According to the (possibly apocryphal) tale, Lydians survived a famine by alternating days of playing dice games with days of feasting, to preserve resources. This allowed them to live for 18 years through a resource shortage, before playing one final game of chance to decide the civilization’s terms of exodus.

Herotodus’s chronicle could not be a more relevant historical anecdote today. There are literally millions of teenagers and 20-somethings who are either un or underemployed, who use gaming as a money-saving means of entertainment, not to mention an effective mental respite from their increasingly intolerable real lives.

While online communities such as World of Warcraft or Second Life were originally conceived of as modes entertainment, they also serve the role of facilitating survival. When food is sparse and work is elusive, there are fewer more efficient (and enjoyable) ways of spending a day than gaming while remotely connecting to a network of peers often in similar situations. And all of this is available for a meager monthly subscription fee that offers unlimited access to these worlds.

While McGongall’s lecture attempts to sell an optimistic vision of this trend, somehow hoping for a future in which we harness gamers’ collective intelligence to solve world problems, the near future seems a more likely forum for using gaming as economic hibernation.

Of course this theme isn’t new to the cyberpunk genre. While The Matrix contains the most obvious reference to gamers in hibernation, James Cameron’s Strange Days also included virtual reality as a sanctuary from a distopian future. Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash told tales of impoverished pizza delivery boys living in glorified storage pods with little more than a ‘metaverse’ jack on the wall for entertainment.

This is becoming present day reality at a very alarming rate. While it’s very noble for the rosy McGongall to seek out a way for humanity to utilize these lives cast away to the Internets, perhaps we should begin to wonder how we’ve allowed our society to deteriorate to the point that a mass hibernation is a rational reaction to it.

Originally posted on Technorati.

It seems inevitable that our species’ faculties of curiosity and a sense of manifest destiny will lead us to settle off of Earth eventually. However, the longer we wait to plant the seed of humanity elsewhere, the longer we will have all of our eggs in one basket. And that basket is an increasingly dangerous one to linger in…

The Earth is becoming a less desirable place to live by the generation. Overpopulation, environmental degradation, and resource scarcity will plague our species in the next century. While some potential technological solutions are on the horizon, we have continually seemed to overplay our hand in expecting new technologies to erase centuries of poor planning and lack of foresight.

Though it will be sacrilege to the ears of environmentalists, we may have to treat the Earth as our “practice” habitat. In the novels of Robert Heinlein, future Earth is always described as a highly undesirable place to live — a yellowed, diseased planet hosting 20 billion humans who lacked the courage to leave their planetary womb. This is set in contrast with the galactic frontier, a wonderland of new, pristine worlds to settle.

Of course, I would rather that Earth didn’t become a giant sludge ball that we are forced to abandon like Homer Simpson’s delicious hoagie left to decay behind the sofa. Optimally we would find a way to grow as a species without the massive, unending, unsustainable, growth of consumption. But that seems highly unlikely to happen without some calamity forcing our habits to change.

Perhaps it would simply be better to start over elsewhere.

In case you’re not as into sports as we here at The Mep Report are, you might have missed this little gem from last night: the worst call in the history of professional baseball.  Not that we ever engage in hyperbole anyway, but just in case you’re tempted to think that’s what I’m engaging in here, I give you umpire Jim Joyce and one hard luck pitcher called Armando Galarraga.

You see, Galarraga was one out from a perfect game–a game in which no man reaches base by any means whatsoever.  No walks, errors, earthquakes allowed: no one can reach base or the perfect game is gone.  This is why it’s only happened twenty times in the hundred plus year history of baseball (though, bizarrely, two of those times have happened this season already).  But Galarraga wasn’t just pitching a perfect game; he was pitching one of the greatest games in the history of baseball.  Up to the final out he had thrown a total of 87 pitches, and the game had lasted an hour and 43 minutes total.  These are staggering, holy @^&*! type of statistics.  And then, as Jason Donald strode to the plate, this happened.

Yep.  Inexplicably, unbelievably, staggeringly, a twenty year umpiring veteran staring right at the call blew it and ruled the runner safe when he was clearly out, thereby eliminating the possibility of a perfect game.  In fairness to Joyce (who is widely considered to be one of the best umpires in baseball), he practically committed hara-kiri during the post-game press conference, calling himself an idiot in, er, far more colorful terms.  He just screwed the call up.  Today there’s a huge outcry for commissioner Bud Selig to overturn the call, but most experts doubt that’s going to happen; it would open a huge can of worms going forward, and it’s doubtful that Selig wants that on his watch.  But the most important thing that should come out of this situation is painfully simple, so simple it can be summarized in two words:

Instant replay.

Some of you who don’t follow baseball might be perplexed by this statement.  “They don’t have that already?” you might be tempted to say, if you’re, you know, rational, logical, sensible, and not married to an ancient system of unwritten rules and ridiculously antiquated concepts that forbid the most basic of technologies from being applied to a multimillion dollar sport.  Football, hockey, basketball–hell, even tennis–use instant replay.  Why?  Because there’s absolutely no reason not to.  Why, when you have the opportunity to get a call right, would you turn your back on that opportunity?  Apparently because we’re afraid of what big bad technology would do to the “integrity” of the sport.  It’s much better to let bad calls destroy the integrity of the game, because hey, at least it’s human beings doing that!

Under enormous pressure, baseball finally allowed instant replay to be used on home run calls a couple of years ago.  But the fact that we’re still sitting around wondering if it’s better to let history and money ride on human error or video precision is testament to how retrograde baseball is in every sense of the word.  If you’re so worried about the time delay, do this: one instant replay challenge per game for each team.  That’s it.  Replay has immeasurably improved every other sport, and we don’t have to sit around wondering what if on the day after.

Obviously this isn’t a big deal in the scheme of life–environmental problems, social justice, economic issues are much more important than a silly baseball game.  But within the context of sports, this couldn’t be a worse mistake.  For his part, Galarraga was incredibly gracious: “He’s just human,” the pitcher said.  Indeed he is, Armando.   And that’s exactly why adding a tool to the arsenal of these humans calling the game–a tool which humans, after all, invented in the first place–is so critically necessary.  Do it today.

The issue of Earth’s movement along its orbit is something flux capacitor- obsessed sci-fi authors and screenwriters rarely acknowledge. Perhaps in some future sci-fi story, the author will restrict time travel to events that happened on the same calendar day as the departure, to prevent the Earth movement problem.

For more on the geographical aspects of time, see Claytonian Time.

Image Source

So, uh, I know the Internet makes it hard to filter ads for potential poor taste. But this pairing I just ran across (above) was kind of ridiculous…

It’s a little like advertising “Jaws” on an article about a tragic shark attack. Or some movie about a bombing on a news report of a terrorist attack.

In some ways, it may even be worse, because “Nightmare on Elm Street” is gratuitous – it entertains us with the very idea of gore. At least that’s the theory. While I like thrillers and suspense, I don’t really understand the appeal of gory slashers, especially those helmed by monochromatic evil madmen.

The thing is, the nature of Internet advertising makes these advertising failures even more likely, because it’s (A) automatic and (B) based on keywords. What kinds of keywords are the “Nightmare” promoters likely to put in their ad? Knife, murder, attack… And what’s this article about?

Maybe we should just stop being entertained by gratuitous violence in the first place.

Click here to see what ad you get with this grisly story!

This wiry broad (band) was created by digi-artist Kasey Mcmahon. If she were mine, I would call her Anne of Green Cables.

Kasey is more well known in Mep land for having given birth to the Compubeaver.

Kasey appears in this BBtv Compubeaver Ep for a split second before it goes all dramatic prairie dog.

Clea Can’t Get No Satisfaction; Greg’s Life in Three Dimensions; Jackie Chan and the Masochistic Dragon Swoon; Mep Report Rare Ostrich Steak Attack GO!!!!!; The World According to EPCOT; We’re Much More Trekkie Than You; and Sometimes Horrible Is In The Middle of Good.

Download Mep Report #119

So, yeah. Those strings of words were actually chosen by the computer, itself. HAL seems rather repressed. I’d leave those pod bay doors closed if I were you.

While I’m certainly no physicist, ESolar’s method of solar power seems a great deal more efficient than the traditional silicate-based fuel cell model. My understanding is that traditional solar cells max out at 40-50% efficiency and most run a great deal lower than that. The mirror array, on the other hand, is cheaper, more flexible, wastes nothing, and requires very little advanced technology (other than the computer program that coordinates the array). ESolar’s mirror array is the 21st century equivalent of a wood stove powering a steam engine. This seems like a much more sustainable and scalable form of solar power. Too bad these guys are not a publicly traded company.

The Mep that Neither Begins nor Ends; How Improv Can Either Save the World or Destroy it; Murderous Shepherds and Other Little Known Cultural Legacies; Gladwell’s Advocate; Privacy – Destroyer of all Things; and Why Asians are Great at Math (but Terrible at Piloting).

