Evan Ratliff
In this digital age, where everything you do is logged, analyzed, and mined (or something), writer Evan Ratliff tries to get lost. He adopts a fake identity, changes his appearance, and sells his car.
Then Wired readers try to find him. Read about it on wired.
The mechanics of The Office, analyzed as a management principle by Venkatesh Rao. It’s a little… mean.
The clueless resolve this dissonance by choosing to believe in the reality of the organization. Not everybody is capable of this level of suspension of disbelief. Both Ricky Gervais (David Brent) and Steve Carrel (Michael Scott) play the brilliantly-drawn characters perfectly. The most visible sign of their capacity for self-delusion is their complete inability to generate an original thought. They quote movie lines, lyrics and perform terrible impersonations (at one point Michael goes, “You talking to me?” a line he attributes, in a masterful display of confusion, to “Al Pacino, Raging Bull“). For much of what he needs to say, he gropes for empty business phrases, deploying them with staggering incompetence. When Michael talks, he is attempting, like a child, to copy the flawless buzzspeak spoken by sociopaths like Jan and David Wallace. He is oblivious to the fact that the sociopaths use buzzspeak as a coded language with which to simultaneously sustain the (necessary) delusions of the clueless and communicate with each other.
A very long read, but food for thought. Watching the show will be slightly depressing after this. Read it on Venkatesh’s site. Via kottke.
From Gunshow, by Rumblo
From here, by K.C. Green, one of the funniest people alive.
Hulu doesn’t work outside the US. I could use Hotspot shield or another proxy service, but they tend to be slow. I use Sidereel instead, which links to videos hosted on various other sites (for educational purposes, of course).
Megavideo links are usually the best ones – they’re fast and reasonably good quality, but you can only watch 72 minutes at a time unless you pay them $10 a month, which I won’t do on principle (and because I’m cheap).
There are ways to bypass it by clearing cookies and restarting your modem to get a new IP address (too tedious), or using a proxy (too slow, too tedious). I recently found a better alternative, the Illimitux extension for Firefox:
Install it, restart Firefox. When you open a page that has embedded Megavideo, you’ll see this:
Click on ‘Remove limitation’, and a new tab will open up which will let you view the video without any interruptions. You can many more borderline illegal things with illimitux. Have fun!
These are some bookmarklets that I use to make surfing easier. To use them, drag them onto your bookmarks bar
Bookmarks bar in Firefox
If you like the concept of bookmarklets, head on over to squarefree, there’s a nice collection there.
Assemblee poster
The Independent Games Source has Assemblee on right now. So, yeah, I’m entering. I love games, especially retro-styled ones.
Also, I’ve been meaning to program a game in forever, but never got down to it. This will be a nice way to rekindle my nuts.
