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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in the "Dev" journal:[<< Previous 20 entries]
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11:21 pm
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open letter to a meme
I'm positively ecstatic to hear of your newfound popularity, and it is my utmost intention that you resume your invocation into this mundane message which would otherwise be great lacking in meme and mirth; but in truth, it is a known fact that the older "All Your Base" meme of the late 1990s is of exceeding quality, and arguably stands above similar memes of the past, present and future. I reiterate: past, present AND future!
I bid you good day!
Yours for great justice,
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) locke61dv
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05:49 pm
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hey academics, write a book, kthx
(Or pretend to!)
For a project I'm doing, it would be kinda inspiring if I could imagine my smart academic friends distributing a book of their own creation. So, inspire me! Post a title of an academic title of a textbook (anywhere from 50 to 500 pages) that you might hypothetically write. Bonus points if you include a table of contents. (You can be silly if you must, but it'd be cool if you also supplied a serious-business title.)
This is also a good thread for my friends to show off that they are smart.
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12:18 am
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Dance and the Dawn: available!
Now you can get the PDF or print versions of "The Dance and The Dawn" via NDP Design's Lulu storefront.
POD + PDF Technology is cool.
(There's a Lulu-glitch that claims that the cover of the printed version is a dark black square. This is just a glitch, and the cover is rather humane.)
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10:16 am
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boil the sea
There is a road trip mixtape story game, Ribbon Drive. I just got it and am reading through it, but it looks cool.
He posted a Firefly hack for it. I think I have something I gotta do.
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11:10 pm
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the best new idea
A bluegrass/newgrass/folkrock rock opera that details the events of the unwritten sequels to Serenity.
What? No, it's not fanfic. It's a rock opera. Duh.
I wish I knew how to write original lyrics or music.
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10:15 pm
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[games] rpgs and games by friends and sorta myself
GenCon is next week, and while I'm not going, a game of mine will be: The Dance and the Dawn. (See also: here.) Like, woah. My friend Nathan did the layout and design, and he'll be presenting it at the Design Matters booth with other neat titles.
For those not as much into the circles of such things, I thought I'd briefly mentions some excellent titles by folks I know. Shreyas wrote a game about wuxia, passions and knives. Elizabeth wrote a game complicated relationships. Ben wrote a game about love and robots. Nathan wrote a game about hunger, redemption, and for-serious vampires. I've played most of these to great effect.
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10:48 am
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so the republicans should go play for milan or something
Yglesias on the bizarre cover of the National Review:
At any rate, then he waited around a bit, got the accusations of racism he was waiting for, and then got to engage in every white conservative’s favorite passtime of wallowing in self-pity and calling his accusers humorless.
And I enjoyed this comment:
jamie Says: What do they call it when soccer players grab their knees and make huge grimaces after someone from the opposing team looks at them funny? Lowry isn’t trying to score points as much as get yellow cards against the other team.
YES. Conservatives are actually like a bunch of divers. Hee.
I mean, it's not like they're on their feet or anything. I proscribe a regimen of two-footed tackles administered daily.
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01:22 pm
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musical reappropriation / Sean Kingston / D'yer Mak'er / LedZip / Me Love
So, Sean Kingston does some poppy (and fun) reggae-pop, and this one (old-ish) track "Me Love". You may recognize the sampled track: "D'yer Mak'er" by Led Zepplin.
Things go awry, as always, when one reads YouTube comments:
harrypotterphan9: This song sucks. Sean stole it from Led Zeppelin's song Dy'er Maker
Wait just a moment. Wikipedia, tell me about the origins of this "D'yer Mak'er" song...
This song was meant to imitate reggae and its "dub" derivative emerging from Jamaica in the early 1970s... The sleeve on the album also gives tribute to "Rosie and the Originals", a reference to the doo-wop influence which was evident in the song's style.
Wow. "Musical reappropriation for me, not for thee," in short. Or perhaps: a kind of musical myopia, where you're unable to see how the lifeblood of your musical lineage (perhaps: all of them) is based on reappropriation of musical styles, and accepting that if your music is worth anything at all, it will itself become reappropriated, as it should be.
