Flutterby™!: Topic : Rocky Horror Picture Show

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Entry: 2023-12-02 00:51:07.309309+01 If You Want Marriage, Compromise With Misogyny by Dan Lyke comments 0

FAIR: WaPo Tells Women: If You Want Marriage, Compromise With Misogyny

In fact, the right-wing Institute for Family Studies lurks throughout the editorial, along with its senior fellow Brad Wilcox, who was involved in discredited anti-same-sex marriage research that was influential in that political battle a decade ago. Together, the Post references or links to them three separate times in its editorial. (The IFS argument about marriage happiness is flawed too, by the way.)

Yeah. Young women: don't. While I'm very grateful to those who have tolerated some of my views over time, we should definitely not be encouraging anyone, let alone young women, to compromise with some of that shit.

Entry: 2023-09-09 16:36:19.304653+02 Some musings on governance by Dan Lyke comments 2

Back when the Internet was much younger than it is now, Johannes Ernst published a mechanism for allowing someone to use a website to log into another website, called LID. Much like "log in with Google or Facebook" is today. I saw it, thought it was a good idea, and implemented it for my blog. Shortly afterwards, Brad Fitzpatrick at Six Apart implemented something similar for LiveJournal, and discussions about creating standards started happening.

I was part of these discussions, and remember asking for a single feature to support a single use case, one that I thought was the most immediate and obvious use case. The conversation wheeled into places I didn't care about, that I thought were way overly complex and byzantine, but I thought "there's no way that my one feature won't make it into the spec".

So I tuned out. Ended up writing some authentication software for a portion of the spec that had been finalized, published that, got a whole lot of "but that's not how it should work!" feedback, said "well, that's what the spec so far says, and y'all are part of that process, so..."

Anyway, the short(!) version is that by the time the OpenID spec came out, it didn't have my one feature, the one thing that would have made the use case of "use this identity to comment on a blog" super easy. Had a *whole* lot of other complexity though.

So I think about this a lot as one of the failures of my career, of not wading through all of the social bullshit and maneuvering, and of failing to get my feature in, and how that lack of a feature led to slowed adoption and to my mind the failure of OpenID to create the sort of meaningful change I thought it should have.

And I think a lot about the mechanisms and processes by which the successful products and standards of my career have occurred.

I had lunch yesterday with someone who has way more experience in local politics than I do. Who's been in the trenches for years, in multiple places, with some pretty challenging projects. The discussion was great, and went on for a long time, and it's bringing up a lot of questions for me.

Measure U has given Petaluma a brief respite, but sales taxes are a crappy way to fund a city, and the city is cash-flow negative without it. There are a number of reasons for this, probably more complexity than I understand.

The core one is the basic issue with American sprawl: lots of people bought into the racist auto-oriented suburb development pattern propaganda, and as a result we have a lot of geometry that's impractical to navigate without an automobile, with all of the costs of infrastructure per resident that stems from that.

A contributing factor is Prop 13. Beyond screwing individual ownership and young people, it specifies how funds get split between cities, counties, and schools in a way that if a city was doing fairly well at the time it was passed, the city got a smaller proportion of the property taxes relative to those other two. Petaluma was doing *great*. It doesn't get much of the property taxes these days.

The culture of Petaluma is also one of activism and consensus. I've often commented that if you've got 3 Petalumans interested in a cause, you've probably got 4 non-profits. Many of these efforts are successful. The moratorium on new gas stations is something that I didn't think was practical, and yet it happened.

Projects here get studied to death. Getting change enacted takes decades, and wears people the fuck out. Charlene and I are currently involved in Mountain View Ave safety improvements, and as we knock on doors and go up and down the street we hear "oh, yeah, I've been asking for [X] for 30 years, and we've only gotten an increased speed limit. But good luck on your efforts."

There was a recent Grand Jury report over how the city has structured its Planning Department for outsourcing, the conclusion of which was that the city has created an incentive for the Planning Commission to create too much opportunity for public comment and feedback, to bill the developers for endless public meetings.

