As Above
Brain children. Those that overlap the Internet.
Dvorak
The improvised card game.
Blog Twinning Project
Democratic blog-pairing.
Two-Word Guestbook
Sign it.
More Besides
Kevan dot org.
Online cliques. Trespassers may be welcome.
Upsideclone
Stem-cell fiction.
Hate the Stupid
Suffering fools.
Mornington Crescent
In outer space.
Exquisite Corpses
Blind collaborative art.
In the bookpile. About to read, or currently reading, or meaning to take back to the library.
Smoke and Mirrors
Neil Gaiman
The Conquest of Happiness
Bertrand Russell
Dance Dance Dance
Haruki Murakami
Incidental music. Ohrwurmen or otherwise.
Here Come The Impostors
Devant
Other weblogs. The ones I make a point of returning to a lot.
About as Funny... AngryBlog The Blast Blue Ruin Capacious Holdall Crummy Digital Trickery Found Icarus Says If You Must Inside Joke Interconnected Life as it Happens LinkMachineGo Néablog Nocto Orbyn Peace Dividend Qwertyuiop RavenBlog Sore Eyes Venusberg The View from Here Why Should I Listen To You?

(Updated UK Blogs)

Supporting cast. That have Web pages. In alphabetical order.
Adam Alice Cerra Chrissy Dan Dave Dunx Eperdu John Lori Nik Paul Raven Riana Sandy Simes Tracy Tyrethali Yao Zarba
Weeks beginning. All having ended.
2002: 01.07 24.06 17.06 10.06 03.06 27.05 20.05 13.05 06.05 29.04 22.04 15.04 08.04 01.04 25.03 18.03 11.03 04.03 25.02 18.02 11.02 04.02 28.01 21.01 14.01 07.01

2001: 31.12 24.12 17.12 10.12 03.12 26.11 19.11 12.11 05.11 29.10 22.10 15.10 08.10 01.10 24.09 17.09 10.09 03.09 27.08 20.08 13.08 06.08 30.07 23.07 16.07 09.07 02.07 25.06 18.06 11.06 04.06 28.05 21.05 14.05 07.05 30.04 23.04 16.04 09.04 02.04 26.03 19.03 12.03 05.03 26.02 19.02 12.02 05.02 29.01 22.01 15.01 08.01 01.01

2000: 25.12 18.12 11.12 04.12 27.11 20.11

Archive search. You never know.

 Sunday  the Seventh of July, 2002
Passing child: "It's like a goat!" - I'm impressed.
"The audience roars in delight. Without a moment's hesitation, 5,000 people are playing a reasonably good game of Pong. Each move of the paddle is the average of several thousand players' intentions. The sensation is unnerving. The paddle usually does what you intend, but not always."
This account of a simulated hive mind has been hanging around at the back of my skull since I first read it a few years ago; pixelised image-creation, particularly. The Smaller Picture is a stab at building such things online, passers-by being asked to decide the colour of a random pixel of one of seven pictures.

This goat emerged overnight, with no intentions beyond general goatness. Differing ideas about which way it should face or how many legs should be visible were eventually resolved as one option became more obvious-looking than the other, and the tide shifted. A coherent image emerging from a thousand tiny independent inputs, with no single person or plan guiding it. It's basic democracy, but it becomes very alien when you give it a paintbrush.

Gimmickry: Jump to a Random Archive Link

 Saturday  the Sixth of July, 2002
Odd thing; some people are claiming that any given word is only three synonyms away from any other; root words, at least. Which seems surprising, but any network of heavily-connected nodes is bound to be fairly tangled and looped-together. And I'm not convinced that it makes any sense in terms of "retrieving related words from memory", with the amount of contextual gear-shifting required to think along a given path.

But it'd be an interesting challenge to play with the hypothesis as a degrees-of-connection brain exercise, or competitively in some appropriately-shaped HipBone Games. [via Matt]

 Friday  the Fifth of July, 2002
Junkbot; help a rubbish-recycling robot to do its job by reconstructing its Lego-built environment around it. Bridges and stairs and whatnot. Constructotainment.
It's one of those drizzly afternoons where I feel like snapping umbrella handles and pointing out that the human race has spent the past few billion years evolving an impermeable waterproof skin.
A herd of mathematical Lego sculptures, generated through computer algorithm and then built brick by painstaking brick in the physical world. Lego's such a splendidly quantum medium - this ugly one-legged Lego table was evolved from scratch in a computer simulation, before proving its phenotype in gaudy plastic. It's stereolithography for the rest of us.
It took great strength to resist walking straight past the bus-stop and onwards through four miles of rain to work, this morning. Such is the raw, dangerous power of a walkman full of Smiths.

 Wednesday  the Third of July, 2002
One for Sandy; Bloggus Caesari, the weblog of Julius Caesar. [via Haddock]

 Tuesday  the Second of July, 2002
"Well," confided the taller one. "Any day now, Great Cthulhu (currently impermanently deceased), who is our boss, will wake up in his undersea living-sort-of-quarters."

"And then," said the shorter one, "he will stretch and yawn and get dressed--"

"Probably go to the toilet, I wouldn't be at all surprised."

"Maybe read the papers."

"--And having done all that, he will come out of the ocean depths and consume the world utterly."

Neil Gaiman writes a Cthulhian Pete and Dud sketch. Most peculiar.

[Update: It's gone from Google's cache, now, but someone thought to take a copy. Bravo the Internet.]

Esso complain about usage of the Stop Esso logo, claiming, absurdly, that the replacement esses are obviously interpretable as the Schutzstaffel insignia. "We find it ironic that the richest corporation in the world can't recognise the dollar sign and confuses it with a Nazi symbol." comment Greenpeace.

Esso respond to the Stop Esso campaign with rather more fully-quoted coherence on their Web site, but it's all very evasively worded and angrily rebutted at Stop Esso. Immovable legally-advised corporate-speak versus irresistible left-wing molehill-flagging rhetoric, as ever, but the general outlines are fairly clear.

Moral: When founding an evil capitalist multinational, choose a name without any esses.

(C) Kevan Davis 2000-2
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