Ooh, I wonder if that was the thing my sister was advancing. She came bombing through my mom's place in Arlington this yesterday, picking up a suitcase, and couldn't say where she was going.
mary@8: The "rushing back to Alaska to give birth" story isn't convincing; flight attendants on the plane say she didn't look pregnant.
I think the last may be a case of misunderstanding; what the spokesman for the airline said was she showed no sign of "her condition", and people have been taking that as meaning, pregnant. But in context it appears he was talking about condition = being in labor.
And the whole "fly back to Alaska and endanger your child" thing finally made sense to me when it was revealed that her husband is a raving Alaska separatist. If you think the only important thing is being a citizen of *Alaska*, then being merely born a citizen of the United States isn't good enough, you have to be born in Alaska.
This was why I considered Joe Biden the least bad of the serious VP possibilities that Obama was apparently considering. Yes, his support of the bankruptcy bill sucked, but he's a hell of an attack dog and the Democrats have very very few good attack dogs.
I have to chime in with Madeline here. A really nasty piece of racism was met, among a notable segment of the great and mighty of SF, with a fine concern for Sanders' feelings; great (and entirely newfound) passion about the vileness of posting rejection letters; logic chopping to 'explain' how it wasn't racist at all... and a great echoing silence when it came to denouncing the racism.
This doesn't entirely surprise me from LWE, from memories of rasff, but from people like Gardner Dozois I find it very, very disappointing, and yeah, it does make the field a more hostile place.
Jules@#171:
I've seen this asserted multiple times during these discussions. Frequently, there's a link to this article. Oddly enough, I don't see Cory criticising Digg here. In fact, it seems to me to be fairly complimentary on how Digg handled a sticky legal situation, while criticising AACS-LA for generating that situation. Nor do I see criticism in any of the other top few results for 'site:boingboing.net aacs digg' on google. So if you want to insist that Cory did criticise Digg, please point out a specific criticism he made.
If you see no criticism of Digg in all the relevant links, we are working in sufficiently different universes of discourse that I doubt that we will find much of use in continuing discussion. I regard articles that portray Digg as censors foiled by the brave and creative revolt of their users as criticism. You, apparently, do not.
Niall McAuley@#128:
Hey, Tavella, what if the NYT backed a disastrous war in the Middle East .. but I suppose that's not worth your time...
Er, what? Care to clarify what you were trying to imply with that? Given that I just criticized exactly that sort of silent editing.
Geeks actually care about facts, and a day or two of lag is not unusual. The facts are what they are, and a few hours delay will not surprise actual geeks like me.
That's not what I was commenting about. My paragraph:
"It's BoingBoing that has been doing the agitating; they deny things that are true -- Cory claiming never to have criticized Digg over the AACS key, Xeni claiming that none of the posts were actually Violet Blue's. In a geek fight, that's the sort of thing that is really going to ruffle feathers; denial of reality never goes down well."
I did not comment that the *wait* ruffled feathers -- I commented that denying things that people can prove with a simple link *will* ruffle geek feathers. There's a reason why the phrase "reality based community" became a popular catchword on geek blogs.
At what point (assuming the person possibly embarrassed is VB or an affine thereof) does VB's continued agitation of the trolls justify embarrassing her?
Er, exactly what are you calling continued agitation? She posted once about this, claiming to not know what caused it. Was she being disingenuous? Possibly, but that's all she's said about it.
It's BoingBoing that has been doing the agitating; they deny things that are true -- Cory claiming never to have criticized Digg over the AACS key, Xeni claiming that none of the posts were actually Violet Blue's. In a geek fight, that's the sort of thing that is really going to ruffle feathers; denial of reality never goes down well.
They failed to be transparent about it on BoingBoing, while letting little passive aggressive comments slip out all over the place, either directly or from surrogates. They've been silently editing their own posts, also something sure to gin up a geek fight, especially when the people doing the editing have been very loud on the subject of transparency and how it is best to show a change and an explicit edit.
