Crickets Chirping

This past weekend I was in Cambridge, MA for ROFLCon. I got to hang out with Pete and visit the Google office while I was out there, which was fun. They have $240 Worth of Pudding boxes spelling out “Google” up on one of the walls.

On to the Con. The ROFLCon2008 tag seems presumptuous. I doubt that they can put something like this together every year, but I am very impressed with what they managed to accomplish so far. Given that it was organized by full-time students it’s nothing short of amazing.

4chan/Anonymous vs. Scientology

Just to get it out of the way, these assholes get their own heading at the risk of Feeding the Trolls.

Anonymous from 4chan was an interesting if not completely obnoxious presence (Anonymous is actually a group of people, all of whom refer to themselves collectively as Anonymous, but in the singular which is kind of weird). Their panel was on Scientology, of all things. The panel title was fuzzed out on the ROFLCon website schedule, presumably to avoid harassment by actual Scientologists who never showed up. They talked about their protest activities over the past year, how they want to destroy Scientology, how bad the religious organization is and lots of other things I remember from alt.religion.scientology back in the day. Read moar about it if you dare.

So why the hell would a bunch of imageboard users decide to organize a global protest to attack Scientology? Why not some other more worthy cause, like, say, the Iraq war? Simple: 4channers had become fond of a Tom Cruise video being passed around, and scientology lawyers forced them to take it down. They were responding to an attack on their stupid image board. I forget who said it but I agree: “Anonymous is only slightly less loathsome than Scientology.” One ant pile dumped atop another. I wholeheartedly support the destruction of Scientology but I can’t really say I support Anonymous.

Anonymous spent the rest of the conference trolling in real life- yelling shit at other panelists, trying to grab attention. So Anonymous: kudos for protesting scientology, but that was far outweighed by your unrelated douchebaggery.

Suh Suh Suh Somthin’ From the Panels

PWNING for Social Justice- Bubble Project guy (who used to work for Saatchi and Saatchi): public advertising is banned in São Paulo. The reasoning is that when you’re watching TV you have entered into an implicit contract to be advertised to. You don’t have to watch TV or the commercials if you don’t want to. But public space isn’t avoidable so it shouldn’t be used to force you to view advertisements. The ACLU guy was inarticulate and I cringed every time he started to answer a question. I have no idea what Leslie Hall was doing on the panel and neither did she. She rocked the house later that night at Middle East though. She’s really energetic live.

From Incubating the Mind Virus: Meme Infrastructures- Drew Curtis has actually spoken to the Daily Show and Colbert Report writers about their use of Fark for news stories. Unfortunately it’s a legal gray area due to writer’s union rules so they don’t attribute. Some newsrooms actually pay people to read Fark and Metafilter. A large portion of morning radio DJs actually read his headlines verbatim (Fark re-writes headlines, so they’re not even copied from the original articles). I was disappointed that Joshua Schachter wasn’t there but in hindsight he might have been a bad fit for the panel.

From Making it Big – Homestar Runner guys intentionally avoid using profanity, refused to do Strongbad’s voice swearing, for instance. Lots of people wanted to hear that. Their logic is that too much of the humor on the internet is cute cartoons swearing. It’s overdone. Loved that Austin was representin’ on this panel. (Brad Neely and Rooster Teeth) Maybe a subject for another ROFLCon would be geography. Most mainstream entertainment comes from Hollywood and NYC. Guests at this conference were from all over the place, a good chunk of them from podunk towns.

Neat People I Met

Brad Neely – He laughed heartily at the idea of a hoodie with the Brain Fuckler silkscreened on the hood, but is thoroughly uninterested in merchandising or anything unrelated to drawing cartoons. He’s kind of old school like that. During his panel on Making it Big, he repeatedly went against the flow and said things like “I don’t know how to make money with this stuff. I delegate that to Turner and they send me a check.” I think this probably stems from his previous experience as an actor.

LOLCode guy – I wish I could have heard him better but we were in a loud bar and he’s got my kind of voice. It blends in with crowd noise, perfectly out of phase so that it gets cancelled out. I could read into that further and draw the connection that like my voice, the ideas that it carries are also perfectly out of phase with the rest of the world. But I won’t.

Joe Mathlete – I had to talk to this guy because he’s from Houston. His business cards were actually pages ripped from a Marmaduke book, with stuff he’d written on it. He also likes Bring Back the Guns, which is my favorite band from Houston (more than Sprawl or The Judy’s :).

The guy dressed up in the FireFox suit. He works in marketing for Firefox, but he has a CS background. Why do some devs move to the dark side? Anyways he’s also working on an appspot app: http://16×16.appspot.com/top/. Interesting visualization of what people are browsing, using favicons.

