Goldmine Gutted

things Facebook already knows

2009-08-27T19:07:26Z

The weird result of the meteor shower incident is that I've suddenly become much better friends with roommate D. Or it could be the Zoloft making me not so antisocial.

Seeing Ira Glass sept 26th. I've become kind of a This American Life fanatic, which is a weird thing to be fanatical about but hey it's better than opiates or Ayn Rand.

Westboro Baptist Church is coming to B-town on September 1st! I'm oh so excited.

God Help the Girl really is one of my favorite albums ever. It's fucking sublime.

The Zoloft is srsly working purty well, but I've been pretty lazy. Oh well.

talkin funny and lookin funny

2009-06-02T16:59:20Z

I saw David Byrne last night.

more on the hack-sores

2009-05-29T23:37:33Z

I wondered why I wasn't getting any email. Turns out that while they were in control of my email account, they had set it up to forward all mail to a slightly misspelled version of my email!

Sneaky bastards.

So now everything is back to normal.

กลับมาแล้ว

2009-05-28T15:01:08Z

Facebook sucks, but I was kind of relying on it and suddenly being locked out blows. Sent a "someone changed the email associated with my account DUDES" to the faceless facebook admins but no reply yet.

I remember livejournal! I used to write all sorts of crap here, three times a day.

Malaysia 401 Scammer

2009-05-27T23:09:45Z

Someone LEET HAXORED my email and/or facebook and sent out a strange email saying I was in Malaysia and needed a few thousand dollars and blah blah blah.

So I changed my email password this morning when I found out.

Also upon returning from work, I couldn't log into facebook.

WTF.

Waiting on the confirmation email to change my password...

...and it's not coming? They could have changed my email... shit.

So ANYTHING I've done today on Facebook, um, isn't actually me. I can't see if I've done anything because I can't log in.

Sorry, folks, for all the hubbub. Peoples are calling peoples over this, but I don't think it's a big deal. Sorry sorry sorry if this causes shit for anyone. I swear I didn't download illegal porn or anything weird.

ETA: They defiently changed my email. I've reported it to Facebook, so um hopefully they will fix this?

SORRY.

กลับเมืองไทย

2009-04-14T03:43:23Z

Okay, my silly "get my lazy ass back to thailand" plan is back and somewhat less unrealistic.

I'm thinking... like... a year from now? I need to first get my act together. NO MORE EMO. Save up some money. Ramp up the study.

Learn Thai, learn how to write, be a translator. That's my vague plan. May take a while. Better than nuthin.

goldmineguttd @ 2009-03-30T22:31:00

2009-03-31T02:31:41Z

Pffffffff they didn't offer a reward when *I* got robbed.

don't fuck with our lives

2009-03-24T01:12:36Z

Already hate the new old job again.

Especially people who play the goddamn scratch-off lottery. Augh. Die. All of you.

I haven't been writing shit in here because 1. I spend my energy on the Thai and 2. everyone seems to be on facebook and 3. I don't feel the urge to write long emo rants much anymore.

I still like to rant about religion but that need is mostly fulfilled by following the atheist blogs.

Anyway.

บล็อกฉัน

2009-03-18T23:33:48Z

The Thai blogging is going very well. Despite being depressed as hell (past tense) I've been updating regularly, and been getting encouraging comments.

Look, I'm linked to.

ฝรั่งงง
A guy from Vermont learning Thai and Vietnamese.

Eh um okay. I do need to get on that Vietnamese. But I'll skip the being a guy part.

very exciting this computer magic

2009-03-17T20:35:27Z

Oh my god I can download youtube videos and put them on my iPod and it works and I can watch Thai lakorn wherever I go!

Also I have a job but that is much less exciting than PORTABLE LAKORN.

oh no gay

2009-03-17T03:42:27Z

Meanwhile

MONTPELIER — Gay marriage opponents are launching a radio campaign aimed at marshaling opposition across northern New England.

