The Null Device
2000/4/27
Something amusing: you might be a goth if...
You've willingly undergone cosmetic dental surgery
Your boyfriend complains that his ribs just don't stick out the way they used to
You are happy when no one has ever heard of your favorite band
(Via rebeccablood.net, of course...)
Salon gets spammed, replies to some spam, finding out that getting in touch with the spammers is harder than one would think:
"With an unlimited dial-up account, they can send a few million messages for $20. If they are selling a widget or Viagra, the odds are that they will never deliver anything anyway -- all they want is a credit card or a check... If they send out a million messages and only get one response, they've still made their money back plus a bit of profit ... and if you look at a million people, you'll always find one bone-dumb idiot to send off a credit card number."
New frontiers in video-game viciousness: Sissyfight 2000, a game in which players play vicious schoolgirls: (Salon)
You go to the Web site and create a player. You choose a name, facial expression, skin tone, hairstyle and hair color. The girls then gather on playgrounds in groups of three to six. The object is to fight your opponents until two of you remain. You can chat back and forth, egging one another on and forming alliances. You can beat up on each other by grabbing, scratching, teasing or tattling on your opponents. Or you can cower. Suffice it to say that strategy is required.
Do patterns in the babbling of infants hold hints to the origins of language? A professor at the University of Texas thinks so; others say it's nonsense. (via rebeccablood.com)
Finally, the investigators found that the patterns of the babies' sounds were similar to those in words that other researchers have suggested might have been "ancestor" words. These are words that often mean similar things in different languages, such as "mano," for man or "mena," for think. Since they are common across languages, they may have been the earliest words spoken, historical linguists suggest.
Stuff on MP3.com: If you like Dead Can Dance, Lisa Gerrard, Love Spirals Downwards or black tape for a blue girl, you may want to give Sara Ayers a listen.