I was catching up on a softer world recently, and came across this comic, which I think is one of their best.

Emily Yoffe has a Slate article about our compulsion to acquire new information—and how it means we’re extremely susceptible to addictive behaviors around Internet use. Critical points: we have drives for both pleasure and for “seeking”, and it is this latter drive that the modern always-online environment feeds. Or overfeeds.

I don’t know how accurate this journalistic take on neuroscientific discoveries is, but I do think that this would be a good article to have printed out, and highlighted, next to my computer.

While randomly looking over one of my older posts last night, I realized that the YouTube video that it was centered around had been removed, making it pointless. This is extremely annoying, not just for me but for any reader of that post.
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For several years, I’ve read cursor.org more or less daily, and it has been one of my primary starting points for political news.

On Friday, due to ongoing resource problems, they suspended publication. I think that’s a major loss, given the amount of ground they covered. They did some good original research, but much of their value came from their aggregation/filtering role. With so much information out there, filtering is unbelievably important, and they did it really well. I hope they manage to get some funding and to come back.

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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I didn’t really take part, but apparently today was Run Some Old Web Browsers Day. I think my first exposure to a Web browser would have been around 1994, although the first time I could really play around with one was in a Humboldt University computer lab, I think, and that would have been 1995. Before that I was restricted to ftp and gopher, but was never that into either of them. I think I have some email from a little earlier than that.
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Apparently this is a well-known internet meme at this point, but I had somehow missed the fact that William Shatner covered Pulp’s “Common People”.
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One of my internet bad habits is reading FARK.com. Occasionally I see worthwhile stuff there, and sometimes it keeps me connected with a certain aspect of the zeitgeist, but generally it falls squarely into the “time-wasting” category. Today, it managed to be quite depressing as well, due to the commentary on this incident: a woman was apparently threatened by a knife-wielding assailant; the woman called her husband; the husband showed up and shot at the assailant, missing; the assailant ran away; the husband got his SUV, pursued the assailant, hit him with the car, and then hit him with the car another two times, killing him. The prevailing FARK sentiment is that the husband is a hero for these actions.
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From the just-because-you-can-doesn’t-mean-you-should department: a web game that turns Pac-Man into a text adventure. Seriously.
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I’ve been editing for most of the day, but there have been some distractions, and freerice.com is one of them. It’s a not-for-profit site that apparently uses ad revenue to give away rice through the United Nations World Food Program… and it’s also a vocabulary game. An addictive vocabulary game. It gives you a word, and you have to choose its meaning from a list of four.
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You’ve probably seen this already, but just in case… Chuck Norris has endorsed Mike Huckabee in one of the strangest political ads I’ve seen.
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The best movie fight scene ever.
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Or maybe not… This evening I found myself perusing the WP:LAME page on Wikipedia, home to what the editors have chosen as the “lamest edit wars”. And wow, people do get very, very involved in long-running disputes over amazing things.
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This is a list of the blogs and sites I read on a regular basis, not including those of friends.
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When the iPhone came out a few months back, I had no desire to get one. It was massively hyped, but I’m not really an Apple fanboy, and there were too many downsides. The first downside, of course, was the $600 price tag. Apart from that, I couldn’t stand the fact that it’s so locked down, both in terms of the SIM card and the contract with AT&T, and in terms of the software applications. I already don’t like AT&T (who were Cingular back then), and want to get out of my contract so that I can get one that’s better tuned to my fairly sparse use of cellphone minutes—so having to sign up for a more expensive plan for an additional two years doesn’t sound good at all.
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I noticed the link to A Softer World on xkcd (which I’ve been reading for a while) today. And got hooked quite quickly. I love the humor, and I love the gut punches it delivers as well. This post is to tell you to read it (and xkcd, if you don’t already).
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I thought of that somewhat obvious term last night, while replying to Seth’s post for December It seems useful.
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