10/15/99 3:28:07 PM
my next hard drive. hard to believe that i have over 20GB right now, yet still short on space. this has to solve my problems! <g>

10/14/99 11:38:48 PM
from /. discussion

Hackers have inner-most sanctums? Boy, am I missing out...

HACKMAN: The city's in peril! Quickly L33tl4d, to the Hackcave!

L33TL4D: You mean your basement?

HACKMAN: ... Yes.

o/~ da da da da da da da da Hackman! o/~

(log on next week as Hackman battles the mp3ster)

10/14/99 3:26:51 AM
a really cool site from japan - yugop.com. found it right at the beginning of the latest outside reading from alistapart. now if only i had time that to browse that doesn't come out of my sleep time...

10/13/99 9:44:34 PM
argument- the web has fundamentally changed for the worse

i have to disagree on this. referring back to my 10/6/99 post. i think that people forget how inaccessible the web used to be. also, i think that people forget that this medium was hyperaccellerated in growth by the whole ecommerce deal, without which, maybe you or i might be on the net, but the majority of people wouldn't. this doesn't improve the situation accessibility/locatability (did i just make that word up?) of content, or even the existence of content.

that people don't react the same way they do to web sites only means that it has lost it's "newness" factor, which is a good thing. it means that as content creators and participants (all of us), we are free to play around with stuff and try to make it useful,. there is also now context (of the web) against which we can work with. there's no need to make a website or page in comparison or competition with television or print-- the is now accepted as its own medium and has its own history.

some good links (some from a pleasant surprise (in the sense that it was exactly relevant to some of the stuff i've been thinking about / discussing - yay) of an article by zeldman in alistapart):

• dmoz.org - an open directory project - volunteer!
• glassdog.net - lance arthur's built "portal to independent, non-commercial, collaborative content sites"
• camworld and eatonweb both show how large communities can become well connected into mini "web rings"
• as zeldman points out, many of the designers for designers pages like shift, uploading, and k10k do the same

* yes, i know that my prose will not win any awards for fluidity and style.

10/13/99 8:57:42 PM
omg. hilarious

10/13/99 8:36:45 PM
See if you can pinpoint when this blog turned from writings related only with being a "journal for ideas, notes and reports" for my fa410 class and into a more general weblog. I think it was during the early morning of October 4th, when I was procrastinating on a paper.

Eventually, when I get a chance. I will need to redesign this page. But until then...

I've been so busy that I haven't really been surfing around (ergo pretty much no nifty links), pared down just to /. now, but I did hunt around for the artificial lobster neuron article I saw briefly earlier. Sorta in line with the leech neuron computer from a while back. Also interesting is the artificial brain they're making. neural computing article here.

lots of exciting stuff "just around the bend."

10/13/99 3:42:24 PM
why no updates recently? because my classes are killing me. fourier transforms suck. art history readings also suck.

10/10/99 2:30:33 AM
/. q&a w/ Bruce Sterling. good stuff. heheh.

Bruce: I remember reading an essay by you about Burning Man a while back; you hauled your daughter along. I thought this move, besides indicating that you were an incredibly cool dad, pretty much marked the end of Burning Man as a "dangerous" underground phenomenom. Similarly, a number of different forces are transfroming the web-centric Internet into something increasingly bland. I know you're a long-time user of the Well, which is now owned by Salon, the Newsweek of the web.

Which leads me to my question. Do you think it's possible nowadays to create a sustained, independent, and transgressive community (a TAZ, if you will) without it being co-opted by society at large? Some of your old Catscan essays (particularly the one on Jules Verne) hint at what your response to this question would have been in the past, but I'm curious to hear what you have to say now.

*If you want a sustained, independent and transgressive community that can't be co-opted by society at large, you need to get out of the boho art scene, and right into organized crime. I mean, stop pretending that Burning Man is "dangerous." You're not fooling anybody. Mardi Gras in downtown New Orleans is more "dangerous" than Burning Man. There isn't a casino in Vegas that isn't ten times more dangerous than Burning Man. My kids went to Burning Man and had a better time than they would at Disneyworld.

*If you're way-into rebellious danger, I can especially recommend drug smuggling. It pays great, it's super-dangerous, and it's kind of the ne plus ultra of unacceptable outlaw subculture. Huge bureaucracies have been invented to try to make you stop existing. You get ritual handshakes, tattoos, slang, gangster molls, fast cars, the works! You may end up spending quite a lot of time in prison, but prison subcultures are the true havens of the congenitally un-cooptable.

*Going into exile in a country with a different ethnic base should also keep you happy. Kyoto, for instance, is full of cool Zen hipster guys who are white. There is zero chance that they will ever be "co-opted" by the Japanese. If you want the straights to pay no attention to you, just go to a place where your skin is a billboard for difference.