Aku Aku

waiting on edamame

At the AMC 1000 on Van Ness, before the midnight showing of Two Towers -- Dav via Danger Hiptop

joining the hiptop nation

My Hiptop has arrived, and I've just joined the Hiptop Nation (here's my personal hiptop nation blog).

I'm sure I'll whip up some cool code for it soon.

lotr: the two towers

Went to the 12:01 am showing of Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers(2002). I'll probably rewrite this tomorrow when I've had time to consider it more, but my first impression is mixed. I personally enjoyed it, but I think this is where the trilogy is going to lose some of the audience who never read the books. Honestly, I don't know how they'll be able to keep up with everything that's going on. In the first movie they were able to leave out large portions (Tom Bombadil, the barrowights, etc) that didn't really detract from the main storyline ...but in this episode they had to pack a lot more of the original book into three hours. This is one where the extended DVD with an extra hour or so might make a whole lot more sense...

pakistani politics

And you thought American politics got ugly: Yahoo! News - Pakistan Woman Councilor Beaten, Paraded Naked

LAHORE, Pakistan (Reuters) - Pakistan's leading rights group said Sunday it was shocked at the public humiliation of a woman councilor beaten and paraded naked through a village on the orders of a powerful landlord.

and it goes on to say:

Earlier this year a woman was gang-raped on the orders of a traditional jury in a village in the Punjab province.

creative commons launch

Sean, Gora and I went to the Creative Commons Launch party. Sean has a good write up of it on his blog so just read that.

My addition to his comments:

• The corporate bigwig who sang the praises of Lessig and Creative Commons was Jack Valenti.
  
• There was also a fantastic flash animation that explains the Creative Commons story, begining with a relevant bit about current rock sensations The White Stripes.
  
• Another video performance was by People Like Us
  

I spoke with DJ Spooky briefly afterwards, he gave me a pretty cool home-burnt CD of something he'd created. It's pretty good.

creative commons licenses

Another weapon for the people: Creative Commons Licenses are now online!

santarchy 2002

Last night was Santarchy 2002 here in San Francisco. I estimate there were near 100 Santas (and one Christmas Bunny) participating in a mad santa crawl that started in Oakland, crossed on the ferry, bumrushed the Mission (where I joined the festivities), took BART from 24th Street to Powell, seriously upset consumers in union square, visited the Lusty Lady (I probably shouldn't have licked the glass), sowed the seeds of future therapy sessions for dozens of innocent children, and spread out over North Beach like an evil red fog. Amazingly no one got arrested, even when the bunny and I hopped through an open window onto a moving yuppy party trolley, danced around and jumped back out through the window.

My photos of the event

ganguro

I just stumbled across this site when clicking through someone else's blog: Ganguro. This ganguro thing was popular when I was in Japan in 1998 but it seems to have died off now (I saw maybe two of these girls when I was there a couple of months ago, and many many of them in 1998). As a style movement it fascinates me. It's not exactly attractive. But it sort of is. But maybe it's just because the girls were attractive in the first place? I don't know. I like weird things though, I wish it would catch on in the States, ha.

revenge of a child

An editorial written by an Israeli which attempts to exlpain the current violent events in the middle east: Revenge of a Child

An ordinary Israeli, who has never been in the Palestinian territories, cannot even imagine the reasons for this rage. Our media totally ignore the events there, or describe them in small, sweetened doses. The average Israeli knows somehow that the Palestinians suffer (it�s their own fault, of course), but he has no idea what�s really happening there. It doesn�t concern him, anyhow.

I visited Israel and Palestine in December of 2000, and I can tell you from experience it's a shockingly different quality of life on either side of those borders. Going over there I had no opinion whatsoever on the middle east. Frankly I could never get straight who was who and what exactly they were fighting about. I came back sympathetic to the Palestinian plight and that sympathy has only been reinforced by the research I have done since then. Nobody is right in this "conflict", and everyone has been wronged, but the Palestinians have been wronged so much more and the Israelis have the power to make it right.

japanese on u.s. military

They must have taken a long time to find the one guy who took the U.S. side in this street poll...

Japan Today - What do you think about crimes committed by U.S. military personnel?

"There are so many American military guys all around Tokyo, especially in Shibuya and Roppongi. Whenever I hear about so many reports of them committing crimes, I tend to worry that one day something bad might happen to me as well. I would like to ask them to obey the law. I used to have a nice image of America but these kinds of incidents ruin it." -Yuki Chugun, 15.

I think the fact that few of those quoted bothered to distinguish between the criminal G.I.'s and the U.S. presence in general tells the story. What are we still doing there anyhow? What's our problem?

I guess I should disclose that I lived in Okinawa for a year when I was 9-10 because my father was in the U.S. Marine Corps stationed there. We lived in town, not on base, so all of my neighbors were Okinawan, and I personally enjoyed living there very much.

Designed By a Tree

I love this concept of creating a font which is carved into a tree and then updated yearly by capturing how the tree has modified it by growing.

 

 

 

Food Delivery 2021

Ran across an interesting project which at initial glance is about food delivery called Free Food. As I explain below, that's free as in speech not beer.

The creator of it, Noah Levenson, has a pretty good intro video:

Given the project name, at first I thought it was about getting food that would be thrown out distributed to hungry folks, but watching the video, it became clear that this is more about being able to order food directly from verified local restaurants on a decentralized trust network and avoiding the (almost criminally) inefficient middle man services like DoorDash, GrubHub, UberEats, etc. The README for the project explains the goals well and has a quick run down on why the middle man food "delivery" apps/services are so bad.

