Weblog

[19 Dec 03] Two more weeks' worth of feedin':

Mr. Picassohead · Who Will Be Eaten First? · Only days old and already a Powerful Force for Good · Friday Coetzee's Nobel Lecture · Congratulations! · An alternative to fight or flight · Awe is what's for dinner; grab a shovel · The 20,000th Mirror Project photo is wonderful · 'Gervais, how many times have you been punched in the face?' · More Office analysis · Shoot out the lights · Antarctic Photo Library

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[ 5 Dec 03] Another feed-bag, minus a few things subsequently linked here. A bit earlier than usual, so that I can note the return of El Relucto.

A web comic based on a friend's blog entries · TWAS on iTMS (try saying that backwards twice) · New Zealand, Land of the Liverwort · '...posting things that require the audience to engage their own intelligence' · Important news if you use MT · Feel old in ten seconds! · Author Websites · Philip K. Dick: The Official Site · Wired: The Second Coming of PKD · Bill Watterson graduation speech from 1990 · Christmas MP3s from Ukulele On The Beach · Return of the Reluctant · Testing the Three-Click Rule · kFDS0dST1VORC1DT0xPUj

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Go Fly a Kite

[30 Nov 03] Obsession of the week: Kite Aerial Photography. It's caught the imagination of photographers and hobbyists around the world, and some of the results are spectacular:

[First posted to MeFi on Wednesday.]

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[24 Nov 03] The drawback with hiding the links blog in an RSS feed is that when I'm too busy to post anything except quick links it looks like I'm not updating the site. But I was, guv, honest... well, a bit.

The Great Spread Debate continues · LRB: The Future of Higher Education · Put a turkey in your tank · USPTO looks again at Eolas patent · Me on Thursday? · Dive into Mark on weblog spam · Go, go, gadget Mil! · Begun, this Clone War has · 'It is to the life of the mind that I must cling!' · Jerry Kindall: Liquid Thanksgiving · He shoots, he scores!

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[10 Nov 03] The latest batch of links from the feed, wrapped up in yesterday's newspaper:

'If you could have dinner with any five people...' · Crooked Timber: Blogs for the Boys · Crooked Timber: Bad language · Shauna saves me from having to write about what we did on Sunday · 'I suddenly felt that they were, like, stifling and canonical' · An educational software breakthrough! · Curse you, obscuring city lights of Edinburgh · Cockeyed.com Pranks · BBC: How to avoid libel and defamation · The Flaming Lips were every bit as good as this in Edinburgh last night · Ogg Vorbis decoder plugin for iTunes/Quicktime 6.2+/MacOS X 10.2+ · How to run multiple IEs in Windows XP

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[24 Oct 03] I'm still updating the feed, which it makes it the first proper links blog I've run in years. Next year, a sideblog? Who knows. Here are the links from the few weeks since I got back:

I own 43, 38, 36, 32, 21, 20, 16, 8, 7, 5, 2, 1 and haven't sold them yet · jill/txt: click here to pat back · How America was double-stuft · I hereby claim the word 'hurriance' by right of forfeit · Guardian: The 40 greatest British bands today · If you run a blog using MT, you need this · Public, private, secret · Open Source Democracy by Douglas Rushkoff · Gelernter on email · Postcards of 1970s Swedish pop groups · Philip Pullman on kids' writing and reading · Tantek's Mid Pass Filter for IE5Win CSS · DON't BID! I dont care! · Elliott Smith six months ago · Very nifty colour picker for web designers · Restoring a Victorian house in grand style

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[12 Sep 03] Latest links from the feed, to bring it up to date before I go:

Biography: Online Lives · Izzle: An Important Political Announcement · badgers badgers badgers badgers MUSHROOM MUSHROOOOM · QTVR of the 9-11 Tribute in Light · Germaine Greer discusses an amazing idea · Greer again—I was going to write about this, but no time · 'We find ourselves in the unaccustomed position of rooting for Microsoft' · Careful with it, it's a little hot · Art Spiegelman is making comics again

