The Only Valid Conspiracy Is My Conspiracy

I've decided that I'm through with Digg.  Now, I've never been one to keep quiet about my issues with specific aspects of the site, particularly the user comments.  (The exact quote I used was "reading Digg comments makes browsing Slashdot at -1 seem like a source of rational of discussion in comparison.")

However, as of today I am officially stating that I am through with Digg.

So what finally did it?  Well, the short answer is: this story.

The long answer (you knew it was coming), is that it's a number of things, culminating with that story, but that can mostly all be described using a single word: tin-foil.

There's seems to be a belief that runs through a vocal segment of the Digg community that seems willing to believe any hare-brained conspiracy theory that arises, so long as it conforms with their views.  (Although it has died down in recent months, witness the former prevalence of links to various sites run by Alex Jones as an example.)

Thoroughly debunked UFO sitings?  Shadowy cabals of bankers that control the US through the Federal Reserve (and are responsible for the death of JFK)?  9/11 was an inside job?  Media stories critical of Digg being obviously blatant misrepresentations of the facts in an effort to make Digg users look like an unruly mob?  (Trust me, Digg users do a pretty good job of that last one on their own.)

I guess I'm just tired of the hyperbole and wild theories.  So when said story showed up, I found it just tiring that the same people who would scoff at the Clinton death wish (a wonderful piece of total bunk), swallow the image of Karl Rove as some Godfather-like mastermind pulling the strings behind a massive army of goons as just too much.  (Hell, and it's not even like I like Rove or anything of the things he represents.)

Maybe I'm just getting tired of conspiracies everywhere.  Don't get me wrong, I adore some them — the more ludicrous the better.  (There's a copy of Jon Ronson's Them: Adventures With Extremists sitting on my bookshelf, just begging to be read.)  I just would rather read them when I'm in the mood to read them, not on what's supposed to be a aggregation of actual news.

So, to the world's largest experiment in hyperbole, misdirection, and groupthink: ciao!  I'm sure I'll miss you just as much as you'll miss me.

Is This Thing On?

Turns out that while I fixed my web server, I forgot to fix the DNS server entries.

Refresh/cache times of several days on the entries was probably not a good idea, given that the IP appears to be much less stable here than at the previous apartment.  They should now be set to somewhere between 30 to 60 minutes.

Now I just have to win back the few readers I still had but likely lost after being down for two months.

In the Black City of the Djinn

If there are any weird tale fans out there, perhaps you can help me in identifying the name and author of a short story.

The story in question is similar in nature to Robert E. Howard's The Fire of Asshurbanipal: protagonist, being chased by raiders/brigands/what-have-you, takes refuge in an abandoned city.  In the city, in a prominent place, is the corpse of a king/priest/somebody important, with some sort of riches on them.  (I believe in this case it was either a necklace or a crown.)

The brigands/raiders follow the protagonist into the city, and engage in a battle which the protagonist loses.  One of the brigands/raiders mounts the stairs to retrieve the treasure from the corpse and dies shortly after touching it, thereby scaring off the rest of his companions.

In The Fire of Asshurbanipal, the reason behind this is that the jewel is cursed, and  touching it unleashes an ancient guardian who belongs to that set of Things that have walked the Earth since before Man crawled out of the primordial ooze.

In the story I'm thinking of, there's a less preternatural explanation: a snake has made a nest in the corpse's skull, and promptly bites the man when it is disturbed.

I'm positive I'm not imagining this story, as Becca's pretty sure she's read it as well.  I'm thinking it may be Clark Ashton Smith, but I won't know until I've had a chance to search through all the stories I have by him (and then all my other weird tale books, if it isn't him).

So, anybody read it and recall what it was called or who it was by?

Posted by g026r at 10:02 | 1 comment | Most recent by g026r

Give My Creation Life!

As anyone (is there anyone?) who still has this site in their RSS feed can now tell: my server is once again running.

If your feed screwed up and showed a bunch of new entries you had already seen before, that's because I had some issues and ended up having to reinstall from an old backup.  The good is that I had backups of most of my entries that post-dated that point (including some that never got posted here), the bad is that I didn't have an actual database backup, which means I lost a fair number of my books that I entered into it.  (Basically: the battery on the motherboard, which keeps the NVRAM state, is dead.  No battery = no quik boot-loader = troubles for anyone who unplugs the machine and forgets to keep a rescue disk — as in floppy — around somewhere.)

So what have I been up to without this web-server?  Well, I went to Newfoundland on a business trip, I read a fair amount of books (if you're on GoodReads you can find my profile over here) and bought even a fairer amount, and basically sat around hating Fredericton most of the rest of the time.

I'm getting the feeling that it may be time to move on, but more on that some other time.

The Emperor's New Wonder Show

I'm currently making my way through Cervantes's Interludes.  Overall, it's kind of meh.  However, one play in particular — The Wonder Show — has distinct parallels to Hans Christian Anderson's The Emperor's New Clothes.

Given that the plays were published in 1615 (though written earlier), and Anderson wasn't born until almost two centuries later, I can't help but wonder if there's some common source — a folk tale of some sort — that both were mining when they wrote their pieces.

Charles Mackay Would Likely Agree

A bigger entry shall be coming sometime (perhaps), but I figured I'd post some links that I read recently.

The first two are by Jaron Larnier, and though from 2006 are still valid.  Digital Maoism and Is a free market in ideas a good idea? (Actually an interview with Larnier, rather than an article by him) both deal with the same subject: is the hive mind really such a good idea when trying to make an authoritative source of information or coming up with answers to any questions where the answers are aesthetic or of a non-concrete nature?

The other two are from the Globe and Mail, and serve (at least one of them) as illustrations of the previous: Wikibook = Wikibomb is about Penguin's "Million Penguins" project, which invited Internet users to contribute to an attempt to write the next great novel — with predictable, non sequitur-ish results.  The second, Duality of Wikipedia, is only peripherally related.  It deals with a subject called "wikigroaning" — the habit for the trivial and faddish to receive inordinate attention on Wikipedia.  As the opening paragraph states:

"There was once an Englishman named John Locke, who had some interesting thoughts about political theory. There is also a character named John Locke on the TV show Lost.

"Which one has the longer entry on Wikipedia?"

That noise you likely just made? That's a "wikigroan".

Of Obsessive Collecting

I'm an obsessive collector.  I'll readily admit this, and anyone who's known me for any period of time probably has noticed this.  ( will probably kill me if anymore boxes arrive in the mail for the next, say, three years at the least — which is probably why it's a good thing I'm off to Newfoundland for a week come Sunday.  There's just a few more stuck in transit, honey!  I promise!)

However, for all my collecting, there's at least one thing I can say: at least the stuff I'm buying doesn't run the risk of slowly killing me.  (Unless, of course, all the books tip over and bury me.)  But not everyone cares about that, and apparently there's a rather active market in radioactive collecting.  There's your standard stuff: uranium/vaseline-glass and uranium-glazed glassware, old kid's atomic-energy science kits, and so on, but then there's the stranger stuff.  Radium toothpaste, anyone?  Or how about a face powder that contains both radium and thorium?

There's a link in there to an article about the health problems of women who used to paint the old radium-coated watches that includes this quote:

"Those days, most people thought radium was some kind of miracle elixir that could cure cancer and many other medical problems."

It immediately reminded of some ancient science fiction story I read as a kid, in which a secret underground civilization was discovered where everyone was immortal, all thanks to the secret of radium!

Post Post Post

I don't read Chick tracts as much as I used to, but I spotted this new one while showing someone the ever-classic Dark Dungeons:

Fairy Tales?

I'm not certain what the moral is supposed to be in this one.  I think it might be "If you let your kids have fun by telling them about the Tooth Fairy, Santa, and the Easter Bunny, they'll grow up to be murdering psychos."  Which, I suppose, makes as much sense as Dungeons & Dragons being nothing more than a Satanist plot to recruit new witches.