Under New Media Policy, NASA Scientists Will Discuss . . . Science
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There are things that catch our eye, but don't really belong on the front page of our blogs; they belong here, on Page Two.
This is a very smart public relations and business move by MySpace, but that's all it is. This move isn't made to protect The Children(tm) as much as it is designed to appease advertisers and parents, and stall the inevitable election-year congressional investigation. A lot of parents will hear this story, decide that MySpace is now completely safe for their teenagers, and continue to remain uninvolved in their kids' Internet activities. MySpace's advertisers will be happy because they now have plausible deniability when accused of being associated with content many parents find objectionable. Bravo, MySpace! Way to keep your market value safe and secure.SuicideGirls > News > Geek > MySpace Deletes 200,000 "Objectionable" Pages, but Will it Make a Difference?
So what should companies do about waiting in line? Here's Seth's conclusion: Seth's Blog: Waiting in lineThe airport in Las Vegas is at maximum capacity. It's jammed. There is a line for everything, even the men's room.
What amazed me, though, was the line ten or twelve deep at the food concessions. People were waiting ten minutes or longer to buy a bottle of water for $2.59 or a yogurt for a few dollars.
All day, every day. A line.
On the way home from the airport I called an organization that sells $500 training programs to businesses. Even though I was trying to reach someone that worked there, I was calling in on the orders line (the only number I had). I waited 15 minutes to talk to a real person.
Think about that.
In both cases, this is the last step of a very expensive chain. It's expensive to rent that space in the airport. Expensive to outfit it. Expensive to bring in all the supplies. It's expensive to build a training business, expensive to have the outbound marketing, the brochures, the events worth talking about.
The last step, though, that's cheap. The last step, the step where someone actually takes your money--it's not just cheap, it's nothing but incremental profit.
In a (perhaps) historic shift, more Americans now consider themselves Democrats than Republicans, the Gallup organization revealed today.Congressional Democrats are going to have to get pretty creative to fuck this one up. I'm sure they won't disappoint.
Republicans had gained the upper hand in recent years, but 33% of Americans, in the latest Gallup poll, now call themselves Democrats, with those favoring the GOP one point behind. But Gallup says this widens a bit more "once the leanings of Independents are taken into account."
Independents now make up 34% of the population. When asked if they lean in a certain direction, their answers pushed the Democrat numbers to 49% with Republicans at 42%. One year ago, the parties were dead even at 46% each.
Geeks are nerds that almost get along and function non-awkwardly in real life. Geeks can't help but associate with nerds because of common interests but often appear embarassed by the behavior of their nerd counterpart. The truth is that they are ashamed of their own nerdiness and try to hide it from their real-life friends. In short, geeks are nerds who have a semi-social life.It's imperfect, but I grok what the author is going for: geeks are essentially nerds with social skills, so they hide their geekiness well. The problem with that, for me, anyway, is that I'm not ashamed of my geekiness at all. In fact, I wear it proudly and geek out whenever I get the chance. OHMIGOD! Does that mean I'm actually a nerd who thought he was a geek?! Wait. Maybe not. Maybe that makes me some sort of Alpha-geek. That could be kind of cool.
"You have to entertain yourself, goddammit! So what if the audience doesn't get on board? You think the audience knows from funny? The audience doesn't know from funny! You have to show them what's funny, and when you entertain yourself, you'll be funny. I know from funny, and you are funny, so show me some fucking funny!"
-My first sketch comedy writing teacher, Cynthia.
It was MST3K and the British Whose Line is it Anyway? that lit the comedy fire under me when I was ninteen. I don't remember how I ended up in Cynthia's class when I was in my early twenties, or why I thought I could be as funny as those guys on TV, but one of the wonderful things about being in your early twenties is not knowing why you shouldn't try to be a funny guy or a rock star or start up a company. With no kids or mortgage, you're not going to fall too hard if you stumble and fall, unless you are spectacularly stupid, in which case stumbling and falling is just Darwin making you his bitch.
Cynthia was one of the toughest teachers I've ever had, sort of like the drill sergeant in Full Metal Jacket, but I learned a lot from her, and if I ever get an award for being funny, she's one of the first people I'll thank.
Cynthia's advice to entertain myself extended well past comedy, and is something I heed whenever I write: "Why aren't you entertaining yourself?! If you're not going to entertain yourself, how can you expect the audience to be entertained?! Get off my fuckin' stage!"
I have written my best work just by hearing Cynthia's voice in my head and doing what she says, but from time to time, though, I start entertaining myself, and chase a red balloon a little too far away from the main point. Example: today, I wrote a news story about finding where your XBox was put together by running its serial number through a program.
It wasn't a particularly good story (yeah, you can find out where your Xbox came from. Big Deal.) so I asked myself, "Hey, where did my Xbox come from?"
I . . . found out that it came from a tiny little village in Chile, where it longed to play accordion in a J.Geils cover band, before its parents joined a cult and fled the country to Indonesia where they were mass-married under a full moon in 1992.
Following a little-publicized coup in 1998 that saw the cult's charismatic leader vanish with all the cult's assets, my Xbox's parents paid a smuggler 27000 bhat to put it on a container ship for America, where they hoped it would have a better life.
That's just the start of the story of my Xbox's imagined life (that easily could have gone on for another fifteen hundred words) but it's got little to do with the actual news. I left it up anyway.
A wonderful part of being 33 and writing in this medium, though, is chasing the Red Balloon a little too far down the street, falling into the gutter and scraping your knees, but dodging Darwin just before you feel his icy hand upon you.
Thanks, Cynthia.
Built entirely in flash, this application gives you information about your xbox based on your serial number. Where it was made, when it was made, and most importantly for people looking for mod chips, what version your xbox is.
