miscellany of april fourth 2009

This is perhaps more a chronicle of things I found of note recently that I want to remember to look at further at another time, than things organized and notated in a fashion that will entertain or engage others. Hell, I'm my biggest reader anyway so far as I know, so... eh, alright then. Yeah. See right now I'm trying to watch Pulp Fiction, with the bf, which we found today in a dumpster along with 19 other misc. movies on videocassette. :D So I'm trying not to get to tied up in my net surfing... but I need to close some of these goldarned tabs so I can ... open more... without asploding firefox. Yup. And check on my SSW account.

( SSW= Secret Society Wars, an online game I've been playing at a possibly unhealthy level since around September of last year. In the game you're a "popsickle", someone from hereabouts in time who was frozen for some reason and then unthawed a ways along in the future... and you have to learn to adapt to the new society, fight and sex0r assorted human, alien, and animal peeps, and later on fellow popsickles. Then you fight a battle to control space and eventually one society wins. Oh yeah, you end up part of a society-- you can control which society you end up in by learning how to control what sort of power you gain/lose in the game... So there's both independent play dealing with npc's - non-player characters- and getting to know your society-mates a bit and engaging in teamwork. :) The game also has elements similar to social networking sites- you can have a blog, a photo gallery, start syndicates- rather like in-game player run clubs- you can start them regarding whatever you want to discuss/share with your fellow players, chat real-time, send bulletins to your friends(you also can maintain a friends' list as well as blacklist/ignore/"baleet" people who piss you off/are dicks), and use in-game email("smail"). Well, I didn't mean to go into such detail, but since I did... well yay! Maybe someone will read it and check it out and like it. And if you do happen to, my username there is pandamonieum , I try to hang in chat relatively often, and I'm currently an Oddfellow(One of the societies...). And I'll be happy to help answer questions or direct them you to places/players who can answer/explain better than I. Overall I think we're a pretty welcoming/friendly community so long as you don't start off acting like a douche/troll. And even then we'll try to give you a fair shake. :) )

Great, I kinda lost track of the movie... I've seen it before but, well, it was a long time ago, and this seems to be the type of film that takes rather close attention to keep up with what happens, being as there was just a time shift to revisit same events from a different perspective, which I tend to enjoy in movies, but... well since I've been typing for the last 20 minutes or so I'm now a tad lost. Oh well, I'll just watch it again later. :P

Um, so what I intended to do before that diversion was just throw some links up in here for me to remember to delve further into later... like, when not watching a film. This is a great movie and quite entertaining, but I think I'll have to watch once or possibly twice more to keep track of what's happenin'. Kinda like "Sin City"- It's great, but took me a couple times through to keep up with. And I still wanna watch it again. :) It's nice when a movie is like that though in a way, even if it can be confusing, b/c you can watch it a few times and still notice stuff you didn't notice before or realize something you missed on previous viewings. Dang I wanna watch that one "old" French film again that I watched back when I took film studies in college... I think it was called "Breathless" and the director is famous and such but I fail on his name right now. I'll google it eventually and then I'll be all, "Oh yeah, I knew that" when I find it. Heh. I'm just gonna settle for being lazy and looking "dumb" for now though. At least I didn't say it was directed by Jean Luc Picard. :P



Wikipedia article on the song "Cum on Feel the Noize"- One of the other RFX dj's mentioned in SSW chat the other night that that song wasn't originally by Quiet Riot but actually by Slade, and furnished the aforementioned link. I forget why I want to save it, probably to remind me to look up the original and assorted covers mentioned in it as well.

eRepublik - Another online game, I haven't signed up yet b/c I'm waiting for the friend who told me about it to play long enough to get some kind of in-game bonus for referring me, so... I can't tell you anything about it now, and I'm too lazy to go back to read the description to say more, you can follow the link if you're curious. :P

a blog post on "art and medicine" from a blog called "Little Hokum Rag"- it's in my blogroll down below as well, but I wanted to remember this specific post b/c it has pics from and links to some neat stuff from some science museum... I'll throw in more info and grab a pic to post later...


