A: Britney Spears. Q: What if Michael Jackson and Cher had a love child?
An amazingly huge pixelated aircraft carrier. the detail here is *insane*
Photographie de Paris
I took a lot less photos in Paris than last time I was there (photos!), but I still got some good ones this time around (well, "good" by my standards anyway).
What you don't see in these photos is the series of miracles that occurred during our visit to Paris. There was uber-chef Pierre Gagnaire getting me to eat (quite happily for the most part) 4 or 5 different sorts of fish & seafood, the nearly-perfect weather in Paris during our stay, and, most miraculous of all, we avoided eating in any of the excellent restaurants we ate at during our last trip (save for a bad pain au chocolat habit I've developed in frequenting the Boulangerie Malineau), opting instead for a bunch of new excellent restaurants.
Hmmm, there seems to be a new Harry Potter book out. Also, 870 pages??!!?
Finally, some font management in OS X. and the rest of the Panther goodies look nice too
Back in Paris
After a nice time in Copenhagen (thanks to the Reboot team for a good time), we're back in Paris for a few days. Feels a lot like home here, very comfortable. Who knows, perhaps it will be home one of these days.
p.s. To the person with the open wireless access point near Rue du Temple, thanks for the hookup. :) (And to the folks organizing the free wireless trial in Paris.)
E-mail to RSS script. from the interesting and new Eightlinks.com
So, House of Leaves is a book about a book about a book about a movie that doesn't exist. Or something like that. Post-modern fiction at its best (or worst if you're not a big fan). I would *love* to see this book -- or the movie it describes -- made into a movie, but I can't think of any particular director who would do it justice.
Google Toolbar adds BlogThis button. there's Blogger in my Google!
Hulk uploader pleads guilty. Appeared in court with green suit and tie
@ the movies
Spun
Skip this one and watch Requiem for a Dream instead...Spun just ripped off all of Aronofsky's camera techniques. I should have known not to go see something with Brittney Murphy in it. It was good to see Jason Schwartzman in a movie again, but would have preferred seeing him in something better.
Sneak preview of Bush's re-election website. with XML/RSS syndication for weblogs
The Nth Country Experiment. How two amateurs built a nuclear bomb in 1964 with a library card
Rebooting
I'm at Reboot in Copenhagen, Denmark today. Don't know how much I'll be writing about it, but I could go off at any moment. Highlight of the day so far is one of the organizers calling Microsoft, a Reboot sponsor, evil.
ShareLive index of P2P files. Arguably legal since they're not hosting the files or network?
Nintendo wins anti-piracy suit against Lik-Sang. Hong Kong retailer sold game copying devices
The Internet Under Surveillance. Extraordinary 150-page breakdown of global Internet censorship, by country
GoogleGuy Says. Insider info culled from a Google employee's forum posts
The power of weblogs, blogging Mt. Everest. How 2 links at Kottke and The Presurfer growed to 840 links and 200.000 visitors in 24 days
Google launches AdSense, context-sensitive text ads that even small sites can use. Perfect for weblogs
Who owns the conversation on my web site?
Back on May 15th, I wrote a 221-word entry on my first impression of The Matrix Reloaded. At last count (mid-afternoonish on June 17th), people have left 700 comments in the thread attached to that entry (7 of which are mine). Those 700 comments comprise a total of ~125,000 words (~180 per entry); that's about 3.3 150-page books. The HTML file is in excess of 1.3 MB in size, has been viewed about 5000 times in the past two weeks (during which about half of the comments were left), and is responsible, all by itself, for 5.3 gigabytes of data transferred from kottke.org this month.
In comparison to the rest of kottke.org (just a few more stats here), the most comments on previous thread was just over 200 (a Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon thread that is no longer online), there are around 3500 comments that have been left on the site in dozens of threads, and over the past 5 years, I have posted around 2500 entries to kottke.org, 27 of them since the Matrix post. My total bandwidth usage for June thus far is about 14.6 GB.
In short, the Matrix thread is unexpectedly large, and depending on how you look at it, is anywhere from 10% to 36% of my entire site, and significantly more than 50% of the total output since May 15th. If you were to look at all the content of the site in the aggregate, you might come to the conclusion that kottke.org is a Matrix Reloaded-related site even though it's been chugging along Reloaded-free for more than 5 years.
