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Rapidly departing.

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There's a depression hanging overhead.

Tropical Depression Gustav should be departing shortly. The storm somehow migrated north and decided to stall over our fair state, which is now soggier.

Much, much soggier, after two days of nonstop rain and high-speed winds (for here) which has put roughly 80000 people out of electricity, my own household having been included in this number.

So… Arkansas is not tropical depression prone. It is landlocked, and the major bodies of water in the state are a large lake, and three rivers, the Red, the Mississippi, and the Arkansas.

So, let’s not say that the Gulf of Mexico ends up throwing its shit over here with regularity. I always figured something like this could happen, but hey, it has, and now it sucks.

So… freaky weather. It really looked like a hurricane thing overhead on the radar. Bizarre happenings, kind of. I mean, two fronts conspiring against my home isn’t uncommon, but tropical weather events aren’t made to tango with them. I would say something like menage a trois, but I’m sure there’s a lot of accents I don’t want to type, and that implies that the air is having sex.

It’s not, I think. It probably can’t, they don’t have those things that let them do that.

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Hey look it's Chrome.

Yes! Google has a browser, answering a need I had no idea I had. It’s pretty neat, although it doesn’t have AdBlock, and I have no idea how they’ll handle add-ons and such, and it’s rendering this text box strangely, the one I’m posting in, ignoring a large swath of text on the far left until I move the cursor over it with the whole arrow key thing. So, aside from my having no idea how to improve the experience, and the fact that I can’t customize the cool new tab thing manually, it’s pretty awesome. Like Opera and Safari had a baby, and then it got open sourced and removed of the bloat in Opera and the uselessness for everything but text and RSS reading that was Safari. Apparently it treats the tabs and the elements in the tabs as separate processes or something, which lets it crash one tab at a time if things fuck up. All sorts of technical sorcelations were involved, and there was a comic that explains all this drawn by one Scott McCloud, who apparently is into this whole comics on the ‘net thing.

So I give it five out of… seven Googles, since I can’t get the add-ons yet, I don’t know where they’ll be or how to get them either. This is a problem, worth two Googles. Granted, it’s incredibly new, but at least you could hint at how I’m getting these things, whether this thing is actually modular or whatever. I have no clue.

And it doesn’t have an integrated RSS reader! This is madness, where I come from at least (not Sparta, shut up).

The user interface is sleek too, so that’s at least a few Googles, and it’s really crazy fast, so there’s a few more.

Also! It came out today! This is breaking news, from Flexanimous, your one-stop shop for whatever the hell I feel like delivering whenever I feel like it.

Links to sate your curiosity, which must be burning a hole in you:
http://www.google.com/chrome/
http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/index.html

The last link is a McCloud’s comic which basically hurls the browser at you in a form that is almost insultingly easy to get. It’s presented in a way that makes you suspect it, but then again, you were suspecting it from the beginning, I’m sure.

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Internet Wasteland

theandrewwest:

I spend a great deal of time on the computer. Less than some unfortunate folks, but it’s surely over the daily quota for the typical sociable human being. I don’t do anything particularly productive online, mostly browsing news portals and niche blogs, but I have grown uncomfortably familiar with the so-called Internet subculture. As much as I consciously avoid the absurd mashups and cut-and-paste jokes, I’ve somehow amassed a metaphorical file cabinet of memes.

This is Internet culture. This is what real time, uncensored, unfiltered communication has wrought; memes and Internet celebrity. It is disappointing that the majority of netizens (to borrow the boardroom-friendly portmanteau) are so concerned with such frivolity.

To illustrate this, I’ll use Tumblr as an example. It’s a fantastic service to be sure, but the “reblog” feature seems to encourage group think to a mind numbing degree. Someone posts a remotely humorous infographic detailing the hierarchy of office politics. It is reblogged. Again. Again. Again. And again. Nothing new is added. After twenty people have posted the same thing, only one of them has said something. This is the equivalent to someone telling a joke at a party, then immediately after, everyone within earshot retelling the same joke, verbatim.

It’s not just the prevalence of recycled content that frustrates me. It’s the overall lack of original thinking. Every other form of mass communication has begun to grow stale; television, radio, glossy magazines. We’re relying on a future of truly democratic media, but if Youtube is any indication of what’s in store…no thnx.

 Reblogged for the… irony? For the lulz? Something like that.

