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

Yeah so I've totally let LJ slide. This is my first post in like five weeks, after over eight years of nigh-daily use (though my posting frequency started nosediving early this year). I may be done with it. If nothing else, I am almost certainly not going to re-up my paid account when it comes time, later this year.

Everything I've been writing lately has been either on the Gameshelf (which I refaced and relaunched last month) or Twitter. I am also on Facebook, but only nominally: all my status updates there are actually just cross-posted tweets. (I kind of hate Facebook now, and wish I'd never joined. But deleting my FB account at this point is not an option. That's how they getcha.)

I've also basically stopped reading LJ, which sucks, and deserves reversing. (EDIT: I have begun to eat through N pages of backlogged flist posts. RIGHT NOW.) I have a Perl script that lets me subscribe to all posts - even locked ones - but its formatting was off, and I am incredibly lazy, so rather than fix it I just shut it off. I would manually visit my friends page just often enough to keep up with y'all, but when LJ lowered the default friends-page size to 10, I stopped bothering, because: incredibly lazy.

So, I would like a place to write longer-form, non-Gameshelfy blog posts. Perhaps I shall join the exodus to DreamWidth, which seems to be well and truly underway among my long-standing LJ flist. Or perhaps I will set up a Tumblr. Or maybe I will try hosting a damn blog myself... or maybe I will just listen my to my incredible laziness and continue using this damn thing. I don't know yet.

How're you?

OK, so, I've been Twittering a lot, and I'm probably going to keep doing so. If you don't use Twitter or Facebook, you're missing a lot of the crap I'm writing every day. It's a different flavor of crap than what I write here (go look and see what I mean), but it's still crap by me, which is of theoretical interest to my friends.

So. Given my impression that some people react to this sort of thing with profound gross-out yuck, should I use a service like LoudTwitter to post my daily tweets on my LJ?

[Poll #1406258]

Some young punks have apparently been freely harassing Davis Square residents for some time now. That thread begins with someone describing how he was assaulted and slapped around by them, apparently in broad daylight and with people all around. The many comments that follow form a story about how this same group has been making trouble in the square for a while now, apparently trying to intimidate people into giving them money or valuables through insults, threats, and even chasing, shoving or hitting them. It sounds like the police frequently get involved (as they did during the OP's altercation) but so far they haven't been able to proactively do much about their presence.

Their anarchic behavior reminds me of how the PCs get through life in the Grand Theft Auto games. If nothing more interesting is going on, you can just wander around thumping people for the lulz, and if your star rating gets too high and a cop nabs you, you suffer a minor inconvenience for a minute before getting back into the action. (One comment seems to confirm that the kids were back to messing with people about 30 minutes after the OP's incident.) Meanwhile, everyone else in the game just sort of mills around. This makes me sad.

The online response is more heartening. Among the "hey I saw those guys too" comments are some pretty good suggestions about what to do next. (And a few eye-rolling blusters, but at least they're on the right side.) It makes me think more of the world described in Clay Shirky's recent opus, which opens with the tale of how, a couple of years ago, a spontaneous online community formed around the fact that a woman in New York had her lost cell phone found by a kid who, after being identified by their subsequent use of it, refused to give it back. Eventually the NYC cops capitulated under the insistent weight of the community and charged the kid with theft.

It would be nice to see that power turned on something that's actually a criminal threat to an entire local population. I hope that something like this is indeed ramping up. I see that the OP, initially not wanting to file a report for fear of reprisal from the hoodlums, has changed his mind and spoken with a detective after reading some 100 sympathetic and action-seeking comments. This is good.

• classicaljunkie volunteered to help clean up my tags, found the LJ page that lets you mass-delete them after sorting by usage, and (with my blessing) nuked all tags I've used only once. This cleared up well over half of my alloted 1,000 tag-slots. So, my new posts have tags again. Aren't you pleased.

• I have a copy of the volity.net webclient alpha mostly running on Brie, my creamy white MacBook. This is very important, not just because Brie's become my primary all-sorts work machine, but because I left volity.net's codebase in a sad state when I last touched it, way out of synch with Subversion. No more of that.

The webclient daemon's regression tests all pass again, as of this evening, and I'm raring to write more tests. Recent work for clients saw me learning to really learn to rock Test::WWW::Mechanize and I am honestly looking forward to writing a mechanized agent that will try to play Tic-Tac-Toe games over the web and report back to me. (I may need to write and install a deterministic TTT bot to complement it.)

I have a goal to launch the damn alpha by April 1, and feel it's entirely realistic. I'll miss it only if I get too distracted by pay-money-work, which isn't impossible, but even in that case I'm gonna get a lot of good work done.

• My consulting business's brand-identity work is down to negotiating business card design, which is just a peewee version of the website's design. I am nearly there! I will be so happy when I can finally announce the business's name and identity loud n proud, though I haven't been exactly keeping it a secret in the meantime. (Have begun renegotiating my open contracts to point at the company, rather than at me personally.)

