Alchemy! & stuff.

Not bad, not bad at all. Headed up to Alchemy around 2230, wearing the hiking boots, cargo pants, and Violet Burning hoodie I wore to dinner--didn't feel like changing. Outside Nation, a nice homeless guy held an open parking space I'd overlooked for me; I dropped him a couple bucks. Walking in, I ran into blankkittyblack; over the course of the night I ran into lanikei (resplendent in her white Hecht's "Young Willing & Eager" tshirt), houseboykinetic, anizee, underfiend, 2501 (in passing), xspookykittyx, lilscotchgirl (but not until closing), Enigma, Jen, and faeriemage (mmm).

Music was pretty good on the club side, too loud/powernoise-y on the concert side, and Alias never appeals to me. Danced a bunch, chatted with quite a few people, had a good time. Delivered a squishy penguin to Jessie, to complement her squishy hippo. She was pleased. :D

Und then, drove Stefanie home again, 'cause her ride apparently ditched her. Got home around 0315, whereupon Nathan came downstairs to give his dogs some soup, again, as he's out of dog food, again. And I had leftover Pizza Hut pizza that Nathan brought home from work. :)

Incidentally, way too much stuff happening Saturday. The Hart benefit party, bluegrass/roots-rock at the 9:30, Midnight (featuring The Drowning Season, live), and no fewer than four other club events I saw advertised and promptly forgot.

Link 1: Ha! Links 2+: Nifty and/or freaky

Via jwz:


(from The Onion)

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Also via jwz, lock/stock/barrel:

Optical Emission Security:

"An image is created on the CRT surface by varying the electron beam intensity for each pixel. The room in which the CRT is located is partially illuminated by the pixels. As a result, the light in the room becomes a measure for the electron beam current. In particular, there is a little invisible ultrafast flash each time the electron beam refreshes a bright pixel that is surrounded by dark pixels on its left and right.

"So if you measure the brightness of a wall in this room with a very fast photosensor, and feed the result in another monitor that receives the exact same synchronization signals for steering its electron beam, you get to see an image like this."

"Tempest" refers to the ability to evesdrop on the contents of a monitor by listening to the radio frequency noise emitted by its electronics.

Here's another fun one from a few years back: Tempest for Eliza:

"A program that uses your computer monitor to send out AM radio signals. You can then hear computer generated music in your radio. [...] the song will be on the radio at multiple frequencies, but the best transmission is at the frequency you gave on the commandline."

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The light stuff: BDs, Amazon reviews, and a comic

Happy birthdays, evelynne and evilegg!

Via skamille: This guy wrotes some pretty entertaining Amazon reviews. :D

The Perry Bible Fellowship has a wealth of bizarre, entertaining, occasionally disturbing little non-sequitur comics. (via lanikei)

Wow.. you've never heard a Super Mario theme like this. Think orchestral. (Via sylffor)

The heavy stuff: Fallujah and the War On Drugs

Mark Morford: == Very, Very Dirty Pictures ==
You want explicit? You want raw and uncensored and free of media bias?
Here you go.
So then. Here is your uncensored truth: fallujahinpictures.com. Real pictures from Fallujah. Real pictures of war. Brutal and explicit and shocking and just one site of many. Be warned: this is very graphic content. Horrific and deeply disturbing. No censorship. No suppression. No Photoshop. No bogus shots of happy Iraqi children running in the streets begging for candy from American soldiers. No night shots of Marines in bitchin' night-vision goggles bustin' down the door of some palace and then cheering.

Because if you think that's what it's all been about, if you really think war is just this tragic but necessary evil that contains some unfortunate violence and regrettable death but is nonetheless still full of righteous democratic American truth, you have been wildly misled and deeply deceived and might want to consider a nice intellectual emetic.

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visgoth: No, really. We're winning the drug war. (or, The New Prohibition, and Just As Effective.) Also, related.