And Petaluma lately does not have a good record on development. Before we got here, the city got screwed by a bunch of car lots in a deal so complex nobody knows what actually happened. We have two big-box developments that got watered way down by consensus, created a lot of traffic and haven't brought the promised revenue,. One large residential development that was supposed to be mixed-use with a walkable retail core has been watered down to a hotel in a sea of single-family homes in with an exit from the area that crosses a railroad track, but somehow we're gonna build a bridge that dumps some huge number of cars into this residential area.

Petaluma does have a fantastic asset: Back in the day of the automobile, a very popular mayor proposed bulldozing a bunch of downtown in order to widen the main drag, there was pushback, and eventually some city assistance in restoring the iron fronts to the downtown buildings created a quaint downtown district. The sidewalks aren't as wide as they once were, but it's there. And even more recently, during my time here, the main drag was reconfigured from two lanes each direction to one lane, which makes it more pleasant to walk downtown.

And right before we moved to town, downtown was expanded with a movie theater, some more retail, a parking garage, and a little bit of residential. And is configured in a way that does provide some more public gathering and foot traffic spaces, the sorts of spaces that build community, where you might walk and run into people you know.

Of course there's also still a lot of downtown that's a remnant of the old days: many buildings that were there in the early '60s were demolished or burned down, and redeveloped into large parking lots with one story buildings. A lot of banks.

Back to the lunch conversation: There's a vacant lot in between old downtown and new downtown. Used to be a gas station. I believe that the first hotel proposal on this site went before the Planning Commission in 2008, and that developer is a local who was pitching his idea for several years prior. It's been around for a while. Meanwhile, the lot has been vacant. Various aspects of the city jerked the developer around for a long time, some wrangling over parking aspects that weren't openly documented. The developer finally said (as developers often do), fuck it, I'm gonna sell to someone who has the assets to fight this project through.

That developer came back and said "yeah, I can't make it work unless it goes up a story", and started writing checks to the outsourced (remember that Grand Jury report that suggests too much public engagement) city Planning Department to write up a proposal for a Zoning Overlay that would create an incentive, in the form of height, for that lot, and some of the other ugly asphalt and one story buildings, to be developed.

The Planning Department folks aren't political, they saw a catalyst for change and brought forward a proposal. And *all* of the ugly came out.

So the conversation was about the processes of building city plans for an area. How to do public consensus building. How the Central Petaluma Specific Plan was developed. And as I went to sleep with all of this in my head, I started wrapping back to that OpenID discussion.

Because it's great to have a goal of public consensus, but that also privileges the people who have time and resources to spend endless meetings going back and forth. It's great for everyone to feel included, but after a while the people who actually do stuff go off and start doing stuff in the places they can do stuff.

And how in the end what we end up with may not be great.

Anyway, Charlene and I are going to sit down and read the Central Petaluma Specific Plan closely, because that's a plan that covers the Theater District, which I believe has a far too low residential to retail ratio but generally feels like an okay direction, and Riverfront, which I see as a massive failure for the city, and a bunch of vacant lots with proposals that aren't inspiring.

But I'm also interested in learning more about municipal decision-making processes in cities that work. Because I like the story of the big consensus building process, but does it give us a city with character? A livable city? Or does it give us a city in which it takes decades to improve livability, and bland out the culture such that it really doesn't matter if you get a Round Table or a Pieology?

What creates a culture in a city? If you create more retail, does that really drive the price of retail up as everybody wants to open a wine bar, or does the higher supply mean that nobody wants to rent in the old buildings that still don't have good fire suppression systems and other modern amenities, and lead to a downtown slum?

I mean, I realize that this is a complex system, that the macroeconomic effects of creating a vibrant city mean that housing and retail interact in ways that simple supply and demand don't apply in obvious ways.

But I find myself looking at a mess, with a bunch of different narratives of what's wrong, how to fix it, how different portions of the residents of the city get served, and how various former residents get driven out, and am trying to see what kinds of processes will actually build the kind of city I aspire to live in.

And whether I was right, in my earlier years, to just treat a place to live as a commodity to be bought, and be prepared to pick up my roots and go find a place on what I see as a saner path, or if I ask my neighbors to give up substantial portions of their leisure time to try to set this city on a stronger path.