The “Don’t Mess with Marriage” ads, which will be aired in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont starting Monday, are sponsored by the National Organization for Marriage, a Princeton, N.J., group that has been active in fighting same-sex marriage initiatives in California and elsewhere.

I am 100% certain that the NOM is a Christian organization.

(checks)
Close. It's Mormon. They're involved with Abovethehate.com

Oh man, MORMONS lecturing about the sanctity of marriage.

goldmineguttd @ 2009-03-13T20:35:00

2009-03-14T00:35:51Z

it doesn't have a wikipedia page so it's not real

2009-03-10T22:48:06Z

Behold... Calendar II!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It's... a mystical magical ancient "lithic" stone chamber in Woodstock, VT.

I get a certain feeling at power centres and I was picking up on this feeling as I found a standing stone and a recumbent stone with Iberian Ogam inscriptions believed to have been written by European Celts 3000 years ago So much for Columbus "discovering" Amenca. At the centre of this cosmic place is a beautifully preserved underground chamber called Calendar II because it is oriented to the midwinter sunrise. If you sit inside the chamber and look out the entranceway on the morning of the winter solstice, December 21, the sun will rise in the centre of the entrance. Analysis by archeoastronomer Byron Dix shows that the chamber was also used in lunar observations and eclipse prediction. This is only one of many such sites found all over New England.

I can't find any non-woo resources on it, so I'm guessing this is actually from 1849 or something.

I don't remember Joseph Citro ever mentioning it.

There's pictures of other chambers. This includes more amusing claims of Ogham script... but if you ignore all the mumbo and jumbo, the fact that there are these little rock chambers dotting VT is kind of interesting. Are they root cellars, or something?

It seems to be very well known among purveyors of woo.

The Double Square is found in some of the best known sacred spaces in the world, from the King's Chamber in the Great Pyramid and Solomon's Temple in the Bible to the interior of Calendar II, an important underground stone chamber in Vermont, USA.

goldmineguttd @ 2009-03-09T12:04:00

2009-03-09T16:05:00Z

goldmineguttd @ 2009-03-03T16:40:00

2009-03-03T21:41:43Z

Watned - editors, bloggers (Vermont)

Apparently so.

"Big Tent Atheism"

2009-03-03T04:47:34Z

I read Boing Boing, and they introduced a really wacky guest blogger guy.

Eventually he got around to his take on atheism.

I think closeted atheists who participate in other religious activities are the future of atheism. They know that prayer feels good without a needing brain scientist to tell them, and they know you don't need God to want to feed the hungry, heal the sick, and provide homes for the orphaned. What if they simply stopped reciting the words that they didn't agree with during religious services, without calling attention to it? In many places I don't think they would be kicked out or turned upon and beaten just for that.

The comment thread is epic polite smackdown.

But maybe I'm biased...

fake homework

2009-03-02T23:04:04Z

Glen Beck's "We Surround Them" thing is pretty fucking creepy.

So, how do we show America what’s really behind the curtain? Below are nine simple principles. If you believe in at least seven of them, then we have something in common. I urge you to read the instructions at the end for how to help make your voice heard.

Apparently you are only American if you are a religious libertarian.

The Nine Principles

1. America is good.
2. I believe in God and He is the Center of my Life.
3. I must always try to be a more honest person than I was yesterday.
4. The family is sacred. My spouse and I are the ultimate authority, not the government.
5. If you break the law you pay the penalty. Justice is blind and no one is above it.
6. I have a right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, but there is no guarantee of equal results.
7. I work hard for what I have and I will share it with who I want to. Government cannot force me to be charitable.
8. It is not un-American for me to disagree with authority or to share my personal opinion.
9. The government works for me. I do not answer to them, they answer to me.

Not that I'm really ashamed to be called unamerican.

In other news, I'm currently reading a couple interesting books on linguistics. Trying to challenge myself and read some more technical literature. It's kind of a crapshoot, because the field is large and I'm not sure quite yet what I want to focus on. One book is Linguistic Theory and Language Description, the other is An Introduction to Second Language Acquisition Research. The former is probably slightly out of my depth (it's dense with new concepts) but I'm still learning a lot from it. (Plus it's making me less scared to try tackling Chomsky.)
The latter I'm taking a look at because of my own foreign-language study and possible interest in TESL/TEFL. It seems accessible.

