I was looking through wedding toasts online as I continue to stress about my weekend, and I found this one . It cracked me up for an entirely different reason than the rest (they’re generally laughably bad): in going through and changing all the instances of the bride’s name to “Jill” — but without looking twice at it, so it’s within words, and if you’re paying attention

extreJaney

is obviously “extremely” so going in reverse, the bride’s name is Mel. There’s only one instance of the reverse, though (“All I can say is full Jims to Jane for never complaining once…”) but I can’t think of what name would be pluralized as applause.

Still — folks, search and replace can sometimes give away as it obscures. Be careful out there.

Shopping for a flash drive today, I came across this:

A-DATA Professional Series PD16 is a USB2.0 Flash drive with stylish industrial design and outstanding performance. Coated with elegant color aluminum housing, it gives off elegance, simplicity and technology aura.

(link)

How could I not buy one?

Cascade Bicycle Club uses active.com to do their online registrations, and active charges a lot, is generally annoying, and then spams you even if you said you didn’t want to be spammed. I haaaaaaaaaaate this kind of thing, even more than random dictionary attacks or whatever, because it’s a personal betrayal:

“Hey, do you trust us to handle this transaction?”
“Sure. Here’s some money.”
“Great, do you mind if we bother you with promotional emails?”
“Please don’t.”
“Whoops! Ha ha ha, turns out we don’t care about the second question.”
“Why should we trust you with money if you can’t be trusted with my email?”
“Doesn’t matter! Too late! Suckerrrr!”

The ultimate insult is the disclaimer:

You are currently subscribed to active-offers as: ####. When you registered online with Active.com you requested a free subscription to our weekly email newsletter and promotions. If you would like to unsubscribe from future newsletter mailings send a blank email to: leave-6505228-66413975.39fbc094bfb884879077a3807305d294@news1-active.com or mail to The Active Network, 10182 Telesis Ct, Ste. 300, San Diego, CA 92121.

No, I did not. I never, ever request a free subscription to weekly email newsletters and promotions, you jerks. Way to run a business.

This conversation gets repeated throughout the day:

Guy: “Hey, what’s going on?”
Girl: “Nothing.”
Guy: “You going to come by the party later?”
Girl: “There’s a party?”
Guy: “Oh yeah.”
Girl: “When?”
Guy: “Should get going about eight.”
Girl: “Okay, cool.”

Here’s what actually happens: if sufficient people show up by magic, it’s a rocking party, and people are sent out to purchase additional beer. If not enough people show up, it peters out and everyone leaves. But every day they’re fishing, which means that if you’re a girl, the claim that there’s a party actually carries almost no value at all, and since the frat boys are drinking every night, there’s no cost to claiming that there’s a party later.

Here’s something I don’t think has been brought up in all the reactions I’ve seen so far: Google demonstrates the difference in power and respect for government authority. The watchers can go unwatched.

Let’s say that I’m Citizen Derek, and I’m shown on Google Streets bringing something really expensive like a plasma television into my house* — or pick your reason. If I want that picture removed, I can’t do it. Similarly, if Google’s got a super-high-resolution view of my house in Google Earth and I’m worried about a stalker, I’m equally screwed.

But if I’m Vice President Derek, I can get my house blurred off. The government has the ability to achieve a level of privacy that individuals are entirely denied.

This is a reversal of long-standing tradition, that functions of government should be open and that the activities and property of private citizens should be private. This is a very good reason to find the whole exercise unsettling, even if you can’t precisely state why — it is unsettling.

* I own a nine-year old 32″ where the picture bends on the far-left side, if you’re curious

Ruskoff’s written about this, but there’s this weird line in public space, where you can either live your life pretty much entirely in public or say nothing at all that isn’t directly book-related.

I see a lot of this related to USSM stuff, and it’s always a little shocking. I drove down to see my parents this morning, and ended up cooking breakfast. When I got back, the game had started, so I tossed up a game thread with a quick note on my lateness… and that became “I live with my mother”

Really? I don’t understand how ticked at me you have to be to say that. But it’s like the flat tire thing – explaining that it took me forever to figure out how to winch down the spare tire on a Grand Caravan became “can’t change a flat” lol ha ha ha.

I’d say that it’s a symptom of internet discourse, but it came out in the Cheater’s Guide book reviews, too, when my acknowledgment to my agent —

Thanks are due to my agent, Sydelle Kramer, who was willing to help me figure out which book idea I could do well with, whip up a good proposal, and find it a home.

was quoted to sound like a three-year project was a get-rich scheme, and then was quoted by people who hadn’t read the book to support that. I mean, the alternative is

I’d like to thank my agent, Sydelle Kramer, for a number of things. First, discussing with me several book concepts, including possible markets for each, which ones suited my interests and strengths, and then …

I don’t write a thank you like that, though.