This bunch of links arose from looking up info on the song "Cult of Personality" by Living Colour, I actually ended up reading more about the meaning/meanings behind the term "Cult of Personality" than the song itself. What led me on this search was hearing the song used for a video montage/promotional video on WWE for Stone Cold Steve Austin regarding him apparently being inducted in the WWE Hall of Fame. I don't really follow WWE these days, my bf had it on; anyway... it just seemed strange to me and kind of a misappropiation of the song or misconstruance of the song's meaning. I still haven't fully informed/educated this opinion but anyway...

I forgot to leave cult of personality up for myself to link to or whatever, but you can certainly google it yourself if it piques your interest.

So stuff that interested me enough to save for later that popped up in relation to the above and/or led to eachother...
wikipedia entry on the term "cult"

wikipedia entry on the "National Fascist Party"

wikipedia entry on the "Order of the Solar Temple"

Yeah, so those sprung from originally looking up "cult of personality" and going on to open/read some other things that piqued my interest... wikipedia/the internet is good for that sort of thing. :)



I think I'm going to cut down on the random blabbery with the links b/c I meant to do this... quickly... for the purpose of personal reminder like stated earlier and instead I'm ... fucking babbling. :P S

google search for info about the band "Amesoeurs"

mindfreedom.org , a website advocating for mental health freedom...

website for artist Audrew Kawasaki

artmagick.com -haven't looked around here at all yet, but they claim to be a source of "visual intoxication".

http://books.google.com/books?id=MI8ym5Idda8C&pg=PA62&lpg=PA62&dq=disinfecting+alley+scores&source=bl&ots=MA7Bw4JMR7&sig=QUOrTC4c97kajosFttsBoA5b_vM&hl=en&ei=fvjWSZL7HZHyMuuhkYgP&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3#PPA56,M1 <-*this wasn't working as a link and I don't have time to mess around with it now so um... I removed the link tags and however it shows up is however it shows up for now...* -googlebooks preview sections for a book called "How the Other Half Lives", which they refer to as an "illustrated tour of New York's slums".

"19th Century British Pamphlets Project"- Haven't poked around this at all yet...


Aside- the guy on the "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" episode on at the moment is quite interesting- apparently he's wearing one sock inside out for luck because "his mom always told him it would keep the witches away", at least, that's what I think he said. I was only lending it maybe 1/4 or so of an ear at that moment. :) I might have to google that later... (Pulp Fiction ended... we'll watch it again in a few days probably, bf followed less well than I, I think, despite paying better attention, but he's also not seen it at all before)... I like "...Millionaire...", I guess in part b/c the escalation from "easy" to "difficult" can be fun and entertaining, b/c what's her name is really nice to people, and b/c the contestants are often interesting and they include lots of little personal tidbits plus they(er, contenstants) sometimes offer interesting personal anecdotes or say entertaining things while trying to answer the questions. :) Maybe it's just a side-effect of being nervous about interacting with people myself, and thus avoiding doing that, yet finding them interesting. So I'm watching interaction on my tube instead and I think maybe the interaction on "...Millionaire..." seems a bit more natural than, say, highly edited reality shows placing people in extremely contrived situations... er, something like that. Damn, I'm babbling again. It's almost 4 am and I still haven't saved and closed all my open tabs to play SSW as intended. o.o See, you might think it would make sense for me to just bookmark them, but I have tons of bookmarks that I always forget to check up on later and end up merging into... well a huge amorphous helter-skelter pile 'o' disorganized links. This seems more useful somehow. :/ More time consuming though. o.o


free patents online dot com- it looked possibly interesting...


The next few links are things that came up while I was looking for information on disinfecting things in general and in particular tips/info on avoiding picking up dumpster/alley scores infested with any kind of bug/pest... quick/easy ways to tell if something you find and want might harbor an unwanted pest spec. cockroaches, or perhaps bedbugs, and simply quick/easy/cheap ways to disinfect stuff before dragging it inside.... I haven't found many tips specific to identifying lousy/buggy computers/furniture/etc when "dumpster diving" yet, but I did find a lot of interesting stuff regarding dumpster diving in general. I'll prob do a post with more detailed info and such ... eventually. :P but for now here's a mish-mash of the links I came up with bearing some relevence to the aforementioned topics.

