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February 8th, 2011

03:14 am Above: "Brazen Disregard" photo from the pool for my personal flickrgroup and yes, I know the place needs work. I'm getting to it. Chicago at its best: In this photo and a few more to come, you're going to get to watch some laws get more than a little bent, as we watch another piece of Chicago's rapidly vanishing architectural heritage go away for no good reason; you're going to get to hear a part of the story that didn't get onto the news. This Joseph Dunphy Homepage Webring site is owned by Joseph Dunphy, oddly enough. Next | Prev | Next 5 | Prev 5 | Members | Random | Join

03:28 am Right: Illustration for the programmable tattoo article on Hacked Gadgets, a technology newsblog on the ring. Randomizer - Random WebSites Prev | Ring Hub | Join | Random

03:35 am Right: Taken from a performance video by Keith Michael Johnson, which I found on the Bubbles Video Frame Page on DewsWorld. Random Ring Prev | Ring Hub | Join | Next | Random

03:37 am Above: Thumbnail of picture from the GrailQuest story on PrivyPages, a site run by an antique glass collector who digs for his treasures, who, recalling a past excavation, decides to share ... Online Journals: Prev | Ring Hub | Join | Next | Random

03:43 am Left: Still shot from a video of a performance by David "Honeyboy" Edwards, which I found on "Had to Blog Today", a weblog focused on the Blues, found on the ring. .. Reviews .. Prev | Hub | Join | Next | Random

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03:49 am Left: August 12, 1877 ... Thomas Edison, anticipating the creation of the Vinyl Fanatics website, decides to invent the phonograph. Reviews Online: Prev | Hub | Join | Next | Random

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04:03 am Above: Thumbnail of screenshot from one member site on the ring, a page devoted to the work of the artist, Jeffrey Spalding, to be reviewed here. Should that site ever go down, it might be preserved in this location in the Internet Archive. The Cyberculture Webring: Join | Hub | Random | Prev | Next

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05:05 am You're still here. Calm down. No, man, I did not call the cops on you, I would not do you like that, and they were too busy to come, anyway, so I don't know what you're worried about. Fine. Grab a cot, but I am not making you breakfast tomorrow morning and that's that. Just don't break anything, OK? Aw, Geez ...

05:07 am OH COME ON! OK, look, this is really starting to freak me out. Could you just like, you know, go home. I mean, it's not like you live here. Just ... go, OK? I mean ... door, knob, put one foot after the other ... out into the refreshing night air, or whatever the virtual equivalent of that would be. D**n, you're not budging. I don't get this. Is it 5:03 am already? Look, I've got to get some sleep. I have stuff to do tomorrow. You aren't going to make me call the cops, are you? This is not cool.

05:13 am You're still here? Go home. Like, you know, man, isn't somebody waiting for you? Aren't they going to wonder what's going on, because I sure am. Woah - I'm not judging you. Dude, like, you know, I'm not trying to tell you how to live, I'm just saying you don't have to go home, you just can't stay here. Good night. Drive safely.

05:18 am OK, maybe not that soon. Did you hear the part where I said that you had read the last review? That there weren't any more posts? I mean ... it's nice having you around, but I don't know what you're waiting for ... no offense. I hope none was taken. You can show yourself out. Nice seeing you.

05:23 am That's all there is, at least for now. You've read it all, nothing more to see. Thank you for dropping by, and if you're interested in knowing when there will be more posts, I've recently set up an update list for my social networking sites. Every once in a while, when there's another page or two worth of reading material, I'll send out a brief summary, if there seems to be any interest. Which I guess you've already shown, if you've read all of the way to here. Thanks, I'm flattered. Thanks for taking the time to drop by, and hope to see you back soon.