I guess the larger question is: does being open about this stuff do enough good that it outweighs the annoying stuff, the intentional misreading, all that good stuff? How do you measure that? How long before I get called ‘whiny’ for wondering this in public?

Or am I, like Rushkoff, going to eventually swap HLWT into something blander and work-only?

I realized, with the release of Halo 2, that part of my life’s ending. I’m not upgrading to Vista – I wrote about it earlier, but the DRM we-own-your-machine-you-just-lease-it is finally too onerous for me, and I’m calling it quits (side note: Google’s acquisition of Feedburner made me realize exactly how much data Google now has available to it, and it scared me).

I started playing games on PCs back when I had to play Adventure, or type them in from the back of magazines, and I’d inevitably typo on some DATA statement and fubar the whole thing. I could talk your ear off about my favorite games and what they meant, why they were awesome, and how they influenced games that came after them (more so than I could for books, say, which I took a bunch of college courses on).

Now that’s it. It feels, weirdly, like I’ve decided never to watch television again, or read a book. Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is quite likely to be the last boxed game I buy, with stuff off Steam — the Half-Life episodes and Portal (Bring me Portallll!!) until they go Vista-only, too.

I can’t explain why I’ve been willing to put up with DRM on my games (as long as it’s not Starforce or particularly horrible) and even the ridiculous Windows Genuine Advantage on XP but drew the line at Vista’s hobbling. And I’m not confident that I won’t eventually be forced onto a disagreeable platform. But there it is: it started with Adventure and other text games, and this is where the end comes.

I’m sad.

I was browsing a tech site today doing research, and noted that someone was going back through old articles and spamming the crap out of them (for adult friend finder). I thought “hey, I’ve got a second, I’ll report that –” I hit the handy button, and I was presented with a “Sign up for your free membership!” screen — there was no way to report abuse on the site without registering, and registering meant giving up a huge amount of personal information and opting out of newsletters. I gave up.

Enjoy your defacement, guys.

I’ve been reading Pauline Kael’s “For Keeps” which is over a thousand pages of her movie criticism. I don’t agree with Kael a lot, but her work always makes me think. I love her book on Citizen Kane, which is included here. Last night, I was reading through and caught this sentence, on how Mankiewicz, who wrote the film, used the script to take apart not just Hearst but also Orson Welles:

One can sometimes hurt one’s enemies, but that’s nothing compared to what one can do to one’s friends.

About a month ago, I was amazingly sick for a long time, and I found myself in a strange situation where I understood that I was operating at some fraction of normal intelligence, sick, with people disagreeing with me. My hazy plan, despite repeatedly feeling light-headed, was to stumble back on a ferry, get to Seattle, reconsider a plan of action, most likely taking a bus to get home.

People around me, though, strenuously disagreed, and felt I should go to the hospital, and I had to make a really strange decision: am I thinking straight? Trying to make that decision, of course, meant a contradiction, namely:
– if yes, then my original plan’s entirely valid
– if no, then my original plan’s a bad idea, but then how can I be trusted to evaluate whether I’m thinking straight or not?

I decided to stop thinking about that and take advice, which meant I went to the hospital for a while, felt a lot better, and went home.

I had a similar experience deciding to go to Clarion West this June. I didn’t really expect to get in, and when they called, I had a whole set of problems:
– no money
– accepting meant I had ~two months and then would be gone for six weeks, so no one in their right mind would hire me
– standard problems being away for six weeks

I didn’t know what to do for a while, and I agonized over whether I should go or not, whether it would be awesome or not, if I could go in future years, if it would be worth the sacrifice of taking a promising job, and so on. I was looking, a little bit, for a set of justifications for not going.

In the end, what swayed me was other people: when I talked to my friends about it, they told me to go and volunteered to loan me the money. Once, I think I might have shrugged it off, but when a lot of the people who really knew me lined up for it had the same reaction, I had to step back and think “Am I really acting rationally, or am I so tied up in the situation that I’m unable to look at the whole?”

Once I made the decision, I feel great about it, even though it meant walking away from job possibilities I was really interested in. And I don’t think, if I hadn’t placed my trust in the judgment of a bunch of people I didn’t know when I was really sick, that I’d have so quickly said “as conflicted as I am, the universal view of others is to go, and to do what I have to do to go, so I’m going to take that course”. It’s been a strangely-won piece of wisdom.

Not that I’m going to let reddit users vote up or down on my meal choices.