the Archipelago of Weird

Go read this essay on subcultures in siderea's LJ. I'll wait.

Culture, in the part of the world in which I've been, and, for all I know, in other parts as well to which I cannot speak, has two rough parts: the Mainland and the Isles.

The Mainland is what calls itself the "mainstream" or "normal" culture.

You know... Mundania.

The Isles are everything else. Everything that's not "mainstream" is an island.

Nobody knows how many Isles there are. They are wholly and utterly unmapped. Each one is its own subculture.

Some Isles are closer to the Mainland, and some further.

Some Isles are closer to others. Some are big. Some are small.

We -- meaning I and a very large percentage of my readership -- live in a collection of close Isles which form up an Archipelago. The SCA. Fandom. NERO. Etc.

This is the Archipelago of Weird.

(From autographedcat, who got it from celticdragonfly.) Very well said.

Here's what gets me

Here's What Gets Me

My problem with Bush -- and here, I do indeed address Bush individually, as a guy -- is that during the time that the crisis was developing, from Monday to Friday, he never seemed to experience any actual sense of urgency as a result of the simple fact that people were, minute by minute and hour by hour, dying.

(Seen lots of places; I got it from gridlore).

A brief reminder

Flying Spaghetti Monster sightings are on the increase as His Holy Day (September 15th -- Marco Polo's birthday) approaches.

Plan on eating pasta this Thursday.

Geekiness

Our new microwave oven arrived today. Hooray! It's one of GE's Spacemaker line of range-hood-mounted zap ovens.


The various PenguinSong.* domains were up for renewal, so I transferred them to GoDaddy at the same time. Pretty smooth, except that in order to transfer a .org domain you have to make a phone call to Network Solutions in order to get an authorization code. During which process they try to persuade you not to do it, and offer you a promotional discount that (what a coincidence!) just happens to match what your new registrar is charging.

Since I discovered that, in the course of the call, they had unlocked all of the domains in that account (I have three, because they kept screwing up the process of adding new domains to an old account), I went ahead and transferred rdna.org, too.


Started the process of compiling OpenEmbedded (at work). It's based on the monotone version-control system, and I made the mistake of pulling it rather than downloading a pre-pulled database. Monotone is slow.