substitute: (reich)
I can't wait for journalists to discover other teen risks such as "buttsex," "alco-hol," and "military enlistment." I hope Kim Komando was on vacation when someone wrote this, because I remember her as smart and funny and pretty much sane.

Web delivers new worry for parents: Digital drugs

We all know that music can alter your mood. Sad songs can make you cry. Upbeat songs may give you an energy boost. But can music create the same effects as illegal drugs?

This seems like a ridiculous question. But websites are targeting your children with so-called digital drugs. These are audio files designed to induce drug-like effects.

All your child needs is a music player and headphones.

actually, it is ridiculous. sorry )
substitute: (oldman bad computer)
"Data centres consumed 0.6% of the world's electricity in 2000, and 1% in 2005. Globally, they are already responsible for more carbon-dioxide emissions per year than Argentina or the Netherlands, according to a recent study by McKinsey, a consultancy, and the Uptime Institute, a think-tank. If today's trends hold, these emissions will have grown four-fold by 2020, reaching 670m tonnes. By some estimates, the carbon footprint of cloud computing will then be larger than that of aviation."

http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11412495&CFID=7201199&CFTOKEN=82937133
substitute: (alien angry)
Wow. If you're in search of a high-quality internet-wide flamewar, there's no better place to start than as I did today: looking for information about bicycle helmets.

I did find out what I needed to know, but holy cats! People who don't want helmets REALLY REALLY don't want them! The wikipedia article is a classic NPOV disaster, to start, and then you look elsewhere and whoa.

I mean, I don't like a sweaty head any more than the next guy, but.
substitute: (binky)
I wrote once before about the strange personal ads I saw when I worked at the Los Angeles Reader years ago. One of my duties at first was typing in classifieds, partly because I was junior and partly because the classififed ad system was also used for the entertainment listings and capsule reviews I had charge of.

Reading last week in The Slacktivist about a proto-blog on paper in a college library reminded me of another oddity at the Reader: the free classifieds.

We had the usual personals and ads, but anyone could send in a card with a few sentences on it and it would be put in the free classifieds section. Nothing in the real classifieds categories could go there, and nothing commercial, but it was free and almost totally uncensored.

The result was a tiny, paper-based social network. Anonymous confessions a la Postsecret were common. "Missed connections" as seen in Craigslist also showed up.

And, inevitably, a running cast of characters turned the free classifieds into a forum. They all had nicknames. Some of them disliked each other. There were running gags and pranks. Occasionally someone would depart in a huff and return. Flame wars went on for weeks. And periodically we had to drop one of the ads because of some violation of policy, and the residents of the free zone would call us tyrants and rage for weeks.

Some members of the group met in person sometimes. I don't think it went very well.

Working at the paper added another dimension to the experience. We could see by the postcards which people had multiple characters, for example. The same was true for personals. There was one sixtysomething couple who were regulars (as one person) on the boards, and had two other recurring ads: an appeal for a cute young woman to form a threesome with them, and an ad offering 24-hour prayer and spiritual counseling for free. Only we knew that these were all the same people.

These weirdos prepared me perfectly for my later adventures on BBS's and the Internet. Perceived anonymity, role-playing, multiple false personae, flame wars, socially inept people forming dysfunctional communities, and outsized complaints about censorship? Nothing new! I already knew about the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, the perils of sexual encounters in a virtual world, trolls and flamewars, and the dissociative and fraudulent nature of virtual personalities.

As I was writing this I thought: hey! I wonder if our parent the Chicago Reader still has these? Our classifieds were an exact copy of their much more successful section.

It appears that they do. They're called Bulletin Messages there, and there are definitely some similarities, and this one in particular looks very much like one of our old regulars. There are obvious differences, but something of the same character is present.

I miss the original, though. There were only 20 or so characters that recurred, and it was a little porthole into a very weird tank of fish.
substitute: (legion badge)
YOW: http://substitute.livejournal.com/1483063.html?thread=8918583

Babelfished nightmare cry from the deep, incomprehensible, on apparently random entry. The permanent zadvigi were inexcusable.

