AdSense really does understand

Recently added AdSense to the blog, and I'm rolling in the money now! Or, maybe I would be if all the ads weren't for bongs and glass pipes. Google says:

Google AdSense Help Center: How does Google target ads to my website?
We go beyond simple keyword matching to understand the context and content of webpages. Based on a sophisticated algorithm that includes such factors as keyword analysis, word frequency, font size, and the overall link structure of the web, we know what a page is about, and can precisely match Google ads to each page.
But I'd have to disagree with them. While it's possible I've used the word bong once, in explaining the site name, most of the posts here are either about databases, or Engrish, or Constitutional folly, or restaurants, or recipes or other things. Well, there's the one post about A Barrel Full of Smashed Assholes (which still brings in more traffic than anything else, I might add)

So I hope the new ads help you find a nice selection of glass pipes. 
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Tags: jacked-in

The Interdictor

There's a guy holed up in a datacenter in downtown New Orleans blogging about what's going on.

The Interdictor
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Hillary vs. the Xbox: Game over

I can't admit to having found this myself, as I don't regularly read the LA Times Editorial section. Xeni linked to this on BoingBoing, but it's just too good not to link to here too.

Steven Johnson, who wrote the article, is the author of "Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter" Follow the link. Read the whole article. It's good.

Hillary vs. the Xbox: Game over
Dear Sen. Clinton:

ADVERTISEMENT
I'm writing to commend you for calling for a $90-million study on the effects of video games on children, and in particular the courageous stand you have taken in recent weeks against the notorious "Grand Theft Auto" series.

I'd like to draw your attention to another game whose nonstop violence and hostility has captured the attention of millions of kids — a game that instills aggressive thoughts in the minds of its players, some of whom have gone on to commit real-world acts of violence and sexual assault after playing.

I'm talking, of course, about high school football.
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Milk Panic

Milk Panic

If you've never tried milking all of your cows before they expode before, then Milk Panic
is the game for you.

Milk Panic is one of the odder online games I've attempted.

Don't forget to empty your bucket, while playing Milk Panic

Milk Panic

Wow.
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Tags: jacked-in pho

Boing Boing: William Gibson - Remixing Good

Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things
Our culture no longer bothers to use words like appropriation or borrowing to describe those very activities. Today's audience isn't listening at all - it's participating. Indeed, audience is as antique a term as record, the one archaically passive, the other archaically physical. The record, not the remix, is the anomaly today. The remix is the very nature of the digital.

Today, an endless, recombinant, and fundamentally social process generates countless hours of creative product (another antique term?). To say that this poses a threat to the record industry is simply comic. The record industry, though it may not know it yet, has gone the way of the record. Instead, the recombinant (the bootleg, the remix, the mash-up) has become the characteristic pivot at the turn of our two centuries.

We live at a peculiar juncture, one in which the record (an object) and the recombinant (a process) still, however briefly, coexist. But there seems little doubt as to the direction things are going.
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