Given that the thread is still active (25 posts today alone), how do I deal with it going forward? I haven't read any of the conversation since around comment #200, and if it hits 1000 comments (which, 2 weeks ago seemed unlikely but now seems inevitable), the file approaches 2 MB in size, and sucks up 15 GB of bandwidth a month, it seems prudent for me to close the thread.
On the other hand, it continues to be valuable as a forum for a small number of participants and a larger number of readers...and from what I can tell, is a relatively high-quality conversation. Who am I to shut down a conversation that I'm not involved in? This may be my site, but the participants own the conversation. As much as it makes sense to shut it down, I'm inclined to let the participants go as long as they want. Who knows, maybe they'll even let me know when they're done.
Related: Sam Ruby's experiment of moderating discussions on weblogs.
Oh, and just for fun, I pasted the entire thread into Word and used the AutoSummary feature to come up with this 100 word summary of the thread:
The Matrix 1.1?
Wake up Neo...
Real vs Matrix.
Sorry, no "matrix within a matrix". "Wake up Neo."
Neo is human.
RTFB Neo!
Rewatch The Matrix.
Neo: Yeah.
Neo: Ahhh.
Neo: What?
Neo: Morpheus.
Neo: What?
Neo: Stop.
Neo: The Oracle.
Trinity: No, Neo.
Neo: Yeah.
The Matrix Overloaded
Matrix Within A Matrix?
3. DOUBLE MATRIX theory.
NEO: No.
Regarding a Matrix within a Matrix:
Aren't 2 matrices sufficient?
Neo: "No."
Neo: "No."
Morpheus: "Rest, Neo.
Morpheus: "Rest, Neo. (of the matrix)
Enter the Matrix
Matrix within a Matrix...
Matrix within a Matrix...
Matrix within a Matrix...
That's just begging to be set to music. Or to be included in a anthology of philosophical poetry.
Ads supporting targeted, one-person weblogs. IWantMedia and PaidContent as case studies
Radiohead announces North American tour. tickets go on sale June 21
Iranian weblogs popular but controversial. Blogging threatened as conservatives attempt to restrict Internet usage
Gamecube games dumped and distributed online. A hack to play burned minidiscs is reportedly in development
Spurs win NBA title as Duncan almost has a quadruple-double. He finished with a mere 21 points, 20 rebounds, 10 assists, and 8 blocked shots.
NYT on Urban Nomads. read: gutter punks
Ceci n'est pas une guerre (c'est l'amour)
Seeing U.S. President George Bush and French President Jacques Chirac get all buddy-buddy at the recent G8 Summit inspired me to make a silent film about the sometimes-tender / sometimes-turbulent relationship of these two powerful men. Witness the giddy highs and depressing lows of a very public love. The film is called Ceci n'est pas une guerre (c'est l'amour), or This is not a war (it's love), and I hope you enjoy it. (Flash 6 required, ~580KB, best viewed with sound on.)
Thanks to Andre, Matt, Meg, Leonard, Mouser, and Caterina for their help with this. :)
Remaindered links bibliography
In an effort to keep things as uncluttered as possible around here, I don't provide a lot of metadata for the remindered links in the sidebar: no posted by, no time, no dates, and no attribution. In order to adjust for the lack of attribution, here are some sites I regularly draw excellent links from:
Gulfstream, Muxway, Anil's Daily Links, BoingBoing, Slashdot, paranoidfish, lightningfield.com, The Morning News, What Do I Know, brushstroke.tv, ex machina, and Magnetbox.
If you've got some time today, give them a visit.
Popular Mechanics revisits Roswell. Newly declassified documents and a deathbed confession conclusively debunk UFO claims
@ the movies
Finding Nemo
Pixar has found what Disney lost in the early 90s...the something that makes animated movies actually watchable. I think it may have something to do with the lack of singing. IMO, as soon as Pixar gets rid of Disney as the distributor of their films, the sooner they'll start pumping out even better movies.
Worth1000 owes $4000 in bandwidth fees. Photoshopping community uses 1.4 terabytes over their monthly quota
Three-dimensional filesystem browser for OSX. Pretty, but impractical
The Believer's Idea Share
The web site for The Believer has a feature called Idea Share. Here's a sampling of ideas that people have shared:
There should be a tax break for perfect attendance at the voting polls. Unlike the law in Australia, which forces you to vote, this would just award those citizens who are consistent participants in our democracy, kind of like a bribe. Small but noticeable: $25?