Reblogged from theandrewwest.com.

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I should be posting more.

I promise to neglect all of my practically burgeoning readership a bit less.

I recently acquired Modest Mouse’s “We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank”. It’s an album. You might remember them for writing Float On, and performing it, and owning the copyright on it. They did that.

Either way! It’s good. The first song, Dashboard, or March Into the Sea, or whatever it is, is good. It’s the song that is catchy and goes on about how things could have been really worse. I enjoyed that tune quite a bit.

In dork related news, Clannad’s other bonus episode came out with the DVD, and it condenses the arc of the Tomoyo After game, which was more to the likings of the H-game crowd that Clannad didn’t really sate, I think. Maybe she was naked in it? I don’t really know, since I never actually played either game. I’m going on hearsay, by assuming that Clannad, a harem show had no nudity. The show itself came close, but gym outfits tend to. It had less suggestiveness than a more robot-oriented show like Code Geass, so I don’t know where it stands on the perversion scale. I’m hoping the consensus is that it’s more on the heartwarming romance end, since that’s what I got from it, and it made me feel fuzzy inside.

The second season is coming soon, I believe. Which will be good news, I guess.

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I am afeared in many many ways of Utah now.

This is amazing.

I mean it. They’ve got this really awesome quote in there, it goes:

Police who have been doing stings in Internet chat rooms for years now are going undercover to catch predators playing interactive games, ranging from Grand Theft Auto to old-fashioned chess and checkers. They’re making arrests.

Which means, sans bullshit, that a bunch of cops are being paid to play GTA and Uno on Live. Sign me up, I want that job. Oh, pretend like I want to meet the random people I play with? Sure. I mean, with a job like that, I would be in a good enough mood to make some friendships posing as a person only slightly younger than I am right now (I’m 16, which is still a molestable age, but not the target age, I think). I would love playing GTA and enforcing the law to be the same things, for once. And occasionally, I get to tell people to go arrest some pedophiles. I can’t be bothered to do it, in this awesome universe, because I am playing GTA, or Uno, or something. Maybe I’m playing Mass Effect or something. And if I join now, I don’t have to spend ages in IRC or some shit pretending to be a little girl or boy. Now I can play pretend (for the enticing/catching thing) and play another, more graphics-intensive game of pretend (because that’s the new pedophile hangout), which I enjoy more.

Maybe it’s like a promotion or something though, maybe Officer Bob spent 5 years catching guys in IRC and cultivating his status on MySpace as a molestable young girl, and long story short, Bob needed a promotion something fierce.

You may be wondering where in the budget these rigs are:

Farnsworth says her office has seized many Xbox machines for investigation and has received training from the maker, Microsoft, on how to extract text messages and other information from them.

From my reading, they’re taking Xboxes, getting the information they’re looking for, and then, presumably, harnessing the fell powers of said Xbox 360s to catch other predators. It’s a self-replicating cycle, and as far as I can tell, Microsoft heartily endorses this cycle. If I can get in on this, then I too shall endorse their tactics. Vigorously.

And another choice quote:

In another case, Kish says, a 10-year-old boy playing the Halo Xbox game got a video message from a man that showed the adult engaged in a sex act.

Which (an unrelated aside: note the phrasing of “the Halo Xbox game” because that is too cool) means that an asshole sent him some fucked up video to a person on his friends list. I mean, that’s pretty awful, but it’s still capable of being played for laughs. There are assholes on Xbox Live, but according to this article, they’re based in Utah. There’s no indication otherwise, so if you live in Utah, watch out. Strange things are happening near the Great Salt Lake.

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You know.

Hayate No Gotoku is like Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors, except it’s not. On second thought, that was a stupid thought. And a stupid sentence.

It’s really rather unlike it. There is comedy stemming from errors in this show, but I can’t presume to say it’s like Shakespeare. I mean, the show has robots and talking anthropomorphic tigers, and improbable hair and it also has people playing PSPs. They didn’t have those in the Bard’s time. Crisis Core wasn’t even a thought back then.

I must admit, this show makes anthropomorphism a very flexible concept, as the tiger willfully assumes it depending on the situation—you know, if he needs to maul someone or if he needs to make a joke about how paws make it difficult to press things. And they do make it difficult. Very difficult.

It’s nice to see anthropomorphism portrayed as being as silly as it actually is in a context where it is apparently a reality.

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There is a new theme.