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[ 7 Sep 03] The RSS weblog has been ticking along pretty well, considering my initial on-again off-again enthusiasm for it; the BlogThis button makes it ridiculously easy to update. Here's a round-up of the first ten days' links, minus the few already noted in other entries here:

Hugo - An Interactive Fiction Design System · When will US bestsellers enter public domain? · weblog, not web log · Wired: The Lost City of Venice · Turn any online PDF into HTML · Shauna's back with this great entry · The choice is yours, and it has to be made · JeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeEEEEEeeesus · Make Your Own Lava Lamp · Ars Technica: Mac Browser Smackdown · slant: The 25 Greatest Electronic Albums of the 20th Century · Tate Archive · Daring Fireball: high reliability, low maintenance · Global Rich List · Eugenics is back · It seemed to suck the whole earth into it · 'I want my historic pop culture back you god damn IP vultures!' · 'I have about one good idea a year. I hope this was it.' · Exhaustive Bert, Ernie and vice-versa research from Kafkaesque · Blogs: There Is No Spoon · Guardian: it's the hottest for 2,000 years · An American family in Raratonga · John Boorman waits for the blockbuster to implode · 'Whenever I have a disappointment in life...'

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Feed the Tree

[28 Aug 03] Like so many long-time bloggers, I've been thinking about implementing some sort of links sidebar to make up for the fact that I hardly ever do any linking any more. But sidebars make the page look too cluttered for my liking, so I've come up with another solution: an RSS weblog. Hook this feed up to your favourite newsreader and you can follow all the links that take my fancy, pure and unadorned; I'll try to be less selective than I normally am when posting here (yeah, right; we'll see how long that lasts). I'm actually using Blogger to run it, not MovableType, so that I can use its BlogThis bookmarklet to make posting to the feed almost as effortless as bookmarking. Here's the template, if you're curious.

There are no archives at the moment, but depending how it goes I might do a round-up of the best ones at the end of each week or two. And of course if I have more to say about a particular link than an implied "this is interesting", I'll post it here.

[Update: What am I, insane? The last thing I need is yet more blogging chores. File under "interesting proof of concept, now proven, so no need to do it any more". I guess I'll keep it up for a while as an experiment, but don't expect too much from it.]

[Update Redux: Actually, I think it might work out okay.]

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[27 Aug 03] Writing as the intersection of idea and occasion by Alex Golub (who has the best about page photo ever):

In an abstract world, there is always more you could think, another book to read, just a few more dots that need connecting. It's fun—it's the candy floss spinning in the machine. But, like too much of any sweet thing, it is ultimately not infinitely fulfilling. ... Writing is the vertiginous wobbling back and forth as you spin off ideas as the opportunity strikes, folding what you've learned from the experience back into the spinning candy floss in your head, licking your lips as the sharp, crystalline sweet dissolves, feeling the zits after you've gorged as you reflect happily 'oh man, I ate too much'.

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Gender Bender

[22 Aug 03] The Gender Genie [via jill/txt] applies an algorithm to a block of text to predict the gender of its author. I'm a sucker for these things, so I tried it out on the four most recent entries of this blog. It correctly identified both yesterday's entries as the work of a male... but both of Wednesday's (including the poem) as female. Either the algorithm is little better than random guessing, or I've got some serious gender identity issues.

So I tried it on the biggest chunk of words I had to hand: the entire text of my novel.

Score: 45135
Words: 60532

The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: Female!

No wonder I couldn't get a publisher. I was a few years too early for chick lit.

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The Salvador Dali Memorial Fund

[12 Aug 03] I may be a tight-fisted bastard when it comes to blog tip jars and Amazon wish lists (gee, I wish I had lots of money and presents, too!), but send up the Snail Signal in a moment of genuine need and the forces of gastropod justice shall respond. Hence this site's first guest banner in living memory (it helped that the colours match), for Paul Cowan's Hunt for Clarence. After all, we tall orange-haired creatures have to look out for each other.