Entry: 2023-06-14 19:45:03.58994+02 Sock Hops, Poodle Skirts, and Climate Change Awareness by Dan Lyke comments 0

The Decade of Sock Hops, Poodle Skirts, and Climate Change Awareness

As new and challenging as these ideas were, sincere attempts were made to introduce them to the mainstream. It may come as a surprise today, but in 1958, the potential for CO₂-driven climate disruption was part of the public school curriculum. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the director Frank Capra (It’s a Wonderful Life, etc.) collaborated with Bell Telephone (AT&T) on a series of educational films that were aired on national television and distributed widely through American schools. Using a hybrid of animation and live action popular at the time, 1958’s The Unchained Goddess featured Meteora, an animated Rita Hayworth–like weather deity who becomes infatuated with the domed and bespectacled Dr. Frank Baxter, a legendary (real-life) professor at the University of Southern California. Over the course of the film, Baxter, a truly delightful man, explains the science and mechanics of weather, finishing up with a warning that “man may be unwittingly changing the world’s climate through the waste products of his civilization … ” As Baxter paraphrases Gilbert Plass’s research and Roger Revelle’s lyricism, we see dramatic footage of collapsing glaciers juxtaposed with fuming smokestacks, bumper-to-bumper traffic, and animations of rising seas inundating the coastal United States. The Unchained Goddess, financed and distributed by one of the biggest and most powerful corporations in US history, was seen by tens of millions of young baby boomers.

All overridden by concerted marketing campaigns from the fossil fuel providers, of course.

Via Sensible Endowment

Entry: 2022-12-07 18:15:03.557632+01 Thinking about how in the early days by Dan Lyke comments 2

Thinking about how, in the early days of blogging, @davew@mastodon.social was the axis of social discovery as we all hand-coded or wrote software to support ourselves. Sure, he also wrote and distributed blog software, but he fostered a community of a variety of technologies. Thinking specifically of how long Brad and Cam kept hand-coding their sites.

This is something we don't have as long as Federation means spinning up another Mastodon instance.

Entry: 2022-08-18 20:55:34.718234+02 Rhythm Nation by Dan Lyke comments 0

Tara over at ResearchBuzz tagged me in this bit of amusement: Old laptop hard drives will allegedly crash when exposed to Janet Jackson music

The issue was also apparently partially resolved by the PC manufacturer at the time. Chen says the company addressed the problem "by adding a custom filter in the audio pipeline that detected and removed the offending frequencies during audio playback." This wouldn't completely fix things since these laptops' hard drives would still crash if they were exposed to another device that was playing the song. But "Rhythm Nation" had apparently declined enough in popularity by the early 2000s that the issue didn't become a widespread problem.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Music Rocky Horror Picture Show ]

Entry: 2022-08-09 18:55:02.512268+02 Anniversaries by Dan Lyke comments 0

RT Xopher pro-choice voter 🏳️‍🌈 ♥️ 🇺🇦 @Halftongue (yesterday, I missed it)

Hey, you know what else happened on this night in 1974? Janet Weiss and Brad Majors, two ordinary, healthy kids, began driving out to see their old Denton High School science teacher, Dr. von Scott.

As they drove, they listened on the car radio as Nixon resigned as President.

Entry: 2022-06-03 22:08:53.923259+02 Department of the INTERPOL by Dan Lyke comments 0

RT Brad Leege @bradleege

Confirmation of how I have always perceived what a “Michigan Man” is every time someone from UM uses the term.

Kyle Griffin @kylegriffin1

Capitol Police: A Michigan man was arrested outside of the U.S. Capitol this morning after he was found with a fake badge, a BB gun, body armor, high capacity magazines and other ammunition.

He presented a fake badge that had "Department of the INTERPOL" printed on it.

