The Adventures of Tobasco da Gama

I think I’m gonna switch off the Twitter digests. They’re a bit messy on the site because Twitter Tools doesn’t let me auto-insert a More tag, and they distract from the actual content, on the rare occasions that I actually post something. I’ll keep the Twitter sidebar, and of course anybody who’s actually interested in reading my Twitter updates can follow me directly on the site. I do intend to start posting more soon (although I’m toying with the idea of a spin-off site for more professional-ish, content-y blogging, while I keep this one for rants and raves and random personal/creative stuff), and I’d like that to be what people see when they come to the site, as opposed to my wacky Twitter hijinks.

That is all. Dismissed.

Я очень болеть всех этих Русский спамеров.

I’ve decided that I like the Twitter digests, but since I post actual content so infrequently the daily ones are a bit obnoxious. So, instead, I just switched to weekly digests and left off the @replies and such. If you want more, for some bizarre reason, just hit up my feed directly.

Also, while I’m housekeeping, I will be writing about the next chapter of Botany of Desire soon. I’m trying to organise my thoughts, but I think I’ll have to end up going stream-of-consciousness. The chapter itself is less focussed than the one on Apples, though not in a bad way, so trying to force order on it presented me with a challenge I’m not quite up to. (Which is ironic, for reasons that will be clear when I get around to writing it up.)

Having satisfied myself that Twitter is probably going to be around for a while more, whether I like it or not, I’ve decided to finally sign up. Hooray for me.

In the interest of actually having stuff up on the blog on a regular basis, I’ve installed the Twitter Digest plugin to post, well, a daily digest of my Twitter posts. I think this will actually be a good thing, because lately I’ve tended to have a lot of random small thoughts as opposed to blog-length thoughts. This way, I can still manage to share and preserve them somehow.

Vanity: it’s why the internet was invented.

I know it’s silly to make fun of those silly tools that run statistics on your word choice and assign you a personality type or favourite Beatle or whatever based on that, but sometimes the results are just too ridiculous. Slacktivist posted his results from the “Typealyzer”, which scans a blog and assigns a Myers-Briggs type to it. Here’s what I get:

ISTJ – The Duty Fulfillers
The responsible and hardworking type. They are especially attuned to the details of life and are careful about getting the facts right. Conservative by nature they are often reluctant to take any risks whatsoever.
The Duty Fulfillers are happy to be let alone and to be able to work int heir own pace. They know what they have to do and how to do it.

My boss wishes.

Although I do have to say that, true to the usual arc of these things, they threw enough vague stuff out that I can make something fit. I definitely do prefer to be left alone and work at my own pace. My own pace usually being not at all, but still.

I have a few substantive things rattling around in my brain, as well as the seed of another Tobasco story, but instead I’d like to continue my spree of contentless posts by taking time to note that my birthday was this past Saturday. I turned 25, which necessitates quoting from one of the most sacred of geek scriptures, Snow Crash:

Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.

Hiro used to feel this way, too, but then he ran into Raven. In a way, this was liberating. He no longer has to worry about being the baddest motherfucker in the world. The position is taken.

I haven’t run into Raven, but I am 25, so I guess I’m off the hook now. Amen.

Yes, my status as a blogospheric atheist is at last validated. I’ve finally got my first dumbass troll.

I’m already getting a bit tired of him, though. He’s a bit tedious, as most trolls are, so I wonder if somebody else doesn’t want to have a go instead.

He’s commenting on my Dinesh D’Souza post. Yes, the guy is defending Dinesh D’Souza. You can see why I’m getting tired of him.

I find it difficult to believe that anyone I don’t already know personally reads this blog, but the site traffic stats suggest otherwise. So, in light of that, I’d like to point out that I’ll be attending The Amazing Meeting 6 at the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas this year. If anybody who reads is going, drop a comment. I’ll be at most of the Skeptic’s Guide events, as well.

So Andi pointed out that I didn’t have a blogroll on my sidebar. Seems like my theme was calling it incorrectly (I think it was written for an older version of WordPress), so it wasn’t displaying. So I fixed that, and now the blogroll is back. I’ve also given it the ol’ refresh by importing links from Vienna and removing a couple of websites that don’t update anymore.

Hooray?

I really need to update my blogroll. A lot of things I consider essential daily reads aren’t up there, just because I haven’t got around to adding them.

But I couldn’t resist getting off my lazy ass to add Sweet Jesus I Hate Chris Matthews, which I haven’t even read yet but know I will love just based on the title.

Update: I can already see I’ve made the right decision, based on this. Seriously:

Matthews: That’s how she got to be a Senator from New York. We keep forgetting it. She didn’t win it on her merit, she won because everybody felt, “My God, this woman stood up under humiliation,” right? That’s what happened. That’s how it happened.

Seriously. The guy is an even bigger douchebag than I thought. I mean, he’s competing with Crossing Over’s John Edward for the title of Biggest Douche in the Universe.