05:30 am - Jackson Pollock by Miltos Manetas, original design by Stamen At first, I didn't care for this site in the least, writing of how I had always "hated those javascript things that leave beads or something else hanging off one's cursor" and even, if you can imagine this, gentle reader, questioned the merit of Pollock's work. My eyes were waiting to be opened, as they soon would be. Trying out the software on this page, I found that I was, indeed, far too harsh in my initial appraisal. As I created the masterpiece you see above if you're reading this on my blog, I was intrigued by the way in which that Jackson Pollock look (that those truly in the know have come to appreciate) was best achieved was for me not to linger, but to race my mouse around so quickly that I couldn't think much about what I was doing, sending the cursor careening around the screen far more quickly than my eye could follow, or would want to, splashing color as it went. First black! Then green! Or would it be red? With each tap the color would change, one would never know what to in advance, and the more I embraced the fact that I had absolutely no idea of what I was doing, the more Pollock-like my efforts became. I had arrived. I had found myself as a painter. Fascinated as I was by the power of such a fearlessly randomised aesthetic, I pondered the possible course of my life as a newly made artist, in this brave new world to be made by our love of such unpredictable beauty, a love which I'd let touch everything I did, for that is the path to greatness. Tenure would surely be close at hand. I wondered where one would hang a piece as this. I imagined it hanging in a campus library stocked with scholarly works such as these articles (1 and 2) which I wrote with a little help from the Postmodernism Generator, while off in the background one could hear the faint notes of music such as this drifting in from a concert hall across the quad. Huddled over, I would be busy producing enduring works of scholarship such as these, racing through my day because I'd know that a new play by Bryn Magnus of the Curious Theatre Branch would soon open, and I had not yet partaken of recreational pharmaceuticals in sufficient bulk to fully appreciate Bryn's writing. There is a knock at the door. Is that? ... why, yes, it is! My beloved Lucretia has taken time from her labwork to drop by with a few words of encouragement and a cup of her homebrewed espresso, lightly fermented and seasoned with just a hint of kelp; I smack my lips and savor the briny caffeination. I don't know how I'd get through my day without her. The delicate scent of orchids and overripe durian rises from the gardens below, gently teasing my nostrils, as ... I shall never know what was to come, for the shorting of my keyboard from the drool accumulating on it has roused me from my reverie, and I have lost my train of thought. Alas, no bathtub full of sea urchins to greet my weary bones at the end of a long day tutoring, no academic recognition of my computer generated brilliance, not even Lucretia, for she is but a dream. But I still do have this lovely, lovely painting and the inspiring thought that I live in a society that would salute the work of a visionary like Jackson Pollock and all that work such as his represents and really, shouldn't that be far more than enough? Posted December 16, 2007 1:45 am at original location

08:25 am - Pretty Lady / ohprettylady.blogspot.com If you've ever wondered what it would be like to read the journal of a spoiled brat who defined enlightenment as being the willingness of others to satisy her every whim without question ... then I'm assuming that you weren't in the United States during the 1990s. No matter, if you missed that decade the first time around and for some reason regret the loss, the spirit of what should be a bygone and perhaps best forgotten cultural era lives on in this woman's writings. I tried to review one of the posts on this blog, one entitled On Picking Up Checks, but the Stumbleupon system wouldn't let me discover the site. I went there, clicked on the "thumbs down" button, and nothing happened. Then I found that somebody had discovered the blog itself, and decided that posting here would do. While reviewing an entire blog based on a single post might seem a little hasty, the post was so thoroughly obnoxious that I found myself feeling far more comfortable with the idea of doing that, than with that of crawling around in the muck of the author's mental world any more than I already had. The author writes: "Women, girls, self-described 'feminists' all: listen to the voice of experience. Check-paying has nothing to do with equality between the genders, good sex, or feminism. Check-paying is the simplest, most accurate method of ascertaining whether you are on a date with a man, or with a bizarre specimen of animated pond slime." going on to engage in a feeding frenzy like binge of character assassination directed against those men who ask the woman to split the check on a date, listing all of the distasteful things that they will supposedly do, and never mind the fact that plenty of couples can be found who have split the check, in which the men have done none of these things. The strikingly ugly "prettylady" goes on to write "A man who does not pick up the check is a man who values his pocketbook more than he values your opinion. ... In short, any man who does not appreciate the privilege of being allowed to take you to dinner for the simple glory of your lustrous presence should be shunned like the mutant he is." an arrogant remark that makes her remark about the "man whose ego is so out of control that he believes he is God's gift to promiscuous women" all the more amusingly ironic The question that she doesn't seem to grasp is a question is why the man should feel any more or less privileged to be on the date than the woman; is his company worth less than hers? One hears a demand that the man show his appreciation of the woman, but not even the slightest hint of how the woman ought to be reciprocating or even of any tolerance of the notion that she might; note the quoted comment about the man valuing his checkbook more than the woman's opinion. But in context, what is the woman's opinion about? Whether or not he ought to be opening his checkbook for her, in effect paying her for her company, and what was the technical term for that, again? We are left with a dire warning that such a man might respond to an unreasonable request with the word "no". As I mentioned on this page over at Google, the fact of the matter is that we do live in an era in which anti-male discrimination is rampant in the workplace, and so if anything, one could make a reasonable case that the woman should be the one picking up the check, in our (post-baby boomer) generation, because she is the one who has found the doors of opportunity being opened, instead of being slammed in her face and bolted shut. Were we living back in the world of years past, expecting the man to pay might have made some degree of sense, because the man was far likelier to have money to spend, but in a world which has radically changed and rendered those expectations obsolete, we have some like this author who, in a wholy unprincipled and adversarial way, is fighting to make sure that she keeps what's hers, and that other women don't undermine her by daring to act reasonably and taking present realities into account when making decisions in the present. I'm not surprised that her date abandoned her; I'm not sure why he asked her out in the first place. (Originally posted December 28, 2007 at 7:56 am)

08:49 am - SomaFM: Listener Supported, Commercial Free Internet Radio These are the people I wrote about over on MOG. Excellent site.