God fucking damnit, I want to go back to college.

jots and joots

2009-02-27T21:25:04Z

I have:

Health insurance.
A vague understanding of descriptive vs structuralist linguistics
~~Sushi~~
No clue how the fuck to type Vietnamese like seriously is it that hard to add a fucking diacritic?

goldmineguttd @ 2009-02-26T23:53:00

2009-02-27T04:58:30Z

Lou Dobbs is very strange and obviously has a bias against the UN, and I'm not a huge fan of Hitchens, but the story underneath does seem really fucking scary.

โฮเวอร์คราฟท์ของฉันเต็มไปด้วยปลาไหล

2009-02-24T06:07:26Z

I'm actually surprised- with a tiny bit of effort, I've managed to start updating my Thai (and soon, Vietnamese) blog regularly. I'm shooting for three posts a week. I keep a few going as drafts, and as I finish them I set them up to post automatically during the week. (Four are in the queue at current.) Of course, I'm a shitty writer and my babbles about Thai are of no interest to anyone; but it's a fun way to organize and motivate my language funtimes. I even made an ugly banner graphic!

Also, currently exchanging messages with two คนไทย, something I really should do more of. I should look in to Skype, which all the cool kids use for language exchange, but oh god I hate talking on the phone enough in English.

In other news, I kinda started getting stuff done today. My boredom with not working has finally outweighed my anxiety about getting a job. Hooray.

Good Enough 4 Goonies

2009-02-22T04:28:43Z

If you haven't seen this... you need to.

He's pished ootay his fuckin heid n he kin hardly haud the fuckin pool cue.

2009-02-21T02:14:57Z

I've been working on my Thai blog, mostly to get my spirits up.

Look, an essay on translating Transpotting into Quebec French.

The translation of swearing: The particular aspect of the monologue that is most striking
in this connection is the proliferation of swear words and the workshop certainly needs to
provide the basic vocabulary of swearing in joual as derived from the Roman Catholic
mass. It is an important fact that Welsh's characters are Roman Catholic. Given the fact
that Scotland is a passionately Protestant country, the speech of Protestant Scottish drug
addicts would hardly have been translatable into joual. The repeated swear words of
Franco's speech are in current use as the ordinary expletive language of Montreal street
French. The translators did not adapt them to particular use in this play because the
characters were Catholic. But if the characters had not been Catholic, our hands and their
tongues would have been tied.
How do you translate swearing? Let's see what happens in Franco's monologue. Perhaps
a count is a good place to begin.

In Scots:
Cunt 31
Fuck (various forms) 42
Shitein 1
Total: 74

In Joual:
Câlisse - Chalice(various forms) 29
Tabarnak - Tabernacle 31
Hostie (ésti) - Host 8
Criss - Christ 4
Sacrament 1

Total of Religious swear words: 73
Other swear words:
Merde - Shit 2
Fente - Cunt 2
Étron - Turd 5
Touffe - Cunt 2
Total: 11

AUGH TECHNOLOGY

2009-02-20T02:06:01Z

Well for absolutely no reason firefox has decided to go fuck-all crazy and lose all my bookmarks... and also not allow me to create new bookmarks. And also crash constantly. Uninstalling and reinstalling does nothing...

AUGH.

And now everything is MAGICALLY FIXED.

AUGHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

augh fuck everyone

2009-02-17T22:03:35Z

Well somebody broke my fucking keyboard, by somehow pulling the cord out. Sure it was cheap chinese junk from Thailand, but somebody better come clean.

I'm fucking grumpy and I have to wait three days for a new one.

I found an onscreen keyboard for Linux but I can't run it because you need an enter key to do that.

How to eat sushi

2009-02-16T20:21:48Z

Maa maa maa maa
Oh toh toh toh.

Taisho always have a secret personal history.
You must never ask about this.