I’ve been playing around with literary awards in Freebase recently, mainly the novel/fiction Booker, Pulitzer, National Book Award, Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards.
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I was going to post a link to this Clay Shirky article yesterday, but then saw that it had made it to BoingBoing and decided not to bother.

However, I think it’s worth posting even if most readers do check BoingBoing. It’s rather interesting, and worth calling out.
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I’ve been re-reading Hellboy, one of my favorite comics. I got into it a few years ago and it took me a little while to figure out why I liked it.
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I came across typeracer last night and have been playing it, on and off, since. It’s a really simple idea, just let people type short paragraphs as a kind of ‘race’, first person to finish wins. Car graphics show your progress in comparison to your competitors.
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I found this essay on the relationship between Fight Club and Calvin and Hobbes to be completely hilarious:
“Fight Club: The Return of Hobbes”.

I came across this video via a BoingBoing comment today, and like it rather a lot.
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My server went down again today. It wasn’t a serious problem, just needed a reboot. But that’s been happening more often recently. It needs an upgrade, but an upgrade is risky—and I don’t have a backup server right now.
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I went to the Shadowmoor prerelease yesterday, and quite enjoyed it. It was a lot more fun than the last prerelease for me. Partly because I went on a Saturday, and because most of the usual crew were there.
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I just read this article about women cyclists at risk in London, having come across it on a friend’s LiveJournal. The basic gist is that women are more likely to be accident victims because they’re less assertive on the road, and in particular because they don’t run reds and are thus more likely to be in the blind spot of large trucks about to turn at an intersection.
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Is the success of English as a global language going to effectively kill English as we know it? That’s one of the fates suggested by this New Scientist article. Despite recently reading a friend’s criticism of New Scientist articles, I think that this one is still interesting (even though I’m not sure the article is “science” per se, just interesting speculation).
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I did my taxes today, naturally on the last day possible. I intended to do them with the paper forms as usual, but problems with the PDF forms for the California filing pushed me, finally, to do them online.
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I discovered Ampersand over the weekend, via a link off Feministing to Alas, a Blog. It’s a political cartoon that runs quite rarely, but I like a bunch of the pieces of it. Not all of it, but enough to think it’s worth a look.

Meanwhile, still no server.

Server’s still dead, and I haven’t managed to revive it so far. I suspect that the earliest the site proper will be back up is Tuesday.

We has them.

Shadowglass, the machine that’s hosted my website since 2001 or so, seems to have finally died. I’ve been “in the process” of moving off of it for almost two years, and am somehow not fully prepared for this kind of calamity.

Which is why the site is down as I write this, and I’m not sure when I’ll get it back up and when this post is actually going to go up.

I use Subversion a lot both at work and at home, and for a while have wanted a way to make it easier to see which files get marked as merged or conflicted in an update.
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I’m rather fond of this photo I took earlier tonight. But I’ll stay silent for the moment on where I took it.
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I’ve never seen Johnny Mnemonic, but I’ve heard bad things. Terrible things. It is renowned as an absolutely disgraceful adaptation of a beloved short story. That being said, I suspect it has nothing on the Sci-Fi Channel rendering of Philip José Farmer’s Riverworld Saga.
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Just over forty years ago, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke out against the Vietnam War. In doing so, he made clear the connection between war and economic exploitation, and exposed the hypocrisy of those who applauded his nonviolent stance on civil rights demonstrations while also applauding violence against the Vietnamese.
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Okay, finally, I’m into this millennium. I have no idea why it took me more than a year to go from 2000′s favorite books to 2001′s.

Especially since I only read 39 books in 2001, my second-lowest yearly total of the years I’ve kept records.
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I was surprised by the news that Bertie Ahern, the Teflon Taoiseach, is resigning. Fittingly, I received this news via a text from a friend.
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I’ve been reading Powers again, because trade paperback #11 finally came out (I picked it up at Isotope, which seems like quite a cool store) and the damn thing is just as addictive as ever. 11 books in, and it still leaves me demanding more as soon as it’s done.
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