Download Mep Report #118

I was going to post this as a comment on Russ’ post, but I have enough to say that it warrants one of these ranty point-counterpoint things we love so much on TMR.

PleaseRobMe is an ingenious little piece of social propaganda. It would be clever or interesting if it weren’t so fundamentally flawed as to expose itself as its own straw-man.

The graphic atop the page says everything you need to know about the proclivities of this page, but also its willingness to be deceptive. The vision is conjured of a Google Maps for Burglars, wherein people can immediately see homes that are documentably empty and round up the goods in said domiciles before the unwitting occupants have time to check their Twitter accounts. Brilliant, right?

Except of course, this is nothing like the service actually offered by the site. Instead, one gets the kind of mangled cloudy information one might expect from the Internet. One gets fake identities (Twitter accounts), no addresses whatsoever, no maps, and uncertainty as to what homes may or may not be occupied.

In fact, the only thing that this website is at all is a series of Twitter updates indicating that the given Twitterer is claiming to be somewhere other than their presumed residence.

Basically, PleaseRobMe relies on many fundamental assertions, each of which is laughably untrue:

1. Twitter accounts can be certifiably linked to real identities.
This is quite hit and miss. Some Twitterers choose to use their real names, which themselves may or may not be that unique. Many are inscrutable to anyone but their close friends or followers, which seems to me to be the whole point of Internet identities. It’s hard to get an exact proportion, but you could spend the whole time someone is around the corner at the cafe just trying to discern who the heck they actually are.

2. People’s addresses are easy to find on the Internet.
This is one of those bright-lines that still exists for a remarkable number of people on the Internet – people will share their cell number, e-mail address, and personal emotions pretty liberally, but most are guarded about their actual physical address. Sometimes you can do a phone-book search and get a direct hit – other times a name will be so common as to create chaos and confusion. Often people live their lives unlisted. Even more frequently, people will move enough that their listed identity is out-of-date.

3. Everyone lives alone.
This is perhaps the most fundamental and crushing flaw in the PRM assumption network. In fact, most people don’t live alone. And very few of these Twitter updates make it clear who is with the person on any given outing, let alone breaking down who may be left at home or whether one lives with the person one is on an outing with. People have spouses, boy- and girlfriends, roommates, friends crashing on couches. The idea that knowing one resident’s whereabouts could in any way mean the remaining home is vulnerable is patently absurd.

4. One can reliably predict how long someone will be away.
Again, hugely inconsistent. Yes, if the person says “Going to Chicago for two weeks” and their address is in Honolulu, that’s a safer bet than “At the Starbucks”. But most updates are “At the Starbucks”. And it’s hard to say whether the Starbucks is in Chicago, Delhi, or Honolulu. Or how long the person will be there. Or whether they updated at the end of their Starbucks run and are almost home already anyway.

But beyond all these basic assertions, there’s a more insidious issue in play. These sites, satirical or not, are designed to get people to think that privacy is being eaten by the Internet and that will obviously lead to more crime and victimization for those losing the privacy. While privacy may or may not be reducing from the Internet, there’s absolutely no causal link between reduced privacy and increased crime or victimization – certainly not in any way that this site is trying to illustrate. By creating an atmosphere of unjustified paranoia about Internet privacy, this site convinces people of threats that aren’t valid and thus has the moral fortitude of the Bush administration invading Iraq over mysterious 9/11-related claims.

But more interestingly, it’s hard to say whether privacy is even all that reduced by the Internet in the ways that PRM is discussing. After all, phone books have existed for decades and are accessible to any member of a community. (Presumably one has to be in the same community as someone one is hoping to rob from.) And while it may seem like an interesting novelty to have a Twitter update saying someone’s at a Starbucks, how is that different from being able to make the presumption that, say, the house is empty during work hours because most homes need two incomes these days? One would actually be much safer and better off looking up basic occupation information that was available publicly long before the Internet and then cross-referencing with a phonebook. You know, basic trappings of 1950′s America that use real identities instead of Twitter handles.

Then again, in the 1950′s, I guess it was mostly just men out working while the women stayed home and cleaned and waited for the kids to arrive. Because certainly no one wanted to do dastardly things to homemakers and rob them.

In any case, PRM’s entire point and argument dissolve upon scrutiny and simply amount to someone shouting in the middle of the street “OMG! The Internet! It’s coming to get us!” for no reason.

One of my new favorite satirical websites is PleaseRobme, a database of absent-minded social networking updates broadcasting that the user is away from home. In the words of the website,

“So here we are; on one end we’re leaving lights on when we’re going on a holiday, and on the other we’re telling everybody on the internet we’re not home.”

This reminds me of some favored internet dating profiles. “On the one hand, my website handle is SuperHotMama, on the other hand, I chose to feature a heavily shadowed picture of my left ear in my profile picture.” Self-deception can be fun.

The Hexacopter can zoom in and out of view in the blink of an eye, and sounds like an “angry swarm of bees” as it collects intelligence, scans for impure thoughts, and prepares a euthanasia beam for its thankful victims.

Four days ago, Andrew Joseph Stack, an otherwise unremarkable software engineer in his 50s, committed an act of terrorism when he crashed a small plane into the Texas State IRS center in Austin. While many people are still processing this event and its potential ramifications, some media sources seek to bury this story and downplay its significance.

While it seems impossible to outright bury the dissemination of an attack of this kind, the story has been obscured in the barrage of celebrity/media/sports stories that mass media outlets usually prefer. Yes, the attack was covered in the New York Times, but the Times downgraded the front page in a matter of hours to celebrate Lindsey Vonn’s gold medal in women’s downhill skiing.

While the Olympics are certainly worthy of coverage, is one medal out of 24, really a more significant event than what could be considered the beginning of a widespread populist revolt? It seems as if the New York Times, along with the rest of the established media, are choosing to downshift into celebrity/athletic fare, and deny that the suicide bombing was at all significant.

First of all, I have yet to hear any relating of this attack to the buzzword “terrorism.” This is despite the fact that the attack had all of the hallmarks of terrorism. We have a suicide, we have a plane being used as a missile, and we have a political and largely symbolic target. The main missing element is the foreign culture to scapegoat. Andrew Joseph Stack was a white, American-born, non-muslim, US citizen. Without the ethic or religious aspects, it’s as if the Right Wing Media doesn’t know how to properly leverage this news to support their point of view. Though it’s not as if they haven’t made a clumsy attempt or two…

Note that while Neil Cavuto could have used this forum to decry the Obama administration for its tax and spend policy and for creating too much big government, he remains incredibly timid in this interview with Scott Brown.

What Neil Cavuto knows (as do his Fox News Marionettes behind the scenes) is that this attack could just as easily have been targeted at the office of a major software company or the capital building, or even a media outlet seen as upholding the kind of corruption Andrew Joseph Stack saw as penetrating society.

Of course I don’t agree with his actions, per se. I think the scapegoating of the IRS is misguided and plays into the hands of critics who call him nothing more than a deranged nut with a crudely scrawled internet screed. And, of course the IRS agent killed in the attack had no particular power to change any of the problems that Stack layed out in his statements. I’m also fairly sure that a more thorough examination of Stack’s life will yield a lot more personal problems than financial trouble. It takes more than poverty to drive someone to violent reprisal.

However, that probably won’t stop Stack’s symbolic value in the decade to come. Populist rage is a valid, though unfocused way of looking at the society we’ve built. When you concentrate a society’s wealth to the extreme extent that we have, you’re bound to find large swaths of people who want to shake that system up, or even destroy it entirely.

And this is the dilemma for the corporate-controlled mass media. It spends much of its time glorifying violence, prejudice, hatred, inanity, and greed, so long as those emotions are used to distract and entice people who are being bled dry of their savings and properties. When those emotions are concentrated and directed back at the source of it all, the mass media panics. Better to bury the story than to understand it. Understanding what happened might encourage huge structural changes. And there are few things our corporate overlords like less than huge structural changes that they, themselves, didn’t engineer.

Much as I hate privacy, I am starting to come around to the idea that Facebook and Twitter are the beginning of the end of the Golden Age of the Internet. Purely because I charge them each with half a count of the murder of blogging.

When I first started blogging in the year 2000, I resisted the term “blog”. I didn’t like its shortness, its seeming triviality, the idea that blogging was something blippy and insignificant. I liked “web log” or “web journal” or even “internet diary” and even though I had one of the terser blogs out there, my posts would still almost always dwarf the absurd 140-character parameters of a “tweet”. Yes, there was perhaps the frequency and occasional irrelevance of tweeting, but 140 characters doesn’t even let one express an idea.

What was neat about blogging, in part, is that it was a public and accessible way to get across ideas so almost anyone (within our societal advantages of ambient time and money, of course) could read them and potentially be impacted. While there were early murmurings of this decentralizing information and giving the power to the people, it was pretty obvious that it would (like any good revolution) just replace one elite with another. And thus the newspapers started to crumble and the blogging infrastructure and hierarchy started taking shape.

