I think it's funny when people are up in arms about freedom of speech issues, but they only think it applies to their own opinions.

For example, the anti-war crowd is up in arms about this reporter being fired for going on Iraqi TV and saying that he didn't think the war was going well. They're screaming that he "has a right to his opinion". Well, yes, that's true. NBC also has the right to fire his ass for whatever reason they want.

It's just like when people will get mad at me for calling someone an idiot because I think their views or opinions are foolish. They'll say something about how everything is subjective, and X person has a right to their opinion. Yes, this is true. I also have a right to my opinion that they're an idiot. It works both ways, not just for the person you're defending.

Man, I really like this new song by The Roots, called "The Seed 2.0"

Go download it somewhere, or check out the video here. Yes, it's a windows format. Boo hoo for all you minority OS users.

http://boss.streamos.com/wmedia/mcarecords/roots/phrenology_10-02/video/the_seed_2_0/300_the-seed-2-0_320.asx

I must see this man live.

"I was playing for 3,000 girls and lesbians [opening for Ani DiFranco] in this gigantic venue, and they were all looking at me. I knew I had to do something, so I said, “I’ll play guitar, why don’t you all clap your tits." "

http://www.weeklydig.com/?ContentId=2759

He's apparently a one man blues show, in a racing outfit complete with helmet. He sings songs about boobs.

Yes, this is an old web meme, but I don't care. Someone just sent me this again today, and it kills me every time I watch it.

http://yocum.org/video/lastexit_terrys_world_dsl.mov

It's that Terry Tate, Office Linebacker reebok spot. If you've not seen it, Terry Tate works in an office and basically beats the shit out of anyone who breaks office etiquitte, and then talks trash at their prostrate bodies. It's hilarious.

Yet another tech commercial making me feel bad about the life I don't have. (Kind of like that "you will..." campaign a while back)

At http://www.nttdocomo.com/home.html, on the bottom right, there's a really neat little film about the miraculous technology that will be brought to us in the future, courtesy of NTT DoCoMo, of course.

Watching this kind of thing makes me a bit awed, and very wistful. Our current technology sucks. Our visions of the future are always so spectacular, and I want those toys and that life right NOW.

Hell of a little commercial though.

Oh, my dreams have come true. We're talking about games you play while you pee.

What fun. I wish they'd actually install these everywhere. People would go to certain bars because they had better games. The bars would sell more drinks because people would want to fill their bladders and go back and play. People would compete for high scores and what not. Oh, the fun we would have. Oh, the wonder of having a urine hose attached to my body.

What I really want is for them to make working out into a game, where workout equipment has some sort of video game aspect to it, so I'll actually do it more often. Maybe running machines with some sort of "race" interface, there's all kinds of ways to game-ify equipment and make it more entertaining and enjoyable.

I just finished Dirvish is Digital by Pat Cadigan, and I have to say, I'm not impressed. I've picked up most of her work, after absolutely loving Synners, but she's kind of gone bad. Her work is overly cynical on one hand, delving into really self indulgent "witty" dialogue with her characters, and even though the first half of the book started out interesting, it really fell to crap near the end. There was just no feel of realism to her digital world at all, it was like she couldn't decide whether to write cyberpunk or fantasy.

I keep buying her stuff because I really want to encourage women to write the type of science fiction that I really enjoy, there are almost no female authors in the cyberpunk-ish genre at all, but she's getting worse with every book she writes, instead of better. It's rare to see that in authors, the only other good example I can think of is Heinlein, who wrote some absolutely amazing stuff, and finished his career with garbage like The Number of the Beast.

Ah well. I'm out of new books again, having burned through my recent Amazon spending spree. I think maybe I'll re-read Signal to Noise, by Nylund. I haven't read that for years.

I'm getting a little sick of CNN reporting about the war and saying "We'll show you what our reporter Nic Robertson had to live through last night", as if the really difficult part is REPORTING a war as opposed to, oh, say, the soldiers fighting in the war. They get so busy sucking each other off for their fantastic reporting, and how amazing it is that they're located all over the action, they occasionally forget to keep their eyes on the prize. I don't give a god damn who your cameraman's name is, or your producer, or how your reporters had to drive 10 hours to get to Turkey. The reporters are NOT the story, unless you're Hunter Thompson.

