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This is a mirror. My real blog is on jwz.org. Please comment there. There is also an RSS feed.

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301 Moved Permanently [Sun, 6-Jul-2031 12:38 PM]
[ Tags | a/b, art, balls, banned words, big brother, bike, blimps, blobs, boobs, books, bp, brand necrophilia, comics, computers, conspiracies, copyright, corporations, daliclock, dnalounge, doomed, emacs, eyes, fanboys, fashion, firstperson, fo, furries, gonzo, grim meathook future, katrina, lazyweb, linux, mac, mad science, mail, maps, meta, mixtape, mn, monkeybutter, monkeys, movies, mpegs, music, mutants, nscp, palm, parts, party, perversions, phones, photobooth, photography, poll, poop, portal, pranks, religion, retrocomputing, reviews, rez, robots, scene missing, security, sf, space, spam, sprawl, switch, sxsw, teeth, tentacles, the future, tivo, toys, tron, tv, vampires, webcasting, wiki, www, xscreensaver, zombies ]
[ music | Los Campesinos! -- This Is How You Spell "Hahaha, We Destroyed the Hopes and Dre ]

301

This is just a mirror.
My real blog is on jwz.org.
Please comment there.
There is also an RSS feed.

 301

I used Livejournal to host my blog from 2002 through late 2010, when the level of quality and utility finally decreased enough that it was easier to self-host my blog than to keep fighting with Livejournal.

These were my reasons for giving up on Livejournal, and some links explaining what I replaced it with:

It was unconscionable that my readers would often be shown full-screen pop-over Flash ads on top of my content, even though I have a "permanent" account. I don't know whether the problem was that Livejournal's policy kept changing, or whether they just couldn't fix the bugs in their ad code, and I don't care; my readers kept complaining about it, and rightly so.

The spam got completely out of control. I was getting a ton of comments like, "Ha ha, that same thing happened to me when I tried to fix my bathroom plumbing, HREF=SPAM-PLUMBERS-INFO-VIAGRA-UK". Or the same thing but in Russian. Turning on CAPTCHAs didn't help. The only option that did work was to moderate comments from non-friends, which is as much work as playing whack-a-mole with the spam.

I used to use LJ as my RSS feed aggregator, and that got less and less reliable every day. Often feeds would stall for days or weeks at a time, dumping out the new posts all at once and very late. Often weeks' worth of posts would just go missing because one of the posts in a feed had some minor HTML syntax error in it. Feeds that contained Youtube videos or other embeds wouldn't show the videos at all; and so on. So I switched all of my feeds over to a feed reader and couldn't be happier. I use NetNewsWire on the desktop, and use either NetNewsWire or Reeder on my iPhone and iPad.

I used to use Livejournal's Jabber server as my way of chatting with people on Google Chat and Facebook Chat (via the Adium client). Livejournal's Jabber server became increasingly unreliable. When it wasn't down outright, it often silently failed to peer with the rest of the Jabber network for weeks at a time. I gave up and signed up for a GMail account which I use solely so that I can have a Jabber account on Google's server.

And finally, but possibly most importantly,
All but a couple of my friends stopped posting here. They have all moved their "personal" writing over to Facebook (with the side effect that their personal writing has gotten a lot shorter.) This isn't LJ's fault per se, but it still resulted in LJ being far less interesting.

This is why "use DreamWidth" isn't a solution to the Livejournal problem. That may fix a few of their technical issues, but it doesn't change the fact that the community has gone away. That's just trading one sinking ship for a much smaller copy of the same sinking ship.

I now self-host my blog on my own site using WordPress. It was a relatively painless migration. WordPress is easy to install, and there are tools for bulk-importing your Livejournal into it. You can read how I did it, and the list of plugins I chose, on my blog post about it.

I was initially worried that if I moved my blog away from LJ, I would get fewer comments. That turned out not to be the case. People who still use LJ can log in on my new blog using LJ as their OpenID provider, so it's relatively painless for them to comment there. (No need to make a new account or anything.)


LJ RIP
2002 - 2010
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Clean Faces [Tue, 14-Feb-2012 7:41 PM]
[ Tags | parts, robots ]

[image]

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

Mirrored from jwz.org.

link
jwz mixtape 111 [Tue, 14-Feb-2012 12:31 AM]
[ Tags | firstperson, mixtape, mpegs, music ]
[ music | as noted ]

[image] </a>

Please enjoy jwz mixtape 111.

[ http://lj-toys.com/?auth_token=sessionless%3A1329310800%3Aembedcontent%3A515656%26914%26%3A6553e9e955299db12990a2026de86587cf385d4e

Mirrored from jwz.org.

link
DNA Lounge update [Mon, 13-Feb-2012 11:04 PM]
[ Tags | dnalounge ]
[ location | 37° 46' 15.63" N, 122° 24' 45.70" W ]

DNA Lounge update, wherein the coffee's still free, and there are photos.