This was fine, though, because it didn’t obliterate the small blogs. Even though newspaper conglomerates ran small locals out of business (or, worse, just strip-mined their content to the lowest common AP denominator), the point of blogging for most people wasn’t to make money but to communicate. So you couldn’t drive the small bloggers off the tracks. And thus I maintained a real insight into the thought processes and daily lives of many of my friends.

Fast forward to the advent of Facebook. Suddenly, most all my friends stopped blogging. The Blue Pyramid, my impressively popular website of mostly online quizzes since 2003, dropped off a cliff in terms of traffic. Suddenly a maelstrom force had entered the Internet and was eating parts of it wholesale. As more and more got dragged into the vortex, corporations and new ground-floor dwellers started loading Facebook up with trivial content and applications.

What’s insidious about Facebook is the way it presents information. For the most part, it is micro-communication, though “status updates” have limits twice or thrice as forgiving as Twitter (I still frequently find myself going over, but whatever). But Facebook has a way of presenting information that makes it completely overwhelming and, resultingly, trivial. Unless one lives on Facebook, stays logged in and refreshing all the time (I know a couple people who do this, but not many), then whatever floats to the top of the feed is completely random. No one can digest more than 15-20 status updates at a time and those at the top are often from your 55th, 64th, 99th, and 401st closest friends – people you would never bother to keep up with so regularly otherwise. It is fragmentation at its finest.

Yes, you can post “notes” that are more like blog entries. Yes, you can scan one individual’s entire page, though it usually consists of blippy irrelevant “wall post” musings from other people, a few photos, and terse and sporadic updates that don’t provide half the regularity or depth of even the most cursory blogs. I’ll admit that Facebook does photos pretty well through its tagging system and that it’s easy. Easy easy easy. Just sign in and go. And, theoretically, all the content you want is in one place.

The problem, of course, is that there’s no content. It’s really easy to post “HELP HAITI NOW” in your status, but impossible to provide the nuance of a more troubling look at the country, like I posted last month or Russ posted here yesterday. And yes, you can provide links, but who really goes to a lot of other non-video links in Facebook? And the need for character limits in Twitter has given rise to another insidious practice, that of URL-shortening websites.

Most savvy web users hover their mouse over most any link before clicking it to ensure they aren’t about to go somewhere suspect that will destroy their computer. I’ve gotten a little lazier about this since I have Firefox set to prompt me to accept or reject every single site’s cookie and save my preferences site by site, but I still do it most of the time. When you see a “bit.ly” or a “tinyurl.com” instead of a real website, there’s absolutely no telling what’s behind the curtain. When they first came up with these sites, I was mindboggled they’d be acceptable in an era when so much paranoia about spam exists. But apparently the Twitterverse can dictate the terms of the Internet’s surrender.

But of course, these sites do something far worse than just force someone to click links on faith (which, given my experience with fellow Meppers, I am already loath to do). They break down one’s mental link between the content linked and the actual website featuring the content. After all, you got it on Twitter and bit.ly. That’s all you need to remember. Just keep going back to the wells of Twitter and bit.ly – no need to remember anything else.

Like cell phones making people forget the phone number of everyone they know, this is a pretty extreme centralization of the Internet. My Dad reminded me the other day to regularly save as much important Internet as I could, both my own and others’, because we can’t take for granted the depth, breadth, and accessibility of the Internet forever. Russ and I had a conversation about six months ago wherein we re-established that the Internet’s decentralization is the last best anti-establishment hope in our world. If we expect all our content to come through portals like Facebook and Twitter, if we stop blogging in favor of driveling our thoughts to finite character limits and hoops of unsophistication, we’re letting the centralization win.

And what’s so bad about centralization? It’s too easy for corporations to control. It’s too easy to buy two or five websites and end up controlling everything. I fear corporations like most people fear the government, but it’s all for the same reasons. Consolidation of control for less than noble purposes is always a threat to those who want better outcomes.

Here’s my translation of this post for those who can now only process in 140 characters or less:

Twitter and Facebook are destroying blogging and accordingly our ability to process sophisticated or nuanced content on the Internet.

Whew. Seven characters to spare!

For more on why Mac Users are impotent tech fetishists and unwitting, unpaid salesman for the company, see TMR #16 and #35. No offense intended, of course

And then came the inevitable women’s hygiene spoofs…

Airbus, that airplane manufacturer that just doesn’t know when to bow down to Boeing and give up already (sorry Brits), has proposed a standing-room only option…

I’m presuming they are going to market this mainly in Asia.  I’m sure the “People Pushers” union is psyched!

This week, England’s Telegraph UK, featured the SarcMark, a purportedly new innovation for warning others of your not so sincere tone. A life-long ironical satirist myself, the SarcMark seemed to offer the prospect of more directly insulting the oblivious. Unfortunately the SarcMark isn’t a novel idea — at all…

Available for download at the rate of $1.99, the SarcMark itself resembles a backwards letter ‘G’ with a kidney stone. Though I liked the idea at first, something seemed oddly familiar about it — as if I had seen it before.

After combing the internet for a bit, I found paydirt…

I knew my aborted 12-year old Hebrew studies would come in handy some day. Yes, the SarcMark is actually the Hebrew letter ‘Pey’ or ‘P.’ It seems that the industrious folks at Sarcasm Inc. are opening up an entire new market to consumers — we now have the ability to buy and sell the letters of foreign alphabets for profit! That’s literally hundreds of new symbols that can be trademarked and sold on the open market. What an opportunity! (Add desired stolen symbol here)

Inspired by Sarcasm Inc, I wanted to unveil the newest Mep Report grammatical addition to the lexicon. It’s this:

I call it the Super Exclamation Point! Why use a regular old line with a dot, when (for only $4.99 plus shipping and handling) you can have this robust image of a slanted ‘T’ next to a man with a stick up his behind. It’s completely novel and definitely not English! Order now!

———-

As an aside, it did also occur to me that we already have the equivalent of a SarcMark. It’s this — . The tongue-sticking out smiley face (made up of a colon and a P) is intended to convey joking or sarcasm, and is already used at the end of the sentence. Perhaps this is why Sarcasm Inc chose to steal the Hebrew letter ‘P’. They are literally buying out the competition. If they trademark all letter ‘Ps’ for themselves, they will own a majority stock in the world’s tongue-sticking out smiley faces and have outright ownership over all of the methods of declaring written sarcasm. How devious! (insert stolen symbol here)

I can’t believe these opportunities are still available.  I’m so happy and honored to have been chosen.

Office Of The National Security Advisor
Federal Republic Of Nigeria
Aso Rock Villa, Asokoro District,
Abuja-Nigeria.

Attn: Honourable Beneficiary

I am Lt. General Peter Olu (Rtd),National Security Advisor to the New Nigerian President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua.I am delighted to inform you that the contract panel which just concluded its seating in Abuja, just released your name among listed beneficiaries to benefit from the Diplomatic Immunity Payment.

Your payment file was forwarded to my office by the auditors as unclaimed fund, we wish to use this medium to inform you that for the time being,the Federal Government of Nigeria have stopped further payment through bank to bank transfer due to beneficiaries numerous petitions to United Nations against Nigeria on wrong payment and diversion of contract/inheritance funds to different accounts….

In this regards, we are going to send your contract part payment of $4.1 Million USD to you via our accredited shipping company…

Note: The money is coming in 2 security proof boxes. The boxes are sealed with synthetic nylon seal and padded with machine. Please you don’t have to worry for anything as the transaction is 100% risk free…

The consignment will be coming with a Diplomatic agent,who will accompany the boxes to your house address….

Bear in mind that the diplomat does not know the original contents of the boxes. What l declared to them as the contents is Sensitive Photographic Film Materials for security reasons. I did not declare money to them please. If they call you and ask you the contents please tell them the same thing Ok….

Lastly,i will secure the Diplomatic Immunity Clearance Certificate (D.I.C.C) which will make him pass every custom checkpoints all over the world without any hitch.
————————————————

What’s “synthetic nylon seal” and why does Fed Ex not offer that as an option?  Oh, I guess they do.

“Sensitive Photographic Film Materials”…so he told security that he was sending me porno pix?

I SOOOOO want a D.I.C.C.; that’s so sweet.

Yesterday, our Digital Overlords (Google Corp) released a new “superphone” that may change life on this planet as we know it…

As reported in TechCrunch, unlike its peers and predecessors, the Nexus One phone will not be plastered all over the media landscape. No one will have to compose a melodic ditty to make the Nexus One seem approachable and familiar. No one will hire John Hodgman to personally mobilize the techno-geek demographic. No one will film silhouettes of dancing hipsters who have found a preternatural groove thanks to the hot new electronic device clipped to their belts.

