Aku Aku

blog comment communities

I once told Anil about a blog entry I posted regarding Michael Jackson that ended up becoming innundated with comments from people who have strong feelings about the King of Pop. Anil says that most everyone he knows has a blog posting that has become a community.

Since then I've thought it would be nice to try and put together a list of these accidental spontaneous communities. Today BoingBoing points to another one: Boing Boing: Fools think Bill Gates is reading about their pleas for money.

Gadgetopia's Deane Barker sez: "Check out the comments on this thread. I posted this note about Bill Gates' philanthropy. There are dozens of comments from people who apparently think Bill Gates posted it and will give them money. It's fascinating to read -- what are these people thinking? "

I haven't read all the comments, but just going by my own experience I can predict that there will be people pretending to be Bill Gates who dole out sincere gratitude and advice on behalf of the billionaire and the comments from the confused visitors will be just a little bit sad in their foolishness.

phonecon 1876

Jeneane announces PhoneCon 1876:

As you know, the emerging power of the Telephone as a tool to shape democracy, our flour and cotton mills, and our understanding of Rhode Islanders, is just beginning to be understood. That's why it's so important for telephoners to get together in person to talk about talking on the phone.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND

-Do you have a telephone?
-Do you talk on your phone regularly?
-Do you wonder where the telephone's headed?

Then PhoneCon is for you.

I love the conference track titles (and speakers).

IKEA walk-thru

In the computer game world, you can often find "walk-thru" scenarios online which tell you step by step how to navigate your way through the game in order to win or complete it. I remember running across these for games like Zork back in my BBS days with a Commodore 64 and 300 baud modem.

Get all/S/S/S/Sw/S/Se/Enter gazebo/Get all/Leave/S/S/W/Light lamp/N Get brick/N/Fill teapot/N/U/Put placemat under door/Move lid Put opener in keyhole/Get all/Drop placemat and opener/Get key Unlock door with key/Open door/Drop key/N/Get sphere/S/D/W/N Kill dragon with sword/S/Kill dragon with sword/S Kill dragon with sword/W/U/S/Get string/Drop sphere and sword/N/D/W/S

Recently The Morning News released a walk-thru designed to let you win at IKEA:

============================================================= WORLD TWO: SHOWROOMS =============================================================

You start this world armed only with a UNIVERSAL FURNITURE-ASSEMBLY ALLEN WRENCH. This is the weakest weapon in IKEA: You will have to hit a person 16 times with it to kill them. So your primary goal in this level is to find more lethal means of dispatching your enemies.

As you enter the SHOWROOM, perform a rolling dodge to the left. Grab a free PAPER TAPE MEASURE and a handful of IKEA EMBLAZONED GOLF PENCILS from the kiosk near the entryway. The PENCILS serve quite well as ranged weapons, but it will take some time to master their use. Before venturing further in the world, stand at the kiosk and practice hurling GOLF PENCILS at patrons as they enter the SHOWROOM. Remember: Hitting the eyes does triple damage.

Full walk-thru here. Good luck furniture adventurers!

commonwealth club ad parody

The Commonwealth Club has been running a new ad campaign all over San Francisco public transit for the past few months in order to encourage a new, younger membership. I'm actually a member of the club and enjoy it much, but the ad campaign is sort of silly.

The advertisements tout the clubs frequent guest speaker lectures and the ability for members to engage in Q&A with A-list lecturers (such as, famously, then-presidential-candidate Al Gore, or more recently Ted Turner). Each poster features a photo of a hip-but-not-too-hip hipster against a white background with a message along the lines of "I wanted to ask Daniel Ellsberg if he leaked the Pentagon Papers today, would he be tried for terroism? So I did." Another infamous one is "I wondered if success was ruining Larry Harvey's original vision for Burning Man, so I asked him" (I actually was at Mr. Harvey's lecture at the Commonwealth Club, it was a good one).

The ubiquity of the ads (they're simply everywhere if you're a public transit user) has inspired some comment, such as an article in the SF Weekly entitled So I Wrote a Snide Column and, my absolute favorite, a parody referencing San Francisco's perennial protester Frank Chu:

Tonight because I need to stay home and interview potential new housemates, I'm missing a visit to the club by Homeland Security director Tom Ridge. Also missing my chance for my own play on the ad campaign "I wanted to ask Tom Ridge if he was evil or just stupid, so I did!"

so you want to learn japanese

Interested in Japan? You might want to read this humorous essay titled So You Want To learn Japanese...

Depending on who you are speaking to your politeness level will be very different. Politeness depends on many things, such as age of the speaker, age of the person being spken to, time of day, zodiac sign, blood type, sex, whether they are Grass or Rock Pokemon type, color of pants, and so on. For an example of Politness Levels in action, see the example below.

Japanese Teacher: Good morning, Harry.
Harry: Good Morning.
Japanese Classmates: (gasps of horror and shock)

The bottom line is thatPoliteness Levels are completely beyond your understanding, so don't even try. Just resign yourself to talking like a little girl for the rest of your life and hope to God that no one beats you up.

