jwz

dope nope pope hope grope hope

jwz@jwz.org — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 05:28:56 GMT

mixtape 052

jwz@jwz.org — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 17:02:30 GMT

Fifty-two! That means I've been doing this for a year now. I wasn't sure I was going to be able to keep up the pace, but it's been easier than I thought.

To close out the year, here's a very old one: as far as I can tell, I actually made this mixtape in late 1985. On a cassette. From records. The tape itself has long since decayed into unplayability, but I still have the track listing, so I reconstructed it (and the map becomes the territory).

Apparently I made this tape right around the time that DNA Lounge first opened!

Unicode Snowman

jwz@jwz.org — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 00:23:06 GMT

http://☃.net/

A penis ocean. Yes, a penis ocean.

jwz@jwz.org — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 18:00:45 GMT

Here is some surreal french cartoon porn
masquerading as a condom PSA:

The one for the other team is marginally less bizarre:

More here and here.

Previously.

"Licking Valley High School"? Seriously?

jwz@jwz.org — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 18:52:52 GMT

Girl labeled sex offender for nude phone pics of herself

NEWARK -- A 15-year-old girl is accused of distributing nude photos of herself to other minors, and one state legislator is questioning whether she should be labeled a sex offender.
The Licking Valley High School student was arrested Friday after school officials discovered the materials and brought in the school's resource officer for a police investigation. After spending the weekend incarcerated, she pleaded deny Monday to both charges: illegal use of a minor in nudity-oriented material, a second-degree felony; and possession of criminal tools, a fifth-degree felony.

I'm guessing that by "criminal tools" they mean "cell phone"?

Licking County Assistant Prosecutor Erin Welch said Monday the investigation into the incident remains open, including exploring whether charges will be filed against the minors who received the photos. If the prosecutor's office elects to bring those teens into court, they could be facing a different section of the same charge pending against the sender of the pictures and classification as sex offenders, as well.
If the girl charged Monday is classified as a sexual offender, Brindisi said as a juvenile in this instance she would not be subject to publication on the public Web sites maintained by the Licking County Sheriff's Office or the state but would have to register for 20 years as the law states.

dnalounge update

jwz@jwz.org — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 02:09:28 GMT

DNA Lounge update, wherein there's something about dead stiff squirrels.

SNL VP debate

jwz@jwz.org — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 04:57:54 GMT

Awesome again.

Previously, previously.

singing the doom song again

jwz@jwz.org — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 04:36:15 GMT

Rep. Brad Sherman says members of Congress were secretly threatened with martial law if the bailout didn't pass immediately:

Naomi Wolf (naomiwolf_org) says we're already completely screwed:

mortgage doom

jwz@jwz.org — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 04:29:21 GMT

Here's a "This American Life" transcript that is the most comprehensible explanation of the mortgage mess that I've seen so far. (Why it's PDF instead of HTML, I couldn't tell you.)

youtube pause

jwz@jwz.org — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 01:15:02 GMT

I can't figure out how the hell you report a bug to Youtube, other than by posting in an obviously-ignored honeypot forum, so I guess I'll just post my bug report here and hope that my LJ is read by a Youtube developer or someone who knows a Youtube developer. (This trick has worked before...)

Dear Youtube,

It used to be that I could press play on the video player and then immediately press pause, to allow the whole video to silently buffer. That no longer works. Now I have to wait until enough of the video has been downloaded that it actually starts playing before I can pause it. This is very irritating, because it means that I can't just press play+pause and then hide the window to come back to it later: I have to sit there and wait 10+ seconds for it to start squawking at me first, then drag the slider to the left, then press pause. Lame! I should be able to press the pause button even if zero bytes of the video have been downloaded.

Pointy, too.

jwz@jwz.org — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 22:57:53 GMT

Last night I dreamed I had a bad cold and was coughing up phlegm, except instead of phlegm, it was two-headed centipedes with beaks.

You're welcome.

mixtape 051

jwz@jwz.org — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 19:35:31 GMT

Please enjoy jwz mixtape 051.

I lolled:

jwz@jwz.org — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 04:20:56 GMT

But at this part I did not lol:

Congratulations taxpayers! Your senators have ridden to the rescue and approved a piece of legislation that should ungum the credit crunch. You'll now be able to buy that car. In the process, your lawmakers also approved extended tax breaks for the film industry in Puerto Rico, and for the makers of "certain wooden arrows designed for use by children."
I kid you not.
I won't bore you with the details, but if you're interested, the Puerto Rican film industry provision is on page 298 of the massive 400-plus page bill, which the senators approved Wednesday evening to Save Americans.
"The exemption from excise tax for certain wooden arrows designed for use by children," provision occurs shortly after that.
That provision is then followed by another that allows people who received income from the settlement of the Exxon Valdez oil spill litigation to treat it as income from the fishing industry for tax purposes.

San Diego Has a Mighty Herd

jwz@jwz.org — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 20:17:28 GMT

San Diego Has a Mighty Herd

The commentary is pretty fine too. And it doesn't even mention the "Look out! here comes an S!" apostrophe.