I've been reading this journal of some kid about my age that went to LA to be part of the porn industry. It's really interesting, because he doesn't have any connections, and he's pretty spotty on motivations, he's always flat broke and scrounging $75 from dancing in a gay bar or doing some fake cum shot scenes. It's an odd look into the porn industry from someone trying to break into it, wandering around clueless talking to people and deciding if this is really what he wants to do with himself.

Porn guy's journal

Wow, this is pretty messed up. Some guy apparently jumped off the Golden Gate bridge to his death to protest the war.

The article is a little short on real motivations, or what he said, but the guy apparently had some issues. It's hard to believe he thought he was making the world a better place by leaving two young kids without a father.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/03/21/MN280768.DTL

I need to go to bed, but watching this war footage on TV live is strangely addictive. It's interesting to see the CNN reporters just about crapping their pants in excitement over covering this war, they're constantly talking about how badass their own technology is and how great their coverage is, it's hilarious. They're all standing around with erections.

But seriously, as I was watching, they reported the first battle casualty, they shot a goddamn scud missle out of the air over Kuwait (I didn't know we'd perfected that), and they're showing live footage from the tank divisions roaring across the desert toward Baghdad. They'll switch between live reports from Parlament, over to footage analysis of Saddam, who may have actually been killed in a strike earlier, back to live footage of burning oil wells, and reporters somehow have all this footage of Iraqi bunkers preparing for war. There's hundreds of Iraqi soldiers surrendering, live on television. We just raised the American flag over Umm Qasr, one of Iraq's major ports. They just hopped to live coverage of Tony Blair looking like he's about to cry because of a helicopter accident that killed 8 brits.

If you go to CNN.com, you can play with digital models of all of our aircraft, make the animations fire missles and execute maneuvers. You can look at live battle maps, updated as we capture airfields and towns. It's like information overload. I love it. I want TOTAL COVERAGE. I don't even want to go to bed, because I want to watch all of this as it unfolds. This isn't like getting delayed updates, or reading "flat" news hours after it happens, as our technology improves, our coverage becomes more impressive. What frustrates me is only having one television. I want five TVs, covering all the news stations, running all at once. I want to see everything, as it happens, with supporting technical specs and statistics. Dammit. I should have gotten in bed two hours ago.

This is hilarious. With what is quite possibly the only funny thing to ever come out of the frat quads back at CMU, we bring to you the pro-war rally:

pic 1

pic 2

My favorite is the "Honk if you love war" placard. I wish I could have been there for that.

Man, I got drunk last night to wash some absolutely disgusting images out of my head, and I may have taken it too far. I woke up at 6am this morning with what feels like alcohol poisoning and a tremendous hangover. At least I feel like a ritual cleansing has been done, removing from my mind some things that needed to be removed. I wish I had selective memory. I'm going back to bed.

As promised, here are the pictures from San Diego. I was going to make a nice pretty page, but then I got lazy, so it's just a big ass first gen page with a bunch of pictures on it, and modem people will probably hate me. Oh well. I'll take substance over style any day, especially if it's less work for me. Even those of you who don't give a rat's ass about my road trip will probably be amused by the picture of the burning Winnebago.

San Diego road trip pictures

I was just thinking, I wonder if we go to a system of purely digital money, will that be the end of people asking for change on the streets?

I've got some pictures from my San Diego trip this weekend that I'll be putting up soon, but I'm too tired right now.

For those people for whom strapping yourself to a rocket and firing it isn't fast enough, Dodge introduces the most ridiculous bike I've ever seen.

http://www.allpar.com/cars/concepts/tomahawk.html

I mean ridiculous in a good way, of course. I want one.

I think I ranted on here about www.ready.gov before, but someone put together a really hilarious interpretation of the informational pictures available on that site.

http://mywebpages.comcast.net/wlee1433/emergency.html

Thanks to Gulkis for finding these, I have the pleasure of showing you some upcoming INSANITY on cell phones.

First we have Splinter Cell for the cell phone:

http://www.infosyncworld.com/news/n/3203.html

That's just freaking nuts. My phone has java games enabled, and I stopped playing them pretty quickly because a phone pad is NOT A GOOD USER INTERFACE. My phone has about a billion cool little net and java-enabled doohickeys built in. I played with them for about a month after getting it, and then stopped, because it's just not enjoyable. Yet, they keep rolling out more and more crap on these phones. I swear to god, soon you'll be able to plug a keyboard into your phone. You probably already can.