This was very illuminating, since it also high-lighted a problem of excessive concern for "purity" and "the classics" in some corners of rock music culture, which is weird and reactionary in line with the long view of rock culture.
Anyway, yay re-appropriation, forever.
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08:47 am
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clever RPG mechanics
I played in an awesome Midsummer Night's Dream LARP in NYC last weekend, and it was great. There were some cute mechanics to emphasize magic/faeriedust/etc. Specifially:
- Potions: their effect is on a sealed card, and you don't know what they do until you use and open them. Also, glittery powder sealed inside each potion card. (Our hosts were very tolerant.)
- Masks: Many people had masks, which they could put on to suddenly look like a "Noble", or "Peasant", or something else. The GMs were clear that these masks would always fool us. There were some funny moments of "oh, my Noble father is here, let me just step aside and find him" "I'm here! Where's that Peasant bastard son of mine?"
- Glamours: faerie magic! It takes the form of a hat with a folded affect card in the front. When someone puts a glamour on you, they place the hat and open the card for you. Result: you walk around with no idea what's on your head, and all other players start reacting to the effect. In other words, some faerie did some magic and everyone starts treating you like their ex-wife and it's KINDA WEIRD. This worked fabulously.
The result was emergently foolish behavior in the style of the play, which I appreciated.
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04:23 pm
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maybe selling my g4 maybe
I have a serviceable Powerbook G4 12" that was bought circa 2006 or whatever. I don't know if I'd want to sell it (with the vision of replacing it with a lighter netbook). But out of curiousity, would any of you be interested in buying it if I did?
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02:49 pm
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keeping the goatee for now
Goal #1: Even when in my Codin' Cave all day, try to dress a little more on the metro side (or at least on my "not a hobo" side). It's too easy to stick with my "scruffy" look.
Easier Goal #2: Try to upgrade my "scruffly" look. Maybe something a little more Mal or Han, a little less like L or Thomas Anderson. Suggestions are awesome.
Actually, this post is a lie, and I'm just offering an open thread for you to post pics of guys who fit #1 or #2.
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02:41 pm
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it's getting pretty crowded in my sky/cloud
I've had several tech-related conversations lately (as a side-effect of pinging lots of various ventures), and it doesn't escape my notice that the big 3 keep coming up: AMZN. GOOG. AAPL.
Want to deploy software? It's gotta be the cloud. Pick AMZN or GOOG. (There are other cloud vendors though, but the power of AMZN/GOOG is staggering and the price is hard to turn down. I'm using AMZN's services myself.)
Want an intelligent mobile device? It's either the iPhone (and if you're reading this, I'm guessing you or someone within one block of you has one), or maybe it's the gPhone that us geeks are hoping could beat the iPhone. (I'm hoping for the gPhone, but owning and iPhone.) And then there's AMZN Kindle, which I'm interested in for a variety of worrisome opinions.
And there have been other conversations which keep rotating around these three. So I think this is the future. It's possible that Facebook might create an unbreakable lock of content and relationships, but it's as likely that it will hit generational decline (MySpace style) or fizzle from too much noise or lots of other possibilities.
And in a world dominated by the iGooglZonBook, there's still lots of room for small players to be aggressively entrepreneurial and carve out a win - indeed, most of these big players have carved out their niche by primarily creating a marketplace for others to participate in.
This is what the future looks like. It tastes free, but that's as far as I'd venture.
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09:56 pm
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JiffyCon: an rpg-minicon (March 21)
I'm helping to run JiffyCon, a one-day roleplaying mini-con. It's fun!
March 21 (9am-6pm)
Davis Square (Unity Church on College Ave)
etc: http://www.jiffycon.com/
And now you know.
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04:41 pm
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oh the meh of internets (meh twitter)
I halted the xposting of my tweets because I didn't feel it was working. In fact, let me pour myself a cold glass of hypocrisy... Mmm, that's the stuff.
AUTOPOSTING YOUR TWEETS IS KILLING LIVEJOURNAL MAYBE
There, I said it. (Maybe.) It adds non-LJ noise, dilluting the value of LJ itself to those users using twitter / facebook, driving them to rely on those services instead and further diluting LJ.
I'm starting to think similarly about Facebook, but I think too much.
