affreca @ 34: It's a small internet, I guess. I think Don tends to hang out in slightly less dirty-hippie oriented zones of the festival, but I've run across him and his camera a time or two, and he put together a site for my aforementioned friend with the ambulance.
affreca @ 30:
Is the gentleman in question by any chance Don Shorock?
A friend of mine drives a late 70s ambulance, re-painted gold, to Winfield every year. I think he gave the County about $300 for it. The gas mileage has to represent at least one deadly sin, but I'd say it's worth it.
The 4:20 bit on the cheap backpack (is that an Eastpak?) also struck me as a bit odd, but then again it might be the kind of item someone had lying around as a throwaway, so doesn't necessarily mean anything...
I've come across Paul Maier before. He's a VP of the Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod (I grew up LCMS) and the son of Walter A. Maier, founder of The Lutheran Hour. I had the impression that he'd done some amount of legitimate scholarship in the past, though maybe I just wasn't paying much
attention at the age of 18...
Andrew@125 - I agree that you'd not want to impose the (enormous) burden of maintaining an entire set of Wikipedia articles on domain-experts wanting to maintain their own WW2 or Anarchism or Star Trek sets or what have you.
I've thought for a while that the better role for a central Wikipedia in a world of distributed encyclopedia editing would be to aggregate an appropriate collection of changesets, rather than to serve as the One Repository of Encyclopedic Knowledge, but I admit that would introduce all sorts of technical complexity and barriers to entry.
I've had my own deeply frustrating Wikipedia moment, and it definitely left me soured on a lot of the culture there.
That said, I haven't given up on the basic project of Wikipedia. I'd like to believe that the deep problems I see are consequences of scale and structure which will eventually be addressed by forking the project all over the place. This is going to be messy as hell and painful for lots of people, but it seems necessary.
Apropos of Andrew Plotkin at #99, I'd like to toss in a quick pointer to wikipedia as source code / emergent trust structure, which suggests (or echoes a suggestion) that distributed version control be applied to the Wikipedia problem.
I will note in passing that my Very Favorite Text Editor, vim, offers builtin rot13 support with [count]g?[motion]. This probably demonstrates some law of software expansion. Though I don't *know* of anyone reading news directly on vim, I would suspect it's the default editor for a variety of newsreaders.
I do know of people reading news on (x)emacs, so I assume there's a similar feature to be found somewhere there...
Eh.
I used to participate in this sort of thing regularly, 'til I noticed that it's actually even less satisfying than sitting around cranking out "best of" lists.
This kind of mirrors my feelings about the entire occupation of (artistic) criticism. I'm sure there's plenty of critical writing out there that's worth reading on its own (the essays of Kenneth Rexroth, George Orwell, and glenn mcdonald, frex, have done me a world of good), but so much of it feels like an empty exercise in Having An Opinion.
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