Comical Ali's 404

Best 404 Error page: Error 404.

eat my cheese

My housemate Sean recently left for a conference in Florida. Before he left he sent Cheu and I an email concering his refrigerated perishables:

Date: Sat, 5 Apr 2003 01:23:43 -0600 (CST)
From: Sean
To: Dav Coleman, Cheu Koh
Subject: listen buddy, eat my cheese

Listen:

Eat my cheese (nice corporatized cheddar-polymer, still unopened in the
butter cubicle thing)

Eat my lettuce (spring mix salad, 2 bags, 1 unopened)

Eat my yogurt (pink strawberry)

Eat them all in one sitting, as a salad. Or distribute them on Ritz
crakers to friends. They're good luck.

-Sean

This weekend I started playing around with a music-generating software program called Fruity Loops which has an 808 simulator. I programmed in some loops and then used AT&T's online text to speech engine and SonicFoundry's Sound Forge application to create samples of "Listen buddy, eat my cheese" and "Donald Rumsfeld" (with a german accent, it's a running joke with my friends). Mixing it all together I came up with a horrible song (trust me, this is even worse than my first attempt at a Double Dactyl [see previous blog post]) which I present to you now: ListenBuddy.mp3 (324Kb)

double dactyl

Over at Boing Boing there was a post about a prose piece written by graphic artist which concerns the current treatment of anti-war protesters in America. I thought the piece was a funny and accurate caricature of the situation, but when I looked in the Discussion section for the post there was only one comment, which read in its entirety "moronic gibberish".

It occured to me that "moronic gibberish" was a double dactyl. What is a double dactyl? The (more or less) official Double Dactyl website states that:

A dactyl, as you may know, is a poetic foot of the form +-- (ON-off-off). For example, interstate, realize, microphone, cereal, limerick, etc. etc. A double dactyl, naturally enough, is two dactyls in a row.

and furthermore

A double dactyl is also a poem, a form [...] Quite like a limerick, it has a rigid (if peculiar) structure. Two stanzas, each comprising three lines of dactylic dimeter followed by a line with a dactyl and a single accent. The two stanzas have to rhyme on their last line. The first line of the first stanza is repetitive nonsense. The second line of the first stanza is somebody's name [...] In the second stanza, one entire line must be a double-dactylic word. E.g. biopsychology...

I've always wanted to write a Double Dactyl. The first step is to come up with a name which works. It has to be six syllables and double dactylic. For instance Jesus of Nazareth and Gloria Vanderbilt would work, but Dav Coleman (on on off) or Mie Kennedy (on off on off off) would not. The first name I came up with was Julia Butterfly but I've as of yet been unable to produce a decent effort on that front so my thoughts of double dactylic creativity had been stalled (it'll have to be a good one, I know her so I can't make it half-assed).

But I decided to try to come up with something using "moronic gibberish" and did manage to come up with something (half-assed), so here it is, my first Double Dactyl:

Rub-a-dub Dub-a-dub!
U.S.A. President,
wasn't elected but
he's living large.

Moronic gibberish
spouts from his speeches, like
"misunderestimate"
And he's in charge?

I just realized Osama Bin Laden is almost double dactylic (it's On off off off ON off), perhaps enough to give him similar treatment when I get the chance...

Kim Jong-Il's blog

Kim Jong-Il's blog

XTRA: israeli club hipster website

Just ran across this crazy Israeli club information website: XTRA. I suppose it's juvenille of me to be so titillated by a garish eurotrash club-scene website just because it's full of flashing graphics, club-girl scenester pics, a legalize pot graphic showing an usama bin laden type lighting up and the entire thing is mostly in hebrew. I have no excuse, it touches a funny bone deep inside. This site has everything a zionist hipster needs. And here's one IDF soldier who could bulldoze my house any day, if you know what I mean.

I was somewhat surprised when I went to Israel/Palestine a couple of years ago to find that Tel Aviv is considered the Sin City of the Middle East. Lots of dance clubs and strip clubs. It certainly wasn't what I pictured in my mind before I got there.

Designed By a Tree

I love this concept of creating a font which is carved into a tree and then updated yearly by capturing how the tree has modified it by growing.

 

 

 

Food Delivery 2021

Ran across an interesting project which at initial glance is about food delivery called Free Food. As I explain below, that's free as in speech not beer.

The creator of it, Noah Levenson, has a pretty good intro video:

Given the project name, at first I thought it was about getting food that would be thrown out distributed to hungry folks, but watching the video, it became clear that this is more about being able to order food directly from verified local restaurants on a decentralized trust network and avoiding the (almost criminally) inefficient middle man services like DoorDash, GrubHub, UberEats, etc. The README for the project explains the goals well and has a quick run down on why the middle man food "delivery" apps/services are so bad.

Using a decentralized network (think BitTorrent more than BitCoin) it allows for restaurants owners to verify their ownership of a particular local restaurant and publish their menus. This protects against the type of unauthorized listings and other fakery that the middle man services engage in, so you know you're dealing with the real restaurant. Hungry people can find the menus of nearby restaurants and place orders. Reference implementations of the diner and restaurant clients are shown, although I didn't see the source for them available. Presumably the restaurant uses its existing delivery staff for the delivery, or you can pick up.

