Having Fun Isn't Hard

Youtube recently revamped its search feature, but that can't stop me from finding nostalgic clips from PBS series!

I find myself blogging most often when I should be doing something else. Some people clean when they procrastinate, I tell the interblag what I found on the PBS website (Not the Arthur clip).

I just requested numerous items that probably won't arrive in time to help write the midterm I requested them for. But they still look interesting! A few of them were videos, so I may watch those if I remember to pick them up in time.

Did you know the song "Make 'Em Laugh" from Singin' In The Rain is actually plagerized? It's true! I read it on the internet. I'd play the more you know sound appropriately here, if I had it on my soundtrack shirt, which I do not wear enough. I'll get there. Currently, I'm still trying to optimize the rest of my daily wear. I think I want to add lights -- to avoid Doomesque situations.

Anyways, the original sidetracking thought was a new PBS series I was fortunate to catch last week about (the history of American?) comedy. I only caught the tail end and it's not on dvd yet since it hasn't finished its initial run, I suppose. There's an episode tonight. They have a web-exclusive episode called "Teh Internets". I can't wait to watch it! Unfortunately, I'm in the library and don't have time (it's 30 minutes) to watch it today. But you should!

Enflamed with Passion

I cannot draw penises this well.

I've never counted exactly how many feeds I'm subscribed to, but they extend almost to my status bar. Perhaps I'll do a screen cap sometime. There are some I only skim and others I wait to check. I'm not even sure why I added Upside Down Dogs to it; all the posts are titled "Photo". Of my many subscriptions, I strongly recommend Passive Aggressive Notes. The image above is my favorite post yet. It actually wasn't included in the post proper but it is absolutely fantastic. My favorite comment:

The orange penis is not ejaculating.

His genie is going back inside!

A blog is fine too

I wanted to do a research paper on Louis Wain, but it wasn't viable.

I had some midterms this week. I'm not happy with my performance. I'll blame Leibniz rather than Newton since I think I did splendidly on my physics test. Did you know Leibniz invented binary notation? Neat!

But that's not important.

I've started on my Halloween costume. It is not one of these, but it will be great. More on that at a later date.

Anyways, what I wanted to comment upon was something I encountered doing another ethics assignment.This time it was about bloggers and citizen journalism and standards of professionalism and... The case study was about Josh Wolfe and whether he is a journalist or not. I came down on the affirmitive side. If I was allowed to cite Wikipedia I'd point that he is included in the category: American journalists, but his Journalist of the Year award is better evidence. I'm sure that was one of the citerion they used when considering that categorization as well. As the class went on, I realized the class didn't share this opinion. I'm an introvert naturally and even more so when I feel myself in the minority opinion. I'm not elequent enough to win an argument against so many. I know the internet is serious business, but the class just sounded like Andrew Keen. I know by writing this, I am confirming many of the criticisms they expressed. In my amateur opinion they sounded a little afraid of the Internet. I don't blame them, but being a luddite just makes you sound butt-hurt. Everyone knows the internet is just for porn and cats anyways.

I've digressed. I did a little reading about Mr. Wolf while I was hastily writing why the Internet needs protection and found that he ran for mayor of San Fransisco in 2007. He failed spectacularly. More interesting to me were the write-in candiates. One vote for Robert McCullough and he's in the municipal history books. I just got my ballot, perhaps I shall try for some of this cheap immortality.

Pseudonymity

I find I work best in the early morning. It's strange but seems to work fairly well assuming I don't grossly underestimate the time and work required or my ink supply. Today's task is from my mass media ethics class and is about...ethics. The case study specifically concerns the creation of shill accounts and their effect on society and the marketplace. I wanted to find some mention of the wikiality that takes place on Wikipedia. I can't be sure how often it takes place, but I would suggest more often than Wikipedians will admit. Perhaps ironically, on the page dealing with criticisms of Wikipedia, including inaccurate and sometimes non-existent sourcing for controversial assertions in articles there are several dead external links. It seems that the North Adams Transcript doesn't keep an active archive. Whoops.

