Aku Aku

War?

Others:"North Korea has nukes, our response: diplomacy. Iraq has no nukes, our response: war. The difference? Oil.""Go SOLAR not ballistic"The man on stage just asked, "are we going to take this message across the nation?" Yes sir, I'm doing that right now.....--Dav via Danger Hiptophttp://www.danger-island.com/dav/

anti-war march

San Francisco civic center, more crowded than previous rallies I've been to here. Blue skies. A beautiful day to care about the world.--Dav via Danger Hiptophttp://www.danger-island.com/dav/

Laden vs USA

Found via Cheesedip:

Reuters, via Yahoo: "A man plays with an electronic game called 'Laden versus USA' which shows the faces of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and U.S. President George W. Bush, that was on sale on a street in Baguio City, northern Philippines, January 12, 2003. The toy, made in China, is on sale for P250 ($4.70). The game plan is to defend the twin towers by shooting down the bombers.

Interesting angle. Note that it's not Bush vs Bin Laden, or even Laden vs Bush. Subtlely implying a more human demeanor to Bin Laden while treating the USA as some abstract foe? I dunno. I suppose it's no worse than all the USA vs Arab Terror interactive flash animations on the web now.

giant squid alert

Possibly all a publicity stunt for the Jules Verne round-the-world race? Giant squid attacks boat - smh.com.au

Veteran yachtsman Oliver de Kersauson, at the helm of the trimaran Geronimo, said the boat was hit by strange vibrations on Sunday, so he sent a crew member below deck to try to identify what was wrong.

"Suddenly he saw something moving," de Kersauson said. "It was tentacles."

I'd like to think I know how I'd react if my ship were attacked by a giant squid in the middle of the ocean, but I really just can't imagine. But I know what Richard Van Pham would do; he'd make soup.
- via anitpixel.

twin peaks

On top of twin peaks. On the horizon to the west the sun falls to the
pacific. To the east the full moon rises above oakland. Behind me in the
photo, to the north, is the golden gate and marin county. Near to me a
man sits on a rock in the lotus position facing the sunset and
meditating. On the ground nearby someone has left a memorial of fruit
and flowers. Friday, January 17, 2003, Sunset in SF.
--
Dav via Danger Hiptop
http://www.danger-island.com/dav/

tokyo Moveable Type meetup pics

Some photos Mie sent me from last night's Tokyo Moveable Type Meetup. Pictured (L to R) Mena and Ben Trott, Mie, Hunkabutta Mike, Nadine, Mie again and Sen "No Pictures" (oops) Nagata of the Neotony Blogging Team.

jlist japanese tshirts

My housemate Sean just sent me a link to J-List -- your friend in Japan where he's got an order for some Tshirts ready to submit. The Tshirts are written in kana and have slogans like "Looking for a Japanese Girlfriend" and "Your Mother has a Protruding Navel". Sean ordered "I am confident in my sexual power" and "Dirty American Devil". I added "I am strange foreigner" and "I am pervert".

roxie deli

The roxie deli @ san jose ave and san juan. It's a tiny corner market
with a deli and a Brooklyn feel, often crammed with folks in line for
some great sandwiches, such as the two foot tuna melt with everything
and swiss on sour dough I'm about to order.

I went to see a band last night at the Red Devil Lounge.
Tried in vain to get a photo to come out and in the process lost the
hiptop camera for about 45 minutes until I found it on the floor near
the bar; I think I need to make a leash for it. One patron at the bar
was quite excited by my Hiptop, because she "works for the VC who
invested in Danger," and hadn't actually seen Joe Q. Public with one
yet.

--
Dav via Danger Hiptop
http://www.danger-island.com/dav/

the state of business

Here's what's left of the XXX Vendor and Device Lists, where XXX stands for, well, you'll see.

I for one can't even believe these guys! I mean, they couldn't invest a stamp or a phone call to talk to me? They couldn't just send me e-mail, like everyone else? NO, the very first thing they do is hire some law firm to threaten to sue me in federal court! For God's sake, what's wrong with these assholes? I've supported their work for years; I've guided vendors to become members of the SIG; I've offered them my work. I would gladly not use their logo if they'd ever said a simple word about it. But no, nothing short of a dagger to the heart is good enough.

What a sad sad world we live in. Death of the public domain, death of common decency. All we've got left in abundant supply is Fear and Greed.

bust.meetup.com

So I'm sitting here at Kezar's on Cole St because that's where this month's blog meetup is supposed to be happening. But all I found was a dark bar filled with very uninteresting-looking yuppie drinkers and tv-watchers, and a staff that knows nothing about a meetup. So much for this experiment, I'm off to catch a band.

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.