Mirrored from jwz.org.

link
A History of the Sky [Wed, 8-Feb-2012 2:33 AM]
[ Tags | art, mpegs, sf, space ]

A History of the Sky for One Year
This is a year-long time-lapse study of the sky. A camera installed on the roof of the Exploratorium museum in San Francisco captured an image of the sky every 10 seconds. From these images, I created a mosaic of time-lapse movies, each showing a single day. The days are arranged in chronological order. My intent was to reveal the patterns of light and weather over the course of a year. More info about the project here.

This video is designed to be viewed in a large format, so it's best viewed in full-screen mode at 1080p.

Previously.

Mirrored from jwz.org.

link
The internet is leaking. I can tell because of the pixels. [Wed, 8-Feb-2012 2:04 AM]
[ Tags | fashion, stormtroopers, tron ]
[ music | The Asteroids Galaxy Tour -- Arrival of the Empress (Prelude) ]

Louis Vuitton:

[image]

Also those are totally Stormtrooper boots.

Previously, previously.

Mirrored from jwz.org.

link
The dead still outnumber the living [Mon, 6-Feb-2012 6:59 PM]
[ Tags | mutants, space ]
[ music | Laurie Anderson -- Speak My Language ]

Good news for zombies:
There are currently seven billion people alive today and the Population Reference Bureau estimates that about 107 billion people have ever lived.

This means that we are nowhere near close to having more alive than dead. In fact, there are 15 dead people for every person living. We surpassed seven billion dead way back between 8000BC and AD1.

In "2001: A Space Odyssey", Arthur C Clark makes the assertion: "Behind every man now alive stand 30 ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living." But Ms Baldwin points out he was not wrong. "He was making his statement in 1968. There were maybe 3.5 billion people currently living on earth so if you use our method, that would be one living person to 29 dead."

And will we ever reach a point where there are more alive than dead? This would imply a very high rate of population growth. "Could we imagine a carrying capacity of the Earth of 100-150 billion? I find that quite unimaginable."

They're counting from 50,000 years ago, "behaviorally modern humans", instead of from 200,000 years ago, "anatomically modern humans", which seems iffy to me.

Previously.

Mirrored from jwz.org.

link
UK declines to pardon Alan Turing for that whole "being gay" thing. [Mon, 6-Feb-2012 6:44 PM]
[ Tags | big brother, computers, doomed, perversions ]

Widespread Celebrations But No Pardon For Turing
This month the House of Lords declined to grant a posthumous pardon for the crime of gross indecency for which he was convicted in 1952. Not only was he forced to undergo chemical castration, his security clearance was then withdrawn and he was unable to work for continue his work for GCHQ, Britain's intelligence agency. Turing committed suicide two year's later.

"A posthumous pardon was not considered appropriate as Alan Turing was properly convicted of what at the time was a criminal offence. He would have known that his offence was against the law and that he would be prosecuted."

Mirrored from jwz.org.

link
Baroness Von Ünderbheit, now with pictures [Mon, 6-Feb-2012 6:37 PM]
[ Tags | mad science, parts, robots, teeth, the future ]

Pictures of the actual jaw from its manufacturer, Layerwise:
[image][image][image][image]

Also an eerily silent and largely Ken Burnsey video of the manufacturing process:

[ http://lj-toys.com/?auth_token=sessionless%3A1329310800%3Aembedcontent%3A515656%26912%26%3A6f3856db5aa13029862f76ea25e6138804f0e621

Previously.

Mirrored from jwz.org.

link
Nobody gives a fuck about Superman. [Mon, 6-Feb-2012 5:30 PM]
[ Tags | comics, doomed, firstperson, movies, mpegs ]

The Death and Return of Superman

"I'm not drunk in the video, I only get about three cups in. The original rant was 45 minutes long, so of course we had to cut a bunch of stuff out for time, and because it was just too stupid. Like for instance the part where Pa Kent dies of a heart attack and literally GOES TO HEAVEN. AND SEES SUPERMAN."

This is an entertaining rant, even though I never read "The Death of Superman", having already been squarely in the "who gives a flying fuck" camp at the time, so I didn't realize just how stupid it was. Apparently it was even stupider than I had imagined. And I can imagine quite a bit. I do disagree with his conclusion, though, that this craven stunt "broke" death in comics. It was already broken when they got there. Characters were dying and coming back all the time long before that, and anyone who thought Superman would stay dead was a fucking idiot.

Mirrored from jwz.org.

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