Midnight Marathon for Serenity/FireflyTechnorati Tags: serenity, browncoat, firefly, whedon, sci-fi
This Friday, March 31st, beginning at 11:55PM PT a Serenity and Firefly Marathon will begin at the Del Mar Theater in Santa Cruz, California.
Serenity will be featured as a midnight movie and will be followed by eight episodes of Firefly, the television series which will run into April 1st (Saturday morning).
Just picture it, Browncoats coming dressed in character, getting up on the stage in front of the screen acting out the parts, the audience yelling back the lines of the movie and TV show to the big screen....This may well catch on across the globe and what the midnight madness cult following did for "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" could very well happen with Serenity/Firefly.
Think about the conservatives most hated by the left. They're all angry, negative, nasty-hearted mean people. But compare them to those most hated by the right: Hillary, Bill, Moore, Soros, Phil Donohue, Alan Alda, Norman Lear, and a whole host of Hollywood - Barbra Streisand on down. Where do you find the hate and the anger spewing from those people? Sure, the right hates them, but you really can't point to any of these people who are as filled with hatred and anger as anyone on the right. In fact, the quality most often shared by those hated by the right: intelligence, eloquence, and a message.He's right, you know. As soon as they're faced with facts and evidence which contradicts their delicate fantasy world where George Bush can do no wrong and Saddam Hussein piloted every plane on 9/11 personally, many of today's ultra-right wing go positively ballistic.
[. . .]
Across the board, conservatives are represented by people who are simply motivated by, and exude, an irrational hatred and anger. Is it any wonder that Republicans are so prone to striking out domestically and internationally at whomever they perceive as today's enemy?
The right wing of the Republican party has sold the libertarian/centrist wing of the party a bill of goods, and the modern ‘conservatives’ are clearly nothing more than statists who, rather than redistributing wealth like their brethern on the left, instead have decided that the state must have excessive rights in order to ‘protect’ us all from whatever the imagined fear du jour might be. Meanwhile, no one is left protecting us from the religionists and the the state itself. In the new Republican era, only fetuses , tax shelters, and ‘traditional’ marriage deserve protection. According to the actions of the current Republican party, the rest of us need to be wiretapped, monitored, have our homes inspected for whatever reason without warrants, and are incapable of making decisions on our own.John goes on to say that his 20-year affair with the Republican party is coming to an end, as a result of these policies (pushed by Bush, Cheney, DeLay, and Frist). I wonder how many other real conservatives feel the same way? I wonder how they'll vote this year? As we've seen recently, many so-called moderate Republicans talk a big game, until Uncle Karl gets on the phone and they whip out the rubber stamp and do exactly as they are told.
When Actor, Poker Player, Childhood idol, and ST:TNG Veteran Wil Wheaton mentioned Mike Doughty and Soul Coughing in a single cohesive sentence, I managed to feel the electric tingle of memory flowing up my arms like a human “jacobs ladder”. The thought of Soul Coughing triggered that memory (now 7 or 8 years old) of the ‘blue eyed devil‘ living in the ‘5% nation of Casio-tone‘ that carried me through countless hours of programming and coffee brewing in college. (Yes - you’ll have to get Soul Coughing’s Ruby Vroom to ‘grok’ that.) “I MUST LIMEWIRE!” I shouted to myself though my iPod headphones “AND GET A …. SAMPLE”.I managed to feel the electric tingle of memory flowing up my arms like a human “jacobs ladder”
ZzyzzyxxZzyzzyxx | The A.V. ClubEveryone wants Lola; she has blonde hair, full lips, and a nice pair of shoes. But before she'll give you the time of day, you must ply her with gifts. Luckily for you, she doesn't seem to care if you give her diamond rings or lollipops, as long as she gets presents.
But Boris, Bluto, and Smoot are all creepy virus-looking guys who want to prevent you from delivering your gifts, so that you can't enjoy the bonus game, which features the whimsical characters Chlamydio and Herpas. Could Zzyzzyxx be any weirder? Assume the role of Izzy, a creature sort of like Evil Otto with tennis shoes, and decide for yourself.
[. . .]
Could be mistaken for: An evening out with your cockblocking friend Justin.Kids today might not like it because: Collecting all sorts of expensive junk to make some girl happy while avoiding icky viruses isn't exactly the diversion from real life they were looking for.
[. . .]
Wil Wheaton is in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
When an adult puts his ear to the door of youth culture, he inevitably mistakes the noise for the signal - and usually misses the signal altogether. So we have Scott Karp reeling back in horror from his visit to MySpace. It is, he tells us, "a DEEPLY DISTURBING place," rife with "sexually suggestive or explicit content." There's even a hint of "murder" in the air. It is "humanity in the raw."I love the image of an adult putting his ear to the door of youth culture, and Carr uses that as a launching pad for a post that puts the latest teen fad into perspective, and concludes:
Excuse me while I go sign up for an account.
What's most fascinating about Karp's post, though, is not his reaction to MySpace but his reaction to his reaction to MySpace. Having offered a moral critique - a visceral one - he suddenly goes all wobbly. "I’m not going to do a moral critique of MySpace or Web 2.0 or anything else — that’s not my gig," he says. Then he says it again, with caps: "let me be repeat — this is NOT a moral critique. It’s a practical, business critique." A wise retreat, I suppose. Moral critiques are so uncool. They're the surest way to lose your web cred.
I guess you see what you want to see. When I look around MySpace I don't see much that's "strange and wonderful" - or "deeply disturbing," either. I wish I did. What I see is a dreary sameness, a vast assembly of interchangeable parts. Everything feels secondhand: the pimps-and-hos poses before the cameraphone, the ham-fisted, cliche-choked blog-prose. It's sad to see so much effort put into self-expression with so little to express. Humanity in the raw? No, this is humanity boiled to blandness in the tin pot of personalization.
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