[ related topics: Law Enforcement Guns Rocky Horror Picture Show ]

Entry: 2022-04-13 16:56:39.235443+02 YouTuber tries to give people botulism by Dan Lyke comments 0

So apparently Bon Appetit sponsors this Instagram personality and YouTuber who, back in February, posted a video of water-bath canning seafood. The outrage over the botulism fears was large enough that they took the video down, but apparently they still give the dude a platform: It's botulism with Brad Leone: Bon Appetit is testing health standards.

Via a bunch of places, but here's the MeFi link.

Entry: 2021-01-23 03:23:32.327283+01 Janet Jackson Bernie Mittens by Dan Lyke comments 0

Janet Jackson takes the Bernie Mittens meme to new heights. This is amazing.

Entry: 2020-12-05 19:10:15.951124+01 Hot Blooded by Dan Lyke comments 0

On a HAI message board, Karin Grace Wares mentioned her memoir, Hot Blooded: A Sexual Resurrection. I ordered it from Copperfield's, and quite enjoyed it.

One of the things that COVID-19 has made me aware of is how much of our sexual attitudes are a product of our times. I'm watching at how my various older gay friends are reacting to COVID-19, and it's amazing how much their experiences with having survived the AIDS epidemic has informed their behavior and attitudes now, and how there have been mentions of some sex parties that a younger generation were willing to attend, probably because they hadn't had that trauma deeply ingrained.

And as I sort through some of my own sexual traumas, I'm realizing that some of them come from the fact that my parents, and upbringing, were more Silent Generation than Baby Boomer, so I'm kind-of in a limbo that's between Boomer and Gen-X, with the additional cultural confusion that comes from extremely rural, Waldorf, and whatever set of neurological differences I carry.

When Charlene and I met, in a hot tub at a neo-tantra community event at a mansion in Tiburon, we talked about not being exclusive, but in practice that's never happened; I just don't have the spoons to have secondary relationships (which speaks to some of my own relationship traumas). However, I do listen to a number of polyamory and ethical non-monogamy podcasts, because those are the folks who are talking about personal growth and human relationships in terms that make sense to me.

But in listening to those folks, most of them are at least a decade younger than I am, if not more, and the generational differences in what sex means, and how they approach relationships, are clear. There's a huge difference in a generation that has access to "they/them" pronouns, to the one for which "ethical non-monogamy" wasn't a new concept, but was a new term.

As I read through Hot Blooded, I kept running across footnotes from books on my sex and sexuality bookshelf. This speaks a lot to my generation, echoing a lot of what I found in the writings of Susie Bright, and Carol Queen, Dossie Easton and Janet Hardy. Within the first few pages I found myself dropping quotes on social media, and as I got deeper into the book the observations got no less pithy, but built on previous thoughts so that they were no longer so easily excisable from context.

As she goes through her own journey, and likens that to what was happening in the culture around, I had the warm familiarity of the thoughts of my generation, contrasted with some wonderful insights and experiences probing the edges and frontiers of the time.

I think I may have to read this one again, and take stronger notes this time. Recommended.

Entry: 2019-03-06 00:08:18.49366+01 No, they fucking did not by Dan Lyke comments 0

My politics are wandering all over the place, though right now I think they're tending towards Guillotine Party, but this line from Brad Delong: A Clinton-era centrist Democrat explains why it’s time to give democratic socialists a chance:

“Barack Obama rolls into office with Mitt Romney’s health care policy, with John McCain’s climate policy, with Bill Clinton’s tax policy, and George H.W. Bush’s foreign policy,” DeLong notes. “And did George H.W. Bush, did Mitt Romney, did John McCain say a single good word about anything Barack Obama ever did over the course of eight solid years? No, they fucking did not.”

I believe history will remember Obama as something like a Reagan, though possibly with a little less illegal arms dealing.

[ related topics: Politics Health Rocky Horror Picture Show Global Warming ]

Entry: 2018-12-20 17:26:26.133131+01 Claas Relotius by Dan Lyke comments 0

Shadow forwarded along a couple of links about what seems to be the news of the day, and I 've added a few more: Der Spiegel journalist messed with the wrong small town:

There are so many lies here, that my friend Jake and I had to narrow them down to top 11 most absurd lies (we couldn’t do just 10) for the purpose of this article. We’ve been working on it since the article came out in spring of 2017, but had to set it aside to attend to our lives (raising a family, managing a nonprofit organization, etc.) before coming back to it this fall, and finally wrapped things up a few weeks ago, just in time to hear today that Relotius was fired when he was exposed for fabricating many of his articles.

