The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by don delny:

heresiarch, 22

I've heard that the way Japanese meetings usually happen is anyone with an idea has to sound everyone else out privately before-hand, and make sure everyone is on board before they propose it to the group.

In my experience,this is a pretty good way to get things done in American nonprofits/hobby clubs/church commitees, too.

*waves*
Your slashfic reference for the day in the form of a webcomic. Safe for work, unless text isn't safe. Funnier if you watch food network.

The answer is always...

Lawrence Schimel, (and PNH)
My apologies, I put two and two together and got five. Looking back on it, my comment makes grammatical but not logical sense. :(

first time commenter's (#11) tinyurl link goes here:

http://www.teleread.org/2008/08/28/amazon-hiding-sales-ranks-of-naughty-books-e-book-standards-and-drm-angles/

Clifton Royston, 879,
thank you for the tips
KeithS,882,
Best to run a virus and malware scan or four just to be sure.
Fyi,
AVG is running right now, 2 and 1/2 hrs later I've got: "Trojan horse Generic_c.XHB"
in C:\My Documents\Desktop\new downloads\us.pdf"
Note that us.pdf is invisible in that folder, and that folder did not exist until I downloaded a new copy of firefox using google chrome.

Thank you for your help! And all, thank you for your patience tolerance of panicky questions about a mundane technical problem. So, a
lolcat haiku:

Halp!

I haz a problem
O hai I are h4xord
Making Light FTW

teh netz search is broke
ooo! chase falling sakura
whut? attention fail

doodz KeithS and Clifton
Royston, UR so helpful
make U cookie naow?

KeithS, 877,

ZOMG! It's totally fixed!
For no reason!!!

Ping from the command line works fine for google?
Yes.

If it's just an issue with a browser, it sounds like it's been hijacked by some toolbar or other.
It's going on with google chrome as well.

If it's any browser and command-line tools, you might have a bad hosts file (c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts in XP).
Pretty plain vanilla, one entry:
127.0.0.1 localhost
I tried commenting it out. Probably no effect. (see, ZOMG! above)

*waves*

Aaaaah! I need your help!*

I'm getting redirects to localhost whenever I try going to google or search.live.com (microsoft). Subdomains like groups.google work just fine. It's pretty tedious trying work around this to search for answers about just what happened.

Can anyone tell me:
1. what I've got
2. how to get rid of it****

[I think I can rule out local network problems, ping works fine, pinging google from the router works fine, etc.]

*can I cash in all my Wuffies for this one?**
**I'll post this in lolcat if that would help***
***or haiku?
****short of reformatting and reinstalling windows

Cat Meadors, 28,
free the dragées
*sporfle*

Cat, you just made my day. Nice little clicktrance too, as I pinged around from the wukipedia entry to assorted little blogs ranting about the horrors of inedible metallic-coated things in our food and, alternately, silver dragees are, like, the Kobe beef of sprinkles.. [Right above a google search result about the banning of genital waxing in NJ.] Paging Ezra Klein! Foodblogging alert!

Slightly more seriously, the redforkhippe blog looks like the real thing: a local blogger who can write with wit and frame things in terms of a story.

Thank you Cat Meadors! You have livened up my day!

A.J. , 16
It has been. But social norms can change faster when the realm of acceptable discourse broadens. It wouldn't surprise me if popular sentiment on these topics was changing a bit faster now than, say, 10 years ago.

I agree, and I think specifically, the election of Obama broke the ability of social conservatives to tie everything to the war on Terra.* So the noise machine is thrashing around trying to find a narrative to hang everything on. Meanwhile rational, normal, people find that the organized opposition to [decriminialization|medical marijuana|gay marraige|gays in the military] has pretty much collapsed. It's almost as though normal people were alienated from the previous administration, and were saving up the changes that they wanted to make.

I mean, really, the pro-gay marriage stuff in VT and NH seemed to move really fast.

*intentional. Refers to the location of the battlefield.

will shetterly, 16,
I think the preference for oligarchy over plutocracy is an aesthetic phenomena.

Oligarchy is a great word! You can emphasize the arrrr, and follow it up with a chk for a nice satisfying hard consonant ending. If it was shorter, it would make an phonemically perfect swear word. The pairing of oligarchy with the images of actual Russian robber barons with implicit KGB backing gives it a nice, everything-old-is-new-again-Neal Stephenson-William Gibson punch too.

Plutocracy, is weak in connotation and phonemes. Pluu sounds almost soothing, like part of a flower name, and just when the word gets up to speed with a nice tok and kra, it peters out into a weak, sibilant, dribble of air, seee. Not threatening at all, it sounds more like something you'd get tired of. As for connotation, really, how effective is a word that brings to mind a cartoon dog or a failed planet in most modern readers? (Yes, yes, god of the underworld and whatnot, but seriously, outside of Making Light, I doubt that's the first mental image for anyone under 40.)

Bad student writing, getting worse?

I think there's a case to be made that once it became necessary for everyone to get high school diplomas, the proportion of college-bound types who could write well would go down. Our (U.S.) educational system does a great job of educating the top 20% of students who would do just fine anyway, and does a mediocre-to-awful job with the rest. (Mind you, illiteracy is waaay down, as is/are high school dropout rates, so it's not all bad.)

