Previously, previously, previously.]]> http://www.jwz.org/blog/2013/05/fix-it-with-eyes/feed/ 2 http://www.jwz.org/blog/2013/05/print-your-own-unknown-pleasures/ http://www.jwz.org/blog/2013/05/print-your-own-unknown-pleasures/#comments Fri, 24 May 2013 21:20:11 +0000 jwz http://jwz.org/b/yhnP

Previously, previously, previously.]]> http://www.jwz.org/blog/2013/05/print-your-own-unknown-pleasures/feed/ 5 http://www.jwz.org/blog/2013/05/discoblobs/ http://www.jwz.org/blog/2013/05/discoblobs/#comments Fri, 24 May 2013 20:52:23 +0000 jwz http://jwz.org/b/yhnO

Previously, previously.]]> http://www.jwz.org/blog/2013/05/discoblobs/feed/ 1 http://www.jwz.org/blog/2013/05/today-in-aquatic-hentai-miscegenation-news/ http://www.jwz.org/blog/2013/05/today-in-aquatic-hentai-miscegenation-news/#comments Thu, 23 May 2013 17:29:43 +0000 jwz http://jwz.org/b/yhnN Octopus clamps on to dolphin's genitals, possibly to avoid being eaten.

I Threw a Show in My Heart and Nobody Came

What's it like being in a band that you think is amazing and everyone else is completely indifferent to? Well, it's a lot like a job where you're the laziest guy on the shift and everyone knows it; it's not great, but it beats working. Except you're working really hard and it sucks. And all your friends are getting promotions, and even if they eventually get dropped by their promotions, they at least got a taste and what did you get? First on a bill of three on a Tuesday night. Like your life, the analogy eventually falls apart.

[...]

I wanted to be successful. Not rock star successful, but successful enough that I'd be tending bar six months out of the year instead of twelve. I wanted to be at least Murder City Devils successful. And I have the idiotic tattoos to prove it. You don't get a flaming 13 on your arm unless you're deeply invested in being the sort of person who's earned a flaming 13 tattoo on their arm. I wanted to die semi-young and leave a semi-successful corpse for my mother to cry over. So what one wants out of the band is entirely irrelevant. The world is a vampire and you are a bucket of blood sitting in the corner, unattended yet still strangely ignored, until you go bad and somebody inadvertently kicks you over and the floor is incredibly sticky and still the vampiric world fails to pay you a morsel of mind. Poor li'l bucket of blood.

If this narrative seems to be lacking in specifics, that's because, as I noted earlier, the specifics aren't entirely interesting. And I should be clear that I'm not speaking for anyone in the band other than myself. If you want their perspective, corner them in a bar and ask them. Like the leprechaun, if you capture one of us, we have to give up our gold. But in this case, the gold is a list we keep in our back pocket of everyone in the industry who ever lied to us. But, hell, I imagine even those monsters have their point of view. It couldn't have been easy to deal with five rapidly aging problem drinkers who were watching themselves become the butt of jokes in the Brooklyn Vegan comment section.

Previously, previously, previously.]]> http://www.jwz.org/blog/2013/05/turd-burglars/feed/ 2 http://www.jwz.org/blog/2013/05/phrenology-works-i-can-tell-because-of-the-pixels/ http://www.jwz.org/blog/2013/05/phrenology-works-i-can-tell-because-of-the-pixels/#comments Mon, 20 May 2013 21:13:23 +0000 jwz http://jwz.org/b/yhnK Mike Pelletier: Lucy Skull

The model of the skull was generated from a friend's dental tomography scan. The form of the object was created by creating an array of copies of the skull, where each successive copy of the skull is scaled, rotated, and moved. The skull starts at life size at the front and ends up rotated 180 degrees and two times larger than life at the back.

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

I learned about this existence of this wonderful artifact and wonderful kook from Bess Lovejoy's Atlas Obscura talk at DNA Lounge last week, which you should surely attend in the future.

She also later co-authored a cookbook, which includes recipes for jellied fish heads and her father's favorite, cod soup. She also worked as a cabaret dancer in Bucharest, Romania, and then found work as a circus performer for Ringling Brothers Circus. During the 1930s she toured Europe and America as a lion tamer, billing herself as "the daughter of the famous mad monk whose feats in Russia astonished the world." She was mauled by a bear in Peru, Indiana, but stayed with the circus until it reached Miami, Florida, where she quit and began work as a riveter in a defense shipyard during World War II.

