I Wish I Were Covered in Fuzzy Knobs

It’s been a while since I’ve had to take serious decongestants. My head feels like space cheese, like an attack balloon, like a mountain stream of badly-distilled moonshine of the kind that killed my great-great-great-grandfather. I am so very vincible.

  • Installed IO ERROR’s Bad Behavior plugin over the weekend (and that’s IO ERROR of ISCA BBS fame! It’s a small internet). Browsing through the logs, it appears to have stopped about 50% of the referral spam that made it through my htaccess barriers, a large number of badly behaved spiderbots, and two one hits that appeared to be a legitimate attempt at auto-trackbacking. Overall, not effective enough to be worth the false positives, so I turned it off.
  • Today’s juxtaposition: Tarka on being myopic (broken link removed):

    [I]t’s more like seeing the world through a nice SLR camera, with the iris wide open to a low f-stop, providing you with great clarity within a very shallow depth of field, beyond which the image is soft and smooth, yet still easily discernable. […] Today has been the first blue and sunny day after about a week of grey sky and drizzle. The tree buds that were poised to explode during the rain have emerged today and are exhibiting their unique shade of green for the first time this year. This green really pops, and to someone like myself, the exact details of the landscape are muted, giving way to a sublime watercolor of spring hues, bleeding into one another and creating a world free of constricting lines and shapes. The yellow greens of tender first leaves fade to the grey of bark and the heather-red of still unopened buds all across the vistas of the central lakes and white mountains of New Hampshire. …At least that’s what I see.

    with jellyfish eyes:

    Jellyfish are horribly hyperopic, or far-sighted! It’s as if they’ve gone to all the effort of evolving a nice set of lenses, and then thrown away all the advantages by grossly mis-focusing them. In the diagram below you can see the effect: light from a distant source is not sharply focused on a single photoreceptor, but at the plane of the retina instead lights up a whole diffuse region.
    […]
    The explanation probably lies in another simple fact: jellyfish […] are only interested in very vague things: Is it day or night? Which side of me is in shadow? Where’s up and down? They aren’t going to be able to grasp the details of a copepod swimming next to them, and don’t need to know about it - tiny motes dancing about are distractions, not information.

Comments

  1. IO ERROR wrote:

    I never received a report from you in regard to those “false positives.” Are you sure they’re false positives? Pretty much all the reports I get in here regarding false positives turn out to be actual spambots.
    If there are actual false positives out there, I need to know so that I can get it fixed.

  2. yami wrote:

    Sorry IO, meant to do that but got distracted. I’ll send you the logs tonight.

  3. R Mutt wrote:

    OT: Book review mentions rocks:
    http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2020305,00.html
    The history of the British Isles could be well told through its five great rocks — granite, sandstone, slate, chalk, and limestone. There are others, of course: schist, shale, basalt, the clays. But these five form a strong mineral pentangle within which the islands and their pasts are contained.
    Each of these rocks has its character, and each its literary keepers. Granite is Ted Hughes’s stone, and that of DH Lawrence in Kangaroo. Chalk belongs to the southern downlanders: EM Forster, GK Chesterton, Gilbert White. Sandstone to Hugh Miller, slate to Jim Perrin, Caradog Prichard, Kate Roberts.
    Limestone has been blessed with two exceptional 20th-century writers…

  4. yami wrote:

    Rockin’, tak!
    As regards your aborted question, the answer is yes, as follows: a, abbr, acronym, b, blockquote, br, code, del, dd, dl, dt, em, i, ins, li, ol, p, q, strike, strong, sub, sup, u, ul; href and title attributes only.
    Use an email address if you’re going to leave multiple links, though, or you’ll get spaminated again…

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