Christmas at Ground Zero, 2016.
Merry Christmas and a joyous Yule, everybody around the world.
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The 2016 election and weird patterns on Twitter.
You've already read my opinion of the 2016 election's outcome so I'll not subject you to it again. However, I would like to talk about some weird stuff I (we, really) kept noticing on Twitter in the days and weeks leading up to Election Day.
As I've often spoken of in the past, a nontrivial portion of my exocortex is tasked with monitoring global activity on Twitter by hooking into the back-end API service and pulling raw data out to analyze. Those agents fire on a stagged schedule, anywhere from every 30 minutes to every two hours; a couple of …
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Memetic warfare in America.
The current state of anyone's capacity to get any useful information in the United States these days, which is to say next to impossible due to the proliferation of fake news sites and pro-trolls doing their damndest to lower the signal-to-noise ratio to epsilon, is the logical end result of the following progression of cliches:
"You can't believe everything people tell you."
"You can't believe everything you read in books."
"You can't believe everything you see on TV."
"You can't believe everything your friends tell you."
"You can't believe everything your teachers tell you."
"You can't believe everything you read …
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The @DNAlounge is in trouble.
20161228: The DNA has started a Patreon account to accept donations!
20161222: It seems that the DNA Lounge is coming up with contingency plans, and they need our help!
Yesterday, JWZ, owner and operator of the DNA Lounge in San Francisco, CA made an upsetting and disturbing announcement.
The DNA Lounge is in danger, and may have to close down soon.
JWZ bought the space that is now the DNA roughly 17 years ago and during that time it's become one of the premiere hotspots of SF nightlife. Just about any kind of event you can imagine has been thrown …
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Neologism: Hopepothesis
Hopepothesis - noun - What you come up with when you really don't know what you're doing or what's going on, but you pull something out of your ass anyway. If anybody asks, that's your working hypothesis.
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To everybody waiting on responses..
It's the holidays. I'm pretty busy right now, and hoping I don't have a sinus infection. I haven't forgotten about anybody. I'll get to the time-sensitive stuff first, and rest as I can.
Happy holidays.
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Blind Guardian - 5 October 2016
Historically, it's rare that Blind Guardian goes on tour in the United States, so whenever they come to the States we scramble to get tickets because they put on a hell of a show. Around the house we jokingly call them elven thrash metal because their lyrics are steeped in the works of Moorcock and Tolkien, with influences from many different myth cycles, such as Arthurian legend. To be blunt, their show was face-meltingly good. They played some classic crowd singalongs like The Bard's Song and Valhalla during the show and brought the house down in so doing.
Unfortunately, when …
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A thought on memorization and memory techniques.
In many memorization techniques it is often taught that you should make use of overly vivid, even absurd imagery to make sure that bits of information stick in whatever organizational technique you might use, be it a ladder of pegs or something as elaborate as the method of loci. Sometimes you have to work to make something stick, and sometimes the absurd makes itself known spontaneously.
Have you ever pondered why there are so many things that you simply can't unsee on the Internet?
Stop and think about all the things that you wish you'd never seen over the years …
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Shaun King: Recording from a Corporate Meeting about the Dakota Access Pipeline
Supposedly, the man speaking is Matthew Ramsey, COO of Energy Transfer Partners.
The interesting bit is around the 6:30 mark.
Just in case, I've put up a local mirror of the recording.
The thread talking about it starts here.
Remember to pick this the hell apart and run every last detail to ground.
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The 2016 election was not rigged.
There, I said it.
I don't think that votes were messed with, I don't think that any (horribly insecure) voting machines were tampered with, and while jerrymandering is totally a thing I don't think it had anything to do with the election. I think that appealing to people's most deeply held beliefs, the ones that few are willing to talk about openly had everything to do with it.
Donald Trump is everything that USians want to be, deep down inside. Let's be honest: Whether or not Donald Trump is really as rich as he says doesn't matter. What matters is …
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