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Found this awesomely dorky time-waster through Cosmic Buddha and here is what it’s got to say about Spam Karma:

This new pizzle is destined ta become tha permanent news repository fo’ all th’n Spam Karma
[…]
Spizzay Karma in tha dogg pound.
[…]
Spam Karma cuz this is how we do it.
[…]
Spizzam Karma . Ya fuck with us, we gots to fuck you up.
[…]
You can leave a response, or trackback fizzy yo own site fo gettin yo pimp on.
[…]
S-P-to-tha-izzam Karma has gizzle nuts . Relax, cus I’m bout to take my respect!
Chosen excerpts from search results

Now I ask all the spammer beeatch out there, you sure you wanna fuck with my homies?

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Now… Since you are reading this, and probably other blogs too, I think we can safely infer that you belong to that category of people who get their secret kick out of hearing how miserable other people’s lives are.

Don’t pull that innocent face: you know who you are.

And I don’t blame you.

I’m with you on that one: sure, fuzzy pictures of playful kittens might bring some warmth to even the most hardened seaman‘s heart… But only the news that some stranger at the other end of the world is having a really shitty day can bring true, lasting, peace of mind. Why do you think I have my PubSub keyword watchlist set to include “I cut because my life sucks” and “suicidal thoughts”: you never know when somebody’s unhappiness is gonna come handy to reinforce your own precarious sense of happiness…

With that knowledge, allow me to humbly feed your shadenfreude with this little story of tragi-comical woes in the land of technology…

We are talking movie material here.

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A while back, Jeremy, at Antipixel, commented on the deceitfully symmetrical appearance of the human body after stumbling upon the frightening realization that he was a freak of nature whose eyes and ears were both uneven.

His findings on feet sizes are perfectly accurate too: as any shoe store clerk will gladly confirm, it is no secret that practically everyone has got one foot a tad bigger than the other. It took me many years to finally remember how crucial it is that I try both shoes before buying, no matter how great the right side fits. My left foot’s big toe, permanently traumatized by years of dancing in undersized sneakers, is a sore reminder of the dangers of impulsive shopping.

Jeremy is too much of a gentleman to allude to another famous occurrence of body asymmetry. One that only members of the feminine gent usually worry about (although they certainly shouldn’t: I think it’s awfully cute).

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Among the many horrific experiments conducted by the nazis on their prisoners during WWII, a whole set of them focused on hypothermia: hapless Russian POW were put into icy water baths until they collapsed, then attempts to reanimate them using more or less scientific means were made.

Unlike most of their other pseudo-scientific experiments, this one actually had some kind of vaguely reachable goal: improve the life expectancy of the average Luftwaffe pilot forced into a sudden scuba-diving trip in the English Channel. Quite a problem at the time, especially among German tourists returning home from a leisure flight over London.

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Picture montreal_street.jpg
The Japanese language has no future.

Literally.

It has got a present tense, a past tense, many inflections for each, but absolutely nothing to accentuate a verb in a way that shows it is taking place in the future.

This is not as inconvenient as one might think at first: present tense is used instead, and, when the lack of context calls for it, precisions such as “tomorrow”, “later”, “after” clear up ambiguities.

Sometimes, though, it gives strange results.

in Japanese, “I will miss you” becomes “I miss you”.

In fact, because the closest equivalent in Japanese is 寂しい (samishii: lonely, desolate), instead of saying “I will miss you” or even “I will be lonely”, you say “I am lonely”…

In other news, arguing all day long while walking aimlessly in a city taken over by muddy snow and icy wind chills is about as fun as it sounds.

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In BoingBoing tonight: “Cubase plugin makes music sound like it’s played by cellphone”

60 years after everybody else, Nokia (and Xeni Jardin) discover the breakthrough concept of… Vocoder…

Congratulations!

What’s next? some crazy device to make your music sound like it’s being played in a concert hall?

And do not come telling me this is news because it is being brought to the public at large: for chrissake, it is a Cubase plugin.

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Few people know that the natural color of the Japanese tatami is, in fact, green.

It is only with wear and sunlight that it becomes its trademark straw-yellow color.

All right, everybody knows that. Especially around here, where Eriko gave me her usual demeaning laugh when, upon my discovery that every patch of tatami that had remained covered by furniture so far, was much greener than the rest, I suggested mould.

Crazy stuff, I know…

Oh, and the free-falling posting rate? What can I say, critical sense is a bitch.

Seriously: once you start actually wondering twice whether what you are about to type is worth the time, or if you shouldn’t instead run to the local combini to see if they got any new seasonal flavored beer… that’s the end of it all.

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I used to read MeFi every once in a while, the same way as I used to read Slashdot a long time ago…

This particular thread is a perfect illustration of why I stopped reading both. In one or the other, you could sum up every single thread thusly:

  1. Random guy posts unsupported statement, presenting it as news accompanied by dubious piece of media and trolling comment, then leaves never to be heard again on the thread.
  2. Dozens of people pick up the thing and take it at complete face value, post immediate emotional replies without ever questioning the information itself.
  3. A few hundred more share pathetically uninformed, yet strongly assertive, insights on a topic they had obviously never heard of until that day.
  4. Three people post interesting, thoughtful, carefully researched post explaining why the whole thread makes absolutely no sense and why most of the previous posters ought to read the news once in their life.
  5. Sensible posters get royally ignored, quickly give up in face of the ridiculously steep road that needs to be walked back to sanity.
  6. More ignorant posts pour in.
  7. Thread invariably degenerates into canonical Holy War for the remaining 3000 comments (most of which are only monosyllabic rebuttal to the previous ones, by then).

Mmmn, sounds familiar?

And yea, I know I am quite late on that train of world news, but it’s not like they’ve stopped killing each other in the meantime…

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