Sure, they have every right to do whatever they want with their archive and their site, as a private entity. But if the publisher of the New York Times had a bad breakup with an contributor and had every mention of them sterilized from the paper's archives, it's unlikely that the BoingBoingers would be so cavalier about it.
This is kind of an odd request, but I need some old-style WordPerfect documents for a test I'm running, and we only have access to X4. While we can save as older version from X4, we have discovered from other software that save-as versions are often not the same as native.
There appears to be three main types of files, 4.2, 5.1, (possibly 5.2 as well) and 6 on, but I could use files from any version.
Does anyone have some old documents that are sufficiently impersonal (directions or something) that they don't mind them being tossed into a company directory for QA tests? My email is tavella@gmail.com.
Dave Klecha@128: I laid out this whole thing to my wife and she said, of Cox, "Oh, he sounds like Andrew Burt."
Yes! That was exactly my thought -- the sort of person who is so desperate for egoboo that they aggrandize their position in fairly minor organizations (no insult to the SFWA, but in the great scheme of things it is fairly minor.)
In Cox's case, it seems to come complete with extreme creepiness, though; Burt may have been self-important, but he wasn't *mean*. Certainly not a stalker.
If we've gotten around to recommending obscure groups, I'd like to put in a good word for the Rainmakers, a kick-ass group out of St. Louis who never made it as big as they should have.
The Rainmakers! Loved them back in the day. I think I must have discovered them via WHFS, even though I don't recall it playing them much.
Pity that I only had their albums in LP form, which means they are now mouldering away in a storage room in my parents' place.
Foo, that Greasemonkey script for Making Light sounds perfect, but molehill.org seems to be down.
I'm with Xopher; my reaction to Carrie's post was "what, you think it only went off the rails with the *third* book?" Native Tongue was awful, awful stuff. I probably should have known better with the setup where women *vote away* their own rights, but it just went on in craptasticness from there.
Joel Polowin@60
"When a city has grown so overlarge and crowded that it is in immediate danger of collapse... when food and clean water flow into the city at a rate just sufficient to feed every mouth, and every hand must work constantly to keep it that way... when all transportation is involved in moving vital supplies, and none is left over to move people out of the city should the need arise... then it is that Crazy Eddie leads the movers of garbage out on strike for better working conditions." -- Niven and Pournelle, The Mote in God's Eye
What's crazy about that? It's the correct time to execute a job action; at the moment of maximum leverage. If the Powers That Be have any flex space at all, they'll use it to screw the workers in question over.
I can see a rather big lack here; no one interviewed the Obama campaign. Because as someone pointed out at James Nicoll's blog, the Secret Service are supposed to listen to what the subject wants, within reason. And the SS has a very big prestige investment in not having someone assassinated under their guard, and very little in having full rallies; and while the Obama campaign is even more invested in not having Obama assassinated, they also have a big investment in having full rallies and not having thousands of potential voters standing outside, angry at not being let in.
So before I suspect dark conspiracy, I'd find out how the candidate wants things handled.
albatross@36:
Oh My God, it's a new genre: Presidential candidate slash fiction. Imagine how this might have changed history, if only invented sooner....
Not new. I promise you. There are entire livejournal communities, and I know fic goes back at least to the 2000 election -- probably before.
I agree that is the real news here -- Democrats are hot to vote, and Republicans are holding their nose, in both Iowa and NH.
It is tomorrow already in Dixville Notch; they have a traditional of opening their voting right after midnight on primary/election day.
One of the fascinating things about being a veteran of various discussion forums is that you can figure out who is a crank and who is a troll and who is for real even if you don't understand the subject. I was reading a blog discussion of Garrett Lisi's paper (the one that went around as "surfer dude invents TOE", when it was more like "Physicist who likes to surf posts interesting paper on unification".) And it was like reading the blog meta post; the math was so entirely beyond me that it was all but noise, but I could still see the form!
| Year | Number of comments posted |
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| 2009 | 1 |
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| 2005 | 37 |
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