Speaking of crazy, here's another one:

http://www.infosync.no/news/newsbits/show.php?id=2717

Everquest on a goddamn phone! Anyone who has seen or played this game knows that it needs a shitload of keyboard interaction, and even though this is going to be a neutered phone version, I don't know how well it's going to play. I already have serious doubts about the PS2 version they're rolling out, because FPS adventure games are crap on consoles. Maybe I've just been brainwashed by playing them on PC first, but I can't stand that type of interface with a controller, much less a PHONE.

Ah yes, summer rolls around and it becomes obvious to me why California is better than other parts of the country(if you ignore the rent, and the socialist government). I have friends who are still putting on jackets to go outside, and today was the first day of TOP DOWN weather out here. Oh convertible, how I love you.

I'm going on a road trip down to San Diego this weekend, and weather permitting, I'm gonna be rolling down the coast with a hawaiian shirt and a car with no top. Mmm.

Here's something I never expected to hear.

I caught on the radio today that there's a woman somewhere on the east coast who is taking a company to court for worker's compensation for her wrists. She's hurt them from repetitive stress. What from, you ask? Well, she works at a phone sex line, and she regularly masturbates on the phone for her customers.

On one hand, you have to give this woman props for realism. On the other hand, no guy is going to be able to tell if you're faking that orgasm on the phone. Even still, worker's comp for masturbator's wrist has got to be a new one.

Oh hell yes. HELL YES.

http://www.sonypictures.com/cthe/cowboybebop/

Cowboy Bebop, the movie. Did I say hell yes?

If you're looking for some hard hitting, intelligent reporting on the war in Iraq, look no farther than:

http://iraq.mtv.com

That's right, here you can find such articles as "Who Is Tony Blair? [An MTV News Video Report]", and " U2's Bono Discusses The Situation In Iraq And The War On Terrorism". Oh MTV, thank you for once again lowering the bar and spoon feeding sound bytes to this nation's youth, giving them just enough information to be loudly and belligerently uninformed.

I think I just might have to change my underwear now.

This was announced a while back, but I never got around to looking at it till today:

http://www.intothematrix.com/

Here you can watch two of the nine planned animated Matrix episodes (based on the world established in the Movie) for free, you just download and drooooool. They'll be releasing one more a month for the next two months.

It's amazing, the Matrix is a total franchise now, but all this material is so fresh and so incredibly well done that I think I can watch all four episodes, and both planned movies this year, and still be dying for more.

Go watch them now, they're fucking amazing.

Ah, the internet. Source of information, instant communication, it's changing the world and making our lives better.

It also allows us to see what it's like when a really fat woman tries to put on jeans too small for her.

Miss your boyfriend when he goes away for the weekend?

Never fear! You can make your own perfect rubber copy of your boyfriend's penis and use it as a dildo!

Rubik's cube art. That's pretty weird.

What I want to know is if they cheated, or if they actually arranged all these cubes one by one into the appropriate shape.

I was shown a sweet new webgame today. It's very similiar to the old BBS games I used to play back in the day. It's really great mindless entertainment if you have a minute at work or something. Kings of chaos!

You become a soldier in an army, and you get to pick to be a dwarf, human, orge, or elf. You sign up under a commander and recruit new people. Every thirty minutes you get more attacks and money, and you get to attack any of the other players. You use your money to buy better weapons, etc. I just started playing with it, but it looks like a lot of fun, it doesn't take much time, it's just a good break.

So check it out, click on this link:

http://www.kingsofchaos.com/page.php?id=323154

If you click there, you can join into my army, and we can RULE THE WORLD together.

Even if you don't want to play, I'd really appreciate it if you clicked on the link. :) Every IP address is allowed to click on it once every 24 hours, and every time they do it adds another soldier to my army, even if you don't join the game. So if you want to be my best friend, you'll click that link once a day, just to bulk up my army. Enjoy!