No, Google, the ‘do no harm’ corporation is sparing us the deluge. They just want to let us know that they have a new product, and that it’s pretty cool. So they’ll link a Nexus One tutorial to your YouTube page. They’ll gently point you toward a demo video on Engadget. But they’re not going to beat you over the head with the thing in the same way that their esteemed tree-fruit competitor might.

And whether they are aware of it or not, the geek masses are thankful for this.

While the phone itself promises little more than an incremental advance from smartphones already in the marketplace, the true innovation of Google’s Nexus One, is that it could be the first Big Market Gizmo not forcibly jammed down your throat by the mass media.

Say g’night, Billy…

For those interested in more than mere amusement, here’s another segment of the same lecture on the subjects of continuity and discontinuity. You should probably have your quantum mechanics textbooks handy for this one…

Yep, that’s not a typo. If the story is accurate, Alvarez, a native of Uruguay, dropped three hundred smackers to make something which isn’t that far off from some of the material in Independence Day (with considerably less Randy Quaid). (Avatar, by contrast, cost four hundred million to complete.) Within a week he had offers from major Hollywood studios for his services, and ended up signing a thirty million dollar deal with Sam Raimi’s Ghost House Pictures. There’s been some heavy skepticism that someone could produce any vaguely professional film for $300, let alone something this impressive, but until I hear different I’m going with the story, for the cool factor if nothing else.

For the uninitiated, Wafflepwn is the YouTube handle of a newly-minted 16 year old internet celebrity. Over the course of a year, Wafflepwn has amassed tens of millions of video views and over 200,000 subscribers by broadcasting the flaily tantrums of his emotionally disturbed big brother.

The piece that initially put Wafflepwn on the map was an Internet Perfect Storm. Combining World of Warcraft-with self-flagellation, the video appealed to the gamer and voyeur alike. Created in the vein of other peer-humiliation videos (see Star Wars Kid), the “Greatest Freakout Ever,” represented much of the worst the internet has to offer.

After garnering over sixteen million views in seven months, the YouTube video has completely changed the lives of Wafflepwn and his Texas family. What was once a son’s privately embarrassing antics is now a revenue stream for the entire clan. As the sequels to “Greatest Freakout Ever” began to come down the pike, other family members began to participate in instigating the big money tantrums from their disturbed son. They filmed him cowering up in a tree, sent the family’s grandmother to paddle him, and gave him an obviously disappointing birthday party in the hopes of eliciting another breakdown. Wafflepwn’s new YouTube channel has even spawned a fledgling production company — “Freak Out Productions.”

While freak shows and carnivals have existed since the beginnings of human civilization, internet freak shows have emerged as their more viral, more accessible, and more lucrative counterparts. Any family with a camera and a computer now has a serious financial decision to make regarding the potentials of exploiting their children for instant fame and fortune. When compared to the huge cost and effort associated with family therapy or counseling, the financial incentives become clear. Why attempt to treat or help a problem child when they can be far more profitable to their parents as an internet celebrity monstrosity?

For Steven, the subject of these pieces, it is very hard to see a route to normalcy. A confused kid who exhibited anger management problems now is being simultaneously ridiculed and rewarded for his anti-social behavior. His value as a money-maker and an attention grabber come solely from his inability to cope with everyday situations. His tantrums have elicited far more attention than anything else he is likely to do for the rest of his life. Wafflepwn’s decision to post and promote these videos will have irrevocable effects on his brother’s path in life.

In his latest video, Wafflepwn himself is interviewed by a British camera crew. Wafflepwn contritely answers the producer’s questions as he is hit by the realization that his YouTube antics haven’t been all fun and games. He is just starting to have a sense of how big the world really is, and how the attention of the YouTube Mob can change the lives of the people around him.

In the latest Mep Report podcast, the Meppers discussed, in part, the ramifications of a world in which privacy is on the verge of disappearing. The Wafflepwn Phenomenon is a harbinger of the darker aspects of this world. It speaks to the powerfully exploitative forces that surround a beloved video sharing website, and the devastation that it is capable of wielding.

Facebook Is Kind. Facebook Is Good. All Hail Facebook. When Even Foresight Should Have Been 20/20; Just War Vs. Just a War; Gilligan’s Island As Metaphor for War; Clea and Facebook are BFF; Storey Still Hates Privacy; How the Internet Saved and Destroyed the World At the Same Time; and It’s All Fun And Games Until Someone Loses a Thought.

Download Mep Report #117

Virgin made a potentially huge announcement in the scope of human civilization yesterday as it publicly debuted the first piloted commercial spaceship.

As referenced in the linked article, Spaceship 2 and its carrier White Knight 2 will shuttle civilian passengers to the fringes of space, just below low-earth-orbiting satellites. Funnily enough, going beyond that range would put shuttle missions in danger of being knocked around by the colossal amount of space garbage circling earth in each of the tiers of normal satellite operation.

The current manifestation of Virgin Galactic amounts to little more than a Six Flags – Stratosphere theme park for the affluent; a zero-gravity joy ride for those that can afford one of the premium seats. However, what this endeavor represents is something a great deal more important.

It seems less and less likely that the faltering first world states of this planet will make any real attempt at space colonization. A global depression, a shrinking resource base, an increasing population and a deteriorating environment may distract world leaders from this vital task before conditions on the ground become too dire to wait.

The only viable alternative left may be for a college of intrepid corporations to take over this vital role. Instead of a unified human race approaching the great unknown with a noble, science-based, inquisitive approach, the galaxy may be franchised out as corporate rivals gleefully spread the mantra of free-market capitalism to the far reaches of space. Nauseatingly, this may be the last, best, hope for mankind.

I’ve made no secret of my affinity for the Virgin brand. It seems to belong to that small cadre of evolved corporations — innovative brands with strong independent leadership and a desire to impact the world in a positive way. (As I re-read that last sentence, I stifle a gag reflex as I’ve just written a sentence entirely in vapid PR-speak.)

But, I should give credit where credit is due. Given my usual distopian ramblings, it is heartening to see someone looking out for the future of mankind. As Robert Heinlein said,

“Earth is too small a basket for mankind to keep all its eggs in.”

And even if the new galactic baskets hold only the corruptible, self-serving eggs, I suppose that’s better than no eggs at all.

Looks like Mr. Obama is finally going to earn that Nobel Prize of his. In one of the more devious moves in recent presidential history, the big O has sent out nearly the entire US army to lamely wander the deserts in Afghanistan.

Under the auspices of a “Surge” (or possibly a Belgian cook named ‘Serge’) the bulk of America’s Army has been sent to the Great Elephant Graveyard of Empires; The Country That Wasn’t; The Stan of Afghans; The Most Useless Pile of Rocks This Side of the Moon. The O man has done this with no apparent mission (unless you count hunting down 97 or so bearded, cave-dwelling recluses as a worthy mission for 100,000 soldiers), and he has attached it to a ‘soft’ withdrawal timeframe in 2011. Of course, if ‘conditions on the ground’ don’t meet expectations in 2011 (read this as: if Afghanistan is still Afghanistan), then the timeline for withdrawal ceases to exist.

This is the military equivalent of putting a lame racehorse out to pasture. Resembling a Texas-sized bomb-testing range, Afghanistan should serve as a familiar and comforting surrounding to put our Army out of its misery. Like Old Yeller before it, the Army might put up a fuss before floating off to that giant Humvee in the sky, but you simply can’t keep an outdated, diseased, incontinent fighting force around forever. It’s inhumane.

After all, the future belongs to other fighting forces. Perhaps we’ll go the way of smaller robot and/or cyborg-hybrid death squadrons, perhaps we will resort to satellite shoot’em up with China, perhaps we’ll develop a boutique arsenal of “tactical” nukes to do away with future pesky cave dwelling insurgents, but there simply is no longer any room for a giant herd of half-trained human warrior cattle that need to be fed, watered, and salaried.

Like corporate America before us, we’ll leave the in-person soldiering to newly outsourced mercenary armies who don’t have to be trained, paid-for, and supervised by loathsome bureaucrats. Like ‘Starter School’ students, privatized mercenary forces will have better equipment, better textbooks, better computers, and carry a better killing GPA. The ‘Public Army’ boys simply don’t have the faculties to properly compete on the same level.

So, say goodbye to your Army. It was the best that it could be, but sometimes, that just isn’t good enough.

So, it could have read something to the effect of:

“OMG stop whining uR LAM3 a$$ off. STFU.”

Yep, old Rupie has decided he would be better off without the help of the search catalogs of the most powerful force on the Digiscape. The fickle browsing public probably won’t even buy into his Plutocratic Propaganda Machine if they have to have its content balanced with actual news sources. Only through full indoctrination (via paid web subscription) can the PPM live up to its full psychologically potent potential. And so firewalls must be erected. Rupie and Co. will happily wall-in their own unsuspecting readership brick by brick. Perhaps they’ll even ordain a few editorialists and build the New Church of Foxentology, while they’re at it. Better that than to expose themselves to the danger that is the Intraweb’s open exchange of ideas.