Germany's Der Spiegel says star reporter Claas Relotius wrote fake stories 'on a grand scale':

Several major features Relotius wrote for Der Spiegel that were also nominated for or won journalism awards are now under scrutiny, according to the magazine.

When the news really is fake: German reporter admits fabricating coverage at leading news magazine:

But at a time when political parties are deeply polarized on both sides of the Atlantic, the Spiegel controversy could also bolster those who now regularly portray reporting as “fake news.” As a publication that often allows its reporters to include subjective observations in their stories, Spiegel’s anti-Trump cover pieces had been widely shared in liberal circles in recent years. The fact that Relotius was initially exposed because of a story from the United States was immediately used to discredit the magazine’s wider coverage.

Among them, "The Last Witness," about an American who allegedly travels to an execution as a witness, "Lion Children," about two Iraqi children who have been kidnapped and reeducated by the Islamic State, and "Number 440," a feature about alleged prisoners at the US detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Writer touted by CNN as 'Journalist of the Year' forced to resign for fabricating stories

The Relotius case resembles past instances where journalists have been caught fabricating stories. Those accused previously have included Stephen Glass, who was fired from the New Republic magazine, Jayson Blair, fired from the New York Times, and Janet Cooke, a Washington Post reporter whose story about a child addicted to heroin won a Pulitzer Prize before it was revealed to be a fabrication.

Entry: 2018-09-05 18:17:59.515702+02 Another police shooting by Dan Lyke comments 0

Off-duty CHP officer kills wife, shoots self outside Amador County store, authorities say:

Sheriff’s deputies received a call about 10:45 p.m. Monday from the owner of Get Ripped Nutrition, a vitamin and supplement store, who said a man he knew to be a CHP officer and later identified as Brad Wheat was banging on the door, demanding to be let in, authorities said. The owner of the business was inside the store with Mary Wheat, 42, the man’s wife.

[ related topics: Health Marriage Rocky Horror Picture Show ]

Entry: 2018-07-23 17:03:01.569841+02 Rockstar by Dan Lyke comments 0

Rockstar - The Computer Language

But why?

Mainly because if we make Rockstar a real (and completely pointless) programming language, then recruiters and hiring managers won't be able to talk about 'rockstar developers' any more.

Also 'cos it's kinda fun and any language based on the idea of compiling Meatloaf lyrics has to be worth a look, right?

Also we can make stickers. Who doesn't want a sticker on their laptop saying 'CERTIFIED ROCKSTAR DEVELOPER'?

Entry: 2018-02-01 20:51:11.990508+01 2 decades of Flutterby by Dan Lyke comments 43

Some time in February of 1998 (for some reason I didn't log the day or time of the update then), I sent an email to a server that got piped into a script and made very first entry to the Flutterby weblog.

In mid 1997 I was working at Pixar, a Steve Jobs funded company, and Gil Amelio was ousted by the Apple board and Steve stepped in as the interim CEO. You could hear phones ring sequentially down the halls as journalists tried to find Pixar people would would comment, the soap opera potential was high, and this little web site run by Dave Winer called Scripting News had the best coverage of all the latest on this transition.

Dave's company, Frontier, sold this scripting package and some software written in the scripting package, and Scripting News was a site maintained by his software. There were a few other people using that software similarly, but I'd been looking for an excuse to sling Perl so wrote something called Newwwsboy to manage my own site.

Journals had been happening on the web for a while. I was an avid reader of "The Semi- Existence of Bryon". Even in the history of what eventually became known as "weblogs" we generally go back to like a month or two after the founding of the web itself, but somehow that late 1997 early 1998 group of people who started putting reverse chronologically ordered semi-personal links and commentary on the web became a bit of a movement.

