JonathanRyan.org

So I recently added Stumble to my browser…  and by recently, I mean yesterday.  I promptly spent four or five hours just clicking that little button and finding new corners of the internet.  Just yesterday, I bookmarked a dozen interesting new sites.  So, you know what that means.  Linkdump!

http://www.anxietyculture.com/contents.htm

This is all about counterculture and exposing the farce that is “normal” life.  As they say it:

“AC began as a magazine, in 1995, exploring the anxieties behind the smiling mask of “normal” society. It contains ideas and gimmicks for navigating the stressed, over-competitive, work-obsessed times we live in.

The website went online in 1998, intended as a cocktail of curious news, satire, outsider psychology and uplifting propaganda.”

http://nine.frenchboys.net/

I like generators.  So does the owner of this site.  They’re a wonderful tool for working around writer’s block.  Need a setting?  Generate one and elaborate upon it.  Need a name?  Generate one and use it at least as a placeholder so that one decision doesn’t take up hours of good writing time.  This one is a lot like Seventh Sanctum, and indeed inspired by it.

http://www.everyvideogame.com/

This is like an online version of an emulator and every rom you can find.  I don’t know what they have or what they’re missing, but I’ll certainly be exploring the games fairly soon.

http://home.austarnet.com.au/petersykes/topscifi/lists_short_stories.html

This is a top 100 list of great SF short stories.  I’m going to use it as a reading list.  I’m sad to admit I’ve only read 13 of them at last count.

http://blog-well.com/2008/03/04/100-resources-for-web-developers/

This is 100 resources for web developers.  Code scripts, testers, debugging tools, FTP clients, screenshot tools, code documentation, windows applets, converters, graphics tools…  it’s got a lot.  I think most of them are free, but not all of them.  It’ll be a useful resource for giving useful resources to people who do this kind of thing.

http://studenthacks.org/2008/03/04/resources/

Another 100-list, this time geared for those of us who are still students and don’t know how to abuse google to within an inch of our lives looking for that one trivial fact to make a paper stand out.  This has encyclopedias, journal archives, style guides, dictionaries, and all kinds of useful links.  If only I had found it back when I still had to write terribly boring papers…

http://psychoprogs.com/articles/101-writing-tips/

101 writing tips, written as illustrations of themselves.  I’ve always liked these, and this batch is the largest I’ve found so far.  Excerpts:

3. ASBMAETP: Acronyms Should Be Memorable And Easy To Pronounce, and SATAN: Select Acronyms That Are Non-offensive.

31. Injecting enthusiasm probably won’t do any harm.

65. If there’s a word on the tip of your tongue that you can’t quite pin down, use a cinnamon.

80. Double entendres will get you in the end.

http://www.bouldertherapist.com/html/humor/WordPlays/lexophiles.htm

Along the same lines, these are simple little phrases that use the english language in ways that are humorous.  Geared for people who love words.

4. A backward poet writes inverse.

14. Local Area Network in Australia : The LAN down under.

That’s all for now, but knowing myself and the internet, I’ll have a few hundred more by tomorrow.  Stumble is definitely a blessing and a curse.

There’s a place in Kalamazoo we like to go to.  I used to describe it to people by saying: “It’s like a bunch of computer students built a little shop for themselves to chill out in.  Electrical outlets all around the walls, wired in stereo system, tables all over, arcade machines in the back, all of that.  Then art students swooped in and took over, painting it green, covering the walls in art, and making it a coffee shop.”  While I doubt that particular origin story is true, the result is the same, and what you have is the Rocketstar, a small coffee shop and hangout for students across Kalamazoo.

One of the coolest things about the Rocketstar, aside from the atmosphere, is the selection of things to do that they offer.  Arcade machines in the back, a pool table, a stash of games in the front, and a collection of interesting ‘zines to flip through when you’re bored.  Not to mention the people.

My friends and I used to visit all the time just to hang out and chat over milkshakes.  Recently though, we often just go to hang out and play Scrabble.  Scrabble at the Rocketstar, however, is more of an art than a game.

