My Mind, My Mood Is Wandering

Last weekend, Easter weekend, was quite quiet. Saturday it rained, Sunday I made it out to the library (just to return books in the drop, the library was closed) and took a meandering route, through the civic district at the top of Highland, past a pastel rainbow of otherwise identical houses sticking out against the residential jumble, across the tracks and homeward.

The work week was smooth and productive, but my mood began to decline towards the end of the week, no doubt in part due to a very painful cold sore sitting dead center in my mouth where my lower lip meets the gum.

This evening, there was a party at DJ and Ginneh's house, which was a lot of fun. A lot of Olin folks who I hadn't seen in a while were there.

Some random friendly but entertainingly drunk women struck up a conversation with me on the T on my way home.

Tomorrow, my usual workout, nothing yet planned for the evening. Sunday I'm going climbing at MetroRock in the morning and there's an over-the-top action flick for film club. Monday is a company holiday, so should be relaxing.

Videos and Essays, Mostly Thought-Provoking

• I've been reading a lot of essays by bradhicks lately. A while ago, I posted an essay of his about brining back the WPA, but since then I've been directed his-journal-wards several times and decided I should pay closer attention to what this brilliant essayist has to say:
  • Here's his classic Christains in the Hands of an Angry God which answers a very interesting question: Why are American fundamentalist Christians so in bed with the Republican party when the economic values of the Republican party are antithetical to those expressed by Jesus of Nazareth, and when the biblical justifications for Republican positions regarding homosexuality, abortion, etc. are so very based on cherry picking and outright mistranslation?
  • He also gives one of the most intelligent looks at the Israel / Hamas conflict in When Will There Be Peace in Gaza: As soon as Hamas makes one crucial realization that they very much don't want to make.
  • He also has an interesting and very pessimistic take on the current economic situation, a catastrophe that could perhaps be mitigated if the FDIC decided to actually do their job... but their decision to not enforce the law was years ago.
  • His take on the church shooting committed by David Atkisson late last year is very interesting (and disturbing) in the context of current right-wing talk-media rhetoric.
• Matt Taibi talks about the contortions of current right-wing political protest, which must oppose Obama administration bailouts and progressive anti-bailout protesters.
• Linux Journal has a post about a recent investigation in Boston over a completely trivial matter that has yet again put this city at the forefront of "The War on the Unexpected". Specifically, police are suggesting (in the justification for the search warrant in question) that using a command-line interface is suspicious behavior.
• Here's an essay on how one of Disney's most famous movies ripped of an earlier Japanese work wholesale. Evidently was a "just claim we never heard of it" response to not being able to get the remake rights. Speaking of Disney, there's also an amusing take on Disney's favorite target for plagiarism, themselves.
• There's been a lot of talk on the gaming internet about OnLive, a new service business that applies the cloud computing model to gaming. The idea is to put the controller on your end and the processing all on the server, with streaming video in between. The tech community reaction has been skeptical, even if you solve all the streaming video problems, it seems like there would be some issues with latency. But maybe that's not a problem.
• A few videos:
  • A Wolf Loves Pork (a clever stop-motion-stop-motion short feature)
  • JavaScript: The Good Parts (only worthwhile if you use the language, but very worthwhile in that case)
  • The Neurobiology of Primate Sexuality