August 2009
59 posts
Listen
David Bowie, “Always Crashing in the Same Car” (Low, 1977) 03:28
There aren’t many albums I enjoy more than Low. It’s the first in a stylistic trilogy of albums Bowie made with Brian Eno (the other two being “Heroes” and Lodger).
From an interview with producer Tony Visconti:
I remember David wrote a third verse to “Always Crashing In The Same Car” and sang it in the style of Bob Dylan. It was done half in jest, but we were a little freaked because Dylan had just been in that motorcycle accident and this seemed like bad taste, I guess. David asked me to erase it and I did. I can’t recall there being any alternative lyrics to any other songs.
Beating of the dead horse
So you are only allotted 20 stars a day on Favrd? Meaning, if you star more than 20 tweets in 24 hours starting at 8 p.m., they just don’t show up on that person’s Favrd page?
But they do show up on favstar.fm?
I don’t want starring to become a science, requiring strategy and timing and graphing calculators and levels and maybe some sort of cartography equipment. I just wanna laugh and let people know they made me laugh.
BOO.
EXCUSE ME?! Am I the only one that didn’t know this? Fuck that. CHANGE THAT SHIT. Ugh, if we all start shifting websites it’s going to make things so messy.
Not per day. It’s 20 stars per hour, or per whatever interval Favrd checks your favorites at. (I think this varies from user to user.) So just don’t go crazy with the stars and you’ll be OK.
Dean told me this in person, so unless he’s changed the way it works in the past few weeks, it’s fairly reliable intel.
Soliloquy
Realize I have to burp;
Realize I also have to sneeze;
Draw breath sharply to accelerate burp and delay sneeze;
Snurbeezp.
(scene)
Just a thought, but if there was an affordable health care option then the people who didn’t want to work 30 or more hours a week wouldn’t have to and the people who need to work 30 or more hours a week would be able to.
The economy would be in better shape because people would be more able to pursue those wacky dreams and create things instead of toiling away as nameless corporate drones or in the service industry and, most importantly, everyone would be happier.
Except for a handful of insurance industry executives who wouldn’t be able to afford their fifth house and a collection of movement conservatives who think tax dollars should only go toward blowing up brown people.
Well, we wouldn’t want that, I guess.
Sssshhhh. Don’t let them know you’ve cracked the code.
Republican legislators’ opposition to public healthcare is not because their campaigns are funded by the insurance and pharmaceutical industries. I mean, that’s part of it, but there’s a deeper reason that healthcare has been tied to employment since World War II, and in fact you can trace basically every conservative policy back to the same simple motivation: cheap labor.
Conservatives don’t advertise this, of course, because they don’t want you to see that all their sails are rigged to one hateful, ugly mast.
My take on the Sharks/Cats thing
(Background: In August 2009, Tumblr did a very weird thing and started a contest in which users could identify as either a Shark or a Cat, and they kept track of the total Tumblarity of each team over about four days.)
Mostly harmless.
Wish they’d instead spend their time fixing the iPhone app, or maybe improving Search so that it goes back more than two months, or fixing Drafts so they aren’t accessible by anyone on the internet without logging in, or even adding one or two reasonable features that people have actually asked for. But hey, Tumblr is an awesome platform and if they need to blow off steam once in a while, so be it, and besides, I’m not enough of an asshole to complain about something I get for free.
Oops.
(Update: in a comment, meaghano informs me that the Drafts behavior is a feature, not a bug. In that case, I think Tumblr should make it clear what’s going on: maybe a “Share this draft” link similar to the ones on private posts would be appropriate.)
Why I don't read Boing Boing much anymore
I’ve seen some complaints that the quality of the content on Boing Boing has gone down recently. I don’t agree. They have more contributors than they used to, so the range of topics and voices is more diverse; and there are more ads than in the early days. But they’ve also managed to keep their RSS feed ad-free mostly ad-free, and they’ve partitioned some of the less-mainstream material into separate sections with excellent independent curation. So my complaint is not about the content, which I still think is among the best on the internet. (Disclosure: I worked with one of the editors ten years ago, but I don’t think this fact has affected my opinion.)
