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  • Baaaaa Johari

    This has popped up everywhere in the last 12 hours. Sheesh. Here’s my Johari Window: http://kevan.org/johari?name=snooze. Tell me what you think of me or something.

  • The Elements of Spam Style

    From McSweeney’s, The Elements of Spam.

    14. Use the active voice.

    Notice how aloof the passive voice is.

    Your balls are to be slurped the most by cum-starved nymphos!!!!!

    Hardly persuasive. The five exclamation points feel tacked on, an attempt by an inexperienced writer to breathe life into a desiccated construction. The active voice, however, allows you to write with verve and straightforwardness.

    Cum-starved nymphos will slurp your balls the most!!!!!

  • Maids in Japan

    CNN has an article on “Maid Cafes” in Japan, a popular place for some otaku.

    Maids rule in Japan’s nerd nirvana

    TOKYO, Japan (Reuters) — “Welcome home, Master,” says the maid as she bows deeply, hands clasped in front of a starched pinafore worn over a short pink dress.

    This maid serves not some aristocrat but a string of pop-culture-mad customers at a “Maid Cafe” in Tokyo’s Akihabara district, long known as a Mecca for electronics buffs but now also the center of the capital’s “nerd culture”.

    “When they address you as ‘Master’, the feeling you get is like a high,” says Koji Abei, a 20-year-old student having coffee with a friend at the Royal Milk Cafe and Aromacare.

    “I’ve never felt that way before.” [CNN]

    I’ve been aware of the whole maid thing in Japan for a while just due to the amount of anime shows about maids. They are a whole genre in and of themselves. Everything from victorian romance type stories to action shows with robot maids to catgirl maids. But for some reason the idea of going to a maid cafe just sounds… wrong. It just sounds like too much of a bad joke. I especially like the line in the article about being able to get your ears cleaned (WHAT?). It actually is probably mostly an extremly focused version of what I’ve heard of called cosplay cafes, where the waitresses are dressed like characters from various anime shows.

  • WoW and Golf

    Jane Pinckard asks the question Is World of Warcraft the new Golf? in an article over on 1UP.com.

    Overheard, at brunch: two tech entrepreneur types discussing World of Warcraft. What server are you on? What guild? Oh yeah, me too, I heard it’s a good way to schmooze.

    Is that true? Has logging in to the world’s most popular massively multiplayer online game replaced a few rounds on the links as the way to make the right business connections in a tech-driven culture?

    The particular Guild discussed by the brunchers above was started by Joi Ito, who became a WoW fan after embarking on the game to do some research on social networks. Joi, the money-and-idea guy behind internet companies PSINet, Digital Garage, Infoseek Japan, and social software like Moveable Type, Technorati, and Socialtext, has quite a few hangers-on who hit him up for advice, money, or access to his Rolodex. [1UP.com]

    The fun thing about this is that the guild I’m a part of, We Know, is the guild Joi started. It’s become a fun group of people with more than a few people from various other startups and internet companies. It’s kind of fun knowing that the person you’re questing with could be the CEO of some company you’ve heard of for ages.

    Is it the new golf? I’m not sure about that. Maybe it’s like the new paintball instead.

    Edit: It’s even hit Slashdot.

  • Pandora

    I tried playing around with Pandora a bit more tonight. In the past I’d gotten frustrated with it by trying to get it to play techno. The problem is it has next to no techno and when it runs low on selections it seems to start pushing me towards listening to other things I don’t care for.

    Tonight I started out with The Housemartins. Things started okay, but started to travel away from that style. I thought of other things that might fit my mood tonight and ended up adding The Style Council and The Blow Monkeys in for flavor. I think I fucked the station up because now it is playing Dead or Alive for me. Not what I was really going for.

    One thing I’d love to see from Pandora is a more broad selection of ratings for songs you listen to. Like, I want to say “don’t only play this song, but don’t play anything by the band performing this song because I never want to hear them again. I hate it that much.” Just thumbs up or thumbs down doesn’t do it for me.

    Overall I’m finding Pandora to be frustrating. It’s not playing stuff I don’t like, but it’s not playing stuff I’m not in the mood to hear (though it did just play some Mike Viola).

  • DJ Documentary

    Delta Heavy is a new documentary covering the 2002 tour of DJs Sasha and Jon Digweed. Newsweek online has an interview with Sasha that I thought was pretty decent. I haven’t seen either of them spin in ages. I still remember the first time I saw Sasha spin was back in around ’95/’96. That night at Metropolis in Irvine, CA is still one of my top five nights out clubbing. I wasn’t tainted by labels on genres as much at that point so I was able to just really kick back and enjoy. It was pure magic.

    Maybe I’ll be able to go out clubbing again sometime soon. That would be a good thing.

  • Teeth

    There are lots of fun side effects to getting an organ transplant. Most of these come from the various drugs you are on after the transplant. You get things that cut down your immune system, lots of steroids, etc. One of the more fun side effects is that you can lose bone density. I get treatments to help it, but I can only assume that this is at least part of the reason why I’ve had two teeth have hunks that have broken off in the last six months. I already feel fanatical about brushing, sheesh.

    Today it happened while eating a tuna fish sandwhich, I wasn’t even eating anything hard. Time for a trip to the dentist.