The Null Device
2001/1/16
Another religious boycott over the issue of homosexuality -- though this time Reform Jewish leaders in the U.S. are urging parents to withdraw their kids from the Boy Scouts -- because the Boy Scout movement excludes gays. Reform Judaism, representing 40% of American Jews, has liberal views on sexuality and ordains openly gay men and women. (via Rebecca's Pocket)
Speaking of curmudgeonly commentators, Julie Burchill has a theory as to why some younger women are attracted to older men: it's not so much their money, but because they're sexually past their prime and uninterested.
Tanya and friends on why they hate indie kids. Quite apt, too.
All indie kids are unique. They are however looking for other indie kids who are unique in exactly the same way as them - cool, huh?
Infantilism is endemic to the indie kids. When was the last time you heard one of them use the word 'man' or 'woman'. Nope, it's always 'boys' and 'girls'. Some girls are 'cute'. Some boys are 'cute' too. The more incurable indie kids use the words 'grrrl' and - shudder - 'boi', for all the world as if they were living in a Disneyworld 1994 Experience ride or fell into a copy of Sassy once and never escaped.
When indie kids pair off with a cute grrrl or boi (all indie kids are in theory bisexual, of course. Just don't ask them to do anything about it.) they tend to treat each other like shit and then write it up on their web pages ("I am SUCH the geek"). This is because they are very sensitive, not as the casual observer might have guessed because they are emotional dwarves with no concept of human interaction outside a fanzine problem page. You become sensitive by listening to Belle And Sebastian a lot.
Oddly enough, if you took this article, replaced "indie" with "goth" and made a few minor changes, it would make just as much sense. Maybe indie kids and goths are both subtypes of a greater category of pretentious, crowd-following tossers?
It is now believed that the much-hyped earth-shattering mystery invention namd "Ginger" is nothing more than a new type of motorised scooter. It's not a free energy device, nor a personal nanoassembler, nor even a jetpack. Sort of proves the old adage about the amount of hype something gets being inversely proportional to its significance, doesn't it?
Welcome to the Digital Millennium: Edward Felten, the Princeton computer scientist who broke the recording industry's much-vaunted SDMI watermarking scheme, has decided to withhold details, on advice that publishing them would be a crime under the DMCA. So much for the free exchange of ideas.
A religious-right group in the UK, claiming to have one million members, want to ban sex-change surgery, instead mandating "holistic" (faith-based?) treatments for the "spiritual and mental health" of those who believe they're in the wrong body. (via Unknown News)
A 10-point post mortem on the dot-com boom, or why you no longer have a job:
2)Their businesses made no sense
4)They assumed more money was in the pipeline
8)Your company was a cult
10)There were too many of you
(thanks, Toby)
The diary of "Adrienne", a homeless junky in San Francisco, as transcribed from a found notebook by the finder. (via Found)
I started at my new job today. Well, I showed up, got my account, did some running around and logged in from the visitors' room, as my office does not yet exist. One annoyance: the place I work at has a strict no-Linux policy for networked workstations, so I may have to make do with a (shudder) Windows NT machine; and they don't even have a site-licensed X server for their NT workstations. (The stock answer to the question of accessing X from NT is "use VNC".)