Of course, I joined up. Cilantro is the worst flavoring ever. It’s always being snuck into my food.
I hate cilantro.

fallenidol: How to download trailers from the Apple site WITHOUT Quicktime PRO
I saw this in my delicious feed. It looks similar to what I did for my This Mobile Life greasemonkey script.

Perhaps I can automate this a little for people. It may be possible to make a GM_XmlHttpRequest on the file linked, determine if it has a *.mov string in it and then change the link. What you want to avoid is downloading a whole .mov file just to check it! Not sure if greasemonkey can do that.
If you want me to look into it, let me know.

Life hacker posted a recommendation about a new service: SiteAdvisor web site tester – Lifehacker. I got a gawker login and commented recommending people look into OutFoxed instead.
A dedicated group of professionals can only catch what they are aware of. A well designed piece of social software turns all users into producers of information as well as consumers, the info produced is exactly the information most desired by consumers. And outfoxed is very well designed. Do check it out. If you’ve already got OutFoxed installed, I’m snarkhunt. You could add me as as a trusted referrer – I wouldn’t steer you wrong.

PICT0148,
originally uploaded by imbrettjackson.

After hitting an icy hunter mountain on saturday I was sick all day sunday while a foot and a half of snow dropped. Chairs have disappeared in my backyard.

I have to go in to work even though I’m sick. If I called in sick, no one would believe I wasn’t skiving off snowboarding.
Oh, how troubling is this world of mistrust.

This is what I want to design interaction around.
So much better than mouse.

If you can’t see the video, try this link.

The Scientific Activist: Reporting from the Crossroads of Science and Politics: BREAKING NEWS: George Deutsch Did Not Graduate From Texas A & M University

This story was terrible enough before I read that article.

Amidst all of the hullaballoo on the Danish Cartoon Debacle, I find this hopeful gem.

A major Iranian newspaper is holding an international competition for cartoons about the Holocaust to retaliate for the publication of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in a Danish newspaper last year.

…
The daily made it clear that the contest was being held to see whether freedom of expression extended to mocking Holocaust. It invited non-Iranian cartoonists to enter the contest.
–Nazila Fathi in the International Herald Tribune

I think it is actually positive. Instead of answer speech with violence, it is answering speech with speech.

While Danish cartoonists certainly have the right to draw cartoons that are offensive to Muslims, islamic cartoonists have the right to draw offensive cartoons right back, illustrating how hurtful and angering an image can be.

At least it is a conversation instead of an altercation.

The israeli response is understandable as well, if also ethically questionable.

The Israel News Agency is asking every SEO advertising marketing professional to create Web pages and optimize the keywords: “Iran Holocaust Cartoon Contest” in order to prevent the Iran newspapers, the enemies of Israel, the Jews, the Christians and Western democracy from attaining a high Google and Google News position. The SEO contestants will wrap these keywords around their comments of how Iran has sponsored Islam suicide bombing terror attacks against innocent men, women and children in Israel.
—Israel News Agency

They are not just trying to silence their opposition, they are trying to promote their argument in search engines. I’m not sure how well this will keep people from finding hateful cartoons from either side or help people to discuss the issue. While it is a response, it doesn’t seem to be responsive. It seems like it would be more of an ad hominem argument, not a response to where the limits of free expression stand.

This is a documentary and it is a horror movie. Prepare to be aghast.

Simon Perry has a good review of this movie as well.
This is the best horror movie I’ve seen in a while. I watched Saw II recently with Sam and didn’t bother to review it, because it was crap. Yeah, you cringe a little bit when these unlikeable characters do horrible things to each other, but not nearly as much as you cringe when you are watching these real, likeable people imprisoned in hundreds of pounds of flesh.

Watching feeder Mark reasonably and intelligently discuss his reasons for pushing his wife Gina to grow from 245 lbs to a mind bending 800 lbs is pure horror. Watching his home movies of her naked in various poses is uber creepy. And then you get started on the devastation that was wrough upon poor Gina’s body. How’s about this phrase:

Her skin there has grown to about an inch thick and has taken on the leathery texture of an elephant.

How can Se7en compete with that?

Apparently what is going on is even worse than what they are showing, which includes the tale of a woman imprisoned by her feeder/lover in his house as he grows her too big to leave. Guys are discussing funnels and feeding tubes to grow their fat girls. You get to see the hints of some pictures that are truly horrific.

This is a presentation of BBC’s channel 4 and doesn’t appear to be for sale or available on netflix. If you are a citizen of the emerald isle, the bbc is opening all of their content for you. I don’t think they’d mind if you downloaded it from one of the bittorrent sites out there.

Who doesn’t like the idea of starting anew? Australian Danny Morgan does it by floating off in the sky in his lawnchair suspended by a bunch of huge helium balloons. He lands in a little town where no one knows who he is and they have enough paxil in the water that everyone just accepts his scruffy ass as a visiting university professor. Maybe people in Australia are just really trusting and accepting.

