incomplete information

Posted on Tuesday, 2006 February 07 by Anton

Another copy of the balloonist joke. I still wanna know what the second man is doing in the deep ocean.

I also wanna know, LJ experts, how I can become a real boy in the eyes of LJ’s comment machinery without creating a redundant Journal.

Posted in blogdom, humanities | 2 Comments

the trouble with neutrality

Posted on Monday, 2006 February 06 by Anton

Alan Bock writes:

So it was time to break out one of the oldest canards in American political discourse – the assertion that anybody who questions any particular military adventure is – cue the boo track – a nasty old isolationist.

In a reasonably sane world such an assertion would have little or no traction. Impatience with wasteful spending and the unnecessary loss of American lives is hardly the same as wanting to withdraw from the world. The notion that military force is the most constructive way to engage the world is more than a little strange to begin with. To suggest that questioning a particular use of military force is tantamount to wanting to retreat behind our borders and have no contact with the outside world is almost beyond absurd.

The trouble, you see, is that all the other ways of engaging with the world are not orchestrated by The State, and therefore can’t be any good.

Posted in militaria | Leave a comment

Colorblind Web Page Filter

Posted on Saturday, 2006 February 04 by Anton

Ever worry about how your webpage looks to the colorblind? I am pleased to find that my doodles page looks pretty good in gray. (Cited by Sam Logan.)

Posted in humanities | Leave a comment

me and my chainsaw

Posted on Friday, 2006 February 03 by Anton

Drunk with power, last night I did some severe pruning in Wikipedia’s main Heraldry article, taking out a lot of arcana that do not belong in an overview (barrulets? erminites?) and adding a few paragraphs on design principles, symbolism (or lack thereof) and styles. I’m eager to see what someone will do to it next.

I’ve also been poking at a lot of Buffy-related pages, mostly adding links and reshaping awkward or prolix sentences to my taste.

Posted in heraldry | Leave a comment

yet another state murder in progress

Posted on Friday, 2006 January 27 by Anton

Brad Spangler provides contact info for the DA of Placer County, whose job it is to persecute Steve Kubby for trying to stay alive by unapproved means.

Posted in drugwar | Leave a comment

one nocturne deserves

Posted on Monday, 2006 January 23 by Anton

I’m on graveyard shift. Last night there were two of us but tonight I have the floor to myself. It’s so slow, I’d be tempted to strip down and run laps, if I could be sure there are no cameras; I haven’t spotted any but it’s a rather hi-tech building. How hi-tech?

  • The elevator cars have no floor buttons. You choose a floor on a ten-key pad in the lobby, and some machine tells you which elevator to take.
  • The loo flushes by sonar or something. When activated it makes a noise like a cat being stepped on. (A small cat.)
  • Most of the lights went out at about 2:20 and I can’t find a manual switch anywhere.
Posted in California, me!me!me! | 3 Comments

someone blew their self-reference roll

Posted on Sunday, 2006 January 22 by Anton

So there’s a banner ad (on Greg Dean’s Real Life Comics) that reads:

Diamonds may be a girl’s best friend
but do diamonds hold all of her d20’s?
Yeah, we didn’t think so.

Naturally, each “o” in the second line is replaced with a picture of a dodecahedral die.

Posted in general | Leave a comment