If you see an orange and purple giraffe... you might want to see a doctor. But if symptoms persist, send it to funkwit.

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[ 8 Aug 03] Self-Defence with a Walking-Stick: The Different Methods of Defending Oneself with a Walking-Stick or Umbrella when Attacked under Unequal Conditions [via Linkfilter].

Of course, one could hardly peruse an article such as this without emulating the illustrations in animatory format. Have at you, sir!

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New Formula Links

[18 Jul 03] One-minute vacation features snippets of sound as evocative as any photograph: try the one for 30 June 2003, recorded "in Antarctica on a crappy hand-held tape recorder. It's a woman singing in a hollowed out oil drum on Elephant Island, which made a lovely, angelic reverb sound on her voice." Makes me wish I hadn't left my own crappy hand-held tape recorder in storage back in Oz. [Via Jerry.]

A review of real life, "the most accessible and most widely accepted massively multiplayer online role-playing game to date" [via sylloge].

Travelling around Europe in (a) Flash. [Via MeFi.]

The Oxford Shark [via Owen].

Compelling tale of a year spent teaching English in Korea, via Stavros (and as he says, "long, but well worth the read").

Useful outcome of Shauna's iBook travails: an attractive new desktop picture for yours truly!

And somehow I've ended up writing too much in this MeFi thread about the British system of TV licences, which despite its anomalies is vigorously defended by those who believe that Lord Reith's magnificent edifice would crumble if the money to pay for it was raised in a different way.

(The title of this entry, by the way, comes from watching too many ads for the UK's number one male grooming brand. More than eight million men use it "at least once a week"! Also, spot the missing punctuation: the track proved to be an immediate hit reaching no one for four weeks. Yes, I am that easily amused.)

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My Relton DuPiniot Hat

[ 4 Jul 03] Two blogs worth visiting this week: Ed takes no prisoners* in this excellent post protesting threats to overtime pay in the US; and Kathleen has a string of thought-provoking entries on academia, not writing about academia, and new academic projects.

*Ed-related cliché now returning to the stage after an 18-month absence—see comments.

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[17 Apr 03] Homesickness [via Portage]. I probably own some of these. There's my valley. That's my town.

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[13 Apr 03] Child's play:

I asked Aurora whether they often play War in Iraq at school. "Oh yes, we've played it fifty or maybe hundred times!"

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Links. You Know You Want Them.

[11 Apr 03] Vertigo is one of my favourite films (Ever, if not Of All Time and Until the End of Beyond), and San Francisco is one of my favourite cities. So I was bound to enjoy this comparison of Vertigo locations, then and now, which I found sitting on the front page of Blogdex buried away in a cosy corner of the internet.

Everyone linked to this make a Starship Enterprise out of a floppy page, too. But did everyone make one? No! Because they're all pitiful fools chained to the floppy-consuming demands of obsolete operating systems, ha ha, whereas we disciples of Job(s) are free to break our idolatrous floppies and bend them into sacred shapes. When we're, um, supposed to be finishing an 8,000 word report. (Now finished, praise-be and hallelujah.)

Via MeFi: April Winchell's mp3 collection; Windows RG; test your geographical knowledge; and more screaming and screeching about current events than you can eat.

Remember that Hazlitt essay I posted here? Quite possibly. Here's an article from last weekend's Guardian about attempts to revive the great man's memory. Between him and Montaigne (whose essays I'm still savouring, slowly), it's enough to make the latter-day scribbler feel pathetically inadequate.

That is all.

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[10 Apr 03] The many faces of Ludwig van Beethoven.