Originally the Scrabble set they possessed was as normal as any to start off with.  Of course, over time in a place where it’s used fairly often, the occasional tile is lost.  Now and then, a new tile is found.  Sometimes someone would bring in extra tiles from home, and they got mixed in.  Sometimes someone would take a sharpie to a tile to change what letter it was.  This new tile set we started calling Rocket Scrabble.

Eventually the Rocket Scrabble tile set was tossed and a new set bought for the Rocketstar.  It lasted for all of a month, or something like that.  Jon and I were there a while back to play scrabble, and discovered we were short on tiles.  Quite short.  In fact,  while a normal Scrabble tile set contains 100 tiles, this one contained only 58.  We played an entire game before we realized just how short we were.  One thing we realized at the end was, it was e-less Scrabble.  Not a single E tile existed in the set.

It was surprisingly fun.

As an aside, here’s the tile set as it was after our game.

AAAA
B
DDD
FF
GGG
HH
IIIIIII
LLLL
NNNNN
OOOOOOOO
PP
Q
SSS
TTT
UUUU
VV
WW
X
Z

Over Dinner
Fiction by Hal Wierzbicki

Glasses clinked and plates clattered, adding to his tension. He wondered if he’d be able to do it tonight.

“So Mary-Anne at work was telling me about this great new show she saw on TV the other day, what was it, something about a lawyer and a cop solving crazy cases…“

He wasn’t listening. The waiter returned with their meals. It was the usual fare; a garden salad with Italian for her. A steak, medium rare, for him. He sawed off a piece of the meat, salted it, ate it. Before he swallowed, he went to work on a second bite. His knife slipped, grating across the plate. He cringed at the sound. She paused her monologue to sip at her tea and he savored the silence. A child shouted across the restaurant, repeating the same thing over and over. “I want the cake!” She started talking again, and he wished something as simple as dessert would shut her up.

“I want a divorce.” He said. She didn’t hear. He spoke too quietly. She never heard his thoughts anymore, not like she used to. He missed the days when body language told him more than her voice. How she did up her hair that day told him her mood, the tapping of her fingers betrayed to him her agitation. Thinking back now he wondered how she had turned into the woman who sat before him. She used to care about him, but it was all about her these days. Her job at the workout center, her friends, the things she did after work. He wondered if she remembered he had a life outside of her.

A waiter dropped a tray. Glasses shattered against the cold tile floor one after another. A hush came over the restaurant for a moment, everyone turning to see what had happened before dismissing it and resuming their meals. The waiter hurried out of sight. He chewed at a third bite, staring now at his plate. She continued to talk about her day.

“I want a divorce.” He said again, louder. She paused.

“Did you say something?”

He shook his head and cut off another bite. She continued her monologue, unaware that it was falling on deaf ears. He stared at the piece of meat on the end of his fork. Dull brown and dry. He put it down and stood. She looked up at him, and their eyes met. Her voice was silent at last, while her eyes asked the questions. For a moment, he remembered why he had married her in the first place. For the first time in months, her eyes actually saw him.

“Where are you going?” The first thing she had asked about him in days. He didn’t answer. Her voice cut through his memory, and he walked away.

~Finis

Author’s Note:   I don’t know how the formatting is going to turn out on the blog or on Facebook.  This is a second draft of a random piece of fiction I felt like posting to start getting my work out there.  If you’re reading this from the blog, feel free to leave a comment (C&C is welcomed), and if you’re reading this on Facebook…  Also feel free to leave me a comment, but be sure you do it in such a way I’ll find it, by which I mean not on Jon’s page.

Now, I’m the first one to say that you can forge a deep, meaningful relationship over the Internet.  To some extent the article I’m about to link supports me, though with a sarcastic enough voice I’m sure it’s not his intent.  Lines like “Ever since we crawled out of the mud and started hitting each other over the head with rocks, attraction has worked this way: I see you across the room. You see me. Something clicks. We approach. We talk. If there’s some kind of connection between our inner selves — even if it’s just a mutual desire to rub chocolate pudding over each other’s naughty bits — we get on with the business at hand. But the Internet has turned things upside down. Now, things work the other way around. Our inner selves meet and connect, and then we get to the raw, physical-attraction thing.”