Previously.

life, art, and something about imitation.

jwz@jwz.org — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 19:56:23 GMT

Exhibit A:
Shepard Fairey

Exhibit B:
Official Denver Police Union
Democratic National Convention
Commemorative T-Shirt

every time I look at this, I see something new.

jwz@jwz.org — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 02:59:17 GMT

"It was like watching Gidget address the Reichstag"

jwz@jwz.org — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 22:49:08 GMT

A fine rant by Matt Taibbi:

Sarah Palin is a symbol of everything that is wrong with the modern United States. As a representative of our political system, she's a new low in reptilian villainy, the ultimate cynical masterwork of puppeteers like Karl Rove. But more than that, she is a horrifying symbol of how little we ask for in return for the total surrender of our political power.
Not only is Sarah Palin a fraud, she's the tawdriest, most half-assed fraud imaginable, 20 floors below the lowest common denominator, a character too dumb even for daytime TV -and this country is going to eat her up, cheering her every step of the way. All because most Americans no longer have the energy to do anything but lie back and allow ourselves to be jacked off by the calculating thieves who run this grasping consumer paradise we call a nation.

Dear SNL, stop being hilarious. It's freaking me out.

jwz@jwz.org — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 21:27:52 GMT

Palin/Couric Interview

Previously.

mixtape 050

jwz@jwz.org — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 19:30:06 GMT

Please enjoy jwz mixtape 050. Fifty! Have some instrumentals. I haven't done one of these in a while.

Spotted in the wild:

jwz@jwz.org — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 18:33:22 GMT

I thought dinosaurs were extinct.

Bill Maher: Occasionally funny.

jwz@jwz.org — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 18:25:15 GMT

Now, take a look at these pictures. Here are the CEOs of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG and the Lehman Brothers. I know the first thing that jumps out about these faces is that they all happen to be white, and they all happen to be responsible for stealing. But what you have to understand is that these whites are a product of a society that made them that way. It was the neighborhoods and the schools they went to: Harvard, Yale, the Wharton School of Business. They never learned the value of doing real, actual work and the first step to fixing that is better role models, so kids growing up white today don't think the only way out of Westchester is corporate crime. Or a government handout or sailing. So I get it, the temptation is to look at McCain and vote against him because you don't see an individual, you just see another typical welfare whitey.
And it's true, he's spent his entire life shuffling from one low-paying government job to another. Well, except those years he spent in prison. Typical! And between you and me, he's not very articulate. Oh, he may have some street smarts, but he's not what you call an educated man. He freely admits he's ignorant about the economy. And apparently the only thing his white running mate knows how to do is crank out one baby after another. And now of course, her teenage daughter is pregnant out of wedlock. Because she learns it at home! But that doesn't mean we should assume all white people are like that, just because so many of them are.

"Would it have Taikonauts space-walking overhead while the chairman of the Federal Reserve is on his knees?"

jwz@jwz.org — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 18:21:26 GMT

Charlie Stross is bummed that the collapse of the USA is making it hard to write science fiction:

Put yourself in the shoes of an SF author trying to construct an accurate (or at least believable) scenario for the USA in 2019. Imagine you are constructing your future-USA in 2006, then again in 2007, and finally now, with talk of $700Bn bailouts and nationalization of banks in the background. Each of those projections is going to come out looking different. Back in 2006 the sub-prime crisis wasn't even on the horizon but the big scandal was FEMA's response (or lack thereof) to Hurricane Katrina. In 2007, the sub-prime ARM bubble began to burst and the markets were beginning to turn bearish. (Oh, and it looked as if the 2008 presidential election would probably be down to a fight between Hilary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani.) Now, in late 2008 the fiscal sky is falling; things may not end as badly as they did for the USSR, but it's definitely an epochal, historic crisis.
Now extend the thought-experiment back to 1996 and 1986. Your future-USA in the 1986 scenario almost certainly faced a strong USSR in 2019, because the idea that a 70 year old Adversary could fall apart in a matter of months, like a paper tiger left out in a rain storm, simply boggles the mind. It's preposterous; it doesn't fit with our outlook on the way history works.

Light Switch Complicator

jwz@jwz.org — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 18:14:46 GMT

"The Society for the Presentation of Inefficient Mechanical Devices Presents The Totally Unnecessary Overly Redundant & Mechanically Superfluous Light Switch Complicator

"Obsolete Construction Methods, Substandard Materials, Inefficient Wooden Mechanism, Difficult to Install Properly, May Not Fit Your Lifestyle Or Match Your Drapes

"In Box: This is exactly the same device Leonardo DaVinci might have used had electric lighting been invented in his time.

"Hand Made in the USA by Ernie Fosselius. One Of A Kind Sculpture, Numbered, Dated, and Signed By The Artist."

Oh Somalia, you're so zany.

jwz@jwz.org — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 18:08:42 GMT

Pirates. With tanks.

On Thursday, pirates seized the Ukrainian ship Faina en route to Kenya with 33 Russian-built T-72 tanks and a substantial quantity of ammunition and spare parts. Russia's navy said Friday it had dispatched a warship to the area, and the United States said American naval ships were tracking the Ukrainian ship with special concern because of the weaponry on board.
The hijackings were the latest in a series of audacious maritime attacks off the coast of Somalia, a war-torn country that has been without a functioning government since 1991.

The spammers have found Youtube.

jwz@jwz.org — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 20:21:18 GMT

I hesitate to link to a spam page, but check this shit out! Apparently the spammers are now taking the title of one (real) Youtube post, the description of another, and the video from a third -- then pre-pending some textual spam bullshit to the front of the video itself and re-uploading it. (And I'm seeing lots of these because they keep mentioning DNA Lounge.)

It's hard to imagine a more wasteful form of spam. Gratuitous video! This evil goes to 11. It's like the bandwidth-thief version of billboard trucks.