Virtual Thought

As a “for instance” I present to you these pictures of animal crackers found by a co-worker:

Yes, these crackers were pulled out of the box this way, molded together in an expression of crackery love. Here are the flickr links if that’s more your style.

Have you seen Seizureman?

There’s a small firestorm going on over at digg about a story on forevergeek about how digg is hierarchically edited instead of peer edited. Very interesting stuff if true… and, adding fuel to the proverbial paranoid fire, the story on digg reporting this has been buried. (That’s me in the second comment… neat!)

One of the main things that attracted me to digg in the first place was the idea of a truly semi-automated, peer-reviewed selection of stories which, on the face of it, seemd more fair than Plastic and Slashdot which have more editorial control. Sure this leads to some really, really dumb digg stories… but they don’t get dugg onto the front page and quickly get lost in the random noise of the site. If a story was interesting enough then it would get voted up by those who cared, cream rising to the top.

But, of course, like any system digg is eminently hackable. And it seems as though we’re seeing it right now…

Or are we? I think it’s a little premature to say that there’s some vast conspiracy destroying this pretty cool site. I want to see what the diggers-that-be have to say about this, let it play out, before I start jumping on the “digg is ruined” bandwagon, or the “digg’s been compromised” conspiracy theories.

One thing that would help this process enormously is some visibility into the process by which a digg story is buried. How bout it, digg? What’s the trail here? Why is this story getting buried?

Then you might want a cleverly named Bibliochaise.

That is just awesome. It’s produced by Nobody and Co. whose website comes up blank for me, probably because of over-protective ad-blocking software (I’m talking to you Adblock Filterset.G Updater!).

This blog is entirely too filled up with kippleposts. I shall make a more concerted effort to be a better blogger.

That’s hot.

Or why my smileys are all backward: ( =

In the Spring of 1997 I dropped out of college for a semester to figure myself out. I was having a rough time of it trying to adjust to several new situations (my parents’ divorce, my newly discovered epilepsy, college life)... basically, a lot of stuff was rattling around in my head and my heart that I hadn’t yet taken the time to fully explore and incorporate into myself. I felt at war with who I used to be and who I was to become and was getting torn apart in the process. A semester without the pressures of college was just what I needed to straighten myself out.

Rather than do any of that I spent a lot of time in AOL “Bornagainonline” chat rooms making fun of fundamentalist Christians.

I’m not proud of this anymore. It’s hard to regret formative experiences since that would be, in effect, regretting the person that you have become… which just seems like a bad policy. I wouldn’t do that now, certainly, since a respect of other people’s beliefs has become a rather core part of my own personality… my personal war against zealotry notwithstanding (and I mean you, Pat Robertson), I can’t attack people just because they do not believe as I believe. That is the utmost hypocrisy for one who champions the freedom of ideas.

The part of this chapter that I don’t regret is the people that I met online that I, at first, only knew by the sobriquets that AOL forced upon us: Daemongrrl (or TalaDrake, or KaliDrake or whichever… ( ; ), Newagegeek, Jokolondo, thefatguy, Hakuin69, Arwen33, wnstnsmth… I was caught up in some larger swirl of events… all of us making the circuit, poking fun, causing mayhem, night after night… getting to know each other, becoming friends in this weird late-night habit.

Naturally, one night, when quizzed by a befuddled “Xian” in one of the chat rooms, “are you guys in some sort of cult or something?” one of us (Joko?) quickly replied, “Yes, we are.” I’m pretty sure it was Newagegeek who elaborated: “The Cult of Squishybear.”

Because Harvey (a.k.a Newagegeek) owns this stuffed bear, see… and he’d written a song about it, and it was Awesome, and, well, gosh darn, a bear is a pretty funny thing to build a cult around… and voila! The Cult of the Graphites, the Worshippers of Squishybear, were born.

Graphites because our holy books were written in pencil for easy revamping.

And lo! The sign of the Bear will fly in the face of reason! And it shall be backwards and written in pencil thusly: ( :

And the Masses shall cry, “Wakka chika” and Be Glad. – The Apocrypha of Squishybear

It goes on, and on, and on.

The reason I’m writing this is because I have this funny habit of Googling the people that I know. And, for no particular reason, today seemed like a good day to fire up the ol’ web browser, go to Google, and type in “jokolondo” and “newagegeek” and “daemongrrl” and, eventually, “graphites cult” and “zeligx”... wait, who? Seems that things have grown since this Saint of the Graphites went on sabbatical.

So I’m posting this as a signpost, an open letter. Hey guys, it’s me… it’d be neat to talk to you again sometime… and I’ll try and get that “Wakka Chika” song up in mp3 form real, real soon.

( =

P.S. By the way: Gil, that comment was me saying hello.
P.P.S If there’s any way I can get in contact with Harvey that would be great, too.
P.P.P.S Not to exclude anyone else on the list… these are just the people I successfully found. ( ;

Hey fellas, have you heard the news…

So it seems that Libby says that Cheney told him that Bush told Cheney that it was okay to leak Valerie Plame’s name. Let’s examine the various conclusions this leads us to:

• When Bush had said before that he wanted the investigation to end so we would know the facts what he meant to say was, “I know the facts but I’m not going to reveal them at this time.”
• When Scott McClellan said previously, No one wants to get to the bottom of it more than the president of the United States, what he meant to say was, “The president knows what happened but is being hush-hush for now.”
• When Joseph Wilson insisted that his wife’s exposure was an act of political retaliation that ended her career the decision to endanger her life and end her career came from the President.
• When Bush said, I want to know the truth. If anybody has got any information inside our administration or outside our administration, it would be helpful if they came forward with the information so we can find out whether or not these allegations are true and get on about the business, he, at that point, knew that he was lying.

Of course, maybe Libby was lying. So that’s perjury. But isn’t he already charged with that?

Here’s some speculation:

• Cheney didn’t talk to Bush about declassifying this information… Cheney, by virtue of releasing the info to Libby, went over the President’s head! And then lied about it!
• The President forgot he did it in the first place!
• Libby is, in secret, a Democrat who hates America and doesn’t support our troops and that’s why he is attacking the President!

Of course, the CIA isn’t doing such a good job at protecting the names of employees anyway… and maybe we should take a look at that?