Vex Appeal

On Wikileaks

“When I was a little kid, my mother told me not to stare into the sun. So once, when I was six, I did.”

My view is that the arguments of Assange et al are really opportunistic disguises for the baser human pleasures of gossip, nosiness, curiosity and destruction. I think it’s a particularly modern, digital, post-everything mindset, and it’s no surprise that Wikileaks’ mission resonates so well with the geekier clans of the web. It’s a hack of the diplomatic system, poking it with a stick to see what happens.

“I shot a man in Reno / just to watch him die.” 

It’s this damn-the-consequences mischief-making that really drives Wikileaks. (Which has become quite the misnomer - the State Department surely wishes that, like Wikipedia, it was “the free database of leaks that anyone can edit.”) This makes it a perfect match for Anonymous, the internet’s most cause-deficient rebels. Their spirited counter-attack against those who would deprive Wikileaks of hosting, domains, and cash is far from an act of principled hacktivism, but rather a successor to their DDOS attacks against blogging platform Tumblr (“they steal our memes”) and harassment of 13 year old girls. 

“Leak ‘em all and let God sort ‘em out.”

Anonymous loves Wikileaks because, cloudy arguments invoking freedom and democracy aside, it embarassed the powerful and created chaos where before there was order. More significantly, it was a reckless demonstration of a novel form of power, amplified through technology. Here, Anonymous and Wikileaks find true common ground - Wikileaks has no clear political aims other than to create chaos by undermining secrecy, while Anonymous has literally no aims other than to create chaos through technological sabotage.

“What is man? A miserable little pile of secrets.”

But what of the consequences of all this? Are we to believe the White House, who condemned the leaks as “reckless and dangerous… putting at risk the cause of human rights” or the more measured take of Secretary Gates, who described their impact as “fairly modest?”

There is only one way to know for sure. This time next year, Wikileaks must leak the flurry of classified State Department memos tracking the fall-out from this year’s leaks.

FROM: LONDON, ENGLAND
TO: STATE DEPARTMENT
DATE: DECEMBER 12, 2010
CLASSIFICATION: UNCLASSIFIED, NOFORN

= = = = = = = = = = =
1. SHIT IS FUCKED UP
= = = = = = = = = = = 

Following the recent release of all the shit I wrote to you for like two fucking years straight, I’m writing to tell you that nobody is fucking talking to me anymore. Well fucking done. Recent meetings with high-level Foreign Office officals have revealed concerns that our “ongoing pillockry in the field of secure communications” may jeopardise “fucking everything,” although some positions of the British govt. were not entirely disclosed thanks to my “half-wit, smart-alec commentary” on the “obviously fucking pointless discussions” that “completely missed the fucking point of what [they] were fucking getting at.”

It was suggested that, to improve the security of our discussions, we ought to consider “just fucking making policy by ‘tweeting’ each other” or, failing that, “leaning out the window with bloody megaphones and shouting negotiating positions at each other like a bunch of complete twats.”

Finally, hi to my mom, for when she reads this.

Minimal cereal packets

On the internet, everyone likes minimal things, like these muppets. I might have dropped out of art school before I learned to use Illustrator, but that’s not enough to stop me joining in the fun:

RICE KRISPIES (Snap, crackle & pop.)

COCO POPS

FROSTIES

CHEERIOS (Cheery corn, cheery oats, cheery rice and wheat)

I made this last one by pouring a bunch of cereal onto my scanner. It looks really horrible.

The only girl in the world.

If you saw Matt Cardle’s duet with Rihanna during the X Factor final, you’ll know all too well that her smouldering sexuality can, in the wrong hands, generate unbearable levels of awkwardness.

Alas, it’s something I’ve had first-hand experience with:

Running the wrong way

A few months ago I started using the Couch to 5k app on my iPhone. The idea of the Couch to 5k programme is to slowly improve your running ability from “crap” to being able to run 5k without stopping. Each week, you spend more of your routine running and less of it walking, and the app gives you audio reminders of when you should do each.

Anyway, it’s a good way to start out, especially if you’re as morbidly unfit as me. The problem is that in order to keep up with the programme, you’re meant to run three times a week. I am much too undisciplined to run that much, so ultimately I ended up cutting myself a lot of slack, and wondering exactly which “week” I was meant to be doing.

So after 12 weeks, I was still on Week 4 or something similarly unchallenging… until last week, when I went for a run with much fitter flatmate. A 5k run. Which it turned out I could actually do, all the way through, without stopping.

My point is that, at some juncture, the supporting structure of the system became a weird constraint. And I did what I used to do as a kid with Unreal Tournament, which is keep it easy and see what outrageous margin I could win by, rather than scrape by at some higher level. I ended up running faster and faster for the running portions, rather than trying to run for longer. But now I’ve learned my lesson, and also discovered that I have more stamina than I thought I did. Nice.

Couch to 5k: gets you off the couch, but not necessarily all the way to 5k. Unless you add a multiplayer, social gaming component in the form of a sporty friend.

How do you feel about the interrogative tone?

I recently read a review of a book called The Interrogative Tone? The gimmick with this book is that every sentence is a question? Would you like to read an excerpt from the book?

