Hmmm, what does one do when they don’t keep up one blog? Start another one! :) Actually, I ran across the concept of the tumblelog, and I thought it sounded like a good place for the interesting things I pass up because I don’t really think about them as a blog post. So, I’ve started one at phantom-thought.com, hosted by Tumblr. Let’s see how it goes. The name for the tumblelog comes from a Thomas Hardy poem I ran across one day. ...

Okay, I’m back to Bloglines after two days. Google Reader was okay, but the way I use feed readers doesn’t quite match up yet. For one thing, when you email an entry from Bloglines, it includes the entire entry. Google Reader cuts it off after a bit. I also like organization options that go beyond alphabetical. Not too far from where Google Reader is now, but those sorts of things bothered me more than Bloglines’ occasional problems with feeds. I did like Reader’s approach to marking items as read. (You scroll past, and it’s read. In Bloglines, you open the feed, and everything’s read.) ...

I’ve been a faithful Bloglines subscriber for years now, but I’m finally breaking down and trying out Google Reader to see if it clears up a problem I’ve been having with indexing new items. I hated the Reader interface before, but they’ve sped up the AJAX-y effects, which makes it a lot more tolerable. Anyway, the one thing I noticed immediately is that there doesn’t seem to be a way to share feeds like in Bloglines, just individual items. I’ll have to see whether I like that or not. In the meantime, maybe it’ll be like a linkblog for me. So, News From Afar, which used to require the reader to work to find interesting content, now changes over to me having to work to keep interesting content. :| ...

In 1952, fashion designers were asked what women would be wearing in the year 2000. I like this one: Marcel Rochas envisions a spiral antenna headdress for thought transference; sunglass-shaped eye make-up; costume reminiscent of ancient armor; floating veils, and sandals of panther skin. I miss the days when you could walk into any store and buy panther skin clothes. Now all we have are free-range panthers, and they’re harder to catch. ...

Okay, let’s see how well spam knows me today: Get a visit from the big dick fairy Okay, Spam, I’m never reading you again. :(

This blog is largely just for me, and a few folks who stop by because they know me, or they’re searching for information on Jackie Manuel or the Google Teahouse Fox. So, I’m pretty used to low traffic numbers. However, I was floored when I suddenly received ten times the usual number of incoming visits over a couple of days, and was curious as to why. Ah, Jeremy Zawodny’s linkblog. Wow, it’s amazing what can happen when you get linked off a popular site. I know I read it most days. ...

I got nothing, so how about some Wikipedia? Cat, a domestic feline, Felis silvestris catus .cat, a top-level domain cat (Unix), the concatenate program in the Unix operating system Cat (Red Dwarf), a character in the TV show Red Dwarf Cat (role-playing game), an indie role-playing game about cats Cat (kingdom), a Dark Ages Pictish kingdom Note the Coat, Legs, Claws, Face, Fangs and Tail attribute system in the role-playing game. Nice. “I have a strong, healthy coat!” :) ...

There is an interesting article by Steven Pinker at Edge about the declining instinct towards violence. In the decade of Darfur and Iraq, and shortly after the century of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, the claim that violence has been diminishing may seem somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene. Yet recent studies that seek to quantify the historical ebb and flow of violence point to exactly that conclusion. - A History of Violence I’d say we aren’t as violent. I haven’t killed anything since last night (a bug), and this very morning I drove to a building, obeying traffic laws along the way, and handed someone some green paper with a mutually agreed-upon value in exchange for food. Right now I’m in another building, using my skills in exchange for more tokens of value, which I can convert into green paper when I’d like. It’s hard to create that sort of framework without a declining instinct towards violence. ...

There are creeps everywhere, man! They don’t even attack…they just keep taking punishment, and they just keep moving, like they don’t even feel it! :) For me, the sign of a good game is that hours after I play it, I’m sitting there thinking about better ways to play it. By that measure, Desktop Tower Defense is a good game. It looks easy at first, but then you start to realize the enemy (creeps) is getting a little farther each time, and those backup towers are starting to come into action, and you realize you aren’t going to make it another ten levels, and another hour has passed in defeat. ...

…you probably don’t really want to know. Courtesy of What Were They Thinking?