why can't my feed reader do that?

I love RSS. It's an info junkies wet dream. Up to the second content in a focused stream of particles beamed straight through the screen phosphor into my occipital lobe. The problem with an (un)healthy number of feeds in your reader is signal to noise. Once I got up around a hundred or so I started getting a lot of duplicate stories, and plenty of irrelevant data.

I think it was philanthropist Monty Burns who said, "I may not know art, but I know what I hate". It seems like any reasonably current feed reader is increasingly equipped with additive customization features only. That is, a saved search or smart feed style filter can be built to include news items which match certain properties, but the ability to globally exclude or ignore news items which match other properties would be just as useful. I may not always have a specific category of news in mind to include in my reading, but there are plenty of subjects I always skip over, so why waste my time?

The problem of duplicate stories is interesting because it offers an opportunity to exploit the advantages of the myriad of perspectives out there. Why can't my "all stories" or river-of-news view collect news items that share say 75% of the same outgoing URLs and group them together somehow? Take it one step further and for stories where maybe 80% or more of the links are identical highlight the differences for me so I can see unique information faster. If a big news event is covered in multiple locations maybe I want a closer look at my local media's coverage first?

Currently I've begun to remove news sources from my reader of choice because of the high dupe counts. This is absolutely the last thing I want to be doing but if the news isn't fresh and relevant then the info high just isn't as sweet ...

h'okay: so this guy has this paperclip

I have no idea how someone would pitch the tale of Kyle MacDonald and his Red Paperclip to a movie exec. Maybe the novelization of his story was just phenomenal, who knows. But it would seem that someone has decided to make a film entitled "One Red Paperclip" and release it in 2009.

The IMDB entry is sparse to say the least, and googling around yields very little at this point save some apt comments on the One Red Paperclip forums. Definitely nothing conclusive, but an interesting happening nonetheless. I wonder if movies based on internet goings on will suck as much as those based on video games, or perhaps plumb the murky depths of television based on "reality". Of course, if somebody produced a cinematic adaptation of say ... The End Of The World, I might be inclined to check it out ...

real geeks love tress macneille

Did you know that the woman who played Vasquez in Aliens also appeared in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas? Remember when Benicio and Johnny tackle the maid and "hire" her as an informant for some deranged government plot? Well Alice the Maid is the same ass kicking Jenette Goldstein who in Aliens when asked by one of her male comrades "... have you ever been mistaken for a man" uttered the classic response: "No, have you?"


I can't remember when I first noticed that, no doubt I was referencing the Aliens IMDB entry to improve my score on some highly prestigious Sigourney Weaver trivia contest. If those flicks arent't enough for ya, she also did a brief stint as the T1000 in Terminator 2 (remember the milk carton?) and is credited with an appearance in an episode of Max Headroom.

So with all this geek cred how does Tress MacNeille stack up? I've dug deep into that oracle of all knowledge worth knowing, the Wiki ( if-its-on-the-internet it-must-be-true ) pedia to find out, and her list of voice acting accolades is truly epic.

First off she plays countless characters on The Simpsons, and Futurama including Crazy Cat Lady and Booberella. She voiced a segment of The Animatrix, and portions of the English release of Princess Mononoke. A little ways back she was also the Warner sister Dot, as well as Hello Nurse and Babs Bunny. She's featured in episodes of Pinky and the Brain, Harvey Birdman, Freakazoid and the (admittedly not fantastic but quite geeky) Dilbert animated series. Dipping way back into the oldschool toons her name even adorns the credits of the English Voltron (think Thundercats or Power Rangers but older). All classic geek fare but surprisingly it gets better!

It turns out she's been working in the game industry since the time when hiring actual voice talent was a decadent luxury for most game studios. She worked with Mark Hamill doing voices for the classic LucasArts SCUMM VM game Full Throttle. A game which shipped with so much custom voice content that I had to pick up some "new" hardware to install it; a CD-ROM! Since the SCUMM VM is right up there with Doom, an ASCII video player, and MAME on the list of things to port to various obscure hardware platforms you can no doubt enjoy Tress' Full Throttle work on your linux watch, iPhone, or in-flight media center.

Of course if you're not that geeky you'd just have to look as far as Clayfighter, or Run Like Hell, two wide reaching console games to sample her vocal stylings in game form. Then again if you are that geeky you can go get your copy of Weird Al's debut album and check the liner notes. She's credited as "Lucy" on the track Ricky.

And then we come to my favorite bit. The Fallout bit. Fallout is a piece of modern culture not unlike Radiohead, The Smashing Pumpkins, or Monty Python. Nobody who likes any of these things feels moderately about them. It's die hard fan or nil, and when it comes to Fallout I'm a fan for life. Tress MacNeille voiced Jain in Fallout and Tandi in Fallout 2, which is just one more reason real geeks love her.

twelve twentyfive oh seven

Well despite my heartfelt emails Santa brought bills this year instead of a nice flatscreen TV. So I threw out sanity, payed the bills and bought some thingys for the fam and invited them here instead of heading home. I've seen my mom make a roast before, it didn't look that hard ...



Maybe after new years I'll put a fish tank here instead.

I hope you find yourself warm, well fed, and in good company today :)

what would shatner do

Yeah I wanted to be an astronaut when I was a kid. So did you. Except what we didn't know until just recently, is that today's space explorers face a terrifying new menace! That's right you dirty biped, giant arachnids are attacking our spacecraft and we seem powerless to stop them. Will they target civilians next? Do our puny defenses stand a chance against their sheer numbers? Is there no end to their insatiable lust for human flesh!?

While they do give me the creeping willies, I for one welcome our new eight-legged overlords.

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