wikipedia entry on disinfectant

a post/article from a site called "ecosalon" on green kitchen disinfecting

an essay by some interesting sounding writer(Lars Eighner) I hadn't previously heard of about his experiences with dumpster diving

wikiHow "How-To" article on dumpster diving

an article on dumpster diving at a site called "the living web" that I haven't read yet

an engaging personal website about dumpster diving and possibly other things that I haven't poked around much at all yet

another as yet unread dumpster diving article, from greenbiz.com

an article at forbes.com by Cory Doctorow about a fellow who's been "dumpster diving" as something of a "job/career" for 15 years or so and managed to turn a profit... pretty cool :)

wikipedia entry on "freeganism"

Trashwiki- a whole wiki dedicated to dumpster diving and such- Rather new site and a cursory poke around suggests to me people should get into it and help create more content... such is how wikis work :) Def. a cool idea.

wikipedia entry for "Really Really Free Market"- as I understand it this regards a movement to have events - "Really Really Free Markets"- where people freely give away/exchange there unwanted stuff for other peoples' unwanted stuff that, uh, they want. :D Sounds rad to me.

google search results for "bedbugs"

I found the wikipedia article on dumpster diving surprisingly well written or fairly written or whatever (ie not "dumpsterdiving is something filthy poor people do... blah blah something something unpleasant and inaccurate and mean) and informative... I just accidently closed it so I'll hafta look it up again later...


New topic- it seems I have a lot of second-hand pants, alley/dumpster scored, given to me, thrift scored, whatever, that have constantly falling zipper syndrome. So I
googled zipper fixing. I haven't gone through the results yet but it yielded quite an impressive amount of links and almost certainly more than one containing solutions to my problem. Yay internet!

And once again viva la internets - our alley scored vcr doesn't always cooperate(it mangled pulp fiction a little after we paused and restarted it, but fortunately it still worked) so I googled fixing vcrs that eat tapes and got a plethora of useful appearing results to sift through...tomorrow. Though my bf still just wants to get a new one when we have cash. He also just complained about how the people that threw out the videos we scored today didn't rewind one. :D Hey, it is annoying...

And that's it for now. The almost entire contents(minus a few more personal whatnots and a couple blogs that are in my blogroll already- down at the very bottom of this blog) vomited out for your perusal and my later exploration, eventually.

As a final note, at least for the moment, think before you throw stuff away people! Just today we grabbed the aforementioned movies, one relatively recent and together computer, 7(really!) older computers the bf is gonna check out and prob just take useful parts from, 2 clean and pretty nice duffel bags, and a handful of clean t-shirts and rugs. Oh, and an apparently broken(?) batteryless video8 camcorder. I'll be googling that guy pretty soon to find out more about it(like a manual) and how to make it work if it seems possible. That'd be frickin' sweet. And if anyone has some tips, or knows a good place to find some, regarding scoping found electronics such as computers,vcrs,etc for possible bugs(like, roaches, not electronic ones) quickly and effectively before dragging them upstairs lemme know. Also regarding quickly and effectively disinfecting/delousing found fabric type stuff- clothes,rugs,furniture. We have cats as well as us people and the overall apt to worry about....

Man I sure get off topic fast-- Even when we happen to benefit by finding cool stuff, it really bums me out to see so much useful stuff in the garbage when there are people around who may really need or simply have use for/would appreciate the items. Think folks... there's gotta be some good way to give away your stuff instead of throwing it in the dumpster. Call your friends, post on a local website/email list(craigslist has a free stuff section, also there's an email list called "freecycle" which has lists in many different areas, and there are probably other resources in your community you can find by searching the net or asking around), look into local charities that will take the stuff, or even just give it to goodwill(I'm wobbly on goodwill, but I really need to educate myself more before taking a real stance- as to how much good they do vs. their top employees/managers/whatevers' paychecks and such)... anyway I'd say find an organization that will give the stuff to people who can use it for free or give it away yourself before giving it to a place that'll sell it...

More babble, point: THINK BEFORE YOU TRASH STUFF :) Thanks.
If anyone enjoyed my ramble and misc. linkage, leave a comment. Leave comments about anything you like or don't or whatever you wish... If someone reads it and tells me what they dig, I can try and do more of it and perhaps... uh... more people will dig it or something. :D

Bloody hell... I gotta go play my game. My trades are prob topped out and my facilities all dry of the resources they need to run... o.o