Killing Time with Craigslist

I'm sitting here with my bags already packed and a couple hours to kill before my flight to Toronto. Already having exhausted my regular internet distractions, I've turned to the Best of Craigslist to fill the time.

So, just to share a few that literally had me laughing my ass off and spewing beer all over the keyboard:

Trading High 5's For Musical Instruments

Apologies, From A Pervert To A MILF

Free Toilet

I Stomped On Your Fire, You Choked On A Biscuit

Large Boat For Sale

Thanks For Shitting Your Pants

...but, for all the funny and probably-not-real ones, you find the odd post that seems totally sincere and intelligent, like this one from a middle-age guy asking for style advice to win back the respect of his wife.

Ready? Ready? Ready? Breathe!

In the realm of sample-based music, I didn't think I would ever hear anything weirder than Matmos' A Chance To Cut Is A Chance To Cure (well not really, in fact I own at least one weirder sample album, an indie disc I picked up years ago in Eugene, Oregon that's mostly built out of recordings of bathtubs draining). But anyways, forget all that noise, because .... wait for it ....

Nine Inch Niles' The Seattleward Spiral has arrived! because I know you've been waiting for-evarr for this one

I won't even attempt to explain it. Listen to it if you dare, I estimate the average human being will lose 10 brain cells per minute, and don't blame me if your head explodes at some point. It's actually almost a form of aural torture.
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I will say though, even if the end product is pretty damned rough around the edges, the api script used to create it is really something else, and could eventually lead to some nifty applications.

On the other end of the spectrum (and if you need a quick q-tipping to wash that noise out of your ears), this seems like a fantastic excuse to revisit Kutiman's ThruYou project - possibly the best website I came across in all of 2009. I was - still am - ecstatic to see that it is preserved online.

Stranger Than ... Nothing

Via the Projects section on Metafilter comes one of the greatest website ideas in years: Fictopedia!

From the FAQ:
"One of the guiding principles of the Fictopedia experiment is to see if people can learn to live with a little inconsistency. We're so used to treating our legends and fictions as if they were academically researched, factual histories, that we forget that stories don't have to add up, as long as they are GOOD. Thus, if someone writes an article about a character and then 3 people incorporate that character in other articles in ways that are totally inconsistent (in one article he's a knight in a fantasy world, in one he's space captain, in a third, he's a private in WWII), its nothing to worry about. Its just 3 creative reinterpretations of the same character"

The possibilities are endless. For example, although this is creative fiction, the article creators don't retain any copyright control over it, so what's to stop someone from reading an article on Norwegian slam poet Arnis Radis and deciding to 'become' that person, perhaps making a few viral videos and pushing them out onto the 'Net.

For a glimpse into how the project was conceived and fleshed out, here is the original Projects thread. Watch for my article on the Bantalorean Vocal Encoder to appear soon, as I've slowly been developing it throughout my recent treeplanting days.

edit 22/06: my article has already been added to!

buzzin buddy

Google's answer to Facebook finally appeared in the form of Buzz. Not sure how I feel about it but I'll roll with it for a bit.

Some of the doubts expressed by posters in the Metafilter thread centred around not knowing where and to whom updates would go. Like, if you are on Facebook (I'm not) and post something, you know that anyone you have as a contact will see it, and that's it. But with Buzz, it's already tied in to your email and other sites linked through a typical Google Account. So as a test run, I linked my blogger account - I'm pretty sure nobody reads this other than random Couchsurfing people, as I link to it through my info page - wrote this post to see if it shows up. Anyone else catchin my buzz?

Ignorance is NOT Bliss

Hot off the Internet, its the 9th Annual Year In Ideas!

Thus far I have learned:
-Cows with names make 6% more milk than anonymous cows...
-Google's search algorithm can predict ecosystem extinction...
-People who smile in their yearbook photos live happily ever after...
-Zombies typically take 7-10 days to overthrow humanity...
-Monkeys and I agree that The Grudge is the best Tool song evar...

... aaannnd there's plenty more. Kudos to the New York Times on the site design; the drop-down menus with the mouseover are great, and you have the option of browsing alphabetically or by category, all on the same page as the articles themselves.

podkasten

Guess I'm behind the curve on this one but I only recently really got into podcasts; nowadays it's what I listen to most of the time at home.

Aside from Metafilter's podcast - still probably my favorite site out there - New Jersey station WFMU has a pile of really great shows to offer. I've especially enjoyed Mudd Up! with DJ /rupture, as well as Coffee 2 Go.

Math Rock in a new Millennium

Something to satisfy both the geek and the rockstar within:

Over at Music Machinery, Paul Lamere explains how he wrote a Python script that will analyze the waveform of a song and automatically detect whether or not the drummer used a click-track.

He then goes on to have some fun analyzing Green Day, Led Zeppelin, Britney Spears, and a friend's band. I could never explain the process myself so take a look. Oh, and speaking of music plus technology, why not process the click detector concept while enjoying Kuriman's YouTube inspired-and-created mashups on ThruYou.

last.fm

Over a year after I signed up at the encouragement of my roommate Allison, I'm just now starting to appreciate the pull of last.fm

I've got Amarok set up to auto-update the music I listen to on my computer, which I'm sure can be done from most popular media players - hell, if Songbird can do it, iTunes or WinAmp must be able to.

My profile there : kiisu_killen

Good News!

Another reason for me to avoid Facebook:
An Australian couple have been served with legal documents via the popular social networking site Facebook.