Tag: culture

  1. Neologism: @here grenade

    03 May 2019

    @here grenade - noun phrase - The act of tagging a message @here (meaning, everyone) in a crowded Slack channel (users >= 100), causing everyone who's busy but monitoring to drop whatever they're doing and flame you for bothering them by messaging @here.  Normally done by a user trying to get a response to a maximum severity ticket that's been ignored for longer than the SLA.

    Example: "PFY threw an @here grenade into the #tech-support channel because the border router was on fire and the admins on call were ignoring their pagers.  He got kicked but at least the outage is over."

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  2. On the toxicity of USian gun culture.

    05 March 2018

    I've been keeping quiet about the mass school shooting in Florida some weeks ago because it's such a hot-button topic, and many people speaking out are catching harrassment and death threats - even the students who survived the massacre.  Of course, the National Rifle Association went on the record as saying, quote, "The NRA doesn't back any ban."  Meaning, of course, they'll do their damndest to hamstring any new legislation that has to do with guns.  It's also worth noting that there were multiple law enforcement officers - trained and armed - at the school, and they did nothing.  Which isn't surprising to …

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  3. Stalking the wild Toynbee tile.

    18 September 2010

    Last Saturday was 9/11, a day of infamy that went down in United States history as the day in 2001 when everything started going off the rails. In a strange sort of way, the year 2001 also figures into the history of science fiction thanks to the novel of the same name by Arthur C. Clarke, and the history of culture jamming and art hacking by way of license plate-sized wodges of linoleum and adhesive called Toynbee tiles. I've been fascinated by them for years, those cryptic messages which read TOYNBEE IDEA IN MOVIE 2001 RESURRECT DEAD ON PLANET …

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  4. ASCAP raising money to fight the new culture.

    28 June 2010

    One of the cornerstones of the Internet is making information available to whomever wants it for low or no cost. Case in point, the TCP/IP stack within the operating system you're now running to read this post was probably originally posted to the Internet better than twenty years ago under the BSD license. In fact, if you dig around inside the "About.." panes of Windows chances are you'll find that little block of text (at least, everything up to Windows 2000 had it, it's been a couple of years). The fan cultures that many of us partake of grew …

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