Everything from there out is standard romantic comedy. I’m not spoiling anything when I say he falls in love with a girl in the new place, he cleans up and shaves his face, then there are some complications in the romance that are resolved.

It’s good popcorn. But it’s basically the story of “Lawnchair” Larry Walters (pic)wrapped up in a romantic comedy with a positive ending. Larry Walters wanted to fly. His eyesight was too poor for the airforce so he tied his lawnchair to the bumper of his truck and tied 10 weather balloons to his lawnchair. It floated. So he tied 32 more balloons to the lawnchair and got in it along with some soda and a bb gun ( to regulate height by popping balloons) . Then he cut the cord. His plan was to rise to about 30-100 feet over the house, hang out for a while, then pop some balloons and descend.

He shot up to 16,000 feet, where it is very cold and oxygen is thin.

He did not descend in a magical town where everyone is full of love, joy and acceptance. He was first noticed by a plane trying to land at LAX. When he descended, he was arrested by LAPD for violating LAX airspace and eventually was served a $4000 fine.

He did some bits on the lecture circuit for a while and eventually shot himself in the heart after a walk in the woods. No wife, no girlfriend, no kids, no romantic comedy.

Mark Barry‘s website has a lot of good info on the larry walters story.

Currently I’m looking at John Ninomiya’s cluster ballooning website and thinking…

David Wellingtons’s Monster series.
When I first got my PDA I was really happy to read David Wellington’s zombie novel Monster Island. It was a great read and managed to take the silly idea of the undead rising, hungry for braiinsss and turn it into a good, well thought out read. You root for the hero, an aid worker in Africa, who is sent back to post-apocalypse Manhattan to pick up AIDS drugs for a warlord. All the cliches and conventions of the genre are present, but well reasoned and sort of believable, once you get past the whole zombies-exist thing. And he doesn’t muck about with that – you gotta believe the undead walk. Once you make that agreement with the author, the rest is good.

It was a great read and I loved it – he’s got two sequels that I’ve been meaning to read but never gotten around to, Monster Nation and Monster Planet. The great news is that he’s also coming out with a new novel that you can get in on the ground floor with – it’s called Thirteen Bullets and it looks to be a modern vampire story. I’ve read the first chapter and immediately subscribed to the novel’s rss feed.

Monster Island is copyrighted, the rest appears to be Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial-NoDerivatives which means you can give it away, but you can’t do anything with it. This explains why there are so few versions of these works, which makes them more difficult to read. I had some problems reading Monster Island as a word doc, but it was the best on the pocketpc.

Roger Williams’ Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect
A buddy pointed this one out to me. It’s farfuture, post-singularity stuff. Humanity has uploaded, but not everyone is comfortable with the idea. How do you amuse yourself when death is not the end and the world is out of danger?
Here’s the “jacket copy”:

Lawrence had ordained that Prime Intellect could not, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. But he had not realized how much harm his super-intelligent creation could perceive, or what kind of action might be necessary to prevent it.

Caroline has been pulled from her deathbed into a brave new immortal Paradise where she can have anything she wants, except the sense that her life has meaning.

Now these two souls are headed for a confrontation which will force them to weigh matters of life and death before a machine that can remake — or destroy — the entire Universe.

The real surprise is the end, where the author doesn’t pussy out and follows the story all the way down into a great conclusion.
You can download the whole novel/site as a zip, or read it online.
The work is copyrighted, but with fairly liberal and specific terms. You can hand out copies, but you can’t hand out derivative works.

Charlie Stross’s Accelerando
This is another great look at the singularity. This book follows a family from this side of the singularity out to the other side. It’s also a joyous flip to MOPI, as the main characters are in love with the very bleeding edge. Written and published serially as seperate short stories, the book totally hangs together as one work. I’ve never seen anything more persuasive that the person I am is not just defined by the meat in my cranium. Also, features sentient legal structures. How hot is that.
You can get this novel in a bewildering number of ways. People have apparently gone apeshit with the creative commons license and converted it into EVERYTHING. I downloaded the single Html file, as that was the easiest way to read in my pocketpc.

Kelly Link’s Stranger Things Happen
It’s a dreamy collection of fantasy/fairytale themed short stories. Some sad, some funny. I mentioned it before, when I read it. I liked it enough that I made a conversion of it that’s better for the pocket pc.
She’s licensed it very liberally, so there’s tons of formats.

And of course, there are the collected works of Cory Doctorow. Click open new tab on that or you’ll never reach the end of this post. There’s an rss feed, but you are better off subscribing to boingboing.net, he always mentions new work there as well. I’ve been listening to his podcast, and it’s really great for the subway. There is a ton of stuff here, and it is all incredible. All of it.

For future stuff, check out the bit of my blogroll called lit – it’s a list of online updating ficiton that I’m reading.