Clearly this is a transmission from the Crew That Never Rests.
substitute: (beaker)
Comment on another post of mine:
This is Elaine Moore and I am deaf hard of hearing. I want tell yu something about drugs bad your health because drug is hard for your life can't use drug then please try resist away from drug that why you had lot pain away from drug and how you feel . Do you have plan your future. I never haven't use drug and alcohol all my life because drug and alcohol waste time mess up my body. Yu better carefully killed from drug.
substitute: (kermit flail)
Add Me On These WebsitesAdd Me On Bolt.com My Website I CreatedRate Me On HotOrNot.ComMy Pictures at PictureTrail.com What Do You Really Think Of Me? Random Funny Sites You Should SeeThe Best Website In The UniverseBadger Badger BADGERStrongBad Techno RaveLitterbox: Bag of BonesBunnies: My Friend Created This Work Of ArtPost Your Secret Gollum RappingThe VW Is IndestructablePolitical Websites You Must Check OutJust How Much Warning Did The Bush Administration Get About 9/11?Fahrenheit 9/11 MessageBoard On IMDBCoalition Casualites In Iraq: They are Real PeopleAnySolder.Com: Send Care Packages to These SoldiersMove-On.OrgSign The John Conyvers Petition to Make Bush Answer To The Downing Street MemoSorry Everybody Gallery
substitute: (bongo punished)
The new best corporate anthem ever is courtesy the Bank of America and it is here:

http://www.vimeo.com/clip:114601

I never knew a merger could be such a spiritual thing and so full of longing.

Also, although I am from Orange County, CA I have never in my life seen anything this white.
substitute: (scary child)
I dreamed that I had found a website that looked at first as thought it was the usual unpleasant sexual tourism thing, guys visiting impoverished countries to do nasty things. But it was worse. It was a cannibalism tourist site, where you could arrange to visit places so benighted that they'd sell you their children and you could eat them.

The site was disguised as a kind of crackpot medical clinic called the California Creative Radiology Institute.

I think this is the first actual Internet nightmare I've had!
substitute: (aarg)
From: "The Hospitality Talent Network"<noreply@hospitalitytalentnetwork.com>
Date: August 31, 2006 10:37:44 AM PDT
To: [livejournal.com profile] substitute
Subject: Sausage Maker positions are available

Dear Colleague,

The HospitalityTalent Network has  Sausage Maker  positions posted by Hills Foods Ltd on our network of job boards.

If you would like additional information on these career opportunities (at no cost or obligation), please go to the following links...


Please consider the following jokes to have been made:

Sausage making/politics/State Legislature joke
Sausage Party joke
Sausage/SPAM joke

spread it.

May. 18th, 2006 02:39 am
substitute: (attack)
In Margaret Visser's excellent Much Depends on Dinner, the history of margarine is related.

A cheap butter substitute terrified the dairy industry. As margarine became widely available commercially, the butter people did everything they could to stop it. They bought laws that taxed the stuff and enforced prominent labeling. In at least once place they required that margarine be placed apart from other groceries in a special closed off "Margarine Zone" of the market so that people would be humiliated to go in, revealing that they were cutting costs. And most of all, the color of margarine was regulated. It couldn't look like butter, so the yellow coloring was either totally absent or in a tiny dot in one corner of the bag of goo so that consumers had to knead the package for some time to get it all yellow before putting it in the fridge. To this day, margarine cannot be butter-colored in some places.

What was the result? Today margarine is everywhere that butter is sold. There is still very good money to be made from butter. There is also good money to be made selling margarine and similar substitutes. Everyone knows the difference. The butter industry was not destroyed; they just lost some market share. Had they invested in the margarine business at the beginning most of their loss would have been stopped.

The Internet is margarine to a long list of industries. The music industry stands to lose retail distribution, which is not only a great place to add marginal costs but the place where their unpleasant friends in organized crime collect their money. The movie industry likewise loses its chain to theatres and all the incidental revenue there. Anyone with a job that ends in "Agent" who doesn't work for the government is threatened.

The car dealers might be threatened too, but they've already got laws in every state in the U.S. restricting auto manufacturers to selling only through dealers; they're in a stronger position than the dairy farmers.

Wine distributors are trying to "margarine" wineries with specious laws as well, because they find themselves disintermediated.

It might be good for business people who feel threatened by these changes to spend an hour with Visser's book and take a lesson from margarine.
substitute: (kermit flail)
[livejournal.com profile] save_the_net syndicates the blog of the Save the Internet site.

The intention of the site and the blog is to oppose a U.S. law that would create a tiered internet instead of the current "net neutrality" policy that governs the Internet.
substitute: (goatse ring love)
PUERILE GIGGLES AND/OR TOTAL CONFUSION AMONG THE INTERNET HORDES IS SURE TO RESULT FROM TODAY'S GOOGLE CHOICE

substitute: (tiki)
ignatz: metaspy

pea: ignatz: bit torrent; coke rat urine leptospirosis; orangeville il interior design; reseller; futsal tournament videos; subaru impreza; grover air horns; romeo and juliet facts; cost of living in sicily; larnelle harris a mighty fortress
  1. Worst. Coke. EVER.

  2. "Grover air horns" sounds like a top 10 Muppets sketch to me.

  3. Someone has Shakespeare homework due.

  4. I am very frightened to look up who "Larnelle Harris" is. You do it.

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