I’ve known this forever, but I never really thought about how strange this is, and why it is strange. Print papers might have dating ads, right? And The Onion is actually a paper weekly in a few cities in the US, but its dating site is national. It’s definitely an online endeavour in my mind, so it strikes me as incredibly odd that this content site spawned a dating network. Weird.
I strangely don’t hate this meme.
This woman sits outside the ice cream shop below my apartment most nights, and rarely asks for anything. Like a hybrid from BSG, she talks constantly about things beyond sense. The best thing is she wears this light pink sequined top that is awesome.
Havana has all of a $5 cover, but why pay when the whole street is your dance floor? He will routinely stand right outside a window and dance to the music that bleeds through. I recently wanted to go dance with him, but Annie nixed the idea.
“Save the lies for your dad or for her,” he yells and gestures to Corey. This guy got me thinking a lot about how important politeness and saving face are in our society. I usually have cash on me, but I prefer to say “Don’t have any” when people ask me for change. The alternative would be “Listen, I’m not stupid, I know that it is impossible to go hungry on the streets of Seattle and you’re going to spend this money on drugs.” In the end I think this is okay behavior, just a fully-acknowledged white lie like the many others we tell (”I have to wash my hair”). But props to this hobo for inciting this thought.
Benny is Fremont’s chief hobo. Any given night of the week, he will gather huge stones and stack them five feet high. There isn’t anything special about these rocks and there’s no trick to it, just mad concentration and some sort of Hinduism he subscribes to. He also yells at passersby sometimes, though usually just bros who fuck with him and he says nice things to me (he digs my ’stargyle’ hoodie). He’s pretty much an institution around here and everyone knows his work.
This is my favorite hobo in a sincere way; no snark about it. He sells those hobo newspapers in front of the grocery store below me, and I buy one every week. He lives in a rehab center of some kind getting help, and selling the paper is part of his program. He talks to everyone on the street and is mad cheerful. I’m pretty sure that there are days there he is the only human I interact with in person, which probably says more about me than him.
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I just got back from Japan where I went to Tokyo and Kyoto with Emily and George. That place is just insane. Short form of some highlights:
Sam and I are blagging again over at nomoreshittythings. We’re going for 3 posts a week instead of one a day now to be more sustainable. Do check it out.
After Obama’s victory speech I went down to 1st and Pine outside the Showbox with Ben and Talia, and it was amazing. A decent-sized crowd marched from there down to Pioneer Square, chanting and dancing and playing music the whole way.
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And then on Saturday I attended the local march for civil rights and marriage equality.
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I came across the need to compare two XML trees for equality in unit tests I’m writing for a project you’ll hopefully hear about soon. I started to write a tree-walking comparer then thought I’d google around to see if anyone had done this for me. simplexmldiff is a clever script that just reads in two XML docs, pretty prints them, and then diffs their output. Brilliant. It isn’t perfectly accurate due to whitespace, but I don’t care about that for this project. I reimplemented what I needed of it in 4 lines of python. hellah.
I spent all the bus rides of the last two months of my life reading David Foster Wallace’s 1000-page epic Infinite Jest, and I just finished last weekend. It was a great experience reading the book and it is a phenomenal piece of literature. I was cnstantly impressed by how approachable it was; like most Stanford grads, I am forever 150 pages into Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, but I had no trouble reading Wallace beyond the sheer volume of it. It did inspire me to buy the WordBook app for my iPhone, though. That app is sweet.
John and I have talked a bit about how oddly predictive the novel is, though it is not really trying to be any kind of science fiction story. Particularly interesting is a several page spew about the (future) history of videoconferencing technology. The short version of it is that (1) the bandwidth and devices for vc become as ubiquitous as the telephone, (2) vc becomes all the rage, (3) people start to notice that vc does not have the anonymizing qualities of voice communication; a vc’er cannot be doodling, doing a crossword, watching TV, etc while engaged in vc’ing; a vc’er has to worry about his appearance, so (4) first devices and then software come out that alter and improve the appearance of people vc’ing, (5) these devices progress to the point that the vc image of a person is almost completely replaced with lifelike avatars of people in a state of appearance so pristine that it bears no resemblance to the actual user of the technology. (6) Everyone gets sick of this silly state of affairs and vc is obsolesced by good old voice communication. Back in the real world, we are basically at stage (1) right now and vc has not yet taken off the way 2001 told us it would. Upon reading this history, it is obvious that videoconferening sucks big ones and I don’t want it (though I must admit I have some interest in developing the software in (5)). John posted an excerpt of this section.
The novel also predicted the end of broadcast TV, something I am very committed to. I have yet to regularly watch broadcast TV since I started college, and the rest of the world has finally caught up with me; I can watch what I want on hulu or iTunes even more easily than I used to pirate it. Broadcast TV’s days are certainly numbered. A prediction that no one seems to have made, though, is the coming demise of physical media. Apple deprecated the floppy drive before anyone else (to much criticism) and is now deprecating the CD/DVD, or trying to. Netflix soft-launched its Silverlight streaming player recently and put tens of thousands of films online, and one must suspect that the days are numbered for the somewhat silly business of sending people movies through the mail. In Infinite Jest, most entertainment is consumed through HD casette tapes; soon most entertainment will be streamed to your computer or XBox or, least likely, some dedicated set-top box.
These details are not at all the main thrust of this great work, but I wanted to mention them because they’re things I think about a good deal. Also, I recently read Rolling Stone’s story on Wallace’s demons. It’s an interesting read, and really reminds you that depression is a tragic disease like any other.
After running for two months, it’s almost time to finish up with TravelForChange. It’s been more successful than we ever expected, and I feel that we really made a difference– nearly 300 campaigners were sponsored by around 150 sponsors. Conventional wisdom says 1 in 14 people are persuaded by personal contact with a campaigner, and a campaigner can talk to such and such people in that timespan. Do some math and I’m sure it’ll turn out that TFC touched tens of thousands of people in states where every vote is critical.
I’d like to thank everyone who worked on the project: Alisa Whitfield, Brian Park, Justine Seidenfeld. Mesa Schumacher, and Devin Sok. And I’d like to thank all of the volunteers who did the real important work. And I’d especially like to thank all the sponsors, and I’d also like to especially thank Alisa for having the great idea and really running the operation and Brian for writing so much of the code for the site.
You can read about TFC in some press-like publications; we were covered by the SF Chronicle, panned by Dan Savage, and mentioned in Wonkette.
Thanks again to everyone involved in the project! Now all that remains is to WIN!
