Reason number 572 why I'm going to die alone.

xkcd - Priorities

Casper and Butterscotch, you are so fat and fuzzy! [kiss kiss kiss]... ... DAMN!

You're a Kitty!

We actually reached the future about 3 years ago.

And yet, no flying cars, NO FLYING CARS!

Startling - xkcd - By Randall Munroe

As always, so apropos of my life...

xkcd - Compiling

Electromagnetic Spectrum

Having spent a lot of time in support channels on IRC, I can really, really sympathize with this one.

RTFM, done right on XKCD

Decius wrote:
I like this... Not quite sure where MemeStreams is though.

Assuming the map wraps around at the edges like it should, I'd say we're a little dot on the far right hand side almost touching the edge, due East of del.icio.us, in the Sea Of Memes. The Blogipeligo lies to the southeast, offering fertile seas for fishing and trawling. The forgotten, undersea lands of Usenet, offered back to us by the powerful wizard Google, as well as proximity to the the IRC Isles and the sprawling confederacy of Wikipedia provide resources and expertise, though the confusing winds and maze-like interconnected channels can often result in many days lost at sea, drifting from isle to isle in search of an exit.

Some of us (cough*acidus*cough) have been known to conduct raids into the Straits of Web 2.0 while others have long since been lost, roaming the northern islands of WoW and EQ after becoming disoriented in the frigid and chartless wastes of the NOOB Sea.

:)

RE: xkcd - Map of online communities

I’ve often heard that Washington’s ‘Farewell Address’ — the speech he sent out (in written form) to a bunch of papers at the end of his second term — is important. Apparently he lays down a lot of good ideas for America. But the common style of writing and vocabulary has changed since then. Maybe people have gotten dumber, too. Either way, the result is that it’s kind of a pain to read sometimes. Particularly tricky are the odd compound sentence structures, where it’s hard to keep track of what the subject is.

Having never read the whole thing, I thought it would be interesting to go through and try to transcribe it into some sort of casual modern speech. I wouldn’t try to recreate the prose and would probably miss out on subtleties and shades of meaning (and no doubt occasionally miss the point completely), but at least I’d get the idea of what he was talking about.

This is great! I'm only about a third into it, and I've already compelled to meme this. Here are some snips:

Government’s important, and it’s not always easy to stay together. You’ve figured this out, and that’s why you ditched the last idea and came up with this Constitution. We went over it all carefully, big and small, and it’s definitely something we can trust (we can even amend it if necessary!). Give it some credit, and if you disagree, change it — don’t just disobey. Otherwise it just screws things up.

Getting in the way of the law for the sake of power plays similarly screws things up. Playing that game creates groups just looking out for themselves, turning crazy splinter groups into a powerful force. Let this get too bad and you’ll probably have the country tossed back and forth wildly as the various parties with their pet issues fight for power, rather than nice, consensual, unified government.

Parties are probably gonna look like they’re helping with one popular issue or another, so you’re gonna want support them, but I bet the guys in charge of them will just turn out to be power-hungry assholes who want to run everything.

...

I just said that parties are no good, particularly regional ones. But lemme go a step further and say ALL parties are a bad idea.

Unfortunately, it’s pretty much human nature to gather into little factions like this. It’s worst in the freeest countries, and they suffer because of it.

Control goes back and forth between one party and another, and they just get more and more pissed, and we’ve seen that get really bad in the past. But it also leads to terrible, controlling government and general suckage. This gets the people more angry, they get behind one party leader or another, and that guy just takes that support and does whatever he wants, screwing up the country.

...

I like you all. We’re friends. I’m not gonna hope that you’ll actually remember all this for long, but I can hope that every now and then people will look back on what I said and use it to calm down a crazy political party, remind us not to get tied up with other countries, or to try to expose phoney patriots. That’s the only payment I need — the hope that in return for my looking after you, you’ll look after yourselves.

xkcd » Blog Archive » Washington’s Farewell Address Translated into Everyday Speech

Do you remember the classic xkcd diagram about Wikipedia?

The code is uglier than Fergie on a rainy day, but it works and I find the results to be pretty fascinating.

Mapping the distraction that is Wikipedia

Contrast this:

With this:

Authorities have fired an official in central China after city inspectors beat to death a man who filmed their confrontation with villagers, China's Xinhua news agency reports.

"Wei is the first 'citizen journalist' to die in China because of what he was trying to film," the group said in a statement.

"He was beaten to death for doing something which is becoming more and more common and which was a way to expose law-enforcement officers who keep on overstepping their limits."

China blogger beaten to death - CNN.com