Using a decentralized network (think BitTorrent more than BitCoin) it allows for restaurants owners to verify their ownership of a particular local restaurant and publish their menus. This protects against the type of unauthorized listings and other fakery that the middle man services engage in, so you know you're dealing with the real restaurant. Hungry people can find the menus of nearby restaurants and place orders. Reference implementations of the diner and restaurant clients are shown, although I didn't see the source for them available. Presumably the restaurant uses its existing delivery staff for the delivery, or you can pick up.

This is an interesting project, particularly because it's potential goes well beyond just restaurant delivery. Really any resource that can benefit from decentralized (no valueless middle man required) localized (relevant to you, where you are now) discovery can benefit from this type of system. In theory a delivery drivers could advertise themselves as resources and the system could do the matchmaking. Since the network is decentralized this would mean they wouldn't have to share their fee with a middle man network provider.

I'd definitely give this a shot if it started up in my area. In the meantime there is a better sort of food delivery service that I've been using lately and have been quite happy with. It is called Club Feast (use my referral code dav1 if you try it out!). While it still is a middle man service, they have a twist on it that should benefit both the restaurants and the delivery drivers. It requires you to order your meals hours in advance (it used to be the previous day but in the past month they have been able to move it up to same day). This allows the restaurant and delivery network time to optimize the food preparation and the routes. It is a subscription service, which means you sign up for a certain number of meals a week and pre-pay for them as credits. It lets unused credits stack up and you can pause, so it is fair to the subscriber. The meal credits themselves are $7 each, so the meals are inexpensive although limited to what the restaurant decides to make available for $7. There are tons of options though so that has not been a problem for me in San Francisco. It seems like a great win-win-win compromise for the restaurants, drivers and customers, although I would love for a journalist to investigate and report on the actual outcomes.

Would a robust Free Food network be better than Club Feast? Perhaps? CF optimizes a somewhat different problem, but perhaps that could be layered into FF as well? Is there additional value CF could bring that benefits from its centralization? Not really sure. Some things I am sure about are that both of these are better than the dominant centralized apps, and that Free Food really needs to change its name, and the paltry amount of tests in `libfood` is scary 😂.

 

An Ode to Roblox as a Gathering Place

I haven't spent a lot of time in Roblox, even though both of my kids have spent significant amounts of their time and my money there, but this essay about how it compares to those places where teenagers hang out and create their own space away from the rest of the world really resonates. It makes me want to give it a try again.

Some choice excerpts:

On his first experience in Roblox:

In one of the very first games we played together (a work-in-progress safari game, the link to which I have since lost), V became a zebra, and I was a lioness. We ran around a broad plain populated by other animals, trees in the distance, low clouds overhead, and the buzzing of insects on a 2-minute loop. The chat was full of messages from prey to prey, predator to predator. V was almost immediately killed by a cheetah who then got in the chat to say, “Overyone come to pr,” “theres meat.” Summoned, I did so, and as I ate the still-living digital body of my friend in the company of a stranger in the shape of a wild dog, I thought, “Oh. This is special.”

On the game creation tools:

But perhaps the most interesting thing about Roblox Studio is the Toolbox. Other game engines have assets stores, but none of them feel like this: a rollicking, copyright-fucked, messy, virus-filled, unsortable pile of labor and of love.

On the long tail of forgotten worlds (games) waiting to be stumbled upon:

But the things I am making in Roblox are not what are unique or compelling about Roblox, and the same could be said for most of the big games that populate the platform’s front page. Instead, what is so special here are the millions of bizarre little worlds, all networked together and waiting (mostly empty, sometimes for over a decade) to be dropped into and explored with friends.

On the "brutal" monetization situation:

As a developer, you can monetize your own games in a variety of ways, from the above-board (tip jars! cosmetics!) to the scammy. Developers earn 70% of Robux spent in their games, which is a pretty standard cut for an app store/developer split. However, getting USD back out of Robux is a different story. The payout exchange rate drops to $0.0035 USD per 1 Robux, meaning the takeaway in real world currency is roughly 24.5% of any in-game commerce—a brutally extractive exchange rate.

Fighting Date Rape With Nail Polish

Now that Bill Cosby got an early release from prison, my friend Paul brought my attention to the company Undercover Colors that developed a clear nail polish that allows you to check a drink for drugs by dipping a fingernail into the drink. The nail polish changes colors if drugs are encountered.

Brilliant! And love that it was founded by NC State students (didn't to school there, but did participate in their rugby club as a townie).

 

It looks like the product has evolved slightly to a more typical strip test kit though. I supposed the manufacturing costs proved too high? Hopefully they are still working on the more subtle version.

Post Pandemic Predictions

I started compiling this list before George Floyd was murdered, and its triteness bothers me now so I'm just going to post it and move on.

In no particular order:

• Masks largely stay culturally accepted in flu and allergy seasons from now on in the USA, but will always carry a political connotation so some groups will never wear them and mock those that do, but like punk rockers have always mocked people in suits.
• 15 years from now, a common trope will be determining how old some young adult is by what basic K-12 subject they seemed to have completely missed. "How old is Alexandra? Well she can never remember what a gerund is, she must be 27-28."
• It'll be seen as the inflection point for polyamory going mainstream when the released masses just can't get enough of each other 😂.
• 2021: long hair on dudes is back in fashion.
• The artist live stream phenomenon is too beloved to simply disappear, but outdoor live music venues are going to see a boom. There might even be a combination of the two.