Dear Lazyweb, can anyone tell me how to disconnect my Words With Friends account from my Facebook account?

I'm sick to death of it sending me push-notifications that someone I'm friends with on Facebook but have never played Scrabble with has played a word. There seems to be no way to turn this shit off.

Things I have tried:

1. De-authorizing the Words With Friends app on Facebook. This causes the the iOS app to go into a loop demanding that you re-authorize it.

2. Deleting and re-installing the iOS app. That stops the auth-loop, but does not stop the "notifications about non-friends" issue, and also makes it nag you daily saying "Hey, you used to log in with Facebook! Log in with Facebook okay??"

So I guess I can't do this myself, since it's stuck in their DB. I'll just mail them and ask them to delete that. Ha ha ha.

3. This joke appears to be the closest thing to a non-FAQ support page.

4. So I go to their Facebook page hoping to message them. There's no option to message them. There's no option to post a question on the wall except as a reply to a previous post from them announcing an new feature in a different game. WTF.

5. So I waste my time trying to strip my complaint down to 140 characters and ask them on Twitter. To the shock of nobody, I get no reply.

6. Then on a completely different, unlinked web site, I find this page. I get a brush-off auto-reply saying "update to the latest version of the app, which will direct you to the FAQ instead of letting you actually contact us."

The fact that they are still nagging me with updates about my Facebook friends when they no longer have authorization on my Facebook account means that they have stored an offline copy of my friends tree, which I'm pretty sure is against Facebook's application terms of service. I'm sure both parties care about this a lot.

Yeah yeah, that's what I get for dealing with amoral scumbags like Zynga in the first place. I even paid them money to make the ads go away, so I'm part of the problem. But hey, I like playing scrabble on my phone.

Remember when a paying customer could actually email support? Those were the days.

Previously.]]> http://www.jwz.org/blog/2013/05/fucking-zynga/feed/ 11 http://www.jwz.org/blog/2013/05/picasa/ http://www.jwz.org/blog/2013/05/picasa/#comments Sat, 18 May 2013 09:30:23 +0000 jwz http://jwz.org/b/yhnG I face-tagged a zillion faces in desktop Picasa while "Store Name Tags in Photo" was unchecked. Now I have checked it and I want it to write all those tags back to the EXIF. How?

Alternately: I just want to extract a map of filename → face-names, and then I can take care of business myself. Where's the API?

Previously.]]> http://www.jwz.org/blog/2013/05/picasa/feed/ 7 http://www.jwz.org/blog/2013/05/devtty/ http://www.jwz.org/blog/2013/05/devtty/#comments Thu, 16 May 2013 19:53:27 +0000 jwz http://jwz.org/b/yhnF Any of you who have been to my home know that this is exactly what my desk looks like.

Previously, previously.

Revolutionary Muon Experiment to Begin With 3,200-mile Move of 50-Foot-Wide Particle Storage Ring. Massive device will travel from New York to Illinois by barge and truck this summer.

Previously, previously, previously, previously.]]> http://www.jwz.org/blog/2013/05/government-coverup-continues-apace/feed/ 3 http://www.jwz.org/blog/2013/05/vigilant-citizen-was-not-immediately-available-for-comment/ http://www.jwz.org/blog/2013/05/vigilant-citizen-was-not-immediately-available-for-comment/#comments Tue, 14 May 2013 05:29:12 +0000 jwz http://jwz.org/b/yhnA

Peaches Geldof has signed up to Aleister Crowley's sex cult Ordo Templi Orientis

Is this, by any chance, a stupid cult? No, actually it's a respected school of academic thought known for its rigorous system of peer-reviewed publishing and many seminal contributions to the philosophy of mind, ethics and epistemology.

Really? No, of course not. It's a stupid cult.

Previously, previously, previously.]]> http://www.jwz.org/blog/2013/05/vigilant-citizen-was-not-immediately-available-for-comment/feed/ 4 http://www.jwz.org/blog/2013/05/bread-circuses-but-mostly-circuses/ http://www.jwz.org/blog/2013/05/bread-circuses-but-mostly-circuses/#comments Tue, 14 May 2013 05:14:35 +0000 jwz http://jwz.org/b/yhm- You may have heard that the highest-paid employee in each state is usually the football coach at the largest state school. This is actually a gross mischaracterization: Sometimes it is the basketball coach.