Also, my writing skills deteriorate like hell as soon as I start posting in a conversation about other people's writing skills. So, sorry that this is so crap compared to what I usually do.

Michael Roberts, 486,
Oh dear Lord, I just looked at the aerial photography from the south. Lee, I really, really don't think I'm going to have to worry about storage space, ever again.

congratluations Michael! Wow! What a house! You are living my dream, dude!

sisuile, 355,

That's a really interesting set of experiences. I have to say I don't like how (most) SBO's are disadvantaged relative to larger, publicly traded corps.

So, your parents brokered the sale of heavy machinery and real estate, respectively? Do you know if they got to use the lower capital gains rate if they held the property for a year, or does that only work for intangibles?

sisuile, 308,

The standard reply here is that people who make 250k plus disproportionately benefit from what government does with that money.

We all benefit from government services, but those who have the most, benefit the most.

In what way? In the form of a civil society that has consumers to buy their products, consumers that are willing to do so because they have things like roads, medicine, (peace!). Likewise, they benefit from having a pool of employees who have safe places to live, safe food to eat, and reliable communication systems. Furthermore, they benefit from having open markets (due to treaties) , with moderate amounts of regulation (FDIC, etc).

Many, many, fewer of these people would have their wealth had someone not paid for them to have these advantages.

I mean no snarkiness by this. I learned this perspective from an elderly Republican who owned his own factory.

via John Gruber (Daring Fireball) I found tinyarro.ws

It's another url shortening service.
Link to making light:
http://➡.ws/刞

Link to last 1000 comments:
http://➡.ws/麒

Diatryma, 47,
I really dislike the thesis template...
I had not thought to use a Word template to do style guidelines. That sounds handy. What makes it obstacle-y?

Nancy Lebovitz, 160
About students not following the directions: As a somewhat spacey person who's worked on it, it's a surprising jump to realize that something you haven't been paying attention to is actually important.
Oh, that's interesting. I have that experience too, from time to time.

One of the things I'm trying to tease out is the distinction between attention failure (like you described), ranking failure ("which instruction is important?") and something...else.

albatross, 165;
aiii! I didn't mean to creep you out!
I totally agree that understanding the requirements is important. I think not understanding them leads to one of the failure modes! And I remember having learned one set of rules for writing a paper, only to re-learn another in school. Maddening! Even more so, discovering that some of the things that I was being asked to do weren't important enough to mark me down on!

But what I was thinking of when I wrote, was more about the learned, semi-conscious, habit-of-mind of pausing to read the directions and tick off each item. I have a hunch that nobody does that unless taught, and that maybe some people are particularly resistant to learning that skill.

OtterB, 182, and KeithS, 171,
thanks, you said what I was thinking and then some!

finally: KeithS said:
I don't think it's unreasonable to wonder what those students were thinking.
YES! THIS. We are all students of human behavior here, and we've all missed following directions before. What is going on inside our heads?

albatross, 165,

Er...oops.
I was thinking about the value of following directions as a matter of practicality, not morality. Umm. More on that in a few minutes.

Serge, 144
J Austin @ 142,
Mako is someone I'd have loved to meet. (Remember him as Evil Aku in Samurai Jack?

He also had a long running role as Uncle Iroh on Avatar the Last Airbender (animated series, not the upcoming live action movie with only mostly white people playing Asian characters.*) He totally rocked as Iroh. Speaking of the fandoms of the young, that series is worth checking out, as it moves quite steadily for three seasons from adventure-of-the week through impressive character development to awesome** sfx laden heroic finale.

I would have loved to meet him too. Dante Basco, who got to work alongside him in the recording booth, spoke of how much of a delight and honor it was to work with him. Just a really nice guy. I'm happy he got to play a character of some complexity for his final role.

*much fandom wank about this.
**with awesomesauce

Leah Miller, 148,
katster @23&56

So the fans are out there, and they're looking to go to cons, but worldcon isn't on the radar. I'm not entirely sure why that is

Uhm. *shuffles feet nervously* I didn't know worldcon existed until I read about it here. After I had been reading ML for at least a year and a half.

I'm 36.

It seemed to be this mysterious, expensive convention for old school science fiction fans to get together to vote for some SF award, that moved all the time like the Olympics. The award has something to do with those massive best-of SF anthologies I stopped reading in tenth grade.*

I go to Otakon (pop 26,000) and ACEN (pop 13,900 ) semi annually, and donate to Child's Play (a PAX affiliated charity) annually. I used to collect comics, now I read webcomics (Girl Genius, yay!). I love it when Cory posts about steampunk. I read Scalzi, Stross and James Nicoll daily. (But have never bought their books). I think plush Cthulu is funny, but I've never read Lovecraft. I'm learning Japanese because I want more stories, dammit. I played D&D in High School, Warcraft in College, Neverwinter nights later on, and now all I have time for is a quick game of Settlers of Catan.

*I have since learned more about what's what, who's who and all that, but...

Wireless robot vacuum cleaner by iRobot. Powered by a hamster ball.

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