Yet another tool pulled off the BatBelt of spammers: ASCII-Art Spam
It took me a second to figure out what I was looking at, but it was made up of urls, and used teeny tiny fonts to make up the “graphic.”
Neat trick, buttheads.
No way to really block it, either. Easy to make it say just about anything.
Here comes another wave of annoying-looking spam.
Grafik Dynamo is a net art work by Kate Armstrong & Michael Tippett that loads live images from blogs and news sources on the web into a live action comic strip. The work is currently using a feed from LiveJournal. The images are accompanied by narrative fragments that are dynamically loaded into speech and thought bubbles and randomly displayed. Animating the comic strip using dynamic web content opens up the genre in a new way: Together, the images and narrative serve to create a strange, dislocated notion of sense and expectation in the reader, as they are sometimes at odds with each other, sometimes perfectly in sync, and always moving and changing. The work takes an experimental approach to open ended narrative, positing a new hybrid between the flow of data animating the work and the formal perameter that comprises its structure.
In other words, random stuff mixed with random stuff is REALLY random. The fun part is that your brain keeps trying to put them together anyway.
So I’m on Engadget, and they have this thing about the iPot (Information Pot) and how it’s used by Japanese folks to keeps tabs (without being invasive) on their elderly folks at home. Okay fine. Sort of a neat idea, a little creepy, but I get it.
Then I’m digging around and notice this piece on the iPot, and they had this little paragraph that struck me as poingnant somehow:
The experience for the participant is to speak the language of the machine and thus to more deeply understand and connect with the machine. The action may also bring about personal revelations in the participant, because in sounding with the blender one is likely to perform gesture and sound expressions not previously accessed which may open up hidden emotions or thoughts or feelings.
Now, this strikes a chord for me, ’cause I’m one of those people who, as a child, spent about four and a half-minutes trying to figure something out, and then I’d get frustrated, freak out a little, think I was obviously retarded, and then put it down, never to do it again.
Which makes me think about why the hell I got into computers in the first place. Immensely frustrating things. I intentionally and happily got myself into a professional field where I often wake up not knowing what I’ll need to know before the end of the day. My lack of organization actually helps me in my job, since it means that I sometimes have to be a little faster on my feet (faster on my fingers?) when it comes to figuring out why a particular piece of hardware/software/user won’t work. It’s gotta be fast, and it’s gotta be darn-near free, otherwise it won’t look like magic, as all good technology should.
Click here to read more.. »
Two iPods and a microphone.
Go there and take a look at the mockup.
Did I mention: WANT?
Finally got the oh-so groovy StatTraq statistics thing installed. Very cool to have this working under WordPress 1.5 Yay them!
Be prepared for stuff where I’m talking about my referrers a lot.
GoogleMontage creates an image montage based on keywords that you give it. The queue on the left shows what’s inbound, and then there’s the recent montages.
Pretty squippy.
I’m waiting for mine right now (12:55am – Monday).
Narf!
Okay, so maybe I just need more sunshine in April (read: almost none lately), but right now I’m sitting here listening to Jack Johnson’s In Between Dreams, and I gotta say this about that:
It doesn’t suck.
His vocal style reminds me a lot of the guy who sang “Welcome Back” from Welcome Back Kotter, but somehow doesn’t have that 70’s schmaltzy sound. Very very warm production, which is probably why all of the reviews of his stuff keep using the word “summer” over and over again.
Of course, it could just be the new speakers we got (our sub blew out in our old set).
So yeah, check it out, if you need a little sunshine in your head.
Slashdot’s got an article about the Feds Hacking Wireless in 3 Minutes.
Get Your Hands off of my Squir-rel!
This story is really fun to read out loud. It’s about a man, his squirrel and the government that would try to separate them. Don’t worry: the good guys win. In the Vancouver Sun today, one cover story started, “If Pope John Paul II dies, who will take over his duties?” Wow! […]
scooped that from CheeseBlog, and used SauceReader to do it.
Beautiful short film. Digitally animated.
Took me quite a while to find it, since it’s called The Delivery, and that is, not surprisingly, a common phrase around the internet. Thank goodness for MetaFilter…