This is an interesting project, particularly because it's potential goes well beyond just restaurant delivery. Really any resource that can benefit from decentralized (no valueless middle man required) localized (relevant to you, where you are now) discovery can benefit from this type of system. In theory a delivery drivers could advertise themselves as resources and the system could do the matchmaking. Since the network is decentralized this would mean they wouldn't have to share their fee with a middle man network provider.

I'd definitely give this a shot if it started up in my area. In the meantime there is a better sort of food delivery service that I've been using lately and have been quite happy with. It is called Club Feast (use my referral code dav1 if you try it out!). While it still is a middle man service, they have a twist on it that should benefit both the restaurants and the delivery drivers. It requires you to order your meals hours in advance (it used to be the previous day but in the past month they have been able to move it up to same day). This allows the restaurant and delivery network time to optimize the food preparation and the routes. It is a subscription service, which means you sign up for a certain number of meals a week and pre-pay for them as credits. It lets unused credits stack up and you can pause, so it is fair to the subscriber. The meal credits themselves are $7 each, so the meals are inexpensive although limited to what the restaurant decides to make available for $7. There are tons of options though so that has not been a problem for me in San Francisco. It seems like a great win-win-win compromise for the restaurants, drivers and customers, although I would love for a journalist to investigate and report on the actual outcomes.

Would a robust Free Food network be better than Club Feast? Perhaps? CF optimizes a somewhat different problem, but perhaps that could be layered into FF as well? Is there additional value CF could bring that benefits from its centralization? Not really sure. Some things I am sure about are that both of these are better than the dominant centralized apps, and that Free Food really needs to change its name, and the paltry amount of tests in `libfood` is scary 😂.

 

An Ode to Roblox as a Gathering Place

I haven't spent a lot of time in Roblox, even though both of my kids have spent significant amounts of their time and my money there, but this essay about how it compares to those places where teenagers hang out and create their own space away from the rest of the world really resonates. It makes me want to give it a try again.

Some choice excerpts:

On his first experience in Roblox:

In one of the very first games we played together (a work-in-progress safari game, the link to which I have since lost), V became a zebra, and I was a lioness. We ran around a broad plain populated by other animals, trees in the distance, low clouds overhead, and the buzzing of insects on a 2-minute loop. The chat was full of messages from prey to prey, predator to predator. V was almost immediately killed by a cheetah who then got in the chat to say, “Overyone come to pr,” “theres meat.” Summoned, I did so, and as I ate the still-living digital body of my friend in the company of a stranger in the shape of a wild dog, I thought, “Oh. This is special.”

On the game creation tools:

But perhaps the most interesting thing about Roblox Studio is the Toolbox. Other game engines have assets stores, but none of them feel like this: a rollicking, copyright-fucked, messy, virus-filled, unsortable pile of labor and of love.

On the long tail of forgotten worlds (games) waiting to be stumbled upon:

But the things I am making in Roblox are not what are unique or compelling about Roblox, and the same could be said for most of the big games that populate the platform’s front page. Instead, what is so special here are the millions of bizarre little worlds, all networked together and waiting (mostly empty, sometimes for over a decade) to be dropped into and explored with friends.

On the "brutal" monetization situation:

As a developer, you can monetize your own games in a variety of ways, from the above-board (tip jars! cosmetics!) to the scammy. Developers earn 70% of Robux spent in their games, which is a pretty standard cut for an app store/developer split. However, getting USD back out of Robux is a different story. The payout exchange rate drops to $0.0035 USD per 1 Robux, meaning the takeaway in real world currency is roughly 24.5% of any in-game commerce—a brutally extractive exchange rate.

Fighting Date Rape With Nail Polish

Now that Bill Cosby got an early release from prison, my friend Paul brought my attention to the company Undercover Colors that developed a clear nail polish that allows you to check a drink for drugs by dipping a fingernail into the drink. The nail polish changes colors if drugs are encountered.

Brilliant! And love that it was founded by NC State students (didn't to school there, but did participate in their rugby club as a townie).

 

It looks like the product has evolved slightly to a more typical strip test kit though. I supposed the manufacturing costs proved too high? Hopefully they are still working on the more subtle version.

Post Pandemic Predictions

I started compiling this list before George Floyd was murdered, and its triteness bothers me now so I'm just going to post it and move on.

In no particular order:

• Masks largely stay culturally accepted in flu and allergy seasons from now on in the USA, but will always carry a political connotation so some groups will never wear them and mock those that do, but like punk rockers have always mocked people in suits.
• 15 years from now, a common trope will be determining how old some young adult is by what basic K-12 subject they seemed to have completely missed. "How old is Alexandra? Well she can never remember what a gerund is, she must be 27-28."
• It'll be seen as the inflection point for polyamory going mainstream when the released masses just can't get enough of each other 😂.
• 2021: long hair on dudes is back in fashion.
• The artist live stream phenomenon is too beloved to simply disappear, but outdoor live music venues are going to see a boom. There might even be a combination of the two.