It also became a really cool community. Brad Graham and others organized get-togethers. I remember getting together for drinks with the Pyra gang (who created Blogger). Dinners were a fantastic cross-section of people, it wasn't just computer people, it was librarians, theater people, people who's primary identity was "Mom", all pulled together by the feeling that we had this really cool medium to explore.

I think we generally credit Jorn Barger, proprietor of a weblog called "Robot Wisdom", for the term. I remember Cam Barrett (of CamWorld) and I tossing around names like "microportal" and such.

Sometime around 2000 blogging started to become a thing. Blogger went big. LiveJournal got a boost. Comment systems on blogs happened. The marketing folks realized that we were hogging all the cool Google search results and started exploiting the medium for sales, the New York dilettantes played in it and we got dreck like Julie & Julia (The Julia parts of the movie were okay).

And then, of course, the web became its current dross: Search results gamed by machines to remove any sense of personality, and often value. A huge morass of people trying to thrust advertising brochures at you.

My sister once asked me "does it ever bother you that you built all of the things Facebook did, years earlier, but didn't become Facebook"? And, yeah, it kind of does, but I wasn't trying to build Facebook. I had a higher vision for humanity, one that was more about the awesome people connections that we used to build with the network.

I miss those days, and am looking forward to the next place I can chase that dream.

Entry: 2017-11-09 20:45:08.735339+01 Cortex on MeFi & Communities by Dan Lyke comments 0

Y'all know this, but I tossed this link up on Facebook and felt like I should copy it here:

I've been doing this social media thing for long enough that grad students call me up to interview me about my role in the history (and to try to get introductions to the people who were famous in it...). My "blog" (formed before Peter Merholz and/or Brad Graham coined the term) is coming up on 20 years of pretty continuous updating. We were talking about echo chambers and the dynamics of curation back in the '90s, and I was late to Metafilter because I hated the idea of centralized discussion. I wanted those conversations to happen on my web site and your web site. Anyway, as we seem to have ceded our human curation of the world over to the opaque and likely malicious algorithms of Facebook, Twitter and the like, this struck me as some worthwhile thoughts on building and nurturing (online) community...

Josh Millard - Keeping Web Communities Healthy in a Dark Timeline - DonutJS October 2017 YOUTUBE.COM

Entry: 2016-10-20 16:30:11.094905+02 Anyone else hear Nasty Woman and by Dan Lyke comments 0

Anyone else hear "Nasty Woman" and think Janet Jackson with a gender switch? "Gimme a beat!"

[ related topics: Rocky Horror Picture Show ]

Entry: 2016-05-13 18:25:07.367442+02 I'm going to assume that y'all have by Dan Lyke comments 0

I'm going to assume that y'all have seen the Dr. Who Timewarp? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WBqHdI5Bdw&t=43

[ related topics: Movies Rocky Horror Picture Show ]

Entry: 2016-04-14 04:12:18.148792+02 Those who erase history... by Dan Lyke comments 0

UC Davis at least $175,000 to scrub pepper-spray references from Internet, including removing the damning internal report that used to be at http://reynosoreport.ucdavis.edu/reynoso-report.pdf

If you need a reminder of how this wasn't a bad apple, but was mismanagement all the way up the fucking chain to the Chancellor's office, Brad Hicks' summary is still on the web and should get more Google Juice.

In fact, that should be the first hit for UC Davis or Police Lt. John Pike or Chancellor Katehi or Chief Spicuzza.

Entry: 2015-04-25 23:40:05.153734+02 Also like these Janet McBeen wire by Dan Lyke comments 0

Also like these Janet McBeen wire sculptures at Riverfront Art Gallery

[ related topics: Photography Art & Culture Rocky Horror Picture Show ]

Entry: 2015-04-22 18:10:43.716125+02 What does economic growth mean by Dan Lyke comments 0

Wall Street Journal: Is Government Debt Too Low? links to Brad DeLong: Things I Probably Will Have Time to Say: Rethinking Macro Policy III Conference, Washington D.C., April 15-16:

... isn’t the point of the market economy to make things that are valuable? And isn’t the debt of reserve-currency issuing sovereigns an extraordinarily valuable thing that is very cheap to make? So shouldn’t we be making more of it?