It’s about the comments. Specifically, the practice of disemvoweling. When a commenter crosses a boundary of civility, a moderator will often push a button that removes the vowels from the offending portion of the comment. This is censorship.
Boing Boing’s chief moderator, Teresa Nielsen Hayden, and undoubtedly the rest of the Boing Boing staff will disagree with me. It’s not censorship because it’s their site, they will claim, and they have the freedom to choose what to publish and what not to. The moderation policy states this, in fact, and superficially the statement is correct. But there’s a subtlety: what they don’t have a right to do is attribute whatever text they want to whomever they want. Silently altering the content of a post, albeit in an algorithmic way, breaks a social contract, and it’s censorship just as the phone company bleeping your calls would be censorship, even though they own the phone lines.
When I read a comment that’s been disemvoweled, I can usually guess at the original content, though I have no way of knowing whether the author wrote it that way (to make a metatextual point) or not. But what’s more frustrating is the decontextualization of the discussion. Here are some of the bits of context that are destroyed or omitted when a post gets disemvoweled:
- The original, presumably offensive, text (though it can still be guessed at)
- Who (which moderator) altered it
- Why it was altered
- When it was altered
- Which replies, if any, were made before the alteration and which after
All of these omissions hurt the flow of the discussion for both readers and participants.
For example: one time, another user directed a slightly rude comment at me. I wasn’t offended, but I posted what I thought was a funny response, and a few people replied appreciatively. A little while later, a moderator disemvoweled the rude comment, which ruined my joke and made me and the people who liked my joke look, out of context, like assholes. Since there’s no way to edit or delete one’s own comments, there was nothing any of us could do.
Why don’t I just ignore the comment section? Well, mostly I do, and it’s been forever since I posted anything. But even just skimming the articles via Google Reader makes me want to click through and read the discussions now and again, which inevitably leads to anger at the approach to moderation.
Mrs. Nielsen Hayden is a literary editor by trade, which means she spends much of her time altering other people’s words. I’m sure she’s very good at it, but it just isn’t an appropriate tool for this trade. It’s destructive to the community, and I’ve had enough.
The Orange
An orange ruled the world.
It was an unexpected thing, the temporary abdication of Heavenly Providence, entrusting the whole matter to a simple orange.
The orange, in a grove in Florida, humbly accepted the honor. The other oranges, the birds, and the men in their tractors wept with joy; the tractors’ motors rumbled hymns of praise.
Airplane pilots passing over would circle the grove and tell their passengers, “Below us is the grove where the orange who rules the world grows on a simple branch.” And the passengers would be silent with awe.
The governor of Florida declared every day a holiday. On summer afternoons the Dalai Lama would come to the grove and sit with the orange, and talk about life.
When the time came for the orange to be picked, none of the migrant workers would do it: they went on strike. The foremen wept. The other oranges swore they would turn sour. But the orange who ruled the world said, “No, my friends; it is time.”
Finally a man from Chicago, with a heart as windy and cold as Lake Michigan in wintertime, was brought in. He put down his briefcase, climbed up on a ladder, and picked the orange. The birds were silent and the clouds had gone away. The orange thanked the man from Chicago.
They say that when the orange went through the national produce processing and distribution system, certain machines turned to gold, truck drivers had epiphanies, aging rural store managers called their estranged lesbian daughters on Wall Street and all was forgiven.
I bought the orange who ruled the world for 39 cents at Safeway three days ago, and for three days he sat in my fruit basket and was my teacher. Today, he told me, “it is time,” and I ate him.
Now we are on our own again.
Listen
Moxy Früvous, “Johnny Saucep’n” (01:26)
The only song I know of that 1) features a penny-whistle and 2) rhymes kitchen with Solzhenitsyn.
Basil endive Parmesan shrimp live lobster hamster Worcester Muenster caviar radicchio snow pea scampi Roquefort meat squirt blue beef red alert pork hocks side flanks cantaloupe sheep shanks provolone flatbread goat’s head soup Gruyère cheese angelhair please and a vichyssoise and a cabbage and the crawfish claws.
God I miss these guys.
