A picture is worth a thousand words

Not too long ago, Z (gavriela) was musing about how strange it was to be able to click around LJ and get snippets of other people's lives. I've found a dangerously addictive new pasttime along those lines. It goes into far less detail, but casts a broader net. It is the Random Personal Picture Finder. What this thing does is generate a random filename in the style of default filenames used by digital cameras and run said filename through Google's image search engine. The result of this is a buttload of various people's digital pictures that they've put up on the web. I find it fascinating. I remember being made aware of this device some time ago and checking it out, but it wasn't working. For some reason I remembered it again today and checked it out again and found it working, and then I spent way too long playing with it. It's great for the voyeur in me...just tiny little snapshots, literally, of other people's lives. Buildings and cars and scenery and such, which is all well and good, but I'm in it for the people. People just cooking in their kitchen, or hanging out at parties, or going on vacation, or getting married, or having babies, or doing....well, whatever. I guess if you hunt enough you might find some porn here and there; hell, I found a photo gallery of booth babes from a car show in Thailand. It's great though...just what I always wanted from the internet. A photo album for the world. Better than clip art. :)

Anyway, that's about as productive as I got with my day, today. :) I had a lot of trouble waking up this morning...I woke up far earlier than expected, but then spent a couple hours twitching and shaking and phasing in and out of experiencing a dream which I can only describe as the first half of an infernal and mutated remake of Catch Me If You Can. There might have been some Cast Away thrown in there, too. Gratuitous Tom Hanks is what I'm trying to get at, here...but twisted, evil Tom Hanks. I wish I could remember more specifics than that, but that's just how my relationship is with my dreams these days.

Some days ago, I pulled the same stunt: woke up early and spent the next couple hours phasing in and out of a dream. This one was more interesting, I thought...it was one of those situations where it takes me a long time to separate the dream from reality. In the dream, I met someone at a party...it was some friend of Jay-Jay's...a woman whose name, I recall, was pronounced "shmee-lee". Or just "shmee" for short. (Now that I think about it...wasn't that Vader's mom or something?) Anyway, in the dream, I knew I'd met this person before, and I was racking my brain to figure out where or when. Then I phased back to the waking world, and I thought, "Oh...it was just a dream. Well that's good...now that I'm in my right mind, maybe I can remember where I know that person from." So I thought about it and thought about it, and it finally dawned on me that no, it was just a dream, and I don't actually know that person. But there was this lingering doubt...which world was correct? Did I actually know that person or not? I couldn't shake that feeling for a long time. Anyway, I phased back into the dream, and more shenanigans were had. I phased back to the real world again, and thought about waking up for good. I thought about writing down the dream, because it was the most I'd remembered about a dream in a really long time. I thought about it and thought about it, and then I guess I probably drifted off again. I later phased back to reality once more, and thought about waking up for the day again. I thought, "Damn...good thing I wrote down that dream. There's no way I'm going to remember all this later." Sure enough, in a little while I'd forgotten pretty much everything about the dream. I discovered this, of course, because I completely failed to write anything down. I had only thought about doing it, but because I was in the phasing state, I was completely convinced that thought had equaled action, and that I'd actually written it all down. So sadly the only thing I have to report about that dream is shmee-lee. That, and somehow the story involved a doorknob coming off in my hand. I mourn the loss of that dream...I'm sure it was a good one. :)

There's this article in Wired about blog plagiarism. I hesitated even bringing this up or linking the link, because I feel like this is a non-story. It seems like it's the nature of blogs to be idea broadcasters. Anybody keeping a blog on an insanely public forum like, say, the Internet, should expect their ideas to be read, if not outright desire them to be grokked and ripped and spread. I mean...attribution is nice and a mark of courtesy, but from what I read in the article, they're not talking about plagiarism, really...they just seem to be talking about the spread of interesting topics or links or something. I dunno...I guess I don't have a lot to say on the matter; it just struck me as odd that it was mentioned at all. Whatever. Fear my implicit copyright, you copycats! ;) But, yeah, I have no big problem with blogs being the big vector for meme transmission. :)

Still being able to propagate links with a clear conscience, I'd now like to point out Let them sing it for you. It's this neat sound art project that lets you type in lyrics and sends you back the sound of those lyrics being sung by various sampled pop artists singing each individual word. It's pretty trippy, so long as you choose words that they've already got sampled. They've got a way for you to request more, but unsurprisingly, they've gotten a huge influx of requests and it's apparently a painstaking process to expand the database, so I didn't muck about with it too much. Still, it's neat. And here's a project if you're feeling uninspired: just type in the word "power" and try to identify the sample. I expect players of Karaoke Revolution and fans of Back to the Future to recognize it immediately. :)

I have two PSAs for you today. One, grownups are dumb. Two, never forget the transience of art.

And in closing, a brief poll. Which do you think will be decriminalized first, weed or breasts? :) Peace, everybody.

"The same thing we do every night, Pinky..."

So, uh...yeah. They think they've found the gene that gives humans their brainy edge. I ordinarily wouldn't have spread this article, I don't think....I was just cruising through it...research, evolution, blah blah blah...but then I got to the final paragraph. This dude's next step is injecting said gene into mice to see what happens. To this I can only say, "NOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!"