You can’t wash the Internet’s mouth out with soap. Or, to switch metaphors, don’t mud-wrestle with a pig; you’ll both get dirty and the pig will enjoy it. Running a service on the Internet that allows humans (or dogs) to post their own content sets you up for a thankless job. Foremost you need to […]
My mom gave my daughter a copy of Curious George and the Rocket, a board book describing the lovable monkey’s voyage into space and commemoration as the first monkey in space: The plot runs a very close parallel to the story of Albert II, the real-life first monkey in space. Until about 4 pages before […]
I mentioned earlier that I got hold of the list of all 107 million dot-com domain names. It’s a pretty fun corpus to crunch for hilarious accidents of fate. Some unfortunate misparsings: Lap To Piss Low What Doe Snot Kill Me Yell Ow Pages Butt Hats Not All Ski Town Snot Ice Anus Ham Dance […]
A friend once posited the existence of a shadowy organization responsible for perverting language into the malevolent and confusing thing that it is. Perhaps language was once pure and intuitive until this secret society, perceiving the power it could gain from creating ambiguity and confusion, acted to twist it. How else can one explain the […]
The dot-com zone file is the master list of .com domain names. It’s maintained by Verisign and available for the price of asking. I’ve been a long-time visitor to Popeye Marine, apparently now known as Popeye’s Catalog Shop and historically called Popeye Sailor’s Exchange. It’s a sailor’s scrapyard, where unusual people go to paw through […]
In December I played a Christmas gig with The Elixxxirs. This was going to be a fun night for me — I planned to start by hoisting a beer at noon with a hundred Santas or so, then arrive late and drunk at the bar where someone else would be providing a drum set which […]
Or, to put it another way, Yaw Views Nubs Die Hit. Have you ever put your hands on the keyboard and started typing, then discovered that your fingers were sitting on the wrong keys? If you’re a touch typist, probably — and for a moment it feels like the CIA has taken over your hands. […]
I’ve continued to tinker with automatic song generation since I posted Nickelmatic as I had a nagging sense that it was shooting fish in a barrel. The project I was intending to follow it suddenly started behaving frighteningly like Scott Walker when I was expecting Gordon Lightfoot — hey, you never know what direction these […]
An acquaintance who shall remain nameless has actually admitted to liking Nickelback. Now, I’ll concede that mocking this band has become a populist move and I’d rather ride a bike than take a bandwagon — but as this famous video shows there is something worth targeting here: manufactured, bland, cookie-cutter production masquerading as anything expressive. […]
Welcome to the new Cassettepunk. I’ve reluctantly replaced an earlier version of it that was conceptually beautiful — it was written in C for the 6502 processor and ran using a Javascript-based Commodore 64 emulator, thus making it the only web site ever to believe that it’s a C64 — but was just too awkward. […]