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Manger du Fromage est Bon

[21 Mar 03] Snide talk of "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" making you fureur? Don't get mad, get even-handed, with French week at Idle Words. Day Two is a timely debunking of claims of French cowardice in World War II, while Day Four sings the praises of fromage:

[As] a student in Paris ... I had been hired to babysit a five-year-old boy twice a week, in the hopes of teaching him a little English. One evening, as I was preparing a snack, I held up a piece of cheese.
"Nicolas, in English this is called cheese. Can you say that?"
"Cheeeese!"
"Very good! Cheese. What would you call this in French?"
"Reblochon."
Five years old, and he knew his cheeses by name. I checked him on every one in the fridge. He even knew the names of the ones that were unpasteurized.

And while we're on the subject, another great French gift to civilisation is discussed by its translator here [via languagehat].

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[20 Mar 03] Want some distraction from the attack? How about an attack of the cutes. Any cuter and they'd dissolve into a pool of treacle. [Via the J man.]

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The "Now I'm Off the Wagon I May As Well Post Some Links" Post

[14 Mar 03] 1. Convincing evidence that Shakespeare was not a lowly nobody from Stratford but someone who had actually mixed with royalty and travelled to the places he wrote about, like Italy, scandalous though that may seem:

If the name "William Shake-speare" is a pseudonym, [the Earl of] Oxford would have had many reasons for adopting this particular nom de plume. Pallas Athena, patron goddess of ancient Athens, home of Greek theatre, was associated with the sobriquet Hasti-vibrans, or "spear-shaker". Oxford's coat of arms bears a lion shaking a spear. At court Oxford was known as "Spear-shaker" because of his skill at tournaments and his crest showing a lion brandishing a spear. ... Upon Oxford's death in 1604 King James had eight Shakespeare plays produced at court as a final tribute. When Oxford's widow died nine years later a group of Shakespeare plays (fourteen in this case) were produced in tribute. ... In an age of copious eulogies, none was forthcoming when William Shakspere died in Stratford [in 1616].

Then there's Malcolm X's point: "From 1604 to 1611, King James got poets to translate, to write the Bible. Well, if Shakespeare existed, he was then the top poet around. But Shakespeare is nowhere reported connected with the Bible. If he existed, why didn't King James use him?"

2. The extraordinarily rich Apollo Lunar Surface Journal [via MeFi] is full of great shots and composites, but my favourite was this one of Apollo astronauts and Soyuz 9 crew at a backyard party in 1970. The warm side of the Cold War.

3. You may have noticed a certain rebranding of fried potato products in the news recently. You may have thought, "That Rory bloke has been carving himself a niche in the competitive field of fried-potato-product commentary; I wonder what he has to say about this?" In which case you'll be disappointed to hear that, in an effort to broaden my range as a Serious Author and avoid typecasting, I have eschewed any further tuberesque talk at this site for the time being.

Offsite comments are, however, another matter entirely.

4. Finally, this interview with ex-war-journo Chris Hedges [via the wondrous chicken] says pretty much all that needs to be said about you-know-what.

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GuardianFilter

[21 Feb 03] See, this is what I was talking about. It took me three weeks—three weeks—to finish reading a single Guardian Weekend magazine, with new ones piling up week by week, reading them all at once, in between work and web and movies and DVDs and three other books on the go. But that 25 January issue was a particularly good one:

And it's Friday. And there's a new one tomorrow.

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Bizarre Tribal Rituals

[18 Feb 03] Given my recent musings on teen movies and the educational demands of today, it's probably inevitable that I'd link to this essay on the social dynamics of high school. It's misleadingly titled, and the MeFi thread about it takes that mislead and runs with it. The strongest insights are halfway in, where Graham talks about how the very nature of the modern American (and Australian, for that matter) high school shapes the lives of those in it, while simultaneously questioning our modern tendency to blame everything on hormones:

As far as I can tell, the concept of the hormone-crazed teenager is coeval with suburbia. I don't think this is a coincidence. I think teenagers are driven crazy by the life they're made to lead. Teenage apprentices in the Renaissance were working dogs. Teenagers now are neurotic lapdogs. Their craziness is the craziness of the idle everywhere.

