Anonymous Bandana
One of the problems for the fashion-conscious protester in 2011 is figuring out what message you want to send. A bandana sends one message. A V For Vendetta/Anonymous mask sends another message. What if you want to send both messages at once? A V mask wearing a bandana just looks stupid.
Etsy user GiantEye has you covered.
Fold this bandana in half to transform into the famous fawksy provocateur from the comic pages. It’s perfect for protecting yourself from sudden dust storms and outbreaks of authoritarianism. Keep your neck warm during those cold sit-ins. Use it as an impromptu rucksack to cart your gear from Zuccotti Park when the cleaners come. Cut eye holes to wear as a full face mask for added anonymity. Flag Fawkes. This is the hanky code for revolution.
(via jwz)
# Nov 3, 2011Poetry of Twitter Spam, Redux
A while ago, I wrote about the poetry of Twitter spam, where a particular spam-bot was generating an odd series of tweets that, strung together, looked like bad teenage poetry.
That was two years ago. Technology has advanced. Neven Mrgan points to @horse_ebooks as an example of how Twitter spam-bots are now producing profoundly entertaining non-sequiturs that could be some of the most entertaining stuff found on the internet. In fact, some of these are so perfectly crafted I’m having trouble believing that it isn’t actually a person pretending to be a spam-bot.
Some of my favourites from @Horse_ebooks:
“OBSESSED WITH GAMBLING”
“1 2 You can use the power of your mind to find a shiny, cool car hidden in a paper bag. Your incredible mental powers”
“The difficulty of seeing with very large instruments”
“It s a FACT - Most Doctors, Nutrition Experts , Celebrity Chefs and Best Selling Authors are DEAD”
I’m wondering what linking to a known spam account will do for what little Google-juice I have - whether Google is going to push me further down its search listings. But honestly, I’ve enjoyed these tweets so much, I don’t care. It’s totally worth it.
# Nov 3, 2011
Reader redesign: Terrible decision, or worst decision? »
An ex-PM of Google Reader explains why the recent redesign/refactor is such a bad decision.
I’m glad to see someone with a bit of authority complaining about this a reasonable way. For the most part, the only comments I’ve read about the changes have either been from people saying “Eww, who uses Google Reader like that?” or from crazy people calling for an “Occupy Google Reader” protest. I was starting to feel like I was the odd one out.
# Nov 3, 2011Financial crisis forces Berlusconi to delay release of latest love song CD - The Guardian »
Seriously, this is an actual fucking headline in The Guardian.
Someone should be ashamed about all this, but I’m not sure who.
# Nov 2, 2011Explosions : Moneymaking
Jerry Frankenhauser charts the correlation between explosions and profits in Michael Bay movies in his Formula for Complete and Utter BAYhem
# Nov 2, 2011
Cult of Done Manifesto »
# Nov 2, 2011
- There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
- Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
- There is no editing stage.
- Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.
- Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
- The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
- Once you’re done you can throw it away.
- Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.
- People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
- Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
- Destruction is a variant of done.
- If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.
- Done is the engine of more.
Just wearing a funny hat
I was trying to prove something to myself, too. It was like, "Am I genuinely eccentric? Or am I just wearing a funny hat?# Nov 1, 2011
The inside story of how Microsoft killed its Courier tablet - CNET »
This is a story I’ve been waiting to read for a long time. Note: this is the setup in a two-part story. The actual “why” comes tomorrow.
# Nov 1, 2011