Still, this story reminds me why you always have to be cautious in what you do online.  While a deep, meaningful relationship can come from AIM Chats and webcams, there’s also a more sinister side.  If it’s too good to be true…  I probably is.

Also, Harlan Ellison is a character.  This simply further reaffirms my respect and admiration for the man.  Of course, I have no idea whether or not this article is factual or not, though being in News for the LA Weekly, I suspect it is.

 The Life and Death of Jessie James

Read.  Be frightened.  Be amused.  Believe it, or not.

We monitor the traffic here at this site using my program Obsessive Website Statistics, which has the ability to generate neat little heatmaps. Well, this site got linked from boingboing about the previous post, so the heatmap is pretty amusing. Check it out.

So, I created this awesome wrapper around the BSD fortune-mod program that is installed on my Gentoo server at home, and it came out really nicely (and was done quickly) for being coded at 2:30am… hehe. Anyways, it allows you to produce silly random quotes like the following:

 _______________________________________________
/ Win95 is not a virus; a virus does something. 
|                                               |
 -- unknown source                             /
 -----------------------------------------------
           ^__^
           (xx)_______
            (__)       )/
             U  ||--WWW |
                ||     ||

Link: Random Quote Generator

Jon recently got me started on a site called Kongregate. It’s one of those collections of flash games and the like, but with a twist: Certain games have “Kongregate Versions” that grant you Badges and Achievements on the site itself. On top of that, rating games earns you points. Or, if you’re a game developer, you can earn points by submitting games and having your games rated. Developers even can potentially win cash money in the weekly and monthly contests. You don’t have to only play the Badge games, but really, you could go anywhere else for games if you didn’t want meaningless points.

That’s the thing; so far, the points are very meaningless. They have various ranking lists and so forth (I’m currently number 10 on the ‘most points gained this week’ leaderboard) but, other than that, they’re simply to have. Eventually Kongregate will have it’s own site-wide online TCG, which is still in development. Currently you can earn one card a week, sort of like promo cards for doing certain things. Like the badges, but the option to get them doesn’t last forever.

Oh, and you can earn points by referring members, and by having those referred members gain levels, up to their level ten. Which brings me to why I’m writing this. Partly to get Jon’s essay off the top, and partly to pimp my own link.

http://kongregate.com/?referrer=Nighthand

To be fair, since Jon did invite me, and this IS his blog, I’ll post his link too. So it’s up to you, anonymous blog audience, to choose who to sign up under!

http://kongregate.com/?referrer=JonathanRyan

So we were bored and browsing the net on the Wii, looking for what did and didn’t work.  Dustin’s site has this nifty little thing where you shoot billboards, so we tried it.  It worked, so…  here’s some pictures.

They’re blurry, but recognizable.

Roadside Wii 1

Roadside Wii 2

-Hal

Well heres my useless guest blog post that will immediately be flagged as useless spam by google. :) Well maybe not. But anyways, I’m doing some website work for a guy at the computer guild, and today we were discussing some really crazy pricing that we had seen advertised.. for example, $12k for setting up Apache. Seriously, wtf? Very Web 1.0 it seems…

– Dustin

The Story

So, I’ve had a camera for a while now, and haven’t really been taking pictures of interesting things. It was about time I put it to use. Thus was spawned the idea for a photo scavenger hunt. The idea is this: I take pictures of things around campus; everything from odd spraypaint designs to bits of architecture, and post them here. Then it’s your turn. Your job is to find the places I take pictures of, and tell me where they are.

The Rules

We will number the pictures for easy reference. When you think you know where a picture is, add a comment with the location. Don’t forget to fill in a name! If you’re correct, we’ll add your name to a leaderboard. New pictures will be uploaded occasionally, depending on popularity of the game, while old pictures will be removed from the contest.

Now on with the pictures!

Photo Set One

Picture Number 1:

Picture Number 2:

Picture Number 3:

Picture Number 4:

Picture Number 5:

That’s it for Photo Set number 1! Get to searching, fellow denizens of WMU’s grounds!