I got there via Larry Burton asking "Are you saying we can borrow ourselves into prosperity?" who observed that

This actually makes some perverse sense if one is a Keynesian. Money is really cheap right now and a government, unlike a family, has forever to work and pay off this debt so, sure, borrow more money, fix up the infrastructure and then pay off the debt with the inrush of taxes from the new, mo’ better economy.

I'm having trouble commenting on his site (Probably the broken vestiges of OpenID and stale cookies), so I'll comment here:

This makes perfect sense if we're investing in things that have a return. It's not clear to me that automobile infrastructure has that return. Education, social programs to break the cycle of poverty, those things have a return. If we spend wisely.

But the other nagging feeling I have... Essentially, economic growth is the portion of the economy that isn't devoted to food. At a Malthusian subsistence existence, all of our energies are devoted to food. At modern developed nations existence, enough calories per day to survive is low single-digit percent (farms are about 1%, add agriculture related industries were under 5%, we may spend more of our budgets, but much of that is because we fly fresh produce in from Chile in the winter or high markups for cartoon characters on our cereal grains).

Everything else is luxury spending. Even healthcare is essentially "how much longer do we want to live after our reproductive years are over". So do we get diminishing returns as food becomes less? When everything is luxury spending, what does economic growth mean?

Entry: 2014-10-03 01:37:36.975536+02 Autonomous Vehicles by Dan Lyke comments 0

RT Brad obese Taft ‏@bradtaft:

On the @google campus on my bike this AM. Driverless car next to me slows down, driver intervenes and speeds back up.

RT Mike4StP ‏@mikesonn

@bradtaft lulz!!! Welcome to the future

RT Brad obese Taft ‏@bradtaft:

@mikesonn i was like wow, "the bike lane ends, and this driverless car recognized it" then it speeds up to pass me and, hand on the wheel

Mike4StP ‏@mikesonn:

.@bradtaft Drivers won't stand for a car that driver responsibility. Driverless is a joke if driver can override it.

Brad obese Taft :

@mikesonn just before a crash, driver throws hands up, moves feet. "it was in driverless mode, I don't know what happened"

Entry: 2014-05-06 18:17:08.270113+02 Broken web site by Dan Lyke comments 0

RT Brad Frost ‏@brad_frost:

"A web app is a website that doesn't work when Javascript is disabled." @adactio #artifactconf"

Entry: 2013-12-06 21:39:21.840219+01 by Dan Lyke comments 0

Brad Smith, General Counsel & Executive Vice President, Legal & Corporate Affairs, Microsoft: Protecting customer data from government snooping

If true, these efforts threaten to seriously undermine confidence in the security and privacy of online communications. Indeed, government snooping potentially now constitutes an “advanced persistent threat,” alongside sophisticated malware and cyber attacks.

Via ZDNet: Microsoft: US government is an 'advanced persistent threat'

Entry: 2013-09-30 02:16:24.405418+02 Charlene "Wait by Dan Lyke comments 0

Charlene "Wait, how did we get Rocky Horror here?" Dan: "Everything leads to Rocky Horror."

[ related topics: Rocky Horror Picture Show ]

Entry: 2012-10-19 18:51:14.748384+02 Tomorrow by Dan Lyke comments 0

Tomorrow: Mole & Tamale contest-dinner http://petalumaartscenter.org/...ule-2012-ENGLISH-FINAL.indd_.pdf followed by Rocky Horror http://www.petaluma360.com/art...e=-Let-s-do-the-time-warp-again- Petaluma rocks!

[ related topics: Community Rocky Horror Picture Show ]

Entry: 2012-04-21 16:20:38.020027+02 The UC Davis pepper spraying incident by Dan Lyke comments 0

Carl Coryell-Martin tweeted "Vastly more readable summary of the UC Davis Pepper Spray Debacle: http://bradhicks.livejournal.com/459368.html original: http://reynosoreport.ucdavis.edu/reynoso-report.pdf (I've read both.)"

