Chaos Magnet

Quote of the day

"Some people are like Slinkies. They're really good for nothing; however, they still bring a smile to your face when you push them down a flight of stairs."

'Nuff said.

Demotivators

I used to have a great poster of a single lit match poking out about an inch from about a hundred other matches. It was a parody of those motivational posters, and it said something to the effect of "Burnout: attitudes are contagious. Mine can kill you." in my former days, I kept it on my wall. Now despair.com has put out a whole series of new Demotivators

Fun stuff.

Changing my life in seven days

Squidoo update

Well, Sarah and I have been fooling around with Squidoo, as you know, and we've got a few lenses up and running. Sarah's very proud of her Home Grown -- Frugal Gardening for Fun lens, and her beginner's guide to genealogy is fantastic. I didn't know there was that much to know about genealogy, much less that she knew it! She also put up an Easter crafts lens, and her Quick and easy cooking lens has a bunch of the really fast, really delicious recipes she makes around here.

Meanwhile, my Natalie Portman lens has been doing well, so I'm assuming V for Vendetta hasn't flopped, and my JSON lens also seems to have taken off.

I'll let you know how it goes...

What makes a good blog?

I've been doing a lot of thinking lately about blogging, and about how to do it better. I've come to the very obvious (in retrospect) conclusion that in order to have a good blog, you have two choices.

You either have to write interesting, deep commentary, or link to items that are interesting in their own right, no matter what you say about them.

So I wonder: which is better, and do you have to choose? Can a blog be effective with entries that are either one or the other, as long as each entry fits into one of these two categories?

Galaxy-chasing nebula caught on camera

Ever lay on the ground in the summer and watch the clouds go by? The temptation is always to make shapes out of them. Apparently that temptation doesn't go away when you grow up and become an astronomer. Check out this awesome photo of a nebula that looks like it's about to devour an entire galaxy.

That, or lice.

Court upholds Creative Commons licenses

A Consuming Experience reports that a Dutch court has upheld a CreativeCommons license in the case of the tabloid that republished photos of Adam Curry's children that had been posted on Flikr. The photos had been tagged with the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Sharealike license, and the judge ruled that this overrode the tabloid's argument that Flikr said "this photo is public".

A complete list of Batman sound effects

Like Adam Finney, I grew up on the old Batman television series, so this complete list of "KAPOW"s and "OOOOFF"s just amuses the heck out of me.

Briscoe County Jr. on DVD!

I am officially very excited to announce that Bruce Campbell's Briscoe County Jr. is coming to DVD on July 18, 2006. If you've never seen the show, it's a tongue-in-cheek western with science-fiction elements. It's also hilarious, and just plain fun.

Breaking down animated shorts

Here's an interesting concept. Animated shorts, like animated movies, are written and drawn by teams of people. And each individual typically has his or her own style, even though the idea is for it all to look consistent. TV Squad has a link to a great blog by a teenager who has broken down individual animated shorts by artist showing what each contributes to the sequence. Very cool.

It's April Fools' Day

Figures that the first have time to actually sit down and look for news is April Fools' Day, where most of the information I find is simply, well, untrue. Funny, but untrue.

One site publisher I know actually said that rant (although I say that did a nice way) about it, complaining that April fool's stories should not be posted in the form that normally contains real news, even if they are clearly labeled as such. He is right that these things tend to perpetuate for a long time, and they are read long after April 1, when people aren't thinking to check the date when they read something like China buys Google, or U.S. bill to adopt Shire Reckoning calendar. he also pointed out that April Fools' Day is not celebrated everywhere in the world, which could cause problems for some international readers. But still, I'd be getting a good laugh out of a lot of the stories I've been reading today. Here are some examples:

The Truth with Jokes (which I have to admit I particularly enjoy due to the contacts I've had with the Apache Software Foundation recently)
FORGET DRAGONS! TIME FOR PONIES!!!1! (about a new My Pretty Pony role-playing game)
SQL on Rails Launched
Microsoft Buys OpenOffice.org
New Plans From Lucasfilm ("Now that the cycle of films is done, we can finally broaden the Star Wars franchise into marketing niches we'd heretofore avoided, and adult entertainment is at the top of our list." and "George Lucas has announced that Lucasfilm and 20th Century Fox will offer free 'replacement DVDs' to anyone who mails in pre-Special Edition VHS and Laserdisc copies of Star Wars episodes IV, V, and VI by April 30th.")
Here There Be Dragons
Email Harvester Launches, Turns Down $750 Million Offer
Emo Programming: Beyond agile and pragmatic