• Idled in the The Burren with taskboy3000 this evening to discuss the format of upcoming Gameshelf shoots, the likes of which you have never seen before, at least not on this particular show. Mailed our director about it. He seems really energized about our trying new things, and quite into playing his role through all of it. We are lucky to have him on-board.

Is there a word for when a baby decides that a certain person in a certain setting is a fascinating source of visual data, and so stares and stares? Mr. T. Boy had one of these attached to him tonight, from the next table over. Very amusing.

So after a month it's become clear to me that one can't just leave LiveJournal to start one's own blog and expect everything to be the same. Movable Type is excellent fun to run and tinker with (at least if you're a software tinkerer), but no combination of plugins can replicate LJ's community features. I particularly miss comments, which for a number of reasons lack the spontaneous and conversational nature of the comments here.

I find that I don't want to return to LJ as my blogging home, though. On reflection, I've decided that the "Flag this post / Flag this journal" controls offend me beyond reconciliation. They are idiot "How's my driving? Call 1-800-555-1234" bumper stickers, implying that I write at the convenience of a higher authority, who depends on you! loyal reader! to come running to them with reports of my transgressions. And if the LiveJournal AUP has in fact made this true since 2001, and it's just been easy to ignore until now, then all the more reason to take my business elsewhere.

So, I am going to start regularly cross-posting to this LiveJournal, by way of a cross-posty Movable Type plugin that someone else wrote. It's not perfect - in fact it is half-broken, and I aim to fix it as a small side project - but it will do for the nonce. This will probably make jmac_org redundant, and I apologize for the implied suggestion that you muck further with your friends list for my sake. But I invite you to wait and see how it actually ends up working out.

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I'm also going to start using the Gameshelf website as a blog (since it is one, after all) posting my own game news and reviews and stuff there. I would also like to extend an invitation to people in the Gameshelf community to join the blog as a games writer. Basically, if your name has appeared in the show's credit roll for any reason, consider yourself invited. Please comment here or contact me elsewhere if you're interested.

The prerequisite is another side-project: I've got to redesign the site template to have a big fat link to the show's most recent episode up at the top of the page somewhere, safe from off-scrolling due to new posts. And I'll slap a less-obvious-but-still-obvoius link to the show archives somewhere, too. I have some big new ideas for the 'Shelf this year, and I love the idea of meeting them with the potential of a blog-based online community, oo la la, instead of the crusty static website that's was there for years.

rserocki wins the prize for the first person on my flist to (without me having to ask) summarize the recent rambling and overlong post to news about what just hoppa. (Basically: a Russian media company, SUP, just agreed to acquire Livejournal from SixApart.)

By itself I probably wouldn't care much, but the whole post-flagging thing left me feeling a little raw. News so soon after of a fundamental structural shakeup at LJ makes me more nervous about leaving six-n-growing years of personal writing exclusively on someone else's servers, running a presentation layer that is getting baroque in strange ways.

Now that I've started to use and enjoy MovableType, and that I have been planning to launch a blog of some variety at jasonmcintosh.com, the chances are looking nonzero that I'll jump ship sometime in the coming year.

This blog is now on the first page of Google hits for [fuck msie]. (It is also the number-one hit for [msie fuck]. Ha.)

davis_square is normally a great community but there are two patterns that make me sad. One is more interesting (and confusing) than the other.

Q: Something about post formatting policy.
A: If you can't write a Greasemonkey script to format other peoples' posts yourself, like me and all my friends can, go back to AOL, luser. Now if you'll excuse me I shall don my totally badass black trenchcoat and away to the Games Workshop store because I hear they just got a new shipment of Space Orks in. Waugh!
A2: LOL USE LUNIX
Commentary: The Slashdork effect. This is not surprising and there's probably not much to be done about it, but it's still disheartening to see. And I just know exactly when it will appear but I still must read the comments anyway.

Q: Something about local coffee houses.
A: Oh god don't go to the Diesel. Every time I go in there I get spat on by the staff and the clientele bludgeon me with their fashionable laptop accessories. I think it's because I'm so manly. I'm just not sure.
A2: Oh hell yes! Sometimes the Diesel workers call my mom up at home and harass her with their tattoos. It's awful!
Commentary: This, I just do not understand. Seriously, what? I'm just an ordinary slobby guy and I've been going there for years and have never picked up on any attitude. I'm kind of numb but I'm not that numb.

Image found on this page while I was writing this comment about the pop-up porn case.

I didn't know until I reread the Wii article on Wikipedia (it was FA yesterday), but the full version of the Internet Channel is available from the Wii Shop thingy. It's a free download until June, iirc.

Yes, I got the Wii email from Nintendo about it and hit its attached "Update" button, but apparently that was a system update and not a browser update, even though the email was all about the new browser. whatevah

Random observation: LJ seems to increase the default font size if you're using the Wii browser. Cool.