God, Jon Stewart rocks my world. Today on the Daily Show, he played a clip where newspeople are interviewing the sister of that big Al Qaeda guy we caught, and she's complaining about his horrible mistreatment, like not being able to wear his slippers, so he might get sick. Here's Jon:

"And if you can believe this, there was probably more brutality than the stretched t-shirt and lack of slippers! The raiders left a scene of utter devistation in their wake, breaking not one but TWO doorknobs in their draconian effort to arrest one of the most dangerous men of all time! The wretched display of American imperalism has already prompted a new book by Noam Chomsky called 'Knock Knock: America's Secret War on Doorknobs'. It's available wherever books that make people think they look smart are sold"

Is it just me, or is almost all of Steven Tyler's singing style cribbed from the extended jam session at the end of Hey Jude by the Beatles?

If any of you haven't seen this site yet, you have to go read it. It's not new, it's been around for a long time, but I just went back today after not seeing it for a while, and it's still hilarious. He even has a bunch of new fake CNN articles about a lawsuit he was "involved" in.

http://www.realultimatepower.net/

It's about ninjas, and how they're totally sweet. The purpose of the ninja is to flip out and kill people.

I just watched a special called "Hackers: Outlaws and Angels" on TLC.

It was decent. There's the usual awful analogies, terrible garbage like "Hackers trying to unleash the Pearl Harbor of the internet", which makes me cringe. They got a couple things right, and it cracked me up at one point where they talked about a computer network being "0wn3d, in hacker terminology". That was pretty good.

They do a little overview of hacker philosophy, the tired hacker/cracker terminology debate, they give background on a couple cases like Code Red, and show how to wardrive. There are some interview bits with famous guys like Captain Zap, which was nice. It's especially funny because he's a fat old man now, which makes me think about how long hacking has been around now. Back when I was hacking in like '92, it was still the "golden age" in that there were absolutely no security precautions of any significance, but some of these bastards had been doing it for over a decade before I did, and it's weird to see an old hacker using modern slang and talking shit.

It's especially funny to see how they "hip" the presentation, with people overlaid on top of graphics showing "hacker" backgrounds like the dos prompt executing a file called hack.bat. Oooooh! Badass!

Anyway, for all the crap, it's certainly interesting, and if you didn't know anything about hacking, it'd probably be somewhat informative.

Blank CDs that look like vinyl records. That's pretty badass, especially for making music CDs or something.

http://www.buy.com/retail/product.asp?sku=10333253

My favorite voice actor in the world has got to be H. Jon Benjamin. He was Ben on Dr Katz, and he was the utter genius of both Jon McGuirk and Jason on the animated show Home Movies. He's also made guest appearances on Aqua Teen Hunger Force and Space Ghost. Anyway, I never knew much about him or what he looked like, but I can recognize his voice in about two seconds flat, because it's so distinctive. I was flipping through the channels today, and Not Another Teen Movie was on. There was this really quick bit where the coach's assistant, this normal looking balding guy, tells the coach that some kid can't play in a football game, and out of his mouth came the voice! I checked IMDB, and that was indeed him. How odd. So now I've seen him.

Yeah, like any of you even watch Home Movies, or have any idea what I'm talking about, dammit. You really, really should. It's still playing a couple times a week on cartoon network, and it's freaking hilarious. Go watch it, so you'll recognize the genius of H Jon Benjamin.

I really, really like karate movies. Old school, new school, you name it. In the last 24 hours, I've had a Jet Li overload, I watched Kiss of the Dragon, and Cradle 2 The Grave.

One thing that's nice about Jet Li is the pure force of his hits. You really get to see him beat the living shit out of someone, as opposed to lots of movies, like Jackie Chan, for example, where the acrobatics and tricks will be nice, but he just seems like he's slapping his enemies around. Jet Li shoves chopsticks through someone's throat, or breaks their neck.

It's too bad that in real life, taking any sort of martial arts just tends to make people annoying.

This is a fascinating study of dialectic trends in different parts of the country. There are 122 questions about things like how do you say "coupon", or "what do you call the little grey creature that rolls into a ball when you touch it", and lots of other interesting stuff. Then they coordinate the answers by region of the US, and show you a picture of the results.

What's really interesting here is that a lot of trends that I would expect to be localized are actually pretty well distributed throughout the country. What I really wish is that I could look at data for these questions every ten years, for the last hundred. Back before instant communication, and before we all used to move often and travel widely, these things would have been in isolated pockets, and the country would look like blotches. There are still area-wide trends, but you can really see the scatter effect of media and travel.

http://hcs.harvard.edu/~golder/dialect/maps.php