This Klingon propaganda reel comes to us via the Star Trek devotees at Bad Monkey Studios. Somehow they had the wherewithal to record the entire thing in an authentic Worf-ian dialect.

Representing the human (or Terran) faction we have two pieces of classic sci-fi themed propaganda. One is the UED victory report from the game Starcraft: Brood Wars:

The other originates from Robert Heinlein masterpiece turned campy movie, Starship Troopers.

While the Klingon video earns points for its excessive use of children and flags, the Troopers video does smartly feature Denise Richards. However, it does seem to waver on message. What exactly are the benefits of guaranteed “citizenship” other than frolicking around with Gary Buse’s kid and following a vacant Casper Van Dien to certain doom?

At least the UED video acknowledges the risks of battle, and gives us the promise of a hero’s funeral upon defeat. Also, it’s more logo conscious.

Ultimately, I’m going to have to go with the Klingons for superior propaganda here. They make a life of warfare and sacrifice seem infinitely cheerier than their flat foreheaded counterparts. Duch vees oh nook, rien!

Incidentally, for those who are wondering why Starcraft and Starship Troopers seem to be telling the exact same story, they are. Starcraft borrows heavily from James Cameron’s Aliens, which borrows heavily from the original Starship Troopers novel. As one should expect, the sci-fi Grandmaster is at the heart of many of our dreams of space conquest.

For more on Klingon Ethics, see Mep Report #24, where we discuss the potentialities of a war between Klingon Nation and Ghandi Nation.

As you just saw, the movie tells the story of a primitive but proud indigenous alien culture defending itself against a human-run technological assault This theme is, of course, nothing new…

The main difference, though, is that Avatar builds in a concept familiar to internet gamers (especially purveyors of MMORPGs). The idea that you can plug into an ‘Avatar,’ who you control, and perform your actions through is a direct reference to video games and an overt attempt at wrangling in the hugely influential gamer demographic.

As if this wasn’t enough to convince studios to fund the project (remember, this screenplay has been floating around in some form since 1994), Cameron seemingly threw in an attempt to co-opt an entire corner of the RPG market. Let’s take a closer look at the native race in Avatar — The “Na’vi.”

Hmm, that’s odd. The Na’vi seem to be a CGI carbon copy of the Draenei race from World of Warcraft, the most popular online role playing game in history. Their inclusion seems an especially clever way of drawing in the 15,000,000 strong WoW contingent without acquiring any copyrights, trademarks, or even making any mention to the source material.

Even the name, “Na’vi,” seems reminiscent of gamer parlance. Nav (or Navigational) Points are often used in games to direct the user to a particular place on the map. In my experience, these came into vogue in the MechWarrior series, which also seems to have a strong presence in the storyline of Avatar (note the remote battle mechs that take on the Na’vi army).

Hmm, co-opting past blockbuster themes, secretly embedding familiar pop culture characters and worlds, and copying other successful works. I suppose that is one way of getting your lame duck screenplay produced. Perhaps, on a meta-level, the movie Avatar is really the avatar of the awkwardly titled World of MechWarrior Craft of the Jedi.

For those of you who enjoy living vicariously through your computers, Burger King Japan has announced the limited release of the Windows 7 Whopper.

With this mountain of fried chuck, you can personally simulate the experience of installing an unstable, under-tested operating system on your own biological BIOS. While I can’t reliably translate the Japanese slogan, I think it roughly says: “Windows 7: Kill Computer; Kill Self.”

Update: Just found the video of Windows 7′s first victim:

Late in the video, Kaiser makes the claim that the dollar’s 52-week low (which is actually a 14 month low) is not only due to a weakening economy, but efforts by other nations to dump US dollars as a reserve currency.

There is a growing body of evidence that Kaiser is right on the money. According to the New York Post, foreign banks have about half as many reserves in dollars as they did ten years ago. With less willing dollar hoarders overseas, the Federal Reserve can no longer count on flippantly increasing the money supply to spur on the economy. Global patience for US economic hegemony is quickly running out.

China, Russia, and the EU seem to be staging a financial intervention for their shop-a-holic, denial-laden, American counterpart. They no longer seem interested in cleaning up his mess. These countries know that when you have a delusional addict wreaking havoc on your life, sometimes you simply have to step back and let him go it alone.

The question is, how far will America go before self-awareness kicks in? How hyper-inflated will we allow dollars to become before we acknowledge the consequences of having a completely unhinged, unaccountable monetary policy?
It may hurt for now, but there may come a day when we thank our global trading partners for cutting us off. It might even spur us into joining a twelve-step recovery program for former World Powers living beyond their means.

Update: For those interested, here’s the second half of the Face Off discussion:

Today, Britain’s Daily Mail Online gave us a glimpse of a possible future distopian solution to unemployment.

Internet Eyes is “a worldwide online instant event notification system utilizing video feed to notify the owner of the feed (customer) that an event is occurring.”

In other words, anonymous internet viewers will be conscripted to sit at their computer and browse through hundreds of hours of surveillance video, in the hope that they can spot some unseemly activities going on, and instantly report it to a Game Warden for a cash reward.

So far, Internet Eyes is stopping short of fully employing online participants in the search for shoplifters, petty thieves, and other Dangerous Sub-Societal Malcontents. But offering monthly cash prizes for viewers who excel at catching Undesirables is a tentative first step down that path.

This new “game” seems to have a huge demographic to take advantage of. There are tens of millions of users out there, patiently waiting to find opportunities to work on the internet. And once it’s determined how lucrative searching for Bad Guys is (as compared to farming for gold on World of Warcraft, for instance), the users and gamers and unemployable masses will flock to see who can earn the most Vigilance Points.

And once this program is underway, do not count on your fellow internet users to abstain from World of Surveillance out of some moral or ethical compunction. Do you really think that the Korean factory workers who earn pennies an hour by farming items in an online video game will be any less likely to take a slight pay raise to search for Altoids tin filchers at the 7-11?

If you need any more proof that this is the direction we’re headed, look to Neal Stephenson’s prophetic work, Snow Crash,

“They [Gargoyles] serve as human surveillance devices, recording everything that happens around them. Nothing looks stupider; these getups are the modern-day equivalent of the slide-rule scabbard or the calculator pouch on the belt, marking the user as belonging to a class that is at once above and far below human society… The payoff for this self-imposed ostracism is that you can be in the Metaverse all the time, and gather intelligence all the time.”

Looking for a way to perk up your work week? Why not update yourself on the impending enviropocalypse?

According to an exhaustive study by the Global Footprint Network, September 25th was the day that the planet used all of the available planetary resources that it could replenish in a year (otherwise known as Earth Overshoot Day). For the rest of the year, we’ll be culling, reaping, and utilizing that which won’t grow back.

Ever the optimist, I like to look at the impending death of our home planet as an opportunity to try out other levels of existence. Farming, fishing, manufacturing, and reproducing can get quite monotonous after a few hundred generations. So, as I see it, here are our options:

The first option is to figure out a way to exist in bio-friendly hibernation pods, as the new movie Surrogates seems to suggest. Now, this may be with the help of Matrix-like robotic overlords, or it may be as autonomous dwellers in an expanded Internet or Multiverse. Incidentally, Surrogates seems to pull heavily from Snow Crash, a novel whose characters spend most of their free time on a fully-immersive giant virtual reality internet. The environmental benefits to this type of lifestyle are clear, with the added bonus of living life in a giant video game. I have high hopes for this potential reality.

Our second option is to dispose of our planet like a used diaper and seek out life on another potential dumping ground elsewhere in the galaxy. For those ingrained into the deficit spending culture, this may be the only satisfying solution. Many sci-fi tales, including Robert Heinlein’s, Farmer in the Sky set the scene for human colonization of other worlds. These are tales of future explorers homesteading on nearby habitable planets. While playing Galactic Oregon Trail sounds like a real hoot, it doesn’t come without its own share of problems. Firstly, this reality sticks us with the farming, fishing, and reproduction toils that we were trying to get out of. And secondly, this future path assumes that humans will have the smarts to build things, grow things, and live without electricity while we break in our new environment. Not bloody likely.

The third option is much less fun, as it involves heeding the constant whinings of our scientific community. Cutting down on global consumption just feels wrong. It would be the equivalent of declaring defeat in the War Against Nature, which we know our political leaders could never bear. And I for one, don’t like losing to an unconscious pile of dirt and brine. Doesn’t sentience count for anything anymore? So, no, I refuse to lay out the potential of slowly weening ourselves off of our highly consumptive habits. It’s just wrong. Surely there must be a more extravagant, American way to go about doing this. Perhaps we can keep our day-to-day abuses intact and simply jettison some of our more extravagant behaviors.

