A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

You can syndicate LJ posts with a specific tag attached by adding "tag=tagname" to the RSS feed URL's query part.

I just set The Gameshelf's blip-blog (cough) feed URL to http://prog.livejournal.com/rss?tag=the+gameshelf, and it works great; you can read all my gameshelf-tagged posts (and only those posts) on the show's blip page. Cool. This saves me from spinning off an entirely new LJ just for the show.

Of course you also end up reading whatever today I ate a ham sandwich stuff that I mash into the same blog posts, but that's fine.

I shouted at my TV last night because one of aspartaimee's userpics, the source of which I'd never had cause to investigate, suddenly and distinctly flashed by while I was watching one of the Arrested Developments that I torrented last December.

That's hilarious. I always love it when that happens.

The show is good too. Watching it marathon-style is a little tiring because all the episodes more or less kick off in the same way: Michael confronts his mother or siblings about their spending money foolishly, or his dad in prison tells him about yet another chunk of the family's secret fortunes stashed away in some ludicrous fashion. But they then each spin off and then re-collide in wonderful ways, and the characters are great. It's the most fun I've had watching a comedy TV show since I was into Seinfeld.

Oh: I forgot about The Tick, the live-action one. But that didn't feel like a TV show since I saw them all over the space of two evenings at jhango's house with friends. Hella fun, though.

I just renamed my LJ after an evocative song title from the band Tortoise. It suits my life right now.

Here is the piece itself, A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work, off Tortoise's late-1990s album "TNT". I like the song but the music doesn't resonate with me as much as its title does. I do like the whole scope of Tortoise's work a lot, though, and encourage you to investigate their music further. (It's all on iTMS, for one thing.)

Next on my list is to do something about my userpics. The Rev. Sir Dr. King is getting a bit long in the tooth, over there.

Now that I've started posting there, I can plug advert_eyes, a community that colorwheel started a little while ago. It's for discussions about advertising. The most recent posts have me building cockamamie theories linking banner ad effectiveness with evolutionary biology, and later I admit to liking veggie burgers. You don't want to miss this.

Sometime around now is my five-year anniversary with Livejournal. I set it up at the start of September with the usual "yeah I don't plan on posting here very often I just want to keep up with my friends" message, and then dived in with earnest a few weeks later after jmac.org got compromised.

I should go port my early-2001 jmac.org weblog over here, sometime.

I would like to randomly note that I am really pleased and impressed with the davis_square community.

* Compared to certain 0ther c0mmunities I could name, this one has remained relatively free of fotoshop-fratboy snarkery. (Though to be fair I just peeked in on that other one and it doesn't look as obviously dopey as it has in the past. Dunno if that's a trend or not.)

* When trolls do attack, they catch like wet matches on damp wood.

* It's all-around drama-resistant. It did have a blowout a few months ago, but came out of it wiser, and maybe even improved.

There's no magic; it's the people in it that are great, and who have set down a culture that inspires continued coolness. As another school year starts and I see another round of young newcomers phasing themselves in fairly smoothly, I have to smile.

I like to hear people talk about their jobs, if they enjoy them. Here is a survey of people on my friends list whom I know mainly through an admiration for their work, and who have blogs where they often talk about what they do. (Are there others I ought to be reading?)

jwz runs a nightclub in San Fransisco, and frequently posts of his adventures, often including a copious amount of his photography. Occasionally posts something that draws from his cred as the maintainer of xscreensaver or the brash alpha-hacker responsible for much of Netscape Navigator, back in the day. Grumbles about macs sometimes (he is maybe the most famous Mac user known to the Slashdot crowd, besides Jobs and Woz I guess). Most of his posts, though, are either fascinating links or crazy photos and movies. His tastes in non sequitur are quite similar to mine, I suppose.

grrm is still writing the Song of Ice and Fire series, that thing I repeatedly declare that I hate forever and then continue plowing through. Posts infrequently, but often enough to assure us that he's still there. Likes SF cons and football.

tmcm is a cartoonist most famous for Too Much Coffee Man and whose cartoons haven't really been all that good in a long time. But I love his posts and photographs about his life otherwise, including his recent adventures in producing an opera based on his famous character. He posts all of his finished cartoons, as well as many preliminary sketches and doodles. Sometimes he gets the blog involved: in a recent post he grumbled about not being satisfied with a particular punchline, and ended up replacing it with one that a fan suggested in comments.

urbaniak is an actor living in New York City. He's most recognized for his roles in the film Henry Fool, which I have not seen, and Venture Brothers, which I adore (he provides the voice for Dr. Venture). About half of his posts are bizarre, slow-paced flamewars with (so far) two particular LJ users who might not even be real people. These are not very interesting. Much of the rest is stories of being an actor in New York, and are great. His fans enjoy making animated gifs of his babies beating each other up.

officialgaiman is Neil Gaiman. Much of the content is public responses to fan mail, which gives it a very different feel than the other journals listed here. Most of the comments are the ladies swooning every time he posts a picture of himself, which is often.

(Was going to add zarf for the yuks "gee he's been quiet lately" but he doesn't actually use his website as anything remotely like a blog, so.)

I think that "References in Fiction" sections are a blight on Wikipedia. I guess I can't reasonably write a manifesto calling for their systematic deletion, since they actually are useful in intent. But, once a topic's list of above-the-fold media references has been exhausted, the section proceeds to overflow with utterly unencyclopedic pointers to obscure anime, video games, and webcomics. Fancruft. And I am very hesistant to delete it because I don't want to catch fancrud.

Come to think of it I have never seen a line in an article's history log that read "Deleted unencyclopedic fancruft" or something similar. And for some reason this makes me want to start doing so.

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Subscribed to nintendo_ds coz I wanna have a better handle on what-all's going on with my favorite video game system, and am reminded why I don't belong to more LJ communities. Too many posts have been sincere but foolish, mostly young people asking questions that are answerable with one word, that being either "eBay" or "Google". I don't actually say that, though, coz it would sound awfully snooty, so I just leave them be.

I normally love answering questions (and seeing questions answered well by others) but some questions are so broad and flat that you just know that the person hasn't even bothered with other of these two First Sources. The posters' evident youth makes it even less forgivable in my eyes, coz it's not like they have decades of life without Google to adapt away from.

Maybe they don't teach Google in school yet, the teachers being mostly old enough to have themselves been students pre-Web? This is my hypothesis.

A well-dressed man took his cookie and coffee to the bar just now. After setting down the victuals and spreading his jacket on the stool, he reached under the bar surface (for there is a foot or so of overhang) and swiped his hand back and forth. He did this with the absentminded air of habit.

What purpose did this serve? Was he making sure that there wasn't any gum or boogers or something underneath, threatening his nice pants? But if that was the case, why was he willing to risk sticking his hand into it?

BTW I dropped down to a free account a little while ago and lost the use of most of my icons. I can't justify spending money on a full account right now. (I can, apparently, justify late-night border-crossing expensive-bagel missions, but that's different, since I had a partner in crime.)

Housecleaning: if you're not on my "local gamers" filter and you want to be, or if you are and don't wanna be, could you drop me a line? I make posts to that filter that I think are of interest to game-players in my geographic vicinity (but am happy to share with remote people if they ask).

I made a post to it a few minutes before I made this one, so there's your current status indicator.