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Verdict: Malfeasance

[11 Feb 03] "These FINAL REMAINING CONCEPTS will soon be GONE FOREVER and there will be absolutely no reason for anyone to publish anything more, ever." From the marsupial cataloguer who brought you The Field Guide to Vampire Hunter Romance Authors.

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Link and You'll Miss It

[10 Feb 03] This really is way too many links to put into separate entries, using up valuable permalinks as if they were dime-a-dozen. So much more efficient to dump them all into one entry where they can be safely ignored.

Ftrain—My Name is Blanket:

My father Michael wanted to protect us, to give us inauspicious, normal lives free of the media spotlight. ... In retrospect, the logic of his parenting was ambiguous at best. Nonetheless, I had my own giraffe.

Fun with perspective, via Kafkaesque.

Brewer's Unoriginal Miscellany, via LMG.

Stavros rounds up a bunch of links discussing Clay Shirky's piece on power laws in the weblog community. Twenty percent of weblog readers will be interested; eighty percent will wish we'd all talk about something else.

Rhymer's Travel Diary, also via Stav. Naturally I read the Australian bit first:

I spent a lot of time 'doing' what I used to do in London: i.e. eating out, hanging around in bars, shopping and playing the James Bond game on Andrew's Playstation until 2am. As Andrew pointed out to me, although there were many interesting things to see in Australia, there were also many interesting levels to see on the James Bond game.

These Japanese pencil carvings are close competitors to Dalton Ghetti's pencil-lead sculptures. And I thought reading a whole book about pencils was obsession enough.

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[10 Feb 03] Too often my (mostly) web-free weekends, meant to give my mind time to sort out all the stuff being jammed into it, end up being stuffed full of newspaper. But some of it ends up being more than mental ticker-tape. This extract from sociologist Richard Sennett's new book featured in the Guardian a couple of weeks ago, and has been scrabbling about in my head since:

In adult life, lack of respect comes less from overt signs of contempt by people of a higher class than from invisibility. People above simply don't notice you exist as a distinct individual. ... What then can be done to "earn" respect of that sort, a sense of worth felt not only by others but by oneself? In my experience, an inner sense of dignity comes from developing a skill.

Then there's this poignant article from the weekend about North Dakota, buffaloes and rural decay:

"I had this epiphany moment," she says. "It was just after my mom died and I was in this little, little town with five streets and a lot of empty buildings. I realised I was looking at something that was dying and it wasn't pretty, it wasn't quaint. It was death, and I'll never forget how sad I felt."

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[ 4 Feb 03] Are we really better off with Octopus Robots?

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[31 Jan 03] <*)) >=<

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I Am Not Making This Up

[23 Jan 03] We all know that William Gibson has a blog, and Douglas Rushkoff has a blog, and Neil Gaiman has a blog. But this, surely, is far more significant: Dave Barry has a blog [news via Blogroots]. It's early days yet, but give it a few months and Dave will be throwing away his best material and doing himself out of a secure writing career with the best of us (er, them).

And where would any of us be without the publicity that he gave to the exploding whale story? The link to that video is probably the genetic Eve of all weblog entries. Dave is the Alpha Blogger. Even if he does have his entries the wrong way round.

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Placeholding

[20 Jan 03] In between frantic report-writing and frantic ACT-news-site reading, life goes on. Here's what I was going to post on Saturday before hearing the news about Canberra: "Daft Punk's Homework is fantastic. Why wasn't I told?" (Because I didn't know about Acclaimed Music, that's why.)

Ed has blogged off. Stav is blogging on. This thoughtful piece from Josh Allen reads like blogging-off, but is actually blogging-back-on.

Some early Soviet children's books with animal covers [via Textism].

Um, that's all. Okay, so life hasn't gone on.

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Cleanin' Out Mah Closet Bookmarks

[10 Jan 03] Seen 'em everywhere? See 'em again!

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Oolong Gone

[ 8 Jan 03] Requiescat In Pancake.

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