Linden Labs are interested in providing "try-before-you-buy" functions for purchasable objects in Second Life.2006-08-01T20:50:09Z
Kent, linking is my gesture, my raison d'être. Scoble's post: this guy did something nice, and linked to me. I'm doing something equally nice by not linking back. Hooray for gestures! A commenter brings up a good point over at Scoble's blog - robots.txt. Robots.txt is a giant great big fuck-you to the whole "no-linking" theory. Tailrank and TechMeme and all that stuff falls apart if you stop linking.2006-08-01T20:26:39Z
Oh my, I just saw that advert for Pipex with David Hasselhoff. I wonder - has he ever actually seen the comments about him on YouTube? 2006-08-01T20:07:58Z
Joey deVilla: "Another chapter got added to Mel Gibson's downward slide from indie film hero to real-life Eric Cartman with an uncanny resemblance to Saddam Hussein on Thursday... It's another case of the South Park guys being on the money (see the episode titled The Passion of the Jew, in which Mel Gibson is portrayed as completely bonkers with masochist tendencies). It's tough to be a satirist these days when the real world keeps trumping you."2006-08-01T18:37:10Z
j_brisby: "Anybody who thinks that Gibson's career is over needs a reality check: the people who made Passion of the Christ so tremendously successful aren't likely to punish Gibson for being anti-Semitic. In fact, right now, these people are sitting around their televisions, bitching that Gibson is being persecuted because he's a Christian. They're not saying it out loud, because they're cowards, but they're thinking it."2006-08-01T18:33:40Z
The Guardian has a sensible enough piece on the Brick Lane issue. But what they fail to understand is that by even using the word "community" (something that Natasha Walter does twenty times in this article), they give support to the very problem they are highlighting.
It's individuals we are talking about, not communities. It's a flawed and useless way of talking about what is a matter of individuals. Some people think the book is treacherous/blasphemous/nasty-nasty, and some people don't. To use the word "community" automatically gives these busybodies the very credibility that they are trying to achieve.
We all take offence at all sorts of things. But, as Penn Jillette says, we don't have a right not to be. That applies whethere you're an individual person or a self-styled "community leader".
Another lurker inside my aggregator, Andrew Sullivan's excellent take on Ken Lay's evangelical faith and it's relation to George Bush's Christian socialism. It's interesting, because Bush can (theoretically) speak any dialect. Well, if he didn't have a ~30% approval rating, he might be able to.
I also write for the Citizendium, an online encyclopedia project. If you know about stuff, you should join in. I occasionally produce audio recordings for The Pod Delusion.
