Long ago and far away, I lived in a region in the United States of America known as New Jersey. When I came online I realized that TV news was usually a week behind online news. Now I notice that with my morning teeth grind while listening to NPR.
The same thing is happening to Slashdot. Digg is blowing Slashdot out of the water. Kuro5hin is not even a contender being an effete LiveJournal with pretensions of being a tech oriented website.
Today, December 12th 2005, I opened up Slashdot and saw half of the stories on the front page were the same things found on Digg a few days ago. If you read at -1 this would be old news. I'm a bit disappointed but Slashdot, regardless of its Open Source philosophy and liberal bent, has become the establishment and rests upon its obese laurels.
Hell, Slashdot isn't even 'News for Nerds' or 'Stuff that Matters'. It's full of Roland Piquepaille and **Beatles Beatles submitting stuff that they posted at their respective 'blogs' and submitting it to Slashdot in order to get a windfall from Google Adsense.

Fact: Slashdot is dying.

Slashdot: Come for the dupes, stay for the trolls.

FROM THE I-MUST-BE-NEW-HERE DEPARTMENT

For a site that touts itself as "news for nerds", one would presume Slashdot knows its audience may have a tendency to be smarter than the average bear. My words are chosen guardedly. From reporting on spurious pandemics and egregious misunderstandings regarding the Torino scale and apocryphal global warming, Slashdot joins traditional media with scare tactics programming.

I suggest a new subject, chicken little. Don't reference the horrible Disney movie. Whenever these pop culture disasters rear their ugly heads during slow news seasons then they should be noted as Slashdot crying "The Sky is Falling!"

I return to my usual shutting the fuck up.

After five years of playing NetHack, two of those spent playing it religiously, I have ascended a character. Kuresu the Samurai achieved demigodhood on 10/13/05 around 5:30 p.m. Mountain Daylight Time. Reckon the game took at least sixteen to twenty hours. Here's a grain of salt, most likely it wouldn't have happened if it wasn't for the early wand of wishing.

I came within a red cunthair of submitting a dupe to Slashdot. The offending article is from The New York Times about some Spaniard astronomer attempting to steal a guy's work through creative Googling.

shit, i attributed a post on 20721. lol

Recently there was some diary entry at K5 about roommates which made it to the front page.
K5 is LiveJournal. Supposedly K5 is supposed to be the alternative to everyone's News for Trolls site. Even worse, they delete comments outright much like the vaunted Rustina pic.
I posted a rude comment about K5 being LiveJournal, Slashdot is quaking in its boots and is now posting sixteen year old girl shit instead of astroturfing teh open sores. It was punctuated by a comment directed at LocalRoger for his spurious apocrypha about being cold cocked by Robert Adams (of Horseclans fame) because Robert Adams is Orson Scott Card's GAY BOYFRIEND. Good god, at pretend you were roughed up by Heinlein or Ellison thought you were worthy to spit on or Cory Doctorow made a pass at you in the men's room at WorldCon.
Anyway, at best on Slashdot I'd be down four points of karma but the comment would be visible for those who browse at -1.
Right now I feel like Michael Sims. I left America because it was allegedly curtailing my freedoms and now I realize in Canada things are a whole lot worse under their frozen, socialist regime.
Here's hoping Elinor chokes on your micropenis while you play ohbutyouwillpet, Rusty.

MIT is currently developing $100 computers for children growing up in third world countries. Nicholas Negroponte, of the MIT Media Lab, enthused, "When the kids bring them home and open them up, it's the brightest light source in the home". Mr. Negroponte was uneasily silent when questioned about things which are more essential to living like food, clean water, freely available and affordable medicine he could only weakly respond "It comes with linux pre-installed!"

CNN/Money has a piece on web logs paving the way towards getting fired. This isn't just a trend in the IT industry but other fields. Common sense in a world with sensitive corporate secrets. But where is the line drawn between telling stories out of school after work at the local bar and publishing your employer's dirty laundry on the net on a site most people wouldn't know about in the first place?

It appears Mark Jen was hired back but not before heavily editing his web log.

I'm sure most Slashbots and trolls want to see the shrill, anti-American blog of the recently-fired Michael Sims.

