And My Axon: Archive

Limitations

I find it tricky to get full utility out of Tumblr. Partly because it’s blocked at work, so I can’t harness its networking features to share and/or aggregate interesting stuff. Partly because tumbling stuff from the iPhone app is awkward. Gack, as they sometimes say. Of course, I have a similar thing on Blogger, but it has dreadful iPhone support, with auto-jumps and text-resizing and...

Mar 28th

Contacts

Sarah Weinman has a tumblr on here; this is great! And Jamie writes over on MGK sometimes. Memories.

Feb 20th

March of progress

How many legions does Jane Jacobs have?

Jan 20th

beaten to the punch

Well, so much for venting about the torrent of reckless hate constantly roaring online; looks like it boiled over already and now everyone’s talking about it.

Jan 9th

GPL != iOS

Maybe I won’t stick with the iPhone long-term after all, if App Store terms of licensing preclude the GPL. http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/01/07/briefly_apple_shareholder_proposal_vlc_app_removed_intel_tablets.html Raaaaaaage rising.

Jan 8th

132 notes

Lyrics

Watching “it might get loud”, the documentary about guitars, and am growing increasingly inspired. First about Jack White and how he felt when he first heard Son House at 18. Then about The Edge and how he felt when he read about the bombing and shooting that set him on the path to writing “Sunday Bloody Sunday” — you just have to get it out, as Jack White said, if...

Jan 8th

Alone, Superman T-Shirt

I was thinking about the movie version of Godspell, with Victor Garber walking around an empty NYC as a Superman T-Shirt-wearing Jesus. (In Toronto, Victor Garber is ubiquitous; I walked past an ad for a new ensem-com just as I started writing this; lo and behold.) But in Toronto, Victor Garber is sometimes the only familiar face. Thinking about other “empty city” images, things like...

Sep 17th

Mistrust

If there’s a side in all this protest that wants nobody to trust anyone else, they’re winning. I don’t trust protestors that are sheltering bunches of “smashies” who ran around in balaclavas, smashing windows near where I work. I don’t trust cops who bludgeon their way into crowds and arrest journalists. I don’t trust self-righteous pontificating...

Jun 27th

Etan's Show

“The Bitter End”, my brother’s show. Watch it at http://thebitterend.tv and become a “Fan” on Facebook. If you do, we might get more.

Apr 16th

quiet

When someone’s assertions are challenged by a critic, and the critic sees the counterarguments as having sufficiently exposed the original assertions as erroneous, and the people the critic originally tried to convince agree with the critic, and the critic leaves the discussion, why does the original asserter, merely reasserting their original assertions, then claim to have won when the...

Apr 8th

Swift thinking

A horrible confluence of “the evolution debate”, reproductive “rights management” and animal rights: Premise: ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. Other premise: better treatment for more “advanced” life forms. More evolved, or more in anthropogod’s image. All men are Socrates: rights afforded to a human fetus should be afforded to animals. And vice...

Apr 3rd

More idiocy

“Web Jew-point-0” or “The Semitic Web” I am five years old. Or stoned?

Apr 1st

Woke up early and very late

And the thoughts entered my head and went right back out. Oh, but I remembered thinking about “Software Ecosystems”. They don’t really have predators. At a PAX panel, the Indie Game panel kept suggesting that a market was “dead” when it had been around for more than a couple of years, was mature, and the killer apps had been written. Currently that means iPhone...

Mar 31st

repercussive

In a pure selfish market economy, wouldn’t the system be incentivized to reward system incentivizers?

Mar 25th

A lame lyric in bad taste

I am a psychopath I am Goliath of Gath What thou wouldst, I hath Don’t wanna taste my wrath Then do the math I’ll cook you like Sylvia Plath

Mar 23rd

meditation from afar

Minty had an interesting reflection to offer on the process of datefail. The moral is an old one: do hard things in person.

Mar 18th

suffer, kiddo

I want to get a boat and sail from port to port. Then publish a magazine. Called “Pier Review.”

Mar 17th

Checklist

Breakfast: oatmeal. Lunch: soup. Dinner: salad. And some dancing. And a lot of productive workage. Book almost done. Today went largely according to some sort of plan. Except weirder and with brain doing some kind of not-with-the-world song and dance. I still need more time out of town, is what I think it is.

Mar 16th

Five people will get this. Four will groan.

What has four PPCs and an accurate train schedule? Benito Masakari.

Mar 12th

Neology

“Niag-riculture?” Or Niagaraculture, or Niagriculture, or Niagribusiness, or Niagarabusiness. Or something.

Mar 11th

Piet

CONSOLATION GROOK Losing one glove is certainly painful, but nothing compared to the pain, of losing one, throwing away the other, and finding the first one again. Here’s how I’d rewrite it for metre: Losing one glove is certainly painful, but nothing compared to the pain, of losing one, throwing the other away and then finding the first one again. Little things, I guess.

Mar 11th

Ready for lunch

Learned to my chagrin that a friend thought he’d purchased a Droid. Turned out it has a bad motivator: Motorola sells the “Milestone” to the rest of the world, with hardware DRM, no Root access and no custom ROMs. Intercourse that! Also: new weekly sitcom about a pair of pen-pals: a gambler in Montana and an ordained Catholic schoolteacher in rural France. “Slim to...

Mar 11th

Yet Another Whatever Notion

So there’s a seldom-used escalator well in the middle of my building. Running 7am-6pm. Now, we know escalators never break, they just turn into stairs. If you’re going downward, it’s basically the same thing. If you’re going up, “just stairs” are fine for the first two or three floors. Of course, it’s fine if you’re going up 8 floors to have the...

Mar 11th

Gallows Humour

I think about writing my own job description. And whether I would apply for that job. Also, nobody knows what is or isn’t dead. Also, nobody agrees on what is or isn’t decided. I need a drink or eight.

Mar 10th

Side-jaunt

Also, teacher-Ben is the best thing in town — any town. The “Ben Theme” is more malleable than the Star Wars “Force Theme”, which went from elegaic twin-sun-gazing meditation to Riefenstahlian triumphal procession. But it managed to do that without even changing instrumentation.

Mar 10th

Idea

This seems as good a way as any to blurt out ideas and then refer to them later. I assume this is also a good way to let people exploit them before I do, which I hope is a good representation of what I see as my stance on intellectual property. Ideas are valuable, and powerful, but if I’m just going to bottle them up and suffocate them they don’t do me any good, do they? Okay,...

Mar 10th

Overreach

Today has definitely stolen a march on me. Bus just zipped past; I was out of soap and got an email that puts me where I started at the beginning of last night’s gruesome overextension. Skin irritated, too much so to ride bike. Not a streetcar in sight.

Mar 9th

And I tumble

Because the hour isn’t late enough. I sort of have a long day planned tomorrow, too, right? Bah! Brain activity has never been important to me before. That’s why a wizard invented theobromine!

Mar 9th