Invite different kinds of people—architects, cartoonists, plastic surgeons—to attend a lecture on an undisclosed subject. Tell them that they will be tested on the information. Instead, take their notes, doodles and all, and display them as an exhibit, perhaps in conjunction with a transcript of the lecture itself, or perhaps with the subject of the lecture remaining a mystery.
There should be more novels about sentient animals.
There should be a device hooked up to your car's stereo system that displays whatever song and artist you're listening to—whether it be tape, CD, MP3, even radio (it would look it up using the Internet)—in a scrolling LED ticker tapetype display on your bumper or running boards.
Animated shows for adults a big hit. Adult Swim beating the late night talk shows with the 18-24 demographic
WonderWalker. Oddball applet puts user-made bookmark icons on a spatial map
Supreme Court ends Sex.com battle. Domain goes back to its original owner
George Bush wrecks on his Segway. expect to see this photo all over the web in short order
Duke Nukem Forever vs Take Two Software. 6+ years of vaporware hell leads to a public battle between developer and publisher
OJR on Gawker and other localized blogs. Can they succeed where local city guides failed?
Some movies, TiVo's descriptions of them, and some lame commentary from me in italics
Hellraiser: Bloodline
Man in space battles Pinhead, as did ancestors. (Ancestors don't do anything in space.)
Cyborg Cop
Drug agent's brother could be a cyborg. (Wasn't that an episode of Leave It To Beaver?)
Sense and Sensibility
Men romance and abandon sisters in 1900 England. ("Romance and Abandon" was Austen's first title)
The Gunfighter
Upstarts dare the fastest gun in the West. (And then what?!)
Showgirls
Dancer stoops low to rise in Las Vegas. (Hey, that's kinda clever.)
Saturday Night Fever
Brooklyn nobody becomes disco king to Bee Gees music. (Shoulda stuck with this same plot for Battlefield Earth.)
The Usual Suspects
A detective questions a con man about associates. (Wake me up when that one's over.)
Wonder Boys
A writer and his student collide with life. (What does that mean, collide with life?)
It took me several months to figure this out as well.
comment on Today's favourite search request..., Jun 11
Sun creates Javapedia Wiki for "all things Java". WillSomebody PleaseMakeAWikiThatIs ActuallyUserFriendly?
Don't Blog. Headlines from the future
P2P Hosting for Blogs. think BitTorrent for weblogs
Entire text of "The Best of Creative Computing Vol. 2". 300+ pages of computer articles and programs from 1976
NES "Kung Fu" SARS hack. SARS Folk Art, Exhibit A
The Phonaesthetics of "Blog". Is "blog" an ugly-sounding word?
An Open Letter to The New Yorker
To Whom It May Concern:
The most recent issue of your magazine, the Début Fiction issue, arrived in our mailbox yesterday. Forgoing for now an exploration of your reasons for accenting the "e" in the English word "debut", I would like to direct your attention to pages 98 and 99 of that issue. Page 98 is to the left of the crease of the magazine and contains part of an article entitled Our Perfect Summer by David Sedaris, an article I was keenly interested in reading when I saw it in the table of contents. Page 99 is to the right of the crease and contains two vertical half-page flaps that open to reveal an advertisement for UBS. Let's call the flap that opens toward the crease page 99A, the flap that opens away page 99B, and the revealed advertisement page 99C.
Here's my problem. Page 99A keeps opening up and flopping down in front of the Sedaris article I'm trying to read on page 98 because the thumb on my right hand is not nearly long enough to clamp it down with the rest of the pages on the right hand side of the magazine. I had to resort to an unorthodox, complicated, and uncomfortable magazine-holding position in order to keep page 99A from interfering with my reading, a position that, had it lasted any longer than the two minutes it took me to read the text it was covering, would have driven me completely bats.
I realize that with all the excitement around the Débuting Fiction in the magazine, you probably forgot, just this once, to run the magazine through The Condé Nast Magazine Usability Lab. And also that UBS probably loves the fact that their exhaustively-honed advertising copy is flopping down in front of the hilarious literary stylings of David Sedaris like a pop up ad on the web and precipitating a post (with a link, no less) on a personal web site of modest acclaim. But this flap, it's seriously annoying. Please make it go away from all future issues of your magazine.