That Brad Hick link starts out:

You know how every time somebody in law enforcement does something that looks bad, we're told that we should "wait until the facts are in" before passing judgment? Well, after Lieutenant Pike of the UC Davis Police Department became an internet meme by using high-pressure pepper-spray on peaceful resisters, the campus hired an independent consulting firm to interview everybody they could find, review all the videos and other evidence, review the relevant policies and laws, and issue a final fact-finding report to the university. The university just released that report, along with their summary (PDF link), and the final report is even worse than the news accounts made it seem.

Entry: 2012-01-23 18:39:07.276208+01 Legal issues of autonomous cars by Dan Lyke comments 0

Brad Templeton has some interesting notes from Santa Clara University Law Review conference on the legal issues of autonomous vehicles.

Also links to an MSNBC article on the conference.

Entry: 2012-01-21 22:42:04.671994+01 City of Brotherly Love by Dan Lyke comments 3

With the news that porn performers in the City of Los Angeles will now be required to use condoms, Brad Guigar has a modest suggestion for moving porn production to Philadelphia.

Entry: 2011-12-16 04:29:53.511367+01 Yes, we're serious by Dan Lyke comments 3

Scott Kurtz and Brad Guigar lay it out for the newspaper comics and syndicate industry. And offer to help.

Dear Cartoonists Studio: This is not a prize. Anyone can put their comic on a webpage and populate it with ads from Google Adsense. GoComics.com isn’t promising (nor can it deliver) traffic. That has to be generated by the artist anyway, so why add a middleman? Also there is no such thing as an electronic-book publishing contract. That’s like selling freshman elevator passes on the first day of the spring semester.

Dear Syndicates: You are making yourselves look more and more out of touch with every passing day. The USC Anneberg School for Commincation and Journalism just released a study that predicts newspapers are gone in five years. If you want to survive beyond that cataclysmic event, you gotta figure out this online stuff soon.

Some good notes on relevance of the newspaper industry in there as well.

Entry: 2005-05-26 18:23:47.605786+02 Bookmark Now by Dan Lyke comments 0

This one's for Columbine: Brad reviews Bookmark Now: Writing In Unreaderly Times

[ related topics: Weblogs Writing Archival Rocky Horror Picture Show ]

Entry: 2004-10-08 17:45:09.352033+02 Mock The Vote by Dan Lyke comments 2

If you see Kerry as a jump to the left, and Bush as step to the ri-i-i-ight, you might want to check out Mock The Vote (Flash and audio)

[ related topics: Politics Music Rocky Horror Picture Show ]

Entry: 2004-08-13 18:03:24.278621+02 Obits by Dan Lyke comments 9

Rough week: Rick James, Fay Wray whom most of us probably wouldn't have heard of if not for the pool scene in Rocky Horror Picture Show, and now Julia Child.

While the first two had long disappeared into history, Julia kept turning out new work with that same deadpan approach and a quirky hint of a smile that never quite made it clear if she was making fun of herself or not. In any case, in her later years when she worked mainly as a foil for other chefs she did an admirable job of asking the questions we'd want to ask, but would feel stupid for. She will be missed.

Entry: 2002-05-02 18:36:17+02 Hedwig by Dan Lyke comments 1

Watched Hedwig and the Angry Inch last night. Maybe my expectations had been raised too high, but I was disappointed. It wavered between trying to consciously manufacture a Rocky Horror Picture Show experience, and being a transvestite rock (as opposed to pop) version of Moulin Rouge. Unfortunately the ending didn't tie back to the motivations of Hedwig that I cared about enough to make it a satisfying movie. Might be one to watch stoned with a good surround sound system, or as the live production, but didn't really work as a straight movie.

Entry: 2002-02-24 07:37:29+01 Which Rocky Horror character? by Dan Lyke comments 25

Via Borklog, Which Rocky Horror character are you? I'm Frank-n-Furter, of course.

[ related topics: Dan's Life Rocky Horror Picture Show ]

Entry: 1999-04-01 10:00:00+02 by Dan Lyke comments 0

The Rocky & Bullwinkle Horror Picture Show, a part of Melissa's Rocky Horror Page

[ related topics: Rocky Horror Picture Show ]

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