Reddit founders are going, going, gone

Okay, pretty sad news for the reddit community. Spez and kn0thing, original founders of reddit are leaving this Halloween. Their contract is up and they are leaving for pastures greener. I have been on reddit for around three years now and through that time I have seen the user base expand massively, some interesting interface changes and an ever growing and somewhat lively community, I'm looking at you  /r/gonewild.


So with spez off to spend time with his lovely new wife, and kn0thing going of to work on breadpig.com what's left for reddit? Well the rest of the current staff are staying on thankfully but with speculation rife about reddit censorship I have to say I do feel a little uneasy.


Reddit has been criticized recently for its ever lowering comment standard and increasingly generic content. If this is all you see in reddit then I encourage you to make an account and visit the vast networks of sub-reddits that are available. These cover things like the previously mentioned "gonewild", the ever useful frugal and the increasingly incendiary Atheism and hundreds upon hundreds of others besides. These are vast networks of small communities built around shared common interests. I do admit that while sometimes this approach can set up boundaries between groups, it does create a sense of community in a what is fast becoming a megalopolis which is really kind of nice. This and this new xkcd comment order by best might just let the site continue to evolve positively into the future

If you want to see kn0thing speaking about leaving there is a thread here

Twitter lists are going to be interesting

So I popped myself on to twitter today and to my surprise I see quite a heavily promoted new feature “Twitter lists” I am obviously a little behind as this feature has been available to me for nearly fifteen days now.

At first glance the lists feature seems like a useful tool to organise your twitter feeds into meaningful categories, this seems like a good idea in itself. Sometimes I am just looking for tech tweets, sometimes I like to follow celebrities, authors and just the people I actually know. Sometimes really interesting things get completely lost in the noise.

Adding someone to a list seems pretty straightforward, go to their page and select “lists” from the menu above their posts and add them to a list. You can also add them directly from your following page.

So after you have made your lists what can you do with them? Well this is where it gets interesting. You can of course view your owns lists but assuming you have made any of your lists public then you can share lists with other twitter users. Be prepared to see some popular lists floating around with some really interesting people on them . This seems like a really useful way to get pre-packed lists of fascinating twitterati to follow without hunting around, searching and adding, although seem might argue that is the fun of twitter. If you think so then make your own list. Perhaps it will get a bit of a following. Of course with a single click someone can follow or unfollow your entire list.

I am guessing that the number of lists you appear on is going to be directly relevant to the amount of new followers you get so also expect some attempted gaming of this system. I am not to interested in what these techniques might be but I am never surprised at the resourcefulness of people after a little bit of traffic, notoriety or fun.

Yours and other users lists can be found at yourtwitterurl/lists here is mine with a few celebrities I follow both small and large http://twitter.com/FeersumEndjinn/famous-people

“Twitter lists” is currently trending pretty strongly with varied views on this new feature. Some people are moaning that it is going to cause segregation, some people “Just Wanted. More. God. Damn. Character.” Others just seem confused.

It does seem like facebook has had this feature for a long time, but the thing I particular like about twitter is the emergent behaviour of such a restricted system. It makes for some really interesting phenomena. I can't wait to see what people do with this. If you've got any suggestions or thoughts on  the new feature, please stick them in a comment.

Seiken Densetsu 3 Translation

If you have any interest in SNES RPGs then I urge you to grab the patch for Seiken Densetsu 3, unoffically known as the sequal to secret of mana. You can get the patch from the insanely dedicated neill corlett.

Sadly you are going to need something to patch, and for that you are on your own. Google is however your best friend 

Here is the first boss.



So far I am loving this game, a lot. I am going to play it through and write a review with some actual detail when I have finished it. I am just up to the second boss and while the story hasn't captured me in quite the same way Illusion of Gaia did it is showing potential. This mole is a bitch though.

DHTML Lemmings

Does what it says on the tin. Lemmings

Dave Dederer just did an AMA

Fantastic. Dave Dederer from The Presidents Of  The United States of America just did an ask me anything over at reddit.com. If your quick you can still make it!

It's like a party, but with translations.

Okay so this is interesting. It automatically translates from English to Japanese multiple times until it finds equilibrium in the switch. It's called translator party and you can see a result of the process below.

I entered:

" I tell you the truth, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God ."

After a few iterations it comes up with something like this.

"I have trouble with in the UK is going to meet the needs of my real riches of heaven. I also, as far as the eye of a needle, I have a lot of people please contact the following kingdom of God. Please. Please. Please. Please. Please. Please. Please. Please. Please. Please. Please. Please. Please. Please tell Purizupurizumirakuda."

It would be really interesting to know who Purizupurizumirakuda was.