08:52 am - Why Can't I Own a Canadian? A nice rebuttal to offer to the sort of alleged worshipper who thinks that having read Torah, that one need not think about it, found in a response to gay bashing remarks made by the radio personality "Dr.Laura".

09:01 am - Pangloss Wisdom A random selector of amusing quotes, for some of which the site owner has neglected to provide attributions.

09:10 am - Mark Jenkins // Street Installations Photographic culture jamming ... more

09:18 am - omg! Celebrity gossip, news, photos, babies, couples, hotties, and more "OMG! It's like Britney got her head shaved, and it's like so not happening girl and who even knows what Lindsay is up to and oh! oh! squeal!" Puke. One of the ugliest site designs I've ever seen as Yahoo, fresh from destroying its distinctive blogging community, decides that it wants to put its effort into an attempt to get into the Tabloid industry, while Google brings us offerings like Google Scholar, which gives the reader abstracts of articles in academic journals. How comforting that Google is doing so much better than Yahoo, under the circumstances. It almost begins to restore my faith in humanity. But you're free to read this trash if you want to. Just don't tell me about it, afterwards.

09:29 am - Miss Universe Has a Wardrobe Malfunction Liking this video for all of the wrong reasons. OK, probably a little embarassing for the very beautiful woman in the video, but on the other hand, one doesn't end up seeing anything that one wouldn't see at the beach, anyway, so I don't have to feel that guilty about having seen this. Do I?

09:34 am - The New Chivalry A reasonably well written rant about one of the more annoying aspects of radical feminism. While the author is guilty of mixing the occasional metaphor - "But that's modern feminism: preach equality, accept favoritism, win with stacked decks, pretend you had no advantage, then rub salt in the wound." - one knows exactly what he is saying, and those small seeming imperfections do not detract from this piece ... more Tags: feminism, hypocrisy, mens-rights

09:42 am - Ariel Levy on Standards of Beauty Video to be found here. Smug rumination on the blindingly obvious (the unnaturalness of the look of the centerfolds in Playboy) that misses a key point - those models do not represent any sort of universal male ideal of beauty in this (American) or any other society. While I won't disagree with the idea that the promotion of such a standard would have a chilling effect on the libido and thus on the species' ability to propagate itself, I will take serious issue with the way in which Levy hints that men in general should be lumped in with that magazine's subscriber base. The scenario put forth would be a bad one, but she slides past the question of whether or not it would be a terribly realistic one. Listening to her, I am left with the impression that we are asked to take for granted that we should assume just that, and such a suggestion is as irritating as that affected prep school accent of hers. I am very, very tired of seeing men in general casually lumped in with the dirty yellow raincoat brigade one can see scurrying into adult bookstores across the land by women who just assume that all men enjoy that kind of literature and what it represents. Most of us deserve better than that, and if Ms.Levy hasn't seen that for herself, then that is the case because she wasn't willing to look. Her misandry is out on display for all to see, and it isn't a pretty sight. Tags: ariel levy, male bashing, radical feminism, sexism

09:48 am In connection to my review of Pretty Lady, I was amused to find that for once, a troll had neglected to stay anonymous. Here is the resume of the author, one Stephanie Lee Jackson.

09:51 am - U.S. To Phase Out Incandescent Light Bulbs Pursued on a national level, this cause is a remarkably stupid one, for reasons I've given in this blog post. Add this one to an already lengthy list of reasons to despise George II even more than George I; guess who signed this silliness into law ... read article

10:10 am - How to hug a baby Zero points for hipness or print quality, but a very cute, sweet moment on film between a child and a family pet. It does seem an unwise shot to take, however. Even if one can completely trust the dog to not attack, the species is not noteworthy for its gracefulness, and as others have noted, that is a very small baby. If the dog accidentally flops over at the wrong moment, the consequences could be tragic. Enjoy the photos, but please don't redo the shot.

10:22 am - Drawings with LSD :: Chicken ... "excrement" On this page, we see a series of pictures allegedly made by an artist who has taken LSD, starting with one made before he took the drug, through the course of his trip, to one made after he came down, with comments about what he was saying during the course of this experiment, supposedly carried out during the 1950s. The kindest thing one can reasonably say is that he isn't getting any more creative. Comparisons to modern day gallery work become inevitable. Tags: arts, drug use

10:27 am - Stuck in Customs / New Top Ten - Your End-Of-Year Favorites, 2007 Images of striking subjects, with a slight and what is at first an attractive touch of surrealism, that loses much of its appeal on repeat viewing. Interesting, but it needs work ... visit site Tags: hdr, photography