Despite it's many flaws, I still consider Wikipedia a nobel endeavor. I have both admiration and pity for those who spend their freetime editting a free encyclopedia. I'm not sure why they do it. I'm even less sure why toast shows up on the list of most vandalized pages.

In related news, I recently went to a little seminar featuring the creator of wiki technology, Ward Cunningham. It was very interesting.

Upgraded

Something horrible happened to me. I lost all my bookmarks. Thankfully, it happened just after I finished my finals. I've been too busy to worry about or address it but it's still frustrating. The bright side is that it cleaned out all the favorites I never bothered to revisit. The downside is that I have no idea what those favorites were.

Another unfortunate thing is that with the release of Firefox 3.0 many of my add-ons aren't compatible with the new version. Fortunately, ScribeFire isn't one of those. Don't let me give you the wrong impression, I'm very excited to break in my new browser, if not to reset all my feeds. What else is new?

I'll tell you later.

An Exciting New Direction

Poor, but honest. Sad, but true!

Between bouts of cleaning, existentialism, and reading my new favorite wikipedia article, I added FeedBurner to my blog(s). What does this mean to you, the reader?

I'm not sure yet. But it's exciting nonetheless.

Certain questions arise, such as, "Do I need to resubscribe to your web feed of now?" and "What is the proper use of a semicolon?"

Again, I'm not sure yet. If it makes any difference, and I doubt that it does, I picked the RSS feed option when adding it opposed to the Atom option, perhaps out of a fondness for acronyms or dislike of chemistry. I abandoned IE before web 2.0 hit and I've never used Safari, so I can't tell you if they are as amazing on those browsers as they are in Firefox. I remember when I had to manually check my favorite websites for updates and how frustrating it was to find that some internet humorist hadn't updated. Gosh, that feels like so long ago.

Basically, I added affirmation that I have no audience and if you want to know when I post new things, click the orange square in the right side of the address bar or at the bottom you can click a hyperlink for the same results. It will say:

Subscribe to Wafflecone

How Do I

So I got bored again. I did a little homework, but not enough; it couldn't hold my attention. Also, I was worried about sounding jingoistic in a question comparing Venezuela and the United States economic systems. I'm not sure any comparison would be valid given the vast differences in resources, population, cultures, histories, my apathy...

So I started trolling Yahoo Answers again. Trolling in the wrong word, I've only asked one question as of this writing. I've found a few Answers I've really liked including this one and this one. And this made me...well, I'll just tell you the question and you can guess the answers given.

Does anyone else get turned on by the Avatar's?

I initially thought it might be regarding this or even this. But no, it wasn't. I checked the obvious rhetorical lyrics first, including "Can anybody find me somebody to love?" and "Is this the real life?" The latter question was posed some sixty times and I sought something more obscure. I found this gem on another site. And then I got an idea, but it was taken too! But it was totally worth it for this copy editor's dissection of the song.

In the mean time, I've grown a little tired of trying to be creative and will probably do something else for a while now. Although I still have a few ideas I might try later.

The Internet is for porn (and trolls)

I made a big huff about my mom disconnecting the Internets and how negatively it would affect my education this morning, only to go to the campus to use the WiFi and do nothing productive. I played around with writing some metafiction, but I think it was largely a bust. However, I found listening to Rick Emerson discuss his ADHD diagnostic test on air very enjoyable. If I had planned better, I would have packed myself some food, but I was in a tizzy of sorts. That would fall under "low frustration tolerance" for those of you playing at home.

On a related note, there have been these commercials on recently for what appears to be an internet health forum support group. It's a nice enough idea, certainly better than this one. It's not something that's going to be featured on Weekend Web anytime soon (do they still do Weekend Web?). Whenever I see one of their commercials, I get the temptation to create an account for the exclusive purpose of trolling the forums.

I won't.Probably.

And speaking of trolling, Yahoo Answers is always choice. I may spend some of my procrastination time this weekend looking up other John Mayer songs with rhetorical questions to ask.

Who films that?

What the hell, people? Why are there over seven hundred videos onYouTube under the search terms "my phone is ringing"? I just wanted to watch/listen to this video. Although I now realize I had the wrong search terms, but that's not the point!