I bet that putting an end to NASCAR and Entourage would roll us back to a level of existence short of Earth Overshoot. And if that doesn’t work, we can always choose some toothless, symbolic action that represents our commitment to fixing our leaky planet when we decide to get around to it. In that vein, I propose that we recycle Tyra Banks into organic mulch. At least this would make our dying planet an infinitely more palatable place to live.

Hey, Hey, The Gang’s All Here, Krull and Kelp Kollide, Russ Goes Back to School, Immortality Is/Is Not Overrated, Baby Sea Cucumbers, Rack-O is Whack-O, Cash for Coal, and NAFTA Bartenders.

Download Mep Report #116

The story here was that I had agreed to do stand up comedy last weekend, but wasn’t particularly in the mood for joke-telling (especially given that the venue was a standard comedian trap — a privately hosted party). So, instead, I decided to employ the audience as the cast and crew in a YouTube video.

The results were mixed. Obviously I had little control over what we ended up recording, but it was a promising experiment. I sort of like the idea of having strangers collaborate spontaneously on a web project. It’s very internet ethos-y. On the bright side, it may be an entirely new form of performance art. Fun.

Zittrain describes a system based not on economics and self-interest, but on random kindnesses, free favors, and civility. What he is describing is no less than the evolution of mankind into HuMan 2.0.

Incidentally, for the Meppers take on Wikipedia vandalism, check out Mep Report #26.

Link via Philosophy Monkey

Digg.com is one of the largest websites on the planet. Like many of its competitors in the social media arena, it doesn’t purport to create or provide anything of substance. Digg’s value comes in the community that it organizes and speaks for. In Digg’s case, that community’s function is to vote for the most worthy news stories of the day for more casual visitors to consume.

With the announcement of some prospective changes to its voting rules, is Digg capitulating to big money interests? Or has its slow march to corruption already rendered its original mission moot?

With its massive growth over the last five years, Digg has become a virtual kingmaker. One link from the Digg front page can send massive swaths of internet traffic to any given website at any time. This ‘Digg Effect‘ is one of the more powerful forces known to the internet. It can instantaneously promote stories, videos, or news items into super-viral memes that have the potential to reach millions of users.

With the advent of online ads, web traffic became a very real form of currency, turning Digg from a virtual billboard into a virtual ATM machine. Not surprisingly, the key to the Holy Teat of Internet Traffic became an incredibly valuable commodity. And the holders of such relics are especially susceptible to corrupting influences.

But, let’s not kid ourselves. Digg wasn’t ever a democracy in the truest egalitarian sense of the word. The site runners have always kept their ‘Feature Algorithm’ a secret. In other words, no one knows how many votes it takes to bring a story to Digg’s vaunted home page. No one knows how many down votes it takes to bury a story. No one knows why some stories seem to linger on the front page longer than others. As far as pure democratic processes go, you can rank Digg somewhere in the neighborhood of Iran or Afghanistan.

Even with its flaws, Digg was once a thriving community of diligent news consumers, constantly pouring over incoming submissions and voting especially compelling ones to the front page. This culture is no more. Algorithm changes have discouraged Digg users from being too active in reading and filtering new submissions. A shift in focus on socializing and befriending other users has lead to the creation of virtual Digg Voting Blocks. The results of this new policy has dramatically reduced the diversity of stories that end up on the featured page.
One study concluded that 46% of Digg’s front page is controlled by as few as 50 websites. Not surprisingly, these 50 websites represent some of the biggest, most well-funded players on the internet.

It’s hard to blame founder Kevin Rose and his inner cabal for Digg’s corporate devolution. I mean, if you were a kid who designed a network capable of leveraging insane amounts of traffic on behalf of a rowdy internet throng, wouldn’t you want some measure of control over the thing? Wouldn’t you set up secret features that allowed your staff to counter the rampant Digging of unacceptable content, or allow yourself a backdoor to throw a bone to websites that paid you to feature them? Wouldn’t you set up safeguards to prevent out and out revolt that threatened the livelihood of your virtual property? I think you would.

This is why democracies aren’t generally run by kids fresh out of a computer science program at UNLV. Thriving democracies have transparency; they have checks and balances, they have interest groups working to ensure that the interests of the few are communicated to the many. Digg has never had any of these protections.

Therefore, Digg has never been a true democracy. But it was close, once. Unfortunately it has slowly succumbed to the addictive brew of advertising dollars, strategic partnerships, and celebrity. So don’t bother raising a stink about the new proposed changes. And don’t expect to find this story on Digg’s front page any time soon. Its corporate overlords wouldn’t approve.

Image via MaximumPC

Earlier today, internet business culture behemoth, TechCrunch, posted a riddle for its millions of devoted followers. Branded as a heretofore unbroken code, the decipherer was promised Good Will Hunting-like stardom and a potential job with Google, no doubt as the Alpha Team Leader of a Top Secret Super-Genius Infiltration Training Program. Not to mention a TechCrunch t-shirt…

These prizes were more than enough to coax thousands of readers to devote their early afternoon naptimes in search of the key to the cipher. Even Yours Truly could not resist the lure of an unbreakable code that had previously foiled unworthy MIT twerps.

And so we crunched. We juxtaposed. We rearranged, substituted, and counted. Early discoveries of a phone voice mail belonging to the Google central nervous system were quickly debunked. Other phone numbers surfaced, seemingly belonging to a Boston law firm. I, personally, came up with several fax numbers and the contact phone for a Bay Area company called Integral.

And in the end, both on our worksheets and in the post’s comment thread, it was revealed that the correct answer belonged to a voice mail that belonged not to Google, but to some network-marketing scum looking for a few sharp minds to enslave and ultimately impoverish with yet more promises of unattainable riches.

Sadness. On several levels. First of all, that a first-rate website could so easily be scammed by snake-oil salesmen into putting out an internet call-to-arms. Secondly, though, that this vast resource of intelligentsia all over the world can only be harnessed by a virtual prankster.

Is there no cause more worthy of this kind of collective mental effort? Can’t we use these kind of thought experiments to do something useful, like figure out the Unified Field Theory or balance the budget, or create a Phantom Zone to exile all News Corp Executives into oblivion?

Probably not for awhile. As it seems that TechCrunch will be thought of as the Website that Cried Wolf for the foreseeable future. For shame.

PS: For you super nerds still keen on finding the answer… Here is my original worksheet…

Occurences:

1 = 1 6
2 = 2 8
3 = 2 2
4 = 0 3
5 = 1 1
6 = 4 5
7 = 0 4
8 = 3 7
9 = 0 9

A = 3 A
B = 0 I
C = 0 L
D = 2 M
E = 1 Q
F = 2 D
G = 0 F
H = 1 J
I = 3 O
J = 2 R
K = 0 E
L = 3 H
M = 3 N
N = 1 S
O = 2 T
P = 0 U
Q = 3 X
R = 2 B
S = 1 C
T = 1 G
U = 1 K
V = 0 P
W = 0 V
X = 1 W
Y = 0 Y
Z = 0 Z

55 possible characters. 8 gaps.

gaps at 7, 9, 17, 20, 28, 33, 42, 49

gaps of gaps: 2 8 3 8 5 9 7 BHCHEIG

each line gaps: 7,9, 6,9 6, 11, 9, 5

gaps of gaps 2, 3, 3, 3, 5, 2, 4

7 9
6 9
6 11
9
5

QLQ6 6I1 R8I3 Fx IA3J
8386 691 9893 69 9131

number of characters

6,1,2 break or, excluding breaks: (617) 274 -8660
5,2,2 break the final zero representing the last needed digit
5, 4, break with no characters following the phrase.
8, 2 break
4, 6 end

Update:

Never mind. The thing was recently solved. It was a substitution cipher that went something like this:

Code for translation:

0123456789ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ (JOBS)

456789ABCDE2FGHIJKL0MNOP1QRS3TUVWXYZ (0123)

The result:
CONGRA T UL ATION SK EE PSEAR CHIN GORCALL6 17 6390 570×10

CONGRATULATIONS KEEP SEARCHING OR CALL 617 639 0570 (extension 10)

Google Jobs answers that call

via fivetechsoft

In a stunning turn of events this week, Facebook revealed that it now takes in enough actual money to pay for its own business expenses.

“There’s a myth that you can’t make money on the internet, these days,” said recently post-pubescent CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

“As it turns out, all you have to do is become a social organizer for a virtual nation of 300 million, and keep them distracted with Mafia Wars while you sell off their personal shopping habits to retailers,” Zuck noted.

Here’s to hoping other internet entrepreneurs heed Zuckerberg’s message and find new and creative ways to engage (exploit) internet users, at large.

Mep Report 116 – Limb Regeneration in Infants from Laserfalcon on Vimeo.

