I've got a couple of people on my friends list who have been making spectacular use of the lj form. and tumblr/twitter aren't really doing it for me, as far as my microblog-your-life needs go. and I'm sick of living on facebook. hrm. anyway, should I resurrect my livejournal? or just start a real blog? or what?

Diogenes of Sinope, who lived between 412 or 403 B.C. and 324 or 321 B.C., was infamous. Wearing only a shabby robe, he wandered the streets of Athens and then Sinope after he was exiled for defacing the Athenian currency. He engaged powerful people in playful debate, often exposing their hypocrisy. Asked which city-state he claimed as his own, he ( Read more... )

"We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace--business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering ( Read more... )

I have no idea when I wrote this -- college, maybe? For those not in the know, nomic is a game where the initial rules only specify that players can propose and vote on new rules. Back in the late 90s/early 2000s there were many active internet nomics, with extremely large, complex rulesets, and each with its own sort of idiosyncratic society built ( Read more... )

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Dreamed last night that the urban legend about Mr. Rogers' arms being heavily tattooed was real, but that there were a couple of episodes where he'd take off his sweater and talk about his tattoos with the kids.

Philip Pullman quote:

In the wake of the Harry Potter extravaganza, one remark Pullman makes in the interview is particularly telling: "I'm sure that far more adults have read His Dark Materials because they were published as children's books than would have done if they had been published as fantasy ( Read more... )

So, yeah, just finished the last book in the HDM trilogy. It's the first thing I've read in a long, long while that's generated the sensation that I get right after (for example) Miyazaki movies; that sense that everything is sparkly and right and blah blah.

I don't really do book reviews [1], but: 1st book is extremely exciting, 2nd book is a ( Read more... )

So I am well-ensconced in my room in the ridiculous neighborhood. Since everywhere in NYC seems kinda dirty to me, most of my metrics for assessing what is or is not a rich neighborhood are completely busted. The new rule of thumb I'm using is that the wealth of a neighborhood is directly proportional to the number of obviously anorexic women in it ( Read more... )