10:42 am - Second Life / First Posted Jan 13, 2008, 3:54 am Very, very strange and very often, not a very good strangeness ... social networking site minus the social networking. Some of the locations are pretty to look at, in a minimalistic kind of way, but after a while it all looks alike. Even worse, perhaps, for a site that claims to have millions of users, Second Life offers a virtual world that seems strangely deserted. One can find oneself visiting location after location trying to find somebody, anybody to interact with, only to find a few and watch them suddenly vanish, one after another after another. Weird. I know that a lot of netizens are shy, but just how timid does one have to be to run in fear from a cartoon? Not that being snubbed is a given. Some places in SL seemed friendly, but even in them one is eventually posed with the question "what am I doing here". Picture playing a video game with the monsters removed. What's left? Something that is to chatrooms as the Web is to Usenet, perhaps - something that has been given structure where there was structurelessness and enriched that structure with graphic and sometimes audio content. That could be cool, if only there was a discussion to be had, but in SL, there almost never seems to be, especially if, out of curiosity, one wanders in with a visibly South Asian looking avatar whose name hints of partially Middle Eastern ancestry to see how the other users will react. Maybe not entirely out of curiosity - the Second Life system sharply limits the user's choice of username. Just like in real life in the Western World, one has a first name and a last name, but SL limits one's choice of surname to one of a few dozen, with a seeming attempt to cover every culture known to man in that selection ... I think forty family names were available. As there are millions of distinct user accounts on the SL system, this results in some very predictable frustration as the would-be user chooses combination after combination, only to be told that it is not available. Finally, one grabs an exotic name out of the air thinking "I'll bet nobody has this one" and one is right. All users have been through this, and the problem is understood and yet, to my amazement, I could still see other users react strangely to the fictional name of the animated character I guided through a cartoon world, as if they could possibly be endangered by such a thing. While virtual racism was hardly ubiquitous, some (mostly European and Midwestern US) users being very friendly and outgoing, it wasn't scarce, either. From the Teutonic surnamed icon whose user seemed to be attempting to physically attack me, oblivious to the fact that I was not my icon and my icon couldn't be physically injured even in the virtual sense by anything another user did, to the multitude of young female icons (many of whom, I had cause to suspect, were being run by lonely men in San Francisco's Castro District) whose owners would type expressions of revulsion and older ones which would act as if I had just tried to panhandle as I approached them, Second Life offered me a rich assortment of users who just, really, really badly needed to get a grip. I wondered how they would have reacted had they known that the "Arab terrorist" who they just cold shouldered away was, in fact, a nice Jewish boy from Chicago. How would their perceptions have been affected as those who held them discovered that they mirrored stereotypes for a group to which the object of their supposedly righteous scorn and rage did not actually belong? Would come to see those perceptions as being something that their expectations had imposed on their supposedly fairminded and objective observations this time? Could they be motivated enough to wonder on how many other occasions they had seen the actions of others through such an easily distorted perspective? Might they consider the possibility that their prejudices might need more careful examination, or would they have clung to their delusional worries for dear life, inventing such facts as they needed to keep their fixations from perishing? I suspect the latter would have been closer to the truth. Many users seemed to have a real problem in distinguishing between fantasy and reality, actually showing visible signs of feeling threatened by the swarthy giant of a stranger appearing on their screens, and in the process revealed a little more reality than they intended. My personality didn't change just because I created a new cartoon character. I was my usual low key self; their expectations did all of the work for them as they created threatening encounters in their own minds which had never existed in reality. That's more than a stray nuisance that comes with the experience, it is something that, by its very nature, redefines the experience, and not in a good way. While one may be amused by the thought "by day, he tutors math students at Hillel over bagels and lox, by night he's the most confused operative in all of Al Quaeda", one should come back to what is what should be the basic question of one asks oneself about any social networking effort, online or off in which one participates - "Am I meeting the sort of people who I would be proud and happy to know and be known by, or at the end of the cliched day, am I going to be left wondering why I came, and why I didn't leave a lot sooner?" By now, I think that the question answers itself, and that the reader will not be surprised to hear that I retired my avatar. Aside from offering me the company of those special souls who made me feel so glad that I had not filled out the "first life" section of my profile, Second Life offered me other delights as well, before I decided that the time had come for that game to be over. I had frequent browser crashes using SL, and this seems to be a common problem, if arguably not much of a loss, given how little of that virtual world one is free to explore - the concept of "private property" having made a major appearance in a setting where one finds people spending real money on fake land and seeing nothing odd about this. What we find is that on a site devoted to "your world. your imagination", what many users like to imagine is a world in which they get to chase everybody else off the beach and little is to be found other than virtual clothing stores and condos, populated by people who, if they can't have the decency to be Anglo-Saxon, can at least be courteous enough to fake it. Welcome to virtual Schaumburg.