This routine, filmed a couple weeks ago at the Upright Citizen’s Brigade theater, will give you a good sense of Maron’s plodding, dark, self-loathing, intellectual style. He seems equally depressed as the Patron Saint Bill Hicks would be having to face a media world as over commercialized and sold out as ours is.

As the nation’s health care debate/debacle (debatecle?) crescendos into to a high-pitched whine, one champion’s advances threaten to trump all the efforts of the medical community, pharmaceutical industry, and lobbying covens. And this champion, this potential savior, is an unlabeled, off-brand, non-invasive, patent-free, discount store sugar pill.

According to Wired magazine, placebo effects have dramatically increased over the past few years, making it monumentally tough to get new drugs approved by the FDA.

While the newfound effectiveness of placebos continues to baffle doctors and drug researchers, it comes as much less of a shock to this Mepper. Firstly, as cited in the Wired article, placebos seems to be wildly effective when treating depression and other mental ‘disorders’. How is it surprising that a purely mental treatment (a pretend pill) is the most effective medicine to treat a purely mental disorder? Isn’t this a much more direct form of treatment than a chemical approach? As we are beginning to learn, when it comes to altering molecular structures, chemists still can’t hold a candle to the power of the human psyche.

It also bears mentioning that pharmaceutical companies probably have themselves to blame for placebo’s rise to power. Here is an industry that spends billions of dollars in advertising and marketing inventing new and ever more vague disorders (i.e. Restless Leg Syndrome) while simultaneously convincing people that a new slew of wonder drugs are going to solve their problems. Pfizer, Merck, and Glaxo have won the battle for the hearts and minds of America. Virtually everyone now believes that pills can fix their problems. This campaign has been so incredibly effective, now it doesn’t even matter which pills patients take. Whether it’s derived from sugar, fairy dust, or unicorn turds, it will fix what ails ya.

However, in the Golden Age of Placebo, medical applications are just the tip of the iceberg.

Our current President ran on what was predominantly a placebo campaign. Yes, he had a great deal of policy expertise and wonkiness at his disposal, but the overriding message of the Obama campaign wasn’t any policy proposal or platform plank. It was simply that of “Hope.” Similarly, when our economy tanked (our mostly theoretical economy that no single human fully understands), our government attempted to spur the most important economic indicator of all — “consumer confidence.” If only there were a pill for that. Perhaps one day soon, there will be.

It seems that, for Americans, marketing is a far, far more important thing than producing. We don’t produce much of value any more, but we sure can craft a perfect 30 second spot to tout the amazingness of our nothing much. In a country where blowing smoke up people’s asses is a cottage industry, placebos should continue to be the most highly effective medicine.

One of my new favorite toys is this online tool that allows you to indulge your wildest internet egocentricities. The tool seeks out your each and every Google-worthy act and unceremoniously dumps it into one of many pre-determined category bins, forever branding the nature of your service to the human race.

It’s so uncompromising and final… This pleases me.

And now, the Personas breakdown of the entire Mep staff. Apologies to Greg, who has a somewhat more common name than the rest of us (hence the prominent “illegal” heading in his breakdown).

Spent the day traveling on Richard Branson’s innovative airline. Virgin is a magical land of travel where the plane resembles a disco dance boutique more than a cattle car.

It’s a place where the mid-air wifi is plentiful, the flight attendants still have some spring in their step, and the Boing Boing Video flows like wine through individual entertainment screens.

Meanwhile the rest of the airline industry is seeking fiscal salvation through some kind of Unholy Corporate Zen Minimalism. In their minds, passengers seek to travel in much the same conditions as their luggage. Packaged in ever-smaller containment crates, deprived of amenities, and watched over by humorless, disgruntled attendants who would be better suited serving on fictional Obama Death Panels.

These are the best ideas that this industry has to offer. The American airline industry is little more than an aging, tumor-riddled, pet hamster whose owner refuses to take it off of life-support for fear of facing a trip back to the pet store.

I think it’s time we euthanize some of these government-subsidized industries. Or at least make them work for the occasional paycheck.

While this piece won an Academy Award a decade ago, and is hardly new news, it was recently released in a larger IMAX format, which is enough excuse to watch it again…

Today, the entire film can be found on Hulu. So ready your supply of Doctor Pepper and Mountain Dew, jump into a nearby Teamspeak channel, and enjoy:

I wonder if they’re paying Stephen Tobolowsky royalties for his Needleheaded improvisation.

A happiness meter featured prominently near the head of the structure reports on how the Cybraphon perceives its search for fame is going at the moment. Unlike its human counterparts, though, the Cybraphon doesn’t post inane facebook status updates of drunken weekend Cabo pictures in the vain hope of seeming more interesting. That remains a uniquely human convention.

In having a more complete picture of border activity, Fox hopes to inspire Starcraft-proficient gamers to remotely manage Border Patrol Resources to more efficiently swarm and destroy the MexMenace. THQ Software is also planning an upcoming release to cross-promote the Fox Map, entitled: Company of Heroes: Poncho Villa’s Revenge.

As per its usual protocol, the Fox Interactive Mexico Map (FIMM) will be posted on all Waffle House menu/placemats, Jon Deer Outlet Storefronts, and projected onto the faces of Wallmart Greeters.

In the inspiring words of map proponent, Sean Hannity,

“We must use every tool at our disposal to stop the brown people.”

Link via mediabistro.

Anyway, here’s Hall of Famer, George Brett, re-telling some charming dinner tales to anyone who will listen (or who happen to be trapped in ear-shot via mandatory calisthenics).

(Warning for language and those who aren’t regaled by poop-humor).

Link via The Awl.

Run out of things to watch while at work?

I don’t think it needs any description.

Ready your empty crack vials. Digital pusher Blizzard Entertainment has just announced that Sam Raimi will direct the official World of Warcraft movie.

Set to go into production after Spiderman 4 (tentatively titled: Web-Slinging for Cash), the movie is sure to attract the attention of the over 10 million devotees to one of the most effective time wasters ever created by modern humans (with apologies to Dark Age of Camelot.)

If the past is any indicator, the movie will take approximately 400-man hours to view, while audiences snack on metric tons of Cheetos and Mountain Dew. The only hope is that some wily gamer will discover a crack that allows you to program a bot to watch the movie for you, while you continue to progress with your level 80 Night Elf Hunter.

Yes, that’s right. China has added over 150,000,000 internet noobs in the last three years. And still only one-fifth of its population is connected.

Link to Full-Sized View

via Maximum Fun.

Download Mep Report #114

Brought to you by commercial production studio, The Mill.

Look out, Canadians… Skynet is now online.

The US Border Patrol is preparing to deploy a ‘Predator B’ unmanned drone aircraft along Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River, presumably to detect drug growing and smuggling operations along the US-Canadian border.

Also known as the MQ-9 Reaper, the drone is a second generation version of the original Predator that the US military has been using in some capacity since 1995. Still enjoying the fruits of a post-9/11 spending spree, the Border Patrol now has at least five of its Predator toys patrolling the US-Mexico border. It launched its first US-Canadian mission along the Dakota-Manitoba border in February as part of the Border Patrol’s “Northern Border Air Wing,” a high-tech surveillance plan called for by the 9/11 commission.

Make no mistake, these drones are not toys. The Reaper has a wing span of 66 feet and can weigh up to five tons when fully armed and loaded. Part of that weight is the 3,000+ lbs of missiles and bombs that it is equipped to carry. Whereas the original Predators were designed primarily for surveillance, Reapers are lauded by the military for their role as “true hunter-killers.”

Of course, without human pilots, these drones are only as good as the electronics and software that keep them airborne, as evidenced by the 2006 drone crash in Arizona. Let’s hope that these new Reapers aren’t running Windows Vista.

Originally posted on The Fresh Scent

Finally willing to be intellectually honest about its product, Pizza Hut is changing its name to “The Hut.”

While the company claims that this is a branding move to keep in touch with the “texting” (read as “illiterate”) generation, it does afford several advantages to the franchise:

First of all, no more pizza complaints. If “The Hut” is going to attempt to vend its novel “marinara-cheese-discs”, a revolted public won’t have the proper language to complain.

Secondly, “The Hut” can now literally sell anything one can find in a hut. This includes sunglasses, computer software, and garden supplies. I, for one, look forward to frequenting The Hut, as I’m in need of some new leaf pruning shears.

Thirdly, “The Hut” can now make up completely new rules on “marinara-cheese-disk” pricing options. For instance, “pizza toppings” will be replaced with “MCdisk add-ons,” a very exciting new innovation. For only five dollars each, the Hut’s MCdisk artists can add-on other food items to your MCdisk. Though a highly complex and lengthy process, Hut customers will surely enjoy their custom-created disks. Just one of many new features available at this cutting-edge corporation.

Of course, none of the attendees can actually verbalize what’s good or useful about Twitter, they just enjoy being around like-minded Twits.

Terrific idea from Dan Meth to compile many of the most popular forward-looking movies and see what year they portray.

