I Like My Internet Unfiltered

Something I always find difficult to convey to others is my love of existence. I’m not talking about existence existence, like us-being-here-on-this-planet existence (though that’s mighty cool and amazing, too, don’t get me wrong!), but rather that certain things do exist. Quite often this is in regards to things that most would find… well, unsavory. Deplorable. Depraved. Obscene. You get the idea.

You see, I like my internet unfiltered — my Google SafeSearch off, exposing the deep dark seedy underbelly. There is much that I have seen that cannot be unseen; much that is truly awful, disgusting, or sick; and even more that is raunchy, ribald, or risqué to an extreme. I take a small risk in even admitting all this.

And His Name Is Weiner!, or This Has to Be an Elaborate Joke

Good ol’ MovieBob sums up my feelings on this Weiner case better than I could.

And then there’s this FTFA:

Along the way he made many, many double entendres.
…
"This is part of the problem with the way this has progressed and one of the reasons I was perhaps, you'll forgive me, a little stiff yesterday," he said.

Wow. Do skim the rest, it’s really bizarre stuff.

Frankly, I didn’t even know who this guy was yesterday, and I still haven’t checked don’t care what his actual policy positions are, but I gotta say I kinda like the guy. With as many Politician Sex Scandals! as there are each year, it’s really refreshing to see a guy not do the usual “No comment, no comment, oh you found evidence, shit, in that case I acted wrongly and I’m resigning effective immediately!” song and dance.

Fascinating interconnections

I’ll probably touch on this same riff many times over the years writing entries, but I can’t stress enough how the internet makes possible bizarrely random and awesome connections.

Case in point, I bring you this gem. I don’t know what to say about it. It floored me.

What floors me again and again, long after the surreal effect of watching this dude, and on many other videos and things, is how I ended up there. I won’t go into how, specifically, but I’m sure you can guess based on the fact that the video doesn’t get much traffic that it is fairly obscure all things considered (even within the microcosm of YouTube).

What particularly interests me is thinking that this guy had no idea how far reaching, both in number and in distance, the impact of his preparing, recording, and posting publically this video would go. That some guy and his girlfriend in Arkansas would find themselves late one Monday night jaws agape and eyes wide trying to take in all of this weirdness all at once and going into overload.

Who else has seen it? Who were they with? Where were they? In a weird way, I’m connected, if only on one common strand, to all the rest who saw this, and yet it’s likely we’ll never know, never meet, never cross paths, or anything beyond this one common ground.

And this kind of ethereal “connecting” of shared experiences happens so often each day to us all. Sure, as humans we’ve always thrived on shared experiences, but only the internet really makes possible this kind of mind-boggling distribution.

Just wow.

Also, the video. God damn.

Bird droppings

By now everyone’s heard of our dead animal epidemic. So far, there aren’t any real results in from the vets on why, so far as I’ve read. Still, it was parroted around all day today at work. We (that is, as our state) love getting our fifteen minutes.

While I’m interested to eventually hear what actually probably happened once they’ve had time to figure it out, I mostly just enjoyed watching the slams fly on /.:

Maybe the birds realized they were in Arkansas and figured suicide was really the only way out.
antifoidulus

I got arrested traveling through Arkansas once. They got me for contraband. I had a bunch of books. I got off on a technicality: no one could prove they were books....
Himring

The birds were hit by emanations from the Arkansas school system, and promptly forgot how to fly.
hyades1

And my favorite...

Arkansas - America's Somalia.
Alsee

As someone who’s not big on tribalism, I have no problem with people slamming our state. It’s often much deserved and I often am the one doing it. (As if I were somehow obviously exempt from the label “Arkansan”).

It's also an interesting live experiment in tangents as you can literally watch the conversation get hijacked by a vegan/PETA debate on eating meat and then one on existence of god. Great sociology fun! The tangential stuff easily makes up half or more of the comments, which is probably because just about anything is more interesting than Arkansas on a slow news day.

These aren't frosted, though

I've been doing a lot of hardware research lately towards purchasing parts for a new system (which I'll probably cover in great detail soon). One of the hardest decisions was the graphics card, so I spent an especially large amount of my focus on reading up on them. Since this started during the limbo before Radeon 6000 series cards came out, lots of review sites were posting the same AMD marketing material as previews before the hands-on reviews were possible. As such, I saw the following slide a ton of times:

And every time I saw it, I thought of these:

Spoilers: I ended up going with Barts.

So is it "Eks" like Racer X or "Ten" like Mac OS X?

So I recently upgraded to the brand-spankin’ shiny new version of Adobe Reader. Since it follows version 9 they decided, unlike iTunes but similar to Mac OS (apparently Apple can't pick one and stick with it), to call it Reader X.

I know Adobe revamps the entire UI every damn time they release a new version, but this time one aspect in particular struck me: the toolbar. Whether it actually is or not, it feels larger this time around (perhaps to address the continually increasing average desktop resolutions?) but that's not the problem. The problem is the icons themselves.

Just looking at the toolbar everything is pretty much okay. There is a definite more-or-less style to them all and none of them stick out as being particularly out of place. It flows, they have a nice soft-gradient-y feel to them (in a CSS3 kind of way), and they are lighter than the previous release's dark theme.

But their hover effects seem to be practically chosen at random. Some highlight, some dim, and some are outlined in a box. Worse, the “link buttons” on the far right for Comment and Share behave more like an Aero-style button (and not particularly impressive ones at that). So much for consistency.

What gives?

My doppelgänger didn't fare too well

Apparently I died in the World Trade Center bombing.

Which is odd because I seem to recall having to leave morning class early to go with the other kids into the school auditorium and watch the news unfold on this TV, wheeled out onto the stage on one of those A/V carts, that was far too small for an entire audience of kids and faculty to make out much of anything.

Bonus: I was also an ADR dude for Star Trek III, even though I hadn’t been born quite yet. (ST3 premiered in June; it would be six more months before I was done bakin’ in my momma’s oven.)

I had to Google to find a link, but I've known about my name in the Star Trek credits since I was very young and watched it with family. (The WTC thing was new to me, though.)