Are your emotions pure? Are your nerves adjustable? How do you stand in relation to the potato? Should it still be Constantinople? Does a nameless horse make you more nervous or less nervous than a named horse? In your view, do children smell good? If before you now, would you eat animal crackers? Could you lie down and take a rest on a sidewalk? Did you love your mother and father, and do Psalms do it for you? If you are relegated to last place in every category, are you bothered enough to struggle up? Does your doorbell ever ring? Is there sand in your craw? Could Mendeleyev place you correctly in a square on a chart chart of periodic identities, or would you resonate all over the board? How many push-ups can you do?

What would it be like if more novels were like this? Would it create a swirling sense of uncertainty?

IT WAS a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen? Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him?

Or what about this? Does it just make everything sound non-committal?

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since?

“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had?”

He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that?

Or a more modern example?

The madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through? You could feel it: something terrible was about to happen? The sun low in the sky, a minor light, a cooling star? Gust after gust of disorder? Trees restless, temperatures falling, the whole northern religion of things coming to an end? No children in the yards here? 

Or perhaps more mainstream?

Renowned curator Jacques Sauniere staggered through the vaulter archway of the museum’s Grand Gallery? He lunged for the nearest painting her could see, a Caravaggio? Grabbing the gilded frame, the seventy-six-year-old man heaved the masterpiece toward himself until it tore from the wall and Sauniere collapsed backward in a heap beneath the canvas?
As he had anticipated, a thundering iron gate fell nearby, barricading the entrance to the suite? The parquet floor shook? Far off, an alarm began to ring?

And finally, do you find this video of Taylor Mali speaking interrogatively merely good, or in fact great?

How to fix Boot Camp on Mac OS X if you just get a black screen with a blinking white cursor

So you’ve got a Mac and you’re hoping to install Windows on it, using Boot Camp.

You use the Boot Camp Assistant to create a disk partition to install Windows on. Then you pop your Windows CD in the disk drive, and tell your Mac to go ahead, boot up using the CD, and install Windows.

Except it doesn’t work.

You just get a black screen, with a blinking white cursor. And no matter how long you wait, nothing more happens. And if you try again, the same thing happens.

THE AMAZING FIX (THAT IS ALSO WHAT PEOPLE ALWAYS SAY TO TRY FOR EVERY TECHNICAL PROBLEM) (BUT IT NEVER WORKS) (EXCEPT IN THIS ONE AMAZING INSTANCE!!11!!1!)

No amount of restarting your computer will help. But if you actually UNPLUG the computer, leave it for 30 seconds, and THEN try, it works! That’s right, turning your computer off and on won’t do it. But pull the plug out the back and plug it back in, and you’re cookin’ with gas.

I couldn’t believe it either.

I guess if you’re using a laptop, the equivalent move is to take out the battery in addition to unplugging. Also know that this is isn’t the same problem as “the screen goes totally black, backlight included” which is something to do with graphics drivers & Vista, and hence beyond my ken.

You work it out.

This:

Then this:

In short, California is invading Scotland. I say we let ‘em have it.

A year of faces

Every time I login to my computer, it takes a photo of me through the webcam. It’s been doing this for about a year. These are the results. If you’d like to do something similar, I’ve explained how to do it below.

AVERAGE FACE

This is the average of all the photos from the past year.

TIMELAPSE FACE

;

That’s all the faces from the past year or so. Sadly I didn’t walk across China this year, unlike this guy:

It’s a start.

HOW TO DO IT

To get your Mac to take a photo of yourself everytime you login, you can follow the instructions in this Lifehacker post. Nice and easy - you don’t really have to think about it once it’s set up, which is how I managed to actually complete this project.

Making the average photo is a bit complicated. It was inspired by the work of Jason Salavon, who creates impressionistic images by averaging together photographs. This is from 114 homes for sale in Dallas Ft. Worth:

I asked Metafilter how to create this effect and got a bunch of different suggestions. There’s a method using something called Image Magick, or a Python script you can use. But I ended up downloading Mathematica and using the method described in the Metafilter thread, which looks like this: 

You have to right-click your “images” section and choose “Evaluate cell” before you do “Evaluate cell” on the second, calculatory part, otherwise it gets confused. AND ANGRY.

I couldn’t find a quicker way to import the images into Mathematica than doing “Insert” -> “Picture” -> “From File…” 250 times. I also found that Mathematica choked on averaging all 250 images at once (even on a reasonably powered computer!), so I created averages of 50 at a time, then averaged the averages. A bit of a palava, but it did mean that I ended up with some extra images like these:

For the video, I just used Automator to copy and rename all the photos sequentially (001.jpg, 002.jpg, 003.jpg…) and then used Quicktime Pro, “Open Image Sequence” at 10fps and then saved it as a .mov. Sweet.

A better letterhead

I saw that Style Deficit posted Charles Atlas’ letterhead:

And commented:

More people’s letterheads should feature shots of them in pants. I fail to see how a letterhead could not be improved in this way.

I decided to put this to the test.

Pretty pimpin’, but maybe a little retro. Let’s bring it bang up to date:

Brilliant - the perfect way to make my cover letters stand out from the competition!

Nowdays everybody wants to talk

“Bomb squad finds kittens”, comic interpretation

Or what really happened:

Business cards for cats

I share my flat with a cat called Mr. Jinx. He thinks a lot of himself, and can be aloof around guests, so I made him some calling cards.

That bit on the back is his catchphrase.

And here he is, looking suave as ever:

Made with Moo.