I think we should turn this map into a celebration schedule a la the Chinese Zodiac. According to which, this year would be the year of Freejack. Emilio Estevez would finally have his time to shine. And, as an added bonus, we could kick off another Rolling Stones worldwide tour to pay homage to Mick Jagger’s character.

A few notable omissions:

Gattaca – Takes place in the “not too distant” future from 1997, so we can probably assume it’s supposed to have happened already.

Death Race 2000- (Obviously takes place in 2000). If you haven’t caught this one, I highly recommend it. It actually features a pre-Rocky Sylvester Stallone.

Enemy Mine – This Mep favorite takes place in the early 21st century. ]]> http://www.mepreport.com/2009/06/sci-fi-movie-timeline/feed/ 0 http://www.mepreport.com/2009/06/weird-al-craigslist/ http://www.mepreport.com/2009/06/weird-al-craigslist/#comments Wed, 17 Jun 2009 00:36:21 +0000 russ http://www.mepreport.com/?p=1776 Do you have any Styrofoam peanuts?

Brit news source TechCrunch is reporting that Trent Reznor is completely fed-up with his fanboy community on Twitter.

In his own words:

I will be tuning out of the social networking sites because at the end of the day it’s now doing more harm than good in the bigger picture and the experiment seems to have yielded a result. Idiots rule.”

Yes, apparently Twitter is nothing more than a Pretty Hate Machine.

Reznor continues:

It’s populated mainly by unattractive plump females who publicly fantasize about having sex with guys in bands. Kind of like a role-playing game where people NOBODY will fuck make up stories about their incredible sexual encounters with people they WISH they could fuck… Cutter’s tip for my friends there: remember to cut along the length of vein, not across. Bigger payoff.

Now that’s commitment.

Everyone needs to be loved, even evil alien superbeings and cyber constructs. The following short is a tale of a love so powerful, it crossed movie trilogies, genders, and even parallel universes to come true.

This is the tale of Smith & Zod.

Feel free to  Digg this video.

That’s not to say I can’t nitpick a little. I mean, aren’t these Boba Fett-gadget types getting a little bit overpowered (a la Iron Man on steroids)? The one in the trailer seems like she could take out the entire Jedi brigade by herself.

And does every Sith Lord have to have the full-body cybernetic breathing suit? Is there no other way to use the Dark Side without suffering full-body disfigurement? Meh.

You can watch the trailer here.

(Removed the embed because it was annoying as all get out.)

According to TechCrunch, China has really ramped up its censorship fervor recently. Visitors have reported blockages on Twitter, Flickr, and Hotmail, in addition to the well known kiboshing of YouTube.

Users speculate that the new wave of intolerance is in anticipation of the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, coming up on Thursday.

I suppose one way to demonstrate your evolution as a nation is by petulantly denying any wrongdoing by your former notoriously oppressive regimes. It must be, since our own debonair and worldly President has adopted similar practices, in protecting and preserving Bush administration abuses of yore. All that’s left is to rope off the Bush family archives and sequester all relevant commentary. Done and done.

Download Mep Report #113

As it turns out, designer Eduard McIntosh is the progenitor of Skynet, or the Oz Head, or whatever computer lineage eventually morphs into the overlord of the Matrix universe.

Called the Autonomous Living Unit, the theoretical one-man-band chair would provide all the needs of the user, and eventually make fully furnished living spaces obsolete. The project is pitched as a solution for homeless people or squatters living without amenities. As long as these people have a few hundred thousand bucks to spare on their pod, they’ll be living it up with the rest of us.

We’re on our way now…

This piece has a little Monochrom flavor to it. Yes, they’re Austrian, and I get the distinction, but they both do the German-accented anarchical satirist thing.

Here’s an example.

A Cracked contributor really let Carlos Mencia have it in this in-depth analysis of Mecia’s Twittering habits…

Poor guy. No one wants to mock his unjustified celebrity anymore. What did he ever do to deserve this? I mean, other than riding on the coattalis of his famous mother, and stealing other comics’ material…

Full-Sized View

Update: As the ever-vigilant impartial-ist, here’s a terrific editorial from TechCrunch on the presumed death of RSS in the face of Twitter’s conquering of the real time sphere.

To be perfectly frank, I have almost no idea who Kanye West is, or why he is relevant. I’m happy to give him a full Mep endorsement, however, solely on the grounds that he despises Twitter so openly.

In honor of Star Trek’s opening weekend, here’s a sneak peak at the future of non-fictional human space exploration. This is an endeavor that seems to be solely in the hands of private entrepreneurs, such as the creator of Paypal, being interviewed here:

Download Mep Report #112

This low-budget ridiculousness brought to you by crap purveyor, Everything is Terrible.

I know many would say that voice recognition has come into its own.  I know that use of a “speech-enabled system” saves companies money which OF COURSE means price cuts for us the consumers.

BUT I HATE IT!!!!

Here are my three simple reasons:

1) They say that you can speak at any time, but it’s rarely true.  If I speak while the recording is speaking, it never works.  I still have to wait till it’s done or there’s a break.  So, it’s not saving very much of my time.  It’s actually taking longer because each time I speak it repeats back what it thinks I said, then asks if it’s right and if I say no, it then says that it’s sorry in some fashion and asks me to say it again.  Can’t I just press “1″ please?!

2) If there is ANY background noise it thinks you’ve spoken and tries to interpret what you’ve said, then leading to what’s delineated under reason number one above.  So, let’s say you have a daughter who likes to say, “SHOE!” while you are talking on the phone…multiple times…then you will have difficulty utilizing voice recognition.  Or let’s say you like to make calls while walking outside, say walking said child to the park, and huge Mack trucks and buses drive by on a regular basis because you live in a major metropolis…then you too will have difficulty utilizing voice recognition.

3) Lastly, when it doesn’t work…and believe me, it doesn’t…all the time…then you cannot react.  You must hold in your frustration and not release it in…say…any form of verbal aggression because if you do, you will only set off yet another recorded speech, then leading to yet another release of verbal aggression, thus starting a destructive cycle of time wasted.

Anyway, the first person who can find the Mep Report episode where Russ explains his technique for dealing with voice recognition will win a personalized voicemail greeting recorded by one of us, your choice.

Enjoy the pandering for Twit sign-ups as his mom/spouse, Demi Moore, scolds him for getting too worked up in his electioneering.

In narrowly beating out CNN to the million mark, Kutcher will now undoubtedly hold a virtual monopoly on the dissemination of Twit-centric retellings of mongoloid celebrity Punkings.

Hooray.

We have the too-hot-for-her-environs girl interviewing the SuperNerd (personified by Bre Pettis).

The too-hot girl neither cares nor understands what’s going on. Her primary function is to look as hot as possible and anchor the male demographic in place.

SuperNerd tries vainly to entertain her with his various half-built gadgets and Star Wars collectables.

She perfunctorily tries to move the interview along. He lamely tries to hold her eye contact. She tries to not visibly look disgusted.

Welcome to Internet TV.

Gerontologist Aubrey de Grey is at it again. In an article from the Daily Galaxy, de Grey claims that, “…most people now 40 years or younger can expect to live for centuries…” and ““The first person to live to be 1,000 years old is certainly alive today..”

1,000 years? Hold your horses there, Methuselah. Laserfalcon only claims to be on his way to 400 years of life. If many of us have got ten centuries of existence to plan for, we’re going to have to really start working on our leisure time skills. I mean, yes, I’ve played over 1000 games of MVP 2005, but that barely got me through three months of total existence.

It’s time to really push the envelope. We’ve got to develop more efficient ways of wasting time, and fast. And, when it comes to questions such as these, I often look to the Japanese. They rarely disappoint.

And so, we have immortal leisure activity #1, Human Tetris:

This could occupy societies for a few decades, perhaps. But eventually, someone would figure out that you can smash through the styrofoam with reckless abandon and never be eliminated…

So, let’s see what else the Japanese have for us:

Yes. Yes… Mmmmhmm. I find this appealing.

…
…

Ehhh, what?

Ah… my supervisory staff has informed me that I’ve spent the last 16 hours acting out various Ronald MacDonald-fueled hallucinations. They found me head-butting a barber-shop pole while throwing very large shoes at passers by. I need to shake this off and ponder immortality another time.

Well played, Japanese pop culture. Well played.

The well known Xinhua Province Television Network is reporting that the Chinese government is cracking down on online gamers.

Government tactics include random internet disruptions for citizens under 30, rationing the national supply of Cheetos and Dr. Pepper, and distributing free samples of heroin.

Other news outlets are reporting that a mammoth Chinese government project is underway to create an MMORPG-wide-government-sponsored gank group. The gank group, run by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) would be designed to “grief” addicted gamers to the point of forcing them to either quit gaming or throw their computers out the window.

Not to be outdone, the Americans are working on their own elite team of griefers:

Here’s your first lesson: