The Net Takes You Nowhere
Go vote for Margarita, Ela and "The Critter" at the New York Time's Lens project "A Moment in Time"!
Rotate the planet to look around. We're in the California "stack," closest to the top in the "Community" sort. It's more fun to hunt through and see the range of pictures people thought representative of "a moment in time," but if you want to get to us quickly, click Sunday morning dog wrangling in Ocean Beach, CA.
Here it is: Earth, covered by stacks of thousands of virtual photographs, corresponding in location to where they were taken by Lens readers at one "Moment in Time" (15:00 U.T.C., Sunday, May 2).
Zach Wise designed the interactive gallery and Jacqui Maher developed the submission process.
Spin the globe in any direction to get where you want to go. Click on a stack and the top photo will open, giving the photographer's name or pseudonym (if supplied) and a brief caption (again, if supplied). Another click will send that picture to the bottom of the stack so the next one can open. The uppermost pictures in any stack are those you've recommended to one another. The height of the stacks reflects the number of submissions from any given area. Note the pull-down menu in the upper left corner. Pictures can be searched by topic - community, arts and entertainment, family, money and the economy, nature and the environment, play, religion, social issues or work - but not, unfortunately, by photographer. (That's for "Moment in Time 2.0.") From any individual picture, you can always return to the globe by clicking on "Return to Globe X" in the upper right corner.
And here's a link to the larger, submitted version of Ocean Beach Dog Wrangling.
Raoul (May '10)
Friday the 13th May 2005 What do you do, when a seemingly sensible woman confesses to have become "Zarazi, Troll Priestess of the Horde, 2nd Level," but doubt she was every really that sensible at all. (Sensible is vastly overrated. Zarazi) And search for proof... Thus, having long wanted to "out" myself and other adult game players, the following: An Interview with Zarazi, Troll Priestess of the Horde, 2nd Level The Inquisition: Zarazi, many have held ... perhaps mistakenly ... that playing games with children becomes the more pleasurable the older we grow; as we, aging, naturally lose our need to win. You have been introduced to this game by your son. Have you not, Zarazi? What say you then, Zarazi, to this belief? Zarazi, Troll Priestess of the Horde: : To start with, you must admit that had you ever really thought that I was "sensible," you would...
Raoul (May '05)
What a pain, a nuisance, annoyance, what trouble, what a bother and botheration it is to inconvenience oneself, to overstrain, extend oneself, to get all hyped up, psyched up, to overexert oneself, all set to trouble oneself, almost kill oneself just to maintain a "vanity" web site year after year after year! Now in the vainest of all vain glories, a blog format. Why Bother? After all, the net takes you nowhere.... In any event, I have no answer to those questions. Nor do I need any. Whybother.org was formally created as a website on August 26, 1999. But "Why Bother" as a vague kind of virtual dis-organization, with a finite but shadowy membership, has a much longer history, reaching back into the deep dark recesses of mid-1970's Berkeley. My lips are sealed.... But in anticipatory celebration of the New Year, I thought why not fly the old flag, yet...
Raoul (Dec '04)
Isn't it bad enough that your word processor knows
how to spell MacDonald's but not
Gramsci?"
Raoul (Nov '00)
Technology has killed the "killer copyright."
In technologically sophisticated markets around the world, music CD sales have plummeted, as kids raised on computers turn to Napster and its more untraceable successors to stock their music libraries.
Raoul (Nov '00)
The most recent attempts to measure the Web's dimensions (May 2000) have produced not so much interesting results as a new wave of metaphors to "naturalize" the predictable effects of mass media advertising, specifically the last two seasons of site-pumping TV ad campaigns.
Raoul (Jun '00)
The issue is NOT piracy. Pirated digital and audio CDs, and endless knockoffs of every other kind of brand-name consumer good have been black-marketed in America and elsewhere for decades.
The current uproar is fundamentally not about this kind of piracy, because what now threatens Hollywood profits also and equally threatens the large-scale, established pirate businesses throughout the world: the prospect of a global grassroots network of theft and distribution, with no centers of production or points of sale to target.
Raoul (Apr '00)
I had a hard time sleeping tonight, and I woke up, read a bit from a book titled "The Victorian Internet" about the history of the telegraph, let my mind wander, and felt compelled to rise up from my bed and check the financials on Yahoo!
mrbdawg (Apr '00)
The Great Unbelievable Thing: In September 1999, as millions of pimple-popping adolescents and college kids presumably left behind all thought of sunshine and the great outdoors to return to school and the midnight glow of interminable computer screens, "the number of active Web consumers dropped a slight 2.81 percent from 66.8 million to 64.9 million."
Raoul (Oct '99)
For more than a year now, the media have enthralled us with the threat of anarchy on a global scale: the total breakdown of crucial informational, financial, commercial, social, governmental and even physical infrastructures directly caused or indirectly precipitated by the Y2K Millennium Bug.
Raoul (Oct '99)
The transcripts of the on-going Microsoft antitrust trial make interesting reading if, like most Americans, you can appreciate the courtroom drama of posturing overpaid attorneys, evasive expert witnesses, a bored and biased judge who seems content with being reversed on appeal, and ream after ream of legalese bullshit. It's better than the OJ trial. There's more directly at stake for the viewing public. And it's easier to follow than the bizarre unresolved murder-rape-incest-mayhem cases recently taken up as standard fare by CBS's 48 Hours. In contrast to the terminally inarticulate boobs featured on 48 Hours--where do they find these people?--all the Microsoft trial participants appear to have passed at least the eighth-grade. They all seem able to comprehend that people other than themselves may well exist and that those others may well view the same issues differently, without the direct intervention of Satan. This helps no end with dialogue. Were...
Raoul (Sep '99)