ABC is reporting that SETI's search may be futile. According to Mark Newman of the University of Michigan compression and encryption issues would make the detection of electromagnetic "leakage" nigh impossible since E.T. isn't using earthly formats like jpg, mpg, mp3, etc.. His complete paper (PDF format) can be found here. Google View as HTML link too.

A friend of mine pointed out the major missed point of the ABC article. SETI is designed expressly for detecting signals sent to Earth not a transmission which bleeds off an alien ionosphere. Newman's article is still an interesting read.

I'm using Win2K. and Firefox. Whenever I come to Slashdot and attempt to read an article seven out of ten tries will get a blank white page with two #006666 lines going across the top.

Sometimes I can see the topic icons, other times the page looks shittier than usual. Slashdot looks normal and is readable using IE but not Firefox, the darling of teh Open Sores??

I used to hang out in a great room on IRC but I don't go there anymore after I tried something really stupid back in March of 2004. I'm certain they resented me for being selfish, an idiot and showing myself as being pitifully weak.

The past couple of months I have found a life off of the internet. A real life girlfriend not one of those imaginary Canadian ones that one visited last year. Meeting real life people in the hopes of engendering something continuing and social. Heaven forbid anyone think I'm being one of those pretentious twits like Cliff Stoll who believe they are better because they don't go on the internet.

Now that winter's coming around I'm wishing I could get online and hang out with people. LambdaMOO trolling, my abiding dislike of Australians and someone from a meetup gone wrong portraying me as evil, slovenly and heaven knows what else has closed that forum.

I'm not particularly geeky or nerdy so there's not much I can add here which would be relevant to the help desk slaves who consider themselves admins because they can cd into a dir then ls -a for 31337 hax0rign.

It's funny that people have so much faith in machines. I am referring to regular people not the self-proclaimed smarts who think everyone should use teh lunix and gnu/rms while building lego versions of Metalstorm: The Legend of Jared Syn.

I have a Gameboy Advance SP and it's quite good. It's tiny, light, rechargeable and backlit along with a large stable of old and new games. Right now I'm going back and forth between playing Pokemon Ruby, Advance Wars, Super Mario World, Tetris and Metroid Fusion.
Pokemon Ruby has sucked up about two hours of my time and I have already beaten the first gym leader. I'm doing my best to avoid spoilers like when what evolves into which and what learns what either by TMs, breeding or by gaining levels. The Pokemon series is a great strategy game where one develops their army of monsters then tests them in the heat of combat. Even though it has the stigma of a kiddie game it can get really involved considering things like STAB (same type attack bonus), mixing and matching the best types. Since I don't know anyone with the patience or desire to play Pokemon of any sort I challenge myself by beating the game using worst possible pokemon available. The best description I can give to people who aren't familiar with the Pokemon games is they are like Final Fantasy or Chrono Cross to be more apt considering their elemental combat system.
Metroid Fusion is okay, a platformer that has eighties graphics and I assume limited replayability.
I bought Super Mario World because back when I was a kid I was poor and couldn't afford something like a SNES. It's a joy to play those old games on a tiny device. Still, beating the boss on world four is tough and I have yet to go any further.
Advance Wars is an amazing game which is saying a lot since I've only played it for an hour. Since I've only played the training missions. I like it because I'm old and don't have time to have every key bound to some command while I click around the screen in addition to micromanaging the output of my resources for one final push on the enemy. I just click, move and take my time with each maneuver. Plus there's always a greater challenge when resources are limited rather than pumping out zerglings and the like for an overwhelming wave of power to ensure an early win. My friend says every system has the game which makes it a must have item. The PS2 has Grand Theft Auto III. The XBox has.. something.. I guess.. and the Gameboy Advance has Advance Wars. A minor point that made me very pleased with Advance Wars was the fact it was only twenty bucks, ten dollars less than the other offerings for that platform.

could i have been easier on you
i couldnt change if i wanted to

DICKS EVERYBODY!!!!!!!!!! DICKS DICKS DICKS!!!!!!!!!

ALSO PLEASE SEND BURNED CDS OF OPERATING SYSTEMS TO ME!!!!!!!!!! WILL PAY FOR MEDIA!!!!!!!!!!! HOLY GOD I CAN NOT CONNECT AND MAKE STAR TREK THE WRATH OF KHAN REFERENCES IN #JERKCITY