Did Jager shots with Leeroy Jenkins. He’s pretty much exactly like you would expect him to be in real life. I couldn’t tell if he was intentionally mispronouncing panelists names when he was introducing them but it was funny.

Watched Randall Monroe play chess at the afterparty. He’s built up quite a cult following. I’ve heard from several people that ROFLCon was largely inspired by the XKCD meetup. He came up with an interesting insight at one of the panels- that geeks tend to like Japanese culture because it’s alien, but has its own set of rules that you can learn and play with online.

I met a Yahoo engineer who lives a couple of blocks from me back in SF. Wouldn’t say anything about the MS merger, but I could tell he wasn’t exactly a proponent. That’s hardly surprising, but until now I hadn’t spoken to anyone from Yahoo about it.

An IT guy who works at Nationwide Insurance- like me, he just thought it would be cool to attend.

A freelancer working for the CBC on a documentary about internet memes. Her friend had a photo of a camera crew filming her filming an interview with one of the attendees. Recursion!

Several students, most of them from Harvard/MIT. Had an interesting conversation with one female student about the white-maleness of the panels. The subject repeatedly came up during Q&A sessions but there wasn’t a good consensus as to why more females were not on the panels. We also talked about porn, and how men tend to look at pictures and women tend to read. I’m a firm believer that “The brain is the biggest erogenous zone.” Then she started talking specifics about her favorite Harry Potter fan fiction. Oh my.

I didn’t actually meet Tron Guy but he was everywhere, always in the Tron Suit.

The internet is even stranger in person.

via kottke:

Benoit Mandelbrot and Paola Antonelli talk about, among other things, fractals, self-similarity in architecture, algorithms that could specify the creation of entire cities, visual mathematics, and generalists.

The interview is fascinating, but I was surprised that it made no reference to the findings of Ron Eglash. The topic immediately reminded me of his TED talk about African fractals:

Sayeth Mandelbrot:

Meaning, for example, walking toward the Garnier opera house in Paris, from far away, the most striking thing is the roof. You come closer, other things appear, but they are always of approximately the same degree of complication.

And here’s a sketch of a Ba-Ila village as seen from above:

Tell me that’s not a perfect example of what Mandelbrot is talking about. It probably predates the Garnier opera house, but it’s African rather than French. I wonder why these two Europeans don’t mention it in a discussion of fractal architecture.

That’s kind of a troll but I had to point it out.

[Somewhat related, but sad: Edward Lorenz has passed away.]

Neato!

see here (probably NSFW).

Several people have sent this link (or variations on it) to me over the last week or so, but I neglected to blog about it for a couple of reasons. First, lots of other people were blogging about it and I didn’t really have anything to add. Second, I have some problems with it.

Don’t get me wrong. I love cooked bacon, but raw bacon is pretty gross. It’s quite unappetizing, even when draped over an otherwise lovely female form.

Furthermore, there’s something deeply disturbing about a woman covering her naughty bits with raw meat. Look at the picture again but this time think about the situation that led to this photo being taken.

The girl, the party, how she ended up there with her shirt off. “To attract men?” Does her “prank” belie a darker truth? Worn down by a life-long onslaught of sexist messages, has she come to believe that her value as a human being worthy of love is defined by her physical appearance? Cruel adolescent remarks about her body stuck in her mind. If nobody would love her with her own fat on the inside, might they love her with another animal’s fat draped on her outside?

Or consider the harshly lit supermarket where the bacon was purchased, the smog-belching truck that brought it there. The cold, grimy cutting equipment of the slaughterhouse where it was sliced and packaged. The cramped pen where the pig once lived in misery. A horrific supply chain stretching from breakfast plate to slaughterhouse. Every bite I take pulls on that chain, pulls another living creature through its awful machinery.

Here’s my meditation on the bacon bra: Simultaneously mindful of the both the life of suffering that animal experienced before its slaughter, and the damage done to women everywhere by this type of objectifying imagery, I am forced to reconsider my desire to consume either. I don’t want any of that in my stomach or my mind.

Oh.

Marry me, bacon bra girl.

This ain’t a bad place to work. (sorry for two bacon-related posts in a row)

Carol and Vance are my new best friends. They sent me two bacon chocolate pigs.

Delicious.

Thank you!!!

Challenge accepted.

I thought the bass was too low, and Thom’s vocals were too high (pitch-wise, that is. Always with the falsetto, Thom is.) so I made adjustments accordingly. I also think drums always sound better when run through an amp simulator.