Hurray for mocking the stupid!

(No, it will not be embedded.  I hate YouTube embedding.)

About the only pundit I follow is Robert X. Cringely.  His article this week has a great insight, but he did a horrible job of explaining it, so I'm going to see if I can do any better.


Once upon a time, some explorers stumbled across a new continent, and named it Internet.  When they returned to their home country and explained their discovery, a group of pioneers became very excited.  They convinced a few schools and companies to help them set up shop on the new continent, and founded a small city.  Each organization in the city would get a few buildings and there were some narrow streets connecting them; people would use those roads to visit the other organizations.  The flow of people was about even--each organization got about as many visitors as it had members who visited somewhere else.

This whole sponsored community thing has people paranoid about their journals. In particular, Mac users have been whining about the fact that programs like LJArchive don't work on Macs.

Of course, they don't realize that they're using a fscking Unix box, which could do what they want with a five-line shell script. Or, as I point out, a two-line wget command.

I have that command, with an additional option directing it at my cookies.txt file, running in the background on my machine right now.

OS X is wasted on Mac users.

I can't draw worth crap. I can write okay, but not wonderfully. I can't fix a car. I can't pay a bill. I can't maintain a poker face. I can't hear the term "Taco Show" without giggling insanely. I can't get to a class on time. I can't get out of a parking space without driving over a planter. I can't go more than about ten minutes without music. I can't finish anything.

But Goddamn, can I make a nifty web page.