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Friday |
the Twenty-Ninth of November, 2002 |
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Thursday |
the Twenty-Eighth |
"Mr. Iwanyk, 32 years old, first suspected that his TiVo
thought he was gay, since it inexplicably kept recording programs with
gay themes. A film studio executive in Los Angeles and the
self-described 'straightest guy on earth,' he tried to tame TiVo's gay
fixation by recording war movies and other 'guy
stuff.'"
An odd article on Tivo and Amazon user profiling, of shadowy technology
extrapolating your tastes and assuming terrible, terrible things about you.
All very anthropomorphic and mediaeval, the quotes of people complaining
about it; a customer is "aghast" when Amazon picks up on her taste for
stupid teen movies, and when her Tivo assumes from her viewing habits that
she is a tiny child. Caliban's rage at the CCTV camera.
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Wednesday |
the Twenty-Seventh |
Why hasn't pages from Ceefax
become pages from BBCi, yet?
I didn't even realise they still ran it, really, I just left a tape recording after something
else the other night, and got a load of piercing-tone Mode 7 eighties-flashback
at the end of the tape. It'll all be dead and forgotten when digital TV
conquers the world, I suppose.
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| For the people who've been hassling me about it; alright, look, there,
an Amazon
wishlist, a list of stuff I've been meaning
to buy but haven't, yet. The rest of you can consider it a list of
things I probably won't be able to feign surprise for during the
unwrapping of.
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Tuesday |
the Twenty-Sixth |
"The Disputed Territories of Morningtonia is a tiny,
environmentally stunning nation, notable for its strong anti-business
politics. Its hard-nosed, cynical population of 5 million are ruled with
an iron fist by the dictatorship government, which ensures that no-one
outside the party gets too rich. In their personal lives, however,
citizens are relatively unoppressed; it remains to be seen whether this
is because the government genuinely cares about its people, or if it
hasn't gotten around to stamping out civil rights yet."
Nation States; a nicely pointless game of world
leadership, falling somewhere between a political personality test and
an ambling statecraft Nomic, with daily issues for your government to
resolve. Largely frivolous and exaggerated in its brushstrokes, but still
fairly thought-provoking.
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