I love xkcd

Okay, just saw this today. Not much to say about it apart that it's a very cute song that made me smile.

I printed out this comic when it first came out and stuck it on my wall. My girlfriend said it was stupid and took it down. Oh happy days.

I love XKCD

Animation by this guy, music by this lovely girl and all based on xkcd comic number 442

We all need a bit of perspective on how nice life really is sometimes.

My Vagina is eight miles wide

This is going to be embarrassing I can tell. I have a habit of singing catchy chorus lines absent mindedly and the disturbingly anthemic "8 miles wide" from Storm Large is going to be troublesome in public spaces

"My vaginas eight miles wide, absolutely everyone can come inside!"

The song is in fact hilarious.

"even the hard core dykes love cock shaped sex toys"

Storms voice is truly wonderful, reminiscent of Diana Krall but with an actual attitude.

It's got a message and a pixeis reference, what more could you want. Be sure to check out the more lacklustre cover of "where is my mind" and the awesome "Ladylike (Rockstar Supernova)"


You can see it here.

Scribblenauts is fucking brilliant

See the title? The one just above here. That's all I need to say. I don't care who you are and what sort of games you like, if you own a DS and you don't have this game you might as well give it to someone who isn't going to squander the opportunity you're wasting.

You might have heard of scribblenauts. It's a game for the DS and it's insanely entertaining. It was only released in the UK recently so I have only just managed to get hold of the damn thing. The premise of the game is fairly simple. You have to collect "Starites" distributed one a level through various worlds. The interesting part of it comes with the method of collection. You can use anything you can type, absolutely anything.

The first thing you will try and do is trick it. Every single person I know instantly wrote "rape" which is childish and reflects badly on me, but more importantly doesn't work. The thing you type must be an object, not obcene and not copyright. Everything else is accounted for.

This in all honesty makes it easy to "cheat" after a fashion. Need to kill people? Black Hole, T-Rex, Death? Or do you want to get more creative and lure police over landmines with doughnuts?

I might update this post as I discover new things.

Okay, so the passage below is a fairly famous quote by Banksy. Reading it should create all kinds of feelings of impotent rage. Rage at the system, rage at the treatment of humanity by evil corporations and rage at the cowering government letting them get away with it. Well  thats what I went through my mind anyway. Go on, read it. Feel some righteous indignation.

“People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.”

Felt good didn’t it, felt like you were right. Yeah! Fuck the corporations! YEAH!
Sadly as important things seldom are;  it’s not that simple. Here is an article written by a very funny man, although he is not being very funny this time. He is being down right miserable, and its kind of depressing.

Let’s admit it. Hypocrisy oils the wheels

The gist of it is that we are all bastards who really need to just kill ourselves. Although it is a little more nuanced than that I have to say. Normally David Mitchell is laughed at by a nation for pretending to be a twat on prime time television. He has done the uncomfortable thing of pointing out that most people are just pretending not to be a twat in real life, and instead of laughing at them he has just sort of shaken his head in a disappointed fatherly way making us feel guilty and a little bit dirty.

“Oil, trade, employment and money are important to us – and, by us, I mean we the people, not just they the politicians or business interests. What are the issues over which we citizens of a great liberal democracy have become really, seriously, exercised in the last decade? The environment? Zimbabwe? North Korea? No, the price of petrol, the recession, the money in our pockets, our jobs. That’s what we care about and the politicians know it. When there’s a controversial war, some nice, middle-class people go on an organised weekend stroll. When petrol is too expensive, lorry drivers blockade the major roads and the country grinds to a halt. Our leaders would have to be fools to take the former more seriously than the latter.”

I would love to call him a middle class twerp who doesn’t understand the real world. But  maybe I should look at myself a little more carefully before being suspiciously defensive. The case seems to be made that people want the car, the nice house and the flat screen television. Blaming it on the governments and corporations is just a way we can feel a little better about it.

At first I was like ohhhhh….

But then I was allrrrighht…

Okay I saw this today and I have to say the look of pure joy on this kids face as he doesn’t grind his coccyx another couple of inches down to his spine is priceless.


Click this picture to go to imagevat.com  They seem to provide a good service and they are hosting this image.

I used to skate, I don’t anymore because I now have a healthy fear of that disgusting pain your feel when your ankles are pointing in a direction that nature never intended.

If on the other hand you do skateboard and you’re in the UK then you could do worse than going to give dawsey a hand with his community skate projects. For some reason he thinks damaging young children for life with bits of wood is “socially responsible”. I’m not sure I agree but the kids seem to like it and it stops them knifing each other I suppose. You can find him here, if ever sorts his site out.

dawseysskateshop.co.uk