artm

Life like Elephant - Mamallapuram near Chennai,
originally uploaded by Hi Pandian.

“OMG. Amazing!” And whatever else you’re supposed to say on teh interweb.

One of the case studies in the Dive Into Greasemonkey is called Dumb Quotes and does just what I wanted - converts all the “correct” typography into plain old ASCII. What a relief.

They look like fish, they swim like fish, they live in the water like fish, so they are fish.

Their breastfeed their young, so they are mammal fish.

For a biologist such classification is useless and hence they decided that an animal is either one or another, you can’t be both at the same time.

For an educated designer web typography is wrong and he’ll whine about it at conferences like anybody cares. I need a wordpress plugin that translates typographically correct apostrophes to feet and inches.

Sólo porque alguien no te ame como tú quieres, no significa que no te ame con todo su ser.

Gabriel García Márquez 13 líneas para vivir

Which reminds me of the discussion yesterday in the V2_lab’s kitchen: about how Rui hates all the bad art out there. Rui, just because you don’t like an art, doesn’t mean the artists didn’t made it con todo su ser (it doesn’t mean the opposite either). It would be so boring if all the art was great to you and you won’t have to look for something that speaks to you - just go to a gallery or cinema or a website and enjoy. That some art stands out, for you, on a background of the other only makes it appeal more, after all:

Quizá Dios quiera que conozcas mucha gente equivocada antes de que conozcas a la persona adecuada, para que cuando al fin la conozcas, sepas estar agradecido.

May be God made all the “bad” art so that when you finally encounter the good one you’ll be greatful. You can substitute “art” above for just about anything.

Update

Pretty much the same sentiment as Rui’s but applied to open source software:

Rotten Flesh

The antithesis of sweetcode.org, rotten flesh highlights the genericity endemic in the “Open Source community.” Rottenflesh is a satirical attack on http://freshmeat.net/, an index of free software and a major Open Source institution. The big problem with freshmeat.net is that it’s inflicted daily with piles of half-brained nonsense; broken MP3 taggers, dodgy CGI scripts and (of course) software to manage your video collection. There is plenty of good software there too, but it often drowns in the muck.

So go to http://unpythonic.net/~jepler/cgi-bin/rottenflesh.cgi Browse the point releases of obscurely-named applications, their menubars and theme systems described as distinguishing marks, their recent change history hinting at feverish, over-caffeinated brains locked away in student digs for long, long nights of unbound hacking.

Then open up http://freshmeat.net/ as a comparison. Wish that some of those free software authors took note of rotten flesh before thinking about what they should contribute to the world. Hope also that they aren’t discouraged totally from working their keyboards to more productive ends.

Alex McLean’s write up about Rotten Flesh project by Jeff Epler.

Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday dear whatever
Happy birthday to you

Fuck Time-Warner

Just found this on archive.org while looking for electronic version of Shergin and Pisakhov’s Pomor tales. It’s a list of books I read in 2001-2002 with little reviews in Russian. Also a portred of younger me.

The picture is from 1999 or so and was drawn by Veronika, my girlfriend at the time.

Totally unrelated (thanks Pirate Bay for this one): today I listened to all Beatles’ official UK albums plus Past Masters (songs from EPs, singles etc) skipping only second side of Yellow Submarine (which is George Martin’s symphonic music) and Revolution 9 (Lennon’s experimental mash up). The best song this time was It’s All Too Much (Yellow Submarine, by George Harrison). I just now realized why i like b-movies so much - as a teenager I watched Beatles movies a million times.

Edit: I finally found the book - Сказы и сказки by Boris Shergin and Stepan Pisakhov. I’m sure I blogged it before but the post has disappeared not only from the face of the internet, but even from the way back machine. But thanks to ya.ru and my alternative handle I could find it back: it’s one of the three pages in runet that contains the word Фемистофель (femistofel).

I’ve just came across wikipedia in Norhtern Russian! They call it Siberian, but articles in Pomor are also allowed. Neither spelling nor many words look like Schergin’s and Pisakhov’s Pomor or Bazhov’s Ural dialects, many made up words have rather Belarussian feel to me (not knowing any Belarussian but having been exposed to Ural dialect of Northern Russian for 12 years). They’ve got 1000+ articles (that’s why I saw it - it got high enough on wikipedia’s title page).

Apparently (that’s in Ukrainian, see also in Dutch or Belorussian) the language was created in 2005, by some Ukrainian/Siberian nationalists (which isn’t as strange a hybrid as it may sound). Their argumentation sounds weird though:

Общеизвестно, что современный украинский - это южнорусская грамматика плюс польские корни. Не думаю, что будет сложно сконструировать сибирский язык, залив в чалдонскую диалектную грамматику нужное количество татарских корней, вплоть до непонимания сибирского языка европейскими русскими.

It’s well known that modern Ukrainian is South Russian grammar plus Polish roots. I don’t think it would be difficult to construct Siberian language by pouring enough Tatar roots into Chaldonian dialect grammar, until rendering Siberian incomprehensible to european Russians.

The best word ever: “Межугимга” (mezhugimga) - allegedly Siberian for Internet. Ешшо в жысти новойраз лекочут Инет.

Russian wikipedians made a proposal for Siberian wikipedia to be shut, because they live in Moscow and (therefore) take themselves very seriously. Discussion is of course impossible like usually when Homo Sapience are involved.

Edit: I was wondering WTF “Chaldonian” meant in the quote above. According to this “Chaldon” is a word Russians living in Siberia call themselves. (And the some of them would probably even protest against calling them Russians).

There is an article on the New York Times web site about podcasted fiction featuring a photo of Scott Sigler “recording” in his closet and mentioning JC Hutchins, Mark Jeffrey and podiobooks.com.