Previously, previously, previously.]]> http://www.jwz.org/blog/2013/05/night-of-the-demons-2/feed/ 3 http://www.jwz.org/blog/2013/05/dear-safari-what-part-of-reopen-windows-from-last-session-is-so-hard-to-understand/ http://www.jwz.org/blog/2013/05/dear-safari-what-part-of-reopen-windows-from-last-session-is-so-hard-to-understand/#comments Mon, 13 May 2013 17:41:34 +0000 jwz http://jwz.org/b/yhm4 I re-launch it. I get back the two frontmost non-iconified windows, and the two oldest iconified windows. What the fucking fuck.

Then I do "reopen windows from last session", and they all come back, including duplicates of the ones I already have open. Come on.

And to insult my injury, the icons in the dock are all blank until after I wait for them all to load in the background, then uniconify and reiconify them, because updating the dock icon at the completion of the background page-load would apparently be too much effort.

I tried an extension that purported to auto-save sessions, but it did some confusing and complicated thing that was not even remotely what I wanted.

Is there a sane solution to this?

(No, I don't want to switch browsers, STFU. No I don't use tabs, STFU.)]]> http://www.jwz.org/blog/2013/05/dear-safari-what-part-of-reopen-windows-from-last-session-is-so-hard-to-understand/feed/ 28 http://www.jwz.org/blog/2013/05/i-resemble-this-remark/ http://www.jwz.org/blog/2013/05/i-resemble-this-remark/#comments Mon, 13 May 2013 17:12:09 +0000 jwz http://jwz.org/b/yhm3 @shyhoof: An ode to the journey of ó on a shipping label.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.]]> http://www.jwz.org/blog/2013/05/series-of-tubes-3/feed/ 2 http://www.jwz.org/blog/2013/05/citation-needed/ http://www.jwz.org/blog/2013/05/citation-needed/#comments Sun, 12 May 2013 22:54:30 +0000 jwz http://jwz.org/b/yhmz [Citation Needed] - Citation needed

"Citation needed", most commonly rendered as ^{[citation needed]}, is a common editorial remark on Wikipedia, which has become used to refer to Wikipedia in wider popular culture. ^{[citation needed]}

Link

Previously, previously, previously.]]> http://www.jwz.org/blog/2013/05/citation-needed/feed/ 1 http://www.jwz.org/blog/2013/05/today-in-killdozer-news-6/ http://www.jwz.org/blog/2013/05/today-in-killdozer-news-6/#comments Sun, 12 May 2013 21:18:00 +0000 jwz http://jwz.org/b/yhmy Four homes were demolished and thousands were left without power after Barry Swegle started smashing homes with his bulldozer.

Neighbor Keith Haynes said that the man "just went nuts." "He took a skidder and took out two houses," Haynes told the Peninsula Daily News. "I mean demolished. It was like a war zone."

Neighbor Barbara Porter isn't too surprised. When she heard the bulldozer start to rumble, she knew that Barry was about to get feisty.

"We all said one of these days Barry is going to take that dang CAT and he's going to start tearing up people's property and that's what he did."

And that article contained this sidebar:

RELATED: NAKED, HIGH DALLAS MAN DRIVES THROUGH A SHOPPING MALL AND STEALS CLOTHES

"Normally, when we deal with people that are," Dallas Police Sgt. Elliot Forge told the station as he took a long pause and tried not to laugh. He continued "naked, they're usually under the influence of some kind of narcotics."

Yes. Highly relevant.

Previously.]]> http://www.jwz.org/blog/2013/05/today-in-killdozer-news-6/feed/ 5 http://www.jwz.org/blog/2013/05/dazzle-is-very-in-right-now-2/ http://www.jwz.org/blog/2013/05/dazzle-is-very-in-right-now-2/#comments Sun, 12 May 2013 18:30:07 +0000 jwz http://jwz.org/b/yhmx

Previously.]]> http://www.jwz.org/blog/2013/05/dazzle-is-very-in-right-now-2/feed/ 3 http://www.jwz.org/blog/2013/05/cyberpunks-back-alright/ http://www.jwz.org/blog/2013/05/cyberpunks-back-alright/#comments Fri, 10 May 2013 22:30:09 +0000 jwz http://jwz.org/b/yhmp ]]> http://www.jwz.org/blog/2013/05/cyberpunks-back-alright/feed/ 5 http://www.jwz.org/blog/2013/05/today-is-the-thirtieth-anniversary-of-rio/ http://www.jwz.org/blog/2013/05/today-is-the-thirtieth-anniversary-of-rio/#comments Fri, 10 May 2013 22:16:44 +0000 jwz http://jwz.org/b/yhmo I should be on a boat.