I'm also trying this working-at-home thing.
I'm also thinking.
I'm running out of girl scout cookies, unfortunately.
I had an espresso earlier.
I may rethink my approach to coffee.
I miss Cowboy Bebop; I miss being on a space ship, rather.
Where are my shoes?
These shoes suck.
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10:21 pm
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5 words meme
via yeloson. (If you would like me to give you five words, comment, then elaborate in your own LJ.)
gaming
Obviously, I dig gaming. (Board games, RPGs, video games, poker, and that "country-or-color" style of games.) I'm not tactical genius or anything - far from it! (sandmantv will corroborate.) But I do enjoy the social kind of fun that games can empower, as well as the interesting social patterns that can emerge. I am most into storygames/RPGs (which is often what I mean by "gaming" anyway). Basically. even more fun emergent social effects, and I like getting together with friends to see what kind of fiction we, as a group, can create.
technomancy
This word reminds me about how I was treated less like an IT guy and more like a shaman at my first job. It's cute how even inside of tech the work is treated with great ritual and superstition, but also that's crippling and bad and limiting.
But it also reminds me about the techno-utopian tendency I have, and the hope that by weaving together ineffable technologies we can will a greater world into being. I still empathize with that view and think that some good things can be done by this sort of utopian technomanacy, but I also don't think that technology has an inherent bias towards a good/bad outcome for people. At the very least, disruptive technologies are easily co-opted, and it takes more than a ruby script to make change in the world.
twitter
There's a lot weird/wrong/lame/youjustdontgetithuh about twitter, but ultimately: it's easy to throw my 140 characters up there, and when I check on it I get a passive ambient sense of a what my friends are up to. It's a social technology that works for me. (It's differences between twitter and Facebook statuses are negligible but nonzero but not worth discussing here.) Of course I wouldn't want to only hear form friends in their twitter voice.
politics
Politics are complicated; for me, they are also emotional and necessarily vague. I have long had an left-anti-authoritarian bent in my politics, but lately it's swung back into mainline social democracy, more or less. But hell, this is all about ideology and wankery. I love that, but what matters in "real" politics is elections and policy. I've made my peace that elections are basically a form of cynical warfare (so I don't expect mercy or ideological purity). Meanwhile, policy is a consequentialist question of what gives us the best outcome, so I basically just hope for reasonable core principles from the policy-making bloc, and reasonably competent technocrats engineering the policy.
So this kind of real-world-politics is half-sport, and half of a necessary attempt to understand the world. The theoretical-ideological-politics is more about forming some ethics about how the world should/could be made/remade, and this would lead to principles which in form policies and so on.
friends in geekdom
Many of my friends are somewhere in the geek spectrum. (Of course, most of them have interests outside of being a geek, which is vital. And I have non-geek friends.) But yeah, my interface at large with geekdom is seeing it as a pool of people who are my friends or at least potential friends. There's a lot wrong with the subculture, but ultimately it's basically my subculture and within are people I care a lot about.
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02:00 am
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(via twitter)
( Read more... )
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02:01 am
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( Read more... )
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02:00 am
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06:26 pm
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cooking for seven
I was cooking for a group of friends with labmouse, and we ended up making three dishes form "Entertaining for a Veggie Planet": Curried Cauliflower & Tomatoes, Red(ish) Curry with Mango and Snap Peas, and Sweet Potato Shepherd's Pie.
The Cauliflower tasted good and lite, though it didn't wow me. It went better than the last time (where I boiled the cauliflower into non-cauliflower). The Red(ish) Curry was amazing, especially since we didn't have the requisite red curry paste, and labmouse hacked together a secret curry-like paste. As for the Shepherd's Pie, I think we're BFF's right now. I was quite happy with it.
One complication was that, due to my studio being Somerville-sized, we had to host the dinner party elsewhere. We decided to prep everything here first - cutting things up, sauteeing whatever needed it, putting into whatever bags/tupperware were called for - and moved it to their place to throw it all together to cook it finally. It totally had a neat "dinner: impossible" vibe to it, and was also a paean to mise-en-place.
In other news, Tamarind Bay in Harvard Square has some very nice folks, so I'm endorsing the place.
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