doing nothing, how do you know when you're done? Or how do you know when you've had too much of nothing? permanent link #     ^ TOP ^  what is this place?

Life's Unanswered Questions If a cow laughed real hard, would milk come out her nose? Before they invented drawing boards, what did they go back to? Aren't all generalizations false? Can atheists get insurance for acts of God? Do you need a silencer if you are going to shoot a mime? Can I get arrested for running into a Fire House yelling Movie! Movie!? How can you tell when you're out of invisible ink? And many, many more. via [The Shifted Librarian] permanent link #     ^ TOP ^  what is this place?