Yours very sincerely,
Jason Kottke
ps. Please do not print this letter in your magazine. I do not wish for my, how you say, inelegant grammar, odd punctuational choices, and inadequate vocabulary to be snickered at by your discerning readership.
pps. I love this bit from the Sedaris article:
"But it's perfect," my father said. "A real beauty, just like your mother here." He came from behind and pinched her on the bottom. She laughed and swatted him with a towel and we witnessed what we would later come to recognize as the rejuvenating power of real estate. It's what fortunate couples turn to when their sex life has faded and they're too pious for affairs. A second car might bring people together for a week or two, but a second home can revitalize a marriage for up to nine months after the closing.
Friendly free advice to the People at Six Apart. Right on, Olivier
Researching the Fargo film death. she wasn't seeking the Fargo treasure, after all
Our Perfect Summer. a brand-spanking new story from David Sedaris in the New Yorker
Oblivio harassed via search queries. Coming soon: harassment via referral querystrings
Sun hires Christina Aguilera as spokesperson. Wireless Java gets dirrty
What's the difference between working for money and playing for money?
I missed Julian Dibbell's The Unreal Estate Boom in Wired last November (I was in Frizzance), but I recently rectified that oversight. Too many interesting bits in the article about virtual spaces and economies to exhaustively list here, so here's a short one:
"The minute you hardwire constraints into a virtual world, an economy emerges," explains Castronova, the Adam Smith of EverQuest. "One-trillionth of a second later, that economy starts interacting with ours."
Some thoughts:
1. I'm not sure if that's always true. Slashdot has an economy (with karma as currency) but as far as I know, no one is selling their karma to less karma-rich folks. But, it's close enough.
2. Back when ICQ was still popular, people sold low ICQ numbers on eBay. #163896 went for $41.
3. When MetaFilter was inundated with new users, Matt throttled new user signups to 15 people a day. But he also let in anyone who donated $5 toward server upkeep and bandwidth. Many people joined this way.
4. And just in case you didn't think they were smart, the folks at Ludicorp recognize that virtual economies & real world economies are tightly coupled in the way that Mr. Castronova describes above. Expect The Game Neverending to let people play extensively with the intersection of the virtual and real world economies.
ps. Julian Dibbell is keeping a weblog called Play Money in which he's documenting his attempt to make real money in the virtual world of Ultima Online.
View the teaser trailer for The Incredibles. Pixar's next film
Google Catalogs: The end of catalogs clogging up the mailbox?. I never want to receive another Pottery Barn Baby & Bath or whatever it's called again...
A new editor for the remaindered links
Andy Baio will be posting to the remaindered links weblog (RSS) for the next couple of weeks. Welcome Andy. And thanks to Lance for posting there for the past couple of weeks. Rumor has it that his special brand of linky goodness will be popping up elsewhere on the web in the near future.
Technorati adds keyword searching. search the full text of 362,537 weblogs
Hong Kong Lipton tea. hyperviolent, but thirst-quenching
4-dimensional Rubik's Cube applet. More potential positions than the total number of atoms in the universe
First person account of Apple's meeting with indie labels about the iTunes Music Store. very detailed as to how the Music Store works
Some thoughts and observations from Book Expo America 2003. includes Al Franken / Bill O'Reilly shouting match
Make your reservations now for Summer Restaurant Week in NYC. June 23-27 & June 30-July 4
Support the Numbered Shirts Project by sending in a pic of your wearing a shirt with a number on it.
Meet the man responsible for the design of the original iMac and iBook.. Jonathan Ive, V.P. of Industrial Design at Apple
Does your signature really matter?. The Credit Card Prank tests the theory of the illegible signature, including signing with stick figures, a grid, "Mariah Carey"...
Egregious, sacherine, truly amazingly awful Michael Jackson 9-11 benefit song finds its way online.. MP3 track available on JacksonDailyNews.net: "What More Can I Give"
The Internet and the Chinese rave scene
Network Effects: Use of the Internet in the Chinese Rave Scene describes how Chinese music promoters and DJs are using the Internet to download & share music, read foreign music-related media, plan events, and generally share knowledge about their interests & craft, despite the Great Firewall of China:
I began to see a number of distinct effects of the rapid increase in Net usage on the nascent Chinese club scene: local DJs and producers were using the Internet to obtain new tools for producing and distributing their own music; websites were springing up to inform users about new developments in the Chinese scene and provide new opportunities for participants to communicate with one another; and music makers and clubbers alike were using the Net to learn about and obtain new music from both domestic and international artists.
and
Some Chinese DJs even use music downloaded from the Net